Andy Binns on Innovation and Identifying Corporate Explorers

Andy Binns on Innovation and Identifying Corporate Explorers

[00:00:00] Andrew Binns: Welcome to be customer lad, where we’ll explore how leading experts in customer and employee experience are navigating organizations through their own journey to be customer led and the accidents and behaviors of lawyers and businesses exhibit to get there. And now your host of Bill’s staikos.

[00:00:33] Bill Staikos: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to be customer led. I’m your host bill steakhouse. I have a very special guest for us this week. Andy bins is director and co-founder of change logic, LLC. And we’re going to get into a little bit about what Andy does a change logic. he’s also co-author of a book. Fantastic book corporate Explorer.

[00:00:51] He’s co-founder of the corporate Explorer’s club. He’s a fast company, executive board member, and that’s where we got hooked up. And then he’s an innovation adviser and a keynote speaker. I don’t know where you find all the time, man. And welcome to the be customer led. It’s great to have

[00:01:03] Andrew Binns: here. Thank you very much, bill.

[00:01:05] Delighted. thanks for the invitation. Oh my

[00:01:07] Bill Staikos: gosh. This is a really interesting show. I mean, the book that you wrote is really about. Larger corporations can really beat sort of the startups and other smaller companies at the innovation game, really important topic, but also just the way you laid out the book was fantastic.

[00:01:26] And I, for those who are listening, go out and go buy the book and we’re going to get into parts of the book because there’s some really interesting things I want to dig in on before we do that. You’ve got a really interesting background. I was hoping if you can share with our listeners the journey. Yes.

[00:01:39] Andrew Binns: Thank you. and thanks for the kind words about the book it’s, corporate Explorer is, is sort of a thing I’ve been thinking about for a long time. And although the title only came relatively recently, that there’s lots of threads that have been in, in my career. I was in marketing originally and. I went to an interview with a consulting firm from marketing job.

[00:02:03] And the guy interviewing me said, you’re a natural consultants. What’s one of those. And so that’s, that was a real sort of, insight and, Fortunate to work for a few years at McKinsey and company, and then at IBM and really the IBM experience. I mean, McKenzie is a phenomenal institution. We can talk about a great deal.

[00:02:23] I mean, this, in some respects, it taught me what I don’t want to do in the future. He told me how I had the exact opposite, the change logic consulting, the exact opposite way to McKinsey. But the IBM experience was, was, was tremendous because I was fortunate to be there at a point sort of when the great turnaround led by Lou Gerstner had kind of been successful and they were trying to figure out how do they establish new sources of growth?

[00:02:49] And so they created this emerging business opportunity program, which I got to work on with the head of strategy at that point, Bruce Harold. And that’s really the, sort of the epicenter. And I had these two business school professors to work. candidly, I wasn’t even sure what a business school was at that point.

[00:03:04] I hadn’t been to one. and I, but here I was with a Harvard and the Stanford professor, and then a few years later, I set up a business with them, which has changed logic. And now we’ve written this book together.

[00:03:14] Bill Staikos: Fantastic. So the book is really thought provoking. In fact, I think, kind of alluded to at the top of a top of the show, it really goes against sort of conventional wisdom.

[00:03:23] Even on some level during my days at JP Morgan, we always talked about, can you innovate faster than the, than the startup can scale? Right. Cause we were so large, that was a big, big conversation. And still is, there are many ways, how do you think of that? So like, why did you like, let’s start? Like, why did you, I’m always curious about.

[00:03:42] One cause I know I don’t have the guts to actually write my own book, but why did you write the book? And can you share, like with our listeners, maybe like one to two surprises that you uncovered during your research to any aha

[00:03:51] Andrew Binns: moments? Yeah, we, we have, the book has the subtitle, right? Corporate Explorer.

[00:03:57] How corporations beat startups at the innovation game and, we could have made. How cooperation sometimes occasionally might be able to, but we went for the slightly more provocative and we went for the more provocative, because it is true. It’s not always true. It’s always hard in my experience.

[00:04:19] I don’t think there’s any, any point at which is

[00:04:20] Bill Staikos: easy for

[00:04:21] Andrew Binns: startups, right? I mean, hello. And I would say that was one of the surprises as I was doing the research, talking to people who are in venture led startups, trying to understand, make sure that, I was reflecting their part of the story in this as well.

[00:04:36] They were the least likely people to disagree with me. Right. They would all say. This is hard for us as well. You think a CEO and a management board is hard to get funding. We’ll go try talking to a VC fund. You might only have a five-year horizon. We talk about them having all their in for the long term.

[00:04:52] Well, five years that long, right? Okay. Many of them will come from multiple rounds on my third round funding. VC might disagree by first round, so, so there’s a lot of tensions in it. And of course there’s huge numbers of. Benefits and opportunities that our startup gets from its increased flexibility.

[00:05:10] Yeah. But the scale question, that’s the one that really sets apart the corporations, if they can figure out how to unlock what they already have in getting this

[00:05:21] Bill Staikos: done. Yeah, for sure. I know the ability. AB test with millions of customers out of the gate. I really can add a ton of value in the first. So I, you, you have the book broken out in a number of sections, the first section of the book, explore aspiration.

[00:05:39] You talk about the concept of corporate Explorer. So tell us about these individuals, like who they are, what makes them different. And, and as a leader of teams, even in. I’m always looking out for these types in my group, in my organization. Right. Because how do I make sure that we’re motivating these individuals?

[00:05:57] We’re giving them. The flexibility to flex the corporate explore muscle, so to speak. So I’m curious, like how do you define it and who, what do they look

[00:06:06] Andrew Binns: like typically? Yeah. Yeah. So let me start a little bit further back to answer that. Cause I think, I think that’s a piece of the context as to who they are in a corporation.

[00:06:13] That’s important because we know that. It’s hard to do this in large corporations. And there’s this long list of companies that have suffered from disruption and disappeared or gone into bankruptcy, Kodak, Polaroid, Nokia, the story. Right. So we know, and, and when we look at them, mostly it is not because they didn’t have the innovation Netflix.

[00:06:37] Offer themselves for sale to blockbuster Kodak had a digital photography. Polaroid had the first megapixel camera in the market in healthcare, right? So it’s not a question not having the insight. The question is. Can they get it done? And so one of the things is that that, that they’re not listening, right.

[00:06:59] Is that they’re not listening to what they’ve got. They don’t listening to the opportunity, not valuing it. And that’s what the corporate Explorer does is the really good corporate Explorer sort of punk. That bubble candidly leadership teams very often have around their business that makes them believe it’ll just continue and continue and continue.

[00:07:18] And they, they do this with an insight and, and, and they must be customer led. in my view to really do this, yes, there are technology led startups within corporations. Well, we should talk about that. So yeah, what, what, I feature in, in the book where we feature in the book is the story of people who are, who are grabbed by a passion.

[00:07:40] They see something in the world. Th they think should be different, just like an entrepreneur would. And in a way what’s, what’s different is that they are transforming an industry. They’re already a part of. So an example of this would be, the example we start with of Christian Kertesz at the, Austrian, insurance company.

[00:08:00] That’s a

[00:08:00] Bill Staikos: fascinating story that you brought up. I wasn’t familiar with it until you, until I read it. I mean, incredible

[00:08:06] Andrew Binns: Christian is this, this awesome guy humble. Smart as hell. Yeah, really, really being a long time insurance company executive, and he’s managing the Hungarian business of this European multi-billion dollar insurance company.

[00:08:23] And it’s not hungry is not a very large country. I mean, it’s a hungry, but it’s not a huge right. And so for him to go to the CEO, which through a series of steps, he gets to the CEO with this radical concept that says everything you think about your business. You don’t need a, and the, he actually has this charts where he has a tower on office tower.

[00:08:48] This is the insurance company today. And next to it, he has little tiny one single story building. This is how many people I need to replicate it today. Right. Because. Yeah, technology, business models as such, you don’t need all of these folks over here in this big and all of the cost that goes with it. If you’re already trying to solve the customer’s problem, rather than just perpetuate the existence of an, of the insurance company.

[00:09:14] And, and he’s fortunate, his CEO says this is like a nuclear bomb underneath our industry, and we’ve got to do it. And this is, this is the story is. Leaders with a passion driven by an insight with yeah. The skill to tell the story and get the attention that they need in order to get started.

[00:09:34] Bill Staikos: How important?

[00:09:35] Well, I guess it’s it’s everything, right? If that CEO didn’t say let’s do this, it would have died on the vine. He may have gone out externally, right. As an example.

[00:09:44] Andrew Binns: Well, he had, he had external, funding options. Yeah.

[00:09:48] Bill Staikos: Yeah. The point around being a. Tech forward business. Maybe we can, we can call it. How important is that?

[00:09:56] Because, in that case, and in many cases where you see this, they’re almost taking a platform approach to the business model. Right. I think about lemonade here in the U S right, as completely. And I’m a customer has completely up-ended insurance in a major way. And just sort of the way that’s done.

[00:10:13] How important is it for. The organization to be tech savvy or tech forward does being, so maybe, I guess my question is to being so make sure that you got the right mindset internally to be able to do this kind of work and rethink the way that. You’ve done business for the last 50, a hundred, 200 years.

[00:10:34] Andrew Binns: Yeah. And it, one of the things that’s noticeable about the book, which we wrestled with a little bit now, one of my colleagues, one of my co-authors, I won’t say which was like, can’t we put an example in here. That’s not a digital business transformation. Andy, come on, there must be something else going on in the world.

[00:10:51] And I’m like, yeah, there is. But right now, it’s not important, relatively speaking. Right? So many of the innovations that we see in, in whatever sector you’re in have some flavor of, of digital technologies, of some kind or AI or machine learning. There’s something that has to do with learning to add that to a solution, to solve a problem.

[00:11:18] One of the things that that does is it means that you’ve got to find access to those capabilities for sure. No question. But these ventures also teach, right? They’re sort of incubators of capability and culture of what the future’s going to look like. And so I think that’s what Christian is doing at Unica.

[00:11:39] I think that, we talk about Kevin Carlin at analog devices and semiconductors firms are in some ways quite bad. In a lot of their business processes and activities and market view because they haven’t needed to be because the only thing they needed to do is generate chips and actually amusing we’re back in that situation now with them.

[00:12:01] Right. And so what, what Kevin does is he chose analog devices. What the future looks like in terms of how you can create offerings, that connect Silicon to the cloud and analytics and all of the possibilities that, that.

[00:12:16] Bill Staikos: So very, very cool. You bring up in the book, sort of the three, three innovation disciplines, ideation incubate.

[00:12:24] And scale that’s right. A, B VCG has almost a similar model. I’ve seen like, similar. I love how you get just the simplicity of it though. And how you break this out in the book is really important. How do you think about the customer, even the employee or even the broader workforce even has an example as part of the success to move through these.

[00:12:43] Andrew Binns: Yeah. Good. So I’m going to start that answer with one kind of response and I’m going to appear to radically disagree with myself. Okay. The expectation. Well, wait a minute. What’s he talking about now? So the first thing you have to say is that employees are at some level, one of your most important sources of information and possibilities.

[00:13:10] This is, this is for Mo any organization of scale. This is a ready-made crowd, right? But you should be leveraging very actively to see the future of innovation. One of the folks we work with occasionally is. Simon. I remember a second. I was on, Zuku anyway, which is one of these idea platforms. And Simon has this great phrase where he talks about that.

[00:13:33] Innovation is at the same stage of development as CRM was 20 years ago. Right. And that at some point we will be able to aggregate information about all of the ideas that we’ve ever had or ever tested or experimented with. And so when we have that idea again, Well, when the market matures, it makes it possible.

[00:13:53] Again, we can go back and we can see what we’ve done and so on. And so I think there’s tremendous opportunity in tapping into employees and obviously network partners and ecosystems and whatever big fan of that kind of thinking. And now let me disagree with myself, right. And this is that, that is also a true.

[00:14:12] Right. And the trap is the innovation zoo. There’s something about creating ideas and generating possibilities. That is. To humans. We just love being involved in that. And the thing about the ideate incubate scale approach is that it needs, you need to recognize the money gets made in the scale. It doesn’t get made in the ideation.

[00:14:35] And so if you’re not careful, you’ll get trapped, generating ideas. And it’s very fun. It’s con and it’s it’s time consuming and it’s risk-free because you don’t really have relatively speaking, you haven’t spent very much money on. Yeah. Yeah. So the trick is to think about how you do ideation in a world.

[00:14:56] That is focused towards things that you want to do that you want to invest in. So we talk in the book as you point out about having an ambition, having a really clear sort of compelling strategic ambition. The one I liked best is MasterCard’s under RJ banker, right? the financial services guy he is, and he’s like, we want to wage a war on cash and I want to convert.

[00:15:22] 85% of those transactions to our business. So he’s, he’s giving me an ambition that’s really compelling, but also I I’ve got something I can anchor it in terms of knowing what I’ve got to achieve. And so. Oh, well, where can I achieve that? You’ve got to frame up what are the hunting zones, where I’m going to hunt to realize that ambition and that narrows the space, it bounds your innovation.

[00:15:47] And then I’ll come to my crowd and I’ll say, okay, crowd, what are the customer problems that really matter? Or, here are the customer problems we see in the, in the hunting zone. How, how would you solve them? What’s your insight. Then you can use that employee energy, that customer energy, the ecosystem.

[00:16:03] To, to a more directed purpose. I think. So.

[00:16:06] Bill Staikos: I want to come back to the three disciplines, but I have a follow-up question for you because there are a lot of platforms out there that are crowdsourcing innovation across your workforce. Fantastic platforms. I’ve used them in the PLA in the past. But if I take it back to what you just said, though, right?

[00:16:21] Where you’ve got people kind of voting up ideas as an example, do you get out of that trap or do you need to be. Crowdsourcing plus focused to, to really be able to tease out the best ideas that will have the most impact, because oftentimes it’s what ideas do you have to improve communication, whatever that means, or what ideas do you have to improve our business?

[00:16:44] And you get the salad in the lunch room. Isn’t so good too. Yeah, very, very big, obviously their employees, great employees everywhere who have wonderful ideas that can get voted up, but sometimes also can get kind of drowned out. So do you have to do both to really tap into your workforce?

[00:17:01] Andrew Binns: So for me, it’s about being focused.

[00:17:05] I think there’s another dimension of employee engagements. there’s a different objective you might view for motivation and so on, but even then I want to make sure things have. Right. Cause it’s just having a point of view is not right. It’s going to happen here. But, so, and there’s another way I can point to where, where I feel that this question of being sort of objective led non pipeline led.

[00:17:32] This is a distinction somebody drew the other day in an article. I read, I think this captures what we’re saying exactly right. That I want to be threaded through. What am I trying to achieve here? And take what steps I need to get there in scale, you have the same story, right? In scaling for me, people wait too long before they think about how they’re going to scale a new venture.

[00:17:55] I want to know right upfront, what’s your hypothesis. What’s this going to look like? And where are you going to get access to? How are you going to get access to capabilities? How are you going to get access to capacity, to bring this to scale? And I want to know that now, because I may need to buy some pretty big stuff, right?

[00:18:13] Again, use your balance sheet is a key part of a, of a corporate scaling plan to make that happen.

[00:18:19] Bill Staikos: Really interesting. So on the three disciplines, my question is how do when you’re ready to move to the next discipline? Like, are there any kind of tells in there that.

[00:18:29] Andrew Binns: Good. I think that the, the shift from ideation to incubation comes about when you’ve got evidence that you’ve, you’ve got a customer problem, that there is a sort of the qualitative answer that, well, what the design thinking people talk about with, of desirability, right?

[00:18:46] You’ve got evidence of desirability and you’ve got some quantification. That solving that problem is, is feasible. And you’ve got at least some notions of feasibility and, and, and one of the other ones come in, because you want to be able to then frame up, a business design or business model hypothesis.

[00:19:08] And that’s what you’re going to test. And one of the things I see people do is go to incubation too quickly without having articulated what it is that they’re testing as a business. Right? So, so what’s the problem. Why have we got the most compelling answer to that problem? How are we going to make money?

[00:19:26] Who are the potential partners within this? Why would we be differentiated? You need those things stated, even if you don’t know you’re right. Especially if you don’t know your rights, this is just a straight lift from the scientific method, right. Scientists start with a hypothesis, they test out whether something’s going to work.

[00:19:45] Right. And so that’s the first step. If you, if you can frame up your business design with clarity on a customer problem, and you’ve got another. By way of the quality of answer, then you can move to incubation. The tip from incubation into scaling is much harder, unquestionably, much harder. the textbook answer is you validated all of these hypothesis.

[00:20:09] Well, that’s not necessarily the way it plays out, right? The reality is there’s a judgment, which is you validated. To give you or to give your investor sufficient confidence that it’s worth the next, the next step and that you never really stop experiments. Well, you do stop, but, but you, you don’t stop for some times.

[00:20:29] And this is where, the, the, the requirements of a book, actually blur reality. Yes. We say ideate, incubate scale, but nothing’s quite so linear. It’s a really complex world. So I think there’s a point at which you’re scaling and you’re still experimented, particularly on things like go to market.

[00:20:47] Right? What’s the go to market approach is often something you’re still testing, even as you’re starting to try out channels that do seem to work and trying to get revenue. Got

[00:20:59] Bill Staikos: it. Yeah. I mean, even if you think about sort of like the classic model of business stages, right. You’ve got startup growth, scale maturity, right?

[00:21:07] I mean, somewhere between incubation and scale, you’re still growing like crazy. That’s where you’re testing and learning things are changing. You’re adding people trying to raise capital, et cetera. Really, really interesting. Let’s talk about ambidextrous organization or the organizational structure, right.

[00:21:22] And team structures for that matter from your recent. Or even just your opinion, like, what do you feel is the optimal way? Could you talk a little bit about this in a book? What do you do you see an optimal way to set up these ventures and set them up for success? Now there’s a couple of different models that you go into, but do you have a

[00:21:40] Andrew Binns: preference?

[00:21:41] Yeah. Yeah. Good. And you’re very subtly saying. Yeah, but you don’t quite tell us what to do. Do you write?

[00:21:46] Bill Staikos: No, no, no. You got to decide for yourself. Right. But I’m curious. That’s what I was reading. I’m like, well, I wonder which one he likes, so that’s why I

[00:21:52] Andrew Binns: keep it. Let, let, let me see. Let me see if I can answer that a little bit.

[00:21:56] It’s I would say it’s the thing that I am most likely to get paid to, to help people. Right. Smart answer. because it’s kind of, it is the most vaccine in all kinds of ways. Yeah. Just for your listeners. This notion of the ambidextrous organization is, is one that Michael Tashman and Charles O’Reilly are best associated with in, in, academic circles.

[00:22:20] They’ve written about it for 25 years and others have come along with versions of. There are people who talk about dual strategies and Juul transformation. It’s the same thing. They just borrowed it from, from ambidextrous organization. And to be fair, Michael and Charles took it from others in, in the past who talked about core and explore and exploiting the restaurant.

[00:22:40] So the basic principle, I boil down to three things. Firstly, that it’s an organization with a shared ambient. All right. So you, everything you’re doing is in service of an ambition. Like what war on cash or, or, or some of the others we can talk about, then you have autonomy for the explore business from the.

[00:23:02] They can operate with sufficient freedom to make decisions about how to operate what their culture is, what their structure is. To some degree, what their compensation is, can be separate, and that can be autonomy. And then the third piece is that they can still access the assets of the coal business in order to go faster than this.

[00:23:24] Right. And of course it’s the access bits that, that causes the most challenge, because this is the place where you’re, dealing with the, the, the, the little rowboat against the, the oil tanker. Right. and so how do you, how do you interface the two is where things become most difficult?

[00:23:41] My questions to, which one works is always. Contextual based on what you’re trying to achieve and what the nature of the innovation is. So the more radical and innovation. So this morning I was talking to a, a large German company and the corporate Explorer I was talking to was, was w w they were, they were doing something which was entirely different markets.

[00:24:05] Their work in automotive. This is in healthcare, right. And, highly different capabilities. Not entirely different, cause it’s still their same core technologies, but taken into, they actually made some new inventions on top of what they did previous here. You’ve got to keep that pretty separate from the rest of the business.

[00:24:25] Right. So I want it to be fairly separate, partly because the core business isn’t going to understand, that they’re going to try and impose all of the models that they used to, to the new business. So you’ve you don’t, haven’t got that separate. You’re really gonna struggle. The other part of it is what are you trying to achieve?

[00:24:43] And this is where we come back to this notion of what are you teaching to the business, what capability you building and in a world where everybody’s going to need to understand about AI. Digital business models, monthly active users, all of these kinds of AB testing. As you mentioned earlier, all of these kinds of pieces of the digital world you’re going to have, if you keep that to separate, what have you learned?

[00:25:10] What have you built? Right. So for me the, yes, separate, but not so separate. That it isn’t able to teach the rest of the business, these things, and that it has sufficient alignment to the business that it’s going to be able to carry on using its assets to go faster. So that means that the sales team is going to play a role.

[00:25:32] That’s often a great asset sometimes can be troubled, but, but it’s often a great asset that you’re going to get at. Preferential access to manufacturing, if that’s what you need, or in the case of the insurance example, that the actuaries are going to be there helping you put your products together and so on.

[00:25:47] So that access piece remains important

[00:25:49] Bill Staikos: as well. Oh man, that’s, that’s an awesome perspective. One of the, one of the toughest things in any organization, whether it’s new, getting people to think about new products, getting team structures to change people change is just changing itself in the book. You kind of talk about the corporate Explorer.

[00:26:07] Kind of leading with the innovation, but also leading the change as well. And being the change agent, what advice do you have for corporate explorers about their, who might be listening right about this and, and where can, what questions maybe they need to ask? Where could they start? Because. you’ve got Kotter’s model, you’ve got the ADKAR model, right?

[00:26:28] There’s a couple of different kinds of change processes out there that you can certainly follow. But what advice do you have for corporate explorers out there on the change piece? Cause that, it sounds like they’ve got the innovation piece down, but maybe not so much the change management

[00:26:38] Andrew Binns: skills. I think that’s where I believe it is.

[00:26:40] You do need to have both change and innovation. Corporate Explorer is always both, just like an entrepreneur is always selling, right? They’re always selling to their VC to customers over there is always on the, so in the corporate Explorer world, they’ve got to lead change. The most important thing from our research is they’ve got to build a social network or where leadership movement around that innovation.

[00:27:03] And so they’ve, they’ve really got to look at who are the people around them, not just the people of. Right. Not just the manager or the sponsor, but also the peer. that they have, and maybe even some people and other teams and departments who they, whose help they might need or who for various reasons may have the ability to undermine them.

[00:27:25] Right. and so, and we, we come to this insight because of the research we’ve done. What we find is that, the, the leaders that struggle most are those that come in from outside and have no social net. Now unknown quantities. They may have skills. They may have insights. They may have things that are really valuable, but what they lack is the human influence.

[00:27:46] And so you’re looking for who are my allies, who are the people in this organization who are going to be able to do things for me, are willing maybe to work even when it’s not there their job, right? Because they believe in what I’m doing. Who are your advocates? Who are those folks who you’re going to have a coffee with, or a virtual coffee with and tell your story so that they may retell that story to others and, and speak up for you.

[00:28:14] Right? and then, you’re going to have some people who are never going to move, who are always going to be opponents. Candidly. Some of them are like from central. I, there, there are, there, there are just some archetypes out there. Yeah. The business unit leader. or product line leader who just doesn’t get it is a very common archetype and you need an ambassador.

[00:28:37] You need to say, Hey bill, could you go speak to Jean or Fred and, and try to explain to them what we’re doing and why actually it may help them in the long run to, to support us. Right? And, and if, and if they trust you more than me, then. Then maybe I’ll get a little bit of more ad time from them.

[00:28:52] So you’re going to work this network in a very personal way in order to get, get to your

[00:28:57] goal.

[00:28:58] Bill Staikos: Yeah, I was, I was actually wondering when I was going through that, that part of the book. I was wondering if, if there’s ever an instance where the innovator or the idea person is different than the change person going out and building the network and can.

[00:29:13] Well, I guess this comes down to the company and the person with the idea, nonetheless, but could you separate those out and say, you’re the idea person, but you’re the sales person. You go motivate the business. if you look at some of the famous startups, they often have an insider and an outsider.

[00:29:27] Andrew Binns: That’s right. Jerry Yang at Yahoo and the other one. And I’m trying to think of the. Google folks, they had the same Sergei Brin and Larry Page. Yeah. And so in a way that kind of duality is one that I think is a, is a smart step for a corporate Explorer to

[00:29:46] Bill Staikos: take. Yeah. I really love your, this concept of productive tension and keeping people in this.

[00:29:54] So, if you could share it with our listeners, what, and I don’t want to, obviously I don’t wanna give away too much of the book. I want really people to buy this book because actually it’s really important. Particularly if you work in a law in a large enterprise, tell our audience around what productive tension is and how do corporate explorers create it and keep people in those zones.

[00:30:10] Andrew Binns: Yeah. Good. Good. So let me answer that with a little bit of a story. So one of the most famous efforts. To create a new venture inside an established corporations. The last decade has been at G and G is effort to create this Predix platform and to create a sort of, make GE a top 10 software company.

[00:30:33] That was the ambition framed by Jeff Immelt in like 2012. Right? Hmm. Well, it’s interesting. And we might touch when talk to bill, Rood’s done a case, bill Rue was the leader of this edgy as has done a case on, on Bill’s efforts. And what becomes clear from all of this is that bill was you’re working without all of the, equipment to get his job done, basically.

[00:30:57] And, to cut a long story short, the real, the real reason was that Jim Jeff. I didn’t want to have the tough conversation with his leaders to say, okay, you agree with my vision? And that means your going to have to give up something. Right. It doesn’t mean all gravy for you. Actually, you’re going to have to give up something.

[00:31:19] And why? Because like most humans he liked to maximize comfort is my hypothesis. I’ve never met Jim at Jeff ML, but my guess is that that affable exterior and he yells and shouts. I’m sure that this is also his reputation, but when it comes to really direct person, Conflict with a peer who you who’s helped you need, right.

[00:31:42] Leaders have a hard time doing the CEOs, have a hard time doing this. And so this notion of productive tension is all about putting into the conversation, the real issues and bringing, making things more transparent. And there are a few things that our corporate Explorer can do to help with this. Some of it is always being transparent themselves.

[00:32:03] Right. They’ve got to manage that reputation so that there is just as honest about where things aren’t working as when things are, because otherwise people will very quickly found them out. and the, that the unfairness of the world is such that that evidence will be treated much more seriously than the good stuff.

[00:32:21] Right. It’s just the way it is. Right. So you’ve got, gotta be really transparent. The second thing is to use some techniques and we talk, we, we describe a few of them. Forgetting the senior team to do the same. So one of the examples we give is of, my, my friend, Eric Cruz shits in, in Australia, who’s then built on the success they had with the first innovation that created an innovation unit in, in, in, una.

[00:32:45] And Eric brings to the senior team that sort of a self-evaluation. Hey team, his eight criteria, doing this well. how do you think you’re doing? And it turns out they don’t think they’re doing as well as they want to either. Right. And so that sort of practice of holding up a mirror, help people see themselves because, usually when, when you’re not sort of being told you are wrong, you’re like, yeah, actually this isn’t, we, we, we’re not quite where we were.

[00:33:13] Let’s figure out how to get better. And I think one of the things I really feel I’d like people to take from this book is that the senior team, the CEO that even that archetypal central casting business unit manager, right. They’re not making a bad decision. They’re not making, an irrational or ill intention decision when they make judgements that are against innovation or it’s like, they’re just playing their.

[00:33:39] And they’re doing their best job. And, and these, these things are. Right. And you’ve got to help figure your way through the sort of the, competing commitments to sustaining what we have versus creating something new. And that, that that’s the job of the corporate Explorer. So

[00:33:55] Bill Staikos: I, it’s, it’s funny when I was going through this book, I w I was hearkening back to the mid 1990s when the internet was really coming to the fore and I actually was having a conversation.

[00:34:06] And on this show, actually, it’s not, Shaw’s been published, but she was the first chief innovation officer for top three. the conversation she was having, people are like, why should I change? Why is the internet important to me right now? This kind of now around this time you have AI machine learning.

[00:34:22] And I was thinking the next 10 years metaverse and just opportunities to innovate, particularly if you’re a large organization, because you do have that scale to be able to test and learn and really get that new platform for engaging your customers in different ways and innovating your business in different ways.

[00:34:40] How important that must be in like, I’m really excited to see the corporate explorers kind of diving into that space and what we will see over the next 10 years as an

[00:34:48] Andrew Binns: example, I think that’s right. And what, what were the things we’re trying to do here is speak to something that’s changed. Corporate explorers have been around for decades and can take back to the 1960s and the creation of the ATM machine by the 300 year old company dollar Rue.

[00:35:06] Right? Yeah. But, but, but they, but recently last 10, 15 years, people have got that. There’s no option other than to do this for the reasons you state we’ve looked at the past, we see the disruption threat. We see the world changing even faster. We’ve got to get on board with it. We’ve got to figure out how to do this.

[00:35:22] This is no longer optional. And those who don’t talk are left behind.

[00:35:26] Bill Staikos: I wonder if you can create a recruiting strategy around corporate explorers, that could be actually an interesting differentiator for your company and your book was really inspirational for me. I hope that our listeners do go out and I’m sure they’ll get an inspiration.

[00:35:40] Where do you go for inspiration? I’m curious, where do I

[00:35:43] Andrew Binns: go for inspiration? Well, I also go to inspiration. Books. I’m reading this book, by Rebecca Henderson at the moment re-imagining capitalism, which I find very inspiring because I do feel that something fundamental we need to rethink about the participant or your POS system.

[00:36:00] I also love to read the MIT technology review. I’m not a technologist, but I love the sort of. The, the, the possibilities that are out there, the innovation that does start in the lab, and the, and the incredible, brilliance of science, but, but also look at history, a great deal, and, and the history of science in particular, in the way in which our world advances through this lots of experiments, lots of failures, lots of possibility.

[00:36:26] it’s a, it’s a con and, and, and lots of happy accidents as well. Yeah, for sure. It’s a, it’s

[00:36:31] Bill Staikos: a constant discussion. And one last question for you, Annie. I’m really grateful for you for your time today, and you being on the show, who do you look up to in this space?

[00:36:40] Andrew Binns: Who do I look up to like

[00:36:42] Bill Staikos: interest an industry?

[00:36:43] Like, do you have anyone in industry that you’re like, here’s a model person that you look up to? So

[00:36:50] Andrew Binns: I don’t know if I, I have a model person. Exactly. Cause I, I, it sort of implies this sort of a, a level of perfection, but I don’t think any of us should

[00:37:02] Bill Staikos: go for maybe are there business leaders.

[00:37:05] Andrew Binns: Yeah, without question.

[00:37:06] And one of them we talk about in the book is Jensen Wong, right at Nvidia. And so here’s my story with Jensen one, 2015. I think it is. I get on the phone with him for a client project and we’re trying to understand his strategy and so on. And at that point, The stock price is like $23. And I listened to him and he’s telling me, and I described the conversations book and he’s telling me about this strategy he has and the insight and the vision and the rest of it.

[00:37:37] And I, wow. This guy’s amazing. Put down the phone and the client’s CFO is with us and he says, yeah, but it’s stocks in the toilet. It’s gone up 8000% since. And I bought none of it. I bet the CFO bought a ton of it because he’s much smarter than I, I do find him very inspirational because of his capacity to, to see stuff to commit, he committed 30% of revenue to R and D to go after AI.

[00:38:03] Deep computing, autonomous driving. He, he really committed and he committed so long ago that you can’t claim that it was luck. Yeah, he had some lucky turns on the way, but I think it’s very, very inspiring.

[00:38:15] Bill Staikos: Very cool. All right. Andy bins, director and co-founder of change logic, LLC, and also the author of corporate Explorer.

[00:38:22] How corporations beat startups at the innovation game. Thanks so much for coming on. Be customer led. It has been. Delighted

[00:38:29] Andrew Binns: bill. Thank

[00:38:29] Bill Staikos: you very much. All right, everybody. Another great episode. We’re out.

[00:38:34] Andrew Binns: Thanks for listening to be customer led with bill staikos. We are grateful to our audience for the gift of their time.

[00:38:42] Be sure to visit us@becustomerled.com for more episodes. Leave us feedback on how we’re doing or tell us what you want to hear more about until next time.