Ep. 177 - CGS Advisors' Gregg Garrett, Author of Competing in the Connecting World

In this episode, Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder, talks with Gregg Garrett, Managing Director of CGS and co-author of Competing in the Connecting World: The Future of Your Disruptive Industry is Already Here. They discuss innovation both inside and outside, disruptive forces, ecosystem commanders, maturing models, and leadership skills.

Interview Transcript  (to read the transcript go to insideoutside.io)

Brian Ardinger: Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger, founder of InsideOutside.IO, a provider of research, events, and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking tools, tactics, and trends, in collaborative innovation. Let's get started. Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. I want to welcome again, Greg Garrett. He is the MD at CGS advisors. He's a coauthor of a new book called Competing in the Connecting World: The Future of Your Disruptive Industry is Already Here. Welcome back, Greg, to the show. 

Gregg Garrett: Hey Brian. Thanks for having me. 

Brian Ardinger: It's been a couple of years since we talked last. Obviously that's a long time in this world of innovation, so I want to get you back on to talk about some of the things that you've been doing. The new book that you've got out called Competing in the Connecting world. Let's start there. Give the audience a little background, what you were doing and then how you got to this book. 

Gregg Garrett: Yeah, so the book is a culmination of experience over probably decades really, but about six years ago. I started teaching a course at a university here in Michigan called Oakland University, and they asked me to develop this course and we called it competing in the connecting world because I was noisy in an advisory session one time and said, are we really preparing students and future leaders to compete in this connecting world, in this future world? Are we just doing more of the same? They said, well, we probably aren't, or we could do it differently. Could you help us to develop the course? Taught it for a few years. This is an MBA and graduate engineering course and realize there's really very little written. A lot in the media world and article world, but very little written formally around it. So my coauthor, Dr. Warren Ritchie and I grabbed a lot of what we were teaching in the classroom, a little bit while we were speaking a publicly, and also what we've been consulting on, living ourselves around digital and transformation in general, and put it in a book.

Brian Ardinger: So let's unpack that a little bit and give our audience a background about yourself. You've done a lot of time in Fortune 100 world as an executive. You've done a lot of consulting and investing in that. So you've seen a lot from both sides of the puzzle, both inside organizations and outside of organizations. What made you decide that this was a topic that you wanted to dig into and and what have you learned? 

Gregg Garrett: Yeah, so you've got the history right. Bunch of years with large firms, and then the last nine years being a very small firm, 20 person boutique transformation organization, working back with some of those large firms, but then also working with the medium size and scaling. And do a lot of mentoring inside of different accelerators and whatnot. So I've got one foot in each of those camps, the startup, the scale-up world, and then the large entity trying to transform world. 

To read the transcript or for more information, go to insideoutside.io