Inside Outside Innovation

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Esther Gons, CEO and Co-founder of Ground Control and Author of the upcoming book, Innovation Accounting. Esther and Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Cofounder, talk about the ins and outs of innovation accounting, and what companies should be doing to track and measure their innovation initiatives. Let's get started.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. Interview Transcript with Esther Gons, CEO and Co-founder of Ground Control and Author of Innovation AccountingBrian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Esther Gons. She is CEO and co-founder of Ground Control, which is a software platform that helps companies measure innovation and co-author of the corporate startup, and upcoming book Innovation Accounting. Welcome Esther to the show. Esther Gons: Thank you, Brian. I'm really happy to be here. Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you on the show. We've had Dan Toma, your co-author of the Corporate Startup and Tendayi Viki on the show in the past. How did you get involved in this innovation space?Esther Gons: I think for me, it's been a journey of entrepreneurship. So, my background is basically being an entrepreneur, starting startups, helping startups. So, I've always been an entrepreneur. And one of my first things that I did when I still was actually in my studies of Information Science was starting a business.And one of the things that I was asked to do by one of the bigger computer companies was building something completely new around their selling of computers. And I think that was one of the first corporate startups that I did, but it wasn't called that way, way back when. But I build over the course of two years, a platform with personal logins, with all sorts of new technologies and things that you could do just to sell their computers, to be able to be working from home. So, blog posts that weren't called blog posts. That was just content from people saying your employees will be so loyal. If you have them working from home, all these kinds of things. I even had other vendors ramped up with furniture, stuff like that. It was an amazing platform. And after two years and a lot of money when we finally launched nothing really happened.And the computer company didn't understand because there were no sales whatsoever and they just simply pulled the plug. But for me, that was a really important event because I was asking myself what went wrong there? What was the risk involved? Was it too early? How could I have known? And that was a search that put me on the path of pioneering and innovation and understanding how you could deal with that. So obviously that platform that failed was 20 years too early. If we look at the situation right now and we needed a COVID pandemic to get there. But yes, that got me into the puzzle, discovering things like the Lean Startup methodology when Steve Blank wrote about it and then working with other entrepreneurs to get it working. To evolve it. To make sure that startups heard about it. So that was when I started to volunteer for a lot of startup activity in Amsterdam. And got involved in that in the tech scene, since I've always been a tech entrepreneur. Brian Ardinger: Your first book, the Corporate Startup really gave corporations that inside look on what it was like and what it is like, to think and act, and move like startups. And create new business models from scratch. And it was a great opportunity to provide a framework for how corporations think about that. Your new book, Innovation Accounting, I'd love to start there. What is innovation? Accounting, and why is it so important? Esther Gons: A lot of corporates asked for metrics. You're absolutely right. But they usually ask for the one metric to rule everything, right? So how are we doing in terms of innovation? And then they use innovation as a catch-all phrase. We want to know about all of our innovation, right? We want to see everything in our portfolio. So, what we've seen with working with a lot of clients, because we like to be practical about things that we write.We want to know that it works. Is that for that startup kind of innovation, which is different from what you do in terms of innovation in the rest of your company, you could be doing a digital transformation. You could be optimizing your current processes with startups. It's all innovation, but if you truly want to do new business model innovation. Breakthrough in disruptive innovation. Then you actually need something else than the processes and the accounting systems that you have in your current company. And we noticed that if people didn't have that new system in place and they were trying to do Lean Startup and they were trying to build new business models, if they didn't have the whole system, the whole package, then it all turned back into incremental innovation again.So, then we thought, well, we have to let people know that if they truly want to do new business model innovation, this kind of disruptive innovation, they can measure that with the indicators that they have in their current company with that current system. Because then it will always fail or turn back into incremental innovation again.So, let's talk about that word innovation accounting, that Eric Ries, once coined as being the system that teams needed to have to be accountable for the decisions they made based on data. And talk about how that evolved into something else. And then what do you need inside a company? What kind of system do you need, need inside of a company to actually measure that kind of innovation?Brian Ardinger: I think that's such an important point that corporations really need to define innovation and understand the spectrum of it. You know, everything from, like you said, the stuff close to the core of that optimization of what they're currently doing and how that differs significantly from transformational innovation when you're trying to come up with a brand new business model. Why do you think it's so difficult for companies to understand this distinction and be able to do something about it? Esther Gons: For a company, it's ingrained in their system, that their goal is to optimize and grow their current system. Right? That's what they are there for. The CEO has been appointed by the shareholders to do that specific thing. So that means that their whole existence, their future is based on, on executing on that core thing. And that also means that everything that they have gathered around it, their processes, their culture, their people, are based around that. And it's hard to understand something that isn't there yet. Something that is probably really risky. So, if you can't see it, then it's harder to understand and to act around it. So, I think it's actually a good point that you're making Brian, because what we've seen is that if you do not make it visible by either a new system with innovation accounting, or in any other way, then top level, it's hard to make that distinction because you can't see it. You're just seeing the investment that you're making, but you can see what you're doing. And what I always say is that you have to look at it in terms of buckets, right? There's buckets that do not have a really high risk, and that have business goals that are aligned with your core business. So fine, you can do that with the current systems and your investment will have to return something in probably a year, because that's what you're used to.But if you're investing in a high-risk bucket, startups are high risk. I'm a investor myself. So, most VCs know this. This is a high-risk profession, right? You don't know how many will return, what kind of money. And the timelines are vague, could be three years, could be 12 years. So, these high risk buckets needs to have a different approach.But you need to have some sort of visibility in terms of control. So, if you make the bet in your strategy, just that saying, okay, I have business models that are fading. I need to look at the future. Then at least you should have some sort of visibility of what you are doing with that future. So are you betting on a specific innovation thesis like we've described in the Corporate Startup. So, then you want to understand how that is going along. Are we doing well? Are we turning that strategy into, into something really practical? Is your funnel turning into a portfolio? So, you need all kinds of indicators to be able to understand that without falling back to your financial indicator. Because naturally, if you're looking for something that is really new, you're searching and your core business is learning, which means that you do not have a return in Dollars or Euros. You have a return on insights and learnings, and that's what you work for. The Ewing Marion Kauffman FoundationSponsor Voice: The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation is a private, nonpartisan foundation based in Kansas City, Missouri, that seeks to build inclusive prosperity through a prepared workforce and entrepreneur-focused economic development. The Foundation uses its $3 billion in assets to change conditions, address root causes, and break down systemic barriers so that all people – regardless of race, gender, or geography – have the opportunity to achieve economic stability, mobility, and prosperity. For more  information, visit www.kauffman.org and connect with us at www.twitter.com/kauffmanfdn and www.facebook.com/kauffmanfdn.Brian Ardinger: So, let's talk about some of those particular metrics. Traditional metrics might be things like profitability, number of customers, things like that. When you get into, on the innovation front, especially transformational innovation, what are some of the early metrics that you should be looking at? Esther Gons: That sounds really simple, right? And I can give you like three indicators, but it makes sense to sort of understand first that what we understand in terms of innovation accounting is like a whole package of indicators. Because you do not only want to understand every single individual team and how that idea is turning into a business model, right. Because we're talking about that journey from idea to business model, and that is a risky journey because you're searching. But you also want to understand how all of the teams are doing inside of the program that you have. Then you want to understand if you have enough ideas to turn that into future portfolio products or services. Is that going along? Do we need more ideas? Is everything stopped at, I don't know, stage two then we definitely have to look at what's going on here. And then you need to also understand from a strategic level, if your bets for the future are doing well. And if your total investment in the future is turning into something that you want for the company. So, these are three levels of indicators or different kinds of indicators that have some sort of abstraction from each other, right? So, at a team level, you need to understand things. Then the manager needs to understand things in terms of how are the teams doing? That is abstracted from the team indicators and strategy level.They don't want to understand how every team is doing, but they do want to understand how that is translated into their portfolio strategy, for instance. So, I think it's important to understand that where Eric Ries said innovation accounting is for the teams. If you want to do it within a corporate situation, you want to do it in a different setting. So, you need to manage all these things and you need be sort of aware or in control of how all of these investments are doing. And if there is some return, I don't know, in the future. Brian Ardinger: So, if I'm part of an innovation team and I'm trying to understand if I'm making progress, what should I be looking at? Should I be looking at the number of ideas I'm working on, the number of assumptions that I'm testing? Where should I start? Esther Gons: For me, the most important thing for, for this kind of innovation is understanding that your core business is learning. So that means there need to be teams that are doing a unified way of working and validating with experiments. Methodically de-risking that business model. Right. So that means that you want to understand if they're learning well. So how many learnings did they have? Maybe you can look at a experiment learning ratio so that every experiment have a learning or not. Or are we doing experiments for the sake of experiments, for instance. If you put that against time or against cost. Because learning for teams is essentially the core business. Brian Ardinger: So, the idea of measuring that against velocity, how fast do they learn, and the cost of that learning. Is that what you're looking at?Esther Gons: So as soon as you put learning the core, you can look at these things, right? So, what is the learning philosophy? What is the learning ratio? What is the velocity cost ratio? How much time do they spend in a certain state, for instance, doing the learnings? That makes sense if you look at the learnings. That is their core business. But I wouldn't ramp up everything if you start. And just look at the core business and what you want to improve, because you have these indicators to be able to steer and improve of them.Brian Ardinger: So, at the organizational level, what are some of the metrics at that portfolio level that companies should be using to know if they're making progress? Esther Gons: That's the top level. You mean the strategic level? I think it's important to understand if you look at that strategic level. The indicators are basically, framed around questions. So, from a strategic point of view, what you're doing is trying to understand how much your company is really under risk of disruption. Right? So is your current business model under threat of, or fade or disruption? Then that is really important to understand. So, we always say, if you look at your portfolio to understand how much you should invest in this kind of innovation, then look at your portfolio in terms of business models and not in terms of products. People usually look at it, in terms of products, right? But then if you look at it, in terms of business models, most of these products are, have the same business model, especially in product driven companies. But the question is my company under the risk of disruption, or is innovation driving growth in the company, that will give you an answer into how much of your investment should actually go to disruptive innovation.And that could then translate into indicators like portfolio fade, stuff like that. And the other questions you should ask yourself is how does my company future look like, right? Am I betting in the right direction? So how is the innovation thesis doing in terms of progressing towards newer stages. Or how efficient is my innovation ecosystem, if I look into the average speed of these innovation going through the stages or are my investment returning something in so many years. Brian Ardinger: So, looking at things like how much of my revenue is coming from new initiatives, things along those lines?Esther Gons: Things along those lines, but that's the easiest one. And that's one that corporates usually want to see that. So that's why I usually stay away from those in questions like this, because in essence, of course you want to understand how much of your growth is driven by revenue from these kinds of disruptive innovations. If you are starting out with innovation accounting right now, you won't be seeing that until three years or four years from now.I think it's then better to look at different kind of indicators on a funnel level. So, what is going on in the funnel? How many of these ideas are actually starting? And how many end up in different stages. Is that progressing well. With one of your innovation theses that you defined, because you wanted to bet in that specific future, nothing is happening after the second stage, you should ask yourself, is this the right pieces? Should we look at it again? So, you need to have some insight depending on the maturity level of your innovation ecosystem, to be able to steer towards a better ecosystem. Brian Ardinger: The last topic I want to talk about is you're based in Amsterdam, so I'd love to get your insights, and I'm curious to know what you're seeing as it pertains to European companies and their approach to innovation and how it may differ from what's going on in the U S. Esther Gons: So, the things I've seen in Europe, but maybe in the Netherlands specifically, is that the Lean Startup and the Lean Startup Methodology is a little bit farther ahead than it is in the U S maybe, especially in terms of the systematic approach towards the Lean Startup and how to do that within a corporate. Which I'm really happy about because that sort of helps me with the innovation accounting. And then the other way around in the U S there is within startups, I'm not sure how that is in a corporate world. But within startups, there's far more appetite for risk investment. So, in Europe, we tend to be a little bit risk averse. Show me first, and then can you at least show me a revenue first before we do any kind of innovation? So, you're dependent on really early-stage angels, if you want to prove that revenue first. But that differs in country per country. But if you look at ten European investment funds, that those tend to be a little bit more risk averse then the U S. And you can see that back into the amount of investments. So, if you compare VC investments, in terms of numbers, US are higher than they are in Europe. For More InformationBrian Ardinger: Well, I can't wait to go a copy of Innovation Accounting. Your books are always so great because they're visual and they're tactical with templates and guides and that. If people want to find out more about your book or about yourself, what's the best way to do that? Esther Gons: For the book, definitely go to InnovationAccountingBook.com, where we have the table of contents and you can download the resources and also look where you can order, and pre-order the book. If you want to know more about me or my company, then simply go to ToGroundControl.Com or might be a little bit more difficult as EstherEmmelyGons.NL. Brian Ardinger: Well, thank you Esther, for being on Inside Outside Innovation. I look forward to continuing to have these conversations about what makes innovation so great and appreciate your time and your insights. Thank you. Esther Gons: Love to be here Brian.Brian Ardinger: That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLSGet the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HEREYou can also search every Inside Outside Innovation Podcast by Topic and Company.  For more innovations resources, check out IO's Innovation Article Database, Innovation Tools Database, Innovation Book Database, and Innovation Video Database.  

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with David Schonthal, Clinical Professor and Director of Entrepreneurship Programs at the Kellogg School of Management and Coauthor of the new book, The Human Element: Overcoming the Resistance That Awaits New Ideas. David and I talk about what keeps ideas from gaining traction and what you can do to avoid friction and resistance to new ideas. Let's get started.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 David Schonthal, Clinical Professor and Director of Entrepreneurship Programs at Northwestern University and Coauthor of The Human ElementBrian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation, I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today, we have David Schonthal. He is a Clinical Professor and Director of Entrepreneurship Programs at Northwestern University and Coauthor of the new book, The Human Element: Overcoming the Resistance that Awaits New Ideas. Welcome to the show, David. David Schonthal: Thanks, Brian. Nice to be here. Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm excited to have you here. You have spent a lot of your career thinking about and watching what it takes to make new ideas happen. You've spent time at IDEO. You were co-founder of Matter, which is that 25,000 square foot innovation center in Chicago. Has some venture capital experience and that. And I thought we could start by telling the audience how you got into the innovation space in the first place. David Schonthal: By accident is the answer. It's sort of a long story, but I wound up becoming the COO of a medical device company in San Diego, California based on a radical shift from what I was doing before, which is tax software in London. To make a long story short, one of my former bosses called me up when I was just at my lowest point with tax and the UK, no offense to the UK, but it was winter, and it was like dark 18 hours out of the day. And he called me up and all of a sudden, I just, all I remember is him saying, yada, yada, yada San Diego, yada yada, yada. I was like, oh please.He's like, would you like to know what the business is? I was like, no, not important. So, I wound up going and being the head of operations for an early stage medical device company. And then basically from that point forward was just bit with the bug around bringing new ideas to market either in the startup space, through entrepreneurship or venture capital or in the corporate space through design and innovation.Brian Ardinger: And you've got a new book called the Human Element. I would imagine it packs a lot about the things that you've learned over that career. Since you've spent a lot of time seeing how early ideas get traction or not, what is the most striking problem that you see most people making when it comes to kicking off an idea?David Schonthal: I think maybe the best place to start is by most innovators and entrepreneurs' instinct that the idea is the thing that needs to be addressed. So, if a new product or service or strategy isn't being adopted by the market, most innovators instincts says well, let's make the product a little better. Let's change the way we talk about it. Let's drop the price. Let's promote it differently. And they make the thing or the strategy or the movement, the center of their attention. And in the course of my career, I've worked on some really amazing, I mean, some terrible, but also some really amazing innovations and products and services. And I was always surprised by how, even though clearly if these things were adopted into the market, they would make the world a better place, no matter how much we tweaked or change the idea that wasn't always the key to success of getting it introduced.And so about four years ago, turned my attention to thinking about what is it that stands in the way of change and partnered up with one of my colleagues at Kellogg, who was a behavioral psychologist named Loran Nordgren. And together we've been studying this problem from both the applied side, as well as the theoretical side.And that was the genesis of the book, which is that our instincts about innovation are too heavily biased on making the thing more appealing and not focused enough on helping the market adopt it by removing the friction that stands in the way. Brian Ardinger: Yeah. I love that. You kind of start off the book, this battle between what do you call fuel and friction. The idea that a lot of times, just to make an idea better, all you have to do is add more facts or more features or try to get more folks bought into it. But really, it's a lot about how do you eliminate the frictions around that? So, in the book you talk about four frictions. Let's outline and tell the audience how they can avoid them.David Schonthal: Sure. So, if you think about a new idea, like an airplane leaving the ground or a projectile flying through the air. Fuel, to your point Brian, are all of the things that propel that idea forward. The need that the customer has, features and benefits, promotional strategies, but like an airplane leaving the ground there are also forces that stand in the way, whether it's wind resistance or sheer or gravity. And so, the book is really focused on these forces, these headwinds of innovation and the four that we specify in the book, the four frictions, our number one inertia, which is our desire as human beings to tend to stick with the status quo. Despite the fact that we know the status quo might be imperfect, our habits are surprisingly powerful. And so, recognizing that inertia is a play anytime you're trying to get somebody to change from what they're doing today, to what you'd like them to do tomorrow. Effort is the second one. All of the ambiguity, all of the costliness, all of the exertion required to get somebody to make that change. The third friction is emotion. All of the anxiety and fear that comes along with changing from something that you do today to something you do tomorrow. And you might not think that emotion comes into play for small things, but emotion comes into play when you're buying a pack of gum or when you're putting on a new shirt.And then the fourth is what we call reactants, which is people's aversion to being changed by others. And each of them show up in varying degrees, depending on what you're working on in spotting them appropriately forecasting them ideally, so that they can be muted and mitigated is really the key. Brian Ardinger: And a lot of those frictions, they're almost not necessarily irrational, but they're definitely not something that you can take an economic model and say, well, clearly there's a cost benefit analysis and everybody should end up on this side of it because of the cost benefit analysis. But there's a lot of underlying things. And it seems a lot of this frictions around ambiguity or being comfortable with failure. How can you get folks more comfortable with that environment of ambiguity? David Schonthal: There's a couple of things that are packed into that question. Number one, ambiguity maps to the friction of effort. Effort we assume is like exertion, which is how much time and money will it take me to make a change. But you're pointing out appropriately that the other way effort comes in is ambiguity or a lack of clarity about how to go about doing something.And sometimes that ambiguity can be so overwhelming that people are afraid to get started because they don't necessarily know how to get started. We talk in the book about a couple of methodologies specifically around helping people with ambiguity. One is around road mapping in simplification. Oftentimes our desire to get people to change is to like keep adding or keep making something better, add facts or add arguments to get somebody to change from what they're doing, to what you'd like them to doing.I mean, just look at vaccines. For example, in the states. Like there's no ambiguity about the evidence that vaccines help protect against severe illness. There is no ambiguity. There is no doubting, the fact that if you get vaccinated, it will make the world a safer place. But that doesn't stop people from having resistance to that idea.And one thing might be around the ambiguity about how to go about getting a vaccine. One might be around the perceived effort of getting a vaccine. The fear about getting a vaccine. And so understanding why people do or don't do the things that they do is really the key to addressing it. So simplification, streamlining, making unfamiliar ideas more familiar. Oftentimes innovators have this instinct that because their idea is new and radical. We need to highlight its newness and its radicalness is part of its allure. Oftentimes that actually works against us because the newer and more radical something seems the less familiar it is. And the more anxiety we have about how we're going to start to use it. And the great example of that comes from Apple. And if you're old enough audience to remember the introduction of the Macintosh OS. In addition to creating a new machine, one of the things that Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak created was a created was a new operating system for how computers are used. And unlike PCs or DOS-based systems, which you really needed to learn the language of computers in order to do something on a computer, Steve Jobs and other great innovators tend to have their products and services operate the way the rest of your world works.So, when you're working on an Apple home screen, you're working on a desktop. And when you're creating a document and you want to store that document, you put that document in a folder. And when you want to get rid of it, you drag it into the trashcan. And these might seem sort of like cute user interface principles, but these were deliberately designed to make something wildly unfamiliar to people who had never worked on a computer to immediately feel more comfortable with it because it works, sounds, and it feels the way the rest of your world works. So even though something is new, doesn't mean that it should be projected as radically.Brian Ardinger: So, if I'm a new innovator or I'm a startup entrepreneur, I've got a new idea I want to start building that out. Do you recommend mapping out these particular frictions or how do you find out what your audience or what your customers are fearful about? David Schonthal: That's a great question. There are a couple of tools we bring to life in the book. One is called a Friction Map, which is anticipating the frictions that might stand in the way of your new ideas. So, it is a document that you can fill out with your team. Where you forecast based on some clear questions that are asked in the Map. What is the relevance? What is the amount of inertia that might be present? What's the amount of effort, friction that might be present? Emotional friction that might be present in reactants? And then there's another framework around remedies. How might you take each of these frictions, test them in the market, but also test possible remedies to overcome. And the more you can bring this into your design process.So, people will fill out a Business Model Canvas based on Osterwalder's work, or they'll fill out a Horizons Framework as they're forecasting what opportunities might exist. We also recommend filling out a Friction Map, which is what are the forces of resistance that might stand in the way. And what might we prototype to overcome those forces as a way of introducing this product or service or strategy.Brian Ardinger: And then do you go out and actually test those assumptions? David Schonthal: Absolutely. Each of them can be prototyped. And yes, testing them with different audiences, testing different ways of communicating or making unfamiliar things familiar. Or identifying the sources of emotional friction so that they can be addressed in the messaging, and the way products are communicated. All are easy enough to test in low fidelity and oftentimes save us a lot of effort down the road when it comes to scaling offers up. Brian Ardinger: One of the other things I liked about the book is that you have not only these frameworks, that people can understand the methodology and that around it, but you also bring out some case studies in the book. And one of them is around Flyhomes, which is a startup company that built a new business model in the real estate space, designed to address some of the frictions in the market. So, can you talk a little bit about that case study? David Schonthal: It's a great story. So Flyhomes, for those of you who are living in the United States while you're watching this can appreciate, we are in the midst of a bananas housing market, residential housing market. Debt has never been cheaper. Inventory has never been lower. And as a result, desirable homes are just flying off the market almost the same day that they're listed, which creates a whole conundrum for people who are trying to buy homes, particularly first-time home buyers. Because when inventory is low, typically the offers that get accepted by sellers, particularly when they have multiple offers, are all cash offers or offers that are perceived to be low risk. And low risk offers are ones that don't have contingencies attached to them. Don't have home sale contingencies. Don't have loan contingencies. In order to compete, in order to get a home buyer, you have to either bring all cash to the table or convince sellers that despite the fact that they've got these contingencies, that there's actually a high degree of certainty, that something will close.Flyhomes is a business that helps address this problem by making all buyers, all cash buyers, they have focused their business model on removing the friction that stands in the way of somebody buying a home in simultaneously removing the friction that stands in the way of a seller accepting the new one offer forum.They didn't start this way. Flyhomes began, in fact, the namesake doesn't come from homes flying off the market. It came from the fact that Stephen Lane and Tushar Garg who were young entrepreneurs, started the business by thinking, all right, in the world of real estate tech, in the world of residential real estate tech, the big names or the new market innovations where things like Trulia and Zillow and Redfin, that had two primary value propositions.One we're either going to take all home inventory off the MLS that exists only for real estate agents, and we're going to democratize it and make it so that anybody who's interested in looking at homes can see all available inventory, which is great. And then the second thing they typically did was discount brokerage. Meaning that if you worked with one of their agents, you would get cash back, they would discount their service fee and you would get some of that back in a rebate. And Steve and Tushar figured there was probably more that could be done in this market. And they being millennials themselves in doing some research, found that millennials, in addition to wanting to own homes, also desired travel, adventure, freedom.And why is it that when we make big purchases on electronics or appliances on a credit card, we get all the benefits that come with a credit card, like points and travel miles. Why don't we get something like that with homes? And so, they created a product called Flyhomes, which is for every dollar you spend on the purchase of a new home, up into a half a million dollars, you would get points on an airline.And they partnered with Alaska and Jet Blue. And Jet Blue actually sent out this mass email to all their frequent flyers saying we're now in this arrangement with Flyhomes, buy a home through Flyhomes get up to 500,000 frequent flyer miles on Jet Blue. In the first day, thousands of people signed up for the platform.And Steve and Tushar looked at themselves like this is going to be huge. And then nothing. Like nothing happened. Nobody was buying a home through Flyhomes. Nobody was actually using the service. There was enough alure or to the idea that got people interested to like check it out and sign up. But that wasn't actually helping people make the progress. They really wanted to make, which wasn't getting 500,000 airline points. It was actually getting the home that they wanted. Flyhomes could address the real problem or address the real progress. All of these bells and whistles wouldn't make things easier. It would just be bells and whistles for the sake of bells and whistles.So almost at the point of going out of business, they decided to pivot. And because they both had their real estate license started selling real estate. And by studying people in this kind of ethnographic way and actually getting out and selling real estate as realtors, they understood that the problem wasn't the points in adventure.The problem was is that people desired homes in competitive markets that they were unable to access. And after two or three chances of putting in bids and having those bids rejected, people were just giving up on real estate all together. And so Steve and Tushar decided that if they could help address the problem of democratizing the ability for home buyers to buy homes in really competitive markets, that would be a revolutionary change. That would really change the game. And so, they pivoted over from points to friction removal. And today. Flyhomes is growing like crazy. They do billions of dollars a year in transactions. They just raised a really big Series C at $150 million. It's all because they changed their business model from fuel addition to friction removal.Brian Ardinger: Excellent example. Now you've got a number of them in the book and that. What other hidden gems in the book that people should be excited about when they pick it up? David Schonthal: I think the most interesting stories and we try to have as many of them as possible in the book, so the ones that are counterintuitive. Like the ones that really check our biases and our assumptions about what we think the right way to do something is relative to what the science and the data tells us. And one of the things that I think readers who read this book will find is that in many cases, our instincts about what we ought to do to affect change are actually in some ways the opposite of what we ought to do to impact change.And we actually start the book off with a really fun story about the world's most successful car salesperson. A guy named Ali Reda, who works in suburban Detroit, in Dearborn, Michigan. Who outsells every other average car dealer in the United States, by a factor of 12 to one. He single-handedly sells as many as 1500 cars a year, which is more than most dealerships sell in total.And when you study Ali, and when you interview him and when you understand how he approaches car sales, that is so much different than his peers, what you learn is that he just frames his job radically different than every other salesperson. And I won't divulge too much about the secrets of how, but there's lots of examples in this book about how people who go left when everybody else goes right. And to succeed, but it's not just that they go left, it's understanding the psychology of what it is that they're doing differently than enables them to experience that success. Which is really, I think the beautiful thing about partnering with Loren on this is not only do we have examples about how these things work in practice, but we can also help people understand why they work psychologically.Brian Ardinger: So, you've been in this innovation industry for quite a long time. What are some of the biggest changes that you've come across and how do you see the innovation space kind of evolving? David Schonthal: That is a, the ability for people to create new ideas and make them real has never been easier. The cost of starting a new business, the cost of creating a new product or service with digital technology has enabled everybody who once had an idea on a napkin sketch.You now have the ability to make that sketch into something real and tangible and available in the market. And what I find now is, we've got a different problem, which is that the world is flooded with new ideas and flooded with new technologies. And whereas before it used to be hard to make an idea into a real thing. Now it's getting people to notice and pay attention and actually adopt your real thing. And one of the ways that we think about doing it is spending a lot of money on marketing and advertising and SEO and SEM. And yes, that's part of building awareness. But we don't often think about awareness as being one side of the equation. The other side is how do you make it easy for people to say yes. Well, one of the things we noticed about new products and services, particularly when you're creating a new consumer product is people will learn about it. They'll even go to the website, they'll put it in their cart, but at the moment before they check out, they'll abandon their cart, which means you've done half the job, right.You've gotten them interested to come to the site at the beginning. You've gotten them interested enough in the features and benefits to actually add that, or imagine that in their lives, but something is holding them back from actually pulling the trigger. And I think, now we've created a world where making the idea come to life has never been easier. But how do we make sure that it's easy for people to adopt that into their lives so that they can say yes, and to get noticed in that way. It's no longer about features and benefits. Now it's just about making things as frictionless and as effortless as possible for people to adopt. For More InformationBrian Ardinger: And the great thing about that is that's becoming easier as well. And people like yourself are helping in that process. So, David, thank you for coming on Inside Outside Innovation, to tell us a little bit about some of the secret sauce behind all that. I encourage people to pick up The Human Element. If people want to find out more about yourself or the book, what's the best way to do that? David Schonthal: HumanElementBook.com is a landing page that shares information about the book. You can find me on the Northwestern University, Kellogg School of Management faculty page, just Google my name, David Schonthal. And usually, you can find me there and I'd love to hear from you. Brian Ardinger: Well, thank you David, for being on the show and look forward to continuing the conversation as the years and the innovation evolve. David Schonthal: Thanks Brian. Me too. It was great to be here. Brian Ardinger: That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLSGet the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HEREYou can also search every Inside Outside Innovation Podcast by Topic and Company.  For more innovations resources, check out IO's Innovation Article Database, Innovation Tools Database, Innovation Book Database, and Innovation Video Database.  

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Sarah Stein Greenberg, Executive Director of Stanford's d.School. Sarah and I talk about her new book, Creative Acts for Curious People and dig into a number of the exercises and activities that innovators can use to move ideas forward faster. Let's get started.Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help you rethink, reset, and remix yourself and your organization. Each week, we'll bring you latest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses, as well as the tools, tactics, and trends you'll need to thrive as a new innovator. Interview Transcript of Sarah Stein Greenberg, ED of Stanford's d.School and Author of Creative Acts for Curious PeopleBrian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Sarah Stein Greenberg. She's the Executive Director of Stanford's d. School and author of the new book, Creative Acts for Curious People: How to Think, Create and Lead in Unconventional Ways. Welcome to the show, Sarah. Sarah Stein Greenberg: Thanks so much, Brian. I'm really excited to be here. Brian Ardinger: You know, as a person in the trenches, trying to help companies and teams think through the innovation process. It's kind of hard-to-get people on board half the time. And you've taken and created this new book, that's really the tactical guide of exercise and experiences, almost a roadmap for that. What made you decide to tackle this topic and what do you hope for folks to get the most out of it? Sarah Stein Greenberg: Oh, great question. We're living through this historic moment right now, where on nearly a daily basis, each of us are trying to solve problems that we have not faced before. So, as we were getting going, we were talking about the challenge of having one kid vaccinated. One kid not vaccinated. People are back in school. There's lots of different risk factors. Folks are starting in some cases to return to offices. Like what's the new social etiquette. And then at the same time, there are these like community level issues or global issues around whether it's wildfires, which are happening in my area, or really different perspectives about politics that we're experiencing all over the country.And it's a lot of ambiguity and a lot of uncertainty. So, while we might be used to thinking about like, how do we apply our creativity to innovation and coming up with new products and services, there's also this whole realm of use for our creative abilities that has to do with these kinds of both small personal and large global challenges.So, I wrote this book because I think that design offers a set of abilities that are really useful when you're trying to tackle problems where you don't know the right answer. Maybe there is no right answer, and you have to bring your full creative self. These are the kinds of skills and abilities that we seek to help develop in our students at the d. School and with executives and teachers and folks all over the world. And I think there's something in here for everyone, no matter where you are in your creative journey. I think you can find something that will be of use to you. Brian Ardinger: A lot of folks are understanding that to a real extent this idea of living in constant change and ambiguity and a world in flux. What are some of the key skillsets that you find are important to be able to dabble in that world?Sarah Stein Greenberg: One is the act of noticing and observing how the world is changing. And, you know, we get really habituated to the routines and the things we see every day. But when you look at what amazing designers do, somehow, they see opportunities that no one else is noticing. But there are really a set of ways, I have a few great assignments in the book based on this to cultivate your own ability to observe and notice differently.So, one of my favorites is called the Dureve, in which you are able to take a walk and navigate around a space or your neighborhood, or your office building, by using the practices in the Dureve. All of a sudden you notice things that maybe have been there for 25 years, and you haven't noticed these elements. And it awakens you to recognize how many opportunities are around us all the time that are just lying in plain sight, but we are not seeing them. So that's one of those skillsets. I think another key one is just, we talk about this all the time in innovation and design, but it's about collaboration. Right. And how you get to a state of true creative collaboration and how much trust that requires, an openness, and the ability to navigate together with a group of people who may think very differently about the same things through a creative process.Brian Ardinger: You talk about in the book, the difference between problem finding and problem solving. Can you outline that and why that is so important to understanding how to work in this innovation space? Sarah Stein Greenberg: Yeah. I mean, for me, that was one of the critical ahas that I experienced when I first started learning about design when I was a grad student. You know, I think in a lot of more analytical disciplines, you are taught to take the problem that you've been given, break it into small pieces and then figure out how are you going to solve that? And that is a very valuable set of skills, but in design, we add some stages before you start working on problem solving. That's about problem framing, as you said. And the reason for doing this is that often the way a problem has been framed is a conventional way, right? It's kind of the way that's either out there and sort of the obvious way. It is what we assume that our customers might need, or we assume that people would care about. But in fact, if you allow yourself that stage of problem finding that's often what drives the innovation, is when you reframe an opportunity and then you start to see it in a whole new way. Brian Ardinger: Do you have any examples that you can share around that? Sarah Stein Greenberg: Yeah. One of the examples that I go into detail in the book is the example of a team of students who ultimately wound up founding a new company. And they were tasked with working with a partner, a hospital, a cardiac care hospital in India. And they thought that their mission as a team was to design something that could really assist with like efficiency or sort of patient flow. They thought that they were going to wind up designing something for either the clinicians or maybe for the hospital administrators. What they saw when they started doing their research was a completely different set of opportunities. What they spotted was the fact that there are many people in the hospital who were coming to accompany their family member and then winding up waiting for hours or days even, and not having a lot of information about how their family member was doing, what their prognosis was.The students really like feed into this and wound up designing something for those family members. So they have now launched this organization that provides healthcare training to family members during that waiting process. And what that allows is that the patient then goes home with a trained caregiver who actually has the largest stake in the outcome, the health outcomes.And they've trained over a million people. They work in over 150 hospitals across South Asia. It's a really unconventional solution. It's so powerful because they just took this completely ignored opportunity and created a very low cost, very effective solution that helps reduce the rate of hospital readmissions. It reduces complications following surgery. Those students would not have been able to get to that outcome if they didn't have the permission to really do the problem finding work, right. And not take the problem as given but find a new opportunity. Brian Ardinger: I think that's so important because when you work with corporate teams, a lot of times they think they understand the problem because they've worked with that customer before, they understand a lot of the dynamics versus like a startup. Maybe that's working in a green space idea. What kind of advice can you give for a team that's working in an existing environment to give them permission, to think about things differently and tackle the problem side first. Sarah Stein Greenberg: I'm going to give two examples of assignments in the book that I think are incredibly relevant for the scenario that you just depicted. And neither of them are a huge investment of time. So, when people are always worried about like, hey, we just got to jump right into problem solving mode, taking one day or even just a couple of hours to check whether or not there might be solution space is it's such a good investment of time. The first one that I'll mention is an activity called Experts Assumptions. And it's based on the practice of Assumption Storming. Everybody knows about brainstorming, but there's a really cool practice created by a guy named Craig Lauchner called Assumption Storming, where you list all the assumptions that you have about what your customer needs, or what the market opportunity looks like.I really list all of them. And then you start categorizing them based on whether they're fact or opinions or guesses. And actually, what you discover is there's a lot more opinions and guesses, behind most of our assumptions, than you would think. Anything that's a fact you just disregard for the sake of the exercise, but anything that's an opinion or a guess, you challenge that.So, you flip it and you say, well what if this opinion were not true, what could we design them? What could we make then? And oftentimes it just reveals that like our assumptions are built on this foundation of a lot of guesswork and it gives you the opportunity to do that right up front when you're starting something.The other practice that I would advise in this case is called shadowing. And shadowing is just the practice of following in the footsteps of whoever you're trying to design for for a full day. We have a lot of experience running this with educators who follow a student for the entire day, from the bus stop to the drop off at the end of the day.And they come back with the most interesting and unexpected insights, right? So those are people who are in the school context all day. They think they really understand what's going on, but until you put yourself in the shoes or you walk in the shoes of someone else, you don't realize how much of the experience might be altered from having that different perspective. And again, it helps you challenge those assumptions, and it helps you spot all of these opportunities for creative work or innovation that you haven't noticed yet. Brian Ardinger: So, you've worked with a lot of teams, and they'd gone through a lot of these types of exercises and that. What are some of the biggest aha moments or obstacles and where do people get stuck and how do they overcome it? Sarah Stein Greenberg: I love it when people get stuck, because that means it's a challenge worthy of their creative abilities. I think getting stuck has a bad rap, but actually it means you're doing important work and you're stretching and you're learning. One place where we often see students in our classrooms get stuck is during the phase when you're trying to light on the direction for your project, kind of synthesis phase, establishing a point of view.I also see our teams get stuck when everybody's gone off and done the exploration research separately. And nobody has actually like gone to interview users together and had the aha that comes from having two different people interpret, oh, is that what that person was saying? There's a real missed opportunity there.And then there was a wonderful moment of feeling the pressure of the final deadline that often causes a lot of angst and tension within a team. And what those moments often are is what's called productive struggle. So, there's research from mathematics education that says that when you struggle, when you're first trying to learn a new skill in math, you actually wind up learning it more deeply. And you're more likely to be able to transfer that knowledge to other kinds of problems. And so people who kind of get things right away the first time, that doesn't mean they're deeply learning. So again, I welcome the struggle. I think the struggle can be a sign that the task is worthy of your attention and that you're going to have to stretch and grow while you're conquering it.Brian Ardinger: One of the things that I've seen working with teams, a lot of times that keeping the momentum and the consistency is difficult. A lot of times they go and get excited, and they go out and do customer discovery and then they think they can check it off the list and then be done with it. Do you have any hints or tips for, how do you keep that momentum and consistency not get pulled away to the executing and optimizing mode, that too many people get pulled?Sarah Stein Greenberg: Really establishing upfront that you're going to go back to customers multiple times is critical. When you first interpret whatever you learned during that exploration and research, you can kind of be like, oh, I'm onto it. Like I've got this new idea. It's new to me. It's exciting. But if you don't actually go back and test your assumptions by exposing those early prototypes to real people, then you're not really closing the loop.So, treating those first insights as a hypothesis, but then continuing to test and make sure that you're getting real feedback from the market or from colleagues or from anyone who has an external perspective to the work, I think that's what really helps you avoid that pitfall that you're describing.And a lot of people, you know, it is easy to get into that like solution optimization mindset. And a lot of that comes from this sense of, I need to work fast. In my opinion, and I think the experience with, you know, a lot of innovators would bear this out, if you take the time to do those tests, you really save yourself risk. Right.You really help get the right product to market or the right innovation going rather than some kind of more arbitrary internal deadline. It's so easy to like lose sight of that fact in the pursuit of, you know, getting to the preexisting timeline rather than actually thinking about what is right here, how am I solving the right problem? How am I going to come up with something that's truly meaningful to some customer somewhere? Brian Ardinger: The key is accelerating the learning, not necessarily the outcome itself. Sarah Stein Greenberg: Yeah, I think that's right. And I think the learning also is useful to a company or a team, not just in this particular project, but then going forward. So, if you think about, am I optimizing for learning, what am I really doing to make sure we come out of this project, having a great outcome, but also like setting the team up for success in the future. That's the exact right mindset. That's the learning mindset that you want to cultivate. Brian Ardinger: So, as you're out in Silicon Valley at Stanford. So, technology is obviously a core component of the whole region. How do you see technology changing the way we design and some of the new trends that you're seeing out there? Sarah Stein Greenberg: One thing we've all gone through in the past 18 months is much more remote collaboration, particularly for many people in the world of design than we have experienced before. And I think that that's been certainly a challenge, but it's also provided a lot of new opportunities to design new types of interactions, new types of practices. So, there are increasingly ways to be testing at scale through online platforms that we maybe haven't used in the past. Personally, still think that has to be complemented by the kind of depth human, you know, more individual, small qualitative research approaches. I think a blend is really useful. It's challenged all of our teams in terms of how do you build trust? How do you build resilience? How do you build the kind of collaboration that we're talking about be necessary when you're not, it's easy to have less empathy for your team members when you're not seeing them every day? And you know, not maybe scheduling in time to have those more human conversations that kind of coffee chat just happens in a in-person office environment. I think you can design for that remotely in a distributed culture, but you have to be conscious that that's an important thing that you value. Brian Ardinger: Like I said, there's, I think over 80 types of activities or exercises that you have in this book. Are there particular ones that you like or want to talk about?Sarah Stein Greenberg: Sure. I mean, one example that I'll give, and I feel like this is the epitome of what we talk about when we say these are unconventional approaches. So, one of my favorites is an activity that I lead every year with students called Distribution Prototyping. So, this is like phenomenal for small businesses or large businesses. Too often in design or in engineering we like think about the thing that we want to make or the service we want to deliver, but we don't think about how it's actually going to reach the customer. That's such a miss because there is so much innovation and creativity that can happen in the distribution and the marketing and the sales experience and all of that.So, thinking more broadly about where innovation can show up, that's a favorite idea of mine. And in this particular assignment, I have people stretch a string across the biggest room they have, or the longest hallway that they have. And then imagine the thing that they're trying to deliver to the customer at one end and the place where it's either being the person being trained to deliver the service, or you know, where it's being manufactured at the other end.And then systematically you hang cards using paperclips or whatever you have at hand to represent all of the different steps along the channel. And there's something very powerful about the embodiment of that, right? Like you can get your head around it. You can build a model. You can put it on a spreadsheet.It doesn't do as much for you as if you physically do what's called body storming and make that physical representation. So, you will have kinds of insights about, oh, we could cut some costs here. Ooh, this could be a really nonsense traditional agent in my channel who might really change how people are experiencing the delivery of the service. Or you might think differently about the economic arrangements or some way to incentivize retailers that you haven't thought about before. So that's one of my favorites. That's really what I'm taking a string and putting it... That is the kind of embrace of the more playful unconventional approaches that can really work. Brian Ardinger: Yeah, that literal mapping of a customer journey gives you so many different dimensions to look at. It's almost like the whole business model canvas versus a running of a business plan. It gives you a visualization of things that you can move around and change. I really like that. Sarah Stein Greenberg: Yeah. And I would say like the visualization is a huge part of it. And then that one step further into the physicalization is like, there is a reason that when you walk into any design studio, it is usually cluttered with so many different objects. It's because designers think with things and there is some really magical part of your brain that gets lit up. When you do that. For More InformationBrian Ardinger: I appreciate you being on Inside Outside Innovation, to talk a little bit about the book it's called Creative Acts for Curious People. If people want to find out more about yourself or the book, what's the best way to do that? Sarah Stein Greenberg: They can reach us at dschoolbooks.Stanford.edu. We are going to be delighted to get this into people's hands as soon as possible. Brian Ardinger: Go and grab it at Amazon or wherever books are sold. And we're excited to have you on the show and thanks very much for being a part of it.Sarah Stein Greenberg: Thank you so much. I really enjoyed it. Brian Ardinger: That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLSGet the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HEREYou can also search every Inside Outside Innovation Podcast by Topic and Company.  For more innovations resources, check out IO's Innovation Article Database, Innovation Tools Database, Innovation Book Database, and Innovation Video Database.  

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Wayne Li, Professor of Practice of Design and Engineering, School of Industrial Design at Georgia Tech and Director of Design Bloc. Wayne and I talk about the growing importance of design and design thinking, and we explore some of the changing trends when it comes to technology, tools, and tactics for building new products and services that matter. Let's get startedInside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help you rethink, reset, and remix yourself and your organization. Each week, we'll bring you latest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses, as well as the tools, tactics, and trends you'll need to thrive as a new innovator.Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Wayne Li. He is Professor of Practice of Design and Engineering, School of Industrial Design at Georgia Tech, Director of Design Bloc. Welcome to the show, Wayne.Wayne Li: Hi thanks. Thanks Brian. Thanks for having me. Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm excited to have you on, because you have had a long career in this whole world of design and innovation. You were a founding class member at the Stanford d.school. You've worked with great companies like Ford and Pottery Barn and VW. And I think you were a part of the original team that helped develop the original Tesla Roadster. I think I'll start off the conversation with where you're currently at with Design Bloc and how it got has origin. Wayne Li: Design Bloc is a multidisciplinary Design Thinking initiative on Georgia Tech Campus. So, you can think a center. We try to bridge different schools and colleges. Think like a large university, they're separated in different units or colleges. You have a college of engineering and college of design, college of natural sciences.And what Design Bloc tries to do is to teach in a multidisciplinary type of way. And so we partner with professors from all over the Institute to try to offer courses that teach not only Design Thinking, but do it in a way that bridges more than one unit, more than one college. We have things like Bio-inspired Watercolor Painting all the way to Transportation Design.Community Engagement and Service, like a humanitarian design project. And again, you can see that those problems exist. They exist beyond just the sphere of one unit. For example, you're saying, okay, I'm going to address developing countries energy grid. That's not just engineering that requires public policy. It requires cultural engagement and community knowledge. You have structure or architecture there. So, you can see a problem like that is multifaceted. We shouldn't be teaching in a siloed or singled mono disciplinary manner. You know, I learned this really early on, probably back when I was still in college, actually. But I worked at IDEO product development very early on in my career.You know, I think the reason why it came to be like, you mentioned, like, you know, what is it, how did it get started? Was that when I went to undergraduate, I was both a fine arts and engineering major. I kind of saw how the perception of an object, its beauty, its appearance, had a cultural relevance to it.And then you coupled that with how well it was engineered. How well it was built. What it was actually intended to function as and whether or not those mesh together well. And I think that's kind of what got me to my work at IDEO. But I think that was the benefit. And so about almost seven years ago, an alumnus from Georgia Tech, Jim Oliver, went back and visited the Institute and just notice that the College of Engineering and the College of Design really didn't talk to each other that much. Even though he himself had had a similar background. In undergraduate, he also had a mechanical engineering and industrial design background just like me.So, he basically put out a search and said, I want someone. I will donate a certain sum of money. And I want someone to establish this kind of initiative, whose goal it is to teach students in a more well-rounded way. And so, I'm very lucky and very blessed after a nationwide search that I managed to get it. That's kind of how it came to be.So, we started about six, seven years ago with basically one class. With 8 students to 12 students in it. And now we teach about 20 classes a year, with about a thousand to 2000 students. Right? So, it has grown. It's wonderful to see it. I love being the director of it and seeing it grow and getting partners and collaborators who are really psyched about it.And the cool thing is, yeah, you actually see professors who have a PhD in something, so they're very, very intelligent about something. All of a sudden get intrigued, like I never thought of myself as a designer. Well, everyone, little d design. Brian Ardinger: That's an interesting point because obviously people are beginning to understand that design is a core component of every facet of their life nowadays. But tell me a little bit about like what's the process of Design Bloc and how do you go from an idea to creating something valuable in the market? So, walk me through the whole process of Design Bloc. Wayne Li: Design Bloc, the initiative, right? Is you, like you mentioned, I did my graduate work at Stanford. We were in the class that helped to found the Stanford d.school. So, let's take like the little d design. Don't think like I'm a fashion designer or I'm a software designer or I'm a car designer. Let's take the little d design. So, design, if we just think about design process, right. Stanford has a certain method for their design process. They call it Design Thinking Process. But if we just think of it as a process, when anyone goes through steps or goes through mindsets or phases in order to create something, they go through a design process. Design is a very flexible word. It's like Smurf, it's the only word where you can almost use it like six or seven times and still get the actual understanding.Like I could say, well, I'm designing a design that will design a design to design. So, and you'll be like, what? But that would make sense, right? I'm designing a design; I'm creating a blueprint that will create a robot that will actually learn and make something of use. That's what it is. The idea of course, is that when they build anything. They're going through what we consider a process, a design process. And again, this isn't something that necessarily is taught at an Institute. You know, an Institute will teach physics, or it'll teach mathematics or Latin. They're not actually teaching the process of how you create novel, useful, effective ideas, right, for society. The Design Thinking processes that Stanford created along with the Hasso-Plattner Institute in IDEO. Talks about how can you hone and better your design process regardless of what it is. Regardless of what you're building. So, I think in that sense, Design Bloc is also trying to create courses that allow students to learn about the design process, hone it, and foster good mindsets and behaviors as they go through it.Like for example, with pick something relatively trivial, but let's just for kicks. You get up in the morning and you want to make eggs for your partner or your wife or your spouse. That's a design process, right? You're making something that serves a need or a benefit to someone or some entity. So technically you went through a design process.Now the question is, if you think about it, if you really wanted to make eggs well for your spouse or partner, what would you have to do? Well, you kind of needed to know what they like. So, if they love poached eggs and you give them hard-boiled, they might not like that. And then you also have to be creative.You have to know how many different ways can you make eggs. You also have to think about whether or not it gets well received. Obviously, if you don't know your partner or spouse very well, and you make horrible eggs for them, they'll let you know about it. So sooner or later, and of course that last part is the cycles, the iteration, the more and more you do it, the better you get at it.Right. The better you get at making eggs, the better you get at making the eggs the way your partner or your spouse likes them. So, you can imagine that's another, like a semi trivial one day activity. But whether or not you're making eggs, an electric car, a public policy, a courtroom drama, novella, all of those are design processes. Now apply it to something more serious and you get my drift. Brian Ardinger: Is there a standard iteration of step one, do this step two do this. Or is a lot of it driven by the learnings that you find by moving the idea forward in the first place? Wayne Li: Yeah, no, this is great because I mean, there are many design practitioners and researchers and, you know, people who are designed professors, people who study design, and the people who practice it, who have put terminology around their design process. You might hear these in the industry, right. You know, Google will say, well, we use Design Sprint, it's an Agile Methodology. You might hear maybe a traditional company say, well, we use a double diamond approach, right? Where we go out and we go in, they have their terminology. And of course Stanford's Design Thinking Process is empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test, or evaluate. And they've put words to that. I think when people get a little bit tripped up on is when they hear things defined with either a series of words or a diagram that like, it looks like it moves to the right.It's like, oh, arrow, arrow, arrow moves to the right. They get into this mindset that if I blindly follow a process from start to finish, I will be guaranteed a great result. And that's where I think practitioners understand that the design process is not linear. It's messy, it's cyclical. It repeats it folds on itself. It goes backwards. You jump two steps forward or back. Part of it is the sense and respond. That's why, what I mentioned before, the more and more you practice your design process through experience, and through each phase, you get better at understanding how the design process is going to affect the final result.And that takes some skill. It takes experience. You know, it can also be taught. It can be learned. As you go through a phase, are you sensing how it's going? Do you understand the implications of what you're doing at the time? And then can you respond? For example, if you're in a ideate phase, it is a creative phase. I need to know how many different types of eggs I can make to address my partner.Let's say I only know how to make one. I only know how to boil eggs. I don't know how to poach them. I don't know how to fry them. I don't how to scramble. If you only make one solution and then go get that tested, chances are you're wrong. You know, one out of 10 shot that or one out of seven shot that that's right. If you're not creative by nature or your company doesn't have a creative culture in it, then blindly going through that phase of creating or ideating, isn't going to help.So, if you don't know how to ideate, you're going to be in trouble because that phase will result in the same ideas you always come up with. Part of that is again the sense and respond. Knowing how you execute. Knowing what your strengths and weaknesses are in each phase and whether or not you can cultivate those.If you know, you're not a very creative person in the sense that you very quickly drill down to one possible solution, and then you're very dogmatic about it, then realize that's a weakness in your creative process. It's a weakness of your design process. At the same time, if you're really blue sky and you just love imagining all day and at the end of the day, you need to put something in front of someone, otherwise this product doesn't get built, then you're going to have to learn about your execution and critical thinking skill.At a certain point, I think we try to instill in our students is that, you know, the design process is fluid, it's living and it's part of you. You need to understand how you use it, and then you need to understand how companies use it. Cause that's not always the same thing. Brian Ardinger: That's an interesting point. Are there particular areas that you find, doing these workshops and working people through a process, where people tend to get stuck? What's the biggest aha moments about teaching a process and how to think about designing? Wayne Li: A lot of this is cultural, right? A lot of this deals with people, and of course you see this right with various established or rigid companies that have very, very well-documented well hewn, traditional processes. They love buying out startups. Why? Because the startups are small four employee kind of entities that are usually young. They take risks. They don't know what they can't do because they've never been slapped on the wrist so many times. For them like big companies who are really staid, who don't encourage or empower all levels of their company to come up with ideas, will usually get into this group thing. Like, well, I can't possibly be right. No one values my opinion. The only person that's valued is the CEO or the executive management or the senior vice president. So, then that just destroys a kind of innovative culture because the creativity is not fostered. It's not empowered across all levels. I see that often, usually when I'm brought in to consult with a company or a company comes in and wants a project with a Design Bloc and we do projects for companies. You know, they're always like looking for something like, let's just show something we don't know. That they usually, something will surprise them. And part of that is because young students don't know what they can't do. When they come up with an idea, a lot of the times, the reason that large companies can't or companies that don't have an innovative culture, they don't ask that question anymore.Right. So, like maybe three generations ago, they stopped doing it a certain way because they learned something. But now the business environment has shifted and no one's bothered to really question why they can't do it that way. Or why they can't do it in a new way. Right. It's always so we've always done it that way.Well, yeah, that's the group thing, right? No, one's empowered to ask and go, wait a minute. Yeah, that was true 20 years ago, but the technology has shifted around you. The audience has shifted around you, the people that use your product has shifted around you. Why not go back and question some of those baseline assumptions.Brian Ardinger: Have you learned any techniques that you could help folks that are in that particular environment to open up their thinking or open up their exploration and not fall into this typical traps? Wayne Li: There are a lot of different ways that you can do that, Brian. What I tend to always ask is when someone is in kind of that group think is to say, okay, wait Taguchi calls it Root Cause Analysis.I think Dev Patnaik  uses, who teaches Needfinding at Stanford has taught like a Contextual Ladder, which is like a How Why Ladder. If you're confronted with a problem, do you understand the constraints with which you are assuming are already frozen. Taguchi method is just, why does that exist as a root problem?That's not necessarily creative, but what it does is it tries to ask, do you understand your context? If you're confronted with, I only know one way to do this, or this is the way that we think the company always wants to work, then at least questioning that constraint to say, well, why do we do it this way? What assumptions are we making about either our processes or our customers, that make us decide that we should be doing it this way? Brian Ardinger: And basically being okay with the fact that let's assume that this is an assumption. And then like, how do we find evidence to figure out is this assumption true or false? I think a lot of people don't go back to that process, like you said, and just double-check like, I know we've been doing this 20 years like that, does it still hold true. Its an important part of the process.Wayne Li: And one thing I always love is just pushing constraints, right? I mean, ultimate creativity is having no constraints. But it's difficult in a business environment because you always have some type of like time and money are always going to be constraints. You don't have infinite time. You don't have infinite money.If you had those, you can make anything you wanted and take as long as you want it to make. So you always have some type of constraint. But what I always like to do is push against it. So if you say something like we can't build that, that's too expensive. Then if you say, okay, well we'll hold on a second.What are those assumptions? And then say, there's inherent assumptions in that way. You're building it the same way. That's one assumption. If you built it with a different material or different process, you could maybe save money. If you built it with a different volume, it could be cheaper. So you're like, well, you're assuming that we can only sell that to 10,000 people.What if we sell to 10 million? Or you're assuming no one will pay for it at a higher cost. So again, really, it is about pushing on that constraint to say, we can't do this. Flip that and reframe it. What are all the different ways that we can actually push beyond that boundary? And I take each, sometimes I'll take the top three constraints and kind of see if they're related and in tandem, push against them.Sometimes I'll take each constraint and basically brain on each one separately. Right. But ultimately I'm always asking why is this assumption here and why is this constraint here? And, you know, sometimes somebody will say, well, that just defies the laws of physics. I'm like, no, that just defies the laws of your creativity of your brain.Right. You're not framing it well enough. The only meaningful attribution you have is that that must be a mechanism that follows the laws of physics or follows the laws of finance. Like it has to, you know, supply demand. You must sell something for more than you make it. But those laws are inherent in a human assumption.Somebody is using that device. So the laws of physics change if a 10 year old uses it versus a 30 year old. So if you're like making a shovel, a kid's plastic shovel is way different than a 30 year olds Gardener's shovel. So one shovel is made out of metal costs, maybe $25, and one's made out of plastic and cost two. So again, your physics law didn't change, but your framing did. Part of that is understanding your framing when you'd make an assumption, Brian Ardinger: I'd lIke to switch gears a little bit and talk a little bit about some of the things that you're seeing, what are some of the interesting trends in UX, UI design, and maybe even technology that you've seen and where do you see this whole I guess, industry going Brian?Wayne Li: That's a great question. I mean, I work with industrial design students and mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, computer scientists, human computer interaction, math graduate students. Definitely the thing you see faster and faster and faster for UI and UX is both portability and anticipation. So let me kind of explain what that means.Portability in the sense that devices get smaller, they get more personal, right? No, one's out of client terminal. There's no client terminal relationship anymore. So the portability meaning your ability to consume data, manipulate software, has to be more and more flexible, more and more intuitive. You basically be at the will it like, you know, sooner or later, you might not even use your hand.It's going to be so fluid and so natural. Then you can talk to it. You can gesture at it. The interactions will be more and more natural and quicker, faster, smaller. Now the other thing, like I said is the anticipation. Everything you do is being logged so sooner or later between the machine learning algorithm and the companies that are constantly monitoring your data, they'll be able to truly understand what you are based on your behavioral pattern. If you've read the Singularity Is Near, they basically say, you know, pretty much by 2045, your consciousness will be digitized. So in that sense, if we, if we got what 20 some odd years, 24, some odd years to get there, that basically means AI will be conscious by then, in the sense that hopefully if I live long enough, I could go back and go, what did Wayne think in 2019, every thought that you put into Instagram, Facebook, anything you put into your computer will be logged and kept. So every thought you've ever had. You may no longer corporally exists, but someone got a, what would Professor Li have thought in 1998, about this vehicle. And based on the machine learning though, well, Wayne said this about certain vehicles. And this vehicle and this vehicle people are very similar. So even if I'm not alive in 2080, and there's a 2080 sports car, they're going to go, well, what would Wayne have thought about this 2080 sports car?And they would probably, the machine learning algorithm will say, well Wayne talked about these vehicles or design these sports cars. And these were his thoughts on them because they've all been logged. And by the weighting metric I have, he would have liked it. Or he would have said blah-blah-blah send it.  Sooner or later, we'll have digital avatars that anyone can consult. And so that's the anticipation part. If you can anticipate that now how will that change, what you do Brian Ardinger: Tomorrow is Tesla's AI day. And they're gonna be talking a little bit about some of the new mind of the car stuff that they're working on. Similar to what you're saying, where the car can anticipate based on its surroundings, what's happening and self-driving and everything else around that.But you know, you take that beyond just transportation. You take that to everything else and how does that change the world and what we're looking at? Even things like I think about technology and how it's accessible to anybody now. So I have to be a coder, for example. A lot of no code tools and things along those lines that allow you to experiment and build and try things that 10 years ago, 15 years ago, you had to have a design development team to make that happen. So it'll be interesting to see where that trend takes the world of design as well. Wayne Li: Yeah, no, absolutely Brian. I mean, going back to what you said. I mean, obviously the sort of research area of mine, because I have an automotive interface, a human machine interface lab at Georgia Tech, right. That looks at futuristic automotive experiences. And absolutely you're right. I mean, thinking about it this. Not only can all the cars, right now is 5g. Like let's just think, think about 5g. If 4g was something like, oh, it was novel for us to have one HD movie streaming on our phone. Like that's the data of 4g, without major compression. 5g is like 40 simultaneous HD streams. So for example, if we just take some of that bandwidth and each car is communicating to the 15 nearest cars next to it, and those cars are connected and getting next to the internet enabled lampposts signage traffic stops, then that information is being shared very, very quickly.So if there's something that optimizes traffic flow like a stop says, well, this is open, right now. And there's really no need for a green light or a red light or a yellow light anymore, because everyone's already talking to each other. Brian Ardinger: Tie that into a person's phone and you realize, well, Joe's a crappy driver and he's, he's in the lane next to me. I probably need to adjust for that. Wayne Li: Yeah. Every car in the compass directions around you will notice that, right. Or based on your driving pattern already know that you're a bad driver based on your previous driving history. Right? So that economists levels between semi and fully is tricky. But that data, if it's freely shared, is there. The same thing and will be the minute you tell your car where you're going. So if you say, oh, I'm going to work and it's like, great, I'm driving you there. That's great. It will then ping everyone who's also going to work with you. And so it'll just say, oh, well, you know your neighbor down the street who works at the same company, why don't y'all platoon together.And all of a sudden you match up and you can streamline your traffic. Right? So, same thing, if you, all of a sudden, you tell the car out, I'm going to a concert. It's a new thing. It'll ping everyone on the internet who's interested in that same topic, who's going to the concert with you. And your windshield will turn into a screen.We actually have this in the lab, a windshield that is an augmented reality screen. And then you can then meet 15 people who will meet you at the door. Cause you'll be all dropped off at the same time to the same concert. So now you can go to the concert with not only the friends in your own car, but feel close kinship to 15 other cars that have the same people going at the same concert.It's an interesting concept when you can share that much data that quickly, and you see that as a trend. Yes, privacy is an issue, but you don't really see people pushing against it that much. They're sharing their information. Brian Ardinger: I love what you're doing and some of the things that you've seen in the past, and that. If people want to find out more about yourself or more about Georgia Tech or Design Bloc, what's the best way to do that?Wayne Li: My email's fine. That's just my name. W A Y N E . L I @ design . G A T E C H - Georgia tech.edu. If you want to know more about Design Bloc, basically design bloc without the K so D E S I G N B L O C.ga tech.edu. So they can go to our website and then see what we do. There's a contact us button there.Obviously, if you're a Georgia tech student or a prospective high school student, plenty to learn about what we do, which classes you can take. We do do workshops and not only for students, but we have done workshops for other entities. And so we are in the process of getting those things approved by the Institute. Right. But we have mechanisms in which we do give workshops to companies or groups like the Georgia Tech Alumni Association. We've done Design Thinking workshops for them. So you'll see a list of all the workshops we tend to give. And if it's something that you are interested in or you're interested in giving to your company or entity, then there's a connect to us button and we can talk about that.Brian Ardinger: Wayne, thanks again for being on Inside Outside Innovation, look forward to seeing what the future brings Wayne Li: Me too. It's been a pleasure. Thanks so much for having me on.Brian Ardinger: That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLSGet the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. 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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Jason Birnbaum, Senior Vice President of Digital Technology at United Airlines. Jason and I discuss what it takes to innovate during a crisis and how United continues to adapt to evolving customer, employee, and market changes. Let's get started.Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help you rethink, reset, and remix yourself and your organization. Each week, we'll bring you the latest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses, as well as the tools, tactics, and trends you'll need to thrive as a new innovator.Interview Transcription of Jason Birnbaum, Senior Vice President of Digital Technology at United AirlinesBrian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Jason Birnbaum. He is a SVP of Digital Technology at United Airlines. Welcome to the show, Jason, Jason Birnbaum: It's a pleasure to be here. Brian Ardinger: Jason, I am excited to have you on the show. You are in an industry that is in the midst of disruption as we all are. But I think the travel industry is even facing more dilemmas. So, I wanted to get somebody on who's focused on innovation in this trying times, to see what it's like to be in the trenches in this world. So, tell us a little bit about what's your role at United and how it deals with it.Jason Birnbaum: I really am responsible for all of the technology associated with our employees, but also all the customer experiences that you would have at the airport, on board, really anywhere that you're physically involved with United Airlines. So, if you like the kiosks or you don't like the kiosk, that's what we do. All the signage in the airports moving you around. That's all part of my team as well. So wide scope, but lots of fun. Brian Ardinger: And when we had a chance to be introduced, one of the reasons I wanted to have you on the show is because the United Airlines takes a broad approach to innovation. You know, I think a lot of companies focus on innovation and think about it from a, like a product perspective only, but you seem to focused on more holistic. Talk a little bit about how you perceive innovation and what goes into making those particular types of decisions.Jason Birnbaum: First of all, when you think about the airlines, our product is the airline. And so our product is the employees. And the product is the experience, and so for us, almost every part of it, including people that actually work and fix the airplanes, people that actually, you know, load the bags and all of those are so intimately connected to the whole experience, that we have to think of innovation in a broad way.And so, when we started thinking about it, we realized that we needed to enable our employees to deliver great service. And connect that to the way our customers traveled. So, a lot of our innovation was really employee focused so that they could deliver great service. And when you start thinking about it in that thread, it really opened the door for a lot of really, really amazing innovation, whether it's freeing up employees, so they can actually spend time with customers. Right. Or it's just giving them information or data to anticipate your need, or if it's making that technician able to get the plane going faster. So, you are not late, like all of that fits together. And the way we think about innovation, Brian Ardinger: I imagine you get bombarded with new ideas and challenges and problems that are coming from their employees or from your customer set saying, hey, fix this or make this better. What's the process to go about looking at, across the ideas, and doing something about them. Jason Birnbaum: Yeah. Well, it's a, it's a great question. There is a lot and we do get bombarded. You know, I, I think one of the pivots we made as an organization was moving from thinking of more of a traditional information technology organization that really took orders, got prioritization lists, to thinking of the whole group as a really like a product development organization. We had a much stronger opinion as to what the next steps were going to be. And really partnered and drove an agenda. And so, for us, the transformation was really about, I have a team of product designers, design thinking experts, people who help us build those roadmaps, whether the product owners are on our team or in some other place, and really lay out, not necessarily a prioritization process, but what's the road map.And then from there we've moved very quickly to how do we prototype, test the theory, move quickly, move in small pieces, to get to the product. We've tried to get away from two-year projects. Four-year projects. You know, we try to think about how do I solve a problem, get something going, start it and empower.And I think when a big company, especially companies have been around for a long time, you know, they built a lot of control mechanisms and we've really worked to strip those out and say, hey, if you're the decision maker, if you're in the front, You've got the product. Make the change, see if it works, and let's move forward from there.Now that's certainly for the customer experience and for efficiency, obviously, you know, when I think about things like safety and those things, obviously all those controls are really important, and we take those very seriously. But there's a lot of places where experimentation can really lead to innovation.Brian Ardinger: Can you talk about some examples of where you've deployed technology and some of the changes that you've made over the years to make the experience better for employees and customers? Jason Birnbaum: Yeah, no, we have so many great examples. I'll hit two things. The first thing we realized, and this was a few years ago is none of our employees sit behind a desk. They, none of them have seats. Yet we built all these applications and all these tools for them on a PC. And so, we started to say, well, how do we un-tether is the word we used, our employees from these desks. And so, we rolled out one of the first innovations was creating and building a mobile ecosystem for our employees. Where, whether you're a gate agent, a technician, you're on the ramp, pilot, flight attendant, you had a mobile device and that mobile device, first and foremost, gave you tools to do your job. So, you could board a plane, help a passenger, take an order for a drink. That was like the base case. Then we said, well we've got this mobile ecosystem, what else can we do? And the second thing we said was how do we give people data to anticipate what they're going to need to do? So now I've got this delivery mechanism. How do I say all right, this passenger is getting ready to reach a milestone on their mileage. So why don't we thank them? Or this passenger has had a couple of bad flights. Take care when you're on this flight. So, we started giving that information. And then lastly, and this is where the real excitement came in. We connected everybody via just communications and chat functionality. We created a product, we call it Easy Chat, that connects everybody involved with the flight. The pilots, flight attendants, the gate agents, the catering company, everybody together in one chat space so that everyone knows what's going on.And that's been an amazing advantage for our employees. And it's really created the capability to deliver unbelievable customer service. I was thinking about it. I got a note from a customer, and they said, you know, my father was 80. He was traveling on the plane and he got on the plane. He realized he left his bag in the lobby, like at the gate.Right. And in the old days, like that would have been a myriad of phone calls and radio calls and running back and forth. And so, the flight attendant just typed on the chat. Hey, does anyone see a bag out there? And the gate agent got it and brought it back on. And it was just a much better experience. And they were really happy for that level of customer service.And I think the other thing we're really excited about right now, I mean, there's many, but the other thing we're really excited about is, we call it Agent On Demand. In a COVID time, one of the things we're seeing is that one people don't necessarily want to be face-to-face as, as much. And two, with a lot of different staffing shortages and things going on right now. And just general air travel, you know, there can be problems. Getting a hold of somebody at an airport can be tricky and there can be lines and it can take some time. And so, we said, well, what if we could scale it by creating just a way that I can hit a QR code or walk up to a kiosk. Push a button and speak to an agent who maybe isn't at the airport, you're at, maybe they're in another airport or some other location, but maybe they aren't as busy as the ones happening right now, where there's a storm or a disruption.And we started really simply and about eight months ago, and we started testing it. Caught on fire. We've gotten it in all of our hubs and another handful of stations and we're continuing to roll it out. But customers really love it because it marries the technology and the ease of using your phone or kiosk with an actual person.And so, they do get the personal touch, but they do it in a way that the technology really supports. So, it's been a big win for us. And it's certainly something we're going to see more of that kind of innovation. Brian Ardinger: You mentioned customers playing a role in that innovation process and giving you feedback in that. How do you go about rolling out a new product like the agent on demand? Did you do that across everything all at once? Or how did you go about testing and building out that particular example? Jason Birnbaum: Yeah, look, we go out and we test, like, we send our people out to the airports and our designers and our researchers. We'll prototype something. We'll grab our employees and our customers and just test it out. And we use our airports as labs almost. Living labs. And we learn from it. We're very transparent about what we're doing. So, we will tell our customers, Hey, we're trying a new process or a new technology. We'd love to get your feedback on it. We stood up a kiosk for Agent on Demand. We sort of had some of our people standing around. We said would you like to try this? What do you think? Did it work? Did it not work? And it just grows from there. So, it's a pretty organic process, but it's certainly not going into a conference room for six months. Emerging with the answer, the answer. What we find out is we're not very good at solutioning in that bubble.The Ewing Marion Kauffman FoundationSponsor Voice: The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation is a private nonpartisan foundation that works together with communities in education and entrepreneurship, to increase opportunities that allow all people to learn, to take risks, and to own their success. The Kauffman Foundation is based in Kansas City, Missouri and uses its $2 billion in assets to collaboratively help people be self-sufficient productive citizens. For more information, visit www.kauffman.org. That's www.kauffman.org.Brian Ardinger: Well, you mentioned COVID. Obviously, that's affecting all of us, but it's affecting the travel industry quite a bit. What have you seen over the last 18 months of how fast your processes have had to change or what's the impact been on both the industry and how United reacts to it? Jason Birnbaum: Yeah. It's been, obviously for our business, the most disruptive event in the history of the airline industry. And I think travel in general. So, and a tragedy in terms of the loss of human life and really the whole problems and pain that it's caused. But for us, our mission was to keep the airline alive, because we believe that it was critical to provide support for the doctors that needed to get to places. It's a lifeline for our economy. And so, the mission was really clear. And it, but it did force a tremendous amount of innovation, really fast, whether it's ever-changing requirements to travel both domestically and in other countries and how we empower our employees to know that in real time. We had to build a lot of tools and connections to that.We've had to become very smart on the big innovations, partnering with Abbott and other providers on how to get testing done, whether your international travel or employee testing. We had to set up clinics in our airport to do both vaccination and testing. As you know, we recently just today announced that we are going to have all of our employees vaccinated over the next few months. And you know, that involved us setting up a system where people could upload their vaccine cards and then use that information to give it to the various systems that people schedule their work. So, we know who is and who isn't and where they are and et cetera. And so, there's been a lot of innovation in that space, but it's been a very proud moment for me of the team and the way they've risen to the occasion. And the way they thought differently to really keep the whole industry alive.Brian Ardinger: You know, a lot of times we think about, you know, all the negative effects of COVID and, and that, but I've seen not only with United, but other companies, like rising to the occasion and understanding that innovation is now not just something that we think about in the future, but something we have to do on a regular basis. Are there any particular surprises or positive effects that have come out because of the crisis? Jason Birnbaum: Yeah. In the beginning of the pandemic, you know, we had to go through like everyone else, some tough cuts, reprioritize. And, and we got through it all. And we said, we've still got an airline to run. And so, we got together and said, you know what we need, we coined a phrase, and we call it, we need to get scrappy. So, we actually created a little manifesto around it. And at the heart of it was, it said, you know, we got to start thinking like a small business. We got to start thinking about how to move forward. It's going to be about, everyone's got to do more, do different roles, take chances. You know, maybe you don't do testing. When are you going to do testing or maybe you don't know how to do this kind of coding, but you're going to do this kind of coding, because we just don't have a lot of people in time that we were used to. And I think that really caught on and the idea that we can find scrappy answers to tough problems is something now that's really sort of taken over the whole company. And we talk a lot about how do we get scrappy, which is code for how do we find simple, fast solutions to tough problems, and then scale them from there. And I think when I talk to my team, especially, they're like, we don't want to go back. We don't want to go back to the bureaucracy. We don't want to go back to the way it was before. We want to stay scrappy. And I think that's going to be a legacy coming out of this, that we're going to continue. Brian Ardinger: Well, that's a great segue for the trends that you're seeing, both in the travel industry and within United. What, what are you most excited about in moving into the future and maybe what are you most worried about or scared about?Jason Birnbaum: Well, first of all, I'm excited people are traveling again. Which is fantastic. I think there's a lot of work and thought happening right now about the travel experience. And I think we are going to be on the front end right now of a lot of innovation and travel in terms of how do we take the friction out of it. Is biometrics a big part of that?And we're working with the TSA. But make that a much more seamless opportunity. There's a lot more personalization that can happen. Whether it's food on board or different kinds of services. So, I, I'm really excited that as we emerged from the pandemic that I think we're going to be able to really continue to make the experience better.And I know some people love it and some people don't, but I think there's going to be a lot of new things that come out using technology to make it just a much better experience for folks. And connect your whole journey, beyond just the airline, but maybe to the hotel and to the rental car as well. And how do we think of it in a more seamless way?So, I think that's what I'm excited about. I think I'm excited as we continue to just the new business models that we're thinking about in terms of, you know, are we more Uber. You know, use your mobile app more, we've got the best mobile app in the industry. How do we continue to make that experience better? So, there's a bunch of stuff I'm really excited about. Nervous, I think again, you know, it's a tough industry. There is innovation happening there is disruption happening. So, I think we have to continue to get better. We have to continue to prove to our customers that we have the best product. And whether that's through a great operation and getting you there on time. Whether it's through the technology that we offer. Whether it's through the great employees and the customer service and their anticipation of your needs through the journey. Like we just got to win on all those fronts.And so, the thing that I'm worried about is complacency as we come out of this. And as people come back that we cannot forget that we've got to continue to up our game because there's always folks out there that will come and try to compete with us. Brian Ardinger: And it's so important that culture aspect, like you said, you know, rallying around the new, new, and the new next and that culture and that. Are there particular things you have looked at as far as being effective at implementing that culture of innovation?Jason Birnbaum: The culture of innovation, I think it's for us, it's about having our innovators or our technology team or people that are driving change as close as possible to the frontline and to the employee and to the customer. If you get bright, creative, motivated people, with people that actually are serving our customers or our customers, they will naturally find a million great ideas.And then our job is to help support them in the creation and the development of those things. And so for me, the culture comes from actually having our folks right there with them shoulder to shoulder, out in the operations, out on the planes. And I think my message to anybody is the fewer people between the user and the customer and the person who's building it, the better off you are. Because you lose some, every step, you lose something in that translation. And you don't end up with the kind of innovation that you want to get to For More InformationBrian Ardinger: Jason, thank you for coming on Inside Outside Innovation and sharing what you're seeing in the trenches. Again, I appreciate the time. If people want to find out more about yourself or more about what the United Airlines is doing in this space, where should they go? Jason Birnbaum: I mean, certainly you can hit me up on Twitter @Jason_ UAL or my LinkedIn profile is available. I've got links to some articles on some of the things that we've done in more detail. So happy to take any comments there and questions, and any feedback you might have on what's happening out there as your audience is out and starts traveling again. Brian Ardinger: Well, Jason, thanks again for being on Inside Outside Innovation, look forward to continuing the conversation and best of luck. And where are you going to travel next?Jason Birnbaum: We just got back. We were just in Mexico. We were just in California, and now I'm setting my sights on trying to figure out how to get to Europe when that opens up. And so, I love to travel, and I've got a long list of places I need to get to. Brian Ardinger: Well, I hope to see you on the road, and I appreciate your time again. Thank you very much. Jason Birnbaum: Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure. Brian Ardinger: That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLSGet the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HEREYou can also search every Inside Outside Innovation Podcast by Topic and Company.  For more innovations resources, check out IO's Innovation Article Database, Innovation Tools Database, Innovation Book Database, and Innovation Video Database.  

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Naomi Shah, founder of the venture backed modern media company Meet Cute. Naomi and I talk about some of the innovations and trends in the world of audio and new media formats, as well as her insights for moving from the world of venture capital to becoming a founder. Let's get started.Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help you rethink, reset, and remix yourself and your organization. Each week, we'll bring you the latest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses, as well as the tools, tactics, and trends you'll need to thrive as a new innovator.Interview Transcript with Naomi Shah, Founder of the venture backed modern media company Meet CuteBrian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Naomi Shah. She is the founder of the venture backed modern media company called Meet Cute. Naomi Shah: Thank you. It's so nice to be here. Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you here on the show because you've got a hot new startup that we want to talk about. You've got to innovate a company, innovative story. So, what is meat cute? How did you come up with the idea to start a new media company at the age of 24? Naomi Shah: So, Meet Cute, just to start with, with what it is I do every day, is an entertainment brand. We make original scripted, romantic comedies. And these are audio stories that are completely written by a network of over 500 creators. Directed, produced, and voice acted professionally. And we distribute them on Apple Podcast, Spotify, wherever you get your audio. And really what we're trying to do with Meet Cute is show that you can create a lot of scripted content and create trust with an audience because of the consistency of how often you release the stories, the types of stories, and really become the best storytellers in original scripted content. Brian Ardinger: You've got an interesting background to go down that particular path. My understanding is you started out as a macro equities trader at Goldman Sachs. You studied mechanical engineering with a minor in human biology at Stanford. Then you just started working at Union Square Ventures. How did you go about kind of that diverse background to end up where you are at? Naomi Shah: It's a really good question. I actually will start even earlier than graduating from Stanford and that is when I was growing up, I saw both my parents working on a company together. My mom was the president. My dad was the vice president, and it was always part of our family dinners, our family vacations. We always heard about what they were working on. It was this like subliminal informal look into what it's like to run your own thing. To be a founder. And to manage people and to bring people along with the vision that you have. And I never really knew how that was going to play out in my life. But I did know from a young age that was impacting the way that I wanted to go to school, study, and then start my career. And so, at Stanford, I went in wanting to be a surgeon and I left with a mechanical engineering degree. And so that kind of explains why I was a mechanical engineering major with a minor in human biology.And what fascinated me about human biology and why I wanted to be a doctor in the first place is I was really interested in the research process. Like how you ask a question, how you create a research project to answer that question, how you're very analytical and then how you convince people to listen to what you have to say.And so, in high school, and actually in middle school, I ended up going down this path of working on a lot of research. Presenting it at a lot of conferences. So, I did a TED talk when I was 15 and it was my first foray into, wow, you can have an impact on the world, that's a lot bigger than the immediate community around you.Fast forward a few years, to your point, I went into finance. I was really excited about pattern recognition in public markets and how it affected trading decisions. But I really was looking for something a little bit more creative. I always felt like I had this creative side of my brain that I couldn't really exercise day to day at work.And that was because my resume was very technical. It was very based on engineering and data and math, but I loved creative writing and I loved storytelling. And that was something that I felt like was part of my personality that I couldn't bring to work every day. So, in venture capital, it gave me a look at how founders would kind of marry different skill sets together. Make that the foundation of how they run their company. And I was really excited about that whole process, but really hadn't seen myself as an operator just yet. But I spent a lot of time at USV, which is the venture capital firm I was at right after Goldman. Our company was focused on human wellbeing. So, what are things that we do for fun?And one of the things that we do for fun is we consume content. We read books; we listen to podcasts like this one. We go to concerts with our friends. And I realized that there was kind of a gap in the market where there wasn't a lot of original scripted stories being created in a really scalable way. Where venture investors felt comfortable taking that risk and investing in a company that was working on that problem.Instead, it felt like you had Hollywood investors that were used to taking out risk profile and venture investors were like, oh no, we only do software and product. And so, I wanted to find a way to bring those two things together, which I felt like there wasn't really a company working on that out there.And that led me to starting to come up with the business model for Meat Cute. At first, from the investment side of the table, where I was looking for that company to invest in. And eventually I took that leap of faith into founding and said, if we're not seeing this company out there, let's go be the ones to create it.Brian Ardinger: So, as you were in venture, kind of looking at particular companies, did you ever think that you were going to jump to the other side of the table or was it something that came about based on your interactions with founders and that? Naomi Shah: I think it was a little bit of both. I think it kind of goes back to growing up and seeing that that was possible. I did see my mom as a leader, and I knew that at some point I wanted to follow in my parents' footsteps in some capacity. Where it's you have an impact outside of just the immediate people that you touch. And I think that that's really what inspired me with founding is that you can have an impact on millions of millions of people who use your product or listen to your stories.And that was really exciting to me. Another thing that I'll say besides seeing my mom in a leadership position early on is that I'd always seen myself on this path of, okay, I'll go to school, I'll work for a few years and then I'll go back and get my MBA. And what I saw when I was in venture capital, Is that so much of the learning that comes along with founding is just natural.It's baked into the process of struggling with how to figure out HR and how to negotiate contracts and how to hire people and how to inspire people like that. And I thought, okay, like I always saw myself on this really traditional path where it felt like if I went to business school, I could do all of these things.And being at USV and interacting with these founders, I started to see a different path for myself, where I thought, I don't have to go down this, what I felt like was a safe path for me. And I could step off that path and do something a little bit different that felt riskier in the moment. But I knew that it was a risk worth taking because all of these people before me had done. And you just learn on the job and that's just part of the CEO gig.Brian Ardinger: Yeah, absolutely. You mentioned a little bit about experimentation and that. When you started Meet Cute, what was your initial thesis and then how has it pivoted or changed based on what you found out in the marketplace? Naomi Shah: It's so interesting how these like subtle pivot tap in, and sometimes you don't even realize that they're happening, but you're learning with every single day or every single story that you make. At first, we wanted to just test, can we make a 15-minute story in audio. No one had done that before in a way that you could start, tell, and end of story, in 15 minutes, in a cohesive way. Everyone is used to 90-minute films or 22-minute TV shows, but we wanted to do it in audio and bring people in and capture audiences to the point where people felt like they were listening to a movie in their ears.And we wrote our first story. Our head of development wrote the entire script. We found a producer to make it. And we put it out there in the world when we just started sharing it with our friends and family. And we said, hey, we're working on this thing. We'd love for you to listen to it and give us feedback.That was probably the moment where we were like, okay, we're doing this now. We actually have content out there in the world with our name on it. We have conviction in short form audio content. And then the next step for us became, okay, we know we can make one story. Can we make hundreds of stories? And so, to our investors, we said, our goal for the next year is really to prove that we can make stories at scale.Anyone can make one story if they put their mind to it. But we want to tell hundreds of these stories consistently and give people something to look forward to every single day. And so that was kind of like this subtle change in the way that we thought about ourselves, where we no longer were just proving the idea of storytelling. We were now proving storytelling at scale. So, the next challenge for us became, can we grow a creator network, large enough to tell so many diverse stories within this set container. And for us, our container was we were audio only. So, we had to engage an audience without any visuals. We wanted to tell 15-minute stories. We found that a 15-minute story broken up into five three-minute chapters, really engaged people and people wouldn't leave in the middle of the story. They would stay until the end. And then finally, as we were making so many diverse stories, we learned that there were certain categories of stories or certain techniques that we could use to engage audiences even more. So, with every story that we put out there, we captured listening data, engagement data, and use that to turn it into the cycle where it fueled our development. So now we were taking our learnings from the stories that we'd already put out there and pulling it back into development and making more of those stories.The idea is we're no longer just a hit driven company where we're making all the decisions. Our listeners are the ones that are teaching us about what's right, and what's wrong. And so today to bring it to present day, what we're working on is scaling this storytelling engine, this incubator to millions of listeners, to get more and more feedback on our stories and then make each story better. And that's really towards that goal of becoming the official source of romantic comedies, the best storytellers out there. That's what we think sets us apart. Brian Ardinger: I'm curious, how much did you look back to old technologies like radio and the old radio shows of the past? We've kind of come full circle in some ways. Obviously with different types of distribution models and that. But talk about what did you learn and take from the past and how are you evolving that into the current day.Naomi Shah: I think radio plays are one of the best analogies for Meet Cute. Some of our listeners, you know, even though they're listening to us on podcast apps, they're like this doesn't really sound like what I imagine a podcast to be. Where podcasts are generally conversational, and they're more interview based, or news based. We're really taking that older analogy of taking a radio play and turning it into something that people in the digital era can consume on whatever platform they're on, making it super accessible to people whenever and wherever they want a story. But to your point, there are so many historical analogies that this works and that consistent storytelling in a tight format is what people actually crave. Another really good example of it is you look at pop music where every single pop song is about three minutes long. And there's a reason for that because not to go too far into this rabbit hole, but when records transitioned to the 45 RPM record, there was only enough room on that physical record for three minutes of music.And what that meant is that as you created a cheaper way to make records, you also needed to fit the content into that physical constraint. And so, it's interesting because people relisten to music over and over again, because it's only three minutes. And so, you listened to an Ellie Goulding song or Lady Gaga song on repeat, and you don't feel like you're wasting your time. But that behavior hasn't really translated into audio storytelling yet.And so, by changing our format to be something that we know works. With repeat listening, we found that actually our listeners keep coming back to Meet Cute stories and tuning into one chapter that they resonated with or the happily ever after, or the Meet Cute moment, in the same way that they would listen to pop songs.And so, they think that it's really fun to say let's build a next generation of storytelling, but let's look backwards at what's worked and what's engaged audiences to do that. Last example, P & G invented the soap opera literally to sell soap. And it was this really interesting tool for branded content that didn't feel super on the nose as an advertising tool. It was a story. It was something you could escape into. And I think that that's a really interesting analogy for Meet Cute. We're we're trying to create escapism and that can be a vehicle for so many things. Like the message, like a social message, or it could be a vehicle for a brand to talk about what's important to them. But through the context of a story, which is a lot more emotional than a pure advertisement, or like the news cycles. Brian Ardinger: P & G built itself on that soap opera platform and change the way they sold soap and became a massive company around it. So, talk about your business model and is it more of the traditional advertising model? What are you seeing and what kind of expectations do you have for the future? Naomi Shah: Yes. So, I think we're in a really unique position because we see ourselves as the intersection of technology and Hollywood. So, technology and media, let's put it that way. Where on the technology side, we'd love to test business models, like let's create an engaged community that cares about this content and wants more access to exclusive content and create opportunities to deepen that relationship with the community that we're building. So, we're using things like. Let's engage people with shoulder content and other podcast feeds and exclusive interviews with guests. And then let's release more content in a subscription form. We just launched on apple podcast subscriptions, which is the tried and true business model on the technology side. On the media side, advertising to your point is an incredible way to be able to bring other companies and other brands into the mix, into the storytelling process. And so that's something we're definitely exploring. We're also exploring how do we engage with our communities outside of audio? So we've gotten a lot of interest from production companies and streaming platforms to start bringing this content into video and licensing our audio to other platforms that need more content. Because while we love being the sole distributor of our content. We realized that there is constantly a lack of content in the world. People always need to tell more stories. And so we can be that source of stories for other people. And so I love it because that really allows us to say let's form a relationship directly with our listeners and our audiences and be that direct to consumer entertainment company. But we don't have to stop working on creating stories for the industry and bringing our stories to audiences in ways that Meet Cute might not be the right platform for. For example, we're not a full in-house video production studio. So we want to partner with the right people there to tell our stories in the best way possible for video production as well.Brian Ardinger: Well, you brought up video, you know, what made you decide that we're going to start tackling the audio format first versus new platforms like Tik TOK or YouTube, that seemed to be getting a lot of traction because of the video format. Naomi Shah: So, audio, what I love about it is that it's such a unique format that has the constraint built in where you can't see the characters. And at first, we were like, oh, that's really tough. It's hard to engage without seeing the characters. But that's just because people haven't done it before. And what we're trying to do is really create more intimate connections with characters and plots and narrative arcs, where people start to visualize the stories in their head.So, if like the main character Natalie goes on vacation, we want the person listening, the audience member, to say, oh, what was my last vacation? Like, let me put myself in Natalie shoes and it becomes a very intimate experience. And I think audio is an incredible way to engage in a deeper way with listeners and really have them be a part of the storytelling themselves.The other thing is audio super accessible. So, you don't need to sit down and watch something. You don't need to take time out of your day. It can really go along with you in whatever you're doing. So, we have found that our audiences actually don't listen to Meet Cutes in the traditional entertainment viewing times.Meet Cutes are consumed throughout the day from like 9:00 AM to 11:00 AM, when you're getting ready for school, getting ready to walk to your classes, getting ready to get lunch ready for your kids. These are the times that people really incorporate Meet Cutes into their daily routine. It almost feels like a meditation or an escape because it's so consistent. It's so predictable, you know exactly what you're going to get at the end of it. So, it's been this really interesting shift in what we thought entertainment behavior was or entertainment consumption was, where we're seeing people develop new habits because they haven't had cinema in audio before. And we wanted to start to push back on assumptions about what that looks like and create new behaviors around it.Brian Ardinger: As a founder, I always like to get founders opinions and insights into what recommendations can you help other folks who are out there, whether they're within a corporation, trying to spin up a new idea or an entrepreneur. What are some best practices, resources, or advice that you would recommend for folks trying to get off the ground?Naomi Shah: Great question. And I relied on so many people that came before me for advice. I would say, getting off the ground relies so heavily on conviction in your idea and standing by your idea in the face of other people telling you, I think you should do it this way, or I think you should do it that way. While it's so important to take advice from people. If you are not certain in what you want to build and the vision for your company or your project or your idea, I think it's really easy to be taken off track and to do things in a way that's already been done before. And that's not the reason that you go into founding, you go into founding to do something that no one has done before.And so actually through the fundraising process, because I just went through that in the pandemic, I learned that in meeting hundreds of really smart people, you have so many opinions coming to you every day. And it's really important to like take time, block off your calendar and like reflect on what you're hearing, because some of those things will actually help you shape your vision for the company.And you have to filter out the noise because there are going to be conflicting opinions that might not be the vision for your company. And it's really important to take time to reflect on that. Otherwise, you could find yourself in a completely different place that you didn't want to end up. So, I think having conviction is probably the number one piece of advice.And the second thing is finding people who are going to support you no matter what. I think that can be in the form of team members, it can be in the form of investors, can be in the form of people outside of your company who are your personal board of investors. Without those people, sometimes founding can be really lonely and really a little bit isolating. And I think that with those people, you find that you have sounding boards or people who will tell you, okay, you don't need to overthink that, focus on this instead. Having those people in your life makes, makes you feel like you're not alone on this journey as you're like climbing up the mountain and trying to figure out what this vision is for five years for the future or 10 years into the future. So, I would say people and having conviction are probably the two most important building blocks in the early stage. For More InformationBrian Ardinger: Oh, they're fantastic building blocks. And I want to really thank you for coming on Inside Outside Innovation, telling your story and giving some focus, some insight in what it takes to really do something innovative. So, thank you for being on the show. If people want to find out more about yourself or Meet Cute, what's the best way to do that? Naomi Shah: So great to be here. Loved, loved this conversation. Finding out more about Meet Cute, were on every social platform. So, Instagram, Twitter, Tik-Tok. And the best way to learn about what we're doing is to tune in to some of our stories on any podcast platform, where you listen. Subscribe on apple podcasts.I am also super available to talk about anything entrepreneurship, business related, entertainment, podcasts, and you can find me on Twitter or on LinkedIn as well. Just feel free to DM me. Brian Ardinger: Naomi, thank you again for being on Inside Outside Innovation. Look forward to continuing the conversation and best of luck in the future for you.Naomi Shah: Thank you so much, Brian, Brian Ardinger: That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLSGet the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HEREYou can also search every Inside Outside Innovation Podcast by Topic and Company.  For more innovations resources, check out IO's Innovation Article Database, Innovation Tools Database, Innovation Book Database, and Innovation Video Database.  

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with April Rinne, author of Flux: Eight Superpowers for Thriving in Change. April and I talk about what it takes to thrive in a world of constant change and uncertainty and explore some of the skills and tactics you can use to better prepare yourself and your organization for a world of flux.Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help you rethink, reset, and remix yourself and your organization. Each week, we'll bring you latest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses, as well as the tools, tactics, and trends you'll need to thrive as a new innovator.Interview Transcript with April Rinne, Author of Flux: Eight Superpowers for Thriving in ChangeBrian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger and as always, we have another amazing guest. With me today is April Rinne. She is the author of a new book coming out called Flux: Eight Superpowers for Thriving in Change. Welcome April. April Rinne: Thank you, Brian. Glad to be here. Brian Ardinger: I'm super excited to have you on the show. When I got a preview copy of the book, I started going through it and it's like, ah, this resonates with everything that I've been talking about, and our audience has been talking about. This whole idea that the world is changing. I think we fundamentally or theoretically understood that 18 months ago, but now every individual has felt that we are in flux.So, this is an amazing book. You start off the book with a gut-wrenching story that gives you immediate insights into what's required to live in a world of flux. And I don't know if you can share that story and maybe its impact on your life and your career and how you got to this place. April Rinne: Yeah. Sure. So, it's interesting. Just picking up on what you just said, which is I was actually working on this book for a long time. Long before the pandemic or lockdown. I like to say that the book itself was about three years in the actual writing, but it was more than three decades or close to three decades in the making. And that relates to my earlier story. But it is kind of interesting where over the last 12 to 18 months, people are like, oh, world in flux, you know, welcome to my life. But I'm sort of looking at this saying, Hm, there was a lot of flux before and there's going to be a lot more moving forward. But my entry into a world in flux or what I, what I sometimes call like my baptism. But my baptism into flux happened more than 25 years ago. I was in college, and I was a junior and I was studying overseas, and I'd had this kind of life expanding mind expanding year.And just as it was wrapping up, I received a phone call and basically at age 20, both my parents were killed in a car accident. And that was that moment where whatever you think your future is going to be, whatever you think the world has in store for you. However you think the world works, like it just all changed.You know, I would not have imagined back then that I would write a book about this sense of like, what do you do when you just can't control constant change. But that's when the seed was really planted. Brian Ardinger: Whether it's the loss of a parent or a major job change or a pandemic. A lot of folks are in that space right now. Like they're trying to understand what I thought the world was going to be is different. So, I think the book helps outline some of the things you can think about or some different ways to approach it. So, tell me a little bit about the book and why a person should pick it up. April Rinne: Yeah, absolutely. And you really nailed it. That sense of like, that was my version, but everyone has today I believe their own version. And what's key is the future is not more certainty. It's not more stability. The future is more uncertainty, more change, more flop, and are we really ready for it? And so the crux of the book is exactly that. That's sense of, you know, on the whole humans, we tend to love change that we opt into. You know, exactly. But we tend to really, really struggle with change we don't. The unexpected change. The change that waylays you. The change that is unwelcome. And yet that's the world we live in today. There's more, not less of that. And so, the fundamental premise of Flux the book is that in a world in constant change, we need to radically reshape our relationship to change from the inside out. I can add. In order to have a healthy and productive outlook. So, we're good at a slice of change, but we're really, really bad at a big chunk of it. This is where I get excited because also individually, this plays out. Organizationally, this plays out. And societally this plays out. So that's the basic punchline of the book, but the eight superpowers are the kind of how to. Brian Ardinger: Talk us through, like, how did you come up with those eight and maybe an overview of those. April Rinne: Sure. This is one of my favorite framing devices, which is, you know, Flux is both a noun and a verb. As a noun it means constant change. I think we all kinda get that. It's also a verb and as a verb, it means to learn to become fluid. So, the way I like to put it as the world is in flux, and we need to learn how to flux. To become fluid in our relating to all kinds of change. And so, I'll be really candid. The Eight Flux Superpowers evolved through a lot of hard work and thinking and post-its and reframing and structuring, you know, all of that.And I will admit now, you know, the book's been written for some time. It's obviously in the publication process. I haven't yet found the ninth one. So, I feel pretty good about that right now. But in short, the eight flux super powers, the first one is run slower. The second is see what's invisible. The third is get lost. The fourth is start with trust. The fifth is know you're enough. The sixth is create your portfolio career. The seventh is be all the more human and the eighth, one of the more provocative, although they're all provocative I think in some way. The eighth is let go of the future. Each of those kind of relates to different themes, you know, run slower is a lot about anxiety and burnout and so forth. And start with trust is obviously about trust. And letting go of the future is not about giving up or failing. It's actually about our relationship to control. So there's a lot more packed in each of those, but that's a quick summary. Brian Ardinger: Absolutely. The first one you start off with in the book is run slower. And I think a lot of people, when you talk about innovation, and you see what's out there in the press and that everybody talks about acceleration and speed of change and that. And the obvious antidote people think of is well, I've got to run faster. I've got to go, go faster and that. So, it's kind of a contradictory approach to that. So, talk about what you mean by run slower and let's unpack that a little bit. April Rinne: Landing on this particular superpower did result from a range of sources. But one of which was my many, many years as an advisor to companies, many of them were startups. But also, governments and think tanks and nonprofits. Organizations of all stripes, shades, colors, flavors, whatever, and their quest to innovate. And recognizing that change breeds innovation, but innovation itself, that simply means something new.It's not inherently good or bad. And I'm looking at this going, how do we innovate well. How do we innovate responsibly? How do we innovate in ways where we don't end up having blind spots and regretting some portion of what we did later on, et cetera. And I think we see a lot of that today, right? So back to the superpower. Run slower. The way I define it is in a world of ever faster pace of change, societally. The way we thrive is to slow our own pace. So again, you nailed it where I like to say the pace of change has never been as fast as it is today. And yet it is likely to never again, be this slow. Right. Now just let that sink in for a moment.Right. It's sort of exciting and it's kind of terrifying as well. And I kept looking around as a futurist, as an adviser, as a human being and saying, okay, society tells us that when the pace of change increases, we need to run faster. We need to keep up. And if we know that tomorrow, there's going to be more change than today and next week there's going to be more change than this week.And next year, next decade. Draw that out as far as you wish. If you know today that every single day for the rest of your life, your mandate from society is to run faster. That does not look like a future in which I want to live. And organizationally run ever faster. Wait a minute. You're gonna miss the very best decisions you could make. You're going to miss the very best opportunities. At an extreme, I say, you know, when we run ever faster, we run the risk of running right past life. This is not about doing nothing. This is not about being lazy. This is about slowing your own pace so that it's sustainable. So that in fact, you can be in touch if you will, with yourself, as opposed to just chasing after the next thing that you're supposed to do or the torrent of the info flow.But also, it helps us make wiser decisions. You want to slow down enough so that you can see, recognize, identify, and focus on the things that really matter. So there are lots of different angles there, but I find this is a lot with people, both struggling with anxiety and burn out. But also, when it comes to innovation, how do we make the best decisions? How do we make sure that we've covered our scope of possibility and so forth? Brian Ardinger: Yeah, it's, it's very much like that professional athlete. When they get into that flow, they talk about this idea of everything slows down. And they can understand the environment that they're in. And I think that's kind of what you're talking about.I've also seen the reverse where people go slow because everything's moving so fast, they fail take any action. Or they're scared of being able to keep up, so they don't make decisions and things like that. So, it's, it's that balance almost of like you said, running. But running at a pace that finished the marathon. April Rinne: Very much so. Exactly. I did not say sit still. I did not say do nothing. I said, run, but run slower. Run at a pace that you can sustain over time. Run at a pace that allows you to take in and take stock of everything that's going on. That really matters. And it's funny that you bring up athletes. There's a section in the book there, too.Everything from, you know, what's the right time to make a judgment or a decision. To also one of my favorite quotes. And it relates to athletes, but also children. And I think adults too. Certainly, for me. This notion that there is a kind of growth that comes only with rest. Just think about that. We assume that growth has to happen through motion and action.Think about how kids grow. Think about how athletes strengthen their muscles. It doesn't happen only when they're in motion. It happens when they're at rest. Brian Ardinger: Another area that you tackle is this idea of getting out of your own way and expanding your vision. And you're talking about expanding your peripheral vision, specifically. Being able to look at industries and ideas in that in different ways and, and expanding your business. So talk a little bit about that particular superpower April Rinne: Yeah. So that's the second one. See what's invisible, which says that, you know, when life feels uncertain or blurry, we need to shift our focus from what's visible to what's invisible. And actually, there are all kinds of overlaps with innovation here. The classic cases that, in which again, what does society tell us? You need to focus on your goal straight ahead. And I'm not saying that having goals isn't important and that you shouldn't know how to focus. I'm saying that actually, where is typically most of the action. It's right in front of you or so we think. Where's the actual and really new ideas. The really game changing opportunities. They tend to be on the periphery. They tend to be outside the mainstream. They may end up going mainstream some years later. And then you feel like, oh, I was a really early, you know, joiner to that particular company or idea or whatever. And so expanding our peripheral vision to see more and to see what is again by society standards, quote unquote, invisible.Now just one quick example here. I've spent much of the past decade in the space called the sharing economy. You know, access over ownership and this, that, and the other. It's a classic case in which entrepreneurs and innovators in the sharing economy saw what was invisible to traditional companies. So, case in point, you know, a car sits parked on average 23 hours a day, 95% of the time. We've come to believe that's kind of normal. How in the world that got normalized to have a 95 or 96% inefficient asset is beyond me? But you look at this and you go, this doesn't make sense. Yet society tells us everyone needs a car, not just one car. You need many cars. This is how we're going to build the car. Yeah. And so, you have, car sharing entrepreneurs who look at this and say, no, we actually see value in that parked car.We actually see value in that parking space. We're going to flip the lens and actually put these assets into shared use, thereby helping people save money. Helping reduce CO2 emissions. Freeing up space. I mean, the list goes on and on. But that's a really interesting case. Society tells us to focus on what's visible, which is the cost of a car. GDP. Things with dollars and cents, but there was idling capacity, or what we could think of is invisible value in streets and cities around the world.When you learn how to see that there's a whole new kind of ecosystem, not just for transportation, but far beyond, that can be developed. So that's an example on, again, the innovation kind of organizational end of things. But it definitely applies in terms of individuals and our own blind spots. And where we think we should be looking versus where the action, the action that really matters where it happens to be.Brian Ardinger: And it doesn't even have to be within your industry. I think some of the low hanging fruit for a lot of corporations would be just to look at other industries and see what they're doing when it comes to customer relationships or whatever. And it may not be in your wheelhouse, or your industry may not be doing it, but it may be something that's very easy to adapt or adopt into your industry. And all you have to do is just quite frankly, look at a different set of competitors out there and see what happens. April Rinne: I love that you bring this up, Brian, because I joked with you in advance. Like ironically, what people often call me is a kind of insider outsider in terms of my advisory work. And I have lost count. I'll share this with you. It's so fun because I have lost count of the number of times I've been contacted by an organization and they've said, we want you to do what you did for that company, for our company. But they're in a domain, I'm like, I think you have the wrong person.I began by saying that, because it was like an energy company that first asked me this. And I was like, I'm not an energy expert. They were like, we know. But, you know, just enough about us to actually be able to bring in insights from financial services, from the sharing economy. You know, and the point was not that I had their solution, but then I could bring a perspective and a set of examples and a set of ideas and a set of principles, et cetera, et cetera.That were wildly different than what they were used to hearing. That ended up kind of churning their engines, if you will, around creativity, curiosity, and innovation. So you're absolutely right. And one of the things not just to see what's invisible, but all of the eight superpowers in the entire book. What I love is that I'm not asking you to have any kind of technology or money or whatever that you don't already possess. It's a matter of knowing where to look. So, see what's invisible. All that you need to learn how to see what's invisible. It's right there in front of you. It requires you actually though, to be able to take the step, to reach out and say, I need to learn more about what I don't know. I need to go somewhere that again, society tells me that's outside my domain. That's outside my sector. It's actually really, really relevant for what you're doing. Brian Ardinger: Well, that power of exploration. I think people underestimate it. And a lot of times it's not even exploring for a specific solution. It's just literally the act of exploring leads you to collisions of ideas and thoughts that lead you to that epiphany of whatever the thing is you're working on.April Rinne: And just a quick side note there, which is it's a little bit meta, but I like to bring it up because I think the moment in time, we're all living in right now. Whether it's reopening, whether it's, you know, what parts of normal are going to continue to exist. You know, is there a such a thing as normal?What, what do you want to leave behind in the last year? And what of the ways in which you changed; do you want to take forward. In this world of like we're in not just massive flux, but the sense of we don't have the solution. We're figuring them out. And we're in the early stages of what I believe will be a massive phase of exploration, iteration, experimentation, improvement, but like, we're not even close to those solutions right now.And I think especially like hybrid work. I focused on the future of work for years. Anyone who tells me they figured out hybrid work. I'm like, no, you haven't. And the more you believe you have, the more, I'm less inclined to actually listen to what you're saying. But if we can all kind of wrap our arms around the fact that we don't know, and we won't know, and to start that process exactly as you've said of, of exploring and experimenting and iterating, we're going to be just fine. But it's the people who want to control and know right now, what it's going to look like. Those are the ones that I worry about where we're going to find ourselves in some trouble. Brian Ardinger: And that's probably a good segue to the last superpower I kind of want to talk about. It's this idea of creating your portfolio. I think maybe you and I are similar from that perspective that, you know, every couple of years, it's a new hat we throw on. I talk about it from the standpoint of everybody's going to have a slash in their name. So, I'm a, you know, entrepreneurial slash podcast slash director of innovation slash whatever. And this idea that everyone in society is going to have this portfolio of experiences that they bring to the table. Talk a little bit about why that superpower is important and, and what I that means to you. April Rinne: Yeah. So this does relate directly to the future of work. It's a bit unique in that regard and that a lot of the superpowers are more applicable personally, professionally, societally. Portfolio career is very much about you and your career.And fundamentally what we're looking at is the career of the future looks much less like a career path, a kind of linear trajectory, and much more like a portfolio that you take responsibility for. And you curate. It gets super interesting. So, the whole like study work, retire, learn linear path that we, again, society told us this is how your professional life is likely to play out.Not to say that that didn't work for some time, but what we're finding is it's broken at every node today. And a lot of people want something more, once something different. I think the great resignation that's going on right now is directly related to this. And so, the notion of a portfolio, it's not just acknowledging that the structure of the workforce is changing.It is now possible to work in more ways than ever before. The role of technology, et cetera, et cetera. But it's also looking at, you know, our professional identity. How do you actually want to show up and bring your best to the world? And so the shift from the career path, which you can think of as a ladder to climb, you know, it's, it's that linear, like pursue, pursue, pursue.So, what's happening is more and more people are not wanting to climb that ladder. More and more people are finding that ladder is teetering, if not broken. And it doesn't work for a whole lot of people. A portfolio, which again, just in the spirit of creativity, you'll hear them refer to it as a jungle gym, rather than a ladder.You'll hear them refer to it as a bento box. If you know the Japanese delicacy. But we're looking, I've also heard of actually a flower that has different pedals and different ways of blossoming. But what we're looking at is basically a shift in how you view your professional development. Your professional identity. And your career overall. And that it's not a path, but it is exactly, as you say, it is a curation of all of the things you care about. All of the things you can do. And if you will, your best work. So, from a portfolio perspective, there are lots of ways you can look at it. The two that I prefer, because I find most people gravitate towards one or the other. One is, you know, investors have a portfolio. It's a portfolio of their investments obviously, but why do they have a portfolio?They have it to diversify, to diversify and to mitigate risk. Right? Then you've got an artist portfolio. Well, what's in his or her portfolio, their best work. So whichever of those, you like, it's more a matter of everything that you've ever done or want to do or skills you have paid or unpaid that can contribute to society. All of that's in your portfolio. And then it's up to you to mix and match and curate it into something that's unique, which is where we end up with hyphens. Brian Ardinger: The other thing about the portfolio career concept is that as the world is accelerating and you know, new tools are becoming easier for the average Joe or Jane to pick up and that. The fact that, you know, what you learned in college is no longer relevant after four years because of the, you know, the world's changed. It's both easier and harder to jump into that next portfolio or learn and take advantage of that, whatever that is. So if you look at it from an opportunistic perspective and it's like, as an opportunity, this pace of change is actually a really good thing. Because you're never really that far behind whatever the next thing is. Because you can jump in and become a part of it and learn faster, because those tools are available to you as well. So because of that pace of change, not only you have to be good at it, but it also gives you an opportunity to be able to flex and change in ways you've never done it in the past. April Rinne: Absolutely. And this is, it's actually a perfect entry or a segue into the portfolio career being much more aligned with and fit for a future of work in flux. And what's interesting, there's a quote, it's actually by Jerry Garcia of all people, but you know, the quote is don't be the best be the only. And the reason I like this is because in the future, being that single greatest expert on X, Y, Z, less and less likely, more and more difficult and less and less just not really aligned with reality.It's going to be the combination of different skills in your portfolio that allow you to stand out. And the more things you have in your portfolio, the more you can mix and match. And to your point, the easier it becomes to add things, layer up or level up. Moving forward as new technologies come through, as new roles become design, become available, et cetera.So it is that sense of this is how not just that you're ready and prepared for the future of work, but also the more robust your portfolio, the harder it is going to be to automate some portion of what you do. The easier it is to keep refreshing your portfolio over time, et cetera. So, one thing I would add, because this comes up a lot where people are like, wait, are you just talking about kind of hustling and the gig economy and that sort of thing, when they hear the word portfolio and I'm always like, no, no, no, no, no, absolutely not.Any full-time job you have is in your portfolio, any side hustle or gig you have is in your portfolio too. Any volunteer experience you have is in your portfolio. The thing I like to remind people is each and every one of us already has a portfolio today. The hook is most of us don't realize it and we're not necessarily being deliberate about curating it.But that's where, like I say, you've already got again, you've got the pieces of your puzzle. It's a matter of putting them together in a different way. That's much more aligned with and ready for constant change. For More InformationBrian Ardinger: We have plenty more superpowers to cover. I encourage people to pick up Flux: Eight Superpowers for Thriving in Change. If people want to find out more about you April or about the book, what's the best way to do that.April Rinne: The best website for my book and all things flux is fluxmindset.com. And I also have my site, which is just more about me, aprilrinne.com, but head to Flux first and feel free to follow up with questions. I'm super easy to reach. My email is april@aprilriinne.com. I'm always happy to be in touch and thank you again for today.Brian Ardinger: Well, April, thanks for being on Inside Outside Innovation. I look forward to having you as part of the community in the years to come, and I appreciate your time today. April Rinne: Absolutely. Likewise, thank you, Brian.Brian Ardinger: That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLSGet the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HEREYou can also search every Inside Outside Innovation Podcast by Topic and Company.  For more innovations resources, check out IO's Innovation Article Database, Innovation Tools Database, Innovation Book Database, and Innovation Video Database.  

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Jonathan Brill, author of the new book Rogue Waves: Future-proof Your Business to Survive and Profit from Radical Change. Jonathan and I discussed the coming rogue waves of change and how to prepare your company for resilient growth, innovation, and decision making under uncertainty. Let's get started. Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help you rethink, reset, and remix yourself and your organization. Each week, we'll bring the latest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses, as well as the tools, tactics, and trends you'll need to thrive as a new innovator.Interview Transcript with Jonathan Brill, Author of Rogue WavesBrian Ardinger: [00:00:30] Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Jonathan Brill. He is the author of the new book, Rogue Waves: Future-proof Your Business to Survive and Profit from Radical Change. Welcome to the show Jonathan.Jonathan Brill: [00:00:58] Thanks. It's a pleasure to be here. Brian Ardinger: [00:01:00] Well, I'm excited to have you on the show to quite frankly learn about what you've seen over your amazing career, when it comes to innovation. To give the audience some context. You are a senior leader and global futurist at Hewlett Packard. Creative director at Frog Design. You've probably helped create over 300 plus products in the innovation firms that you've worked in. And you've been a contributor to Ted and Singularity University and Forbes and Harvard Business Review. And the list goes on and on. Now you've got a new book coming out. So, I really wanted to dive right into it. The title of the book is called Rogue Waves. So, let's start there. What is a rogue wave and why should companies start preparing for them? Jonathan Brill: [00:01:38] So in the deep ocean, literally out of nowhere at the snap of a finger, 120-foot wave and pop up and sink you know, a 600-foot ship. We used to not think these things were real. We thought they were kind of sailors' tales, but it turns out that as we're having better tracking and satellites and whatnot, that these things are happening every day in a major storm, that one of these things might pop up about every eight or 10 hours. So, the issue isn't that rogue waves are rare it's that the world is large. And to use that metaphor and in many ways, the same types of mathematics apply. We're moving faster as a society. We're becoming more connected as a society. The reason, and so more freak occurrences will occur, and when they do, you'll see more contagion, you'll see more movement between those occurrences. And so, when you think about business. When you think about something like COVID right, why did COVID happen? And SARS was a pandemic. It didn't scale in the same way. Mers was a pandemic. It didn't scale in the same way. Lots of reasons. But I would argue that the biggest was we've put a population, the size of Los Angeles into the wilderness and outside of WuHan. So, we increased density, but we did that at the scale of literally the population of the United States and China, over the last 20 years or so. Connected them by 16 high-speed rails.Since 2010, we've increased travel out of China by 10 times, making China the largest spender on tourism in the world. Literally coming from out of nowhere and that didn't just happen in China. It happened in India. It happened across Southeast Asia and it's happening in Africa. And so, what was containable, 10 years ago, or 20 years ago, is suddenly not containable today. Not because of the disease, but because of all of the things that surrounded. All of those overlapping trends that surrounded. And when you think about a rogue wave, that's what it is. It's these independently manageable waves of change that overlap to become massive and unmanageable.Brian Ardinger: [00:03:43] It's not the one particular thing that is necessarily the disruptor. It's the blending of emerging technologies and changing demographics, and the data economy, and all of this colliding at once that creates that seismic events so to speak.Jonathan Brill: [00:03:57] Absolutely. And there are something like 10 major trends. And I picked these because they're the 10 sort of highly trackable trends by analysts and whatnot. And they tend to be highly quantifiable trends, that are overlapping over the next 10 years to virtually guarantee that the next decade will be more volatile than the last decade. And so, what that means is that we'll have more risk. Risk is a measurement of volatility change over time. And most people sort of, a lot of traditional risk management looks at that and says, okay, well, how do we push back the future? How do we protect ourselves from it? But the reality is when a rogue wave comes at you, you cannot protect yourself from it. What you can do is position yourself to try and ride it. Be more resilient. And if you're more resilient, take advantage while your competitors are trying to recover from being capsized. That's a radically different way of looking at the future. Looking at the world, then business schools have been teaching us for the last 30 or 40 years. They kind of assume that even though new competitor might disrupt you, and a new technology might disrupt you, that the rules that the playing field, the game board will stay the same. And that's simply not true anymore.Brian Ardinger: [00:05:13] Do you think companies are getting it so to speak? I mean, obviously COVID was a major factor, I think for most individuals and companies alike. Where I think we've been talking about change and disruption, you can see examples throughout the ages about this. But rarely did it hit everybody at the same time. So, are you seeing companies being able to fundamentally grasp that this type of change is here? And are they getting better or worse when it comes to navigating this type of change? Jonathan Brill: [00:05:40] So within that question, there are so many other questions, right? At the board level, is there an awareness that we need to focus on resilience? Yes. The number or percentage of meeting topics on agendas, that are focused on resilience has gone through the roof. The number of topics that have focused on innovation and other things is also dropped through the roof. And so, I don't know that at the investor level, at the board level, we yet understand that resilience and growth are intertwined issues. You can't focus on one without the other. It's a balance because if you don't have that resilience, if you don't know where to position yourself, it doesn't matter that you're better, you're faster. That you have a life jacket, right? Like you're still out at sea. Brian Ardinger: [00:06:30] So tell me about this book. How did it come about? And what's in it for the readers? Jonathan Brill: [00:06:35] I spent the last several years at HP as the Global Futurist. And a lot of our study was looking at long-term change. What could happen? What risks did we think were static risks? Like hundred-year pandemics that were actually dynamic risk. And so, if you are in that community of people who look at these things, pandemics were becoming more and more and more likely over time.And yet most of us, most of our leaders, 8 of the 10 largest companies in the United States, failed to identify pandemics as a risk in their SEC Risk Filings. So, we were in denial as a, an economy about what was happening. A lot of my job at HP was also to figure out, okay, If the world is changing, what are the new opportunities?Not just what are the risks and how do we become resilient, but how do we turn those into new opportunities? And one of the things our group focused on was how do we deal with disease diagnostics? Because we know that the population is getting older. We know that something like a pandemic can rapidly accelerate this type of work.And I actually just published an HBR article about how to balance that kind of resilience and growth that we experienced at HP over the last year. I've recently left to write this book because it's, and it's really about what I learned as a practitioner. Right. I spent 20 years as a consultant working on contract R and D. All of a sudden was a practitioner and you had to figure out how to actually drive change in the 58,000  person organization. And it turned out that it's a different problem entirely. And so, this book was really about how do you blend that world, that the knowledge of the consultant versus the reality of the practitioner.  What are the simple steps that you can take? And there are really three and I call them the ABCs of Resilient Growth.First, you need to increase your awareness as an organization that the world outside is changing. And you need to think about the range of ways it could impact you. It's really easy to look at the world and say, okay, you know, our technologies have to change, or our workforce has to change or whatever. What we discovered over the last year is actually that all has to change at the same time. A lot of times, things overlap to become unmanageable rogue waves of change. So, you need to create awareness, not just of what the changes are, but what would happen if they overlap. Brian Ardinger: [00:08:56] On that front, is it something where you can't manage it incrementally? It is something where you have to transformationaly change these things to actually be able to keep up, or are there opportunities to, to do a more incremental approach to, to this.Jonathan Brill: [00:09:11] I think there are two answers to that. Yes, there are opportunities to do an incremental approach, and that's the only way that works. You can't change your culture overnight and you can't change all of your processes overnight. And by the way, if you do that, there's a better than even chance that you'll, that you'll sink yourself.So, it's this balance. The first piece is building that awareness of there is stuff going on outside. The second is building the skills, the behavior change within the organization. Because even if you know that the wave's coming, if you don't know how to swim, it's not a good idea to pick up big wave surfing. So, you got to build the skills. And then the third is the culture, right? You have to, I don't believe that you can really change corporate DNA. I think that's consultant speak. But I do believe that you can change the RNA. When you think about DNA, this is the deep code that causes life. That allows life to build itself.But RNA is the code that controls the types of proteins that you use to regulate your body. That RNA can actually be changed relatively quickly. If you take a look at an octopus, for instance, or a Cephalopods, like a squid, a cuddle fish, they can change 60% of their RNA in a  lifetime. And companies do it all the time.You change your processes, you change your hard incentives, right? Bonuses, bonus structure, and whatnot. And you change your soft incentives right? Who do you encourage? Who gets ahead? Those, those kinds of things. So, you can change that stuff pretty much overnight, but the change is incremental, right? The company has to catch up to the reality that you're serious and that you can sustain the change over time.And that's the real challenge. I see a lot of these sort of change efforts. I read, the other day in Harvard Business Review that 70% of change efforts fail. And so there, I think are two things there, right. One is, do they fail or do people just not keep at them long enough? Do the leaders not convince their population that they're serious?And I think there are kind of like four phases in corporate change of any type, but certainly in becoming what I call a resilient growth organization, right. The first is you come, and you say the future is going to be different. The sky's falling, whatever your story is. And everybody looks at you like you're insane. But you get a few early adopters. The second is that people start saying, well, actually you're not the legitimate person to make that argument. I am. Your arguments dumb, my argument's better. It turns out that's actually a win. And as a, as a manager, if you're asking people to be change agents, you need to recognize when that shift occurs. And that that's actually the big win. What you see though, is that people take whatever the change message is, and they start covering the first page of their PowerPoint deck with it. To justify whatever it was they wanted to do, all right. It's a shift. It's an important shift. It's about being future compliant, as opposed to actually thinking about the future.The third one is when they start actually asking for budget to do new things, and this is where I think a lot of change management breaks down, right? You can get through the first one. Sure. You send in your Avant guard; you send out your Scouts. And you send out your missionaries and they, they preach the future.Couple of people believe it. The better politicians figure out how to do what they already wanted to do. But then a couple of people say, no, I want to find out if you're serious and I'm going to start asking for money. Not like a hundred thousand dollars, like a million dollars, $10 million. A meaningful amount of money and, and talking about large organization terms. Right. And if you say no, think about what happens. Their ideal is almost destined to fail, right? It will be right. It's almost destined to fail. And so, if you're a rational manager, you say, well, I'm not going to invest in something that I know is going to fail. And if you don't support them, when they do fail for trying, you cut off the opportunity. You cut off the change.And I think that's where a lot of change management breaks down, right? That you have the senior manager incentives on an annual basis, versus a senior manager incentives on a long-term basis and they get disconnected. And then the third piece is when your senior managers start looking at this as a process and saying, okay, we're going to embed this in the process. We're going to take whatever the change is. In this case, becoming a resiliently, a growth organization. And we're going to have it be part of our annual decision-making process budget process. And we're going to set a minimum that we spend on this thing. And that's when I think you start to see the long tail of growth from this work. But it's often, you know, it's a three-year or five-year process. It doesn't happen in six months, and it doesn't happen because the board woke up on Tuesday and realized that they'd been cutting resilience for 20 years. Brian Ardinger: [00:13:59] Absolutely. On that you've seen and worked with a lot of different companies and have seen this progression. Where are the biggest struggles or obstacles that companies are facing going through that? Are most of them dying at that stage one stage two stage three? Or is it a combination or, or what are the things that people should be preparing for as they go along this journey?Jonathan Brill: [00:14:19] I think there are two answers to that question. The first is really at the board level, you know. Are you serious about this? If the board has a cocktail party and they say we should be more resilient than, you know, that verbals down, like that happens a lot. That happens a lot. That change isn't going to happen.And the people who participate in that change, especially in performance driven organizations, tend to not keep their job. So you've got to figure out, okay, well, are people serious about this? And that's why phases one and two happened. That I was talking about earlier. That's why they happen. The second question is, if you are serious about this, you know, can you be serious about it from the bottom up?Can you make that change from the bottom up? Or do you have to make it from the top down? I think it's probably generally a bi-directional process where you have to link the communications between the senior leadership and the edge of your organization. And that, that's a huge political challenge, especially like in organizations where you have high longevity of career. You know, where you have 20-year careers and whatnot. It gets really hard to do that. You know, people in the middle, don't like, you know, the people in the center talking to the edge, you got to break through that. And I think that's one of the real places where the issue breaks down. And I think the third, and this is really important to, and I think this is why I wrote the book, or one of the main reasons, is that if you have somebody, if you're headquartered in Indonesia and you have somebody who sees a rogue wave on the horizon in Mozambique, right.That person in Mozambique, probably even if they can talk to the CEO, probably doesn't have the skills to the language, the context. They're just going to sound crazy. And we've all been in that conversation, right? We've all been in that conversation. And so the key thing is you also need to increase the executive judgment, executive communication skills far lower in your organization. If you want to have an innovative organization. You can't trust people to innovate if they don't understand the context. You know, and they don't understand how to take risks, as opposed to just manage. Brian Ardinger: [00:16:32] And maybe that comes back to some of that, like you were talking, one of the first themes is, is awareness. And it's not just awareness at the board level or at the CEO level, it's awareness across the organization that these risks are happening and exist. And what can you do to both understand them, as well then do some behavior or cultural things around it to actually execute or, or take advantage of that. On that awareness front. Are there things that you've seen that can help companies think outside their industry and see what's going on and explore in areas that they don't typically explore. Whether it's technology or human resources or whatever.Jonathan Brill: [00:17:08] Right. So, in a pre COVID world. One of the things that I did was I'd bring teams who'd been in Europe and the US their entire careers. High potential leaders or whatever, and I'd bring them to China. And this is one of these things where if you're an American and you try and explain the   Grand Canyon to a European, they just don't get it.If you're an American and you haven't been to Beijing or Shenzhen or Shanghai, you just don't get it. That, you know, every two years, literally they're using the concrete that the U S poured in the United States in the 20th century. The scale is unimaginable. And once you get there, once you see that. Once you see your Grand Canyon, once you see your Beijing, your mind can't go back to the same place.And so that would be my first thing is just kind of, how do you get that cross-cultural awareness of, of what's happening. The scale of change in the world. The second thing that I really suggest is figuring out how to create peer groups outside of your industry, but at your level. And ideally across the world. And that's some of what I do is building those peer groups, so that we can have those conversations. Because otherwise you don't actually understand the challenge. You don't understand the scale of the opportunity. You don't see the rogue wave coming, right. If you were sitting around and you know, you were very specifically, you know, stockpiling face masks for the US government and you see, you know we can get these things cheaper in China. Like let's shut down our supply chains. Let's shut down our local manufacturing. Yeah. That all makes sense. Right? Because it's a price performance issue. Like all the incentives are there to do that. Until you look at the bigger picture, risk is changing. Everyone's going to need all this stuff all at once. And we're going to need it when we need it on a sustained basis. And by the way, it's super cheap. Right. Like there's no, which is the entire problem, right? There's no margin in this. It's so cheap. There's no margin in, this. It totally makes sense, as a middle manager that you'd say let's get rid of that thing. But as a senior manager, as a senior leader, you need to say, okay, that doesn't make any economic sense today, but in the long-term, we're going to have an inevitable need. Brian Ardinger: [00:19:34] So how far out in the future do you think companies should be preparing or looking. To, or is, does it depend on the rogue wave that you're looking at?Jonathan Brill: [00:19:42] How far out should you be preparing and looking are interesting. There, there are two different questions. What I really am interested in is that there's a range of possible futures. There isn't one, the closer you get to that future that, you know, the more the rank shrinks So the farther out you're looking at the broader the range should be obviously. But the goal isn't necessarily to look at 7 years out or 10 years out, or 3 years out, or 1 year out. It's to figure out, am I prepared for the types of threats and opportunities I'm likely to see?And so I think about this as kind of like, what are the financial, operational, external, and strategic aspects of my corporation of my organization. And what types of waves would impact it? What types of challenges or opportunities might you see?  And the same thing applies to customers, by the way. Could a static threat,  a hundred year disease, suddenly become a dynamic threat, right?We're starting to see these more often. Could a symmetric threat, it's going to impact everybody the same become an asymmetric threat? So you take a look at a Toyota. Their investment in semiconductors, after the Daiichi nuclear explosion in 2011. They looked at, you know, we had an asymmetric thing happened to the us, all those American manufacturers they didn't get hit by this nuclear meltdown. But we did. What would happen when the next thing happened. And how could we move that from a situation where we get hit and no one else does, to we survive and then everyone else gets hit. So how do you shift between symmetric and asymmetric threat? And the result of that is in 2016, when there was an earthquake in Taiwan, China had a six-month supply of chips and they kept operating just fine. Everyone else got hit. This past year, same thing happened. How do you move things from synchronous to asynchronous threats or the other way around? So how do you move them from things that hit everybody at the same time to things that hit people at different times, because you know, often all you really need is enough buffer.All you need is enough time to respond. And then the other is to think about which issues are temporary and which ones are permanent. So, what's amazing to me about the U S response to COVID is this thing that really should have been a 10 year, five-year, ten-year issue historically. Appears at the moment, you know, to have been shifted from a permanent issue in the United States to a temporary issue. Now we're going to need to manage our response permanently. Right. But the economic impact may be temporary. It's one of the greatest innovation moments, you know, I think when we look back 50 years from now, we changed the path of nature. It was one of the great innovation moments of the 21st century.Brian Ardinger: [00:22:36] It's, I mean, truly fantastical times, we're living in, in a number of different ways. Are there particular trends or things that you're seeing or want the audience to pay attention to that they may not be as familiar with? Jonathan Brill: [00:22:47] So we can talk about trends you might be unfamiliar with, but I think the question that you should really be asking is what happens when the trends that you're familiar with collide? I mean, a lot of the things that I talk about were in the news. Can you take a look at the growing risk of a pandemic? I mean, and all of the things they talked about, high speed rail Maglev in China, the explosion of urbanization around the world, massive increases in Chinese Asian travel, the explosion of low-cost airlines around South Asia. Right? These were all front-page news. The issue is that people weren't putting them together. For More InformationBrian Ardinger: [00:23:25] It's a fascinating book and I love folks who are listening to this to take a deeper dive. It really is a really good framework for how to start thinking about these things. And you dig into a lot of the tactics and examples around that as well. So I encouraged people to pick that up. But if people want to find out more about yourself or about the book, what's the best way to do that? Jonathan Brill: [00:23:44] Jonathanbrill.com is my website and there's piles of useful tools, HBR articles, Forbes articles, advisory options, surfaces, and they're all focused on being useful to you.Brian Ardinger: [00:23:58] Well Jonathan, I want to thank you again for being on Inside Outside Innovation and sharing your thoughts on this. I'd love to have you back. You know, as the world changes and we get more used to seeing innovations and digging in and being a part of it, I'm sure things will pop out new best practices and that will emerge. So, I appreciate you sharing what you know now, and hopefully we'll have you back on to talk about the future as the world evolves. Jonathan Brill: [00:24:21] I'd be glad to anytime. Thank you very much for having me.Brian Ardinger: That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLSGet the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HEREYou can also search every Inside Outside Innovation Podcast by Topic and Company.  For more innovations resources, check out IO's Innovation Article Database, Innovation Tools Database, Innovation Book Database, and Innovation Video Database.  

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with New York Times bestselling author and founder of Moves The Needle, Brant Cooper. Brant and I talk about his upcoming book, Disruption Proof, and provide a sneak peek into our upcoming IO Live event on September 20. Let's get startedInside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help you rethink, reset, and remix yourself and your organization. Each week we'll bring you the latest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses, as well as the tools, tactics, and trends you'll need as a new innovator.Interview Transcript with Brant Cooper, CEO of Moves The NeedleBrian Ardinger: [00:00:30] Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Brant Cooper. He's the founder of Moves The Needle, New York Times bestselling author of the Lean Entrepreneur, and author of an upcoming book, which I'm so excited to talk about called Disruption Proof: Empower People, Create Value and Drive Change. Welcome Brant. Brant Cooper: [00:01:07] Thanks Brian. Pleasure as always. Brian Ardinger: [00:01:10] I'm excited to have you back. As our audience knows you've been a part of the lean scene for a long time. You had a chance to speak at our IO2020 Summit. And we're going to do a little something different with this podcast episode, because we're having you back on September 29th for a live event. It's part of our IO Live series. Basically, we're going to have an hour to talk about the book and have audience questions and do a little bit more in depth stuff with you. So, I wanted to save this episode more as a preview to get folks excited about the book and excited about some of the things we're going to be talking about. So, with that, you got a new book out called Disruption Proof. Tell us how you got to the point of writing a new book and what's it all about? Brant Cooper: [00:01:50] Yeah. So, I guess it's been in the works for a couple of years, actually. It seems like so pandemic ready, but that was maybe just fortuitous that I was already embarking on it. And then of course the pandemic itself hit and business kind of dried up. So that gave you the opportunity to really crank it out. You know, over the last seven, eight years taking some of that lean stuff into the large enterprise. And it's just, that was an interesting journey in the sense that, you know, all of this lean startup, lean innovation stuff really started in Silicon Valley startups.I mean, honestly it preceeded all of that, but you know, us tech startup people like to feel like we've invented everything. There was a movement. Right. And so, starting in startups and then we bring it into the big companies. And inevitably we start with the innovation groups. As I'm trying to work through the change that is required inside of these companies, I really realized that there's uncertainty everywhere inside the enterprise.There's something happening here, way bigger. And this is perhaps obvious to a lot more people. It takes me awhile. I think really this fundamental shift from the industrial age and management practices and even management organization, that's based around the industrial, really this level of complexity and endless disruption that is in the digital age, leads to this uncertainty.And we continue to try to tackle the uncertainty the way we did in the industrial age. And it just creates more angst, and it creates more doubt and people just really wondering what the heck is going on. Then the pandemic hits. And I think we blame all of that angst and anxiety on the pandemic. And now people are like, ah, man, I can't wait to get back to the old normal. And yet the old normal was still filled with that uncertainty. And so that's really what the book ended up addressing. So again, I didn't start out with writing, you know, sort of this post pandemic book, but because I was writing it right in the middle of all of this, there really ends up being these pandemic…and how do you respond to it? And what does this mean in that bigger picture that ends up being what the book is about? Brian Ardinger: [00:04:05] It's interesting because I think, you and I have I've been talking about disruption forever. And innovation groups have been talking about it and trying to figure out how to do this. And the pandemic really seems to have taken that theory and made it real for most people.I mean, everybody on the planet to some extent has been disrupted by various means of, of what happened during the last 18 months. And it really, I think has brought out the conversation where it's no longer theory we're talking about. It's like, yeah, I get it. But now I really get it. But I still don't know what to do about it.So, you know, I've seen a proof of your book in that you really capture it and talk about the five elements of what you need to be doing to embrace this new world of work. So maybe talk through a little bit about that and some of the things you found out. Brant Cooper: [00:04:48] Yeah. So, to me, the key is to all of this, is that it's not really the technology, even though we're in a digital revolution and we're doing digital transformation and we're working in innovation. It just really isn't about the technology because there's not that much uncertainty around the technology.It's really about the mindset and the way we have to change our thinking and our behavior relative to this massive change in technology. And so, I described the behavior change that we need based upon these five elements. And so, empathy, exploration, which is basically admitting what we don't know. And so going out and learning. Leveraging evidence, so data plus insights to help us inform decisions. We don't want just algorithms and AI deciding for us, but certainly what we go and figure out needs to inform our decision. This concept of equilibrium, which is building a balance between the execution, everything that we know we have to get done, and this exploration work, meaning that we have to go and learn something first. That's a continuum throughout the organization. Even your core business needs to do some amount of exploration. It's not this bifurcation of one side of the house is execution. And one side is exploration. I think that's industrial age innovation thinking. And then the final one is ethics. And with all of the data problems that we have, and with livable wages and all of these other things that have really come to the fore, it's really incumbent upon businesses to figure out how they live up to their own values that they establish and that they broadcast.And again, that ends up being something that we have to drive down into the human behavior. And so rather than some of the big management theories on how you do change, which is very top down. I wanted to describe the behaviors of what people actually have to do day in, day out inside of their jobs. And it really is a ground up initiative.It requires obviously leaders to buy in and go, yes, we're going to change. It's kind of a pincer move, but you have to start with developing that behavior on the ground. And I guess the one other point I would make about it is the reason why I'm somewhat optimistic about that is this behavior already exists, right?The people that are subscribing to your podcast and that read your stuff, Brian, Design Thinkers, and Agile people, and Lean Startup people and entrepreneurs, people that are doing side gigs, these are people that already have this mindset. And so, what we have to take is not put them all in this silo, but rather get them to be the leaders of tomorrow, bringing this diverse mindset, this exploration skillset to the rest of the business. Brian Ardinger: [00:07:32] All the stuff you talked about, it's just so messy. And I think everybody's still looking for that silver bullet. Like if you do this, this, and this follow this particular path, you will have success. And Lean Startup was never meant to be the perfect path. Even if you follow lean startup 100 percent, you're still not guaranteed a successful product, service, whatever you're trying to create. It's that journey. You have to put on those exploration hats or backpack or whatever. I talk about going into a cave. The only way you can get out of the cave is you got to stumble around and figure it out. And the challenge is we don't reward that stumbling around. We don't provide the tool sets or the skillsets for folks that are not inherently like the entrepreneur that kind of has that built into their ecosystem. So, what can an average Joe hearing about this, understanding theoretically, like they need to do this. Are there tactics or things that you've seen that help start building that muscle? Brant Cooper: [00:08:26] There's a couple of things in there that come to mind. Number one is go find the like-minded people. Go find the people that maybe already exist inside of every big business. So go find them. And it could be just doing an innovation mindset happy hour once a week or every other week. But it's something that you want to try to spread throughout the organization, because these are your early adopters. And what you find is that there are leaders that actually belong to that group. And suddenly you make, you have these areas where you can start running experiments even with budget or even with permission. So, number one is finding like-minded people. Number two is to not wait for permission. To go and run experiments and come up with data. And then when you actually are seeking permission or advice or input. You're actually bringing evidence to the table and not just ideas. And I really do believe that ideas are a dime a dozen. Every big organization I've worked with has no problem with ideas. And I think leadership and middle management and all the rest go, yeah, we really need to empower the ideas of people. It's just not taking it far enough. If you've got thousands of ideas, literally it's how do you choose those ideas? The people on the ground need to themselves, not just go ask for stuff. They need to be able to provide evidence for what they're asking for. And I think that that added layer is actually going to start changing the conversation.And then the third thing that I really encourage people to do is to try to go and get empathy for their leadership. And so, it's kind of a funny concept because we often in that hierarchical command and control structure, are either afraid to do that, or don't think that we're even allowed to do that.And it doesn't mean that we are to whatever the whims are of the leaders. There's a selfish aspect of developing empathy in the sense that the more I understand my bosses, the more I understand how I'm going to get what I think that I need. Right. So, you're learning just as if they were a customer. You're learning how to navigate your relationship with the leader in order to get what you think is the right thing for yourself, your team, and your company. For More InformationBrian Ardinger: [00:10:45] Yeah. Oftentimes it is a balance. You still have to hit those quarterly numbers and still do what you're designed to execute on and optimize but knowing full well that if you do that and only that you're not going to get to where you need to be or not create the next future, whatever ends up on it.Again, we can go and talk for hours and we're going to do that here in the coming months. So, I encourage people to go to Insideoutside.IO. We'll have information posted there about signing up for the IO Live event here with Brant Cooper and in the interim, if people want to get a little sneak preview, find out more about yourself, more about the book, what's the best way to do that?Brant Cooper: [00:11:20] Yeah. So, I'm brant@brantcooper.com. Brant Cooper on all the social media. And I really encourage people to reach out. I respond to everyone. The website is Brantcooper.com right now. And people can pre-order the book as well as get some other goodies and we'll be sharing a content from the book in the coming months. As we prepare to join you on your show. Reach out, say hello and join the conversation. Really. I think that one of the things that you said, Brian, is that there isn't a formula. I mean, there's actually not one way out of that cave. And that's what complexity is right. Is that there's no best practices. And so, all of these different variables that people face based upon their businesses and based upon the history and based upon the people that are inside that business, everybody's going to have to figure out their way out of the cave, but there are some fundamentals.And also, what we want to do is try to create community around what works. We can share, what works and what doesn't work and those types of things. So, all of these people can start figuring it out, what works in their organization. Brian Ardinger: [00:12:21] Excellent. Well, Brant I'm excited for this conversation. Thanks for being a part of it. I look forward to having, again, a more in-depth conversation with the audience and encourage people to come out for that. Participate in that. And we look forward to talking in about a month or so. Thanks again for coming on. We'll talk to you soon. Brant Cooper: [00:12:35] Thank you, Brian. Great to catch up, man.Brian Ardinger: That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLSGet the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HEREYou can also search every Inside Outside Innovation Podcast by Topic and Company.  For more innovations resources, check out IO's Innovation Article Database, Innovation Tools Database, Innovation Book Database, and Innovation Video Database.  

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Robyn Bolton, Founder and Chief Navigator at Mile Zero. Robin and I talk about her experiences in the world of corporate innovation from her days at P&G to Innosight to today. And what are some of the stories and things that she's learned to help companies navigate the world of disruption.Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help you rethink, reset, and remix yourself and your organization. Each week, we'll bring the latest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses, as well as the tools, tactics, and trends you'll need to thrive as a new innovator. Interview Transcript with Robyn Bolton, Chief Navigator at Mile Zero on Corporate Innovation and DisruptionBrian Ardinger: [00:00:30] Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another guest. Today we have Robyn Bolton. She is the founder and chief navigator at Mile Zero. Welcome to the show, Robyn. Robyn Bolton: [00:00:53] Thank you, Brian. Thrilled to be here. Brian Ardinger: [00:00:55] Well, I'm excited to have you here for a number of different reasons. You've spent your career at the forefront of corporate innovation. So, you worked as an intrapreneur at P & G. I believe you were part of the team that launched the Swiffer and the, and the Swiffer Wet Jet. So, congrats on that. You were a partner at Innosight, Clayton Christensen's growth consulting firm, and now you're the founder of Mile Zero, which is an innovation consulting and coaching firm.You have been around corporate innovation, both inside corporations, doing it, helping companies grow and innovate. And then outside as a consultant. Where have you seen the most progress from companies when it comes to the concept of innovation? What has happened over the last 10, 15 years that hopefully makes these companies interact and do innovation a little bit better.Robyn Bolton: [00:01:40] There's actually that, as you can imagine, a tremendous amount of change that's happened over the past decades. So, when I started in innovation at P & G in the late nineties, innovation hadn't yet really become an industry. Entrepreneur was still synonymous with unemployed. I mean, it was just, it was before the first dot com bubble. Innovation was really just a company launching new products.Now there's a whole industry around innovation. You have admittedly consultants like me. You have venture studios; you have incredible firms that do market research that do prototyping. You have corporate venture capital. There's this entire industry and ecosystem that has been built up to support companies who want to innovate.The other thing is innovation has just become part of the corporate language. Right. I don't think you can tune into an analyst call. I don't think you can read an annual report without seeing, or hearing innovation over and over. So, it's just become part of the language and the lexicon of business. And what executives think about. Brian Ardinger: [00:02:51] Do you think a lot of that is due to the part that the world itself is changing so much and disruption is happening at a faster pace? And then therefore companies have to adapt to this, or is there something? Robyn Bolton: [00:03:04] I think it's very much that the world is changing at a faster pace. It is easier to start a company than it's ever been before. So, you're just seeing a lot more traction amongst startups. And you're seeing disruption as Clay Christiansen, coined the phrase. It's happening more and more.It used to be that it took decades and generations for disruption to happen. Now you just think about the last 10 years. And all of the industries that we've seen disrupted. So it's become less of, I would say this nice thing to do, and more of a business imperative. Brian Ardinger: [00:03:39] One of the things that I'm seeing out there is even though it's becoming much more part of the lexicon and people are thinking about it and trying to do some things around it, it doesn't seem to be actually impacting corporations. There's still a lot of failure when it comes to innovation. Can you talk a little bit about why companies are still having struggles around innovation? Robyn Bolton: [00:04:00] That's actually the question that has plagued me, and I think a lot of folks who work in innovation. Innovation has been around, been talked about being worked on for decades, but nothing's really changed when it comes to that success rate. And why is that? It's a lot of things. Companies got big by doing the same thing over and over and doing it better and better. And innovation is the opposite of that. It's doing something you probably never done. And making mistakes and learning from them. So, it's just the complete opposite of what a company is.I think there's also this very human element of companies are filled with human beings. And as human beings, we respond to incentives. And we respond to the things that benefit us. So just any rational human being in their role within a company is going to say, okay, what do I get paid to do? What do I get a bonus for?Honestly, the tenure enrolls has so reduced it. I think it's now like two years. That why would I spend time and resources and political capital on something that if it works, it will come to fruition maybe in five years when I'm long gone. Versus spending all of those resources and political capital on something that will most likely yield results in six months, when I'll get the rewards for it. So, there's just all of these human elements that are a challenge. Brian Ardinger: [00:05:35] I'm curious to hear your insights into what's changed over the last 18 months. COVID radically accelerated virtually everything, and probably you and I have been talking about disruption in that for a long time. And now it seems when you go into a boardroom, the executives, get it more than a theory, but they actually understand like, oh yeah, my entire business may have to change overnight. How has that affected people's take on innovation. And what have you seen over the last, maybe 18 months? Robyn Bolton: [00:06:03] I've really seen this just enlightenment and this opening up to the realities of innovation, because what makes innovation so hard is it requires change and change is uncomfortable and change is uncertain.Well, COVID required to change literally overnight for a lot of companies. And suddenly leaders had an experience of change. And they experienced the learning process and they experienced all of these things that go along with innovation, and they realized they could do it. And that it wasn't as scary as they thought and that it was okay to make mistakes and then learn from them.And so, all of these things that you experience when you're doing innovation that seem very scary and that you want to avoid, they suddenly did them and survived. And are thriving. In that way with every dark cloud has a silver lining. The silver lining of COVID is the companies now have a greater belief in their ability to innovate and to change and a greater openness to try new things.Brian Ardinger: [00:07:14] Who's doing it well now. And have you seen a shift in how companies are embracing innovation and maybe the tactics that they're using? Robyn Bolton: [00:07:23] There are a lot of companies who are doing it well. I think the common denominator there is that they are moving off of what I call the shiny objects. So that innovation theater, like let's do a hackathon. You know, let's have an accelerator. Those things are all useful, but in isolation they don't tend to yield results. And companies are realizing that in order to achieve their innovation goals, they have to approach innovation, invest in it, the way they invest in really any other function or competitive advantage that they're building.So, they have to take a much more thoughtful systematic approach. And that it requires change. So, one of the things I talked to a lot of my clients about is that innovation really is head, heart, guts. We absolutely in business, you have to understand things on a logical level. You know, you need data, you need reason and rationale, but we're human.And so, we decide with our hearts and we justify with our heads. COVID brought this heart experience of, oh, now I know what it feels like. I understand how my motivations are affected all of these intangible things. And then it requires guts to act. Companies and leaders are now realizing they have to invest for the long-term and that they need to speak to the three parts of themselves as a leader in order to really get innovation to stick.Brian Ardinger: [00:08:51] I think the other thing that I'm seeing at least is that they're seeing innovation, not as something that is done by a group, but it's more integrated part of the culture that has to be created because of the rapid changes. And my belief is that everybody's going to have to be flexing these particular muscles of resilience and adaptability.And so how do you start teaching that in the context of what they're currently doing, but also allowing them to understand that those muscles are going to have to be used if the organization is going to go forward. Robyn Bolton: [00:09:20] I think you're absolutely right. People tend to hear innovation and they think of new product. Right. And one of the first things I talk to my clients about is innovation is much more than that. And in a lot of ways, I think of innovation and especially the tools of innovation, really as a way to solve problems. So all of those skills that you use to create a new product, the skills of curiosity, empathy, questioning, rapid test, and learn.You can apply all of those skills to any problem. So, these really aren't skills that just the innovators need. These are skills that really are needed throughout the organization, regardless of where someone sits that reframe of, oh, innovation is about a product to innovation is how we solve problems, has really also led to a deeper engagement and higher priority being put on them.Brian Ardinger: [00:10:19] You have to allow any associate within the organization to be able to raise their hand and say, Hey, I've noticed a problem. Or, Hey, I think there's an opportunity here. What do I do about that? You know, do you have any recommendations or thoughts how the average employee within the company can begin to build that innovation muscle, especially when it may not be culturally appropriate yet within the entire organization?Robyn Bolton: [00:10:40] Yeah. Sometimes it can be very scary to raise your hand and say, Hey, there's a problem over there. Especially if like a lot of us, you've heard, from your boss, you know, bring me solutions. Don't bring me problems. Well, you want to make sure you're bringing a solution to a problem, not a solution to just an annoyance or something.There are several things employees can do to maybe lay the groundwork for a more welcoming reception to their idea. You know, one is to make sure that there actually is a problem to be solved. And it's a problem that a lot of folks have, if it's affecting the organization versus just something that's annoying them.Second is to draw a clear link between solving the problem and something that's important to the company. Does the company have a strategic priority around the topic? Does the company have a KPI around the topic, make that direct link for why this should matter to the company? And then third, approach it from your bosses' point of view. I know a lot of folks go in and say, Hey, I have this great idea. And then they have no plan after that. Go in with a plan.  Speak your boss's language. Speak to the KPIs and say, okay, here's what I want to do next. And so I have a plan in addition to the idea. Brian Ardinger: [00:11:56] Yeah, I think that's so important. I think a lot of folks that we talk to have an idea and they want to throw it over the fence for someone else to execute on that idea. But oftentimes the person who has that idea has that unique insight has that domain expertise, is really the one that should probably at least early on take that idea to the next concept. Do some further research, do some testing. See if there's any evidence that they continue to put resources, dollars, time into whatever that next stage of the experiment might be.And you mentioned KPI. So, I'd love to talk about the concept of metrics. How do you start measuring success and how do you know if you're making progress? Especially when you know that innovation 8 out of 10 shots are not going to go into the goal. And it takes 5 to 7 to 10 years for some of these things to actually bear fruit. So how do you start measuring success appropriately? And how do you know that you're making progress? Robyn Bolton: [00:12:45] That's the $10 million question. The holy grail is what are the best metrics for innovation? The best metrics I think are the ones that help you measure progress to your goal. So, for example, I have one client that hasn't honestly in years, hasn't launched anything new. They just need to launch things, launch it.So have metrics around the launch and they need to launch quickly. So how rapidly are they going through ideas? How rapidly are they moving through the innovation funnel? Now I have another client that has been launching a lot of stuff and nothing is sticking. Then don't measure how many launches you're doing because you know, that's a vanity metric.So, it's really starting with why are we doing innovation? What are the ways to measure how we're progressing towards that goal, and use the first few months, year to set that baseline? A lot of people look to, oh, what's best practice. Oh, what's Apple doing? What's Google doing? Well, you're not Apple. You're not Google. So don't benchmark yourself again. Benchmark against yourself or maybe your nearest competitors, and that's really kind of the comparison and the improvement that you want to see. Brian Ardinger: [00:14:03] So the next topic I want to talk about is what trends are you seeing that excite you when it comes to innovation? What are some of the new things that are on the horizon that particularly are jazzing you up and jazzing your companies up.Robyn Bolton: [00:14:15] It's a great question. I think there's, as always, a lot of excitement around technology and, you know, things like AI, VR, you know, more immersive experiences. And I think again, another silver lining of COVID is since none of us can travel or go anywhere, people have been experimenting with how do you bring experiences into the home?And so, there's been a lot of leap forward in technology that would have maybe taken several years. So, I think there's a lot of excitement around technology and using that to enhance, augment, even fill in parts of the portfolio. There's also a lot of excitement around the talent that is suddenly out there.I'm sure everyone's been reading about the great resignation and what that's doing is it's making amazing talent available to a lot of companies that would have had a much harder time attracting people. So, there's a lot of excitement there about bringing in different perspectives, bringing in talent that may not in the past, have been interested in coming to companies.So, there's this excitement around the diversity of talent. And then finally is what makes me most excited, is this realization amongst executives and managers and employees of, Hey, we can change. We can do something different. We are resilient. We can be creative. We can be problem solvers. Just a complete mindset shift from kind of heads down, execute, to heads up. Think about the big picture, be creative, and solve problems. Brian Ardinger: [00:15:58] Do you have any recommendations or thoughts around how to not fall back into that mindset of the way of the normal. You know, I know most people are still struggling with going back into the hybrid world. They're trying to hold onto the fact that, well, now we're going back to the office. Or we're now we're going back to what, the way it was before. Any recommendations or thoughts around how to not fall back into those old patterns?Robyn Bolton: [00:16:18] The tyranny of now will always get ya. I think it's like sustaining any habit. I mean, essentially that's what people have built are these habits around resilience, creativity, problem solving, and it's hard to sustain habits. You've got to very consciously, deliberately, create time for the habit. It doesn't have to be a big thing.I've seen clients I've worked with when it kind of like is a parting gift of literally they just make a card that they take into a meeting and be like, right, these are the types of questions I'm supposed to ask in this type of meeting. And kind of creating these little cheats to remind them of the skills and habits they've built to try to prevent them from falling back. So it's the things you do to keep a good habit going, you need the same kind of helps. Brian Ardinger: [00:17:09] It's definitely going to be an interesting world that we come into. And I think it's actually more difficult to go back into this world than it was to go into the lockdown. Everybody was in the same boat at that time and had to relearn and learn things overnight.Now this hybrid world is going to be a different type of shakeout. It's almost like a reverse culture shock to a certain extent. So, we'll, it'll be interesting to see how that plays out. What kind of recommendations or resources would you recommend for folks that are interested in exploring innovation or strengthen their muscles around this particular topic?Robyn Bolton: [00:17:38] I'm a big reader. So, I always kind of default to reading first. There are several great organizations that publish newsletters and quick articles. Innovation Leader is one of them innov8tors, which is spelled with an eight, primarily in Europe, is another one where they're just constantly producing great materials, great resources, especially for corporate innovators.You know, certainly all the magazines. HBR often has great innovation articles. And very selfish plug. I'm always publishing on my blog, Mile Zero.io, and just keeping up on latest thoughts, practices in the innovation space. Brian Ardinger: [00:18:24] Absolutely. I would definitely recommend your blog and, and the stuff that you've written for Forbes and other places as well. It's been very helpful for my journey as well. My last question is, do you have any interesting stories from your Swiffer days, or maybe an interesting client project that could summarize the ups and downs of creating something from scratch? Robyn Bolton: [00:18:42] Oh yes. Oh my goodness. I have so many stories from, from the Swiffer days. I will say, one. I learned many valuable lessons from this, but myself and some of the guys from R and D. We were actually in Rome. And we were doing in-home visits with women. And this was as we were developing Swiffer Wet Jet, just to understand their cleaning habits. And what we learned over the course of a week is a surprising amount of Italian women have home buffing machines for their floors and daily would buff the floor. Would get down on hands and knees and scrub kind of like Cinderella, and just a completely different practice than what we're used to here in the U S or in the UK. Anyways, we went into one apartment and talking to the woman through a translator. We asked her, you know, okay, get prepared to wash your floor. We want to see how you do this. And she stepped away, came back in and she was completely naked.  And we were not prepared for that. First lesson I learned was this is why we carry notebooks is so that you can hide behind them. This is also why you do research in pairs because weird things will happen. And then when we asked her why she chose to clean that way, she explained that it was because her husband likes it when she cleans that up. That was also what I learned that it's okay to cut an interview short and just gracefully bow out. And maybe not consider that as a data point in the research. Brian Ardinger: [00:20:15] Perhaps an outlier.Robyn Bolton: [00:20:16] Yes. Perhaps we found an outlier. For More InformationBrian Ardinger: [00:20:19] Thanks. Well, Robyn, I do appreciate you coming on Inside Outside Innovation to tell us some of those insights and some amazing stories. I'd love to have you back to tell some more in the future, but in the meantime, if people want to find out more about yourself or about Mile Zero, what's the best way to do that?Robyn Bolton: [00:20:32] Best way to do that is to go to Miles Zero's webpage. It's Mile Zero. So, zero spelled out Z E R O dot I O. Brian Ardinger: [00:20:42] Excellent. Well Robyn, thank you again for being on Inside Outside Innovation and looking forward to continuing the conversation as innovation continues to move forward. Robyn Bolton: [00:20:49] Absolutely. Thank you, this was great.Brian Ardinger: That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLSGet the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HEREYou can also search every Inside Outside Innovation Podcast by Topic and Company.  For more innovations resources, check out IO's Innovation Article Database, Innovation Tools Database, Innovation Book Database, and Innovation Video Database.  

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with David Roger, founder of Felix Gray, the e-commerce eyewear company with proprietary blue light filtering technology. David and I talk about the founder's journey of launching a new category of eyewear and the challenges along the way. Let's get started.Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help you rethink, reset, and remix yourself and your organization. Each week, we bring the latest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses, as well as the tools, tactics, and trends you'll need to thrive as a new innovator.Interview Transcript with David Roger, Founder of Felix GrayBrian Ardinger: [00:00:30] Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have David Roger. He is the founder of Felix Gray, an e-commerce eyewear company with proprietary blue light filtering technology. And he's got quite an interesting story. So welcome to the show, David. David Roger: [00:00:57] Thanks so much for having me. Brian Ardinger: [00:00:58] Our paths have not crossed until today, but a lot of our common network have in the past. You started your company, Felix Gray in 2016. Let's go back to the beginning and let's talk about how you got involved in becoming an entrepreneur. David Roger: [00:01:13] In college, I initially thought I wanted to be a lawyer. That's what I went to school for and by sophomore year I realized I did not want to do that. And I kind of loved this idea of starting businesses. And this is the time where TechCrunch was starting to get really popular, and you'd read a lot of different things and different entrepreneurial things. And it was something really exciting. I ended up starting my first business in college, which was a secondary school newspaper. And I had to sell print advertising to local stores and shops and businesses. And if you want to learn how tough selling is, try doing that. And then when I left Cornell, I went and joined Venture for America, which is basically Teach for America, but applied to startups and entrepreneurship. Founded by Andrew Yang, who is running for democratic nominee couple of years ago and is now running actually for Mayor in the New York Mayor race. And so that's kind of how I got into entrepreneurship.Brian Ardinger: [00:02:06] I think you started in Vegas, is that correct? Working with Tony Shay and the Downtown Project. And maybe tell us a little bit about that Vegas Tech Fund and some of the stuff that you've done in there. David Roger: [00:02:17] Through Venture for America, they are in partnership with Tony's Downtown Project. And so that's how I got connected with them. I interviewed out there, really bought into the mission, really thought it was an amazing thing to fill a walkable livable downtown area, which is, Vegas is not known for that. It's basically all suburbs. And then essentially the strip, which is a transient first population.And so, I thought that was an amazing mission. I was part of the biggest tech fund, but my primary job was on their operations team. Basically, when I got there, Tony had put in $350 million of his own money into revitalize the area, and we had no idea if projects that we had going on ranging from a million, to twenty-five million dollars, we're going to make money or lose money. It's kind of the wild west.And they threw me in, and they said, go figure this out. And so, it was really cool. Great job right out of school. I will say it did mean that I was in front of Excel, building financial models, 12 hours a day. That's when my eyes started to absolutely kill me. I was looking around, looking at everyone else, complaining about the same things our eyes being tired at the end of the day, their eyes being dry, headaches, blurry vision. And kind of looked and said, okay, why is this a thing. Everyone I know at work and half the people I know in my friend group that are in different jobs all around the country, why are we all complaining about the same thing? That's when I started talking to Optometrists Ophthalmologists.  Learned around what screens produced, which is blue light and glare and basically that caused a lot of these issues that get categorized as digital eye strain. So, if you get filtered blue light, you can eliminate glare. You create this more comfortable experience. Brian Ardinger: [00:03:50] I love the genesis of that. But not every new idea becomes a company. And so how did you make that jump from, hey, I've got an individual problem from the standpoint of, you know, my eyes are getting strained from all the work I'm doing on screens to, hey, I think there's something here that I can create a company around?David Roger: [00:04:08] So the first thing was really recognizing that problem. Right? So, recognize the problem myself and then recognize that problem in a lot of other people. Whether it was people complaining about it firsthand, or me saying, hey, do your eyes ever get exhausted at the end of the day? You ever deal with a headache?And everyone's saying, yes. You're like, okay, there's something here. So, then I start to understand, okay, what is going on? So that's when I started talking to eye professionals for a better understanding what could be these root causes. And so when I'm talking to ophthalmologists and optometrists they are saying look, screens are a large driver behind this, and particularly what screens produce, light and glare.And so like, look, you can filter blue light, and you can eliminate glare. You can create a more comfortable experience. There are these glasses out there, they're yellow or orange lenses, and basically, they're going to help. So, I look, and they're not only yellow and orange lenses, but they look like hunting goggles.And if you put them on your face you look like one of the X Men. And I'm like, I can't wear that, and we'll show this to plenty of other people like, hey, this will solve your problems. They're like, I'm not wearing that. Right. So basically, the idea was okay, well, how do you create something that is functional, but also can look good. At the flip side, there were a couple other things in the market at the time, and this is still the case today. But these clear lenses, basically the Optometrist, the Ophthalmologist, the real eyecare professional said this stuff is not really filtering real blue light. It's filtering 2 to 3% of blue light where it actually matters, which produces blue light. It is basically placebo. It's not worth buying. So, what I did then was said, okay, well, how can you marry the fashion function?How can you create something that has a beautiful frame, but a really functional lens? And that's when I started working through a lot of networking with, with different lens suppliers and ended up developing a proprietary way of filtering blue light that can still have a clear lens. But be highly effective, right?So, Felix Gray's lens, even today, filters 30% of blue light instead of 2% of blue light at the 455-nanometer range, which is where screens produce blue light. Right. So basically, we filter 15 times more blue light where it's important. And that's why 9 out of 10 people who wear Felix Gray report significant improvement, but that was the genesis.So, it was okay, let's spend time building a great product off the bat. That's not only going to make your eyes feel great, but make you feel great. You feel confident in what you're wearing. And from there start. Brian Ardinger: [00:06:34] And obviously there were some signals in the marketplace that e-commerce was taking off. Warby Parker, I think had just been around and being introduced to the concept of cheaper or less expensive frames that you would buy than going to the store and stuff. So, there's some signals in that. How did you go from, and the concept of there's a problem here. I think I can solve it from technology perspective and then creating an e-commerce company? Those are different things as well. How did you go about building the team and experimenting your way to where you're at now? David Roger: [00:07:01] Ecomm was definitely growing. I would say that the distinction between the fields where I was doing and a lot of what other direct to consumer was doing was direct to consumers basically saying here's a toothbrush, you've always bought a toothbrush, let's make a prettier looking toothbrush. And let's cut costs through the supply chain and then be able to deliver it to you and use, you know, Facebook advertising, et cetera, in order to get it off the ground. We were basically creating a new category. We're saying, look, we believe that this is a big problem. After looking at lots of research through companies like the Vision Council, which is an independent group of optometrists and ophthalmologists, you're learning that 60 to 70% of people are experiencing digital eyestrain. So you're realizing this is a big problem, but the market is really low. So, the awareness is not there. The problem is obvious. It's just that no one has applied all that's known on that problem. And no one has    brought a real great solution to the market. What we said is the best way to do that is to do that through a new age direct consumer model, as opposed to the traditional retail model. Because especially when something is new, a retailer's not going to say, sure, I'm just going to buy this thing. You know, I'm going to help educate your potential customers. It doesn't work like that. Right? So, we had a lot better direct connections with the customer. If we could go straight to B to C. Brian Ardinger: [00:08:20] My understanding is you got scrappy early stages when you're trying to start a new category, sometimes there's not investors that are interested in starting a new category and that. So, talk us through how you got off the ground? David Roger: [00:08:31] I remember, you know, at the time Away Luggage had just raised $2 million pre revenue. My co-founder and I said, okay, look, we're two smart, you know, guys. He came from hedge funds. I came from an entrepreneurial background. And we said, look, we can go raise some money.And we basically got laughed out of the room because people said, you're not going to start a new market. And especially we are selling specifically non-prescription glasses. So, people with either contacts or 20/20. So, you're not going to get people who don't wear glasses, to wear glasses. And so, we actually said, we believe in this product. We've tested it among friends and it's a really good success.So, the first thing we did when we really got scrappy is when we launched in January 2016 in a closed beta, we actually did what we called an office trial. We worked with offices all around New York. Spotify, Uber, Barclays, LinkedIn. And we would go in and offer up to 50 pairs of glasses to employees for two-week free trial period.We took care of everything. So really easy for a Culture HR team to just say, hey, this is a fun little perk. We don't have to do anything. And it's a nice thing to offer. And at the end of that program, people could either return them. We come and pick them up. Or they could use their own credit cards to buy.And we saw about one in three people without knowing about Felix Gray, without knowing about blue light, bought right off the bat. And then we always get emails like we'd always pick up on a Friday. And then by Monday, Tuesday, we'd always get all these emails saying, actually my eyes are killing me. Can you come back so I can buy those glasses? So, we knew we had something there. Brian Ardinger: [00:10:02] So you did an Indiegogo campaign as well and raise some money from friends and family and then manufacturing and that's expensive. So how do you get off the ground with just selling individual orders? David Roger: [00:10:13] That private beta happened after the Indigo campaign. When we did the Indiegogo campaign, we really didn't have a company at all. There's no supply chain in place yet. Basically, it was rough estimates of what we would need in order to place our first order quantities. And we didn't even know what the suppliers were. We just knew that was roughly what it was going to be. And we would figure that out later. So, I think for us, we were in a position where we use Indiegogo very much as a friends and family way of raising some money.People could contribute $50 here, $100 dollars there. And then, you know, some people, you know, friends of friends got interested, excited about the idea, but you know, you see some Indigo Campaigns that are really, really polished. They really know their supply chain. They know exactly what's going on.They've already built prototypes. And now they're racing for, you know, that full kind of, I'd say seed round, right. It goes beyond actually just the production there's marketing expenses that they're looking to raise and things like that. We were very much like, hey, we don't know if this is going to work. Let's raise as little as possible off the bat. We didn't raise our official seed round until a year after we launched. So again, 2016, right. So, we raised our first seed in March of 2017 once we started to have traction. Brian Ardinger: [00:11:30] And so flash forward. We're what, five years or so into your journey? What are some of the lessons learned along the way? And then we can talk about where you're at today. David Roger: [00:11:39] Starting with a really high-quality product, particularly one of ours that is proprietary and just works better than others, does mean a lot, right. Because at the end of the day, you can have best frames, the best marketing. If you don't have a great product, it can win, but it often doesn't, especially if you're trying to be scrappy. You know, word of mouth is still our largest source of revenue from any individual channel. We do a lot of advertising on a lot of different channels, including podcasts, including, you know, Facebook, Instagram, Google influencers, things like that. So, it's not like we're not marketing. Just word of mouth still continues to be really strong. Another thing I'd say is, you know, when we launch, we launched as a   blue light company. We launched as a blue light product. We were really growing this market. Over time, I think it's important for brands to understand really at the core, what they stand for. For us that is this idea of your digital wellness, right.So, we fundamentally believe in improving the relationship between people and their technology. We believe that like, if you are able to do that, you can help people live a happier, healthier, more productive life, and change the world, right. You're happier because your eyes aren't killing you at the end of the day.We've even had the best review I ever got was a person saying that their marriage has gotten better with their spouse because they don't come home grumpy, cause their eyes aren't exhausted. And at the same time, you can also be more productive, right? So, you might have to burn the midnight oil to get a project done. And you're able to do that because your eyes aren't fatigued. You're not dealing with that headache. But at the core of what we stand for, it is really this idea of how do we help your digital being. If we care about the food we put into our bodies. We care about that exercise we get. Then we sit in front of our laptops or monitors for 10 plus hours a day, watch TV for a couple hours or on our phones for every minute in between.We know that's not good for us. So why not have a healthy relationship during that day. And that is ultimately what drives new product development that's in the works. It ultimately drives the conversations that we want to have with customers, the type of partnerships we're looking to do. And so I do think that finding your brand North Star is very important.Brian Ardinger: [00:13:51] So we've had a challenging year, as everybody has around the world. I always like to ask the founders, what have you learned over this past 18 months in COVID and that. How has that affected your business? How's it affected your ability to manage teams and grow what you're growing.  What are your takeaways from where we've been and where we're coming out of?David Roger: [00:14:09] Yeah, from a business standpoint, I think, you know, particularly in the beginning of the pandemic, everyone's indoors, everyone's now learning to use Zoom. And, you know, we saw, you know, blue light, the category really exploded. I think now you're seeing kind of the opposite happen, where everyone is just focused on being outside and most people are vaccinated and which is to be expected.You know, it makes sense, but the awareness overall has risen a great deal. A customer said, you know, 80% of our customers do their research beforehand. So, you know, as the space matures, there's a lot of competition out there from $20 products on Amazon that are honestly pretty crap, to like, you know, $150 products. And people are wondering because that price point is so wide. What are the differences? And a lot of times they'll do their research. So we're learning a lot about that. In terms of business and managing a team, you know, we've always had a fundamental philosophy of it's more important to get your work done and get your work done well than to just be in the office.And so, while we had an office first culture, performance was not relying on if you showed up to the office or not. You had a plumber that needed to come, of course you could work from home for the day. If you just weren't feeling like coming in, you can work from home for the day. So, we already had, I'd say an innate level of trust with everyone on the team.And so, when we switched to work from home, I think it was less of transition for us and less a transition for people that manage teams here, than it was for other companies where that cultural is less so.  Now I will say that over time, you obviously miss those interactions with individual people, you miss just being able to get in touch.And so, you know, we started doing randomized lunches every other week, so that you can kind of have these small group lunches. That was really nice. Also a nice thing is a lot of people are Slacking all the time now. And it was really nice to just Slack call or actually call someone because I liken it to just swiveling your chair around and then talking to the person next to you.And we weren't able to do that anymore. And you lose so much if you're just texting. If you're just typing on Slack, you lose all that tone. So that was another thing that we learned over time. Like, hey, let's just get on a one-minute phone call. It doesn't have to blow up into this whole thing. It can just be a one-minute phone call to talk through something.Brian Ardinger: [00:16:27] So coming out of it, are you going back to the office? Are you doing hybrid? Where are you sitting? David Roger: [00:16:31] We'll end up having a hybrid. So, we're figuring that out right now, but it's clear that most people want some office environment, but they don't want to go back five days a week. We've also started hiring people outside of New York, which I think has been awesome.It's a great way to expand the talent pool and the way that I see those things going is having a couple of off-sites every year to bring everyone together. And I actually think having multiple off-sites is really helpful anyway, because everyone, especially in a small company, working and being pretty busy.Everyone is so heads down often. It's really hard to get people up and just kind of have their heads out of the sand. And that's, especially true of people who are, you know, at lower levels in the company. And that's really, really important to get their perspective too. And off-sites are a great way to do that. Brian Ardinger: [00:17:21] Do you have any kind of go-to resources that you'd recommend for entrepreneurs or innovators out there that you rely on or use to keep you up to date and moving forward?David Roger: [00:17:29] The best thing is your own network. And as you build that network, then you might become in text groups or Slack groups and different things so that, you know, what's going on. Whether that's marketing or supply chain, or leadership. I think surrounding yourself with a couple of key mentors is also really important to better understand how to build teams in particular.So, I would say network more than anything. There's a couple of good newsletters and stuff like that. Fore Runner has a really good one. I always liked to read, Not Boring, which is not usually in the D to C space, but I think it's just very, very thoughtful and strategic. And you can learn a lot about the thought that companies put into their strategy through newsletters like that. But I would say more than anything, it's building your own network because that's where the real value has to come from.  Brian Ardinger: [00:18:15] What's next for Felix Gray? What do you see coming out in the next few months, years? Where do you see the company going? And what's new and exciting in your world.   David Roger: [00:18:22] Yeah. So, we're really focused on the digital wellness space. So, you know, there'll be some things that we're going to launch a Warranty Program pretty soon. We'll launch accessories pretty soon. Really just additional things on the eyewear side. But we do have a couple of products that are not eyewear related that we're looking to launch one of them in actually like late summer, early fall.It's a product that helps your long-term eye health and also helps your short-term eye comfort. So, it's kind of something that we look to be in addition to Felix Gray. And the way that we're thinking about the business overall is really this idea of we want to own and help facilitate the conversation around new digital wellbeing, and then create products that support that right products that support the fact that we weren't evolved to be in front of screens all day, every day. There are negative effects that are associated with that. And we want products that help mitigate the same effect. For More InformationBrian Ardinger: [00:19:14] Well, David, thank you again for coming on Inside Outside Innovation to share your founder journey and give us some insights into where you see the world going. I really do appreciate it. If people want to find out more about yourself or about the company, what's the best way to do that?David Roger: [00:19:27] You can follow us at Felix Gray. So, it's the same F E L I X, G R A Y S. Felix Gray was taken when we first started that. You obviously can sign up to our newsletter as well. Those are probably the best, two ways to follow the company. Brian Ardinger: [00:19:43] Awesome. Well, thanks again for being on the show and looking forward to continuing the conversation in the years to come and appreciate all your time.David Roger: [00:19:49] Thanks so much for having me.  It was great.Brian Ardinger: That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLSGet the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HEREYou can also search every Inside Outside Innovation Podcast by Topic and Company.  For more innovations resources, check out IO's Innovation Article Database, Innovation Tools Database, Innovation Book Database, and Innovation Video Database.  

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Amos Schwartzfarb, Managing Director of Techstars and Co Author of the new book Levers: The Framework for Building Repeatability into Your Business.  Amos and I talk about the framework for going from idea to scalable repeatable company and the challenges startups face in the process. Let's get started.Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help you rethink, reset, and remix yourself and your organization. Each week, we'll bring you the latest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses, as well as the tools, tactics, and trends you'll need to thrive as a new innovatorBrian Ardinger: [00:00:00]  Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Amos Swartzfarb.  He is the Managing Director of Techstars Austin, Author of the book Sell More, Faster and Coauthor of a new book and the reason we have him on today's a new book called Levers: The Framework for Building Repeatability into Your Business. Welcome Amos. Amos Schwartzfarb: [00:01:01] Hey, thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. Brian Ardinger: [00:01:04] I'm excited to have you here too. You've been in this space of spinning up new ideas and helping companies get off the ground. You've got a new book coming out called Levers. And so, I wanted to have you on the show to talk about that and give some insight into what it takes to build a business. So maybe let's start off with what's this new book about, and we can go from there. Amos Schwartzfarb: [00:01:25] What the book is and I should clarify it is, it's a book, but it is more a book that you do versus read. And that gives you a little sense of what it's about and the goal that my coauthors and I had when putting this together was, we're all investors and operators for many, many years.And as we sort of looked around, and this is the stuff that we teach and profess to the companies we work with, and we realized that there wasn't really a great place, resource to go, accelerators included where the focus is on, what are the fundamental things you need to do to operationalize a business. How do you get it to repeatability? And how do you scale it? I like to say this is sort of like a recipe book. Like you open it up and follow the instructions and it doesn't guarantee you're going to get there, but it certainly will help you figure out the right ingredients so that you can have the recipe for the cake you're trying to bake. Brian Ardinger: [00:02:18] What I like about the book is the fact that it really does start at the very beginning. And I think a lot of startup founders take the startup journey. They see the big vision of where they want to go and that and they start 25 paces ahead of where they really are. And the book really starts off with who are you really trying to serve. What are you trying to build? And that, so maybe talk through that initial W Three methodology and your belief around that. Amos Schwartzfarb: [00:02:42] So I think maybe just for the listeners to give context here, the book is a five-chapter book. Each chapter is dedicated to a piece of the overall framework. It's very intentional in the order that we have everything and the way that we see it makes most sense to think about building the business.And I should also clarify that the framework absolutely works when you're sitting in the coffee shop and the writing an idea in the back of a napkin. And really where we focus our energy is working with founders that are a little further along than that. Usually there's some customers or some revenue. There's no repeatability in the business. And so our thought process is regardless of the business you're building, it all starts with really having a deep understanding of who you're serving. And who you're serving is who your customers ultimately are. And so, the, the W3 framework is a way to answer three fundamental questions, which are, you know, when I say them, everyone's like, yeah, of course these are the questions you need to answer. But getting to the right answer is the hard part. So, the three questions are who is your customer and what is the very specific and narrow definition of the customer that, you know will say yes, 100% of the time. That doesn't mean that your prospects will, that's not your entire tam. It's just like, what are the attributes of someone who, you know, will say yes, a hundred percent of the time.That's the first W. The second W is what are they buying from you. Not what are you selling to them? And that's a really important, often subtle nuance. And you know, I think as you know, the reality is your potential customers. They don't care what you do. They only care what you do   for them.And so, we just try to really get at that so that when you're talking to them, you can talk in the language that they understand. And then the final W, the third W is why are they buying it? What's the impact on the business? Have a clear understanding of what that is. And more importantly, or equally as important is how are they going to measure that impact? Because if they don't know, they won't know if there's an impact and they won't be a customer for very long. In the book, we also get at that there's two different parties that you need to understand the why from. There's the obvious one, which is the business why. But then there's also the individual buyer. What's their motivation and making sure that their motivations are aligned to.So even if the business looks like the perfect customer for you, they might not be because of the kind of person they have in the role or the exact person they have in the roles. Understanding that deeply as important to getting at, figuring out who your customer is on a deep level. Brian Ardinger: [00:05:00] Yeah. Specifically, based on the business model too. Oftentimes you have multiple different stakeholders where you have to figure out what that why is for not only the user of the product, for example, but the buyer or the influencer, whatever the case may be. Amos Schwartzfarb: [00:05:12] Yeah, you have to understand why they're going to care. If you're going to get them to understand why, what you're doing matters. Or conversely, to understand why maybe they're not actually the right customer for you right now, even if they look like it from the outside. Brian Ardinger: [00:05:23] Right. And then we could grow into it. But those early adopters are sometimes a little bit different than the ones that buy longer term. So you mentioned at Techstars, you tend to have companies that have thought through that a little bit more, and maybe they're in the early stages of developing that customer network and stuff. What's the next step? Where do startup founders typically get tripped up? Once they've started that business and have gotten a little bit of traction. Amos Schwartzfarb: [00:05:44] There's sort of two things that I see most often are the    operational trip ups. The first is the notion that they have product market fit literally years before they actually have it. And so, this goes around, figuring out who your W3 is, but saying like, okay, we've got a couple of customers, we've got a bunch of people that have said they would buy, we've found product market fit.That is not a true statement. It's the furthest thing from a true statement. Product market fit is when you have a huge base of customers that are working with you, that can't live without you. That is product market fit. That takes years to get to. So, the first is kidding yourself into thinking you have it long before you have. You might have great product market direction or signal, but that's different than product market fit.And then the second thing is skipping over finding repeatability and moving right to scale. So maybe you have 10 or 15 or 20 customers and saying like, great, I'm going to hire a sales team and we're going to go from 20 to 200. But the reality is most of the time, you don't understand why it's working the way it's working.And until you understand why you really can't scale because you don't know what to scale. You might think you do from the outside, right, from a hundred thousand feet away. But when you get into the nuts and bolts, it's often very different than what you think. Brian Ardinger: [00:06:55] So how do you define repeatability and what are you looking for for that portion of it?Amos Schwartzfarb: [00:06:59] Yeah. Repeatability is when you have proof with data that you understand that by doing a thing, you have a crystal ball to understand what the result of that thing is. And you have enough back data that you can reasonably predict what will happen. You may have good instincts and you may be right often because your instincts are good, but if you don't have the data to back it up, you don't have repeatability yet.So, the thing that people do is they have good instincts, they see things starting to happen, and so they skip the repeatability step and move right to scale. And then things break down because they didn't realize that, oh, well actually there was these pieces we didn't know existed or mattered or things broke that we didn't think were even there.Brian Ardinger: [00:07:40] Interesting. Very interesting. So, let's say, you understand your customer, you understand what they're buying. You started to kind of create some value. One of the chapters in your book is really talking about how do you create that revenue model around that? How do you start putting the pieces in place to know how you make money and the quote, unquote levers, I guess that you can pull to make that happen? Talk a little bit more about that. Amos Schwartzfarb: [00:08:00] So that's   Chapter 2 of the book or the second step of the overall framework, which is we call it, finding your revenue formula. And so, the simplest way to describe it is there is a simple math equation, that is your business. And it's, you know, something times something, times something, times something equals revenue, right? And every business is a little different. And what's interesting about this is like, if you're a marketplace business, you might assume that all, all marketplace businesses are reasonably the same are all SAAS businesses are reasonably the same. And the reality is that's the furthest thing from the truth. But when you're looking at it from a hundred thousand feet away, it can sometimes feel that way. So, finding your revenue formula starts with having a theory of what that math equation will be at some point at scale, and then mapping out, and if you can picture the math equation sort of on top, and then under that, a list of things that we call them, drivers that drive the values, the different values in your math equation or your business model.And then those drivers all have sub drivers. And so, these drivers and the sub drivers are the things you need to do or learn or research or prove in order to know how to move one of the values in your formula. These are your levers. What are the things that actually allow me to, to move that? So, until you, what we say is like, until you understand that the levers of each value of your formula, and you can point to it and you know, you have repeatability.If I do this thing, this other thing will happen. You don't actually have repeatability in your business, even if you have it in part of your business. And that's often what happens is you get repeatability in one part, you're still learning about the other parts, right? And it's always an evolution. You never have full complete understanding. Big billion-dollar public companies still only have 90 plus percent understanding of the levers because you know, there's just things that happen. The economy shifts. There's a global pandemic. Or there's a new competitor in the market. Right. These things change. But generally speaking, you have a crystal ball that's relatively clear.Brian Ardinger: [00:09:49] Yeah. And I like that analogy too, from the standpoint of like a lot of the times you can get one or two levers, right? Like for example, you can get people into your funnel. But then they fall out because of something else. And until you understand across the board, how do you actually get it from that first conversation to dollars in the bank? A lot of things can happen in between. Amos Schwartzfarb: [00:10:07] Yeah. And even dollars in the bank, like what happens at renewal time? Brian Ardinger: [00:10:11] Or what would happen if you turn off a particular part of the funnel. Does that change the dynamics of how they buy or come back to you?  A lot of information is available out there to startups nowadays, you know, 8, 10 years ago when you and I were starting kind of this journey, a lot of it was much more black box and that. You know, what are the biggest changes that you've seen in the regard for access to resources and availability for startups to actually get started?Amos Schwartzfarb: [00:10:36] I think probably one of the biggest changes that I've seen in the last decade is that there is a really true and sincere desire for people that have had some experience to help people that don't have experience. You know, and I've been doing this for 25 years. I wish the level of people that were willing to give first and help was there, and it just wasn't.So, I think that there's been a huge shift there. And I think there's a lot of really great resources out there and theories and philosophies and thought processes around the way to do things. There's lots of accelerators and incubators, and most of them are really well intentioned. I would say that to me, that's probably the biggest shifts, that, which is that more and more there is access to information to help you figure out what to do.And I think not to bring it back to the book Levers. What we saw was all of this stuff out there. We felt like there was a gap to tactically what do you do to operationalize a business. Nothing in this book is new. What we've done is we've packaged it in a way that hopefully makes sense. For someone to say, okay, like I said, open it up.I know the steps I might, they might learn that the thing that I want to build is actually not a real business or not possible, but we'll give you a framework to figure that out too, so you don't waste time and money.Brian Ardinger: [00:11:52] Well and that's an important part, especially like in the corporate world where I see a lot of corporations kind of spin up new ideas and they keep spinning it up and throwing resources at it rather than saying, okay, this idea is bad or we need to pivot it or let's pick a different one and push it through its paces. You know, that ability to say not right now. And let's try something else, I think is an important piece. Not only for founders, but corporate innovators, things, anytime you're trying to push it. Amos Schwartzfarb: [00:12:16] Yeah. Well, I say going back to your question. I think another thing that has happened in the last, on and off for the last 20 years. But I think in the last, you know, five to eight years, which I don't think is a positive thing, is I do think that there's been a notion there's so much available venture capital out there, and a lot of VCs, people that get into VC, they're not necessarily operators first. And there's a lot of people who think that being an entrepreneur is a career path versus an infliction. And I think you put those two things together. I think one of the negative outcomes of that is a notion that money solves problems when you're building a business. And actually, it's completely the opposite. I've seen way more businesses raise too much capital and fail because they think they can throw money at solving a problem, versus solving the problem and then using money to scale once it's solved. Brian Ardinger: [00:13:07] Yeah. If you take that money too early and don't know what to do with it, you can burn through it pretty quickly and not get to where you want to go. You mentioned COVID briefly, but you know, what are you seeing coming out of COVID. What are some of the biggest trends or opportunities that you're seeing?Amos Schwartzfarb: [00:13:19] I get this question a lot and I feel like I'm always giving a really dissatisfying answer. I don't know that like I'm ahead of seeing any trends. I think I'm in the middle of it with everybody else. I mean, there's lots of things around, how do you get people together virtually? How do you bring people together virtually or in person more together? In my last investment class, there were a lot of community things that have popped up. Candidly, I don't know that I'm ahead of the curve there. I wish I had that crystal ball, but I think I'm using my instincts just as much as anybody. Brian Ardinger: [00:13:50] Yeah. I think it's going to be an interesting time, especially coming out of COVID. I think that's going to be, actually, folks are going to struggle even more with that transition versus actually going into COVID. I think. Amos Schwartzfarb: [00:14:00] So true. I'm even having trouble getting used to like getting back to in-person meetings. It feels weird to say yes or to offer it up. Brian Ardinger: [00:14:07] Exactly. Yeah. I'm going out this afternoon and to see people in 3D and it's going to be a little bit weird. I guess the next question is like, what's next for you? What's next for Techstars? What's next for the book? Amos Schwartzfarb: [00:14:18] This thing that we do at Techstars is really, really fun. You know, we're in Austin. We're looking to increase the number of times that we're running a year. So, my hope is that, you know, over the course of the next couple of years, we're more frequent, so we can be more impactful on companies that are part of the Techstars or want to be part of the Tech Stars network here in Austin.I mean, the book is doing great. We're getting tremendously good feedback. Trevor, my co-author and I, we do some work with non Techstars companies on the process. So there is that too, which, you know, it doesn't take a lot of our time, relatively speaking, but it is fun because we get to work with companies that wouldn't necessarily be a fit for Techstars, but we'll get to give them, you know, the same sort of, it's not the same thing at all, but we get to give them this process, which to me is really the most important piece of it.Brian Ardinger: [00:15:06] Yeah, I found it very in line with a lot of the stuff that I've seen in lots of the, we're doing both again inside corporations, as well as working with startups out there. And I'm excited to see where, where it comes out. And it's always good to have people talk about what it takes to do this, because I think that's where a lot of people struggle.It's, it's so glamorized out there nowadays. And like I said, there's so much capital and it's never been easier to spin up something. But it's just as hard as ever to scale it and grow it. And it's always nice to see some ways to think through that process and actually make it happen. So, if people want to find out more about the book or more about you, what's the best way to do that.Amos Schwartzfarb: [00:15:41] To find out about the book, go to Leversbook.com, L E V E R Sbook.com. One word. Find out about me there too. You can reach out to us through there. Brian Ardinger: [00:15:52] Excellent. Well, Amos, thanks for coming on Inside Outside Innovation. Looking forward to continuing the conversation as the world changes. Appreciate your time.Amos Schwartzfarb: [00:15:59] Yeah. Cool. Thank you so much for having me. It's great chatting.Brian Ardinger: That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLSGet the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HEREYou can also search every Inside Outside Innovation Podcast by Topic and Company.  For more innovations resources, check out IO's Innovation Article Database, Innovation Tools Database, Innovation Book Database, and Innovation Video Database.  

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Seth Levine and Elizabeth Macbride, authors of the new book, The New Builders: Face to Face with the True Future of Business. We talk about the current and future state of entrepreneurship and hear some stories about new builders making an impact in their local communities. Let's get started.Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help you rethink, reset, and remix yourself and your organization. Each week, we'll bring the latest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses, as well as the tools, tactics, and trends you'll need to thrive as a new innovator.Interview Transcript with Seth Levine and Elizabeth Macbride, Authors of The New BuildersBrian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have some amazing guests. Today, we have Seth Levine and Elizabeth Macbride, authors of the new book, The New Builders: Face to Face with the True Future of Business. Welcome to the show. Elizabeth Macbride: Thank you very much.Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you on. Let me start out with a little background and bios for our audience. Among other things, Seth, you are the co-founder of the venture capital firm Foundry Group and Pledge 1%, which is a global network of companies that have pledged equity and time and product back to local communities.And Elizabeth, you are an award-winning business journalist, and founder of Times of Entrepreneurship, which is a new publication covering entrepreneurs beyond Silicon Valley, which is a topic near and dear to our heart. So welcome to the show. The first question I want to start with is what's the current state of entrepreneurship and what led you to write this book?Elizabeth Macbride: So, the current state of entrepreneurship in the United States is not nearly as good as people think it is. We concluded after our two years of working on the book, that entrepreneurship in the US is in this, in a state of profound decline. It's been declining over the past 40 years for a whole host of reasons. And I know we'll get into that some more. But I'll just answer the question as well about how we came to write the book, which is that I'm the original, like overlooked, not the original one, but an overlooked founder myself. Right. So I got a divorce seven years ago and had to reinvent my career pretty fast as a business journalist to feed my two kids. In doing that, I ended up founding this publication times of entrepreneurship. And along that journey met Seth, who has, a side specialty to being a venture capitalist, which is really supporting overlooked entrepreneurs. And so, we bonded over that and decided to write a book two years ago. That's how it came about.Seth Levine: Brian, I guess I'd add to that. We knew that there were really interesting stories, right? You tell many of them on your podcast of people building businesses that were for starters outside of Silicon Valley, and the big tech hubs. But also, really interesting businesses, but that weren't necessarily these sort of high growth tech focused businesses.And we wanted to tell their stories. Frankly, we thought it'd be kind of a lighthearted book. Interesting look at some founders that maybe were a little bit different than what people think of when they think of founders. But as we did all the research, we realized for starters, what Elizabeth just described, which is that entrepreneurship in the US is actually dying.And then we also learned that the types of people that are starting new businesses are very different than those people realize. Specifically, that the majority of new business owners are black, brown, female, and also quite a bit older than most people realize. And that, we realized as we came across these data, that these stories really need to be told. That it sort of went from a lighthearted, Hey, this will be fun. And we'll tell some interesting stories of people doing things out of the mainstream media eye. To, oh wow, there are some critical stories that we need to be telling here because we have a window here to change the trajectory of entrepreneurship in the us, and we'd act on it. Brian Ardinger: You know, and I think that's one of the things that we obviously talk about, you know, Tech Crunch and you hear the stories of the unicorns and things along those lines. And obviously that's important and that. But can you define, like, what is entrepreneurship to you? It's not just the tech giants that we're hearing about. How do you define a new builder? And what's the difference that you saw out there? Elizabeth Macbride: The way entrepreneurship traditionally has been defined is broader than the way it's currently defined. And so, when we looked at it and really, there's no reason why we should think of entrepreneurship as only the tech founders of Silicon Valley. They're part of the universe. They're not really the center of the universe. And definitely not the entire universe right. They're maybe 1% of all businesses in the US get venture capital funding.So, the fact that we're so consumed by that is sort of crazy. Because the other 99% are in fact, the drivers of a lot of jobs, they're actually drivers of innovation, we would argue as well. And they support and are part of our communities in just a host of important, different ways. And as the economy transitions, I think they're going to be even more important. So we define entrepreneurs as a very fundamental basic thing, right. They're  people starting businesses. Seth Levine: And that's always been the case in the US. And really, if you look back, I mean, certainly the US was founded by entrepreneurs. I mean, in some cases, quite literally, right? The Massachusetts Bay Companies, you know, all of these initial settlers that came over were essentially entrepreneurs, right? Who are in business ventures to go and settle new land and send raw goods and other materials back to Europe? And still, we have this long history of entrepreneurship and something changed in the last maybe 30 years or so, where the concept of entrepreneurship, use to be very broadly defined a shopkeeper is an entrepreneur, a local business owner was an entrepreneur.It got eaten up by the tech narrative, right? And this idea that the only entrepreneurs that were worth talking about were technology, business founders, and frankly, the only businesses that were worth talking about in the entrepreneurship context are businesses that are, have this aspiration for growth. Right? You referenced unicorns. And we think that that's incredibly dangerous to the overall dinosaur and frankly just the health of the US economy, because it really only describes such a small number of businesses. And frankly, and I say this from inside the world of venture capital, I'm not convinced that venture is a very good model for creating. Certainly, it's not a good model for creating broad-based economic development. Right. I mean, we know it can create some really big companies. And by the way, those companies are incredibly important. And other businesses end up being built on those companies. So Shopify or Google, like those are incredible innovations that help other small businesses, but it's just, it's not the only thing. And I think we've sort of lost sight of that. So it's, we don't argue in the book that, you know, that big is bad, for example, and small is good. We argue that there should be a balance just like we don't argue that venture capital should go away or anything crazy like that venture is great. But we talk about needing to create not just unicorns, but camels. So much more party actually real and not mythical, you know, animals that, you know, businesses that are sustainable and, and, you know, really are the drivers of our economy.Brian Ardinger: So you mentioned in the book, the research and that, around entrepreneurship and that it's going down and there's challenges around that. What is hindering the rise of new builders? Elizabeth Macbride: There's a lot, that's hindering a rise of new builders. You know, what we focused on in the book is really finance and that's the world that Seth and I both come from. So, we felt like we had a lot to say about it. And it's probably, I think it's deeply woven with the question of networks, but right, businesses need capital to grow. They just do. Like, we've also gotten consumed by this myth that what you need is grit, or perseverance in that, yes, that's all true. But we found so much grit and so much perseverance in the new builders that we interviewed. What they were missing was access to capital. And that is happening for a whole bunch of reasons.But maybe the clearest thing to say is that our system of community banking is really broken down. And I think that's the most direct tie. The other kind of pervasive issue is that the new builders reflect the increasing diversity of our country. So, they're women and people of color, immigrants, as they always have been, and older people. And they're really disconnected from the networks that also lead to that access to capital Brian Ardinger: in the book, you talk about something that really resonated this idea of a ghost startup or these companies that will never be created because of the lack of access to capital and things like that. Can you talk and explain a little bit more about that topic and the impact of that? Seth Levine: Hard for us to understand sometimes as Americans. Or really it's just humans, the thing that doesn't exist, right. We can look at the company that's true and see it was successful or it failed. Right. But what we struggle with is understanding businesses that just never got off the ground. And there's actually been some research that has studied this. And it sounds so simplistic.  But it's not right. I mean, Elizabeth describes capital is a key asset for starting businesses. And there have been some studies that looked at businesses that had more or less access to capital. And what they found is that there was no real difference in the innate qualities, right? The talent, the grit, those things that, that will make someone successful for people who had access to capital. And who didn't have access to capital in their businesses. But of course, there was a huge gap in terms of the success of those businesses. Companies that have access to capital, are more likely to be successful. And I think that's something that we really need to address.  And then Elizabeth talked about 1% of businesses receiving money from formalized institutional capital, like venture, which surprises most people.I think most people in our world think that it's a much larger, I mean, it's a big dollar amount, but it's a small number of companies. Which just goes to show you just how many more mainstream companies are actually being started out there. But only about 17% of businesses take money from banks. And so Elizabeth talked about a community banking system. We clearly need to bolster that system and increase the 17%. But we also need to recognize that a large number of businesses never take any formalized capital. They raise money from friends, family, you know, aunts, uncles, or they use a home equity line. And what's happening is that unfortunately people who don't have access to capital and don't have wealth built up over generations are struggling to start businesses. And this is diametrically opposed now to the people who are starting businesses, because the wealth gap in the United States, as many listeners may realize is 10 X between, the average white family, the average black family. That's true across every income level. That's true across every educational level as well.And the wealth gap as well for people from Hispanic origin is not quite as bad, but it's seven to one. So, at the same time that we're really relying on people's own capital sources to get them going, we're also the type of person who starting a business is shifting to the group of people that are less likely to have those personal capital resources.We need to address that. And we talk about in the book about a number of ways that we might, adapt, change, augment, help, better support our existing systems of finance to do a better job of supporting these new builders. Brian Ardinger: Are you seeing particular communities or particular areas of the US doing better when it comes to this fostering, this new builder?Elizabeth Macbride: That's a good and interesting question, actually. So, we did focus in the book on one particular community. We just ended up telling some woven stories about Stanton, Virginia. Which in a holistic way, I think did a ton to rejuvenate their community by entrepreneurship. So they started a community loan fund.  They have an angel network for that is like wealthy people in the community investing small sums in companies aren't necessarily tech businesses, but it could be like a pie company or whatever. They have both of those things going on. And then there's like, just a bunch of other community support. There's a maker-space there that I went down and visited. And it turned itself around that way. Right. On the foundation of some revitalization efforts that started in the eighties where some visionary business leaders downtown said, Whoa, we are not going to like destroy our historic downtown. Instead, we're going to, push really hard to preserve it. And on that foundation, the community was really able to rebuild itself economically.And its population is rising, which is kind of like the most basic measure, of community's health. Right. And actually, like super inspiring things during the pandemic. I mean, it ended up, of course it was suffering along with small, with communities everywhere, where small businesses were hurt so badly. And it also had a terrible flood in August that had like a storm cell just park over it and dump like eight inches.So enormous amount of rain washed out the downtown. You know, there were like cars floating around and as we reported it, we wrote about it for CNBC as well. And it's in the book as well. The community really came together. And there were people like digging out mud from storefronts to get their small businesses back up and running. It's inspiring what is happening in communities across the country that are pulling together. Seth Levine: So that's a story that sort of a physical, like a geographic community coming together. And it's a really good example of one. They took a long-term view. Lots of people got involved. There was a lot of buy-in.And, you know, a lot of what, like my partner, Brad Feld wrote the book, Startup Communities, a lot of what Brad and Ian his coauthor talk about in Startup Communities, I think was true in Stanton, but the other types of communities that we talk about a lot in the book are these sort of communities of like-minded people, right? And especially in this day and age, those don't need to be bounded by geography. Certainly the book is a hopeful book, Brian, and we talk about ways in which we believe that entrepreneurship can be revitalized. But we talk about some of these communities systibiz  in Denver or Ohub or digital and divided. EforAll we talk a ton about them. That, you know, these are all various communities of people that come together to help support new builder businesses. Some of them are place-based E for all works in certain locations. We talk about some of those, cause we, one of the entrepreneurs we highlight went through their program in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Others are a little bit more virtual, right? Where they might help people all over the place or bring people in together. But Silicon Valley has always been great at that. Right. And you know, there's so many stories of, I mean, how many accelerators are there in the world? Right? The Foundry, my venture firm, my day job, is the biggest investor in Techstars, which is one of the larger ones.And that's a great model, but how do we bring that. The network and the help that comes from being surrounded by a community of people that want to see you be successful? How do we bring that to new builders? And I think one of the things that we learned that scared us is that many people starting businesses feel like they're out on an Island and they're alone and they don't have resources to help them out. And that's why the community banking system that Elizabeth alluded to earlier is so important. We, it turned out, we were not seeking out community banking stories, but it turned out a number of the new builders that we talked to, their business trajectories were totally changed by, you know, what's in many cases, seemed like a chance meeting with a community banker who really spent some time to understand the business and then help them figure out how to finance it.Brian Ardinger: Well, and it comes back to capital is more than just the cash and the actual dollars that you put into it. It's capital of that network. Like you said, the ability to actually even find a, a banker in your backyard that you can form a relationship with and build that trust. And, you know, eventually leads to the, the capital capital you need to build a business. Seth Levine: Here's a statistic that should scare everyone. 25 years ago, there were 14,000 banks in the United States. Today there are 4,800. Most of that consolidation has happened in the smaller end of the scale, as we've created, essentially these utilities out of banks, by the regulations that we put on top of the banking system.And so obviously some of those regulations were warranted. There were banks that were, you know, engaging in predatory lending behavior or behaviors and you know, needed to be curbed. But, it perhaps went a little bit too far. And the result of that is what we're seeing in terms of the consolidation of banking, which is not good for anyone.Brian Ardinger: So, you mentioned the pandemic and obviously that's had an effect, but some of those trends were happening before the pandemic. How do you see the pandemic affecting entrepreneurship, both good and bad?Elizabeth Macbride: Well, traditionally, there's a surge in entrepreneurship after a big economic downturn, right. Because people lose their jobs. And so, they like to start businesses because they're trying to pay the bills. And we've seen evidence that that's happening right. There was a huge surge in new business applications in the fall. So September, October. I think, you know, that's on one hand, a hopeful sign. On the other hand, we think those people will have a harder time starting businesses than say they would have 20 or 30 years ago, because of all the changes that we described in the book. There's a huge number of people that are entrepreneurial in the United States and want to be entrepreneurial as evidenced by the participation in the gig economy, which is 60 million people in 2019. But making the leap from that to becoming a business owner and a small business owner, and there are so many benefits to making that leap.That's what's become much more difficult, right? Is formalizing yourself into a business. And I just want to add here, because I think your listeners might be really interested to think about exactly how that word entrepreneurship was co-opted because when we looked into the research and of course I'm a wordsmith and Seth is a word lover, too. We discovered that it was Ronald Reagan. Right. Who figured out that he could sort of marry the ideas that were coming out of Silicon Valley, this vision of the aggressive sort of free thinking, innovative entrepreneur from the tech world. And he used the word entrepreneur to describe only those people and use that as sort of like a push for global democracy and capitalism.You know, he just synthesized all these ideas into that word. Silicon Valley, the marketing genius's  took it and ran with it. And an important thread in that was this libertarian idea. That I think is really holding back some of the things that we could do to support the broader world of entrepreneurship.Because if you buy into that myth, that entrepreneurs grew up, that they're libertarians. That it is a concept. It's the free market. Then you don't invest in some of the social safety net programs or the government support. You don't pay that much attention to government regulation. I mean, so many CEOs in Silicon Valley have said to me, government's always behind, right? We don't need to worry about it. Like we'll just succeed despite them. And that is really not reflecting the true history of Silicon Valley at all. Brian Ardinger: Yeah, it's quite ironic because a lot of obviously Silicon Valley came from the rise of government dollars going into defense and other things that were, that provided that R and D and original push to start some of this amazing stuff. Elizabeth Macbride: Yeah, exactly. Right. And it's just disturbing the extent to which that piece of the story is left out. Right. And it looks like a very convenient retelling of the history. Seth Levine: And I think it's also important to note that, you know, the government, we've talked about this a little bit, not a lot in the book. But government spending is not bad right on research and development. And in fact, there's some quite a bit of evidence that companies are not always great at spending on R and D, especially as they get larger, right. A lot of innovation comes smaller companies, but then when companies get larger than they don't necessarily invest in R and D.And a great example of just that inaction was the, the tax cuts that were enacted a couple of years ago, where, you know, the deal was that we were going to give companies a trillion-dollar tax cut, and they would then invest in their businesses. Right in R and D. And the exact opposite happened. They didn't. And they instead really bought their stock back. Which for any individual business that was looking to increase its share value, that might've been the right thing to do.But it suggests that the people running those businesses certainly felt like investing in buying their stock back was a better bet than invest in R & D because they just simply didn't know where to put it. Brian Ardinger: So, let's talk a bit about some of your favorite stories in the book. Who are some of the entrepreneurs you met and what are some of the positive, hopeful things that you found through the journey?Seth Levine: There are amazing stories in the book, and I certainly hope that your, that the listeners will go and pick up a copy and really read it. Because I think we really tried to write a book that was balanced in terms of storytelling, but also facts. And hopefully that's coming through on this podcast as well.You know, punctuating the facts with real stories. So, you can get a sense for those facts and action. You know, we think is a really good way for people to understand what's really going on the ground. So one thing that I would probably point out is Isaac Collin, who owns series of Yogurtini businesses in Kansas City.And he's just an incredibly compelling guy. And it's a story of someone who really, you know, with both, persevered and had a lot of grit, but also was helped by others. So he got into business because he won a business plan competition. And by winning that business plan competition, he actually won both the monetary help as well as business helped by this very successful relatively well-known in that area, businessman. And he got to start a Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory with this guy. And, and ultimately that was a successful business because he's just a good business person. And he was able to sell that business, use the money, the proceeds from that sale, then to buy his first Yogurtini  business.What I really love about Isaac and this is true of really all the new builders we talked to is his connection to community. And just how important it was for him. He now has three, I think the fourth was not quite open, he's about to open a fourth location of his Yogurtini   businesses around the KC area.And, you know, community for him, isn't even just KC, it's like the individual neighborhoods where those businesses are located. And he has that deep sense of community. And, and it comes through in his business in the way that, you know, people who work at the businesses, open the door for their customers. So, they welcome them in and kids are welcomed to come in and do their book club and, and earn free yogurt. And he's just a great example of a quintessential new builder who is hardworking and has reached out and figured out how to build a network around himself. And has other things going on. He and, and two other women started a yoga series that goes into inner city schools and helps teach kids how to calm and center themselves through yoga. Just as one example, I mean, he's just someone who's constantly giving back. So he really stands out for me as just the quintessential rebuilder. Elizabeth Macbride: I'm so glad you talked about Isaac, because we haven't, we haven't actually talked about him in our interviews so far. I would highlight the entrepreneur who is sort of the center of the book. Her story is woven throughout and that's Danaris Mazara who started her bakery in Lawrence, Massachusetts, literally with $37 in food stamps. You know, she just has this amazing story of lying on her couch. Her husband had lost a job. This was in the great recession. She had a newborn baby. She was like, I don't have enough money to feed my family here. With that $37 in food stamps, she bought the ingredients to make blond sold it at the break table at the Samsung factory where she was working. And it went from there and she was lucky enough in the process of developing her company. So she did those early couple of years with, by herself and with the help of her friends in the community, and then happened on  EforAll which Seth referenced earlier.And I love the EforAll story. And we tell Danaris's story in the context of the founder of EforAll which is Desh Deshpande who was a telecom entrepreneur in the 1990s and made loads and loads of money and gives it back to the world in many different ways. But one of the things he did was found EforAll and he really has some interesting insights that we report in the book about the differences between encouraging entrepreneurs in the main street world and encouraging them in like an MIT or Stanford. Because at MIT or Stanford, there's all these smart people in search of a problem to solve. On the main streets of America and elsewhere, there are million problems in search of a solver. And he really talks in a compelling way about how you encourage both of those communities. And we end the book with Dinaris's as well, and her optimism looking toward the recovery post pandemic. And so, she's incredibly inspiring. For More InformationBrian Ardinger: Well, it's definitely exciting to hear those stories and it'll be exciting to see how this plays out as the world changes in front of us. Elizabeth and Seth, if people want to find out more about the book and more about yourselves, what's the best way to do that? Seth Levine: We set up a book website. We'll put it in the show notes, but it's www.thenewbuilders.com. And that's a great place to find out a little bit more about the book. You can read a little bit about us, and most importantly, you can buy the book there. We have links to a number of local booksellers. We're certainly encourage people to consider buying from local independent bookstores, whether it's the handful that we have listed on the site or their own independent bookstore. We do have links to Amazon, to Barnes & Noble of course they're bigger platforms. And those are also great ways to buy the book. There's a Kindle version that will be released. It'll be out by the time this show airs and there will also be an audio book that should be out right around the same time that the show airs as well.Brian Ardinger: Well, Elizabeth and Seth, thank you again for being on Inside Outside Innovation, sharing these stories very much like to continue the conversation and have you back on in the years to come as, as the world evolves. So, appreciate your time. Seth Levine: Thank you, Brian.Brian Ardinger: That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLSGet the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. 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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Alistair Croll and Emily Ross, co-authors of the upcoming book Just Evil Enough. We talk about the changing role of marketing and how companies can subvert systems, undermine industry norms, and get platforms to behave in unexpected ways that tilt the scales to generate attention and demand. Let's get started.Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help you rethink, reset, and remix yourself and your organization. Each week, we'll bring you the latest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses, as well as the tools, tactics, and trends you'll need to thrive as a new innovator.Interview Transcript with Alistair Croll and Emily Ross, Co-authors of Just Evil EnoughBrian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have some amazing guests. Today we have Alistair Croll and Emily Ross authors of the new book, Just Evil Enough, which is a book about getting noticed in this noisy environment and subversive go-to market strategies. Welcome to the show guys. Alistair Croll: Thanks for having us. Emily Ross: Thanks a million. Brian Ardinger: Well, I'm super excited to have you on this call to give our audience a little bit of a sneak preview of the upcoming book. But first let me give a little bit of background. So, Emily Ross, you are a founder of a tech marketing consultancy company called Ink Vine based in Ireland. So we appreciate you coming across the pond to give us some insights on what's going on. And Alistair and I go back a long time back in the days of Lean Startup. And he's the coauthor of Lean Analytics. We brought him back to Nebraska about six or seven years ago, I guess it was, when I was working with Nmotion to help with our startup teams in that. So thank you for both being on the show. The title of the book, Just Evil Enough. How'd  you come up with that  and what's it all about? Alistair Croll: So I'll tell you a quick story. We ran an accelerator in Montreal called Year One Labs. And one of the companies in Year One Labs was a company called Local Mind. And Local Mind was a platform for asking people questions, asking strangers questions about an area.It was later acquired by Airbnb and Lenny Rachitsky,  the CEO ran supply-side growth there. And he's now the author of one of the most prominent newsletters for startup growth marketing, Lenny's Newsletter. And in the early days they were doing what every startup does, which is building lots of stuff. But because we were very Lean Startup focused, we have them ask what the biggest risk was.And it turns out the biggest risk was that whether people would answer questions from strangers. So they ran a very quick study, which we talk about in Lean Analytics. And they found that 94% of people on Twitter would answer a question from a stranger. But this happened because I had been asking Lenny, are you being evil enough?And they were like, we're not evil. And I said, yeah, but just a little evil, because it turns out that people answer questions, but people on the platform won't ask questions. The real risk is the supply of questions. And so they actually built a system that would ask fake questions of new users. So they get in the habit of asking questions. Now you can debate the means versus the end, but what we have found ever since that time is that almost every startup that's successful has some little dirty secret in their background, where they were able to take advantage of an emerging technology or subvert the way a platform is supposed to work and turn it to their advantage.And so the basic idea behind Just Evil Enough is that almost all the time, the problem isn't whether or not you can build something it's whether anyone will care. So your job should be creating attention you can turn into profitable demand. Emily Ross: I think the subversive word is really, really important because we want to clearly differentiate between nefarious, which is downright evil and subversive, which allows you to think a little bit differently.And it's very hard for people who've been conditioned to think a certain way, to try and think differently.  So the book is about trying to teach people how to think subversively, and to show examples and frameworks in order to do that. And I remember working at a platform years ago and one of the engineers said, right, I'm going to put this button on the website to test if people will click it.And my instant reaction was, but it doesn't go anywhere. That's a terrible idea. They're going to have an awful experience and that's bad for them. And he's like, no, but I don't want to build something unless I know they're going to need it. So I'm just going to put that button there and yeah, I'm going to burn a few thousand clicks and they're gonna have a terrible experience. I don't care. I'll learn something. And he was prepared to be disagreeable in order to learn something different and to save an awful lot of time and money. And it was funny. It was like, okay. I need to think a little bit differently about how we're treating users sometimes. Alistair Croll: Yeah, we did a similar thing at Gradient. We had a reporting feature. Gradient was a startup that I launched in 2001. Eventually got acquired by BMC, their TrueSight product line. And we were about to launch reports in the product. And so we created our reports tab, and the reports tab went to a survey page. It says, we're going to do reports soon, what would you like to see?And people put in their email address and the report they'd like to see. And of course we were building a generic reporting tool. So what we did is we then generated like the top 20 requested reports. Made them defaults and then mailed those people saying we loved your feedback. Thank you so much. We've built the report you're looking for. Forget about the fact that 40 other people ask for the same report. Every one of them felt like they were a unique and special snowflake. And so we were exploiting the asymmetry between what we knew, which was 20 people asked for it and what they knew, which was, Hey, look at this, I'm special. You listened to me. And the customers loved it. Right? Is that evil? Well, it meant that we were able to build the default reports people wanted, which made the product better, but it's a little subversive. Brian Ardinger: Well, I think part of that learning is the fact that I think a lot of people think that they need to build the entire thing, because that's what shows the value. But, you know, again, you have to incrementally de-risk some of these new startup ideas. And so how do you do that with building just enough to get the learning that you need so that you can move it to the next level and build it out if you need to? Alistair Croll: Well, I would say that the problem's not minimum viable product, it's minimum viable attention.Emily Ross: Yeah. And actually, if you think about, and this is the one thing that the book, I suppose, hammers home, is that getting your go-to market strategy right, is as important, if not more important than getting your product right. Because if you can't capture attention and turn it into profitable demand, then no one's going to know about your product. And it's all about various different approaches that you can use to figure out how to do that. And  asymmetry being just one of about 10, I think that we cover. Brian Ardinger: So, is it a form of customer discovery almost so rather than the traditional customer discovery interviews there, you're looking for different ways to engage with a marketplace, engage with a customer to get that understanding of what their demand is and where they want to go from there?Emily Ross: Well, it's really interesting. Some of the examples in the book are not business examples. There's a lot of historical stuff in there, right back from Machiavelli,  all the way through to The Godfather. There's businesses, oh, tell the Genghis Khan story. I love that one. Alistair Croll: So I mean, the idea behind a lot of this is that if you know something to be true, that other people discount, you can take advantage of that. And there are many times where people knew they could do something better, but didn't Genghis Kahn, for example, knew that women could be very effective rulers. This was something that was not widely held. And so he would conquer a city, marry one of his many, many daughters off to the leader of that city. Send that leader off to war, he'd promptly get killed. Now you have a blood relative in charge of that city. Was that evil? Well, Genghis Khan did a lot of nasty things, but he did have a decent amount of respect for women's ability to run cities, which was something nobody else was factoring in. And this was an unfair advantage. Right. And I think, I mean, we're getting a little ahead of it. One of the things that Emily talks about a lot, is the idea that you need to know the norms of your system in order to subvert them. So do you want to talk a little about the water stuff? Emily? Emily Ross: Yeah so normative versus formative is like super interesting. So there's a story of by two fish and they're swimming along, and a much older fish is swimming the opposite direction. And this is from... Alistair Croll: it's a commencement address, right?Emily Ross: That's it, the older fish says, Oh how's the water? And the fish swim on a little bit and they turned to each other and go, what the hell is water? So, you have to be able to recognize the fact that you're swimming in the medium. And the best way to do that is to use external viewpoints to help recognize what you're swimming in or downing  in.I also use a log jam metaphor, which works as well. And this is a one I use all the time for teaching for problem solving, but it's really, really applicable as well too, to recognizing the difference between normative and formative. So when these to say a logs down the river, to ship them to the log yard, And they would occasionally get tangled up and a team of river pigs used to have to surround the problem really quickly because it's obviously getting worse and worse all the time, and figure out which was the one key log that you could extract to unlock the whole problem.And the only way they could do it really, really well, was through diversity of thought, opinion, and perspective. By surrounding the problem, by sharing ideas, by looking at it from lots of different perspectives. And that's why diversity in your teams, that's why diversity of perspectives is so important so that you can actually recognize what you're swimming in, whether it's water or something, a little bit stinkier. And also getting the sense of looking at it from outside, what you're used to. So ideas from different verticals, from different walks of life. That's going to help you think subversively. Alistair Croll: And that's kind of the supervillain stuff. I mean, Brian, I'll give you an example, that's a concrete example from when I came to visit you .One of your startups was making a rotary sprinkler solution.So to recap, rotary sprinklers, when they're lateral to a strong wind, get blown over and this costs a lot of money to fix. And so they built a thing that could measure the weather and the incoming winds and rotate the sprinkler downwind kind of like a wind sock, so it wouldn't fall over. And they're having a hard time selling. And what the startup revealed to me at the time when we were meeting, was that there's this weird existing system between farmers, farm subsidies, insurance, salespeople, and the makers of those sprinklers.They don't really mind when it gets knocked over because everyone makes some money and then they use that money to go on a fishing trip. If you don't know that you're in that water, all your efforts to sell are going to fail. You've got to recognize that and then go, huh? Maybe this is something I can sell through the maker of the sprinklers, or like maybe I can, you can subvert that system.Maybe you have to create an awareness campaign that farm subsidies being wasted and they could be spent on something else. But if you don't know that strategy, you can't subvert it. And that word subvert just means find another version. By definition, the hardest problems we face are the ones for which we don't have an obvious solution, because the normal approaches don't work.Which means you've got to find an unusual approach and that's normally called hacking, right? Hacking is getting something to work in a way it wasn't intended. Whether you're using a Pringle can to focus wifi signals, or you're getting a computer system to throw an error, so you can own a system. The problem with hacking is that in startups, hacking has a horrible polar reputation. Growth hacking is a bag of cheap tricks.Brian Ardinger: Talk about some of the examples in the book that maybe some people have heard of or can get a visual around. I know you've mentioned in past talks and that I've seen around this is like things like Peloton or Burger King.  Can you give examples from that? Emily Ross: I would quite like to talk about one of the ones that I had the hardest time with is about being disagreeable. And we talked about it slightly there in terms of doing things that you wouldn't necessarily think of as being quite right. But as a woman, I have been raised to be polite, to be agreeable. And actually, if you look at some of the most innovative, interesting entrepreneurs in history, quite a lot of them have been profoundly disagreeable.They've been prepared to be unliked or unloved. And this is something, a behavior that you can adopt or think about as a means to finding new ideas, or it means of finding new ways of doing things. One of the examples that we talked sports a little bit earlier, but Wilt Chamberlain was arguably one of the best basketball players of all time. He has on more than one occasion scored over a hundred points in a single game. But he had a problem. He couldn't shoot free throws to save his life. Back in college, he had a really high score, but over his career, it went down and down and down and he had a career low of like, I think 26% success rate.He was a star player. He got fouled a lot. So this was a really big problem for him. So he went to see Rick Barry. Rick Barry was the guy who could not miss. He actually had a career average of 89.3% and he got better and better as his career progressed in the last two years of his career, he had a 94% success rate from free throws. But he actually threw in a really interesting way. He threw underhand, which is actually kind of a cool word for the, Just Evil Enough book, because he shot underhand. But he was the best at shooting. But this was called the Granny Style. This is, you know, if you throw like a girl, you throw under hand. He didn't care. His father had drummed it into him from a very young age, how to shoot underhand, overhand, underhand, overhand, and he could just nail it every single time.So Chamberlain went to see Barry learned to shoot underhand and his performance doubled. He went from a career low, to a career high, in that same game where he scored a hundred points. So it turns out it's a much better approach. However, Chamberlain didn't have the guts to keep shooting underhand because he cared too much about what people thought. His career best was 61% from the line in 1961, he sank 28 of 32 free throws against the New York Knicks.So after a while, though, he reverted to shooting the way he knew, and his percentages  plunged. And he admitted that he felt like a sissy. He worried too much about what other people thought. And unlike Barry who was rational, Chamberlain was being agreeable and wrong. Barry meanwhile said he could be as selfish as he wanted to without hurting his team. So being a little bit disagreeable or asking yourself what you're prepared to do is a really good first start. Alistair Croll: Just to chime in quickly, we've all heard of growth hacking right? Growth hacking is these little tricks that get people to click a button or move down a funnel or whatever. The problem with any of these known tricks is that they're known.  Andrew Chen talks about the law of shitty click-through rates, which is simply the idea that as you find a vulnerability, if you will, a way to change the market, it becomes widely known immediately.So the first click-through ad on Hot Wired had an average of 44% click-through rate. Some people say it was as high as 70% for a banner ad. What's that at now? Emily? Brian Ardinger: Well, industry averages will tell you, or they'll tell you it's 0.1%. But in my opinion, it's closer to 0.02%, if you're lucky. Alistair Croll: So that's a huge decline. Same thing happened with email and so on. And so there are these known hacks that are the sort of marketing equivalent of a script kitty, who's running an attack on WordPress. And if you haven't patched your site, you'll be selling Viagra off your website. What you should be doing is trying to find the marketing equivalent of a zero day exploit.So in security a zero day, is an attack that nobody knows about yet. And they're incredibly valuable. Two of them were used to retard the Iranian nuclear program and damaged centrifuges. The marketing equivalent of a zero day exploit, we call this zero day marketing, is finding a new way to get a platform to behave in an unintended manner, with which you can create attention you can turn into profitable demand. And there's some amazing examples of like Farmville, for example. When Farmville's app would send you a message saying, Hey, Brian, Alistair's cows need some grain. And you'd click on it. Now you're a user. Well, they got to 30 million users before Facebook went, Whoa, we maybe don't want apps posting to people's friend feeds.There are so many examples of this, and we can tell you those examples. But the point is you can't use those examples because they've already been done. Right? What you have to do is devote much more of your time to inventing your own zero day marketing exploits. Brian Ardinger: So from that perspective, is it a series of experiments that you just have to run? You, you come up with some ideas and you run them like that, or is this, talk me through the process of how you get better at it? Emily Ross: One of the examples that I like to share, if you see it often enough, you begin to understand how you can apply the thinking. It's a model and you just try and apply it to your own environment. So if we take the information asymmetry, and example, the idea of subverting, one thing for another. Or a bait and switch. The idea of you're selling one thing, but actually getting another and Tupperware parties did this, you know, you think you're going for dinner and you end up getting guilt ridden into buying a load of plastic.But when I was working in a comparison platform, we subverted the PR channel for the generation of white hat backlinks. So PR is generally around building brand and brand awareness. But one of the side effects of PR was the generation of backlinks. So this is back in like maybe 2013. So what we did was we mined data. We attached big data trends to celebrities, pushed out, press releases to high value domains, and pretty much one in five hit would generate a backlink. When we started. We had about 1400 high quality backlinks. And we were generating about 60,000 non-brand organic visits to site per day. And after three years of pushing out two releases a month, month in, month out, we had over four and a half thousand unique domain backlinks and almost 200,000 non-brand organic visits per day.And this was a platform that turned traffic into money. I won't tell you how, but what we did for example, was we mined hair transplant trends and prices. And one example of the many, many crazy pushes we did was the Jude Law index of baldness. So here's a scale up from Colin Farrell all the way up to Dr. Evil,  of how bald are you? And you find yourself on the index and you see, Oh, this is how much it would cost for me to have hair transplants. It was a price comparison website for private health clinics. And this was a fun, interesting way to attract attention and turn it into traffic to the sites. But actually it wasn't really about traffic. It was always about the backlinks. So one in five hits generate a backlink, but again, it was channel burnout. It was a zero day exploit because you know, over the course of the three years, the number of backlinks that were being generated, went from maybe one in five to one in 10, because the platforms themselves started to recognize the value that they were accidentally giving away.So naturally you get published in a paper. If there's an online version of it, they print it online and they put a backlink out. It was a side effect of the real, a pure PR. And channel burn happened, those backlinks are no longer as readily available as they were. But it worked for about three years, four years. It was a fun time. Brian Ardinger:  You have to have a continuous funnel  yourself of new things that you need to explore it. Emily Ross: Exactly.  Exactly. So that was a, we had a good run, but it's about thinking about, well, what is the channel? What is the platform? So PR was the channel and we used it in a way. It wasn't intended to be used for our benefits. And so what are your channels? How can you use them differently? And that's a really great question to ask of yourself, no matter what you're doing. Alistair Croll: One of the things we often do is. What has changed in a technology platform. So for example, Travis Kalanick has this new startup Cloud Kitchens. What has changed in restaurants? Well, first of all, there's a huge abundance of restaurants that I could order from. Far more than I would know about. So I'm already overwhelmed with selection when I go to order food, because we're all at home, in a pandemic, ordering food. And second of all, The fact that the storefront is virtual, it means one kitchen can have many restaurant front ends. And so Cloud Kitchens will set you up with brands and their brands have games like Fucking Good Pizza, My Pasta, Dirty Little Vegan Bitch, Don't Grill My Cheese. None of these tell you about food, but when you're overwhelmed, and you have that sort of paradox of choice, you go, no, I'll just order it from that one. That sounds fine. Right? That's only possible because that brand is part of an experiment. You're ordering from an experiment. And they're constantly testing, which ones get more attention and then the restaurant can deliver all of those things that might be the same kitchen. And so Cloud Kitchens has taken advantage of an exploit within the traditional model of food ordering. So it's looking at, you know, what technology changes or combinations of technology, makes something possible that wasn't possible before that you can then subvert to your ends. Brian Ardinger: How do you go from not just creating a gimmick or how do you, I guess also approach being wrong, like trying these things and, and being wrong?Emily Ross: Growth hacking is gimmicks. Growth Hacking is doing something that maybe it's a publicity stunt or, I mean, one of the examples that we use in the book is pairing two things unexpectedly together. That's a great way to draw attention and Heineken did this really well in the UK just last week, where they put out a mobile hairdressing units and bar, so you could get a free haircut and a pint together.So this generated publicity and it's nice, but it's gimmicky, right? Is that really going to move their needle? You know, for the year? Possibly not. It's a nice story. So, but if you look at governments have been doing this for years and they've done it so well, there's a really good example in the book, which I won't go into now about how the government shamed people into stopping spitting in the twenties, as they tried to fight TB. Instead of just saying it's bad to spit, they actually made people feel bad, and socially, and vulgar  by spitting because before that it was perfectly normal.And if you look at the Chinese government, they use Fapiao.  Fapiao  are receipts. And they use Fapiao  as a lottery to fight corruption. So this is really interesting. In China, corruption can be rampant. Merchants will give their customers a discount, if the customer doesn't ask for a receipt.So the merchant doesn't have to report the income and like just pockets to the savings. The government used an incentive to combat this called Fapiao, which is a receipt  from the merchant. And there's a couple of hacks in here that are super clever. So the merchants have to buy the receipts beforehand and then hand them out to customers in return for payment.So the first one is the merchant has to pay tax before the transaction. That's really smart. And then customers demand their Fapiao, because there's a scratch and win lottery element. And then the government runs the lottery and customers can scratch off the panel to see if they've won anything. And so the second hack there is create demand for a receipt by making it a game.And then of course the government can also adjust the prize amount of each lottery to create just the right amount of incentive. So they're literally able to alter the rewards of the game to like tilt the Nash equilibrium, which is just like super smart. So you can do this at a macro level and absolutely get away with it.Alistair Croll: I want to just make sure we address your question about gimmicks. One of the big differences between a Zero Day Exploit and traditional Growth Hacking is that it's not known. But another is that it is intrinsic to your business model. The haircuts aren't intrinsic to Heineken's beer, but when Dropbox launched, they were the first to pioneer this, both of us get something. I invite you, we both get storage. That's built into the product, right. That's intrinsic to the system itself. And I think what it means is that you're factoring in Zero Day Exploits, marketing exploits, to your business model and your product roadmap. Not just to your marketing campaigns. I mean, Genghis Khan's  a good example, right?It wasn't just a tactic. It was a fundamental change in how he thought that societies could be ruled. So the real lesson here is, I'll give you one more example. There's a company that makes software called Energage  and they make workplace surveys. So they would sell to an enterprise and the enterprise would survey their employees and do  360 stuff. And so on. But the way they go to market is they launched this thing called the top workplaces project in concert with the Washington Post, the Denver Post, the Dallas Morning News and so on. And they run this survey and they say to these newspapers, Hey everybody, here's the survey. We'll take care of it.So now you go do it. And like, Whoa, isn't this great. My company is one of the best workplaces. I'll buy an ad in the newspaper. Everything's wonderful. And then Energage can go back and go, Hey, congratulations on being the third best workplace in Nebraska. Too bad about the other results. And you go what other results? Well, you know, we got more data than that, would you like to see it? Okay. And now you have a new customer, right? It's intrinsic to the business model, right. Rather than just being a little trick or hack. Brian Ardinger: That's an interesting point. And it also goes to the point where you see a lot of these examples in startups, because you can build it early on into the business model and that. How does this play out for a large existing company that wants to try to use some of these tactics?Emily Ross: So big companies really need to think about reframing and they also need to give themselves permission to think in ways they're not used to. One of the exercises I like to recommend is called a pre-mortem. And you basically give them permission to imagine the worst possible outcome. You invite them to invent the worst, worst, worst thing that could possibly happen and then work backwards from there.And it's amazing what happens in an environment like that, because that group think is real. That tribal behaviors of wanting to be agreeable and wanting everyone to pull together is very much a systematic thing that you see in large organizations. So giving them permission to think disagreeably.  Giving them methods to reframe where they are, what they do. These are all great frameworks for them to try and think subversively. Alistair Croll: First of all, I think that it's really important. I mean, I would consider a marketing department, have a Red Team. Have a second group, hmm, that has the same product and resources, but their job is to put the first group out of business. What do you do? Right. That's just hypothetical. You're going to think better. We Red Team on security. We Red Team on PR. Why don't we read team on go-to-market strategies.  And the second thing is, if you look at great brands that changed how people discussed a product or a service, they found a frame of reference that favored them. For decades we used to talk about electric cars. We would talk about sustainability and range. Pretty boring stuff, right? Lots of hippies sitting around going let's save the planet and look at my Prius. Elon Musk put one of them on a race track against supercar and beat it. And all of a sudden the conversation on electric cars was performance. He'd reframed the discussion about electric vehicles to performance, right?When Gmail first launched, your inbox on Hotmail or Yahoo mail had 10 mgs. That's like one photo, right? We don't remember that. My daughter doesn't believe this. When Gmail came along, Google knew that they did not have strength in folders and archiving and hierarchy and export, but they were good at with search and storage.So they said, Hey, email's not about your ability to manage your folders and your inbox and organization and management. It's about abundance storage. And they reinforced that so much that they actually had a counter showing you how much storage you get. Salesforce, when it first launched, was a web based CRM, but web-based CRMs had very few features compared to Siebel and Vantive and Clarify, companies that you don't see anymore.So they said no CRM is about not needing IT. In fact, their logo was no software. They had us the word software with a slash through it, despite the fact that they own their own programming language called Apex. Right? And so each of these companies found a way to reframe things, even like Listerine. Listerine was this clinical health thing. And then along comes scope and says, Hey, you know what? Mouthwash is actually about being attractive and sexy, not about clinical health. One action that a lot of big brands should take is to step back and say, what is a new frame that favors us and disadvantages our competition. And then what is it about that frame of reference that we can do to prove it that will then allow the customer to find a different way of valuing the product?Emily Ross: I would also chime in there and talk about generally large marketing teams will have, they'll have done their marketing degrees and their MBAs or masters on they'll turn out the four P's from, you know, the 1960s or the seven P's of service. And like there's too much P. Just stop peeing. Guys just stopped doing it.Right. Chuck, all of that in the bin and start thinking about creating attention. And it's as simple and as complicated as that. We talk about human motivation and Alistair  I think coined laid, made, paid, afraid. I tidy that up a bit to the piratey AARG. Which is appeal, authority, risk, and greed. So think about your customers. Think about your competitors. Think about the marketplace through the lens of human behavior and whether you're selling radiator bits or cars or Cola, people have all those very basic triggers. They want to be liked that's appeal. They want power that's authority. They want to feel safe. That's the risk lens.And then greed, you know, people want the things that they want. So. We're just human meat bags, right? We're just walking bags of meat with emotions. We have very simple motivations at the end of the day. And in a B2B setting for a big organization, the AARG framework is a really useful function. Like, so throw out the P. Think about AARG.And if you're trying to convince people to act, you need to appeal to base emotions more than you do plain reason, because most people really aren't very rational. There's also really a good examples of the seven deadly sins. If you look at the big, big enterprises, I think Chris Pack said this on Twitter.I thought it was really, really good. Uber and Amazon are slough. Instagram and Tik Tok are pride. Door Dash is gluttony. Tinder is lust. Pinterest is envy. Twitter is rath. And Bitcoin is greed. So think about the fundamentals. Just think about the basics. We haven't changed all that much. Alistair Croll: But I think the biggest thing here is that big brands haven't realized that the biggest risk they face is that someone else will subvert attention that they could otherwise be getting and turned into their profitable demand. And so if you don't do that, you're going to get eaten alive. If we can get the world to realize that the biggest risk is not whether you will build something, but whether anyone will care, we've already given people a huge headstart.Brian Ardinger: Well, and the fact that the world is changing so fast on the fact that you can go from company like Airbnb in 12 years to being, you know, one of the most recognizable brands, you know, overnight effectively from what used to be to build a business. New technologies, new marketplaces, new access to talent. All of that is just accelerating the opportunities to be disrupted. Alistair Croll: We used to have a new platform come along. You know, we had writing that took a few thousand years. Then we got to radio. It took a few hundred years. And then we got to television that took a decade, the rate of introduction of new platforms. And therefore, if you're thinking like a hacker new attack surfaces, Is incredible, right? The Cloud Kitchens example happened because of the pandemic and the rise of Uber Eats and Door Dash, and so on. The pace at which new exploit opportunities appear is very, very fast. And as a result, there are far more opportunities to subvert the status quo or the norms of your industry with one of these new platforms.So we're trying to get people to be much more opportunistic. And part of what we do, like I said I can't tell you do this thing, because if I tell you, then it's already been done. What we can do is we can say, here are some ways to think about it. You know, is there an innovation that happens? Can you reframe things? Can you do a substitution where people think they're getting one thing and they're actually getting another. Can you appeal to the foibles of human psychology? Emily Ross: Don't be afraid to be disagreeable. Alistair Croll: It's weird because in the past I've written books that are very technical. There is a right answer. And Emily's written lots of articles on like how to do stuff. This is a more subjective thing and candidly more uncomfortable for us as writers, because we want to make sure that there are applicable lessons, but it's almost like, you know, teaching someone Zen. I can tell you what it is, but you're going to have to go sit on a rock and figure it out for yourself.But once you start thinking this way, everything becomes a subversive opportunity. And once you have that subversive lens, you're not being evil, you're just being just evil enough. Opportunities are everywhere. Emily Ross: And actually, if you think about it, just coming back to your very first question, which is a nice cyclicity.  The title of the book is exactly what we set out to do, which is we got your attention and we're turning it into demand. So the book title is a really, really simple and effective way to showcase the thinking. And I think if you take one thing away from it, it's change what you spend your time on. So building a subversive go-to market strategy is just as important as thinking about your product. And if you get the balance, right, you're going to be unstoppable. Brian Ardinger: Well, and you've also from the book perspective, the book's not out yet, but you're doing things to grab attention differently than a lot of, I mean, I get pitched every other day by a book author trying to get their book noticed and that. But I know that you've been doing some things as far as live online course that's leading up to the book. And you have a interesting little survey. I don't, if we got to talking about any of the things that you're doing from a attention perspective to, about the book. Emily Ross: Well one of the things I love, this was so much fun, is that you can't just order the book. You can't just pre-order it. You have to take a quiz so that we can decide if you're evil enough. So you take the quiz and if you're not evil enough, we think, you know, you're not going to be able to handle the book. And if you're too evil, then this book could just perhaps be too powerful. So we have gamified the experience of the pre-order function, which was a lot of fun. And we've done a ton of tons of things, just mostly because we'd like to mess around, but that's just one of the things we've done so far. Alistair Croll: It's also great that Emily has like a whole team of web developers that stand up.  Emily's business is actually, she's like the SWAT team or the MI6 for some very advanced tech brands, who can't really explain what they do well. And Emily figures out how to do that. So she has a team of people to build stuff. So a good example of that is we wanted to do a survey to see whether people would take our cohort based course, which we're going to be running with Maven, the founders of  Alt MBA and UDemy,   set up this new, online cohort based course program. But we wanted to get people to take the survey. So we told them one lucky winner will get a free workshop or talk from us for their organization, which is usually something we charged a lot of money for. But we also wanted to make sure they shared the survey, which is a paradox because I want the greatest odds of winning. So I'm not going to tell my friends, right?So we made two surveys. One was Team Orange, one was Team Black. And we say, we'll choose the winner from the survey that has the most responses. That's a bit subversive. Right. And we found some funny things about people getting kind of tribal and like I'm Team Black and so on. We even did things to tweak the survey questions a little bit between the two.So we ran like six or seven social experiments in the survey. But would you buy a book from people who weren't thinking subversively? I mean, I wouldn't buy a book on subversiveness for someone who went through normal tactics. For More InformationBrian Ardinger: Absolutely. Well, I appreciate you both coming on Inside Outside Innovation to share some of this subversiveness and hopefully get more folks to be Just Evil Enough. People want to find out more about yourself or the book itself, what's the best way to do that. Emily Ross: Just Evil Enough.com and I'll actually, I landed Alistair in it on a talk we did last week because we were live Tweeting. They wouldn't let us take live questions. So we just got everyone to jump on Twitter and ask us questions there.And I promised everyone lives that if they hashtag Just Evil Enough that Alistair would read out whatever they wrote. And they all said smart, intelligent things. And I was like, I can't believe none of you are like trying to flog a course or a book or promote something. Like he will have to say anything you like. So people should...Alistair Croll: I think one guy had me mention his podcast, but there's a good example where like, Oh, you think you're getting free promotion in this thing we're recording, but you're actually following the Just Evil Enough account. Emily Ross: But yes, Just Evil Enough.com is where you can take the quiz. You can hear about the cohort class. You can, pre-order the book and there's an Evil Enough Twitter account too. You can check that out. Brian Ardinger: Well Emily, it was great to meet you for the first time here and Alistair. Always good to catch up with what's going on in your world. So appreciate you both for being on here and looking forward to the conversation in the future.Alistair Croll: Thanks so much for having us. Emily Ross: Thanks Brian.Brian Ardinger: That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLSGet the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. 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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Atholl Duncan, author of Leaders in Lockdown: Inside Stories of COVID-19 and the New World of Business. We talk about his interviews with senior executives from around the world during the first 100 days of lockdown and what he learned about crisis management, leadership development, and what's next in the post COVID hybrid world. Let's get started.Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help you rethink, reset, and remix yourself and your organization. Each week, we'll bring the latest innovators, entrepreneurs, pioneering businesses, as well as the tools, tactics, and trends you'll need to thrive as a new innovator.Interview Transcript with Atholl Duncan, Author of Leaders in LockdownBrian Ardinger:  Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Atholl Duncan. He is author of Leaders in Lockdown: Inside Stories of COVID-19 and the New World of Business. Welcome to the show. Atholl Duncan: Thank you. It's great to be here and great to be a guest of yours. I'm looking forward to chatting about innovation and how we lead out of lock down Brian. Cause that's the question that everyone's trying to get their heads around there.Brian Ardinger: We have gone through disruption and I think people understand a little bit what that means. You have written this book. You spoke to 28 senior executives around the world in the United States, Europe, Asia, during the first hundred days of lockdown, to understand and get their feedback on what we were going through when it comes to disruption. So maybe we'll start with the book, give us a little hint and insights into what it's all about and what did you learn from it? Atholl Duncan: The way the book came about was in March of 2020, I sit on the boards of various businesses. And all of these businesses were in some state of jeopardy and certainly in a state of crisis. And I was pretty stressed by the whole situation. I think as most people were. And I decided that there was what I thought was a crossroads and history. Certainly, a crossroads, probably the defining moments of this century. And I wanted to capture them. So, I followed 28 business leaders, people who, whose businesses were spread from Asia to Europe, to UK, and many leaders in the US. And really to answer a couple of questions from them. How were they leading through the pandemic? And how did they think the world would change because of what we've all been through. Brian Ardinger: When you reached out to these leaders, what was the initial kind of feedback that you got? Was it nervousness? Was it excitement? What kind of what were the emotions that people were going through and specifically, how did they adapt to that sudden disruption? Atholl Duncan: I got remarkable access because these people were locked down in their kitchens. And it was like they'd witnessed some predictably dramatic accident because they just wanted to share with someone. They wanted to talk to someone about what was happening to their businesses, which were getting pretty smashed up at the time.So, they opened their Zooms to me. And they talked to me. They talked from the heart and they talked about how they hoped the world would change. And that the remarkable thing was that many of these people whose businesses, which they had built themselves over many years, lying, smashed round  about them.They remained remarkably humble and remarkably steady in their thoughts. But yeah, they knew this was a major moment. So, you know, even a year ago we knew this was a pretty significant moment. And the general message was that even back then, was this is a time to reset. Is a time to reset how we run our businesses and is a time to reset how we run society.Brian Ardinger: So, in the book and through the conversations you defined, I think seven core themes that came out through that. Can you walk the audience through a little bit about what are those core themes that you uncovered? And let's talk a little bit about each one of them. Atholl Duncan: Yeah. So, seven major themes. The first theme was the new age of purpose. And the feeling as one business leader said to me, that purpose was on steroids at the peak of the crisis. And that purpose now was no longer just words that you emblazoned on a website. It was now something that your employees, your customers and your investors would demand was delivered through action. And not just words. The second theme was the new world of work. Because we saw this remarkable thing that, you know, most people talk about, regarding Covid, which was the move to homeworking. And you know, one of the business leaders that I've talked to is a very senior executive at Tata, which is based in India. They moved 600,000 people to homeworking. Even 6,000 is big Brian, but this is 600,000 people. And you know, many, many major corporations were doing the same thing all around the world. As a crisis went on, people have realized that the new world of work was not just about home or remote or hybrid or flexible. We were really seeing defined probably a new, psychological relationship between the employer and the employee.Third theme was widening inequality. Because the virus widened inequality in so many ways. Obviously, it raised the Black Lives Matter, raised diversity and inclusion in a way that we hadn't seen before, but also homeschooling raised equality. The people who had access to digital. Homeworking raised in equality in terms of it was very comfortable for some people to be working from their homes. But those who had dysfunctional homes are in multi person homes, difficult for them. And then the vaccine. You know, we already see that there's 130 countries around the world, which haven't delivered one jab of the vaccine. 95% of the vaccines have been delivered in the richest countries in the world. So, there's this really quite a defining moment. Roundabout, the widening inequality gap. Fourth theme was about global cooperation, because at that moment when we hope that our politicians would be cooperating across global boundaries, they were doing, they were falling out. And I think generally, wherever you are in the world, we were pretty well let down by our politicians. Whether you were in Asia, Europe, or the U S it was a pretty, sorry ceiling. You actually saw large corporations, doing far better at global cooperation. If you look at the pharmas that developed the vaccines. If you look at the big tech companies who came together to try and work out track and trace. Next thing was resilience. Not just personal resilience, but you know, when the crisis comes, cash is king financial resilience is everything. And the resilience of the operations of these large corporations. Sixth theme was all about resetting the supply chain. Particularly if we're in manufacturing, we couldn't get stuff anymore. Borders were closed and we still see, you know, big shortages and computer chips, big shortage use in raw materials, and the prices of raw materials going up.So, this really brought the global supply chain to a shuttering halt. And I think a major cause to rethink 40 years of decisions that were made on productivity and costs and they all fly out the window, when our pandemic shuts the borders. And then the last theme probably dearest to my own heart is maximizing potential. So, maximizing the potential of your employees. We saw physical welfare and mental welfare, really going up the agenda. And a big debate round about, what kind of leaders do we need now. What kind of leaders were successful in the pandemic? And what kind of leaders do we need to lead us out of lock down?Brian Ardinger: So, what was some of the most surprising or unexpected findings after these conversations that you had? Atholl Duncan: I think an unexpected finding was actually that there were no new trends. What you actually saw here was a massive acceleration of trends that were already out there. Right. Right. And, and I think you would particularly see that in the world of digital. People have talked about 10 years of digital disruption squeezed into 10 months.I think that was a surprise, because I thought we would maybe see some new trends coming up. I think one of the anecdotes that kind of sums up for me is I spoke to Mark Thompson who was at the time Chief Executive of the New York Times. And he had to go into the Time's offices to do his earnings call.Mark Blake says Brompton fold-up bicycle. And when he got into the office, he's I think that was probably about 5,000 people normally in these offices. And when he got in there, there were only about 20 people, security guards, you know, keeping the place safe. And he decided to go for a cycle, round the office on his Brompton bicycle.And as he went around, and he saw the empty savannas of the New York Times offices. He thought it looked like an empty milking parlor. And he had this vision of all these people that went in there to the Times, and they hooked themselves up to their desks for the day. You know, milking out their ideas before removing their headphones and making the painful journey home.And he thought at that moment, maybe I should sell my skyscraper. But he decided I'm not going to sell it, but we have to completely rethink what the relationship is between the worker and the office. You know, and I think that's going to be huge. You know, we see that in cities, all around the world, what's going to happen to the central business districts and, you know, a lot of huge change being seen in Manhattan at the moment.Brian Ardinger: I'd love to get your insight into the emotional feedback that the leaders had.  Did you sense a lot of fear or optimism or at that early stage? How did they react to the disruption? Atholl Duncan: The true entrepreneurs, their attitude is utterly staggering. Because as they are a billion pounds and it's mainly a billion pounds of their own money. As their billion pound plus businesses are lying in tatters, they are thinking about what the opportunity is and what the next thing is, and how they can build back out of the crisis. And they're remarkably calm. And a number of them who repeated to me that the most important thing was health safety of your employees. I worked with a chief executive of a large asset management company in Hong Kong who runs many of the shops and offices in Hong Kong and China. And his view was that things could be worse. You know, we had our health. And he stuck the way as mantra of the three Cs. And the three Cs for him were cooperation, communication, and care. Now cooperation was about working together. Communicating we say was communicating more than you'd ever done before. Communicating what you didn't know, as well as what you did know. And care, care for your people care for your customers and care for all your stakeholders. There was a remarkable humanity and almost the bigger the corporate crisis and the greater humanity that I saw from the leaders. Brian Ardinger: Did you see from a tactical perspective, the leaders that you interviewed, doing similar things, or were there some that stood out that approached the disruption differently and tactically did things. Or did they, you see kind of similarities between what the different leaders did?Atholl Duncan: I think there were a number of similarities. I mean, I think agility was, you know, agility and speed of movement was probably top of their agenda. And if you weren't reacting. Moving quickly then you were tossed. I think focus was very important and the number who repeated to me, but focusing on the right thing. Not falling into the trap of making yourself busy, you know, making yourself busy, I think in that situation as a way of dealing with your anxiety.So, it wasn't about making yourself busy. It was about focusing on the small number of items. That would make the difference between life and death for your business. I think empathy and compassion and leadership was very strong as well. And I think seeing the opportunity, seeing the opportunity again, what was a big thing. And I think these themes will continue as we come out of the crisis. I don't think there will no longer be steady as she goes in many if any businesses. We are into this kind of supersonic age of change. If you're not fast, Brian, you're going to be last. Brian Ardinger: Absolutely. And it's interesting that the themes that you identified and and wrote about, obviously came out of the pandemic itself, but there's similar to what we're hearing today. Like they're not changing much. You know, the idea that you have to have purpose. The world of work is changing. Inequality and resilience, all these things that you've mentioned as the core themes as being identified early on in that we are still wrestling with that and they are evolving. So that leads us to the next, I guess, set of questions around, we are coming out of this "coming out of this pandemic," but what does that mean? And how do you see leaders and companies approaching this reverse culture shock, so to speak, coming out of lockdown? Atholl Duncan: Well, I think one of the things that unlocked then and the pandemic has proven, is that the command and control type of leadership is dead. You know, I think you are going to see an era of more compassionate and more empathetic leadership. Cause I think that was the more successful leadership through the crisis. I think you're going to see people here who will want to hold on to the things that worked well at the peak of the crisis and try and recreate them. So, I mean, I’ve had a number of clients who said to me, how do we recreate the mindset that we had that did remarkable things at the peak here? And how do we recreate the pace of change? The problem with that is it sustainable, the pace of change that we had at the peak of the crisis. You know, you're going to kill or blow up your people. But definitely the mindset is fascinating. You know, how did we manage to do the vaccines in such a short space of time?How did we manage to build the field hospitals in weeks rather than what it would have taken years? And how did we manage to make these huge pivots. So, I don't like that word, but it was a word of the crisis. Yeah. How do we manage to make these huge pivots in so many businesses? And, you know, some people are going to want to get back. They don't like it in this space. You know, change is uncomfortable. And some people are going to want to get back the way we were. But I think that's a false idea, because all your competitors are going to a different place. If you're going back the way, then you're heading back towards an inevitable decline. I would see. Brian Ardinger: Did any of the leaders admit to any kind of failures or things they wish they would have done differently or, you know, things they stubbed their toes on? Atholl Duncan: I think they were all pretty open about mistakes they've made. About not being prepared enough. About underestimating, I mean, we all are underestimated how long it was going to take, didn't we? You know, when we started doing this, Brian, the biggest fear people told me was the book will be out of date by the time it comes out. You know, nobody will be interested in that. How are you going to manage to get this current and keep it relevant? Well, you know, the book first published in the UK in the autumn of 2020. Published in the US now. One criticism of the book could be that the story is still unfolding. You know, are we in the middle of it? Are we in the last quarter? Where are we in this story? And some of the clients I'm working with at the moment, and my executive coaching were saying, well, you know, maybe the difficult bit is still to come, because we're going to get going a game, we're going to get out there. What is hybrid working? What is the new world of work? In many parts of the world, we've been in a steady state. We've got into a routine, sadly over the last weeks and months. Well, that routine is about to change as we try to get back to something resembling the corporate life that we had before.Brian Ardinger: Well, and I think that hybrid environment is going to be even more difficult to manage. You know, it's, it's one thing when you have to move everybody to remote or, you know, everybody is going through the exact same thing and understands that disruption and, and will, has to take place because of it. But now as we come out, the variables and opportunities that different companies are having and different communities are having, is going to make it that much harder to navigate the hybrid nature of it. That's what I'm seeing and hearing. Atholl Duncan: Yeah, definitely. Definitely. Brian Ardinger: Are there any other great stories or interesting stories from the book that would shine some light on people now trying to adapt with this and how they can make this transition even better. Atholl Duncan: If I was to give you two or three quotes from some of these business leaders, you know. One of them was a guy Christian Lang, who's Chief Exec of a tech business, a digital procurement business in San Francisco, called Trade Shift. It's an interesting business because it was formed by three Danes, in a garage in Denmark. And then they moved across to San Francisco. And then he simply said with COVID 19, every single long held belief has been thrown out of the window. Every single long held belief has been thrown out the window.I did a bit of interviews with Will Hammad, who has a business called Whoop up in Boston. And Whoop is a wearable tech. I've got my Whoop around my wrist. And his view was that he fundamentally believed that this moment in time will shift the way humanity thinks about health. And that's another revolution in this.If you look at the home health and the virtual health world, right. You know, that's a shift that, you know, we've, wow, we've gone 10 years or 15 years and they are in, maybe the breakthroughs that we'll see in this next digital revolution will be about of solving some of the big problems in health and our, and our healthcare systems.I think diplomacy for the next generation. If not, several generations are going to be redrawn. There really is just so much change that's coming about it. And we've not really talked much about the diversity and inclusion agenda, but my favorite quote is from a woman called Alison Martin, who’s the Chief Executive of Zurich Insurance Group, in Europe. And she said, why don't we create a world that is fit for our children to live in rather than the one that we were destroying before COVID. Brian Ardinger: You obviously interviewed a lot of business leaders and that. What can the average, middle management or person within a company take from the book to make themselves feel better or understand how to, again, navigate this new world.Atholl Duncan: This is not a complex Harvard academic analysis. This is storytelling in this book. It is telling great stories of people who find themselves in remarkable positions during this crisis. It tries to give you a window seat in their boardroom. And I think there's so much that everyone can take, about leadership. It is not the size of the business. It's the behaviors. It's the Innovation. It's the agility. It’s that mindset of opportunity. When the crisis hits, do you fear? Or do you look for opportunity? And while I think many of these people had a bit of fear, their instinctive reaction is to look for where is the opportunity in the crisis? And that sounds a bit like carpet bagging, but is there true entrepreneurial spirit coming through?For More InformationBrian Ardinger: Everybody's going to have to learn these skillsets. And the world is like you said, moving faster. And I think we saw that before COVID, but COVID just put a, a stake in the ground for everybody to rally around. So, I really do appreciate you coming on Inside Outside Innovation to share your thoughts and share what you learned through this particular process. If people want to find out more about yourself or more about the book, what's the best way to do that? Atholl Duncan: The book is on Amazon.com. One of the companies that clearly did very well, during the pandemic. And I'm doing a lot of executive coaching cause I'm in the U S and you can find me on Atholl Duncan.com. And that's Atholl with two L's, Atholl Duncan.com.And really for me, now Brian, it's not about selling a book. I've become an evangelist for change. And really what I want to do is to inspire as many leaders to not let us go back to where we were. Because people in some of the workshops that have been doing, are looking for, who's going to reset the world. Who's going to change business. Who's going to change the style of leadership. And I say, guys, it's us. There is nobody else. We are the leaders. If we don't do it, it isn’t going to happen. So come on. Come on the journey. And then let's reset the world. Brian Ardinger: Let's reset the world. Indeed.  Atholl, thank you very much for being on Inside Outside Innovation and looking forward to continuing the conversation like you said, this is an ongoing thing. So, we would love to have you back at some point to continue the conversation and see where the world takes us. Atholl Duncan: It's a pleasure. I'd love to come back at any time because I think the next bit is potentially from a leadership point of view, is as interesting as the last bit Brian Ardinger: That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLSGet the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HEREYou can also search every Inside Outside Innovation Podcast by Topic and Company.  For more innovations resources, check out IO's Innovation Article Database, Innovation Tools Database, Innovation Book Database, and Innovation Video Database.  

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Alyssa Simpson Rochwerger and Wilson Pang, authors of the new book, Real World AI: A Practical Guide for Machine Learning. We sit down and talk about some of the biggest misperceptions about AI, as well as some practical advice on how to tackle creating, building, and maintaining AI projects. Let's get started.Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help you rethink, reset and remix yourself and your organization. Each week, we're bringing the latest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses, as well as the tools, tactics, and trends you'll need to thrive as a new innovator.Interview Transcript with Alyssa Simpson Rochwerger and Wilson Pang, Authors of Real World AI: A Practical Guide for Machine LearningBrian Ardinger:  Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing set of guests. Today we have Alyssa Simpson Rochwerger and Wilson Pang, authors of the new book called Real World AI: A Practical Guide for Machine Learning. Welcome to the show.Wilson Pang: Thank you, Brian. Really excited to be here. Brian Ardinger: We are excited to have you both here. This is an exciting world of technology and new trends that are happening. AI is obviously on the forefront of a lot of people's minds. And I'd love to get your input on what do you really mean when you say real-world AI and how does that differ than people's perceptions out there?Alyssa Simpson: I think one of the things that we wanted to address with this book is sort of the in-between space between, you know, the hype and maybe what you read about AI and the headlines, or what you see AI or very smart futuristic systems depicted in the movies. And then, you know, also a very academic or technical approach to machine learning that you may have come across a textbook or learned in school.And this is kind of the middle reality, right? Is, you know, what are real companies who are using machine learning based technology? How are they using it? You know, what struggles are they having? What successes are they having? And then how does it work in the real world. In the reality that we all live in and share and products that you probably use frequently in your everyday life?Brian Ardinger: Well, I think there are a lot of misconceptions about what AI even is. Maybe Wilson, can you tell us a little bit about some of the myths or misconceptions about AI that people commonly struggle or fumble over? Wilson Pang: There's a few major common misconceptions. Number one, it's really, a lot of people think AI, they think is the kind of a machine can do whatever human can do, right? This is called Artificial General Intelligence. Basically, AI can repeat human. So that's happening in those small ways but it's far away from the reality. In reality, what AI, all the real-life AI, is really the application, which can be taught or learn to carry a specific task without being programmed to do soSo, the machine can learn from data. And then performing some tasks. So that's kind of a like what real world AI is. So that's number one misconception. Number two misconception is that people are thinking to build an AI, the team needs to spend a lot of their time to tune the model, work on the model, and get the best performance. It is more related to the signs or the model tuning.  In reality, science is a big part of AI, for sure. But for the AI team, they spend a majority of their time, on data. Need to collect the right data, clean up the data, make sure the data has all of the representatives and also make sure that data has quality. And then the data complete the magical part is to really improve the AI performance. So those are the two major misconceptions. I hope everyone can really learn and understand that. Brian Ardinger: You know, you often see two sides coming out, when you talk about AI. You have one side of the spectrum where everybody talks about AI as a panacea of opportunity. And it's going to change the world for the better. On the other side, you have the folks that think AI is a massive danger and a menace and a lot of unknown repercussions. Where do you guys fall on that spectrum? Alyssa Simpson: I'll argue all sides of that one. I think both are true and neither are true. As with anything, machine learning and AI technology is disruptive. It already has changed the world as we know it and will continue to be an incredibly powerful and disruptive technology in almost every industry. On the other side, it's just technology, right? And there's a lot of things that are powerful and it's only as powerful as what you put it towards and how you shape it.And in other ways, it's incredibly brittle and really narrow as Wilson was referring to, this is not a magic eight ball. It's not generalized. AI often is very narrow and specific, and only is able to accomplish a fairly narrow and specific tasks that you train it for, if you have all the data available to train it really successfully to perform that task.And so, you know, what we see in reality is companies having a lot of success. If they are able to find a use case that this technology can perform really well and do things that previously were undoable before and open up new streams of opportunity. Brian Ardinger: Where are some of the industries that are getting the most out of AI right now. And where do you see the trends moving, when it comes to folks capturing the benefits of AI? Wilson Pang: AI only become a buzzword in recent years. But in reality, AI has been there for a long time and high-tech industry who has big company like Google, Facebook, all those tech giants. They have been using AI for a long time. And AI has been used to optimize their price sprints, to help you find the right product, to give you a better recommendation. To show you a better content. So those have been there for a while. The usage of those AI technologies is pretty mature, and that's also almost embedded in every part of their product. So, for high-tech industry, very mature. Meanwhile, in recent years, it's also a lot of other industries, they are catching up. Like the finance industry. The medical industry.  All kinds of industries are catching up.So, you can see the train of AI is already, the adoption of AI has become much broader. And also, the speed to adopt AI is also a leverage spot. Meanwhile, as you mentioned earlier, AI can really bring on a lot of benefits. Can also create a lot of harm. So, with this even wider adoption, we really need to make sure people understand how to use AI in the responsible way. So that way we can get the benefit part, but meanwhile not really doing a lot of damage to the society. Brian Ardinger: Yeah, you definitely hear that. And you hear the use case scenarios when it goes bad and that's oftentimes hyped up. I actually just read this morning. I think it was a fast company article talking about how the New York City Council is considering new rules meant to curb bias in hiring when it comes to AI and putting AI in hiring practices and that. What's your take on some of those challenges that you're seeing in that particular space. Alyssa Simpson: Yeah, I know Wilson and I both feel really passionate and strongly about the importance of responsible and ethical applications of AI. You know, one of the places where I see challenges is that people don't think about the potential harms or bias from the beginning.And don't look at their data and training set really critically, with a critical eye to inform whether or not that training set is appropriate for the use case that that model will be applied to in the future. So, in take your hiring example, you know, there was a famous case a couple of years ago, where Amazon tried to use machine learning to look at resumes and figure out which ones are going to be the strongest candidates and put those forward. And, you know, they found it was really biased from a gender perspective.  That's because the training data set that they were using was mostly men because Amazon mostly had men working there. And so, the system wasn't trained to be biased against women. The training data had more examples of men having more success at Amazon. And so, the model ended up amplifying the biases that were there already. So often, that's sort of a classic case of what's happening, Is that the model is supercharging, right, any existing biases in our society. And so, as we all know, are at least in the United States, right? There's a lot of biases against women. There are racial biases, you know, there's all sorts of different challenges that exist in hiring practices. And if you are not careful, or if you are not actively sort of proactively correcting for some of these challenges in the data, you can end up with a model that reflects those back to you. And at that times makes it worse. Brian Ardinger: With that, are there particular ways or opportunities for folks to do better job at that particular training. Is it just coming to light now? We're getting better at this, and so we're, we're learning from these mistakes. And so, they're being amplified, but we're getting better at it or walk me through the state of AI and specifically around the bias of the training of the system. Alyssa Simpson: Yeah. I mean, I have to think, unfortunately, most people who are training models are not thinking about this at the beginning. You know, perhaps more and more, but I think it's often really overlooked at the data stuff. And they only realize it later once deployed some big into production, like, Oh woops. You know, but if you think about it from the beginning, it's a lot easier to correct for. So, I'll take a, perhaps a different example. If you're building like a voice assistant, like a Siri or an Alexa or something. And you want it to work for people in the United States? Well, that means you need to capture voices from people in the United States, right? Not just white men. You need to also capture voices from people who speak English as a second language or from children or from elderly people or from people in the South who may have a Southern drawl.So, you need your training data to be reflective of the population that is going to be served or be interacting with the system. So, in say New York's hiring case, if they're building an AI model and they don't want it to be biased, well, you know, look at the candidate pool, right. But you know, everyone who lives in New York state, do you have a representative sample in your training data of everyone who lives in New York state or is your training data biased already you know. And there's a lot of different types of biases. This is like, you know, sort of a sample bias or collection bias. There's a lot of different ones, you know, but is it bias towards a particular demographic that you could look at it more critically and then include a much broader set of examples that are more reflective? That's probably the easiest thing that most people can do, but certainly not the only thing. Brian Ardinger: That makes sense. So, let's dig into the book a little bit. Wilson in the book you outlined some of the key characteristics and the things that people should be looking at and working on when deploying a new AI system. What are the key insights in the book that people should take from it?Wilson Pang:  Our book actually walks through the whole journey, from identify the problem, to problem of the team, from defining strategy to how to get data. And also talking about a buy a model or build a model, right. There's a lot of details around how to really develop the AI journey. If we can make a quick summary there's a few super important points there. Number one is really to identify the right problem to solve. And you always also want to start from small instead of wanting to boil the ocean, in the beginning. So, the right problem, which should be a, really small problem or a specific, and also, you know, what a success looks like if you are successful, and you knew how to measure that.And that will give you a good start. And then after you have that right problem, then you need to assemble a right team. On the right team, you need to also have multiple different roles. Besides everybody can think of I need a data scientist. I need a machine learning engineer, right? You also need the people who really need to know the business, either product manager or business eminence to help you to understand the problem. And then a data scientist can connect the department to a science problem. I also needed engineers to have you deploy this tool production. And after you deploy to production, you also need to monitor and the operation, all of those AI model, right? So, assemble a right team is super important. So that's number two. After that, I think another super important part comes is really to get the data. Get the right data. So, the right data also has a lot for meanings on there, that can mean you need to have the data quality, right. You need to have the data to be representative of different categories or groups, right? Alyssa mentioned earlier, if you don't have the right data to represent the different group of users, you can create a lot of bias. So, data cleanup, data quality. That's another big piece. After that, you probably get the right data to run properly. You will have a successful pilot and they get some good results. Or the company will help you to celebrate the success. And they'll also want to what's next. So that comes with data. You need to scale from a pilot to production, where you also need to invest a lot more to consider how you come to the production. How you can access the data regularly. You need to refresh the model. You need to refresh the data. And also, you probably also need to define some common process to help you manage the data, manage the model. And that you also need to continue there, like at a production scale. Now we are not really running a pilot that you, maybe your model is serving meetings or hundreds of meetings for people. You have to make sure the model is available. And you can deploy the increase the demand. So, there's a lot of things to consider, once it comes to the production. And also, once you start to have more and more productive use case, you know, AI is impacting the business in a huge way. So that is the part, consideration like a lot of ethical consideration or responsive governing, a lot of those kicks in.  So you need to define not just the product, but a program, also a product to make sure you can get the benefit of from AI across the whole organization instead of just the one product.So those are the key points to consider when you really want to deploy successful AI. I know that's a lot. And I think I only covered a small piece of it.  And if you might want to learn more check out our book. Brian Ardinger:  That's an interesting point because I think a lot of companies want to dip their toes into AI and get better at it. But there's so many different moving parts. So, what recommendations would you have for ordinary folks, ordinary companies trying to get up to speed on this topic and prepare. How should they look to find an expert on the outside to lead them through this process? Should they start building a team? What are some steps that people can do if they want to get more into this AI world?Alyssa Simpson: Well, there's a book that we wrote, that might provide step one. Step one, read the book. You know, but in all honesty, you know, I think that's part of the reason we wrote the book is because we got asked this all the time, and this was a way for us to kind of brain dump on paper in a little bit more scalable way of like, Hey, here's a quick guide of how to get started.There is no one size fits all approach. It depends on your company size. It depends on your budget. It depends on your risk appetite and a lot of other things. But I think generally speaking, my guidance would be, find a problem that is well-suited for AI. We talk about this in our Goldilocks chapter, which is pick the right problem that you want to solve. Is really important to solve for your business.It's not a good approach to say, Hey, I want to do AI. Let me like sprinkle this AI magic on top of my company. And that's not how it works. It's Hey, I have a really hard problem to solve. And, you know, I think it's really well suited to be solved by machine learning technology. And that's a much better way to approach it, right.It needs to be a problem that is really important to your business. That's critical to get done, right. That has high value that you have a lot of data in order to solve that problem, that you can train a model to help you solve. Brian Ardinger: You've been around in the AI space for quite a long time and seen a lot of changes. What are you most looking forward to in the years ahead? Wilson Pang: I think there's a lot of evolvement in this AI data field. There are a few areas, particularly I'm super excited about.  Really the kind of this big language model are, you probably are really seeing like what kind of a magic AI can help you to play. It is those kind of big language models, they leverage almost every piece of information on the internet, seeing all like terabytes of data and also almost capture all the knowledge from all over the word and with all of those data, they can perform a lot of amazing tasks, like write an article for you, and also maybe even write a program for you. Right. I know it's still early. They're, the people, they discover ability, but they don't really know how to really use this. And also, there's still a lot of use cases that even the big model cannot really handle. Right. But I do think they are missing. So now it’s you GPT-3.  When it comes to GPT-14, GPT-15, there might be a lot of magic it can do to this society.So that's the one part I'm super excited. On the other hand, also say AI now is not only a research problem, or a problem where only a high-tech company can tackle. Now I see a lot of different tools, to have a developer to build AI. Or maybe have a data scientist to deploy AI in production. So, with all of those tools, I feel the adoption for AI will be much broader. And the speed to adopt AI will be much faster. So, obviously a lot of different use case from any kinds of industry can be supported by AI. Some of those use cases, maybe we can, we cannot even imagine today. So those are the two areas I feel super excited Alyssa Simpson: For me. It's more personal. I'm excited to like, not have to repeat myself to Alexa. Or you can turn the lights off. Or I'm excited that, for new drug discoveries. You know, I suffer from migraines and, you know, neurology and the best medicine in the Bay Area, which the fanciest doctors have not been able to, you know, help me that much. And you know, I'm excited for new drug discoveries and things that are going to impact my everyday life for myself and those that I love. Whether or not it's a customer experience improvement or real big medical breakthrough.For More InformationBrian Ardinger: Absolutely. It's going to be an amazing world. We're, we're looking forward to it as well. We'd love to have you back on the show in the future to continue this conversation. But in the meantime, if people want to find out more about you Alyssa or Wilson or the book, what's the best way to do that? Alyssa Simpson: You can find me on LinkedIn or AlyssaSimpsonRochwerger.com. Our book is available on Amazon. We'd look forward to hearing your feedback and thanks so much for having us, Brian. Wilson Pang: Yeah. And you can always find me through LinkedIn. And Brian thanks again for having us here. Brian Ardinger: Well, thank you both for being on Inside Outside Innovation. I'm very excited to see where this world is going, and I appreciate you all sharing your insights.That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLSGet the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HEREYou can also search every Inside Outside Innovation Podcast by Topic and Company.  For more innovations resources, check out IO's Innovation Article Database, Innovation Tools Database, Innovation Book Database, and Innovation Video Database.  

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Lauren Golembiewski, CEO and Co-founder of Voxable. Lauren and I talk about the future of voice and other wearables and the challenges of designing for new technologies and applications. Let's get started.Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help you rethink, reset, and remix yourself and your organization each week. We'll bring you the latest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses, as well as the tools, tactics, and trends you'll need to thrive as a newInterview Transcript with Lauren Golembiewski, CEO and Co-founder of VoxableBrian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Lauren Golembeski. She is CEO and co-founder of Voxable which is an agency that designs and develops chatbots and voice interfaces based in Austin, Texas, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. So welcome Lauren. Lauren Golembiewski: Thanks for having me.Brian Ardinger: Hey I am excited to have you on the show. You and I connected pre pandemic. I had been reading some of your work in Harvard Business Review. You wrote a couple articles, one entitled How wearable AI will amplify human intelligence. And another one more recently called, Are you ready for tech that connects to your brain?And I thought those articles were so insightful. I want to get some insight into some of the things that you're seeing in some of the new technologies when it comes to wearables and voice and, and things like that. So maybe to kick it off, why don't you tell the audience a little bit about how you got started in this field and tell us more about what Voxable is.Lauren Golembiewski: Yeah, absolutely. So Voxable is a design platform for teams that want to build better voice and chat apps. We had been consulting in the voice and chat app design and development space, helping companies, large enterprise teams build their voice and chat experiences. And then we pivoted to creating this product because we realized that every team, no matter how much they invested in creating a great conversational experience, they still had no tool that was available to them to efficiently build that experience and define it in a way that created a great user experience for their end customers. So that's what we're currently doing today.And we got into the voice space just by tinkering in our own homes. I was mentioning to you before we started the show that I started the business with my husband who's a software engineer and my background is in product design. And we basically, as soon as, you know, early voice technology had become available to us, we started playing around with integrating it into our smart home devices.And we realized that in creating our own voice experiences, that this was really going to be the next paradigm shift in human computer interaction. So, we quit our jobs and started Voxable, the consulting business, or what became the consulting business. And then, like I said, through those five years, recognizing that the significant problem in the industry is that there's no good design tools. That's kind of our current mission is seeking to change that and to help teams create a better UX in the process. Brian Ardinger: That's pretty amazing. My career started back in internet 1.0 in the UX UI design research field and designing for new technologies back then when it was a screen-based kind of thing, it's obviously evolved in that. And you mentioned this term conversational design. Tell us a little bit about what does that mean? What does it entail? Lauren Golembiewski: Conversation Design is a new term and conversation designers is a new role that has come about on the market. And these are people who focus on creating that voice or chat experience and defining what that looks like for the end user.And so just like today, you might have a product designer or a user interface designer. The way that we talked about that role in a voice application or a chat application is just by calling them a conversation designer because they're focusing on the actual substance of the conversation, writing the words that will be said, be spoken by, for example, an Alexa skill or sent through a chat bot in a chat application. They're dealing with those substances as opposed to, you know, HTML CSS that a web designer would be considering or iOS framework that a mobile designer would be considering. And so, a conversation designers are focused on affordances of conversational experiences, which includes synthesized speech. It includes new conversational AI. So that would include something like natural language understanding, that can now take the natural words that a user says and translates that into something a machine or an application can actually do something with and can perform actions based on a more natural interaction.And so, these types of affordances are what conversation designers become experts in, and then can craft these experiences that help fulfill the end user's goal, whether it be getting help, they have a support issue in, you know, your product. And that's one big place that people are automating these types of interactions is on customer support chat.As well as, you know, people want to be able to speak to their mobile device and they want to be able to play music and perform actions without having to use their hands. So, whether that's on a mobile device or on one of these smart speakers. And I think the other really big sector that this is exploding on is in the wearable markets because now not only do we have like a smart speaker that's sitting in a room or a personal mobile device, but we now have a kind of always on piece of personal accessorizing that people are wearing almost throughout the entire day. And it's like a whole other channel through which conversational interaction can happen. And it can be both very personal and on consumer level interactions where I'm playing music or tracking my fitness. Or can be on a very enterprise level where I'm trying to automate certain parts of my job and do my job more intelligently by having an assistant that can kind of help me do that on the go, either hands-free or site free. Brian Ardinger: One of the things that the whole field is still fairly new and it's fairly new, even for the user to understand, you know, obviously a lot of people use the Alexa to ask, you know, what the weather's going to be. What are the core applications that you are seeing that are really having an impact in this new field? Lauren Golembiewski: So, very similar to the early days of the mobile market, when mobile apps became really popular gaming has established itself as a very early craze. And I think a lot of people are gravitating towards voice only games. And then there is the whole media consumption landscape. Podcasting is a very big interest of a lot of enterprises and consumers alike. It's a channel that a lot of people are starting to recognize the value of. And so, creating voice experiences in new places where audio and voice interaction can happen.Brian Ardinger: Like, what do you see with things like a Clubhouse or the new Twitter spaces you see that is just a place to consume audio? Or do you see this interaction element coming into play? Lauren Golembiewski: I think that if those particular companies aren't already thinking about how the interaction can come into play, there are definitely other companies and startups I know of that are thinking of that. And so, regardless of whether that is Clubhouse, who creates kind of like a two-way type of interaction or even just, you know, one of the big use cases of people who are interacting with Clubhouses is they're out taking walks and they're using their wearables as an interface to the Clubhouse world. And could that browsing experience be easier if there was a better voice integration into it? Or better ways of interacting. Actually, one of the early Clubhouse rooms that I was in was with a lot of voice industry folks who were thinking about how Clubhouse could incorporate voice into its strategy. Regardless of whether that's right for clubhouse, I do think that audio interaction essentially reinventing telephone calls is, is something that we're constantly trying to do.And I do think that there will be a new way, that people start to interact with a combination of not only just like my being able to interact with my voice, but also being able to interact with like my virtual assistant that embodies me as Lauren, that can automate some of my responses to people at work, friends and family, kind of like the autoresponder. That's just much more intelligent and personalized for any individual worker or consumer. And can I have a synthesized voice that is modeled after my own, that I've trained, that can then step in and speak my words for me in certain situations. And so that seems really futuristic, but I do think that we're getting closer and closer to places where that is relevant. And there's voice channels like Discord, the chat, the gaming chat application, where gaming has a whole other culture around it, where people start to think of modifications. So, like what if I could buy a voice model occasion that then changes my voice when I'm speaking through to my fans or to my fellow gamers. Because I'm playing a character and that's part of my, you know, gaming interaction and lifestyle. And so, I think there's a lot of places where voice is relevant and can change the way interaction happens beyond just incorporating it in the current app that we're kind of thinking about today. Brian Ardinger: You mentioned gaming. Are there other industries that are kind of ahead of the curve when it comes to utilizing some of these technologies?Lauren Golembiewski: I think the financial industry is definitely ahead of the curve. There's a ton of financial virtual assistance. You see it in a lot of the industries where information and search are fairly complex and there's a lot of data and just information that a consumer has to wade through. And you can either pay someone to do that for you, but there's a whole host of people who don't have that type of budget, who aren't paying a financial advisor.And so, there's starting to be offerings by these larger companies. Capital One has a virtual assistant Bank of America. I think her name is actually Erica, their virtual assistant. The Charles Schwab, there's a lot of businesses that are starting to, or a lot of financial institutions that are starting to look at how they can help their customers through some of these more automated interactions. But, you know, delivering information in a way that's more natural and consumable and timely, and kind of responding to contextually the situation that the user's in.Brian Ardinger: Are those companies using the voice technologies, I guess, integrated with existing telephone types of systems and that, or are they including them on the websites? How's the use case scenario actually playing out? Lauren Golembiewski: I think most companies are incorporating them into their custom mobile apps. So, if they have like a mobile banking experience, it's like a layer that is part of that mobile banking experience. Whether it's a message center, or an actual voice like touch to speak type of interaction. I haven't yet seen or tried any experiences that exist via a conversational channel like Alexa or Google assistant. I think some of those businesses are hesitant to deploy to those platforms, both for a couple of reasons. Both because it's validating to these larger enterprise businesses, Amazon and Google that may be seen as competitors or in some way competition to a lot of enterprises out there. On the other hand, while Amazon and Google, and Samsung is also a player in this realm of creating a voice channel because they have Bixby. While they've created a really great ecosystem that does a lot of things, they still haven't really nailed the end user experience in the same way that I think iPhone did when it kind of established the mobile application market. And so, I think we're still kind of waiting for these big players to create that really killer user experience that makes these secondary applications really see value in deploying to these secondary channels. So, I think that's why we're not seeing as much like a banking experience on Alexa for those two reasons. Brian Ardinger: It definitely makes sense. I'm curious to understand, like, is it because the consumer, the behavioral changes the consumer has to make is too much to overcome, or is it because the application developers so to speak are having a tough time creating something that's usable? Because like you said, it's a different format. It's a different way of thinking about how to have an interaction with a customer. It seems like the technology itself is there, but that behavioral hurdle is difficult to overcome.Lauren Golembiewski: Yeah. I definitely think it's more the behavioral hurdle. I for sure am confident that the technology can support. To some extent can support a good user experience. I will say that in a lot of ways, just like, you know, the way that iPhone competed in the mobile market when it was like Blackberry and Palm Pilot, and those were the big players and iPhone came in and it was not competing on features, it was competing on experience.And then when the App Store came out, similarly, it said, we're restricting the amount of applications that can be deployed on the store, and we're going to make it harder for you developer to create that. But, Hey, we're going to create this whole developer program. We'll create all these standards for how we think applications should be built and for better or for worse, like people could disagree with their, you know, interaction paradigms and the way that they set things up, but for better, or for worse, that represented some of the best UX design that was available, and guidance that was available.  And so, I think the way that we're seeing that happen on the voice side is that like, we're not seeing that kind of leadership play out in the same way, where we have someone that's saying, Hey, we're going to restrict the amount of skills or, you know, actions that can be deployed to these systems.We're going to make them, make sure that they're really good. And then we're going to make sure that third party developers have all of the resources that they need to get those experiences to be as good as they need to be. And I think, like not to say that those companies aren't going in the right direction, but I just think that in kind of instantiating that behavior shift that does need to take place with consumers, I don't think it's a difficult behavior shift. And I think it's actually an easier one than perhaps learning how to work a touch screen. So, I think that that shift isn't necessarily like totally a blocker in making the market proliferate in the way that it can. But I do think that there does need to be a big enough push to satisfying that end user experience to ensure that that behavior change is simple and seamless. And that not only am I interacting on these devices, but that I'm also interacting with the businesses that are deploying experiences through these devices. Brian Ardinger: You kind of have to have both. And I think that's one potential tipping point is where we're getting to the ubiquity of these particular devices. Everybody has an Air Pod in their head almost all times, or, you know, they're carrying around their phone that can quickly tap on it and access Siri or whatever. And so again, the technology is ubiquitous enough now. Now I think is the next step is trying to figure out what are those applications to make somebody actually want to turn it on and interact with it.Some of the things that I've seen when it comes to voice and that is I love your opinion and insight and curious how the area of, because you have to speak, and it's public when you're talking to a microphone in front of other folks, is that a behavioral challenge to overcome? Or what do you think are some of the behavioral issues that are holding people back from trying these things or using these things more regularly?Lauren Golembiewski: Yeah, absolutely. I definitely think that there are social changes that we are both experiencing and are yet to come, that will affect how people interact with voice interfaces. And so, I'm reminded of when those Bluetooth headsets became popular and to the phenomenon of the person alone on the street talking out loud, right.Us all like grappling with that. And you know, and now I think, we're used to seeing that, or we're used to looking for the headphones to ensure that that person is speaking, not to us and not directing the conversation towards us. So, I think that's a certain social change that we're getting more used to.And I do think that the public nature of speaking out loud is a limiting factor to voice interaction. It for sure reduces the amount of contexts around which you would be willing to talk. Because either I want to be in my home to talk about this sensitive matter out loud. I don't want to be just like in a public place speaking about maybe like my personal financial matters. Or I want to be able to interact in a different mode of interaction. So, I want to have a voice available to me when it matters when I do need to, I feel like talking or I'm out and I'm hands-free and I have like a low stakes voice interaction that I don't care is public. But a higher stakes interaction. Maybe I want to text that interaction. And then there's also a lot of cases, not just the private public major voice, but the synchronous, asynchronous nature of it, where to have a voice interaction, both parties need to be like active and consuming that information in real time, basically. So, if I'm listening to an interaction or I'm listening to instructions from a voice interface, it's kind of streaming out at me. And if I don't catch it in that moment, then it's kind of cumbersome to like recall it, you know, repeat et cetera. So, there are situations when audio information along with a visual aid. Or a visual element to go along with the interaction is really helpful. We're seeing people start to think not just about like voice only or graphic only, or screen-based only, but think of really like the multimodal interaction. Because beyond just voice and, you know, tapping on a screen or chatting in a, you know, text field, we also have all these gestures and other sensors that we're wearing, like heart rate monitors and there's gyro scopes in all of our devices and location information that's constantly being grabbed.And so, all of these data points, sensors, and gestural types of interactions are now inputs into any type of device that we're interacting with. And so that really, I think, breaks us beyond like this thinking about one particular mode of interaction at a time, and thinking about what does the user actually need and what are they going to, like, what are they using?What is available to them and what makes the most sense to them. And they could really switch between voice to text, to gesture. For any given interaction, pretty seamlessly. And that's probably what they want to do, but that experience, that's what I see in the future is that seamlessly moving between pretty much any input that I, as the user want.Brian Ardinger: Yeah. Being able to capture and use all your senses whenever you need them. Lauren Golembiewski: Yeah, absolutely. And then, I mean, all those devices and sensors are getting so much smarter and more interesting. And that's what I wrote about in Harvard Business Review was, so instead of having a speech recognition is we're starting to see research being done on sub vocal recognition, which is the brainwaves that you send to your mouth right before you're thinking about what you're going to say, that can be read and translate that into data that represents the words that you were thinking to say. And that's a vocal recognition. Alter ego is a device that's using sensors attached to the face to perform that sub vocal recognition. So, then you can have a feedback loop that's actually silent, but it's still based on a voice interaction paradigm. And that kind of gets around some of that public private notion where maybe I can have a voice interaction that's actually happening all through like a closed loop system. That's like a sensor attached to my face and like a bone conductor. Headphone that's speaking it into my brain then. For More InformationBrian Ardinger: It's definitely a fascinating world. If someone wants to find out more about how to explore these new opportunities or are there particular go-to resources or things that you would recommend people take a look at?  Lauren Golembiewski: Yeah, absolutely. So you can certainly search for those articles on Harvard Business Review. I read a lot over at Voxable's blog at voxable.io. You'll be able to find our blog and on my Twitter account @LaurenGolem is a place that I often muse about the future of technology. And then one person who I do follow quite, quite regularly from seeing her speak at South by Southwest pretty regularly is Amy Webb, who's a futurist. And she releases the tech trend report every year, usually at South by Southwest. I mean, I think she did it virtually this year, but she walks through a lot of the individual trends happening in wearables, in healthcare, in artificial intelligence and in the confluence of all of these things. And really goes deep on a lot of the fascinating things happening in the future of technology.And so, I recommend a lot of people seek her out. Amy Webb at Future Institute Today. And you can find her reports, which is all like open sourced and free for people, which is another amazing aspect of what she does. Brian Ardinger: Absolutely all good stuff. Lauren, I really do appreciate you coming on and kind of sharing your insights on where the world's going. And, I'd love to have you back on the show at some point and continue the conversation as we move forward. If people want to connect with you directly, or what's the best way to do that, Lauren Golembiewski: You can email me lauren@voxabale.io. Brian Ardinger: Excellent. Well, Lauren, thanks again for being on Inside Outside Innovation.  Look forward to the, the world ahead and appreciate you spending some time with us. Lauren Golembiewski: Thanks so much, Brian. Brian Ardinger:  That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLSGet the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HEREFor more innovations resources, check out IO's Innovation Article Database, Innovation Tools Database, Innovation Book Database, and Innovation Video Database.

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Cactus Raazi, Author of the new book, Price: Maximizing Customer Loyalty Through Personal Pricing. We talk about the important, but often overlooked topic of price innovation, and how companies can use technology and experimentation to move from the traditional model of revenue maximization towards that of loyalty maximization. Let's get started.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 TranscriptBrian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today, we have Cactus Raazi. He is the founder and former CEO of Elephant. Now part of EXOS Financial, and author of the new book, Price: Maximizing Customer Loyalty Through Personal Pricing. Welcome Cactus. Cactus Raazi: Thank you very much. Appreciate you having me. Brian Ardinger: Cactus, I'm excited to have you on the show because this is a pretty important topic that doesn't often get talked about in the innovation front. You know, if you think about pricing, a lot of the pricing models have probably been around for 50 years. And yet when I'm working with startups or people introducing new products, they're always talking about how do I set my price and that. So, I'm really excited to hear your thoughts on that. To get started, in the book you talk a lot about, and you encourage companies to look at price differently. So, we'll dig into the details, but how did you get involved at researching and writing about the topic of price?Cactus Raazi: You know, it's interesting. My day job is in financial markets. And what we, myself, and the team have been working on for years are various algorithms to be able to automatically price different bonds at different times of the day for different customers under a wide variety of different conditions. And we started thinking about on the one hand data analytics and I had done a masters program at NYU in business analytics recently. And then on the other hand, I started thinking about the challenges of running a business in today, particularly in the B2C world. But a lot of what I had thinking about also has applications in B2B and really thinking about internet price transparency, and the destructive effects on pricing power for companies, large and small.And so, I kind of put everything together and started really thinking about why do we think so simplistically around pricing? Why has my professional experience, as you mentioned, generally been a table of old wise men and women sort of guesstimating a price or using a sort of rudimentary cost-plus approach.And most importantly, I think with everything that's going on around us, so many of the pricing approaches fail to take into account the individual customer, or they made it an unspoken assumption of homogeneity of the customer base. Or sort of an indifference. I don't care really who buys this good or service so long as they pay a certain price.And I don't think that that's going to be a useful way of thinking about the world going forward. There's a whole host of tools at our disposal. Referred to generally as data analytics. And there's a whole host of new threats that one needs to be thoughtful about, particularly around internet-based price comparison. Browser-based automated discounting. And we could go on and on, we talk about it in the book. Put these two things together and you think to yourself, look, am I in the business of maximizing the revenue of any potential transaction in the moment, or am I actually in the business of cultivating an increasingly loyal customer base. Such that my enterprise value starts to gravitate towards sort of that have recurring revenue streams.And this conversation is applicable for businesses, large and small. And we use a lot of examples in the book, anything from a sole proprietorship, maybe a hairstylist, all the way up to multinational corporations, airlines, things like that. Brian Ardinger: And I love that thought of moving from revenue, maximization to loyalty maximization. And a lot of that probably again, hasn't been really dealt with because of technology. And now we have some tools and data and that, that we didn't have at our fingertips to make some of those leaps that we can now. What do you think is holding people back from taking advantage of some of these technologies and actually going towards a more loyalty maximization model? Cactus Raazi: You know, in my survey of the landscape, I'm not necessarily aware of an impediment to use data in increasingly sophisticated ways. As we all know, there's so many off the shelf products. There are so many courses, everything from sort of how to use Excel on Coursera, all the way to, you know, a PhD in artificial intelligence or something along those lines at the other extreme. I feel that, particularly when it comes to pricing, just to not give you too general and answer, when it comes to pricing, I feel the fundamental question has yet to be asked, are we doing this correctly?And have we really unpacked the assumptions of our approach to be thoughtful around whether this is the right approach and whether we should be using a different set of tools. You know, even industries that are renowned for their ability to differentiate with price something. We could use airlines as an example.And I'm sure at maybe at one point in your career, you were probably some form of a frequent flyer. And I'm sure you would probably agree that while you were perfectly happy to pay different prices, based on various profiles and times of day. That that was not a price for you personally, it was a price meaning that if you were to log into a website, as a loyal customer and I were to log in to the same website you and I were to try and book the same thing, we wouldn't see a difference in price. We would see a difference in price on different days or, or, you know, you name it. There's a variety of obviously supply and demand techniques. And so right there you say, well, that's a sophisticated industry, but it hasn't really moved forward with thinking about the customer, rather than thinking about any customer who's willing to sit in the seat.And that's really at the core of the suggestions in the book is to say that step one, start collecting data about your customers. Obviously in an appropriate fashion and in a transparent fashion, such that you can start to identify behaviors, objectives, or any other elements of the customer, which you can then correlate to the types of behaviors you'd like to see from your customer base.And the book really exists at the level of strategy. And frankly, this conversation exists at the level of strategy. How should we be thinking about some of these questions and are there a new set of tools to be able to answer some really interesting questions around what the right price is, and right is defined as in my case, as maximizing loyalty. And also at the same time, there's this elephant in the room, which is the internet, and mobile commerce, and browser extensions, and couponification. And how are we going to react to the impact of these sort of margin destroying developments? Brian Ardinger: Well, and you've seen examples where there have been companies that have been a little bit more in the forefront of changing algorithms and that, to look at pricing. Uber comes to mind with their surge pricing, and obviously that's trying to maximize supply and demand and things along those lines, but then you have examples when the models go wrong, such that, you know, there's something that occurs the price to scoot up and, and it caused a PR backlash, for example. What are you seeing when it comes to companies and how they react to experimenting in this particular realm and the both the good in the bad around that? Cactus Raazi: Yeah. So, we've seen a lot of experimentation with personalization in what I would refer to as the general marketing realm, such as sending people emails or potentially coupons, identifying products that you may or may not be more or less interested in. And I think that that process is in relatively early stages that traditionally has not really dealt with price with one potential exception. Sometimes you send a premium or a coupon of some sort to say, you know, for you specifically it's 20% off.But I may say in my personal experience, this use specifically thing tends to be extremely wide net. So, everyone who has bought a pair of jeans from us in the last five years gets an email that says, great news, our jeans are 20% off. Although that's a start, I don't think that that's nothing to be particularly proud of.I think, you know, you're implying a second question, which is if you provide a better experience to your better customer, does that imply you're potentially providing a degraded experience to your not better customer? And the answer to that I think almost necessarily should be, yes. At the core of thinking about generating loyalty, almost certainly must be this idea that we have to define who our customer really is or who do we want our customer to be. And we have to ensure that we're treating that group appropriately. And it may come at the expense of people who have not demonstrated any loyalty. When we think about loyalty, we don't necessarily need to define it as someone who has patronized our business for a good or a service, for example, on a very regular basis for a very long time. In fact, I'd argue even a second visit is the beginnings of an attempt at loyalty. This is now a recurring customer is different than a first visit customer. It's easy to go from there to really thinking about, well, maybe we don't define loyalty at second, but at the third visit or at the third purchase of a good or a service, we should start to really think of this customer in a differentiated manner. This person's trying to do business with us, and we should be rewarding them. I think, you know, also it's interesting that you didn't ask, but I'll just bring up. There's been so much time and energy put into recapturing customers whom you have lost. This is generally referred to as churn management in the industry. And so much time and energy into predicting and avoiding churn, which tends to be, you know, a small number is definitely single digit percentage of your customer base in any given time period. If you have numbers greater than that, you actually have a product problem. But I would argue that the amount of time and energy you put into that portion of your customer base could potentially actually be better, spent ensuring the loyalty of your customers who have already demonstrated such loyalty. If this is the 72nd month in a row, you've simply paid your T-Mobile bill. Why are you not receiving some form of an indication that the company values you? And I believe that rather than giving me a coupon that tells me I'll get $10 off at Chipotle, I would rather just receive a discounted bill. Brian Ardinger: Yeah, absolutely. What are your thoughts from the perspective of how do you set pricing in the early days when you don't have those first customers or the early data is, is a little looser or less relevant or available. And specifically like on the startup side versus existing business side. Cactus Raazi: Yeah. You know, it's interesting, you say that startup pricing is very challenging, and it is a topic that many VCs or I would say professional startup investors try to give startups help with. Sort of the heuristic approach, but obviously you need to contemplate what are the costs of various substitutes or alternative paths to solve, whatever problem it is that you're solving. Another perspective would be of course, to think about how much value you're creating for the purchaser of your good or service. What is the value creation and how much of that do you think you can capture, particularly if you're creating an entirely new category, then the pricing question is one that needs to be approached with a degree of sensitivity? One of the things I would say, so I don't know that there's a one size fits all answer, but I'm trying to give you a few parameters of the conversation. I oftentimes get the implication that pricing is a obviously a sensitive or touchy topic. And I like to suggest to startups, the companies or the customers that you choose to do business with initially, you should feel comfortable in your pricing conversations, because if they're not interested in being a, let's just say for lack of a more descriptive word, a good customer. Initially, they might not be your best place to start your commercial journey.Brian Ardinger: Well, and the fact that I think a lot of startups are afraid to experiment early on for fear of losing that first customer when it comes to price and that. But. At the early days, you don't know what you don't know. And I've heard Eric Reese tell a story of going in and working with a company, and he basically just said, double the price, let's run an experiment. And it turns out more people bought it and let's double it again. And it turns out more people bought it. But without that experimentation, your assumptions really can't be played out. Cactus Raazi: So interesting. You asked the question I was asked about a week ago. What is your one piece of advice to companies that are starting out? It was a more of a sales conversation, than specifically sort of startup, but I said, don't be afraid to ask for more in terms of prices. That you know, again as salespeople, we all tend to be a little bit more focused on getting to yes, then perhaps we need to be. And I think there's a lot that you can learn from a customer saying no, so long as they described the know or want to be your partner in getting to S, starting from a place of no is not a problem.It's very difficult to propose a price, have the customer say yes, you can say, well, in that case, maybe I should raise it. Right. That's a very awkward conversation. But to propose a price that you'd be really thrilled with, and that would really put your business on a very sound footing, and to have your potential for first customer push back, and to understand why there's pushback, I think can be obviously very illuminating as to what you should do on a going forward basis. And you'll always have the option of saying, look for a first customer or for the following reasons, or since you've been so transparent, alternatively, as well, you can say, we'll go with your lower price, but let's create some conditions for success that allow us to raise prices, you know, so long as we meet certain conditions. You can kind of create a structure to get you to where you want to be, but in a manner that the customer feels is aligned with their interests. Brian Ardinger: Absolutely. So, in the book you give a lot of great examples. Well, actually good and bad examples of how companies have taken on this topic of price. Talk about Apple and Nordstrom's and the airlines. What are some companies that are doing it better than others? Cactus Raazi: I haven't seen particularly great examples specifically around price, but I have seen some companies do a great job of customer engagement with their digital platforms. I think a pretty good example of that most people would agree with is Starbucks.They have a really user-friendly app. Funny enough when you get this thing to recharge automatically, I've noticed that instead of recharging the app at about a dollar, it recharges it about 20 bucks. And if you multiply that by billions of people, if interest rates weren't at zero, that would be a lucrative business unto itself. That's a side note. They do a great job of encouraging the use of the app. My criticism of course, is rather than giving me stars, which I can eventually cash in for one of your goods. It would be actually an even bigger thrill, if when I zapped my app, I just get a different price, as a basis of my behavior with Starbucks, sort of how I'm engaging your organization.That would be my assertion. So, I think they do a great job of collecting the information. I think they provide an excellent experience. They've had widespread adoption of this platform of theirs, and I believe that the next step would be to try to further increase their customization down to the customer level.Brian Ardinger: You've mentioned some examples in the B2C realm, and that. Are there particular industries that are more ripe for some of these pricing innovations? Cactus Raazi: So long as you define your businesses, one where you encourage repeat customer type activity. If you're in the business of building nuclear reactors, I don't think I have a lot to offer because that's such a, one-off kind of a thing.On the other hand, there are a lot of businesses that have repeat customers in some way, shape or form. And I think those are the businesses for whom this approach is most applicable. And I think in the context of startups, so often we think about SaaS businesses or sort of subscription style businesses.I mean, that's all the rage with many, not all startups, but many startups obviously. And some of these ideas also apply. I believe even when you have a subscription business and you propose that there is a price, it's not necessarily the case that that needs to be offered to all customers at all times under all conditions.So even there, I would think, you know, look, we can always advertise an initial price and then start to really think about our customer base. Why are they using their product? How are they using our product? What can we be doing to improve the channel and increase the loyalty to every one of our customers?It could be anything along the lines of, we came out with Product A. It seems to have been achieving some success. We're now launching Product B with regards to pricing. What could we do on Product B to take advantage of the loyalty we have already generated with Product A? That's the question that very few companies would ask themselves.They would say we come out with a second product and it's priced at X with no differentiation between a customer, who's never done business with them before, and this large base of customers that they have on Product A. Brian Ardinger: Or thinking more broadly about what does price mean? It doesn't, it's not necessarily just the actual price that you pay for that good or service, but it's the services wrapped around that that can augment or change the value creation or the loyalty around it. Cactus Raazi: 100%. That's exactly correct. And I think that the statement you just made is something that so often slips through the cracks in our fundamental approach to coming up with a price. You know, you think a lot about what your input costs may have been or various other elements, and you forget to think about well if a customer has done a lot of business with us in the past, shouldn't we treat them differently. And the other thing I would say by the way as part and parcel of this conversation is also the broader customer experience. I argue that price is a really important sort of a fulcrum of the customer experience. But in today's day and age, the scarcity is all the rage and limited additions and one-offs, and all of these things are also, you know, very much becoming fashionable. So, it's not always the case that you need to necessarily discount. We're really saying price to the customer, but it may be something along the lines of, we have a limited-edition item and you're getting access to it, even though it's actually at a premium.Brian Ardinger: So, what else in the book have we maybe not covered that you want to make sure our audience understands they can get some value out of it. Cactus Raazi: We've covered a lot of the approaches. We haven't spent a lot of time on the threats, and we talk a little bit about in the book about not only is e-commerce sort of gravitating towards generally towards price displayed user interfaces.And of course, with mobile, that starts to be happening in real time, even in the brick-and-mortar environment. But really, we talk also about, it's not likely that we'll be doing traditional website based commerce, forever voice assistance, and other further automation is creeping slowly but surely into our lives.And if you think about that, it becomes even scarier because it's not likely that these paradigms with the voice assistance and with other additional levels of automation would offer anything other than the lowest price. Why would your voice assistant tell you that the same good are services available at three different prices?Right. That's sort of annoying. And you'd say, just give me the cheapest one, right? That we all gravitate to that. So, we mentioned that only because even if you feel that you can handle the current levels of competition and price transparency that are being generated by the internet and by the browser extensions, and by the coupon crawlers and all the things that already exist. It's important to recognize that there are additional levels of threat that are only going to further erode your pricing power, unless you're starting to price to the customer, which is no longer widely available. We are seeing very early signs of such a thing, such as you go to a website and you need to input your email address prior to being allowed access to the experience. So, we're seeing early signs and I think that thinking a lot about the threats of technology and the deflationary impact of technologies is another important part of what we bring up in the book Brian Ardinger: The last topic I want to talk about is COVID-19 and how that may have affected and made the changing landscape of pricing and that.  What kind of examples are things have you seen from this acceleration of this disrupted world?Cactus Raazi: It's funny, I'm glad you used the word acceleration because that's exactly the word that I think is the appropriate word. They call it the great accelerant and I've seen all of that. So yeah. What we've seen, I'm sure as you've seen is we've seen significant changes in behavior. And I think that we've seen as so much more of our activity has gone from analog to digital, we've seen a lot more opportunities to capture information about with whom we're doing business and various elements of our customer base and start to use those things. I have not necessarily seen tangible impact of such, but clearly, most companies at this point have gotten the wakeup call that the shift to electronic commerce, which was always obviously underway, has now only accelerated.And I think what you're going to start to see in my humble opinion Is providers of platforms such as Shopify or big commerce, really start to think about how can we give our users additional tools to help them do more business and do better business with their customers. And I think so between the CRMs and the sort of e-commerce platforms, I think we will likely see a fair amount of innovation.Brian Ardinger: Well, Cactus, thank you very much for coming on Inside Outside Innovation, to tell us a little bit more about this. It's a fascinating topic. And like I said, so important and often overlooked topic when it comes to innovation and that. If people want to find out more about yourself or the book, what's the best way to do that?Cactus Raazi: Probably LinkedIn I'm on LinkedIn Cactus, like the plant, Razi is R A A Z I.  Easy to find me and I love to hear from people and I'm happy to be helpful. I'm not in the business of consulting. I have no agenda. I'm just trying to be helpful for its own sake. Brian Ardinger: Excellent. Well, we appreciate you sharing your knowledge here today, and thanks very much for coming on the show. Look forward to continuing the conversation as the world evolves. Cactus Raazi: Absolute pleasure. Good luck.Brian Ardinger: That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLSGet the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HEREFor more innovations resources, check out IO's Innovation Article Database, Innovation Tools Database, Innovation Book Database, and Innovation Video Database.

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