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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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B
Hi, this is Julie Annixter.
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C
And this is Dan Hill.
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B
And this is Real Transformations, where we look at business change from the inside out. And today I am so excited. I have an old and wonderful friend of mine, a colleague, a former colleague from the Tom Peters Company, Eileen Fisher. And Eileen has a wonderful new book that's coming out called Innovation A Dynamic Blueprint for For Organizational Success and Engagement. And Eileen, I think it's a wonderful book. So welcome, welcome to our podcast.
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A
Thank you. Thank you for having me. I'm really honored.
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B
So the big question we always ask up front is, why did you write this book?
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A
So I worked with Peter Sangay for 10 years and then I worked with Tom Peters for about eight years and I was doing a lot of consulting in those years. I've consulted for about 36 years and I incorporated both Peter Senge's work and Tom Peters work. And I delivered it in a number of organizations. And I used the methodology that's in the book, the Innovation Ecosystem methodology. And it was a home run. Now it was a little, you know, the first time I did it was like early on. But now it's even more important than it was when they first started this because things are moving so fast and there's so many disruptions happening all at the same time that we can no longer really solve the problems that we are looking at linearly because they're just going to suboptimize everything if we do. So the disruptions I talk about in the book, and the book is coming out October 20th and it's being published by Hachette. Well, actually John Murray Press, which is a London subsidiary of Hachette. And it's also available to buy on Amazon, to pre order on Amazon at this point. So anyway, let me go back to this. So there are nine disruptions I talk about in the book and they're all facing us today and they're facing us at the same time. And some of them are, you know, you can't plan anymore. The days of having a three year strategic plan are over. The days of having a one year strategic plan are over. Because things change so fast. You're always adjusting. You know, it has to be very iterative and you have to look ahead about a month or two to really plan. The other thing is the policy changes, given our new administration, well, not so new, but happen on a daily basis and it's really hard to keep up with it all. You know, businesses, yeah, businesses right now, they don't have any Certainty about what's happening. And they stopped hiring people, and, you know, people are getting laid off. So the. Some of the other disruptions are AI and quantum. Right. Nobody's even talking about quantum. That's going to have more of an impact than I think, even AI, because all possibilities exist in quantum. And you cannot. And you can easily hijack quantum, because all possibilities exist. Right. But, I mean, I interviewed this guy who is working in the quantum computing lab in Carnegie Mellon, and he told me an amazing story. He said that, you know, to build a bridge, it takes about three years, two to three years to get all the materials, because I had to look at all the specifications. Then they can pull all the materials, have to test everything. They put all the specifications for this bridge in the quantum computer, and within a week, they had everything. Materials they hadn't even thought about using. And he said it was, like, extraordinary. So, you know, that's just a little bit of it.
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B
Let's pause before we go into the other disruptions, because I think if it's okay, Dan and I want to set a little bit more of the. The. The context, which is amazing. Dan, do you want to go next or.
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C
Well, actually, I wanted to start with something. I thought it was a wonderful dedication to your mom. It was thorough. It was heartfelt. It had a lot of conviction to it. So I have to imagine when he was talking about trying to get employees psychologically ready to embrace transformations, that your mom did a wonderful job for you as your champion and role model. So can you tell me what you gleaned from her and how it applies to trying to create that psychologically safe environment that people are going to have to have amid all the trauma and disruption and chaos of these nine disruptions?
- [04:46]
A
Well, I think, you know, what she really provided more was always saying that I could do anything and never to give up, no matter what I did. I mean, I was a chemistry major in college, and I ended up. My first job was as a chemical engineer. So. And I was the first woman chemical engineer hired at Raytheon at Andover, Mass. And it was horrific. It was horrible. I mean, men used to throw acid at me because I used to have to get acid out of the electroplating tanks. So, you know, it was a very hostile environment. But I didn't give up. I mean, I was there for two years, and then I moved on and became a quality manager and in a company where the CEO said, there will never be a woman manager in my company. So, you know, I think persevering and the Tenacity that I have is really the result of what my mother taught me. The psychological safety you're talking about. I've done a lot of inner work. I led programs for landmark education. I've done a lot of meditation and a lot of work with Dr. Joe Dispenza. And what I see in terms of psychological safety and also my favorite author these over the last few years has been Michael Singer's book, the Untethered Soul. So, you know, what I see is if you want to let. Have people be able to let go of whatever they're upset about in all this disruptiveness, if you've got to be really present and you have to be able to listen from. No. No agenda. The minute you hear yourself evaluating, you got to let it go. The minute you see yourself judging, you got to let it go. You're not there to respond. You're just there to listen. And when we employ this in the, in the, this methodology and the deep listening and the organizations we're working with, it really becomes a lot easier to. To implement change because 70% of all change initiatives fail. And they fail because of the resistance in the organization. The deep listening actually allows people to let go of whatever they're resisting.
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B
You know, I love this last comment because we really believe that change has to happen from the inside out, you know, from the people. And I've, you know, like you, I've been in the innovation business for a long time, and I. What I love about what you've done is, you know, Peter Sange was the p. The proponent of the learning organization, where everybody was learning continuously. And that was a sense of freedom and permission. Tom was about a lot of things, but for us, really about wow. Projects and making work something that really, you know, that, that really turned people on, that they could bring their best selves to. And you have taken that thinking to the next level by talking about ecosystems. So like I said about context, you know, innovation in the sort of old way of thinking, it's a department, it's a methodology, it's a workshop, it's a program. But you're saying no, it's a living ecosystem of relationships and capabilities. It's a culture. So can you say more about successful innovation, ecosystems, what you see them doing, you know, what are they like?
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A
Well, they're really exciting. And the thing that happens is it really shifts the culture. I believe that if you change the way people work, you're going to change the culture of an organization. And the methodology changes the way people work. There's some that some people would look and say, oh, this is just like ideo. Well yeah, we do use rapid prototyping. We do use, you know, we've used that. But really ideo doesn't do deep listening first. They don't have people let go of whatever's there for them. And what I see when it's implemented is you got cadres of people, like let's say you have five teams and you have like eight people on a team. So 40 people are going to be involved in this. We had a wait list of people that wanted to be on these teams in most of the organizations because they knew it was going to be exciting. And the companies we work with, we tell them up front, these people are going to spend a third of their job on these projects and you have to offset their work. They're not going to do 30% on top of my hundred percent and they have to be reviewed for it. And the leadership that comes out of them being on the team is extraordinary. So they're iterating every week they're getting feedback from all stakeholders. They've learned how to pitch to different stakeholders. Because you pitch differently to a CEO than you do an engineering manager. Right. And indifferent to your, you know, if your healthcare system to your customers. Right. And the ecosystems include all the stakeholders that are in that system. So it's a systems approach. We have a team called the Ignition team that's part of this process and their job is to get and communicate everything that the teams are doing throughout the organization. We had one client where they had these hands on meetings like every month and people that were remote would join by zoom and people that were there would join in person and you know, people had a blast. They wanted copies of the stream of the videos so, so they could share it with their families because they're having so much fun at work. So the whole culture gets excited around these projects. The people working in them are getting really trained in being leaders because they're having to pull together all these stakeholders, iterating, getting feedback on the iteration, recreating the new prototype. And they're learning. So everybody's learning. The other thing is, it's from, you're looking from a systemic perspective. You know, you're not looking to like if you look at the disruptions I started talking about, you know, people might look at that and you know, 30 years ago, 36 years ago, when Peter wrote the Fifth Discipline, Systems Thinking was a nice to have, you know, really smart people, you know, that loved mit, they'd get into it. But it wasn't like, you have to learn this or you're not going to survive today. If you don't learn this, you won't survive. Because if you've tried to solve things in a linear fashion, you're going to undermine every other. Because they're like. If you look at all the disruptions I talk about in the book, they're all connected in a system. So if you try to fix one, you know, like the way we used to do things. Oh, okay. Well, you know, HR should take this issue, right? Like the talent issue. Right. Because right now we have a talent shortage, even though people are out of work. And the talent shortage isn't about, oh, I don't have enough accountants. I don't have enough accountants that also know AI. So there are multidisciplinary needs that businesses have right now that we can't fill. So you might say, well, HR should take that, you know, and oh, AI, that should go to it, right? No, there's no, like the departments and the silos. If you continue to operate in, in this day and age today, your company will fail.
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C
I agree with all of that. I also thought I wanted to mention I really like the book. It's so comprehensive and careful in its consideration of all these factors that systemically work together. You mentioned at one point in the book that there's some feedback that strengthens innovations and there's others that destroy it. You mentioned having a feedback form, but I didn't see that in the book. And I was wondering if you could maybe detail a bit more what's. What kinds of feedback are, are helpful and what are. Are not.
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A
Well, if you can get a virtuous cycle going in a company, that's going to be very helpful. But you can also begin to identify, if you're looking at things systemically, vicious cycles that are arising in the company. And either one will grow exponentially. So, yeah, either one will. So, you know, if you're building on something and it's exponentially growing, you're going to have. That'll be positive. But if you have something, you know, something going on in your company, which is a vicious cycle, it'll get worse. So either one will take you either places. And I only talk about reinforcing loops in the book. You know, there are many more archetypes and ways of looking at systems. I think I talk about shifting the burden. One archetype in there because so many companies are just committed to the short term and the way that things are structured. The system is structured for quarterly rewards that really forces this short term thinking. So that's why I put it in there. But yeah, so you gotta really look at it and how do you create a virtuous cycle in your company? How do you build on things? And that's what I think really starts to happen with the weekly iterations because you're iterating every week, you know, and you're building on it and you're getting feedback from people to be able to build on it and they're going to point out to you what's not going to work and what's going to take you down.
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B
So, you know, I remember Claudia Kochka saying as she was exiting P and G where she led design, even though she had a finance background, that she thought in the end, I'm paraphrasing that really it was all about everybody prototyping and you know, and it's, it strikes me as very interesting that even though we've had IDEO around for 25 plus years and, and, and design thinking and human centered design, it's still not really a widespread. So I want to go back because I kind of cut you off. Sorry about the disruptions. So you talked about talent, scarcity, you talked about quantum, what? Innovation, paralysis, generational shifts. Obviously AI say a little bit more about paralysis.
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A
It's like theater. You know, they're not really going to take forever to decide what project. They're not using teams to work on them. They may use an individual and one other person. They don't give people the time they need to work on the project. They don't give people the freedom to fail. I mean, in the book I talk about how the culture of the company is going to determine whether or not you can successfully implement this. Because if you have a culture of fear, if you have a culture where there's no experimentation that's allowed, you can implement this. And in the book, I think in the eighth chapter, there's a whole assessment so you can see where your company's at. And there's a continuum. So if you're at the very bottom of that continuum, you're going to have to probably get some help on working on the culture before you even start anything like this. My fear is that a lot of companies, because this is really a paradigm shift, this is not nice to have the whole business paradigm is shifting right now. It's not someday, it's happening now. And if you don't get your companies lined up, what's needed given the shift, those companies are going to Go out of business. And some of them are so big, they're like dinosaurs, it's going to be hard for them to shift quickly.
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C
You mentioned eight red flags. You've been in this for 36 years. Are there certain red flags that you particularly want to talk about? Or one that's the reddest of the red flags, for instance?
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A
Well, yeah, and then I'll go back to. To some of the disruptions, but the flag. So the biggest one is if you have a culture of fear. No. And you have a culture where you can't risk, and you have a culture that is not going to allow you to experiment. That is. I mean, I work. There's a. There's an example in the book about a beauty company we worked with, and I can't say the name, but they were impossible. They took forever to make a decision. And their culture was such that they always said they're going to innovate. But what ended up happening is because their decision making took so long and, you know, they had to have, like, everybody sign off on everything. Everything would get pushed out. And the other thing that happened was they had people in the organization working on, like, eight projects at once. So they kick off this project and go on to the next and then forget about it. So they never met their timelines. In fact, we were supposed to work with these guys for six months. Two years later, we finally finished our contract because they pushed everything out all the time. Right. So they couldn't get anything done, and they never innovated. So what they do is they get to the end of the time when it was due to, you know, whether it was a new lipstick case or whatever. And then they'd say, oh, we're out of time. Let's find something we have and just tweak it a little bit.
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C
Sure.
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A
And then, by the way, within a year or two after we worked with them, their stock dropped like a rock, and they're not doing that great because of the way they operate.
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B
So I'd say you say it's. You say it's a paradigm shift, and clearly it is. I'm interested in how you are coaching leaders who really, at the end of the day, have the accountability and the responsibility to shift things and can. If they. You know, if they. If they want to. If they want to go bold, they can. How are you coaching them to deal with these disruptions?
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A
Well, a lot of them come to me because they see it, you know, and then I can coach them. But a lot of them, you know, like, I I had my. A concern I have is with PE firms because they're not really looking to create great cultures. They're looking to flip a company to make money. Well, that's gonna, that's gonna be short lived because if people don't like working in the company you created, they're all gonna leave and good luck making money, you know, So I think that has to shift too. I can't tell you how many times I've gone to so many private equity conferences, talked to people about how they may want to get their culture aligned before they buy a company. They may want to do a cultural assessment and they're not interested. I worked with one, I worked with one. They were bringing eight companies together over an 18 month period. And they hired us to create a culture that included everybody's culture. And that was really interesting because going back to psychological safety, we interviewed 110 people there and some in a focus group, some individually and did. We used our deep listening skills and they let it rip. I mean, some people were thrilled because they were afraid they were going to go out of business. Other people are afraid of their jobs and loss and all that. So I had designed in the cause we're getting 85 of those people together in an off site to create this new culture. And I was like, okay, we should put two hours in in case there's more stuff that has to come out. Half an hour into it, we were done. That's how powerful the interviews were. People had let go and the two hours we thought we needed ended up being a half hour. So. Yeah, and that was the only firm I've ever worked with that was interested in culture.
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C
Follow up on Julie's question. When you do talk to these executives and you're trying to get them to understand where they're at and there's these bottlenecks and so forth, what have you found most effective to, you know, get the light to go off of them. I'm really fond of the cliche that said people don't see the light so much as they feel the heat. So whether it's the light or the heat, I mean, how do you get this ball rolling?
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A
Well, I think that all companies right now are facing a talent challenge from multidisciplinary point of view. And I think that's really driving people. They're also feeling there's like a lot of a lack of employee engagement.
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C
Yep.
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A
At many companies. Right. And so there, I mean, I have in there a really good analogy. People are now treating, you know, it used to Be, you know, when my father went to work or your father went to work, people stayed in jobs for their lifetime.
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C
Oh, you do? I'm from Minnesota. My dad worked for 3M. If you left the company within 25 years, you were considered footloose.
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A
Yeah, right. And now people treat their jobs like rental cars.
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C
Yeah, I think that was a line in the book. I loved it, by the way.
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A
Yeah. You know, so it's like a different error, and people are going to leave if you don't allow them to express their talent at work. And that's the most exciting part to me. I took a stand many years ago that my job in life was to have people love their work, be able to express themselves, and for companies to thrive when people do that. So it's. This is like an expression of that. The book is an expression of that. And everything I learned going through, it's so clear, Eileen.
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B
And I want to kind of take another step, maybe up. You know, you're a chemical engineer. You understand all the molecules and the neurons and all the. The way that, you know, material is actually formed. And I get that. Teams learning how to prototype and iterate and working with all the stakeholders, you know, is a key. But at the same time, you're also talking about changing the structure of organizations. This is bigger than teams learning how to deal with, you know, with iteration and stakeholders. So how do you think about, as an engineer, how do. How do structures need to change?
- [23:20]
A
You know, I think it's mindsets and there are structural changes. So like I said earlier, if you're operating in silos, it's not going to work out. That's a structure that has. Is like from a different century, you know? You know, like, we have all these departments, but nobody's talking to each other, so they can't solve. I mean, even like my. I have a dream, by the way, my. One of my dreams is to transform healthcare, because healthcare is the perfect, perfect model for what doesn't work. Right. You have specialty doctors, right? Now I have some healthcare problems. I have about 10 doctors. Right. And do they talk to each other? No. I had to actually call them up and say, I want you to call this doctor for this. And I'm trying to, like, create this team. Right. It won't happen. Why? Because the structure that prevents it from happening is insurance. They don't know how to get paid if they work as a team. Right. And so I think those are the things that you have to look at. And in every organization, what would be in the way of creating a team environment, an ecosystem environment. And how can we redesign it so that we can have people working cross functionally and contributing to each other.
- [24:40]
B
You know, you have done such a beautiful job of taking everything you've done because I've known you now for 20 plus years, everything you've done and synthesizing it into this powerful idea of an innovation ecosystem. I think just that type alone represents a breakthrough in what people think innovation actually is. So I'm so appreciative that we've gotten to spend this time with you. And I want to wrap up here. I'd like to ask you to think about what is your wish for organizations right now? I love your purpose, the purpose you stated. What is your wish for organizations?
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A
I hope that they. Well, I have a couple, but one of them is I hope that they see the shift happening and that they take the actions they need to take so that they can succeed.
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B
Wow.
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A
And we have powerful leaders in business.
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B
Yes, we do. Yes, we do. Thank you, Eileen.
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C
Dan, it's been wonderful. I really enjoyed the book, enjoyed the conversations.
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B
The book is Innovation Ecosystems, published by division of Hachette. You can pre order it on Amazon. It'll be out October 20th. So. So, Eileen, thanks a million. This has been absolutely wonderful.
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A
Okay, great.
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B
Thank. You.