Inside Outside Innovation

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Monica Kang, Founder and CEO of InnovatorsBox and Author of Rethink Creativity. Monica and I talk about some of the obstacles and opportunities around creativity. And how individuals and companies can benefit from enhancing their curiosity, creativity, and courage. Let's get started.Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help the new innovators navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.Interview Transcript with Monica Kang, Founder and CEO of InnovatorsBox and Author of Rethink CreativityBrian 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 Monica Kang. She is Founder and CEO of InnovatorsBox and Author of Rethink Creativity. And also has a children's book called Have You Seen My Friends? So welcome to the show Monica.Monica Kang: Thank you for having me. Brian Ardinger: One of the things that we do in our Inside Outside community is ask our audience out there, who should we be talking to? And what are some of the interesting things that you're seeing out there? And somebody said, hey, you should talk to Monica. I think the first question I want to ask is probably a softball for you, but why does creativity matter. And why does it matter more today than ever before?Monica Kang: I'll start with maybe the notion of, I feel creativity is one of the words that we don't realize how much of a jargon it is. Because we use it so much. We say like, oh, you're creative. You're not creative. Or like, that was creative. That was innovative. We put in our marketing materials. We put in our campaigns. We put it in how we describe things.But if you really break it down, like, do people really understand or live the value that what it is. I think that was part of the reason why when you go back to why it's so important to talk about this is actually because of that. Because we use it all the time, but so many people don't realize the root and the nuances. And hence, don't realize this is jargon, that we're just keep throwing it around without the full intention. And so, I first fell into it because of that very situation. I was originally in nuclear weapons security. Government work. Wanted to be a diplomat all my life. That having grown up in DC and in the States, as well as in Korea and worked in Europe. And, you know, hey, I'm not comfortable with science and math. So, this sounds like the perfect path. And like, I love people and building relations. And so, I was good with a lot of things, but like creativity, wasn't really a thing that I would describe I was good at. Even though now looking back, I realize I had. And only until when I find myself really getting depressed and stuck in a dream job where I realized that I was finding myself literally crying to work, feeling upset, not knowing what to do in a job that I fell in love with. And I'm like, what is wrong with me? Like I'm solving a very important mission. Mission-driven. Preventing bad guys from having nuclear weapons. We're working in the government. It's really hard to get into this industry too. And yet feeling stuck. And what helped me gave the courage of, you know, walking to work instead of taking the bus to work. Getting curious about all these different surroundings. And realizing how one life decision can make a huge difference. Because now I felt so curious in the office got even more energetic. Even though the work description hasn't changed at all. It got me curious about understanding about, well, what happened. And people did ask me like Monica, whatever you're doing, you seem happier. And that's where I realized creativity was one of the key elements.I didn't know back then, but it was the mindset of simply doing something different. Finding the courage to take different things. Try different things. Ask different questions. Even organizing my process of the project differently because as I looked at the traffic in the fourth street every day, I'm like am I creating traffic in the way I do things unconsciously. Just like how there's always traffic here. Like at this time? What do I need to do differently? And getting curious about it. And that's where I learned that comment that I started the beginning. That question of creativity, innovation. There's so much history and research behind it. That I had no idea. And because we throw around the word and use it so much, that I misunderstood what it meant.And I didn't know that it was for everyone. I didn't know that something that we can all do more. And regardless of where we are, it expressed differently. And I think it's even more needed now because of the pandemic. Brian Ardinger: Oftentimes I think the perception of creativity is it's some kind of magic. Or it's something that other people do. Or, you know, some, other people can possess that, but I can't do that. So, this idea of creativity not being magic. That being every day and available to anybody to possess or use, talk about how you identified that little nugget and what are some of the tactical things that you do to bring out that magic. Monica Kang: So, I love that you said it. Because immediately one book that I'm remembering, it's about daily habits. And I was mindful because I'm like, wow. So, all these creative, innovative historical people around the world, like they had to work hard to be a better writer. What, like, they didn't just magically write that book. And like became a best seller. And like, no, they had to write every day. The musicians had to write music every day. And I'm like, wait, if that's how it is.Like I wonder in the traditional non art industry, how they do creative. Of course, same thing. I think of new ideas every day. They had to try new things every day. Get rejected every day. And I'm like, oh my gosh. I mean, even the story of how WD40 product came about. Are you familiar with the WD40 products? So, it's that spray, right. You know why that name is called WD40. Brian Ardinger: I do not. Monica Kang: The reason why they named WD40 for that product was not a coincidence. It means water displacement, right? 40. Which indicates that it took 40 times to perfect that formula. Brian Ardinger: Ah. I hadn't heard that story. Monica Kang: How often are we willing to try 40 times. Hear 40 nos. Before we get to that yes. Not a lot. And I think that brings a weight. Hence to that question of what can we do every day, is that it's building the routine. As I learned about these daily routines of all these famous people of what they've had to do every day. Learning about stories like WD40, that how many attempts that people had to try.And my day-to-day activity, that means that I need to just make it a routine of constant learning and trying new things. And so, one activity I a...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Abhishek Nayak, Co-founder and CEO of Appsmith. Abhisek and I talk about the rise of no-code tools and some of the misconceptions and opportunities that no-code can bring to startups and enterprises alike. Let's get started. Inside Outside Innovation is a podcast to help the new innovators navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.Interview Transcript with Abhishek Nayak, Co-founder and CEO of AppsmithBrian 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 Abhishek Nayak. He is the CEO and Co-founder of a company called Appsmith. Welcome to the show. Abhishek Nayak: Thanks Brian. Really excited to be here. Brian Ardinger: I heard about Appsmith as we talk more and more about this no-code low-code space, that's developing in the startup and in the enterprise world. And Appsmith is an open-source framework that makes it easy to build and maintain internal custom business tools. No code for the enterprise if I'm correct. Abhishek Nayak: Yeah, exactly. Think of us like WordPress, but for building internal user facing applications. Brian Ardinger: I'd love to dig into how this got started, this rise of no-code technologies and that. Making it easier for the non-traditional technical person to build and create faster and that. So maybe let's take a step back and tell us a little bit of your journey of how you became a founder and specifically around, how did you decide to build a no-code app platform? Abhishek Nayak: Been an entrepreneur for a better part of the previous decade. Appsmith is actually my third startup. My first startup was in the space of offline logistics. We were doing cash and delivery. So, we had around 150 plus people. Lots of custom software built internally to manage them. And to run the business. My second startup was in the space of AI, where we were trying to automate customer support. And we used to have 10 plus customers and use to automate support requests for them. That again, we were building a lot of custom applications to train the data. Look at how a particular board or a particular model is performing. And just run all sorts of experiments and processes. That was my second startup. And all of these startups, I had the same co-founder and CTO Arpit Mohan.  And he actually got sick and tired of building all these tools. Our second startup didn't work that well. Our first one got acquired. Second one didn't work that well, and we had to shut it. But he actually started tinkering with the idea of building UI builder but for backend entrepreneurs. Because he was a backend engineer and he really disliked dealing with HTML/CSS. So, he started working on this side project. And this is why he was working at a different job.And during this period, when he was working on a different job, I was working as an EIR at Excel partners. So, I was an entrepreneur in residence where my job was to meet new startups, talk to them about how to run their business. And just understand if it makes sense for Excel to invest in it. While at the same time, I was also looking at other ideas that I could start out with.Now I couldn't find anything interesting. But I was helping my friend Arpit figure out if his idea for an open-source project had any legs. And during that process of helping him out, I started interviewing some of these startups that I was meeting on everyday basis. And I realized that almost every single startup had this problem. That they need to build a lot of custom business applications, maybe to run customer support or expose some data to the sales team. Have a way for the marketing team to maybe generate coupons. Or maybe look up some customer data.And they never had engineering bandwidth to build what they needed. And that was a problem, right? That's when I started telling Arpit, hey, maybe this can actually be a business. Maybe you just don't need to think of it as a side project. Maybe we should start a business together and do this like a startup.That's how it actually got started. It was my co-founder's idea because he hated HTML CSS. And then we started working together to build this out as a company. We also have a third co-founder Nikhil who heads product. And he again has been an engineer for a really long time. But he's a front-end engineer and he was just sick and tired of doing the same thing over and over again.So even though he has skills in HTML CSS, and he loves working on front end, he just disliked the repetitive nature that these internal apps generally have. And that's why he was excited about this idea. Brian Ardinger: I love the story. Because you often hear entrepreneurs’ stories start with a pain or an itch that they have to scratch. And it sounds like that's exactly where you guys started. And it seems like the timing was perfect for this type of new tool. Because it's getting easier and cheaper to use multiple different tools and open APIs, et cetera, to make it easier to build and scale and test and try things than ever before. Talk a little bit about the early traction you got when you started the company and some of the early things you learned.Abhishek Nayak: So, the first six months of app Smith was just building the product out. And we actually started pitching it to users and convincing them to use it. But nobody actually converted. Nobody wanted to use it. And that's when we began to question is the product quality low? Do we not have enough features or what's happening here?When we started digging in deeper, we just realized that the standard style developers have for a product like this is really high. And we just had to go back and improve the quality. And add a lot more features to the product. For it to be ready. So, after our first launch which failed, you know, we had this pivotal moment where we had to decide, should we start building this for a different audience. Because developers don't seem to like this. Or should we just continue to follow our vision and get this right?So, I'm glad that we actually decided to continue following a vision, but just improve the quality and add lot more features. Because when he lost a year later, you know, one and a half years have gone by, since we actually started, it instantly took off. Like within the first week, I remember we had about 30 plus teams using us.And the only thing that we had done was write a blog post announcing that this is live. We did not actually do any sort of sales or any sort of cold outreach to get the users. And we honestly weren't putting in that much effort because we launched, expecting completely failure. Because that's what we had experienced, you know, like a year ago when we had tried to launch. But this time we were pleasantly taken aback by the reaction the market had.And that's when we realized that a product like this just takes a ...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Rachel Kuhr Conn, Founder and CEO of Productable. Rachel and I talk about the pitfalls and challenges facing corporate innovation and some of the processes and practices that companies can use to level up their innovation efforts. Let's get started.Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help the new innovators navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.Interview Transcript with Rachel Kuhr Conn, Founder and CEO of ProductableBrian 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 Rachel Kuhr Conn. She's the Founder and CEO of Productable, where she is turning the innovation process into software. Welcome to the show, Rachel. Rachel Kuhr Conn: Thanks so much Brian. It's a pleasure to be here. Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you on the show. I'm surprised we haven't had you on earlier. We have a number of mutual friends that have crossed paths. And we just only got introduced to recently. So, I'm glad to have you on the show. You've recently started a company called Productable, focused on the space of innovation and how do you create more repeatable processes and things along those lines. You've just landed a deal with the US Air Force to expediate the innovations process at the national defense area. How did you get involved in this innovation space to begin with? And then we'll talk about how did you develop Productable. Rachel Kuhr Conn: Really excited to finally connect after all of the different people we have in common. So, a little bit of my backstory is I was a bright eyed, bushy tailed engineer, thinking that I was going to change the world with amazing products. And dreaming of all the impact I was going to make. And my research area in school was actually around predictive analytics for innovation success. And so, there's actually a lot of data around personality type, team dynamics, methodologies that you can look at and actually predict what should be used and what the team dynamics should be to drive the best outcome.So, in school, I was like, oh my gosh, industry must be amazing at solving problems. Like I just can't wait. And instead, I went into large corporation after a large corporation and just couldn't believe how politics and silos and just corporate bull crap for lack of better term, ruined every single opportunity I thought I had to ever make something awesome.And so just personally, I got really, really tired of the amazing capacity that all these large organizations have. And I just could never quite create the thing that made it to the finish line. And so got involved in the venture capital world. Saw how things work differently. Got really inspired by it. And essentially started building our platform and what we call the Productable Way, which leverages VC mindset and built it more into a corporate friendly approach, if you will. Brian Ardinger: And you worked with Mark Cuban companies, and some other folks, to build out this philosophy or build out this methodology. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Rachel Kuhr Conn: So, I got so frustrated in the corporate world. I actually cold emailed Mark Cuban while watching a bunch of Shark Tank. Cause I was like, they say yes to a lot of things that I think my boss would have said no to. And so, I just had to figure out, figure out what the difference was. And in the venture world, it's okay to take a lot of bets. You're supposed to build a whole portfolio of bets. And you understand that the outcome of a few is going to be big enough to pay for the losses of the others, and then some. It creates this incredible culture of risk-taking and experimentation. And having the room to do that in corporates really is what's required to help large organizations overcome the disruption curves that are ahead. You know, you always have something that's eating these large organizations. And so, you really have to have a way of managing, how do you actually take a lot of bets on new ways of solving these problems and in overcoming these things to actually be able to succeed. Brian Ardinger: Well, I'm curious to talk a little bit more about how you came about creating Productable. So, you know, there are a lot of idea management, idea capture, innovation software platforms out there. So, a lot of people kind of taking a swing at this over the last 20 years. What made you want to try to tackle this marketplace? Rachel Kuhr Conn: For one, it was from the pain point. If one of those had solved the problem, I feel like I would've just run with it. I didn't really necessarily feel the need to be a founder. It was actually the pain that I couldn't go into corporate innovation yet again and face the same problems. And so, something about those tools just wasn't doing it for me. It wasn't solving that problem that you end up with ideas on a shelf.And so, there's a lot of great idea management platforms that start to build that early stage of top of the funnel kind of solutions. But how do you actually move solutions through mid-stage and late stage of the funnel? And that's really where Productable comes of help. Brian Ardinger: Well and that's one of the interesting insights is I think a lot of people think that a tool will solve the problem, but really a tool is just a tool. And what really makes this thing work as far as innovation within big companies, it's a culture of innovation. And its processes and that that are around the intake of an idea. So maybe talk about how does process play a role in the actual software itself? Rachel Kuhr Conn: Yeah, absolutely. And so, it's a hundred percent culture where just a means to help support all of those things. And one of the big things is the company has to be willing to really invest in innovation. And if you're not putting your money where your mouth is, you're not going to get the outcomes. And so Productable is really a three-pronged approach. It's portfolio, progress, and people. And so what those three elements are, Portfolio Management is really about establishing and evangelizing a solid strategy that people understand. Making it so that you invest wisely in innovation, so that you're not throwing good money after bad. And you're making it really easy to expedite decision-making across the whole process. Then I'm going to actually switch to People Management. So that's more of like the top-down strategy if you will. People Empowerment is about honing the innovator skill so that you can actually empower projects to go through the right methodologies and tools and ensure you're involving the right subject matter experts. So, it's a little more of the ideal, if I was building a product, and building a company, these are some of the tools and processes I might. And then you would have to actually sync those together and that's our Progress Management. So, progress management, is...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Kapil Kane, Director of Innovation at Intel China, and Co-founder of the corporate accelerator GrowthX. Kapil and I talk about his journey from his early product development days at Apple working on the first touchscreen, to today where he runs Intel's award-winning accelerator. Let's get started.Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help the new innovators navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat to what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.Interview Transcript with Kapil Kane, Director of Innovation at Intel ChinaBrian 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 Kapil Kane. He is the Director of Innovation at Intel China, and co-founder of the GrowthX Corporate Innovation Accelerator. Welcome to the show. Kapil Kane: Thanks Brian. Glad to be here. Brian Ardinger: You are calling in from Shanghai right now in the midst of a pandemic lockdown. Let's talk a little bit about your journey into the world of innovation. Kapil Kane: I was doing my PhD at Stanford when I dropped out of the program to join Apple, to build the touchscreen. The very first task, I remember I was an intern at the time. And I was the very first engineer to actually make a drawing of the touch screen. Like a revision 0 0 1.And my journey started from there. Although the touchscreen project failed. We had to hand it over to this other team, that was working on a secret project, which turned out to be the iPhone. But my last project at Apple was iPad. So, I came around full circle. And then I left Apple and joined Intel to actually create a tablet version of Classmate PC, which was inspired by one laptop per child from MIT Media Lab, which is to create an affordable education computing device for the emerging market or for the less fortunate as it was envisioned. And then on, you know, I got into this role of Innovation Director at Intel China. And so that's my journey. Brian Ardinger: Excellent. Tell us a little bit about how you got to China. And how you got to cofound this corporate innovation accelerator called GrowthX. Kapil Kane: Coming to China was with Apple. This is when we were developing the very first Mac Book Air. And at the time, if some of you guys remember, it was called a Unibody. That means it was carved out of a solid block of metal. Whereas everything before that was sheet metal, and hundreds of parts joined together.So, it was a completely new way of manufacturing a product. And so, we were designing the product as well as designing the manufacturing process at the same time. So, we thought it would be better to have some of the designers move to China so that we can do both designing product and process at the same time. And so, I volunteered. As a, so I was one of the first three product designers to move from Cupertino to China. And I've been here ever since. Brian Ardinger: Let's fast forward to today, you're running this thing called GrowthX. How did the idea of a corporate innovation accelerator start and then give us some insight into what's going on with GrowthX?Kapil Kane: Intel has this amazing culture of innovation. And it's something that I can think of it like the Google's 15% thing. Where we encourage our employees to spend a percentage of their time on things they believe is important for our future. And so, we have lots of this cool innovation that has been created in the labs.And around 2005, that's when I took over the innovation at Intel China. We saw that there's lots of cool things happening in the labs, but we couldn't find those things being commercialized. Not lending into the market. When I took over this role, this role was created because until that point, there was lots of different efforts of innovation, like very vibrant culture. Even to the date, there's a very vibrant culture of innovation. And we thought we needed some streamlining.And so that's when they created this position to streamline all the different innovation activities at Intel China. And we have around 10,000 people here in China. So, it's by no means small offsite operation. It's a pretty huge operation. Brian Ardinger: Kind of a little bit different than a lot of companies. A lot of companies we hear about the fact that most of the core is not that innovative. And so, they created an accelerator kind of program. Or a lab to kickstart that. But where at Intel, it seems like the reverse it's like you had to kind of harness or extra harness some of the activity. Kapil Kane: Exactly. And also, the concept of accelerator is, is quite different. Like if you look at the other corporates who are building accelerators, they are accelerating outside startups with the hope that they will get to know what they're doing. They may be able to acquire them or partner with them. But for me, I didn't even know what an accelerator was when I took over this role. And in my very first week, I happened to be in a round table conference at American Chamber of Commerce. And the guy sitting next to me happened to be running China's very first startup accelerator, Chinaaccelerator. The guy, William Bao Bean. He's a legend in China.And I just happened to ask him what he does. And he explained to me the concept of accelerator. And I thought, you know, maybe I can replicate this right inside of Intel because we are so much creativity. We just need to give them the tools to turn those cool innovations into viable businesses. And that's where the idea for accelerator came along.And that was the, the birth of GrowthX, where we started up as accelerators. We pick the teams. We make them believe they are actual startups. We have the CEO, CTO, CMO, and we bring them in a batch of cohort. And we have business sprints. We have around eight sprints focusing on different aspects of business. We have mentors.We have entrepreneurs in residence. And we run this outside of Intel from a coworking space. So, it's just like any startup accelerator. Just the thing is that all the startups are internal projects. And we've been running this for six years now. Brian Ardinger: Let's talk a little bit about some of the differences or similarities that you've seen between entrepreneurs in the outside versus intrepreneurship. And are there key skillsets, mindsets, tool sets that are similar or different.Kapil Kane: I think what we are seeing, and it may be different for different companies. For us, most of those innovators will come to our accelerator. They are techies. You know, they get very excited about the technology. And they have no real background in business. So, we spend a lot of time and effort to make them understand that it's not about, can you build it, but should you build it? That's where we focused on changing their mindset. If we change their mindset, like, you know, typically they're of this mindset that I will build something, then I will show it to the cust...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Dr. Alex Young founder of Virti. Alex, and I talk about the impact of new technologies like virtual reality and artificial intelligence on the training and human performance space, and some of the challenges and opportunities facing companies in the changing world of work. Let's get, started. Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help the new innovators navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.Interview Transcript with Dr. Alex Young founder of VirtiBrian 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. Alex Young. He is the founder of Virti. Virti helps HR teams and organizations using things like artificial intelligence and augmented reality to improve and measure training. So welcome to the show, Alex. Alex Young: Thanks so much, Brian. It's great to be here. Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you because you come from a different background. You were a trauma and orthopedic surgeon before you became a entrepreneur founder. So how did you go from being a surgeon to being a founder of a virtual reality training type of company?Alex Young: Yeah, so it's been a really interesting journey. I mean, my interests have always been around how to improve learning and the performance of people really in any sector. And my original degree, as you mentioned, was in medicine. And then I specialized in orthopedic surgery, working in the UK and also in the US for a little while.And I've always, always been a bit of a tech nerd as well. So had a couple of companies when I was actually training to be a doctor. And taught myself how to code. Pretty terrible coding skills but managed to build a few companies around that. And then really with Virti, what I wanted to do was build a deep technology company, which tackled one of the major problems I was seeing. Both in healthcare, but also in every other sector, really on the planet which was how do we democratize and scale soft skills type of training for the workforce of the future. And when I trained as a doctor and a surgeon, often we do communication role-plays and things to train people really how to be more empathetic. How to be better communicators. How to do things in health care, like break bad news to patients, or explain a diagnosis. And in the operating room about how to make decisions under pressure and lead teams. And often those sort of training sessions, were not very scalable. They weren't hugely engaging, and they were quite biased and not that data driven. So, as you mentioned with Virti, what we do is we use AI and tools like virtual reality to put people into these very scalable, very measurable scenarios, where they can fail in a safe environment and run through lots of soft skills trainings senarios whether that's on a sales team training. Whether it's for managers or leaders, to understand how to deliver feedback. Or it's on your hiring or HR side, where we can actually find if people have some innate biases in the questions they ask during interviews. Or how they deliver team performance. So really, really interesting journey and lots and lots of parallels between healthcare and being an entrepreneur. Brian Ardinger: Absolutely. The whole concept of this metaverse and some of the new things that are coming in when it comes to augmented reality and virtual reality, what are some of the things that you're seeing in that space? How has it changed and evolved since you've started the company? And what are you seeing? Alex Young: I think the whole VR space has been on a bit of a rollercoaster. Really, you know, going back all the way to the 1980s when NASA first started using VR tech for some of the training that they were doing. And in the healthcare sector there's always been lots of, kind of, sort of use cases of virtual reality for things like surgical training. But it's never really seen mass adoption. And I think now with some of the newer headsets coming out and with companies like Meta, which of course rebranded from Facebook. Putting kind of billions behind the type of technology. We're seeing some of these PR teams like the Metaverse really galvanizing businesses and people behind this idea of a shared space. Where people can go, communicate with others. Practice in safe environment. Or just go and relax. And, you know, play games with each other. And I think on the back of the pandemic where everyone was very isolated and teams still work remotely, it's really, really interesting having that projection in a shared space where you can build rapport a little bit easier than perhaps that of over Zoom, looking at your camera. And you get a bit more inclusivity with team communication.And I think, you know, for us as a training company, we were founded back in 2018. Really under that premise of how can we scale role play or in-person training. And make it more affordable, more scalable and more data driven. And for us, it's just been a great time to sort of execute on that vision and help lots of companies to upskill their people. Brian Ardinger: You mentioned you started the company before COVID and that. But obviously we've seen a massive shift when it comes to this change with COVID. And the fact that everybody's now trying to up-skill cross sell, figure out new ways to do work and that. Are you finding particular industries or jobs settings that are more conducive to this virtual reality environment? Alex Young: I think it's really interesting, just the diverse views of kind of sectors and categories. Kind of find, you know, helpfulness from immersive technology. It can be used throughout absolutely everything. For us specialization, which is obviously soft skills, I think, you know, we're seeing a big uptake by people like sales teams. Particularly in industries like franchises, where they got to upskill new franchisees from a playbook and have a certain way of doing things.The traditional method there obviously was doing in-person meetings or in-person webinars and, you know, live webinars and things like that. And it just wasn't either that engaging or that scalable. We've seen big uptakes there. Other industries outside of healthcare, where we've seen big uptake, things like aviation, which again, anything that kind of has infrequent, but very impactful hazardous outcomes. We found that putting people into virtual reality scenarios to be really, really helpful.So, things like how to communicate with a passenger on an airline who might be rude to the staff. Or, you know, disruptive to other passengers. Being able to deescalate them. It doesn't happen too usually often, but, but it can be incredibly disruptive and cause flights to be landed in places other than their destination. That kind of thing is just great for running people through that talk of repeatable training, Brian Ardinger: The trend of VR, seems to be just on the early stages of that. What's holding this back fro...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Andy Binns, Coauthor of the new book, Corporate Explorer. Andy and I talk about the innovation imperative facing corporations today. And what they can do to foster an entrepreneurial environment, to create corporate explorers within their companies. Let's get started.Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.Interview Transcript with Andy Binns, Coauthor of Corporate ExplorerBrian 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 Andy Binns. Andy is the Cofounder of ChangeLogic and coauthor of a new book called Corporate Explorer: How Corporations Beat Startups at the Innovation Game. Welcome to the show, Andy.Andy Binns: Hey Brian, thanks very much for the invitation. I'm delighted to be here. Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you on the show. You have been in this innovation space for a while with McKinsey and IBM. Now you have a new book called corporate Explorer, which is exploring a lot of topics that I think are near and dear to the heart of a lot of our listeners is how can we, as corporations, become better at this whole innovation stuff? Why is innovation becoming so important for corporations to figure out?Andy Binns: That is really actually the point isn't it. And we try to open the book Corporate Explorer by saying, look, a lot of what we're talking about is really old. And it's been around forever, right? And even the notion of a corporate explorer didn't turn up in the last few years. You know, one of the earliest ones that I know of is the creation of the ATM machine. The ATM machine, Della Ru a UK based currency printer literally has the license to print money. And it's like, well, surely people want to access this differently. And this guy comes up with the notion of the ATM machine somewhere in, Surry in south of London, with Barclays Bank in the 1960s. And this was a 300-year-old corporation. This can be done by corporations, but to your point, it's got more important. And it's got more important because we know that digital is there. And transforming not only a business, but an industry. You cannot safely set within automotive and say, all those guys over in consumer devices no longer have anything to do with us. That's true there, but it’s there in a dozen other industries you care to name. And so, this notion of disruption that Clay Christiansen taught us all about. It's kind of like it's present. We don't dispute it. And we certainly don't dispute it after the last two years we've had. This high degree of uncertainty is present.And so, a lot of corporations, even those who are doing really well today, I think see that the dynamics of their industry are changing at such a pace that they can't ignore a bunch of different innovations. Either because they want new revenue streams and or they need new capability. Both of these stories are going on.Brian Ardinger: Yeah, they're being forced to. It's kind of spot on. We've got technology advancements that are coming on. We've got new changes in marketplaces. We've got a pandemic. All these things are colliding at once requiring companies to think and act to move faster than they've ever had before. And yet, we still find example after example of companies that are struggling with this. And overcoming obstacles that you would think that they'd be able to overcome. Because they have quite a few advantages from a corporate perspective.Andy Binns: Absolutely. And that's why corporate innovations beat startups at the innovation game. Now they don't beat them every time. They may not even beat them half the time. But they do. And the point about assets is exactly why they do that. Right. It's when you can leverage brands customer access, technical capabilities, whatever it might be, then that's, what's going to bring you success.Brian Ardinger: So, let's dig into that a little bit more. What are the key advantages that corporations maybe aren't recognizing or aren't using to the fullest extent when they are wanting to do more innovation initiatives? Andy Binns: One of the stories we tell in Corporate Explorer is that analog devices, a really strong technology innovation company, electrical engineers. Running around making phenomenal semiconductors. Worrying about the speeds and feeds of that circuits. And then they start to observe a change in the world, particularly the industrial markets where there's this opportunity to connect their sensors, accelerometers, and various other ones to the cloud. And to use analytics, to observe the functioning of the machine.Right. It's a great space, a lot of startups are active in. And they build this product line around condition-based monitoring. They make some acquisitions to build it out so they can do acoustic sensing as well as motion and all the rest of it. But if you're a startup and you go into, tell the same solution. No one's ever heard of you. You go into Analog Devices, you're 60 years old, and your brand is based on never retiring a product and always meeting your supply commitments. But totally different conversation. The market access is a real opportunity in many cases for these corporations. And also, they can access customers in different ways because they matter as a supplier to a bunch of automotive industry clients or whatever it might be. So, I think that's a big area. The other area is sort of some of the permission to play. So, another case that we give in Corporate Explorer is of the insurance company, Unica in Austria, where they move into sort of a digital insurance product. And again, they already have the actuaries. They can already design the insurance product. They already have the licenses from the relevant European authorities to sell insurance. So again, they can just move that a little bit faster when they are using these assets to make things happen. Brian Ardinger: So, having said that corporations still aren't necessarily good at innovation. They stumble on the fact that a lot of times they get focused on executing and optimizing their existing business model. For fear of messing up that apple cart, they don't necessarily take the next steps and that. How do you create that culture of innovation such that they are willing to take risks and leverage those advantages they do have? Andy Binns: We talk in the book about these being the silent killers of exploration. A term we borrowed from Mike Beer and the silent killers is that actually there isn't a deliberate agenda to stop innovators. Right? Sometimes it feels that way, but it's rarely the case. Mostly they're on autopilot. They're on autopilot because they're focused on the short term. They wanted to eliminate risk to the degree that that's possible. They want to preserve the way they think business should be d...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Harini Gokul, Head of Customer Success at AWS. Harini and I talk about the importance of working backwards to define customer success. And how companies can better understand customer needs to create better products and services. Let's get started. Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change, and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.Interview Transcript with Harini Gokul, Head of Customer Success at AWSBrian 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 Harini Gokul. She is the Head of Customer Success at Amazon Web Services. Welcome to the show. Harini Gokul: Thank you. It is such a pleasure to be here. I've heard many episodes of your show and I'm so excited to have this conversation. Brian Ardinger: Obviously, Amazon Web Services is one of those companies that we think of when we think of innovation. I first want to just start with, what is your role at Amazon Web Services and what is the Head of Customer Success actually do? Harini Gokul: Yes, it's a great question. So, AWS is all about customer obsession. It is baked into the DNA of how we build products and go to market and take care of our customers. I lead what we call as the customer solutions function. What they industry sometimes also calls to as customer success for our next generation of customers. What that means is we want to make sure that we are investing in our highly innovative hyper-growth customers to make sure that we are supporting them in their transformation. In their digital transformation and their business transformation. At the end of the day, my job is making sure my customers can take care of their customers. Brian Ardinger: Let's dig into that a little bit. So obviously you, by working with a lot of different companies, you've seen both the good and the bad of how people focus on customers. And what are some of the insights or maybe biggest mistakes that you've seen from customers when it comes to interacting with customers.Harini Gokul: There's certainly a lot of good and a lot of opportunities for us. Our starting point is how we define value and good with the customer. Right. And the one challenge I see is we start with our definition of what good looks like. And we are nodding. We are in customer conversations and nodding sometimes. But not really actively listening or absorbing what the customer's articulating their problems. Because we so badly want our solution to fit their problem statement. So, I think the biggest hurdle is starting with what we think is good. And thinking versus truly actively listening to the customer and focusing on a customer defined value. Brian Ardinger: So, are there particular tactics that you use when you start that first conversation with a potential customer to understand their needs and then subsequently what to with that?Harini Gokul: Absolutely. So, my, my favorite, I've many tools in my toolkit, but one of my favorite tools is actually an Amazon methodology called Working Backwards. Many of our listeners, and probably you have heard about it, Brian. Working backwards as an approach of creating a press release before you build a new product or a service, or you create a new program and what that does is it starts from the customer. And it says, when we do this, this is the problem we are solving for. This is the challenge we've addressed. This is the benefit we've provided the customer. And it's an articulation of value. And what good looks like when the job is done. So, you work backwards and place the customer squarely in the center of what you do. And then work backwards from that to say, what do we build, create, stand up, create as an organization to deliver on that value?Brian Ardinger: And through that process, I imagine you're not always right. Those assumptions that you make at the very beginning of what you think the customer needs and that. So, you need to, I would imagine to be agile or adaptable to how that works. So how does that initial, I guess, take on the customer and that, how does that play out in real life when you're actually then executing and finding out that some of the things that you thought were correct. Some of the assumptions you had are now incorrect. Harini Gokul: And, you know, it's two ways. It's one be, make flawed assumptions. Or we, like I said, we truly want to believe that some of our beliefs are true. So it's important to dis-confirm our beliefs. Also, especially in the past two years with the rapid growth and innovation we've seen, customer needs are constantly evolving, right? So, we need a muscle to continuously listen.  You listen first and then you create what you believe, what you've heard and have that document from working backwards. And then be constantly check in. You know, as we do the work with the customer, to dis-confirm our beliefs and understand if customer needs have changed. If what they are looking for has changed. If their customer needs have changed. So, there is a process to constantly check in and iterate.It's about actively continuing to get customer perspective. And as we do our work, and also being open to going back on positions, we've made. Always sort of examining decisions that are being made. Commitments that have been made. And say, is this the right thing for the customer. Brian Ardinger: I imagine you work with a wide variety of types of companies. So, startups to more established ones. And all kind of growing fast. Is there a different mindset from a brand-new startup, that's trying to spin up some new things in the marketplace? Versus an existing customer that's trying to grow and expand their existing business model?Harini Gokul: It's such a great question, by the way, because I do work with the diversity of customers. And the more I see at the spectrum of customers. All from sort of more mature companies to born in the cloud companies, there are certain common foundational things that go across them that help them succeed. One is this focus on customer defined value. And putting the customer at the center of everything they do. The second is making sure that there's a culture of innovation that is built into how you solve those problems, right?And that goes back to creating an environment where your talent feels fearless. They feel like they can take risks. They feel that are two-way doors here, where they can make decisions, experiment, and fail fast. Those are the things that are common across these companies. What is different, of course is the approach and the execution, right? So more mature companies have more legacy assets as an example. Or a mindset that needs to evolve. And born in the cloud companies have seen growth, but they're struggling with how do I sustain this growth.Now that my product, is such...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Liam Martin, author of the new book Running Remote: Master the Lessons from the World’s Most Successful Remote-Work Pioneers. Liam and I discuss the challenges and opportunities of the new world of asynchronous and remote work. And what employees, managers, and leaders can do to be more productive and thrive in the new and changing environment. Let's get started. Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.Interview Transcript with Liam Martin, Author of Running RemoteBrian 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 Liam Martin. He's the author of Running Remote, which is a new book. He's also a serial entrepreneur. Runs Time Doctor and Staff.com. And he's also a co-founder and co-organizer of the world's largest remote work conference called Running Remote, which is coming up here soon. So welcome to the show, Liam. Liam Martin: Thanks for having me. I'm very excited to get into this. Brian Ardinger: As everyone has found out, it's a topic that's become a lot more on people's radar. In 2020, I think if you started before that talking remote work, you're talking about nomad life and they were the folks that were doing it, but it wasn't necessarily mainstream.Now we're in this world where everybody's had some taste of remote work. You know, they've been working from their basement or someplace along the line. What are people getting, right. And what are people getting wrong when it comes to remote work? Now that everybody's been plunged into this deep end. Liam Martin: Oh, that's a great question. January of 2020, 4.5% of the U S workforce was working remotely. March of 2020, 45 % of the US workforce was working remotely. And we're projected to effectively, as we moved from pandemic to endemic, be at about 30% of the US workforce working remotely. And if you make more than a hundred thousand dollars a year, that number is 75% of the workforce.So, we're talking about a transition that is probably the most influential transition towards work since the industrial revolution. But the industrial revolution took about 80 years, and we did it in March. So, a complete change of the way that people work. And when people made that transition, I was getting crazy calls because I've been doing remote for almost 20 years.I was getting all these calls from governments and from multinational corporations. And I lovingly call these people Pandemic Panicers. The people that were just like, okay, we're going to go remote at gunpoint. Right. We have no choice other than to go remote. And the biggest thing that people really get right, is number one, just allowing people to make that transition and putting away the fears that they classically had before that occurred.And that was a really interesting opportunity for the market, because for me, I mean, I think I call myself like a fundamentalist remote worker. I'm really committed towards remote work because I think it actually makes everyone's lives significantly easier. Not only the employee, but the employer. But when you saw this transition, people just said, okay, you know, we're going to try this out. We're going to see if it happens. I think a lot of people said, this is probably only going to be two months, it ended up being two and a half years. But the reality is that when everyone made that switch, it was putting away those fears. That was probably one of the best things that people could have done. People did almost everything else wrong, unfortunately. And that's actually the goal of the book is to be able to, to make that shift. But the core piece that I would probably touch on. The most important thing that people don't recognize is there is an entire industry of people called Remote First Organizations. I was one of them. We have people in 43 different countries all over the world.We do not have an office. And these people work all over planet earth, different cultures, different identities, and we all seem to get along together. The reason why we do that is because something that I researched or I came across basically during the book, which we call asynchronous management. Which is basically the capability to be able to run a business without speaking to anyone face-to-face. So think about it in this context. You've got a company you want to be able to build out a massive company like Coinbase, as an example. Coinbase IPO'd at $141 billion. They entered number 89 on the S & P 500. And for the first time in the history of the SEC, they stated that their headquarters was nowhere because they said everything else would be a lie. And the vast majority of the communication is asynchronous. Meaning they don't do Zoom calls. They don't meet in person. The company basically just evolves on its own. And there's a bunch of mechanics that kind of connect to that, which I talk about at length in the book.Brian Ardinger: What's the first topic that people ask you about or pick your brain about when it comes to remote working. Like where do people naturally go to that they need help with? Liam Martin: You're hitting all my buttons, Brian. All right. So, the first question that people ask me is, should we be using Zoom or Google Meet, or should we be using Asana or should we be using Monday.com. Or Trello or whatever it might be. And my response at this point, Is, if you're asking those questions, you don't actually know what your problem is.So fundamentally, the tools that we're going to use are not actually the way to be able to manage remote workers. That's an excellent way to be able to recreate the office. But when everyone's working from home and working remotely, it's actually a completely different way of managing people. So, I say as an example, just to kind of give you facts on the ground.I meet with my direct reports about two hours a week. I literally have synchronous conversations with my company, two hours per week. The other, you know, I probably work about 50 hours a week. The other 48 hours of that workweek, I work asynchronously. And so does everyone else inside of the organization. The actual systems, the platform, the process documents, those things are the manager. And we really focus on leadership, instead of management inside of these teams. Brian Ardinger: That's an excellent point because I think a lot of people, again, like you say, they gravitate towards the tools. And the tools will obviously are getting quite good and much better than they were 8, 10 years ago when you probably started this. And things like even Google Docs were a little bit janky at the time. But when it comes to leadership. When it comes to putting the culture in place, what are some of the pitfalls that most people fall into when it comes to remote ...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with David Cutler, author of the new book, The Game of Innovation. David and I talk about how companies can integrate creativity and gaming into their innovation practices. And we'll discuss some of the best practices, tactics, and techniques that you can use in the process. Let's get started. Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help the new innovators navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive, in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.Interview Transcript with David Cutler, Author of The Game of InnovationBrian 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 David Cutler. He is the founder and CEO of the Puzzler Company. He's a Professor of Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of South Carolina. And I have him on the show because he's the author of a new book called The Game of Innovation. Welcome, David. David Cutler: Thank you. It's so great to have the opportunity to chat with you. Brian Ardinger: The book is very visual. And I would love to be able to show pictures of that. Maybe we'll put some of that in the show notes. Let's start about your background and how did you get into this game of innovation? David Cutler: You know, so much of the work that I do is with different kinds of organizations, focused on all kinds of problems. Sometimes it's around culture. Or it's around trying to achieve certain results. But they're not sure exactly what to do. And so, we worked together to design some kind of a process or a game. And then often we'll work on multiple teams. Where they'll come up with these great ideas and figure out how to design it. Often it is run as a tournament, so the teams will compete. But sometimes we do fusion rounds where parts of this idea are combined with parts of another idea or have all different kinds of formats. Brian Ardinger: So, you've been working with a lot of different types of companies out there. What are some of the biggest obstacles that organizations face when it comes to innovation?David Cutler: So, I think when it comes to innovation or when it comes to change, most leaders that I know have one of two fundamental beliefs. Or one of two fundamental leadership styles. And unfortunately, as well-intentioned as they may be, they often do not work. The first is top-down leadership. This idea that, you know, I have the big ideas as the leader. That's my responsibility or maybe my inner circle. And over time, I'm going to impose any number of these big ideas upon the community. And look you or I, we might love those ideas as outsiders, but it turns out that most people do not like being told what to do. Especially if it's different from what they've always done before.So as a result, people digging their heels. They push back or maybe they retreat. Morale plummets and the likes. And usually even if the change is implemented, it's probably not going to stay. And you know, most of those top-down leaders suffer one of two fates. Either they're fired or maybe they're promoted to a place where they can torment more people. Brian Ardinger: Do less damage.David Cutler: The other, the other perspective is this idea of bottom-up leadership. If we want change that. But if we want innovation to happen, it's got to come from the grass roots. Come from the trenches. And the problem with that is that most people have no idea that they are responsible for innovating the future. I think most of us believe my job is to do my job well. The thing that was outlined in the contract. So, if I'm supposed to serve French fries where I'm supposed to be the accountant, it's not immediately apparent that I'm also responsible for re-imagining the future. Brian Ardinger: So, let's talk a little bit about why games are so important and, you know, that's obviously the topic of your book and it goes into great detail. And again, I love the book because it's very visual and it gives you a lot of tactical things that people can do. But why games? Why is that so important in this innovation space? David Cutler: You know, I consider any well-designed process to be a game. Whether or not it's particularly gamey. You don't need dice and concept cards in order to effectively solve problems. And yet there are many, many benefits of unapologetic gamification. Games unify communities behind a common and shared sense of purpose. There's accountability to rules and results. Puzzlers, as I call them, problem solvers are often much more open to thinking creatively and strategically in the context of a game. Finally, though, the problems we may be solving are really, really serious often. People are more likely to bring their best selves if they're really enjoying the process. So, games can be really fun. Even though they're hard, hard work. Brian Ardinger: So, let's talk a little bit about how you go about crafting a game. And the importance of the different functions and that, of how you should do this in real life. David Cutler: So, game is actually an acronym for a very, very loose and flexible system. So, game stands for G guidelines, an arena, M materials and E experience. It's not always the same. In fact, every time I design a game, or I encourage other people to do, I often want to mix things up, especially if you're working with the same community, but there are constant tools.So, it just very, very quick. Guidelines G guidelines is about the parameters of your game. So, what's the most important challenge you're trying to solve. What's the problem at the core of things? What are the constraints? The non-negotiables that may not be challenged under any circumstances. Constraints are necessary to innovation. And criteria, what constitutes success.So those are the guidelines. Usually those are written before the game has started. So, we really know what this game is all about. Arena is the conditions of play. It's about your puzzlers, period, and place. So, the puzzlers. Who is playing this game, what kind of people, what kind of experts do you need to best solve this problem?Period. How long do you have to solve the problem and place? Where are you going to do this? And sometimes, you know, the arena before you start, and then you have to build a game that works within those conditions. As sometimes you know, this is the problem we have to solve. So, then you build the arena that will work with it.And then materials are the tools of your game. Maybe you're in the physical world. Flip charts and crayons and prototyping materials. There are a whole bunch of things you can use online, in virtual games. And the experiences. What happens. What is the order of activities, in which order, for how long? Brian Ardinger: I think a lot of people when they have gone through these types ...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Grant Botma. Grant is the Author of the new book, Work-life Harmony. Grant and I talk about the common problems with work-life balance. And some tactical tips for how to create harmony through the inevitable changes and opportunities that people face each year. Let's get started. Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help the new innovators navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and that certainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.Interview Transcript with Grant Botma, Author of Work-Life HarmonyBrian 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 Grant Botma. He is an entrepreneur and author of the new book called Work Life Harmony. Welcome to the show Grant. Grant Botma: Hey, thanks for having me on Brian. This is cool. Brian Ardinger: Grant with all the changes in technology and markets and environmental disruption that's going on in the world. We're trying to talk about what individuals can do to navigate and manage accelerated change. And I thought your book would fit in perfectly. This concept of work-life harmony. Grant Botma: Yeah, I think balance is great. It's something that all of us need to have in various areas of our life. The problem is somehow our society has made balance the goal. And that's the wrong target. Even the best balancer in the world who holds the Guinness Book of World Records. He fell out of balance. There are times where we fall out of balance. And the biggest travesty I think with that is when we do fall out of balance, because it isn't inevitable. We feel like a failure. We feel shame. We feel alone. And sometimes it prevents us from continuing to pursue the real goal, which is work-life harmony. Where we don't have a work life and a home life warring against each other all the time. But they're in harmony moving in one direction. Brian Ardinger: Well, I think a lot of folks are having to reevaluate that in their lives. You know, with COVID and all the changes when it comes to hybrid work. People are now both for good and bad trying to restart. Or we think about how they approach this particular topic. Why don't we talk a little bit about the book? And how you've outlined a number of different tactical concepts that people can go through to create this work-life harmony. Grant Botma: The biggest concept within the book, is to try to invite your family and your work into this purpose that you are on. What I espouse is that no matter who you are, no matter what you're doing with your work, a business does not exist unless you're serving somebody somewhere with a product or service, right?So, you are making an impact on somebody's life at somewhere down the line, through your business. And although profit is a great goal and a great thing to have with business, it's not the primary goal. You can still have profit, but not meet your purpose of genuinely serving people. And what we want to do is determine, okay, what does that impact we're making on folks?Let's put that in something that's simple that everybody in my life that's important can understand. Including but not limited to my coworkers and my team at home. And then you want to create intentional systems and processes. And also have some very tactical things that you can do throughout your week, month and year. To make sure everybody's invited in this mission together. And you're all going in the same direction, and everybody has good expectations managed. That's kind of the big thing.Brian Ardinger: I had a chance to skim through the book a little bit. And you do break it down for folks how to think about this, because I think it's very easy to struggle with. I know I have to manage my household. I know I have to manage all the work-related things that are happening. But how do I go about doing that? And one of the particular topics is you have what you call is like creating your ideal year calendar. Grant Botma: Yeah, this has been a huge thing for me and my wife. But then also it's something I make sure all of my employees do as well. That's where you look at the year to come. And instead of putting things specific on this day, at this time. I'm going to go to go here. It's understanding what are my priorities for this year, both in work and at home. And making sure that you say, okay, during this time of year, I'm going to focus in on this priority and make sure I do that.But then in this time of year, I'm going to focus in on this other priority and make sure I do that. So, an example is I take my kids out on a birthday trip every year around their birthday. And again, this ideal year calendar I'm not putting the exact date of when I'm going to go on the trip with them, but I know it's around their birthday.I'm going to say with my son Parker, his birthday, September 15th. Sometime in or around September 15th, I'm going to go on a trip with him. And it's not going to be something that lasts a week. It's just something where I spend one or two nights with him and maybe we go out of town. Maybe we stay here locally. Where I just focused on him. And I ask him some intentional questions about how I'm doing as a father. I might have some intentional questions about him based on where things are going in his life. But really, it's just, I'm pausing and I'm focusing on him. And I have that priority for each of my three children, but then also my wife during our anniversary.But I also have some priorities that work to where I get together with my other business partners and founders. And we do a trip. And we ask some intentional questions, and we focus in on what we want our business year to look like. I'd say the biggest thing with the Ideal Year Brian is understanding that I have busy seasons. Communicating to my family ahead of time. These are my busy seasons. So that I can get the support needed before, during, and after those busy seasons as well. Those are just a few of the things that are in that. Ideally your calendar, Brian Ardinger: And so, the idea of zooming out and getting the big picture at the beginning of the year, so to speak. And blocking time from that. Is it blocking time? Or is it more along the lines of here's the ebbs and flows and things that are going to be part of the year that we know coming up. And then a plan from that? Grant Botma: Yeah, it's expectation management. Brian, think of it this way. So, harmony, we're going to talk about music for a second. If I asked my wife and kids to sing a note, they'll do it because they love me, and they'll sing. And they'll keep singing and they'll keep singing. But eventually they'll stop. And when they stop singing, I'll look at them like, why did you guys stop?And they'll say, well, I got tired. And you didn't tell me how long to sing for. But if I tell them ahead of time, hey guys, I need you to sing a note. I need you to just sing it at this tune. I need you just sing it for this long. Chances are there'll be able to sing it longer because their ex...