Inside Outside

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Tamara Ghandour, Author of Innovation is Everybody's Business. Tamara and I talk about innovation, what it means today in today's changing environment, and what individuals and teams can do to build their innovation muscles. Let's get started.

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

Interview Transcript with Tamara Ghandour

Brian Ardinger:  Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Tamara Ghandour. She's the Author of Innovation is Everybody's Business: How to Ignite, Scale, and Sustain Innovation for Competitive Edge.

You also have a podcast called Inside Launch Street, which I had great opportunity to be on last week when we recorded. And we said, Hey, let's get you on our show and let's share the community. So welcome. 

Tamara Ghandour: Thank you, Brian, it's good to see you again. It's been so long. 

Brian Ardinger: It's nice to have you on our show. You know, obviously our audience is probably overlapped to some degree, but I thought it'd be an important to get you on our show to talk a little bit about what you're seeing out there in the world of innovation. 

And one of the reasons I liked your book and some of the stuff that you're doing...it's not just about the people, it's about the mechanics behind it and the blocking and tackling, and you even have an Innovation Quotient Edge Assessment that people can go through to find out how they can be coming an innovator and that.

Tamara Ghandour: We believe very strongly, and I think science has also shown us that everybody has the ability to innovate. I've been in innovation 25, I don't know so many years, I can't even count now, but you know, this because you're in it too. There was a lot of focus on the process and the initiatives and the kind of structure of innovation. But what I kept seeing time and time again, is that those efforts failed. 

And when I really kind of dug into it, what I really realized is that they're failing because they weren't focusing on the people side. Like how do we as humans innovate? How do we unlock that in ourselves and our teams? How do we tap the power of diversity of thinking. How do we drive it from the inside to the outside, to the culture and kind of bubbling up from there.

So I think over the years, that's why our business has transformed into what it is. And why its been successful is because we get people at an individual anda team level to recognize their power of innovation and how to apply that in their daily world. And then from there, the initiative and the culture and the process and all that kind of follow, but I'm sure you've heard this too Brian.

It's like, I can't tell you the number of times I got a phone call from a client who says I've invested a lot of money in whatever the latest and greatest innovation philosophy is, and my team's not doing it. What do I do to get them to do it? And there's always this kind of, you know, awkward silence of, well it's not that you need to do something to connect them to the process. It's that you need to do something to connect them to themselves and how they innovate. 

Brian Ardinger: Well, and that's a very important point. I think a lot of people think that innovation is that mad scientist or that founder, the only way you can innovate...  So the fact that, we talk about this too, where you don't have to be a founder to be innovative. And, you know, first of all, it helps to define what innovation is for your company. And it's not just creating the next Uber or the next Twitter, but it can be just as simple as, Hey, I've seen a problem in our way we process things. How do we go about making it better? 

And so that's what I liked about the assessment. Is it allowed everybody to play a role in innovation because I think everybody does have a role to play in creating new value in an organization. 

Tamara Ghandour: Actually, I want to highlight something you said, because I think it's so important. You said that innovation doesn't have to be the next, like Uber, Twitter, Airbnb. I think we put a lot of false pressure on ourselves to make innovation this big blue skies, disruptive thing, but, and I'm sure you've seen this in your work. What I find is that, that the challenge with that is it's great. If it happens. But there's incredible opportunity to just rearrange the box you have. 

And I think that when we, as the leaders go to our teams and go, we gotta be disruptive, disrupt or die, like all the cliches, right. I could come up, with what ends up happening is people shut down because they're like, well, but I'm staring at my box and my box is my reality. And you want me to go out the box, but I don't even know where to go outside the box. So like, I think there's this funny struggle that happens unintentionally when we're trying to force the next Uber. 

And if you really look at Uber, it actually, isn't what it did ended up being disruptive, but it was just some mapping technology and allowing people to use their cars. And I don't mean that to put down Uber. I love Uber, but I think your question though, was around the assessment. Right? 

Brian Ardinger: Tell us a little bit about like, what does it show? And one of the things I liked about it is it talked about the diversity of skill sets and that, that have to come to play, to become an innovative team.

Tamara Ghandour: So, I got super obsessed with how we, as people innovate. And I came to this realization very early on in my career that everybody is innovative. Right, I had some experiences that made me go wait a minute, did Jill and accounts payable just come up with an innovative idea? Like she's not the creative one, hold on. What is this? 

Coupled with people constantly saying to me when, I do a lot of keynoting, so when I go off stage and saying things like, well, that's great Tamara that Apple does that, but what about the rest of us? Like, and how am I supposed to apply that? Me, Susie? Right. 

We started to dig into the neuroscience, the behavioral psychology, like the real, like the research and the science behind our brains and how we innovate and what we came to uncover and all the research, and combining that with our years of experience, was that everybody's innovative. It's universal. That we all do it. 

However, how we innovate is unique to each of us and there's actually nine styles or triggers. So, ways that we can innovate and we all have this thing. Think of it as like an equalizer. It's not that we are a void of all but two, but there are two in there that are your absolute power play, like your wellspring of innovation. 

And the way I do it, the two that are me. So, I'm a risk-taker experiential, might be different than like Laura who's on my team, who's a collaborative tweaker, and we can ...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Johnathan Grzybowski, co-founder of Penji and on-demand graphic design service. Johnathan and I talk about the changing face of graphic design and the new trends making it easier for folks to build and launch new things. Let's get started.

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

Interview Transcript with Johnathan Grzybowski, Co-Founder of Penji

Brian Ardinger:  Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Johnathan Grzybowski. He is the Chief Marketing Officer and co-founder of Penji, an on-demand graphic design service. Welcome Johnathan.

Johnathan Grzybowski: Brian, thank you so much for having me appreciate it.

Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm excited to have you on board. I wanted to have you on as a founder to talk about what it's like to build a startup outside the Valley, but I also want to talk about some of the new tools and trends that we're seeing that's making it easier for folks to build and launch new things. Penji's one of those. And so, what is Penji and what do you do for them? 

Johnathan Grzybowski: Penji is an on demand graphic design service, where our customers can essentially sign up for the service, get immediate access to the top 2% of graphic designers in the world, and be able to receive a completed project in under 48 hours. That's essentially the nuts and bolts of it.

We want to make graphic design more easily accessible and not necessarily this commodity where you have to spend thousands and hundreds and thousands of dollars in order to receive something really good and custom and unique to you. So, we're really trying to just challenge that mindset, that old school mindset of graphic design.

Brian Ardinger: So, talk a little bit about the genesis of Penji. How did it start and how did it grow? 

Johnathan Grzybowski: We were a digital marketing agency that necessarily wasn't the best at a lot of things. However, a lot of people kept mentioning about how good our graphic designers were. So, we started interviewing people and we talked to them and we said, well, what are some problems that you have, or it comes to the marketing space.

And we started to see trends and people say that they had an issue with finding reliable talent. And then we realized that that talent translated to somebody who could execute the graphic design. So that's one aspect of it, but more so we also thought about the big picture of who we wanted to be as a company.

We are a digital marketing agency. We only helped, you know, maybe 10, 15 customers a year, new customers a year. People cancel people, come and go and et cetera. And I remember the time when I sat inside of a meeting at Rutgers with like a chancellor of some kind. And they wanted like a website. And I just remember sitting there, and this person's like talking to me and sharing to me about like what they want to do and how they want to promote to get more people.

And I realized that the thing that we were creating was only benefiting like the higher ups. It wasn't necessarily benefiting the actual students or, or anything like that in which we really wanted to change the philosophy and say, who do we want to be when we grow up? And we thought to ourselves, well, we want to make an impact.

Well, how do we make an impact? And then we kind of put the two, all of the pieces of the puzzle together. To basically say we want to make graphic design more easily accessible. So, you know, your company can actually come in and get some really cool graphic design work done. Or what about like Jimmy who decides they have this amazing idea, but they can't necessarily hire somebody full time in order to complete their idea, their app, their whatever it may be.

And then what about the person who is. A marketing manager in a really big corporation. They have all these brilliant ideas. They don't have the time or the technical skill to actually do graphic design themselves, but they don't necessarily have the ability to hire somebody else for their right hand. All of those scenarios are really essential as to why we created Penji. 

Brian Ardinger: It's interesting you mentioned impact. We talk a lot about on the show, we're kind of entering this age of impact, where, you know, access to new tools and new talent has never been easier. You know, quite frankly, if you think about starting a company, you know, 20 years ago, especially a tech company, what you had, they go through and now everything's in your pocket or available in the cloud or other places.

So, talk a little bit about that trend of democratization of tools and things for builders. How are you seeing that affecting your business and what do you see for the future of this trend? 

Johnathan Grzybowski: There's always going to be people out there. They want to do a DIY. There's always going to be people that want to create their own website that do the graphic designs themselves. But I think you have to look at it as like, how much is your time worth? Yeah. 

You can get something to what it is and you could probably get it to be somewhat manageable, but there's always going to come a point in time where it has to go above that. And so that ultimately depends on what you want you to do with your business.

For us in particular, we want to talk to the people who have that need. There's always going to be that sector of people that want to DIY. There's always going to be people that want to be able to, that just need that additional help. And those are the people that we really want to talk to. 

Brian Ardinger: And so that kind of brings to the question, like there are all sorts of new tools for, I guess, that you wouldn't typically think in the past, you'd have to go to creative agency to do it. So now you've got tools like Canva, for example, or even like Photoshop and that are technically getting a little bit easier for the person to hack together things or see templates and utilize that in such a way that makes it more graphically sound or more visually appealing than ever before. What's the difference between something like that hacked together versus going to like a Penji or...

Johnathan Grzybowski: So, I think when it comes to the DIY aspect of this, the company that you mentioned, there are skill sets of graphic designers. Let's just say you want to create a website, that's a technical skill. You might be able to put pieces of a puzzle together to do like a social media meme. Right. You could do that, but can you create a website and then when you create the website, and you send it to a developer, can they actually code what you do?

And the short answer is probably not. So, the benefit of Penji is essentially that you have a pool of hundreds of graphic designers that specialize in very specific things. So, if you could do like the big things, like, let's just say you are a web designer, but you can't...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Tom Bradbury, author of The Culture Project: 30 Days to Reboot Your Organization. Tom and I talk about the changing role of technology in the workplace and how companies can better deliver value by aligning culture with technology decisions.

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

Interview Transcript with Tom Bradbury, Author of The Culture Project

Brian Ardinger:  Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation.  I'm your host, Brian Ardinger and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Tom Bradbury. He is author of a new book called The Culture Project: 30 Days to Reboot Your Organization. Welcome Tom. 

Tom Bradbury: Hi Brian. Thanks for having me today.

Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm excited to have you on board. Our friends at Sense and Respond, Josh and gang, connected us about your new book that's coming out. You're a two-time founder, a technology advisor, author of this new book. 

You've spent about 20 years of your career focused on workplace technology assessments and how do people use that.  What have you seen in the last 20 years in workplace technology and how did you decide to write a book about culture? 

Tom Bradbury: Great question. Thank you. So, Brian, for a big chunk of my career, 18-19 years, I owned a business, Labrador technology, before selling it to a great competitor in that space. But what we did was help design and manage technology as part of workplace transformation projects. Mostly connected to real estate transactions.  i.e., A lease comes up, we're building out a new workplace and we would design all the connectivity and all the AV in the boardroom tech for these companies to leverage in their new spaces.

And for doing that for some of the biggest global brands out there, we ran into a lot of different scenarios and a lot of different approaches. But one thing was for sure, that the design and construction process had such a gravitational pull from a budget perspective, and a resourcing perspective, that the decisions around investing in technology weren't as strategic as they should be or could be. Right. 

So, I would see and hear these discussions about Pepsi, Unilever, BNP Paribas, Alliance Bernstein, Bridgewater Associates, where they were going and how they wanted to represent themselves with this new workplace. But some of the technology discussions or that thread of the project didn't always match the same level of strategy as some of those other conversations.

So the final handful of years of me owning Labrador Technology, what I did was create a methodology to go in and understand an end-user's reality of what it's like to use technology at whatever organization they work for. 

And I would overlay that with either a direct experience interviewing executives on where they were taking their business, right, or some material that was released in a board meeting or what was presented at the start of the mission of a new workplace. And I'd get a sense for where the executives were trying to go and what they were trying to accomplish. 

And then I would talk to it and in some cases, HR, to get their perspective on technology and its importance within a business. And I'd lay those perspectives over each other. IT, HR, employee experience, and executive senior leadership's perspective on where they were going. And there was a hundred percent of the time, there was always a mismatch in each one of those realities and what they were seeing. 

So, I really started to set out and say, what's driving how people invest and how they enable internally technology. And it connected. And I mentioned HR, really, what I started to focus in on was the use of technology by talent, by the people in any organization. And seeing the influences of culture impact how they made tech investments, and how they were rolling them out and giving them to people to be productive.

Brian Ardinger: Well, I imagined 20 years ago when you first started, a lot of those technology decisions were probably, Hey, we just need a computer. Technology was not ubiquitous, as it is today. And culturally, it wasn't as formative. How have you seen that trend evolve? And is that one of the reasons why you believe culture plays a more important role in those technology decisions and that?

Tom Bradbury: A lot of the organizations that I've worked with and many or all organizations have a culture. And that culture either pushes people, whether challenge their comfort zone, or constantly look for things, whether they're policies, processes, tools, that match where they're going next. And sometimes there can be tension between that attribute of a given culture and what a domain expert sees, knows, and how they run their domain, whether it be an IT or HR or any other finance, right.

An IT leader, as an example that you bring up, where technology used to be, give me a computer and I'll plug it into the server or the switch plugs into the server. You know cloud, going to cloud. It sounds very easy today, right? And it's much more common, right. But still not as common as we probably think, in you know, many organizations. 

But that being said, operational experts knew how to not only understand, control, keep secure an environment that's on prem and the cloud technology and making that transition, which might offer more flexibility, efficiencies, costs, productivity, can impact positively all those things but it's out of their realm of experience, right? So, it was a challenge. 

So, it, wasn't only how do they navigate the company there, and are they comfortable navigating out of their comfort zone? It also is a paradigm shift internally for IT on how they operate right, in a cloud environment versus an on-premises environment. That would be another challenge that they have to deal with to get the whole staff to buy into. We no longer have control over how we upgrade. We receive notices that there will be an upgrade and we need to understand what it's going to do to our environment before we unleash it. 

Brian Ardinger: I used to work at Gartner. And that was one of the challenges that the IT group, were the gods and they controlled exactly what was displayed and put out there into the organization. And it seems to be much more collaborative environment now, where their power shifted. 

And because technology is ubiquitous across different verticals, and it's no longer a vertical in and of itself, per se.   It has definitely impacted the way people act and move and do things within organizations. Let's dive into the book. So, it's called The Culture Project: 30 Days to Reboot Your Organization. Tell us a little bit of overview of it and what people can get out of it. 

Tom Bradbury: So, when I wrote this book, it was informed by many workplace technology assessments that I performed either on my own, being invited by the client, or in conjunction with a partner, like a great partner of mine has been Cushma...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Allison Weil, Senior Associate at Hyde Park Venture Partners. Allison and I talk about some of the latest trends in venture capital in places outside the Valley. And we dig into some of the tips and insights for new founders.

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

Interview Transcript with Allison Weil, Hyde Park Venture Partners

Brian Ardinger:  Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. We have Allison Weil; she is a Senior Associate at Hyde Park Venture Partners. Welcome to the show, Allison. 

Allison Weil: Thanks for having me. Really excited to chat today. 

Brian Ardinger: Have you, we've had a chance to work together a little bit. You were panelists at the IO 2020 summit and helped look at a lot of the startups that we had at the startup showcase. And you and I were on an investor panel for the Pipeline Entrepreneurs about a month ago. I realized we hadn't had a chance to sit down and talk more in depth about the life and times of venture capital here in the Midwest. So, I figured I'd have you on the show. How about you tell the audience about Hyde Park Venture Partners and what do you focus on? 

Allison Weil: Yeah, absolutely. So, Hyde Park Venture Partners, we are a seed through Series A, venture capital fund, based in Chicago, that exclusively invests in companies in what we call the mid-continent. And we define that as the traditional Midwest plus Toronto and Atlanta. Most of our investments are in software companies. A lot of it is SaaS, but we're also investors in marketplaces and tech enabled-services and companies that we invest in can be anything from free product, you know, with a great team, all the way through a few million dollars in annual-recurring revenue.

Brian Ardinger: The new world that we're living in, the post COVID world, let's take a step back and over the last year, what have you seen? That's changed the dynamics of venture capital in this now post COVID world. 

Allison Weil: Yeah. Great question. So, I think, you know, the first and most obvious thing is the shift to entirely remote investment. You know, prior to this past year, we really actually emphasize meeting our founders in person.

You know, you learn a lot when you meet someone in person that you can't over Zoom call, you know, or a phone call. And I think that's still true for the record. So, it's not a thing that I think is going to stay permanently. I'm not on a perma-Zoom bandwagon, but you know, obviously that was kind of the first thing is a shift to fully remote investing and investing without meeting our founders in-person at all. 

The thing that, that enabled that's been different particularly in the Midwest, is it means that investors and founders don't have to be in the same city or location, which makes it easier for coastal investors to spend time with interesting companies in the Midwest. And so that's been a trend that we've certainly noticed a little bit.

The other thing that we've noticed, frankly is that investment hasn't slowed down at all. It might've slowed down for a little bit in March and April is everybody, ourselves included, took some time to like orient ourselves to this new world, like personal life, professional. Like what in the world is going on right now? Let's figure it out. What's going on with our portfolio companies, get everything stabilized. 

But past that, investment's been going on rapidly and at high valuations, and the markets are shockingly hot. All of that is what I'm seeing, which is certainly, probably not what I would have anticipated, if you would have asked me, you know, the second or third week of March, like what's this next year going to look like.

Brian Ardinger: A number of questions come to mind after what you just talked about, one being, so you mentioned investing remotely. What have you learned about how you can read a person or what specifically is different about investing remotely versus in person and how have you adapted? 

Allison Weil: What investing remotely requires you to do is spend a little bit more time just on having those conversations with folks over Zoom, right? So typically, you'd invest in person. You might go to lunch with somebody or dinner, you know, in the city, and just build that rapport. Right? Early-stage investment report is actually pretty important because you're building your relationship that can last a really long time. 

And so, you don't want to cut that time short. You still want to spend lots of time with the entrepreneur. You still want to get to know them and you can do that over Zoom. Right? Like you can still learn about like who are you as a person? How do you lead a team? You know, how do you interact with people who are different than you? How do you make decisions and all of these things that are still important, you can pick it up via Zoom.

There is some stuff that you can't. I think some of like the interpersonal chemistry is a little bit different over Zoom versus, you know, in-person, but you still have to spend all of that kind of time getting to know folks. It just might be more sporadic than the concentration that you had, you know, when you traveled to their city.

Brian Ardinger: Have you seen founders address it differently or different ways that they've come across better in that particular environment?

Allison Weil: I rely more on quality decks than perhaps I did in the past. So, in that first conversation, if it was in-person, it's a little bit easier to interject and kind of read the room a little bit more and people over Zoom, the really good founders, are doing that over Zoom effectively. So, they are using a deck, but they're using it as a prop rather than as the center of their conversation. Right. 

They're still reading my facial expressions. They're still figuring out, you know, if I have a question that needs to get asked or where to pause and where to keep going and things like that. And they're effectively guiding the conversation much more so. I prefer those kinds of intro conversations to be more like a conversation than a pitch.

Like I prefer folks to tell me their story, rather than walk me through their pitch deck. And so the best founders are using Zoom and are using their pitch deck to enable them to really tell their story, versus tell the story of their pitch deck. Those are two different things. 

Brian Ardinger: Are you seeing more cold outreach than that? Or are you still seeing the same deal flow from other founders recommending or other venture partners and that recommending? 

Allison Weil: I'm probably seeing marginally more cold outreach right now, but I don't think that that's a function of Zoom. I think that's a function of just some other things that we, as a funder doing and I'm doing.  So, most of our deal f...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Ryan Green, Co-founder and CEO of Gridwise. Ryan and I talk about the future trends of the gig economy, ride sharing, and mobility analytics. We also talk about his experiences helping to navigate his startup through the pandemic.

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

Interview Transcript with Ryan Green, Gridwise

Brian Ardinger:  Welcome to another episode of Inside outside innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today with me is Ryan Green. Ryan is the co-founder and CEO of Gridwise, which is a mobile app powered by gig mobility analytics to help rideshare and delivery drivers do more and do better and welcome to the show Ryan. 

Ryan Green: Thanks for having me, Brian. 

Brian Ardinger: Hey, Ryan, I'm glad to have you on the show. One of the things we wanted to do this year is to bring on more founders and tell their stories. As I was doing research and looking around, you've got interesting story, interesting space that you're working in. And so, I wanted to have you on the show to talk a little bit more about that. 

You used to work at the Naval Academy, then you did some foreign exchange trading at PNC, and now you've started a company called Gridwise. Why don't we talk a little bit about your background, how you got to become an entrepreneur and what Gridwise is all about. 

Ryan Green: When I was studying at the Naval Academy, I ended up starting my first company there. I was an economics major, Chinese minor. And then I really got into trading and keeping up with the stock markets and later the currency market. 

So, we started a company called FX Connection, that actually taught people how to understand the currency markets. And then our platform connected you with coaches who helped you actually apply that knowledge. And they were very, you know, vetted, very successful traders who traded for a living. 

I really learned how to stand that business that like, stand the business up. I didn't know how to buy a domain when that first started, when I started that company. And so, learning curve at that point, but grew the team out to a few people, started generating revenue, and made some big partnerships with brokerages, global brokerages, and things of that sort.

So, it was really great experience doing that in parallel school and then going into active-duty military. And I ended up shutting the company down as I was in active-duty military as all my partners and I were operating in different parts of the world. And it just became an operational mess. In addition to so many other mistakes we made in this company that gave us so many valuable learning lessons.

But ended up after I got out of the military, I ended up going into banking, doing FX trading, which was related to the company I started before currency trading. And that's what brought me to PNC and working there. And in between the midst of all of that, when I was in the military, I had a period of downtime where I was tinkering with a few ideas, but this new concept came to our city called Uber and I took a few rides and I was like, wow, this is interesting.

I'm definitely a part of the early adopter cohort of technology. So, I was really intrigued by the model. I ended up signing up to drive. And I became a driver for Uber later for Lyft. And it was like really interesting for me to just be able to like tap a button and be able to go out and make some extra money.

And I had experienced what it was like to be the driver. The pain points that really persisted as drivers at that time. And then you fast forward to the time I'm in banking, I'm still an active driver driving less, but taking a lot of rides with Uber and Lyft drivers and just hearing them complain about a lot of the same pain points that I'd experienced firsthand. 

From those rides and my perspective driving, during my time at PNC was like where the light bulb lit up. I knew I wanted to start another venture. At some point it was expected to be a little bit farther down the road, but I had a list of about 25 ideas and the concept of GridWise popped up to number one. And I had started working to validate that on my personal time, while I was at PNC. And then I ended up validating demand for the concept and ended up going to start Gridwise and became the co-founder and CEO of the company. 

Brian Ardinger: It's kind of an interesting concept and how I found you is you put out a report, The 2020 Ride Hailing Industry Report, that talks through a lot of the data that you've seen with GridWise on how drivers and Uber and all these things are shaping the world. And specifically, how it's changed in a pandemic environment. Let's talk a little bit about that report. And what have you learned? 

Ryan Green: I would say with us as Gridwise in operating in mobility spaces and focused on empowering drivers, drivers using our application and it gives us a glimpse into supply and demand across the different services, both on the ride hailing side, as well as the on-demand delivery side, whether that's food, grocery or parcel.

And so, I mean, in looking at this past year of 2020, I mean, it's what a year it has been. But, you know, in our industry instantly, as COVID really took off in mid-March, you just saw a drastic drop in the industry, just ride hailing activity. And I think the service providers reported seeing anywhere from a decline of 80%-90% of activity on their platforms. For us at Gridwise, we saw a direct decline of about 70% of drivers stopped driving for ride share services.

A good portion of them ended up continuing to drive but ended up moving over to delivery of services. And so, as we saw ride hail decline, we just saw a huge uptake in delivery demand as people started ordering food and in groceries from Instacart and Door Dash and platforms like that. 

It was really interesting we saw that there were drivers who would continue to drive for ride hail through this year. And you've seen from an emission standpoint, it's created a great picture where it's like these vehicles have been more utilized, because there has been some demand that's persistent in this, and has picked up over the coming months, but there hasn't been as much of a movement of drivers to go back to driving rideshare.

So, for the drivers who continue doing that, we've seen just, you know, more utilization and we're looking at that from the trips per hour increase that we've seen there for drivers and as well as for their hourly earnings, you'll see that hourly earnings did increase for ride hail drivers. Specifically, for a period of time, it started to decrease or normalize back towards closer to normal levels.

But overall, the drivers across all services did really spike in the summer, but it's really come down to, it was around $18 an hour, but now it's back to about $15.50 somewhere around there. 

Brian Ardinger: So, with that, obviously things have changed and we're probably not going to back to a quote u...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Manbir Kaur, Author of the new book Get Your Next Promotion. Manbir and I explore what it takes for leaders to navigate today's changing work environment, the power of a growth mindset, and how you can set yourself up for success in the new year.

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

Interview Transcript with Manbir Kaur

Brian Ardinger:  Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Manbir Kaur. She's a techno banking, corporate professional turned executive coach and author of the new book Get Your Next Promotion. Welcome to the show. 

Manbir Kaur: Hey Brian, thank you so much for inviting me. I'm so glad to be here with you today. 

Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you as well. We were introduced by a mutual friend and she said that we needed to connect because you've helped many folks in your practice kind of navigate this new world of work. And we thought it'd be good to get you on the show. One of the key areas we're focusing on in 2021 for the show is some of the tools and techniques and mindset that individuals can use to become more innovation competent. And so, let's start there. Let's talk about innovation and how you got involved in your practice on coaching folks around this topic of innovation. 

Manbir Kaur: I started my career as you said in banking, moved to the FinTech world. And in the FinTech world, basically, I got exposed to the word innovation because as you know, tech world needs innovation all the time. And 10 years back, I moved to coaching. I got intrigued towards human behaviors, human mindset. Behaviors and mindset are two things which I really, really got attracted to. And that's how, you know, I transitioned to coaching side. 

So now it's been 25 years of working with people, including corporate and coaching. How I got involved into this is basically as that I got intrigued by human behaviors. And when we talk about human behavior, every day is new. Every day, especially in the world, every day is new. So, we need to innovate daily what's happening in our own life. How do we have conversations? How do we do stuff with other people. So that's what, you know, for me, innovation starts from there.

Brian Ardinger: I agree. And everybody I think is facing it obviously more and more 2020 gave everybody a kick to the gut when it comes to innovation. I think people realize that it's part of the core competency that they've got to start building. So, you have a book, called Get Your Next Promotion and give me an overview of the book and what can our audience expect to get from it from reading that?

Manbir Kaur: So, this is my second book, Brian, which launched in this year 2020. You know what happens is basically individuals, especially high-performing individuals, high-potential individuals, leaders, they get stuck at mid-level. And their point of view is I'm not getting promoted because other person who's not that capable is getting promoted because of politics because of something is happening there, which I'm not understanding. I'm performing at my best, but still are not getting promoted.

So that's individual standpoint of view, but organizations have another point of view. They are looking for leadership pipeline. They're looking for right individuals. And they feel people are good performers, but they're not good leaders to execute things, to have strategies, to have innovation, to have the right mindset at that level, which they are expecting.

And I found that there is a huge scar between these two perspectives. So, I wrote this book, get your next promotion to bridge this gap. To help people understand that, you know, organizations are looking for right people and you have the capabilities, you have high potential. What else you can do to basically bridge that gap?

Because career is no more a ladder now, right. We can't expect, you know, manager, senior manager, director, blah, blah, blah. No, that doesn't exist. And after pandemic, that word is not going to exist now. Right. Or it is going to be flatter. So, coming back to the book, the book bridges the gap of expectations from organization standpoint, that, you know, what are they expecting for senior positions and that this book also, you know, it's not only my perspective of things. It's not only my research. The book has 10 stories of 10 CEOs across the board. They bring in their life journeys, they bring in their learnings. It's basically, you know, I mean, one coach and 10 mentors helping you to bridge that gap. 

Brian Ardinger: Through your research and through your coaching practice, what are some of the skillsets and mindsets that tend to get the people promoted to a leadership position or what stands out nowadays, specifically around, you know, the changes that we're seeing?

Manbir Kaur: That's a good question, Brian. What helps people get promoted? At certain level, especially at mid-level, people get promoted because of the good work they have been doing. You know, they have been rated five by five, four of five and or something like that. And they have been getting promoted. 

After a certain level, it's more of a mindset. It's more of an attitude, which we can call it leadership skills in some way, but I prefer to call it, you know, kind of a leadership mindset. We have the words like agility, innovation, whatever, basically it all relates to the mindset. How do I come across as a leader? How do I take people along? What kind of conversations am I having?

Do people trust me? Do I come across as an authentic leader? All these things to actually help you getting promoted and even your visibility. You might be thinking, yes, yes, yes. You know, I'm doing this. But do clients see me as a stakeholder. That, you know, Manbir is doing all these things. What's your perception in the organization? Your perception, your branding, your conversations, your emotional intelligence, how people perceive you, your trust, authenticity, all these things help you and over and above the work you have been doing.

Brian Ardinger: I think that's one of the key focuses as we get into more of an innovative world is the fact that it's not just about your ability to execute on what you've done in the past, but really to explore and open to navigating whatever is new from there. 

Manbir Kaur: And one more point, you know, as you said, it's not only execution, you know, as you said, and aligning that strategy to your team also. That is also a big point when you get promoted to that level, which you are looking at you know, from mid-level to senior level. So, aligning your team to that bigger picture. And for that again, you need, a mindset.

Brian Ardinger: That's a great point. So obviously getting a promotion that, there's a lot of individual skills and mindset that's required, but you mentioned it's really a team sport. Let's talk a little bit about how innovation is a team sport and where do companies and individuals f...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Elliott Parker, CEO of High Alpha Innovation. Elliott and I discuss why innovation is getting harder and what to do about it, as well as new models for tackling transformative and disruptive innovation.

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

Interview Transcript with Elliott Parker, CEO of High Alpha Innovation

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of inside outside innovation. I'm your host, Brian Arbinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. With us this week is Elliott Parker. He is the co-founder of High Alpha and CEO of High Alpha Innovation, which is an Indianapolis based corporate venture studio, which partners with organizations to create and launch new ventures. Welcome Elliott to the show. 

Elliott Parker: Hey Brian, happy to be here. 

Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you here because you and I have crossed paths a couple of different times with the stuff that you've been doing in startup and corporate innovation work outside the core tech hubs. And the stuff that High Alpha has been doing. Over the last decade we've seen a lot of changes and innovation, and a lot of innovation has actually come to the work of innovation. Can you give us a brief history of an evolution of High Alpha and this venture studio model? 

Elliott Parker: Yes. So High Alpha is a venture studio based in Indianapolis. What that means is we're a combination of a build function with a source of capital. Think about it as a venture capital fund that builds companies. I'll make that small correction to the intro. I'm not a co-founder of High Alpha. I actually joined about three years ago. High Alpha has been around for five years. It was started by some friends of mine five years ago. They'd been working together in a company called Exact Target, that our managing partner at High Alpha, Scott Dorsey, founded about 20 years ago.

They exited Exact Target in 2014 and decided they enjoyed starting companies. And so wanted to go build a studio. Investors said you ought to raise a fund to sit alongside the studio. And this idea of a venture studio came together. That combination of build plus a source of funding. So, our team at High Alpha has gotten better and better at launching new companies over the last five years.

This year 2020 has been kind of a breakout year in many ways for us, despite all the challenges. In the end we'll get, the count 10 or 12 companies launched in 2020, but we will soon launch company number 29 out of the studio. And we've invested out of the fund in another 30 plus companies. All B2B SaaS focused. And along the way, as we've gotten better at this systematic building of new ventures, we've had a lot of scale enterprises, big companies come to us, and say, can you help us do what you're doing in your venture studio?

I mean, there's been a lot of interest just recently in the venture studio model with big companies, either starting their own form of a venture studio or looking to partner with an external studio. And initially that was not part of our approach. We were focused on building startups inside of High Alpha, but it makes a lot of sense to team up with scaled enterprises to do this. 

Because although it may take us longer together to build a new startup than it might if we were doing this on our own. You know, we can launch a new startup every four weeks, but Hey, if we can build a startup with a bigco as a co-investor with us and potentially as a first customer or distribution partner for that startup, that startups got to a much better chance of getting to scale and getting to scale quickly.

So, we're very, very excited about teaming up with big companies to do this. So that's the LSD, the impetus behind High Alpha Innovation, which we created earlier this year to focus specifically on applying this venture studio model with partners like university corporation. 

Brian Ardinger: So, we've seen this happen where corporations are looking at the startup realm and saying, Hey, how can we move as fast and how can we launch things that we're seeing out in the market that these disruptors and that, why do you think it's so difficult for corporations to get that innovation mojo and to the launch new starts in the way that the startup marketplace actually is doing it?

Elliott Parker: For a number of reasons. I think Clay Christiansen hit the nail on the head with the Innovator's Dilemma at 23 years ago now. And I spent many years working at Clay's consulting firm InnoSight where we tried to help companies overcome this challenge. And one of the things I learned is that to pursue innovation requires a certain set of processes and governance, the right incentives, the access to the right kind of talent. 

And when you're building a scaled enterprise, you're not optimizing that scaled enterprise for learning in front of nation. You're optimizing that scaled enterprise for execution. So you develop a certain set of governance, talent, process, and incentives that help you execute to do so at scale. And to take that operating model and say, now we're going to try and deploy this model to go learn. It doesn't work. 

On the other hand, what we're seeing out in the market is that startups are designed to learn, to innovate, to move very, very quickly and to disrupt. And so what we try to do in the venture studio models, we've created an out of the box off the shelf collection of the right governance process, incentives, and talent that we can deploy to drive systematic innovation and to do so quickly. So, in scaled enterprises. It's very hard to take what they're so good at and to redirect it for something that they're not optimized for.

Brian Ardinger: So, talk through maybe an example of how a company would come to you and say, Hey, we want to innovate. We have some ideas that are on the shelf, but really don't know how to get that done. Why would they come to High Alpha? And how would you walk them through that process of launching or building something?

Elliott Parker: Yeah, most of the companies he's come to us because they are dissatisfied. To some degree with the quality and quantity of their innovation output. Things are moving too slowly or it's not disruptive or transformative enough. It's no wonder, right? Innovation is getting harder inside of big companies for a number of reasons.

And there are certain types of innovation that are both necessary for big companies to pursue. And at the same time, impossible or near impossible to pursue internally, it's a real challenge. And so most of the time, the companies that come to us are saying, Hey, We need to move faster. We need to get some points on the board, some meaningful points on the board.

And over the course of three or four months, we can launch a new venture backable startup and put some meaningful points on the board that way. So, it's the way to do something pretty rapidly at a cost that in many cases is lower than what it costs to do internally or certainly many times lower even than it would cost to go build a proof of concept with an existin...

On this week's episode, Inside Outside’s Susan Stibal sits down with RSM's Deputy Chief Economist Kevin Depew. This episode was recorded live at the IO2020 New Innovators' Summit on Oct. 22, 2020. Susan talks to Kevin about actionable insights for a turbulent economy.

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

Interview Transcript with Kevin Depew, RSM

Susan Stibal: I want to introduce Kevin Depew. Economic trends have been on a roller coaster ride and Kevin will provide actionable insights to help you plan for the future. He is the Deputy Chief Economist and Industry Eminence Program Leader at RSM. Kevin provides RSM's clients with macro economic and industry perspectives and insights they need to successfully manage their middle market businesses. 

He is also an Emmy-award winning writer and producer. So we look forward to hearing more about that. Prior to joining RSM, Kevin worked in economics for Bloomberg, Dorsey Wright & Associates, and PaineWebber and A.G. Edwards. So thanks for being here, Kevin.

Kevin Depew: Thanks very much, Susan. Just so you know, the Emmy was not anything to do with economics. We did have a show on Fox that ran. It was a little bit like the daily show of finance. We had about 18 episodes and then it was canceled the day before we were nominated for the Emmy. That kind of derailed those aspirations right out the gate.

So I'm going to share just a couple of slides, then go through and talk about where we are. When we talk about the economy recovering and I see in some of the Q & A there, some of you had similar ideas to what we have at RSM about so much being depends on the pandemic. 

But when we're talking about recovery, I thought it would be useful to go back before the pandemic and talk about what kind of economy we are recovering into. So, this is a slide from, I think we were doing road shows in February last time I was out somewhere.  I think maybe it was in Nashville in late February. And so we had just started to see the appearance of COVID-19 on the West Coast and had not really moved at that point to, at least as far as we knew, to the East coast.

But these were our forecast, what we were anticipating for 2020, pre-pandemic sub 2% growth in 2019, so that's suboptimal. Anytime you're below 2% growth, then it doesn't take very much to teeter the economy into a recession. So that's one of the reasons, that's kind of the threshold we look at for being a positive economy versus one that's not really firing on all cylinders.

Our forecast for 2020, prior to the pandemic was for continued deceleration to one and a half percent. And really the economy has been characterized for much of the past decade by a couple of things. The first an economy that's being propped up by the consumer. So what we mean by that, the consumer of course accounts for about 70% of economic growth, but we've really seen weak fixed business investment. Capital expenditures being a drag on the economy, something that was really restraining growth. So everything was sort of in the hands of the consumer. 

The good news about that is we had 3.6% unemployment at that point. So we had a lot of people in the workforce nearing probably full employment. Of course, things have changed now. Just a couple of risks to note, at the time we saw the potential for fiscal policy or administrative policy error, so if the administration re-escalated the trade war with China or migrated the trade war to the European Union or the UK, that was a potential risk. And also a potential error on the part of the Federal Reserve. So for example, if they raise interest rates too quickly.

At that point, based on what we do, we viewed the COVID-19 epidemic at that point, not quite a pandemic, as really a liquidity event. So something that could have the potential to derail the economy in the short term, but once we get past it, then we'd go back to where we were before. Even though it is a pandemic it's been far worse than what any of us anticipated. 

There still is the potential that we return to the same type of economy we had prior to the pandemic. But as you can see, the forecast for that type of economy was not quite robust. And the longer this persists, the more we have the potential for long-term economic damage to happen. It's why fiscal policy is so critical right now. 

So just a couple of things to talk about in terms of the recovery. You know, we really had a supply shock, a demand shock, and a financial shock all occurring at the same time. So any one of those in a sub 2% economy, would be enough to turn the economy into recession.

We had all three at the same time. So we had what were essentially depression like shocks. You see the first quarter minus 5% growth. The second quarter astonishingly horrible, minus 31% growth. And then our forecast for the third quarter, a sharp rebound at 33.5% and then moderating in the fourth quarter at 2.25%.

And I'll talk about that moderation just a moment, the reasons for that household consumption remains risk due to the lack of fiscal policy support and we'll get into those numbers in just a moment.  The major risk to the economy is, as some of you noted in the chat portion for this, is a second wave of the pandemic, which we seem to be on the cusp of right now. If we look around the globe and we see what's happening in Europe, then I think it's very likely that we will see something that looks more like a second way in coming weeks.

In terms of policy response, the initial response and a catastrophic economic shutdown, was very robust. You had the Federal Reserve learned their mistakes from the great recession and acted very quickly. And even with the polarization that we have in DC, the fiscal policy, the Paycheck Protection Program, the pandemic unemployment, those things happened relatively quickly when you consider where we are now. Where we're past the stop gap measures that were designed to move the economy through very dire circumstances. 

And so now we're at the point where fiscal policy is needed to provide economic stimulus. So going back to the spring, that was really crisis management, making sure that people who suddenly lost all income had the ability to purchase food, the ability to take care of their families, even though you've had since horrific labor market numbers. Now we're at the point where through partial recovery, we need stimulus to get over the hump to keep the long-term damage from impacting the economy. 

The reality, and I think that you probably all are aware of this based on what you were posting in the chat prior, is that until there's a vaccine or multiple major therapeutic breakthroughs, we just cannot anticipate the whole problem.  

You hear a lot these days about the shape of the recovery. Will it be a V-shape, will it be a W or an L? The most recent one that has been making the rounds has been a K shape recovery. And what's meant by that is in line with some of the things that you've probably been talking about the past couple of days at the Innovation Summit. There are people and businesses on that upper K path that have largely gone through the pandemic relatively unscathed.

So you think all ...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Martin Babinec, Co-founder of TriNet and author of the new book More Good Jobs. Martin and I talk about the importance of community dynamics, and the creation of new businesses and the changing trends, that are affecting building startup communities outside the Valley. 

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

Interview Transcript with Martin Babinec

Brian Ardinger:  Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger and as always we have another amazing guest. Martin Babinec is the co-founder of TriNet and author of a new book called More Good Jobs: An entrepreneurs action plan to create change in your community. Welcome Martin.

Martin Babinec: Thanks Brian. Glad to be here. 

Brian Ardinger: I wanted to have you on the show. As a lot of our audience knows, part of the stuff we talk about in innovation, it's not just about startup innovation or corporate innovation, it's about community innovation. And your book around how do you create jobs and how do you create new innovations outside of the traditional tech hubs, was quite interesting to me and obviously up my alley, as far as what we've been doing here in the Midwest as well. 

You're an entrepreneurial by nature. A few years ago, you started TriNet back in Silicon Valley and grew that to a, a major company, but you've got some interesting things about how you did that. Not only did you create it in Silicon Valley, but you commuted back and forth from your residence in New York. So, take us back to the early days of starting a company from scratch in Silicon Valley, and then we'll eventually progress to talking more about the book. 

Martin Babinec: I'm a very lucky guy because when I began my entrepreneurial journey in 1988 and living in Silicon Valley at the time, I didn't realize how valuable it would be to be starting a company in what would be considered the most entrepreneur supporting place on the planet.

I had no appreciation for it at the time. It was a struggle. And when Tri-Net began, since in the late eighties, you couldn't say the words HR and outsourcing in the same sentence and have people understand what you were talking about. We're talking pre worldwide web. So, we didn't have the connectivity that we take so for granted today. And like most entrepreneurs, I began with only the vision of trying to create a small business. I was tired of working in a larger organization. I wanted to be more in control of my destiny. And that's a very common thing that prompts people to start companies. But what I did not understand is that the very nature of what we were creating a TriNet would depend on economies of scale.

And so as an entrepreneur, once I began trying to start this business and sell to other small businesses as a business to business kind of approach, we were not successful. And we were on the verge of going out of business, when I kind of made the decision to really do something counterintuitive. 

Even though this is an economies of scale kind of business, it required having lots of scale for it to be successful. It was waning our direction towards saying we're only going to sell to emerging world technology communities. It really changed my life and outlook as an entrepreneur. And then became for TriNet to over the entire 20 years of, as the CEO, that was the focus of our business initially in Silicon Valley and then on, from, as we expanded to other markets, still retaining that very tight focus. 

And by doing that, it brought me into the world of Silicon Valley in ways that made me appreciate how important was to get support from the community. And it wasn't till I moved my family from Silicon Valley to my hometown in upstate New York, which is more like the Midwest in terms of culture. All right. It's 210 miles from New York City and a small community. 

And I spent 10 years commuting from my Mohawk Valley home in Little Falls, New York. Back to Silicon Valley while still running the business. And it wasn't supposed to be that long, but that's how it turned out. And over that 10 years of commuting, I really began to think hard about the difference between my two valleys and Mohawk Valley and Silicon Valley.

And that's what prompted then this journey to, how do we take the assets in a place like upstate New York or in a lot of places in the middle of the country that have a lot of intellectual capital that is underutilized. And how important is it of a supportive community to help entrepreneurs start and grow companies? And that's ultimately what led to the start of our nonprofit Upstate Venture Connect, which in turn led to writing this book More Good Jobs. 

Brian Ardinger: This conversation has started about the rise of the rest and startup communities outside the Valley and that. What do you think started some of that conversation early on to even think about the fact that companies can be created outside the traditional tech hubs and that there was a yearning and a desire to actually create these ecosystems?

Martin Babinec: National recognition through Steve Case's Rise of the Rest was illuminating for some, but for me, it goes back much earlier. As I talk about in the book, in 1995, my good friend, Brad Feld moved from Cambridge, Massachusetts, a hotbed of startup activity in the nineties, he goes to Boulder, Colorado. And at that point in time, Boulder was not a place VCs were flocking to, to find the next big thing. All right. Nice college town, but not a whole lot of action.

And here, even by 1995, TriNet's businesses is a hundred percent focused on emerging tech. Brad Feld moves to Boulder and not much going on there, but I decided to open a TriNet office just because Brad Feld moved there. That's how much confidence I had that this was going to be a game changer. 

And lo and behold, those people that follow Brad Feld and are aware of his book Startup Communities that talks about how did Boulder transform to a community that then rose in the ranks to be second in the country on the metric of venture capital investment per capita, trailing only the San Francisco Bay area. I mean, how did that happen in a period of call it 10, 15 years, which is not a long period of time when we think about major transformation of a local economy. 

So I had a ringside seat and watched that unfold. And meanwhile, still growing the company and it was long before I started the journey of trying to learn from Brad's experience and the experience of TriNet in many markets where there was lots of startup activities since that was the focus of our company. 

I was taking in a lot of what I saw elsewhere and all the times thinking about someday, somehow, you know, if I had the time and more resources, I could put into it, what could I, as one guy do to help bring about some transformational change in an area that I really love? Not just in my hometown, but more broadly, the more difficult challenge of how could we leverage the assets that are dispersed geographically across the broader region? Because that for me is what made ...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Ty Montague co-founder and CEO of co:collective and author of True Story: How to Combine Story and Action to Transform Your Business. Ty and I talk about his career in advertising and his pivot to a new framework for how companies should be approaching a changing landscape, customers, competitors, talent, and more.

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

Interview Transcript with Ty Montague of co:collective

Brian Ardinger:  Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Ty Montague. He is the co-founder and CEO of co:collective, which is a creative and strategic transformation company. Serves clients like Google and YouTube and IBM and MoMA. And the list goes on and on. 

Ty's also been named one of the 50 most influential creatives in the past 20 years. One of the top 10 creative directors in America, as well as the top 10 creative minds in business. Ty, you also wrote a book called True Story: How to Combine Story and Action to Transform Your Business. So welcome to the show Ty 

Ty Montague: Brian. It's great to be here. Thank you for having me. 

Brian Ardinger: Well, I was super excited to have you, because I want to talk about the transformation and the things that you've seen in this whole world of advertising. If I understand correctly, you've had an illustrious career in the advertising world, but about five or 10 years ago, you made a pivot from that world of classic advertising. And so maybe we can start there. Can you tell us a little bit about that shift from what you were doing in the past, in the advertising space, and where you are now? 

Ty Montague: I used to call myself a storyteller for businesses, helping them craft their story, and then tell it using paid media 30 and 60 second television commercials primarily.  But about 15 years ago, I started to notice that it was getting harder to tell stories using traditional paid media. And I also noticed what seemed to me to be a new kind of company being born. These companies had a story, but they weren't telling it using paid media, they were actually doing it in their customer experience.

First one that I remember noticing because I was still in advertising at the time was Starbucks. You know, there's a moment that all of us I'm sure had where you wake up one morning and suddenly there's a Starbucks on every street corner in America, but there was no Starbucks advertising anywhere. And I couldn't figure out, I was like all other things being equal, right, the Starbucks way of building a business has got to be more efficient. 

And so I looked into it, and I started collecting lists of companies that seem to be operating in this new way. And about 10 years ago, once I realized that they actually did operate in a very different way, I decided to leave traditional advertising. I was the co-president and chief creative officer of a big agency called J. Walter Thompson in North America. At the time, my partner and I decided to leave and launch co:collective. And what we do is we help more traditional companies begin to function in this new way. 

Brian Ardinger: Talk a little bit about that thesis. Can you unpack this quest that you see companies going through and who's good at it and let's start there.

Ty Montague: We have two theses at co:. First to be successful today and increasingly in the future, companies need to be pursuing a higher purpose. We call it a quest. It is something that transcends merely creating shareholder value. Making money is a great result of having a quest, but it's not the point of having a quest.

There needs to be generosity to a good quest. It needs to be something that inspires your customers and your employees to engage with and come along and try to achieve it with you. And so, we help leadership teams define and align on this quest, this higher purpose. And then we help companies actually enact that quest.

In other words, the quest isn't a communication strategy. It's an action strategy for the company. You take your quest and you put it to work in your customer experience. Defining innovative experiences that you make to make your quest real and tangible for people inside and outside your company. And 10 years ago, we had no idea whether that idea would float at all. And fingers crossed. It's a much more popular idea today than it was 10 years ago. And we're excited to see the world pet in our direction.

Brian Ardinger: Let's talk a little bit about framework. Can any company embark on a quest and what's that framework to do so?

Ty Montague: We have a process that we've developed. It's been iterative. As you mentioned, I wrote a book and published it in 2013 that's really about the process. And it hasn't changed massively since then, but there've been a few tweaks to it. So, we basically look for four truths for a company as we look for inputs into how to develop your quest. We look for a truth about the protagonist and this is all story language, right?

Ultimately, we consider the protagonist to be the company itself. So, what is your true state of play today? And we do a lot of desk research. We do a lot of internal interviewing at these companies to define, like, what is the truth about your current state today? We then look for a truth about the stage.

And by that we mean the stage that the story is playing out on, what's going on in culture. What's going on in your competitive set, what's going on in technology that you need to pay attention to. We look for truth about the participants, the people that you actually want to serve in your business. Your customers would be another way to put it. We think of them as participants though, because if you're on a good quest, they want to come along with you and help you achieve it. 

And then we look for a truth about the antagonist. So, it's not enough and know what you're for. We believe you need to know what you're against. What is the dragon that you're trying to slay when you get out of bed every day? And a good antagonist can be extremely motivating. 

And then we take those inputs, and we work collaboratively with the client to develop their quest, usually with the whole leadership team. Often, including the CEO. From there, we take that quest and we put it to action both in again, four quadrants offer, your identity - so the products that you make and then, you know, your identity including communications, your community -internally like internal stakeholders in the company, and then capabilities. Because if you have a good quest, a good quest is ambitious over time it may require you to add capabilities to the company, which can be done through acquisition or by hiring new kinds of people. 

Brian Ardinger: Is this something that pretty much any company in any industry can go through and take part in? Or ...