Inside Outside Innovation

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Kate Leto, Author of Hiring Product Managers Using Product EQ to Go Beyond Culture and Skills. Kate and I talk about some of the trends and tactics needed for hiring the best product managers and why there needs to be more of a balance between technical and human skills in the process. Let's get started. 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 consultant 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 you're a front row seat to the latest thinking tools, tactics, and trends in collaborative innovation. Let's get started. Interview Transcript with Kate LetoBrian 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 we have Kate Leto. She's the author of Hiring Product Managers Using Product EQ to go Beyond Culture and Skills. Welcome to the show Kate. Kate Leto: Thank you, Brian. It's great to be here. Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you on the show. Our mutual friend Jeff Gothelf suggested we talk, and you're based in the UK. Is that correct? Kate Leto: I am. Yeah, just outside of London. Brian Ardinger: I wanted to talk more about all this concept of product managers and some of the new things that you're seeing out there. Tell us a little bit about that. How you got involved in product management at the very first Kate Leto: Probably like the majority of product managers, I didn't intend to get into product management. Didn't even know what it was. When I started out over 20 years ago, it was still very much a new and developing area and profession. And I fell into it really just before I joined Yahoo, but I was actually working in Chicago at the time at a startup. Back in the late nineties. And actually, fell into product management, I was doing marketing, which led to product marketing, which led to product management. And went to grad school at Northwestern University and ended up at Yahoo directly after that, again, working with product marketing and slowly made this transition into product management. So, it was trial and error and it was by accident just as it is with many of us in product management. Brian Ardinger: So, let's talk a little bit about some of the changes that you've seen over the last 20 years in product management. And, you know, it seems to actually have become quote unquote profession now, and people actually know what that means, but maybe what are some of the big highlights that you've seen over the years that have really changed how people think about product? Kate Leto: Number one is product has more credibility and a bit more clarity around what it is. I think a lot of that's come from the different communities that have sprung up around the product world over the last 10 plus years. Groups like mind the product have been really powerful globally and encouraging, creating a space for product people to come together and talk about what is product management?What is it? How do we do it? How do we do it? Well, like many product people. Still within my friends and family group, people have no idea what product management is. My partner just tells everybody that I'm a spy because he doesn't quite understand it. So, we just roll with that. I think one of the best things that I've seen over the last 20 plus years within product, is amongst ourselves more clarity around what it is that we do. And to create a support system, really in a support structure to help us have a place to go to learn, to vent, to talk about what's challenging us what our tensions are and how to do that in a different way. And one of the things that I really latched on to I'd say over the last five plus years is the movement of product management from just being something that's about what I call technical skills, which are the things that we focus quite a bit on, you know, the fundamentals of product management, how to build a roadmap, maybe how to do a strategy statement or a vision statement for our team or a product or an organization, how to put in KPIs or OKRs and while all those are essential and those are things that we've really talked about quite a bit as a community over the last five, 10, 15, 20 years, I've noticed this trend within product that we are starting to talk more outside of that set into more kind of a human aspect of being a product manager, because we are people, right?Products are built by people for people. For the most part, bringing the concept of what I call human skills into the product management space is something that I've noticed a big trend in the last five, six, seven years. And I'm happy to say that's something that I'm involved in and I'm happy. I'm really enjoying talking to people about things like self-awareness and resilience and adaptability and all of these great things that are just as essential to how we build a product as a roadmap structure or building OKR out for our organization.Brian Ardinger: Absolutely. So, you mentioned that most people tend to think about the technical side of product management and product development. Your new book called Hiring Product Managers tries to talk about the move from the focus on technical to this balance between technical and human skills. Tell us a little bit about the book and how it came to be and what it's all about.Kate Leto: The book Hiring Product Managers using Product EQ to go Beyond Culture and Skills just started to come about probably five, six, seven years ago, as I started to look outside of the technical side of product management. So outside of the skills that we talk about, and I was coaching a lot of people on and working with organizations on things like how to have a better road mapping process or how to actually introduce OKR as into our organization or how to run design sprints, and integrate that into our product development processes.And to be honest, I kind of got tired of thinking and just talking about those things. And I took a coaching course, something to help me help people I was working with beyond just these technical skills, because it was very interesting. I'd go into conversations with teams or with leaders about specific mastery of technical skills, and suddenly it would drop a bit further into an area of personal need.I don't think my team likes me or why can't I get a promotion or why does this stakeholder, will they not have a meeting with me? Can I not get anywhere with them? I started to really focus on this area of what I now call product EQ, which is bringing in human skills into the conversation and helping people feel like they have the confidence to talk, talk about things like self-awareness and resilience and leadership and collaboration, and even how to deal with conflict. And giving them some words and tools to do that. So, from that over the past 10, 20 years, I've done a lot of hiring within product management. And it seems like a very natural evolution to how can we actually build better teams and bett...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Marguerite Johnson, author of Disruptive Innovation and Digital Transformation, 21st Century New Growth Engines. Marguerite and I talk about the evolution of disruptive innovation theory and how legacy companies can embrace digital transformation and open innovation. Let's get started. 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 of change and disruption. Each week we give you a front row seat to the latest thinking tools, tactics, and trends in collaborative innovation. Let's get started. Interview Transcript with Marguerite JohnsonBrian 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 Marguerite Johnson. She is the author of a new book called Disruptive Innovation and Digital Transformation: 21st Century New Growth Engines. Welcome to the show. Marguerite Johnson: Thanks Brian for inviting me and thank you to your Inside Outside audience for listening. Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you on because you've got a new book and it's all about disruption and we are clearly in that particular pathway. That train is hitting us full force. Why don't we talk about how you got involved in innovation space? Give us a little bit background about your career and why this is so important to you. Marguerite Johnson: I've been in innovation as a practitioner for just over 20 years and my career. Initially started in market research in the big dot com era where anyone, everyone with a website could make money. It evolved from there into doing a lot of scientific research on cardiovascular blood pathogens for Bristol Myers. And so, moving the large context of digital and how digital was basically burst onto the scene with a lot of companies in this kind of new, exciting way. All the way to how large established companies like pharma was using science and research to touch patients who were experiencing either the need for, the drug at that time was Plavix a blood thinner, primarily used to help patients after a cardiovascular event or primarily a stent. And so my background in innovation was very much a convergence of technology becoming a key player in the role of business. And the larger companies that we're learning to navigate to use it in unique ways and spaces that touch people's lives. And then it evolved into mostly industrial businesses. So, your large-scale engines, fracking, air motors, industrial pumps, and mixers, and mixing systems and conveyors, and all the way to automotive and electronics and seating systems and safety systems. And so, I've gone through the full gamut, starting with the digital.com era and then evolving into a lot of other what we call nonnative digital, traditional big businesses.Brian Ardinger: Yeah. Those legacy industries that are facing that disruption and may be in a little different position than some of the new startup technology companies that we're seeing today. Tell me a little bit about why you decided to write this book. Marguerite Johnson: Like so many other people right now, we're looking around and we're trying to understand and interpret this system environment that we're in. In the past, digital and these large traditional companies were basically separate and apart from one another, they were playing in their own space.And now we're seeing this drive to bring these competencies together. And when you look at big traditional legacy companies and you look at your native digital, such as your Apples, your Amazons, and Googles, and you see this apex or this inflection point where everyone is moving it into creating more value with digital. And the traditional innovation literature was not ready for this. When you do any type of research on disruptive innovation and you look at all of the practices around, where do you find new growth in these new spaces? They were all around B2B enterprises and B2B enterprises positioned themselves to defend against new market entrance. And that was primarily focused around a new market entrant coming in with a cheaper, more simple, maybe a less functionality product, and then grabbing additional functionalities and moving up market and taking bigger share.And so that was the conversation. It did not include digital at all. In fact, Christensen later on came back to explain the reason why the iPhone wasn't included in his original assumptions about disruption. It was more related to the evolution of the laptop, which I challenged that in the book. And, you know, I want to make clear to the audience that my desire is not to rewrite the history or up end the history of disruptive innovation, as it pertains to Christensen's original theory.I build on his theory. I pride myself in taking all of the published works from many, many authors and researchers in the past and using it to evolve my own knowledge. And that is a reason why I wrote the book as well is, I wanted other people to live their evolution on disruptive innovation through me, as other authors have given me the benefit to live it through them.That's very, very important to me. I did not want to keep all this knowledge to myself and be the little wizard behind the scenes and say, aha, I have the secret sauce. Knowledge should be shared. And with the accumulation of knowledge, I think we all grow as a society and we all benefit. That was very important to me.So, understanding the context of disruptive innovation in the past, making sure it was relevant to today, looking around at the science and the research and, and understanding that it wasn't there. And then building on what others have done to bring us to the point where we can have this discussion and move forward as a society and innovation.Brian Ardinger: So legacy companies obviously need to embrace digital a lot more than they have in the past and that. Why is it so difficult for them to do so, or what's been holding them back? Marguerite Johnson: If you've spent a century building talent, assets, operations skills, supply chains, and your entire profit model is built around those assets. It's very hard. I mean, it's literally throwing the baby out with the bath water. I mean, that's what it seems like. Okay. So that's absolutely not what it is, but that's how it could sound. You come to some of these conferences and digital is presented as a disruptor. Digital itself is not a disruptor, how it changes innovation, product services and business models can be a disruptor, but it's not a competency and a capability that's out of the scope of knowledge and abilities of a big company.You have the customers; you have the biggest part of digital that you need. You can learn to add value to the products and services you're already delivering to them by enabling it with technology. By providing additional value through some connectivity. So traditional companies shoul...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Regine Gilbert, author of Inclusive Design for a Digital World: Designing with Accessibility in Mind. Regine and I talk about what inclusive design is and how teams and companies can build accessibility into their processes and the impact of future technologies in the space. Let's get started. 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 helps 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. Interview Transcript with Regine GilbertBrian Ardinger:  Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger and as always, we have another amazing guest. With me today is Regine Gilbert. Regine is a user experience designer, educator, international public speaker, and author of the book Inclusive Design for a Digital World: Designing with Accessibility in Mind. Welcome to the show, Regine. Regine Gilbert: Thank you, Brian. Happy to be here. Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm excited to have you on the show. Not only for the fact that we're going to talk about your book and all the things that you are an expert in when it comes to design, but you're also going to be at the IO2020 Summit here, coming up next week. And we're excited to have you to talk to our audience a little bit more there, but we wanted to jump into it and get a little sneak preview of some of the things they're going to be seeing at the event and hearing from you. So, thanks for coming on. Maybe to start, what is inclusive design? Regine Gilbert: Well, that is the million-dollar question. You could ask five different people. They'll tell you five different things, when it comes to inclusion and what inclusion means. I like to take a chapter out of Kat Holmes's book. Kat Holmes says that we don't really know what inclusion is. She wrote the book Mismatch Design. But she says, we do know what exclusion is. We do know what it's like to be left out of something. And so that's what I think about when I think about inclusion. I actually think about exclusion and I think about who are we leaving out when we create products? When we create services, when just this morning, I was talking to one of my friends who's a makeup artist. She's a professional makeup artist. And she's like, Oh, you would really like, forget the pop stars name, but she has a condition that makes it hard for her to like open things. And she's like, Oh, she has a new makeup line. And the way to open it is so easy. You should really look into it. And she's like, I thought of you when I saw the packaging. And I said, yeah, that's the kind of thing. I think about packaging now, you know, and things that are hard to open and I'm in my forties. And as we get older, our dexterity changes and it doesn't improve. I mean, it doesn't, you know, everything is relative to our bodies and whatever happens, but when I find something hard to open, I'm like, WHY!!! Brian Ardinger: Exactly Or hard to read. Regine Gilbert: Yes. Or hard to read. Brian Ardinger: Can we get rid of the eight-point font please. Regine Gilbert: Yeah. I mean, at this point, you know, most people are looking at screens all day. We're, most of us are engaged with some sort of technology at all times, especially during this pandemic and with that, we're getting fatigued. Right. And so, we don't need things that are cumbersome or hard to see. Yeah. That's a whole thing. Brian Ardinger: So, if I'm not a designer, why should I really care or pay attention to this trend? What are some of the reasons why everyone should be really caring about accessible design? Regine Gilbert: I think of it this way, that everyone is temporarily able bodied. If you wear glasses, you may not think of yourself as someone with a disability, but if you take off those glasses, are you still able to see? And if you're not, then that is a disability, right? So those glasses are an assisted technology, that help you function in this world. And that's basically what we need to be doing throughout our society is providing the glasses or providing whatever assistive technology that is needed to help people do what they need to do.Brian Ardinger: Personally, we've gone through that particular journey. My daughter here's what cochlear implants. And so, having that assistive technology to be able to access the hearing world. It has been a game changer for us and has led me personally, try to figure out how do people talk to each other and how do they interact with each other. And can you talk about the design process and where accessible design fits into that process? Is it something that happens at the beginning of the end or where can people go wrong with it? Regine Gilbert: The classic answer when it comes to design, is it depends. And it truly does depend. For me in my classes. I teach accessibility from the beginning, right? The first readings I have for my students to do and the first couple of weeks of classes are on inclusion and accessibility. And what are these things and what do they mean? And how do you incorporate those into the research plans for what you're about to do? When it comes to the corporate side of things a lot of times it's not thought about in the beginning, it's only thought about when a company has been sued, right? They've been sued because their website isn't accessible to people with disabilities. And then, Oh, no then everybody's in a panic. We need to fix the website. We need trainings. Oh, and you know what? We'll just settle. We're not even going to fix it. We'll just leave that to the side. I mean, there's so many different things. I mean, just, I think it was just last year where Domino's Pizza was sued because their website wasn't accessible and then they took it up to the Supreme court and the Supreme court was like, you got to make the site accessible. It's part of the American with Disabilities Act. Now, technically speaking, the American with Disabilities Act came out in the early nineties before we have the internet that we have today. So, them applying this old statute to something new was quite eye opening and people were like, yes, this means like, make it accessible.And why not? In the United States, I like to throw this stat out.  In the year 2035, which is 15 years from now, which is not a long time, we're going to have more old people in this country and old, I mean like 65. I won't be old when I'm that age. Cause I'm not that far from it. You know, we'll have more people who are over the age of 65 than under the age of 65. I am trying to plant little seeds with my students to like start making stuff for your older self now, because when you reach that age, it's too late. Inside Outside Innovation Summit - Husch BlackwellSponsor Voice: As a provider of smart, legal advice to ...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Scott Anthony. Scott is a senior partner at Innosight and co-author of the new book called Eat, Sleep, Innovate. Scott and I talk about the challenges of creating a culture of innovation, as well as some of the behaviors and actions required to drive innovation success. Let's get started. 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 and collaborative innovation.Interview TranscriptBrian Ardinger:  Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Coming to us all the way from Singapore today is Scott Anthony. Scott is a senior partner at Innosight and co-author of the new book called Eat, Sleep, Innovate: How to make creativity an everyday habit inside your organization. Scott, welcome to the show. Scott Anthony: Brian, it is a pleasure to be here. Brian Ardinger: I am so excited to have you on the show. You are a prolific author, speaker, consultant, in this world of innovation. So, it's really nice to sit down virtually across the ocean and talk to you more about some of the new stuff that you're working on. I always like to ask folks who've been in this space a long time, and you've written a lot of books and talked about this particular topic. Why did you decide to write another book on innovation and why this book now?Scott Anthony: The origin story of this book really traces back about five, six years ago. So just by background, our organization Innosight was co-founded by the late great Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christianson. So, for the last 20 years, we've been trying to empower forward thinking organizations to navigate disruptive change and own the future.And most of the work that we've done is focused on helping businesses, identify and launch new disruptive products, come up with board facing growth strategies, build deep organizational capabilities and so on. So, it's been, you know, pretty big picture, strategic stuff. Then about five years ago, I was doing a session with a big logistics company. And the CEO said, I've read all the books. I understand what I have to do separate organization, but we've done all that. We've got 28,000 other people. What do we do with them? And I thought that's a really good question and we didn't really have a really good answer to it. So, over the last few years, we've had a chance to just probate it through various client projects. And now I think we've got a pretty good answer to that question. And that's why we wrote the book Brian Ardinger: it's called Eat, Sleep, Innovate, and it really talks about almost the behavioral things that you need to put in place to make innovation a competency within an organization. So, talk a little bit about the overall framework and what people can expect to get out of the book.Scott Anthony: Yeah. So, we start the book with definitions. We're trying to enable people to create a culture of innovation. So, you got to define that. We define innovation as something different that creates value. Intentionally broad to remind this is not just about technology. We then say there are five behaviors that enable innovation success. You gotta be curious, customer obsessed, collaborative, adept, and ambiguity, and empowered. And then argue that a culture of innovation is one in which these behaviors come naturally. We start with the definitions and then we introduce a puzzle, which is those behaviors, sound pretty straightforward. I've got four kids. I don't have to teach them to do those things. They just are that way naturally, because that's what humans do. Yet organizations, we all know really struggle with innovation. And what we highlight in the book is the key problem is essentially the existing habits of the organization, institutionalized inertia that allows you to keep doing what you're currently doing but stops you from doing something different and that's innovation.And then we talk about what do you do to break and reform habits, to overcome those barriers, to really make innovation of repeatable habit. And we've got some specific tools and techniques about how to do it. So that's the basic arc of the book. Brian Ardinger: It does a great job of a lot of case studies, a lot of insight into some specifics on how you can make this happen. But the thing I keep coming back to as I work with companies and I talk to other innovators like yourself, innovation is a team sport, but at the end of the day, it's like, who helps drive that bus. So, a lot of the stuff that you talk about, right, are behavioral changes and that. Does this have to happen from the top of the organization or is this something that you roll out division by division, person to person? Talk a little bit about that. Scott Anthony: The answer is of course, yes. Which means that both are true. So, it really depends on what you're trying to do. Ideally, if you're trying to create enterprise level culture of innovation, if you're trying to really have it be something that scales across a multi-divisional whatever. Yes, of course, you need to have the topic leadership actively involved because there's a lot of work that needs to get done. But that doesn't mean that if you're a manager inside a large established organization, that's not doing this, that you have no hope because you can, within your team, group or department, create essentially a microculture subculture, whatever you want to call it, that enables those innovative behaviors to happen at a very local level.And we have an example in the book, chapter four of the book talks about the HR function within a large organization in Singapore. Singtel, the biggest telecommunications company in the region. So that was not an enterprise wide effort. It's really the HR community saying that we want to do this. We had another recent client where it was the supply chain community. It said we're getting a lot of pressure to do different things. We need to up our innovation game and we can't wait for the enterprise to do it. So yeah, ideally, you've got top down, but there's also plenty of room to have things happen in pockets that could have lots of impact. Brian Ardinger: And I imagine that allows for that creativity and the uniqueness within the division or within that particular group, the specifics of how that culture is addressed, the specific rewards, et cetera, are probably different based on what's required to move that team forward. Scott Anthony: A lot of this in our view is not about how you change how people are rewarded. You know, money is sometimes the worst way to try and change behavior. Cause it's really hard to get right and all that. It really is trying to create an environment where people are encouraged to follow the behaviors and they're supported when they do it. And that it means they're supported when good thin...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Dr. Christian Busch, author of the new book, The Serendipity Mindset: The Art and Science of Good Luck. Christian and I talk about how you can expand your surface area of luck and flex your serendipity muscles, both as an individual and an organization. Let's get started. 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. Interview TranscriptBrian 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 Dr. Christian Busch. He is the author of the new book, The Serendipity Mindset: The Art and Science of Good Luck.Christian Busch: Welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me, Brian. Brian Ardinger: Christian, I am so excited to have you on the show for a number of different reasons. We can get into the details in a minute, but to give our audience a little bit of background about who you are and that. You teach entrepreneurship innovation and leadership at New York University and the London School of Economics; you direct the Center for Global Affairs and Global Economy Program. I think you've co-directed the London School of Economics Innovation and Co-creation Lab, and you've been in this space of innovation and entrepreneurship for a while. So, I'm excited to have you on board. And I think I'll start off by talking about how we actually met. You have a book out called The Serendipity Mindset and you have a new article that just came out in Harvard Business Review about how do you create your own career luck? And I was fascinated. I was reading through the article. I said, Oh, this is a perfect person to talk to, to have on the show and talk about this idea of how do you create luck?  You know, we talk about invention and creation of new innovations and that. And so many times you hear people talk about, well, it was just luck. And so, I want to get your take on what got you interested in researching and studying the art and science of good luck. Christian Busch: Yeah, that's a great question because I've had an experience early on in life, a car crash that made me realize how quickly life can be over. And so, its instilled kind of urgency and search for meaning. And, you know, I started reading this Victor Frankel book around man's search for meaning and really dove deep into what is meaningful to me. I realized that what I enjoy the most is connecting people, connecting ideas, seeing how dots connect. And so, over the last years I've been part of building communities, companies, and then doing a lot of research on what makes companies successful, not successful. What makes individuals successful purpose-driven or not successful, purpose-driven. And one of the things that I found fascinating is when I looked at that kind of whole spectrum, the most joyful, you know, successful people seem to have something in common, which was that they all somehow intuitively cultivated serendipity. They intuitively saw something the unexpected, whenever it happens, they connect dots. They somehow create their own smart luck. And you know, these kinds of people where people around them would say, well, they're just a bit luckier than others. Since I got really fascinated by this question. And I delve deeper into the signs of it, but also then inspiring stories and try to identify what is the science base pattern behind this and how can we make it happen by exercises and other things.Brian Ardinger: So how would you define the difference between blind luck versus smart luck? Christian Busch: Yeah, it's really, I mean, if you look at the blind, like this kind of being born into a loving family, or, you know, things that just happen to you without you doing anything versus the kind of smart luck, which is really the active luck, which is about saying it's not just something that happens to us, but it's a process of seeing something and doing something with it.So for example, you know, picture this quintessential situation of you're in a coffee shop. And if you have erratic hand movements, as I do, you might spill a coffee more often than not. And you know, you spill that coffee. And there's this person next to you and you sense, there's a kind of connection, you know, you just feel, Oh, this could be interesting. And you know, you now have two options, right? Option number one is, you're just saying, I'm so sorry. Here's a napkin. And that's it. You leave it at that option. Option number two is you strike a conversation. You see some potential overlaps and it might grow into a potential love relationship or become a cofounder, whatever it is.And then obviously this really bad feeling when you had option number one happen. You walk outside, you're like, ah, I should have talked with this person. Right. And so that is serendipity missed, and that is smart luck missed. So, what we're seeing here is that it's really about what is our proactive decision that we make in the moment when the serendipitous or when that kind of unexpectedness happens. And so, in a way, serendipity is all about making accidents more meaningful, but also making more meaningful accidents happen. I think in the business context, I guess you have a lot of people also who are running businesses in the audience. And so, one of my favorite examples is a company in China.  They produce washing machines and other white goods. And, you know, they had farmers call them up and saying, Hey, look. We're trying to wash our potatoes and it always breaks down this machine whenever we try to wash out potatoes and what would we usually do when something unexpected like this happens, we would say, well, look, this is a washing machine for clothes. Don't wash your potatoes in the washing machine. Right. But you know, they did the opposite. They said, you know what? This is unexpected, but there's a lot of farmers in China who might have the same problem, but actually they want to have their potatoes washed. So, they added the dirt filter and made it a potato washing machine. The point here is that when they look back now, they're Oh, it was just lucky that we learned from farmers X, Y, Z. Yeah, but you work for it. You did something about it. You saw something in the unexpected. And that's the same with everything from Viagra to how we met the love of our lives, all these different things. They were practice decisions rather than just happening to us. We had to do something about it. Brian Ardinger:  Let's talk a little bit about that. In the article that you wrote in Harvard Business Review, you talk a little bit about how you can expand that surface area of luck. And you talk about specific practices that people can do as far as one of them being setting hooks. So maybe let's talk a little bit about what does it mean to set a hook for serendipity. Christian Busch: Yeah, that's one of my favorites. So essentially, it's something that I've...

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 helps 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. Interview TranscriptBrian 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 George Brooks. George is the founder of Crema, which is a digital product agency based out of Kansas City. So right here in the Midwest, welcome to the show. George Brooks: Thanks, Brian. Its's good to be here. Brian Ardinger: Well I'm excited to have you on. A couple of reasons. One, you are also a podcast host like me. Your podcast is called Option Five. You talk a lot about product development and that, close to the core of all the stuff that we talk about here at Inside Outside Innovation, when it comes to what does it take to work and live in this new world of change and disruption.George Brooks: Yeah. Thank you very much. I'm excited. Brian Ardinger: Let's talk a little bit about Crema. How'd you go about forming this company and tell us a little bit about what you do. George Brooks: My background is in design. So, I started as a design agency first, and really that was as a freelance designer going out on my own. And we talk about when sometimes entrepreneurship innovation happens because you have this dream and this vision, and sometimes you're just pushed off a cliff and you have to figure it out as you fall down. And mine was being pushed off a cliff. My oldest daughter was in the hospital for the first seven months of her life and I couldn't be at work. I couldn't be at the agency that I was at. I needed to be there. She was super critical. And so, I left that job and started freelance design about 10 years ago. Well, actually gosh, 12 years ago now. And the story used to be 10 years, right? Time has passed. Brian Ardinger: And Coronavirus adds another three years for this last six months. George Brooks: I know. So true. So, I started freelance designing. I don't have any business background. So about two years into that, my best friend and I had always dreamed about doing a business together. And I said, I think I accidentally started a business. And it looks like this agency work, doing a lot of design work for other agencies, and for developers and entrepreneurs. Can you make sure that I'm actually paying my taxes and doing all the things that I should be doing? And so, he was finishing up his MBA and so Dan and I joined together about 10 years ago and Crema is about 10 and a half years old.What we do today has changed since the beginning. We're now a full-service digital product agency. So, we do everything from user experience, design and consulting, strategic direction workshops, coaching, agile process training, all the way through. I have almost 40 full time employees now and focusing on actually providing full-stack product teams. So, design development, test engineering, product management, and we deploy those now, used to be a lot of startups and early stage companies. Almost all the work that we do now is with large enterprise innovation teams around the world. A lot of fun. Brian Ardinger : Well, we seem to have a very similar background, 8 or 10, 12 years ago I started in the startup world and started the Nmotion startup accelerator and starting early stage teams, helping them get up and going and that, but starting these things in the Midwest is a little bit different. So, I want to talk a little bit about what has the evolution been like and what have you seen starting and building companies here in the Midwest, especially like 10 years ago versus what it's like now.George Brooks: When I first was freelancing and going to the first startup weekend that took place in Kansas City. And I had no idea what to expect. I think I probably overdressed. I looked way too fancy for what kind of event. I had no idea. My wife didn't know that I was literally going to disappear for three solid days. And that was kind of back in the day when you tried to build a full stack of product in three days, right? It wasn't about putting together a pitch or a deck or something. It was like, we're going to build this thing. So, you just pulled all-nighters to make it happen. And I think during those days, it was that new wave of creative thinkers and entrepreneurs, at least coming through Kansas City specifically. It felt like the next wave since the early nineties, when the Sprints of the world and the Cerners of the world started here in Kansas City. These large enterprises, and there really have been a gap where you saw new innovative companies coming up. So, ours was spurred on by Google showing up and we got to win the Google fiber contract. And that was a big deal at the time. What are we going to do with gigabit internet? And then really what I think we saw as a quick rise, lots of activity, lots of moving around and trying to put on events and then kind of a dialing down to where you saw people...it got weeded out pretty quickly that the chaff fell through, If you will, to figure out where are the people that are going to sustain doing this work. Who's going to stick around. Who's going to actually survive the hard work it takes to start companies and sustain innovation. And I think that's where we're on that next wave of really the companies that have stuck. Even the new companies that are starting now, now have an infrastructure of enough great of companies that have been through it the last 10 years to say, here's what it actually takes. It's not all fun and games. Let's actually get to work. And I think that's what I've seen, at least in the environment. For Crema, it's about iteration. It's about refinement. And so, we've had to iterate on ourselves and experiment with new ideas and offer our services in a different way and use different language. And UX was like this super-hot, nobody had heard of term. There were two letters that shouldn't be next to each other. And it got us work in the beginning that doesn't get us work anymore. Right. Everyone does UX. So, we have to innovate and continue to iterate to stay relevant. Brian Ardinger: I think the other dynamic that seems to be similar to what I've experienced and seen around the country as well is there was a lot of buzz around startups was how do these companies move so fast and create something from nothing? And that's how I got pulled into the corporate innovation front is because bigger companies were coming to me and asking those same kinds of questions. It sounds like you have a similar type of ride from the standpoint of you were building and iterating and getting things up and going and old established companies were craving that ability to do that. So, talk me through that transition from working with startups or building brand new products, and then moving towards a more established organization. George Brooks: One of our clients...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Vaughn Tan. Vaughn is the author of the new book, The Uncertainty Mindset: Innovation insights from the frontiers of food.  Vaughn and I talk about his well-researched account of how some of the world's top chefs and their teams approach culinary innovation and what it means for innovation teams of all kinds. Let's get started. 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. Interview TranscriptBrian 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 are talking to Vaughn Tan. Vaughn is an assistant professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at University College London, School of Management, previously worked at Google in California has a Harvard PhD and he's author of a new book called The Uncertainty Mindset:  Innovation insights from the frontiers of food. Welcome to the show, Vaughn.Vaughn Tan: Fantastic. Thanks for having me. Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to talk about this topic of innovation in the culinary space. Restaurants have been around forever. And when you think of innovation, you don't always think restaurants and culinary space. And so I wanted to dig into this particular topic. Maybe you could tell the audience a little bit about your eclectic background. Vaughn Tan: Absolutely. I'm from Singapore originally. And so I guess it's kind of like a trope that if you're a Singaporean, you have an unhealthy interest in food.  This is more or less true. That kind of only started to show up in my research a little bit later. I think where I got interested in the questions I'm asking in the book, it actually started when I was working at Google. When I was there, one of the most interesting things that I noticed, I was there for about three years, was that the really interesting groups that came up with really innovative ideas we're the ones that weren't sort of organized the way management, conventional wisdom, would say you should organize the innovation group. They were the ones that bubbled up from the ground up. People found each other. The goals were kind of like amorphis and  shifting a lot. The themes that eventually showed up in the book.I first noticed in an inchoate way, when I was working at Google.  When I went back to get my PhD, I was interested in finding out more about how organizations could do something like what I saw at Google. Create this environment in which people and teams could self create projects that resulted in innovation. And when I was doing the research, everyone who tries to do like a research project for a PhD, you have to chose your setting. You have to choose the site that you will go look at trying to understand more about the phenomenon that you're interested in. A lot of people who study innovation, will study things like a microchip foundary or something like that.I just sort of, I thought initially, maybe I should try something, which is a little bit weird. What I always tell people is there's tons of reasons why restaurants and food R & D are good place to study innovation. The biggest one is that if you study food R & D the cycle time for innovation is very short.So as a researcher, what you see is you see many, many cycles that you can start to see patterns across all those cycles. But actually the true reason, which is not less good, it's just also a good reason for it is that it's just much more fun. You know, studying chefs, being in restaurants, being in a kitchen where they're coming up with new ideas and food and constantly failing is just more fun than watching people code all the time and looked at both. So I can say that. And it's not to say that programming or hardware design is less interesting. It's just less fun to me. That's why I did it. My personal background is connected to why I decided to do this. Because I think it's an inherently interested in food and interested in how it gets made. I would not have thought about doing it in this way. But a lot of the reasons why I'm looking at food are actually the same reasons that initially drove me to do a PhD in the first place. And they were the same things I saw when I was working at Google. Brian Ardinger: Let's talk about some of the examples and how you went about learning some of this stuff. So you've worked with some of the world's top chefs and their teams and looked at how they approached innovation. Did they look at it as innovation, the stuff that they were doing, or tell us a little bit about that. Vaughn Tan: I think they absolutely thought of it as innovation, or at least they thought about it as trying to come up with new things. And I think most of them, even though they would not maybe have used the same words as I'm using, they would have thought of it as trying to come up with a new approach, either at the level of the dish, trying to come up with the new dish or in some cases in new idea of what service should be like the entire experience of going into a restaurant. Some of these teams were interested in new ways of cooking. Some of them were interested in developing new materials in the sense of new ingredients. They were always thinking about it as innovation and thinking about innovation as something that could happen at several different levels that can be combined of course, but they were always thinking of what they were working on as trying to come up with new things.Brian Ardinger: Let's talk about the book itself. It's called the Uncertainty Mindset. How does that come into play this idea of uncertainty in the innovation process and what did you learn? Vaughn Tan: I think the big takeaway point that I want everyone to come away from the book with is that innovation is often thought of as something which companies must do in order to survive and thrive and all that other stuff. Everybody knows it. But the thing which is also true about innovation, which people sort of conveniently forget all the time, is that if you are truly going to make something which is brand new, you have no idea what that is at the beginning. Not a precise idea anyway. And you also don't have a clear idea of how you're going to get there. Innovation as a process and as an outcome is probably the only kind of activity that we do in a corporate context that is unavoidably and inevitably inherently and uncertain activity. That's sort of the big framing for the book, which is if you're trying to do something inherently uncertain, the way you think about how you do things, what the constraints on your actions are, what the resources are that are available to you. Even what you're trying to do in the first place, like at a very fundamental level. All those things have to be appropriate for something which is uncertain and that's where the uncertainty mindset comes in. So the uncertainty mindset is basi...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder, sits down with Pam Marmon. Pam is the CEO of Marmon Consulting and author of the new book, No One's Listening and it's Your Fault: Get Your Message Heard During Organizational Transformations. Pam and Brian discuss operational and organizational change, why change isn't hard, and what people are doing to adapt in this very fast paced change that we're experiencing now. 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 to the latest thinking, tools, tactics, and trends in collaborative innovation. Let's get started. Interview TranscriptBrian 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 Pam Marmon. She is CEO of Marmon consulting, which focuses on change management and the author of the new book No One's Listening and It's Your Fault - Get your message heard during organizational transformations. Welcome to the show, Pam. Pam Marmon: Thank you for having me, Brian. Brian Ardinger: Well, let's get into it. One of the things I read in your book is 70% of organizational change efforts fail. Can you unpack that? Pam Marmon: Yeah. So, a lot of research has been done on the change management front and why large initiatives fail and based on the research, when organizations and when leaders don't apply proper change management up to 70% of those efforts fail. And this is where change management as a discipline has really flourished to help leaders understand what is the role of the executive, of the leader, of the people, the managers, and then how do you weave these communication messages or the behaviors and the mindsets that have to shift within the organization so that you can have a successful outcome.Brian Ardinger: So, let's talk about the book and how you got to the place where you wanted to compile all this information and help people figure out this process. Pam Marmon: Yeah. So, I started writing the book actually last May of 2019. But prior to that, I was working with leaders and I came to realize that a lot of my leaders we're afraid of change. There was just a sense of fear associated with change, whether it's fear of failure or just behaviors, or resistance that they may encounter within their organizations. And having done change management for the last decade, I felt like I was on the other side, looking in into their organizations and knowing that if they did the right things at the right time, that they wouldn't experience this resistance or nearly to the level that 70% of organization experience. And so, I wanted to help leaders not be afraid of change, and I wanted them to be confident when they step into the roles of leading organizations through change and the most effective way to get your message heard is through writing a book. And so, I wrote the book in a way that, and easy for leaders to understand, to read. There's a model that I share in the book LESS. I walked each leader through the process of leading transformation and having the right mindset as you listen first, so that you can engage your team later. The things Brian Ardinger: One of the things, I liked about the book is you really do set the stage of having to have that kind of mindset shift. A lot of people, when they hear the word change, they automatically think hard and difficult. And I don't want to go through this, but you twist it on its head and say that change isn't hard if you approach it in the right way and have the right mindset. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Pam Marmon: Yeah. So, with the proper process, change is not hard, and it does sound radical to say it out loud. But when the process that I talk about is being able to listen first. So, within your organization, as a leader, you need to be able to align to the vision. You need to be able to understand what your peers at the executive level are doing, and you need to be able to create a story that aligns well. And part of that listening is the readiness assessment. You need to understand if your organization is ready for this change and also to stage the change. So maybe there are multiple changes happening at the same time, and you have to be mindful of the resources and the people impacted. The second part is engage. And so, part of the process I talked about your ability as a leader to engage the right people at the executive level, the managers, the change champions that you identify in your organization, and then you can actually speak. And when you do speak, you need to understand the channels, the proper messages that have to be shared, the timing of those messages, how they're going to be received by people. What's that cohesive story and that experience you want to shape for the individual that's experiencing that change. And then the last part is measure. It's our ability to solve and that's through measuring and being able to create the dashboards and the metrics so that we can evaluate is this successful. And what is success for this particular change as we look at the behaviors and the mindsets of the people that we're shifting. And how can we measure that against the project outcomes, which is really where we measure success. Brian Ardinger: Everybody right now is experiencing massive change with the coronavirus and recession and all the other things that are hitting companies all at once. Having a more proactive approach and measured approach to change know, listening and putting all the ducks in a row would be an important process. How do you do that when the pace of change is accelerating so much, that what you thought was going to happen is not the current case. And you've got to execute quickly. Pam Marmon: Yeah. So, the environment that we are certainly as different than under normal circumstances, when we plan change and we have the time and the opportunity to stage things and think them through and stretch them out long. Currently, what we're seeing is the urgency of change to happen. And so, there's a lot more reaction and reactive leadership that's happening and also the need for stronger and more frequent communications that have to come out from the leaders. We're seeing a lot more communications that are more human in the nature of how they're delivered because we're seeing leaders empathize with people and whether their customers. And so, the volume of communications that we're seeing is greater. And also the ability of leaders to kind of shift that mindset and say, I know we may have planned to do this then, you know, in three, four, five years, but here we are now and we are forced to change and we don't have another option. We have to learn to adapt. We have to have grace for one another, as we're learning through this journey and we have to test and shift as we move along because some of our assumptions will be broken and we may have to redo what we thought was the right way to do something and think outside...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Stephen Shapiro. Steve is the author of a new book called Invisible Solutions. He spent a number of decades speaking and writing and working with corporations all around the idea of innovation. And how companies can reframe and relook at problems to get better results. 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. 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 Stephen Shapiro. Stephen is a innovation instigator, hall of fame speaker, author of six books including the most recent one that I wanted to have him on the show to talk about called Invisible Solutions. So Stephen, welcome to show. Stephen Shapiro: Hey Brian. Great to be here. Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm excited to have you on the show. Actually, we got connected, I was interviewing Thomas Wedellsborg a few weeks ago about his new book, and we serendipitously started talking about an example that you talk about all the time. This idea of how do you reframe problems. And we want to start there and give a little bit of background on how you got into this innovation space. Stephen Shapiro: Sure. So, I started off life and I guess I still am a bit of a nerd. I loved math and physics and all that stuff. Growing up, I was in the math club, went to college, majored as an engineer, left university, went to work for Accenture, and I was doing a lot of engineering work. And in fact, in the early nineties, I was actually involved with something called Business Process Reengineering, which was basically efficiency work. We would optimize businesses. And one day discovered that the more we optimize the company's processes, the more they would downsize the workforce. And I had just had this existential meltdown in. And took a leave of absence, reinvented myself. And in 1995, 1996 timeframe, I decided to focus on growth and innovation. Wasn't a hot topic that far back, but that's what I put my hat on and I've been loving it ever since. That's all I've been doing for 25 years.Brian Ardinger: You've had the great opportunity to see the evolution of innovation specifically in a corporate environment and how companies look at innovation, how they treat it, how they execute on it. What are some of the things that you are seeing that people are getting wrong about innovation? Stephen Shapiro: Well, it's been interesting, like you said, having been in for 25 years, I've seen the evolution. It started off as basically R & D. And then it started sort of in the early 2000s, 2003, 2004, it started to gain some traction in terms of it being a companywide, an enterprise wide endeavor, rather than just sort of this little group. But I think the thing which I've seen most organizations get wrong is they collapse innovation with creativity. And they believe that quantity of ideas will drive value for the organization. And from my experience, you might get there eventually, but it's an extremely expensive and slow way to go about it. So that to me is the biggest mistake is a focus on ideas and quantity rather than focus on questions, opportunities, and solutions that drive the greatest level of value. Brian Ardinger: Yeah, that's an interesting topic because you talk to corporations that are spinning up innovation labs, and they're putting maybe 5 or 10 ideas in a year, hoping that one of those five or 10 will end up being Uber or whatever the next thing is. And not realizing that like the startup ecosystem alone is putting out thousands of these types of ideas and Uber or Twitter or whatever it comes out of those thousands of ideas. And it's very hard for any one organization to have that lead flow or deal flow in such a way to have enough of that throughput really to make that happen. If it's not about ideas or if it's not just about ideas, you know, you have to have the idea and you execute on it. What are some of the things that corporations should be thinking about when they start about thinking about innovation? Stephen Shapiro: It comes down to, instead of focusing on the solution, it's focusing on the question. And the thing that I found is paradoxically, the more we try to focus on the end game, the goal, the, the solution, the less likely we are to find good ones. And so what I always tell my clients to do is anytime they're chasing ideas, chasing opportunities, just push the pause button for a moment. Just say, what are we really trying to achieve here? What's the problem we're trying to solve. What's the opportunity that we're trying to take advantage of. And is there a better way to ask the question that will get us a completely different result? Sometimes it's that simple, but it's recognizing that having the answers isn't the answer. It really is about the question. The problem, I think a lot of times as leaders feel like they have to have the answers and I think that's actually not good leadership. A good leader is somebody who asks questions, which gets the rest of the organization to ask better questions. And when you have an organization, that's actually thinking about it from the perspective of what creates the greatest value. And is there a different way we can do it. We now get more much greater throughput than we would otherwise. Brian Ardinger: And that whole fear of failure. It makes sense from the standpoint of corporations and organizations that have figured out a business model that works, you know, the idea of killing that business model or failing at that business model is quite scary. But yet if you're going to create something new that is uncertain, and unknowable have to go through some failures to figure out that and navigate that particular process. Stephen Shapiro: Yeah. And here's an interesting, I just want to build on something you said earlier, is I'm not sure that large corporations should be doing a lot of radical innovation. Because if you think about the way markets work, I mean, we will talk about an Uber or Lyft as sort of this breakthrough innovation, but the reality is if you think about the number of companies, small startup companies that are trying new business models and new technologies and fail. The success rate is extremely small. So, to assume that a company is going to have a high likelihood of success is a high level of egotism in some respects. If you focus on what the real opportunity is, then you can put a separation between the opportunity and the solution. And it doesn't mean you as an organization need to find the solution. It doesn't even mean you need to invest in developing it. You could use open innovation and crowdsourcing to buy a solution elsewhere. You could do tech scouting. You could partner, you could buy another company, you can license technology from another company. But when you put that pause between the opportunity, question, challenge, whatever you want to call it and the solution, ...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder sits down with the creator of Pictionary, Rob Angel. Rob is a speaker, author, and entrepreneur and author of the new book Game Changer: The story of Pictionary and how I turned a simple idea into the bestselling board game in the world. 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. Interview TranscriptBrian 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 Rob Angel. Rob is the creator of Pictionary. Welcome to the show, Rob, Rob Angel: Thank you for having me, Brian. Appreciate it. Brian Ardinger: You've got a new book out called Game Changer: The story of Pictionary and how I turned a simple idea into the bestselling board game in the world. I wanted to get some insights into what it was like to create something from scratch and something that's well known throughout the world. Let's start at the early stages of your entrepreneurial journey and how you took paper and pencil and created a million-dollar business. Tell us a story of how you became the creator Pictionary. Rob Angel: It's a long story, but the ultimate was that I was always open looking for ideas. I was always an entrepreneur and just waiting for my opportunity. And that came in the form of one evening. My roommate said, you guys want to play a game. We said, sure. Why wouldn't I want to play a game? And he called it charades on paper. We just sketch words out of the dictionary to each other. I'm 22, just recently graduated from college. 22 years old. And we started playing and I stay up all night for several nights in a row. And at this point, I'm thinking this would make a good board game. And that was the genesis. That was my first shot with picture. And I didn't start working on it for another two years, but that was the genesis. Brian Ardinger: Have you always been entrepreneurial minded or was this something this was a stroke of genius, stroke of luck that pulled things together, that you decided to start a business around Rob Angel: A little bit of both. Most things are a lot of hard work, but I've always had the mindset that I was going to work for myself. My father got fired when I was 19. And I thought if this executive, who I looked up to, my father is my role model could get fired. I wasn't going to let anybody have control over my future. And so, at that point, 19 years old, I said, okay, I'm going to do my own thing. And that kind of put me on this path of being an entrepreneur and to take care of myself. Brian Ardinger: Talk a little bit about starting a board game, if you've never been in the game business, or I guess any business, if you've never been in that industry and that before. How did you go about thinking, well, there's something here and how can I incrementally such that I can create a business around it?Rob Angel: Yeah, I think that's exactly the point. I mean, how many times have any of us had this wonderful idea for something? You get it? You ever walked out of a shower and thought Oh my God, here's my million-dollar idea that never got started. I think a lot of times that's because we overthink the process. Overthinking all the different steps to get there. And that's what happened to me. Is that I started thinking of all the steps necessary to put picture in the store shelf. I mean, physically, I could, I could visualize that, but I couldn't get started because I couldn't think straight if you will, over-thought all the steps. So, I broke it down to its first easiest step. And for me, I think for a lot of us, that's easy to digest. Digesting business plans and marketing plans and all these other things that I knew, nothing about, was too much. So, breaking it down. I said, okay, what's that step? And it's making the word list. And for me, that was pretty simple because everything I needed was right there. You know, I didn't have to overthink it again, that a paper, a pencil, and a dictionary. Went in the backyard. And I started writing down the word list. The first word I came to was aardvark. I wrote down the word aardvark, and that was my first Pictionary word, but that's how it got started. And so when you're thinking of ideas and you're thinking of things, it's not necessary to have everything in place. I didn't. Just know that it's easy to get started. Write down a word, get a Go Daddy domain name, whatever it takes, just to take that first step. And then just get excited about that first step. And that's when it gets started. Brian Ardinger: So, you're excited after the first step, you start moving the ball down the path, so to speak. No business gets off the ground without hitting some obstacles. Tell us about the first time you hit an obstacle and decided to keep going through it, even though it was challenging, Rob Angel: There's always obstacles. And as I say, it wouldn't be any fun if there were no obstacles, because it just makes you tougher. It made me tough. First obstacle was to find partners for me. I started working on the game and I had somebody join me, the business side, business end, and he quit. And so, I'm back to square one and we all know our limitations. We have to acknowledge. And I had to acknowledge the fact that I didn't want to run a business. And so, when this gentleman that I thought was going to be the guy quit, I had to find somebody else. But what I found was that I found somebody that was aligned with my vision. I mean, when you're talking, you know partners, and you're talking about business, not just finding somebody that could cross the T and dot the Is and somebody that shares your passion and your vision, and that's what I've found in my partner and that set me on the path. Kept me on the path.  Shall we say.Brian Ardinger: So how did you go about finding a partner? Did you actively start going out, looking for somebody to help co-found this with you? Or was it serendipitous or talk us through that step? Rob Angel: I think everything is serendipitous, we chalk it up. You chalk it up to, Oh, you know, I found the right guy and I found it. But I think serendipity has a lot to do with everything. Actually, the gentleman who quit did a play test and his friend showed up, and when I met him, it was like, Oh my goodness, it's almost a visceral reaction. I knew in my gut that he was the right guy. I mean, you know, people know when the right thing is happening. You kind of get, you know, break out a little sweat maybe or your heart rate races.  Has that ever happened? Of course, that's happened. Because you know what is in front of you. What is transpiring is the right thing. And that's what happened when I met Terry my business partner. Brian Ardinger: Can you talk about some of the...