Jason Wilder (8:21)
Yeah, absolutely. So actually when I was going to college, I was working at a law firm in Chicago to, you know, pay my way through college and, you know, making copies, filing documents, you know, pre Internet stuff. And I guess maybe law firms still do some of that. They probably do. And I just came to this realization of I was more passionate about ideas than debating and litigating interpretations of, you know, the past or current state. So it kind of led me to business, even though I had really very limited, you know, business experience. So I got my MBA graduate with an mba, but with like, have like no business experience. So luckily at that time, it was like the beginning of the build out of the Internet and there was just a tremendous amount of growth. So I was really, really lucky because they were hiring people that didn't have the experience because they just, they needed, they needed bodies and they needed people to, you know, do that stuff. So I did that for a little while, started a family, you know, going through the financial crisis and. And as I started to really develop kind of my dream job at that moment, it was going to work for IBM. Why? Because IBM is international Business machines. And I had been bitten by the travel bug and I thought of business and the gold standard, it was IBM. And so I eventually made it. Their first week was a big turning point because I was really fortunate. It was the end of the tenure of CEO Lou Gerstner at IBM. You know, famous, famous CEO that was kind of controversial when he started at IBM because he was an outsider to the world of tech. He came from American Express. So, you know, there are a lot of people who doubted whether he would be successful. And so in the employee onboarding in my first week, believe it or not, right, we're at headquarters and the CEO stops by to give a chat for 10 minutes. And I've been really fortunate to hear so many people through my life and literally been surrounded by geniuses. But, Mick, when you have these moments where you feel like time stops and the person is speaking to your soul, and the story was really about, hey, he takes over IBM. He goes and meets with Wall Street. Wall street says, break up IBM, right? The portfolio fun days are over. Who says, interesting. Thanks for the Input, but then goes and meets with a bunch of customers. And the customers told him time after time, don't break up IBM. Just find a way to bring together the best of IBM and harness it into this relationship. And for a young person in my 20s to hear, because I had the Wall street and the stock market and nobody challenges them, right? And to hear a CEO who is successful basically talking about customer centricity. And one of the first things that I really learned, and I think it was that moment so I became really passionate about customers. And I realized that for different reasons, it wasn't always natural that people think of customers first. You think of any company 100 years old, a one week old Mick, that pretty much have the same origin story, right? Some entrepreneur came up with an idea of a solution to solve some problem in the world. You find a customer, right? And it's kind of like you're right like this at the beginning of that relationship. But as you grow over time, you have lawyers and operations and supply chain and the decision maker gets farther and farther away from customers. So as crazy as it was, one of the first projects I worked on was with a regulated utility and was still like year 2000, 2001. We're talking about a customer strategy and the client says like timeout, we don't have any customers here, we have rate papers. And it was just shocking to me. And so the innovation bug bit me early because I saw that I had thought that innovation was really just disruptive innovation, right? These things that visionary geniuses come up with and they change the world. But I very early on broaden my definition of innovation. And innovation is that but it's also can be little things and anything that's new and useful. And that sometimes the best innovation was not something that was new to the world, it was something that was new to an industry or new to a context that you were applying it, you know, in a way that made sense to whatever the problem you were trying to solve. And that as I was really surrounded by many of these geniuses, I started to see that it just felt like they were approaching things the wrong way, even though they thought that they were doing it the right way. And what I mean by that is falling in love with their own ideas, celebrating pilots, rewarding ideas. But to me, I've never climbed a mountain. I've been up to maybe a 3,000 foot one. But innovation kind of is like climbing a mountain. And which is people think the goal is getting to the top, but it's not just like the goal of innovation is not just to generate the ideas. You may not know this Mick, but there are more fatalities in mountain climbing going down a mountain than going up, which is counterintuitive until you think right, your adrenaline goes down, you think the job is done, you relax and bad things happen. So I saw millions of dollars and like the brightest minds, focused at the beginning around ideation, but very few ideas actually getting far enough to change something and be meaningful enough to change a system. So it stuck with me. And it was a question as a practitioner doing the work around, why is that when the conditions seem generally the same, but then the output can be very, very different? So I became a lifelong student of trying to understand why that is. And one of the key things was these people. We fall in love with the what of innovation. There's something, I think, human nature about being able to sleep at night and feeling like we can understand it by making it tangible and putting it in a little box and convincing ourselves that we understand it. But the most innovative companies don't focus on the what, they focus on the how. And they focus on creating a community where organically, innovation happens.