In this episode, Jocelyn Mangan, CEO of Him for Her, joins us to discuss how her social impact enterprise is building the boardroom of the future by addressing the gender gap in for-profit boardrooms to increase diversity. Him for Her’s unique approach overcomes the networking gap responsible for the sparsity of women in the boardroom by engaging business luminaries such as Stacy Brown-Philpot, Reid Hoffman, Jeff Weiner, Eric Yuan, and many more to connect the world’s most talented “hers” to board service. Since its founding in 2018, Him For Her has built a referral-only talent network of over 2,000 board-ready women and delivered free board-referral lists to over 300 companies ranging from start-ups to S&P 100s.

Brad D. Smith, Executive Chairman of the Board of Intuit shares his lessons in leadership and the role of a CEO in nurturing innovation. He talks about authentic leadership, serially disrupting yourself, the importance of creating a learning environment where people treat success and failure the same way, and how to deliver the numbers today and reimagine the company for the future.

Stephen Ranjan, Vice President of New Product Development at Roche Diabetes Care shares how leaders and teams there are overcoming the unique challenges of innovating in healthcare despite the global pandemic. He shares how they built new capabilities to explore the needs of underserved customer segments and develop solutions at speed in a regulated environment. Stephen talks candidly about how leaders need to exercise new skills and behaviors to focus intently on customers and their problems while encouraging teams to move quickly and get their ideas funded and sponsored by executives.

Bennett Blank, Innovation & Transformation Leader at Intuit, shares his observations on the creativity of small businesses during hard times. He also discussed the grass-roots activation of Innovation tools at Intuit to help small businesses get through this pandemic.

In this episode, we are joined by Michelle Brigman, Director of Customer Experience at 7-Eleven. Michelle shares how, in the face of the global pandemic, 7-Eleven quickly shifted to ensure their over 68,000 store owners and franchisees could continue to meet their customers’ needs. She also provides insight into 7-Eleven’s COVID19 Command Center and how they use this to rapidly collect and respond to insights gained from all parts of their business. She discusses their digital transformation journey using Lean Innovation techniques. Michelle also explains how she is encouraging her team to bring their “whole self” to work and balance competing priorities (along with a few insights into fried pies, frogs, and the gift of time).

Steve Portigal, Author, Speaker, and Customer Research Expert, shares how to drive innovation using the power of strategic customer insights. He reminds us that learning from customers is “messy” because we are complex beings. In order to go deep while interviewing customers, you should have clarity about what is uncomfortable for you versus what is uncomfortable for customers and not conflate the two. His provocation, “No One Cares,” highlights the risk of magnifying the significance of our solutions in a customer’s life and missing the opportunity to focus on things that customers care about.

Katie Hanson, Director of Product Management at Benefitfocus, shares how her company quickly adapted to help their customers find affordable benefits during this global pandemic, and how it led to the creation of a new offering. She also talks about the importance of supporting her team during these stressful times by understanding how they are “really” doing. 

Katie is a consumer experience thought leader and trained innovation catalyst. For almost two decades, she has helped consumers navigate big financial decisions using technology. Her passion for using data to uncover insights and foster innovation has contributed to the advancement of consumer-centric solutions at market-leading companies including Wells Fargo, Renovate America, Intuit, and Global Analytics.

Learn how Roche Diabetes Care used Agile, Lean Startup and Design Thinking to reinvent themselves to better address disruptive forces in Diabetes Care.  Moritz Hartmann, head of the commercialization for EMEA/LATAM shares his leadership lessons learned throughout this journey driving transformation in the highly regulated medical devices industry.

Key take-aways 

• When creating a new innovation program, beware of too much planning up-front. You will have a strong desire to do it “right”, but Moritz advises: “Don’t try to get it all right”.
• Empowering teams to make decisions based on evidence increases their engagement and has a very similar effect for leaders.   The team taking on some of their own decisions can be a huge relief for a leader after a day of back-to-back meetings and non-stop decision-making.  

To transform your organization you must quickly re-shape one of the foundational capabilities of your interdependent system, Portfolio management.

 Key take-aways 

• Must keep our innovation initiatives tied to the corporate strategy through our portfolio management processes
• A portfolio review is NOT a place for project status updates and your annual budgeting process should not be a stand-in for portfolio management.  Markets, customers, and competitors are moving too quickly.
• Don’t wait, creating an evidence-based portfolio management process takes time.  Start right away.

Innovation as an Interdependent System  by Noel Sobelman - https://medium.com/@nsobelman/innovation-as-an-interdependent-system-cbd4b298acbe

In this episode of Shift, we link up with Arthur Daemmrich, Director of the Lemelson Center for the study of invention and innovation at the Smithsonian Institution, to discuss the differences between innovation and invention, and whether or not we have truly entered the fourth industrial revolution.