No Drama Innovation with Janice Fraser, Co-author of Farther, Faster and Far Less Drama

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with the amazing Janice Fraser, one of the leaders in the Lean Startup movement and co-author of the new book, Farther, Faster and Far Less Drama. Janice and I talk about the evolution of leadership and how today's world of uncertainty and change requires new behaviors and mindsets to lead teams and companies forward. Let's get started. 

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Interview Transcription with Janice Fraser, Co-author of the new book, Farther, Faster and Far Less Drama

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 Janice Fraser. She's co-author of Farther, Faster and Far Less Drama: How to Reduce Stress and Make Extraordinary Progress Wherever You Lead. Welcome Janice.

Janice Fraser: Thank you for having me. I'm so glad to be here. 

Brian Ardinger: This is a super honor for me, quite frankly. Janice, you, and I met over a decade ago and you've been hugely influential in my journey around this whole startup and innovation space. I think you and I met at one of the first Lean startup conferences in San Francisco, and this was when I was spinning up Nmotion startup accelerator and I said, I need somebody with the chops, who understands everything from customer discovery to product development to help our teams through this process and teach me quite frankly how to do some of this stuff. 

So, I brought you into Nebraska a while ago, and since then we've been friends and have learned so much through that process of watching you help teams and help people grow in this space. And, and now you're in a different journey, but how did you get involved in product development and Lean Startup, and then how did your career journey get you to the point where you've written this book? 

Janice Fraser: It's so lovely when I hear people say that I was influential. I'm always the most grateful when I've been helpful. Right? Honestly, that was the best compliment you could have ever offered to me, so thank you. Thank you very much for sharing that. 

My career journey, like so many of us in the innovation space has not been a straight line at all. And really it started my journey into product. And then from product into innovation, it really goes way back.

I accidentally ended up a product manager at Netscape in 1995 when we didn't even call it that for the work that I was doing. And from there I moved into user experience consulting, and I started a company that did that. And then it became Luxer where it was like, helping startup companies kind of get off the ground.

And when I look back over the arc of my career, if you remember the Crossing the Chasm model, like I'm that first person, you know, on the far side of the chasm, sort of like holding my hand out, helping people jump across the chasm. Like my job is to sit at the edge of the newest thing and make it boring.

I had to write a six-word biography at one point for some offsite or retreat or something, and it was knitting at the edge of newness. Whatever the bleeding edge thing is like I'm just sitting there figuring out like, how can we do it in a way that everybody, normal people can practice. 

And like I keep a sticker on my computer that says regular people just to remind us all like. The world is made up of regular people and they're doing extraordinary things all the time. And so, I want to just, I just want to help that process out. 

And so right now it's been innovation. Before that it was product management or starting a company. And it's, what I want to do is just figure out like, how can we do it reliably better?

And of course, that takes you to lean start up because you know, Lean Startup isn't going to make you successful, but it will keep you from failing or it will help you raise the floor on how bad that failure could be. And so that's how I got here. 

Brian Ardinger: I think you're underselling yourself to a certain extent. You've had a chance to work with some of the best companies in the world when it comes to innovation and you've kind of been behind the scenes player when it comes to a lot of this stuff and helping companies understand that. 

The next thing I really want to talk about is this book, because it's slightly different than a, you know, product strategy book or something. You know, Farther, Faster, and Far less drama. It seems to be a culmination of what you've seen in the workplace and in creating companies and working through this uncertainty that it, it is to create new stuff, but less from the product and the tactical side, but more from the people side, the leadership side. Talk a little bit about why you decided to write this book. 

Janice Fraser: So the book is co-authored by my husband, who was my co-founder at Luxr, where we had like 50 companies go through this 10 week program, which ended up being an accelerator kind of thing, right? He's still very much focused on product management.

He runs a team of like 50 people who all work with federal government clients. All product managers and product designers. I come at it more from the innovation side, from, you know, how do you get very large organizations to be more agile or more lean, or to simply create value from new ideas and especially new ideas that challenge the status quo.

That's a hard thing to do, to get a large organization that's been around for say, 150 years to begin to actually change their behavior. When we started writing this book, it was four years ago. That's when we first did the very first outline, and we thought that it would be a very tactical book for practitioners of like meeting facilitation. Because a lot of the ideas land at that moment of like, I need to run a strategy session, or I need to get more out of this leadership thing, and I was doing a lot of network then.

But over time and, and in consulting with some editorial folks and some of my closest advisors, my ex-boss, a guy named David Kidder, who’s a dear, dear friend David said, this is bigger than what you think it is. The way that you lead is different than the way that other people lead. And those kinds of feedback over a period of a year or two really gave Jason and I pause.

And so, we sat down and thought like, what is it really that we're seeing that's different and what I think is that the leaders that are most successful, whether it's agile transformation on the software side or innovation execution on the non-software side, what we see is that the most successful leaders were leading differently than the ones who seemed the most stuck. 

We can call it could be mindset like the Carol Dweck book. It could be any number of things. But some leaders were able to, as the book says, go farther, get there faster. And my favorite thing is to go there without a lot of bickering, without a lot of hassle, without frankly, drama. Like, we just don't have time to mess around th...