Retiring Products to Fund Innovation

Tendayi Viki joins Brian to unpack the difference between doing innovation and delivering value, with practical takeaways for product folks, innovation teams, and anyone who wants to stop spinning their wheels.

Overview

Innovation theater. Experimentation theater. Value that never quite materializes. In this episode, Brian Milner sits down with Tendayi Viki—author, strategist, and partner at Strategyzer—to talk about why so many organizations look like they’re innovating… but aren’t.

Together, they dig into what real innovation looks like (and how to measure it), how to escape the trap of cool ideas with no customer value, and why experiments only matter if they lead to decisions. You’ll also learn how to spot the difference between a small bet and a large leap, and what it actually means to “be a pirate in the navy.”

References and resources mentioned in the show:

Tendayi Viki
Tendayi’s Books
Get the Agile Skills Video Library Use code PODCASTSKILLS for $10 off
Subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast

Want to get involved?

This show is designed for you, and we’d love your input.

• Enjoyed what you heard today? Please leave a rating and a review. It really helps, and we read every single one.
• Got an Agile subject you’d like us to discuss or a question that needs an answer? Share your thoughts with us at podcast@mountaingoatsoftware.com

This episode’s presenters are:

Brian Milner is a Certified Scrum Trainer®, Certified Scrum Professional®, Certified ScrumMaster®, and Certified Scrum Product Owner®, and host of the Agile Mentors Podcast training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work.

Tendayi Viki is a globally recognized innovation strategist, author, and partner at Strategyzer, where he helps large organizations build real value—not just innovation theater. With a PhD in Psychology and a client list that spans Unilever to The British Museum, Tendayi brings deep insight into the human side of transformation, backed by frameworks that actually work.

Auto-generated Transcript:

Brian Milner (00:00)
Welcome in Agile Mentors. We're back for another episode of the Agile Mentors podcast. I'm here as always, Brian Milner. And today I'm very, very excited. I have Mr. Tendayi Vicki with us. Tendayi, welcome in.

Tendayi Viki (00:13)
Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.

Brian Milner (00:15)
Very, very excited to have him here. Just to give you some background, if you're not familiar with his work, very prolific and very deep thinker here. He's a partner at a company called Strategizer, where he helps large companies innovate like startups. He's a regular contributor on Forbes, so you may have read some of his articles on Forbes. He's the author of three books, The Corporate Startup, Pirates in the Navy and the Lean Product Lifecycle. Pirates in the Navy is his latest one. Pirates in the Navy, correct me if I'm wrong, it's kind of about how to infiltrate via innovative presence in a large corporation. Is that correct?

Tendayi Viki (00:55)
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, how to be a pirate in the Navy.

Brian Milner (00:58)
I love it. I love the title. ⁓ But his books are really practical. They're on building innovation ecosystems that actually work. He's advised some big companies like Unilever, Amex, and Lutanza. He's been named to Thinker's 50 radar list for his influence and innovation and strategy. But his passion is really helping teams avoid

Tendayi Viki (00:59)
that.

Brian Milner (01:22)
what do you terms as innovation theater and focus on creating real sustainable value. So I thought maybe that's a good place to just start to kick off a conversation and say, Tendayi, talk to us about innovation theater. What does that look like to you? How would you define that? What does that mean?

Tendayi Viki (01:41)
Yeah, it's fascinating. It's a term that's kind of simultaneously coined by Rita McGrath. Steve Blank has used it a few times, and so has Alex Osterwalder. And it's really about... So the thing about the startup world is that the startup world is kind of a coolness factor. So everybody wants to be cool. And then the toolbox that startups use in that cool design thinking, deep school vibe of like sticky notes and... design and prototyping and all that. So everybody wants to do all of those things. I've even watched teams actually engage in agile rituals. Like they do the daily stand up, they do the demo day, they do the retro, right? But when you really look at the, when you dive deep into the focus, it doesn't seem to be a lot of value creation. So you're like, you're doing a... a retrospective as an agile team and you're not talking about what you learned from customers. You didn't do that during that week's sprint. yeah, you can do all the rituals, but if you don't understand the reason the rituals exist, then it's easy for you to kind of just spin and not create any value. And that's innovation theory.

Brian Milner (02:42)
Yeah. Yeah. man, I am with you a million percent on that and completely agree. These structures are there to help kind of be a pathway to that, but not the end result. If you don't understand, just like you said, if you don't understand the reason behind it, the why, then yeah, you could go through all the motions. And I completely get that term, It's kind of theater. It looks like it's actually happening, but it's not really happening. The culture underneath it is not really there. ⁓ So that brings the million dollar question then, right? If these structures like we do, like standups and everything else, aren't going to automatically generate that kind of innovation and it's more of a culture thing,

Tendayi Viki (03:28)
Exactly. Mm-hmm.

Brian Milner (03:44)
How do you then build a culture that is placing innovation as a priority?

Tendayi Viki (03:53)
So yeah, so just to answer your question, think one of the things that's really interesting about the way to create value is you have to authentically care about value creation first. You really have to understand this notion that innovation is this combination of really, really cool ideas, right? Together with a deep understanding of customers and their needs, and then a deep understanding of how to... use a business model that works to deliver that value to customers so you can get value back. Once you complete the entirety of that cycle, we say you're a successful innovator. If you complete the ideas or tech portion of that cycle, you're just an inventor or the ideas guy or whatever people call themselves, right? And so I find that companies excessively focus on ideas too much. And so too much focus on ideation and not enough focus on putting ideas on a journey towards value creation and actually value realization for the organization. So if you're going to build a culture for innovation, you have to understand what you're building it for. You to go, all right, we have to deliberately design our workflows and the way we interact with each other to discover what customers we need. Then we have to design the workflows to bring those customer needs into life through products. Then we have to test whether those products are really delivering that value. And then we have to figure out a way to scale that value and give value back to the moment of vision. you go, okay, that's the job. Now let's design the process, the culture, the toolbox, the artifacts, the rituals that allow us to actually do that. And I think that kind of understanding is probably more fundamental than anything else.

Brian Milner (05:32)
Yeah, absolutely agree. It's the structure for discovery, right? I mean, it's not the discovery. It's the structure that led you to the discovery that has to be repeatable that then can generate future discoveries. It's not how you found the island in the middle of the ocean. Or it's not the island you found in the middle of the ocean. It's how you found it. ⁓ that would lead you to find another one you know. ⁓

Tendayi Viki (05:55)
Exactly. And that's the fundamental question is, can you find another island? Because again, innovation teams stumble a lot on good ideas. And so you can bumble into something good and then fail to do it again because you don't have a repeatable process.

Brian Milner (06:01)
Yeah. Yeah. So let's dive into that a little bit. mean, whether you're a startup or whether you're a bigger organization and you're working on a product in a bigger organization, I know that you can often feel like you're kind of, I was talking to someone this week about this, you kind of feel like you're drowning in a sea of opportunity. There's all these things that we could do and it's sometimes hard to find, well, which ones do we really

Tendayi Viki (06:32)
Mmm.

Brian Milner (06:42)
double down on which ones we invest in and really pour our time and energy and efforts into. So how do you talk about that in your book? How do you find the things that are worth really investing in?

Tendayi Viki (06:54)
Yeah. So I mean, mean, there's two ways, right? The one is the first one is a kind of like an art thing. It can be fed by data, but it's art and that's finding the direction of travel. So that's a strategy choice. We go, we think that an AI is big thing these days. We think that AI is going to do these various things to our business model. And that's really important, by the way, like when you think about AI. And Sharjee, Alex also has got one of my favorite all-time phrases, is AI changes everything and AI changes nothing. The fundamentals for business are still the same, even though the stuff that you can do is exponentially different. So you have to think which elements of the business model do we want to play with around here strategically.

Brian Milner (07:26)
Yeah. Yeah.

Tendayi Viki (07:41)
And then once you pick a direction of travel, now you've got multiple options of different product ideas, services, business model, value propositions, offerings, technology, stacks, et cetera, et cetera. Once you get to that point, you then cannot pick the winning idea on day one yourself. You have to stop building a systematic process of discovery. so you may be, and we, so we often say when you're at that stage, make multiple small bets, right? OK, and I like the way you phrased the question, by the way, because you said, how do you choose what to double down on? That's what you said. You said double down, right? Well, you don't double down on something unless you've made an initial small bet. You double down after an initial bet. Doubling down is I've made a bet, now I'm doubling down. But what companies do is they just make a large bet, and they call it doubling down. But it's not really doubling down. You've just made a large bet.

Brian Milner (08:18)
Yeah. Yeah. Hmm.

Tendayi Viki (08:38)
Right? Doubling down is a follow on bet after an initial bet. And so it means that the first bet is a punt. It's a, see what happens bet. And then the question is, what do you want to see? So somebody just wants to see size of market. Somebody who's wanting to see a real customer with a real need. Somebody who just wants to see a real customer with a real need plus an internal capability to create value. So they'll say, if I give you my 50K, you have to answer both these questions before I double down. And some of these will say you have to answer only one of these questions before I double down. And then so I'll give you less, I'll give you 20K. So that's how you start building these frameworks, right? You start going like the one we built at Pearson, right? You go, ideas, it's ideation, it's strategic thinking. We don't invest any money. That's free. But when you start going into discovery, we might give you 25,000 pounds and you earn the next level of bet by the data you bring using that 25,000. And we have a list of questions that we need positive answers to before we actually make the doubling down. And so that's a way of curating ideas based on evidence and some kind of action and activity.

Brian Milner (09:48)
Yeah, it's amazing to me, like in some of the companies I work with, it's amazing to me to see how many times people will choose bets that they're going to make, but not really even be able to articulate what it is they hope that bet will actually do. Right? Not just, you know, like we have this feature that we're betting on and we think if we add this feature that it's going to, you know, be cool. It's gonna, you know, people will love it that will add this feature, but they don't go the extra step of being able to articulate, yeah, but what does that mean? Does it mean that you're gonna increase your return on investment? it gonna increase your customer satisfaction? So that kind of gets to the heart of how do you measure whether it's actually a successful bet or not?

Tendayi Viki (10:39)
Yeah, exactly. mean, to go way back in the days, to Dave McClure and the pirate metrics. I'm sure you were like, R, right? It's like if we do acquisition, activation, revenue retention, referral, whatever those R's are, you could add a few others that you want. So those are metrics. Why would we ever build a feature that's not connected to any one of those goals? Like, what's the point?

Brian Milner (10:58)
Yeah. Yeah.

Tendayi Viki (11:07)
Right. A measure of satisfaction is referrals, maybe. A measure of customer satisfaction is retention, maybe. You could measure customer satisfaction with your NPS scoring or whatever, right? Like, if you have all those things laid out, then you go, right now we're working on this thing because we believe that it's going to increase our ability to acquire customers. by how much? Possibly by 5%. OK, now we have a benchmark. Then we have a way to start testing whether the things we're building are actually

Brian Milner (11:17)
Yeah.

Tendayi Viki (11:33)
actually creating value. I don't think that there should ever be a wouldn't it be cool if conversation. Maybe at the beginning, but later.

Brian Milner (11:39)
⁓ Yeah, businesses don't... Right. That's not really a great model to build a business on, right? It's just, I think it would be cool.

Tendayi Viki (11:48)
Yeah, it was crazy. I was once working in the large organization and they had disparate products on different platforms. So they had this thing where they were going to put it all as like one on one website, one platform, one product layout. And for them, it was in the backstage of the business, was value creation because it lowers costs and puts everything in an easy to manage place. But then I was like, have you guys ever considered that you could potentially destroy value by putting everything, like you could essentially like make it worth for customers. Like it's not automatic, but just because you've now put everything on this one thing, they even called it the one strategy, whatever. But then because you put it all in this one thing, that is automatically value for customers. So who's in charge of checking for that? Because it's distinctly possible that you've just made things worse. You're going to see a drop off in customers and you're to see a drop in revenue. So that's really something to always be thinking about, right?

Brian Milner (12:21)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, or kind of parallel to that would be if we wanted to add something because we thought it was going to increase customer satisfaction, but it kept customer satisfaction flat or even declined. But maybe it did something else well, like it raised revenue or something like that. It's still not a success, right? Because what you were trying to do was to increase customer satisfaction, and that's not what you did. So you still need to do that, you know?

Tendayi Viki (13:09)
Yes. Yeah, exactly. I mean, you still need to fix it in such a way. If you want to retain it because it grew revenue, then you do need to make it work somehow to make customer satisfaction work because yeah, today's revenue is not tomorrow's revenue. Customer satisfaction is the best way to create value.

Brian Milner (13:24)
Exactly. Yeah. Well, this discussion seems to, know, when we talk about innovation and we talk about this product life cycle, there's, I think, you we can't avoid the term or the concept of experimentation a little bit. And I know you talk about that quite a bit in your writing, kind of the idea of experimentation and what that means, you know, as far as what the expectation should be when you experiment. on things. So I want you to talk a little bit about that. kind of what should what should we what should Scrum Masters product owners? What should we be thinking about when we what should agile teams think about when we think about experimentation and failure? You know, how does a healthy portfolio kind of bet? What does that look like?

Tendayi Viki (14:15)
Yeah. like I remember at the beginning, we talked about innovation theater. Remember at beginning? And we said that was like an excessive focus of, excessive focus on ideation. Then there's another form of experimentation theater, which is fascinating, but I've also noticed, which is people think they're doing well because they're running experiments. Right? Like they're running experiments. We did customer discovery. And

Brian Milner (14:21)
Yeah, yeah.

Tendayi Viki (14:42)
But the experiments they're running are not helping them make decisions about the product, the value proposition, or the business model. So I eventually wrote a piece. I think you've already find it in four or five years ago. But the goal of running experiments is not the experiment. The goal of running experiments is to make progress with your idea. That's the whole goal. So you have to set expectations. You cannot run an experiment that doesn't have a hypothesis and success criteria attached to it.

Brian Milner (14:58)
Yeah. Yeah.

Tendayi Viki (15:11)
Like success criteria and hypothesis first, then experiment. Whereas what happens in a lot of organizations, and I've noticed this is, they have a go-to method for experimentation. Like some organizations will go to market surveys. Some organizations will go to focus groups. They their go-to methods. So they've already decided what the method is going to be. And then they go, so for the focus group we're going to do next week, what are the questions that you'd ask? And it's like, no, that's backwards. First you have to figure out.

Brian Milner (15:11)
Yeah.

Tendayi Viki (15:40)
what you want to learn and then choose the experiment and then design the experiment to deliver those learnings and then look at the data and see if it allows you to make decisions. Great. So that's really, really important. So if you're a Scrum master, like that should be a fight that you have all the time. like, okay, when we finish the experiment, what decision will we be able to make? And then we go, oh yeah, we'll be able to make a decision of whether the pricing works.

Brian Milner (15:42)
Yeah. Mmm, love that.

Tendayi Viki (16:08)
We want to the decision of whether we should keep continue producing this feature or stop. We'll be able to make the decision of whether the position of this thing on the landing page is impacting sales. We should be able to make a decision. And then we say, OK, now we're running the experiment. Not to the experiment and then come back and go, yeah, we learned a lot. Customers are like this and customers are like that. it's like, OK, but what decision did you make after the learning? And that's a really important, the connection between experiments and decisions is something that

Brian Milner (16:14)
Yeah.

Tendayi Viki (16:37)
I don't see that happening a lot sometimes when I walk into an Agile team.

Brian Milner (16:42)
Yeah. Yeah, I love your connecting that to the theater kind of concept because you're absolutely right. From the outside looking in, it looks like, hey, great, they're doing all this experimentation, but it should be driving some decision. Like you said, it should be driving some kind of a movement forward. And if it's not, then you're going through the motions of doing the experimentation, but you're not really applying that that knowledge that you gain from it. yeah, that's why I think it's so important to be able to state it from the outset. Like you said, I've got to have the hypothesis. I've got to be able to say, here's what I hope to learn. Now let's try to do this thing and let's see what happens. And now we can say, now that we know this, what do we do about this? ⁓

Tendayi Viki (17:14)
No. Exactly. And analysis paralysis is finding data for no reason. you don't have, like, what is the, why are we mining the data? What's the reason? What are we looking for? Because as soon as we find it, we stop. But if we're just like reviewing customer interviews and reviewing this, like it's interesting and it's busy work and it makes us feel like we've learned a lot, but we're not making business decisions at the end of the day. you know, it's not really valuable.

Brian Milner (17:27)
Right. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I hope this doesn't put you to the test too much because I know this is not your latest book, but in the lean product lifecycle, I know you talk about kind of how the product life cycle, I love that term even, that it is a life cycle of a product and it kind of goes through phases, maturity phases almost, you know, and that's because you kind of brought that up in what you just said about the fact that, Do we continue or do we not continue? So just for the listeners, can you maybe broadly lay that out for folks, help us to understand a little bit about what that life cycle looks like from idea to retirement?

Tendayi Viki (18:24)
Yeah. I mean, so in my experience, a product or a service has two lives, right? Well, actually maybe three lives. Let's call it three lives. There is life before product market fit, life after product market fit, and then life after decline. And so what tends to happen in organizations, which is where the product life cycle or the lead product life cycle is we ended up calling it, became really valuable is that

Brian Milner (18:32)
Ha ha.

Tendayi Viki (18:51)
The management tools for life after product market fit are the tools that are really prominent, the execution tools, the scaling, the forecasting, the business planning. That's all life after product market fit, because that's where they make sense. You know the customer, you know how much they will need to pay. You know how to scale. know how to... All of those things are useful for life after product market fit. And what we're trying to do with the Lean Product Lifecycle was to say, happens, what is life before product market fit? And life before product market fit is learning and discovery, it's not execution. So when innovation struggles inside large organizations, it's because they take the toolbox for after product market fit and apply it to before product market fit. So we're trying to a toolbox. So we're like, okay, so what's life before product market fit? Well, life before product market fit is having a great idea or a great collection of ideas that's aligned with your portfolio strategy. And so...

Brian Milner (19:36)
Yeah.

Tendayi Viki (19:48)
If you have a whole bunch of really good ideas that you think are going to help you navigate towards where you want to go as an organization, the question then becomes what's the next phase after that? So you run ideation competitions, you generate ideas. Well, if you're going to take the toolbox from life after product market fit, then the next thing you do after ideation is write a business plan.

Brian Milner (20:08)
Hahaha.

Tendayi Viki (20:09)
And thinking like, no, you've jumped over a couple of things first. You've just had an idea, you've got to plan first, right? You got to do other things. You got to do something to check if your idea has legs. And so that's when we came up with the next phase after, idea creation, which we called Explore. So we said, OK, so you explore whether the idea has legs. And Explore is focused on deeply understanding customers and their needs.

Brian Milner (20:14)
Yeah Yeah.

Tendayi Viki (20:39)
understanding, willingness to pay, size of monoket, just kind of understanding like the front stage of your business model. And if you find that the idea sounded good, but there's no customer need that's going to be able to serve for this, you can do two things. You can make a decision. You can stop the idea or you can change direction to whatever you learned. And then we're like, okay, so after that, we moved to another stage we called validation, which is really now about validating the product, the backstage, the business model, the pricing, the channels. How are you going to scale it? So if you get positive outcomes, now you go product market fits. Then you can go to grow, scaling to the whole thing. Eric Gris wrote about growth engines, What are your growth engines really important and how do you drive growth? And then after a while, the product matures and if you can't figure out a way to revamp the growth, then you can move into what we call the sustained stage where you're sort of sustaining, lowering costs while maintaining revenue. And then after a while you... move to the third phase, which is about taking about which is, you know, retiring the product. And what we tried to do at Pearson was we tried to create a process for actively retiring things. So we would walk into these investment boards and go, great, you want to unlock money for innovation? Which thing are you holding on for dear life, just in case one customer asks for it? And they're like, but this thing, this thing, I'm like, kill all that, like actively retired, go through it systematically, get in touch with the customer.

Brian Milner (21:44)
Yeah. Ha ha ha!

Tendayi Viki (22:03)
Say, what do you need? We'll put it for you in this place. It won't change. You can always access it, but there's no more support for that. Like do it in an active way. That way you can systematically move resources from declining products into innovation. So that's effectively the lean product life cycle and the way we designed it.

Brian Milner (22:20)
Yeah, it's awesome. And what really kind of stood out to me is that there's, we're talking kind of more about at a larger level, at a product level, but the same things actually, it's really quite parallel for a feature level, for items within a product that, you know, they go through sort of a very similar life cycle that you have to explore and you have to understand. what the customer is, what their want is. You have to find the market fit for it. Once you find the fit, you have to expand it. And then you have to eventually end up at retirement because there are certain things that's... I kind of want to get your opinion on this. We seem so reluctant to accept that. The concept of whether it's a product or a feature, the idea that no, it's time to now let that go play on a farm upstate. Why do you think as humans, because I know your background is in psychology, I'm kind of curious what your view is there from a psychological standpoint. Why do think we as humans are so reluctant to let go of these things that we've

Tendayi Viki (23:16)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Mm.

Brian Milner (23:34)
we've invested on in the past, have produced for us in the past.

Tendayi Viki (23:38)
Yeah, I mean, it's a whole bunch of things, There's inertia, right? It's just like, it's effort to stop something, relook at it, take it off, et cetera, et cetera. And then there's also loss aversion. I I think product teams can always imagine what might happen if one customer shows up and things no longer there. It's like, no, we had three clicks last month. Those three customers. So there's always that fear of like, what might happen. And so you do need to make a discussion. And one of the things that I love about it,

Brian Milner (23:57)
Yeah. Yeah

Tendayi Viki (24:08)
Some of the product thinking I've seen out there is like, if we're going to add a feature, if we don't want our product to become bloated, what are we dropping? Right? And so you've always got like on the bubble things to drop that you've been thinking about actively. Then you just think about how do you like roll those things out while you're adding new things? Because yeah, it's not some Frankenstein products in the end, right? You keep adding features, but you're not taking anything off. It becomes really hard to use. Yeah.

Brian Milner (24:14)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I love that. Well, I don't want to let you get out of here without at least giving us a little bit about your latest book, Pirates in the Navy, because it's such a great title. just maybe kind of help us understand a little bit about what was your thought behind that topic. What led you to write that book and what really interested you about that?

Tendayi Viki (24:52)
Yeah. So, first it was my own like horrible experiences as an innovator inside large organizations, like the kind of mistakes I made. remember once being in a room, running a workshop to try and convince a group of leaders to buy into this innovation process that we were trying to create. And I was getting a lot of pushback, lot, a lot of pushback. And then after the workshop, one of the leaders who kind of took me aside and was like, you know, today I was watching everything you were saying and this

Brian Milner (24:58)
Yeah.

Tendayi Viki (25:21)
very little to disagree with about the things you were saying, but what we didn't like was the way you made us feel. so most of the pushback was not really about your idea, it about the way you made us feel. And I said, okay, so over time it's gonna land on me, but like a very slow landing, like would be like, like how slow it's been landing on me. It landed on me that actually, if you're gonna do corporate innovation or any kind of transformation.

Brian Milner (25:28)
Hmm. Yeah.

Tendayi Viki (25:49)
the number one skill is actually relationship building. The number two skill is being a good innovator. But what we tend to do is we tend to make innovation the number one thing. We even think of innovators as mavericks. But actually, Pirates in the Navy was this reminder, because there's even a chapter in there that I call, you're not Elon Musk and you don't work in a company full of idiots. It was just a reminder to say, yeah, you don't work in a company full of idiots. People know what they're doing. They've been running the company for a while. They may have blind spots, but they're not idiots. So it's a mutual respect thing that you kind of have to build. so actually, it's funny because I'm about to publish an article in a couple of weeks and a newsletter this week, which is called Innovators Does Not Equal Maverick. And what I'm trying to do is to create this disassociation between having crazy ideas and being difficult to work with. Because we often tend to think that people like Steve Jobs is really like iconic. And part of the iconicness, is that how you say it? The iconography of Steve Jobs is not just how brilliant he was with the product, it's also how difficult he was to work with. Like everybody's like really like, you know, but that's actually pretty rare.

Brian Milner (26:54)
Yeah.

Tendayi Viki (27:08)
Like serial entrepreneurs are people that are really good at working with others. Right. And so that's what Pirates in the Navy is actually really about. Yeah.

Brian Milner (27:14)
Yeah. Yeah, and I've seen people, unfortunately, who have used that example as, well, Steve Jobs was an asshole. I guess that's what I need to be is an asshole because that's what works. No, please, that's not what made him successful was being an asshole, right? Yes.

Tendayi Viki (27:31)
Thanks. Yeah, no, he succeeded in spite of that, not because of that. And so it's something that's kind of foundationally important. So I have like this thing that I do some conversations that I have with colleagues, just to kind of say, I can usually tell, it's like one of my subtle internal pains that I feel. I can usually sense when an innovator is going to burn out in a logical.

Brian Milner (27:58)
Yeah.

Tendayi Viki (28:02)
And that's when every time they open their mouth, people are like... And then so they create like innovation is already a form of deviance, right? Cause you're trying to do something different from the organization. So you don't want to pile on your own personal deviance on top of the ideas deviance, right? You want to be, yeah, it's really important. And so that's what the book was about by the way. The title is a catchy, but it's really just about how do you actually succeed as an innovator inside these more structured institutions.

Brian Milner (28:10)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome. Well, thank you so much. for our listeners here, this will all be in our show notes so that you can find quick links to this, find more about Tendayi and kind of his work. But I can't thank you enough for coming on. I really appreciate it. This has been a fascinating conversation. And I just really strongly encourage the listeners, if you like this, if you really found this conversation interesting, check out his work, check out the corporate startup.

Tendayi Viki (28:44)
Thank you.

Brian Milner (28:54)
Check out the Lean Product Lifecycle and his newest book, Pirates in the Navy. They're really, really good and I think you'll really enjoy it. So, Tadayi, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Tendayi Viki (29:04)
Yeah, thank you for having me. I really enjoyed the conversation too.