(interview blurb)

Tendayi: If you could like get a team to just like coalesce around how close are we to finding a business model that works? What are the outstanding questions we still don’t yet understand about our business model and how do we get that figured out? Then you have really great coach for startup

(intro)

Alex: Hi, I’m Alex Pascal, CEO of coaching.com and this is Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee. My guest today is an author and corporate innovation expert. As the associate partner at Strategyzer, he helps companies innovate for the future while managing their core business. He has written three books, Pirates in the Navy, The Corporate Startup, and The Lean Product Lifecycle and is recognized by Thinkers50 for innovation and being among the top emerging management thinkers. Please welcome, Tendayi Viki.

(interview)

Alex: Hi, Tendayi. How are you? 

Tendayi: Hey, Alex. How you doing? Thank you for having me. 

Alex: It’s a pleasure to have you. We typically start our podcast by asking our guests what we’re drinking today so, Tendayi, what are we drinking? 

Tendayi: Drinking sparkling water with ice and lemon. Well, I’m drinking sparkling water with ice and lemon. You’re just drinking sparkling water. You’re cheating. 

Alex: Yeah, with lemon, but no ice. It’s 8 a.m. here in LA and it’s a little early for ice, I think. But, cheers.

Tendayi: Cheers, yeah. Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Alex: So you started drinking that to stop drinking Diet Coke, is that right? 

Tendayi: No, to stop drinking actual Coke. If I drank Diet Coke, it would be better, like I used to drink and I was like a two-, three-can-a-day guy. I was like a proper addict and so — 

Alex: Oh, wow.

Tendayi: — it was like really bad. But I could actually feel it in my body that it was starting to make me — I would crave it and then after I had had it, I wouldn’t feel great. And so I kind of stumbled into the hack, that if I like ordered a can of sparkling water, could I fit it? And it took away the craving because the feeling of the bubbles on your tongue, that was it. Kind of cured from craving Coke.

Alex: Well, that’s a great way to prevent a sure early onset of diabetes with three cans of Coke a day.

Tendayi: Actually, I can have three cans sparkling water a day. I think is better.

Alex: That’s certainly better for you. I don’t think we’ll get Coke to sponsor the podcast anytime soon after my comments, but it’s great to have you. It’s great that you’re joining us. You’re joining us from Zimbabwe today, which is cool. Really cool. 

Tendayi: Yeah, I know. I moved to here about a year ago. I spent about 20 odd years in the UK, living in England, in a small town called Canterbury because I went to college there. That’s where I did my PhD and MBA actually here. And so I lived there for 20 years. When I joined Strategyzer, which is Alex Osterwalder’s company, Alex Osterwalder is the inventor of the business model canvas, and so his company, Strategyzer, when I joined Strategyzer, it’s a fully remote company. We’re like over 50 people all located all over the world, from Australia to South Africa, Canada, to London, Dublin. And so I was still in Canterbury working for a fully remote company and I turned to my wife and I was like, “If we could live anywhere in the world, why are we living in Canterbury?” And so that started the conversation about coming home, because I’m from here, this is where I’m from originally.

Alex: Oh, that’s nice. Always nice to go back home. So, tell me about your PhD work. What did you specialize in? 

Tendayi: So I specialized in social psychology. So I’m a social psychologist. I did a lot of studies about feminist theory for a while there. Also studying feminist theory and male-female relationships, certainly around like intimacy and how that can be determined by various roles so that’s kind of like how I got started. And then actually I moved to working on another concept called infrahumanization, which is like a mild form of dehumanization and it was really interesting the research there. I found that people don’t attribute what are called secondary emotions to people who are not of the same racial or social group with them. Secondary emotion, the more complex emotions like guilt, shame, emotions that have a bit of a cognitive element to them. They’re much more likely to attribute base emotions to other groups, like anger and the less cognitive emotions. And so there was this researcher, name was Jacques-Philippe Leyens, and I kind of like collaborated with him for a little while working on that. And then I ended up getting a fellowship to Stanford, which was really transformative in my career, because I got there as a social psychologist and left an innovation aficionado, interested in creativity and innovation just by having spent a year in Silicon Valley. It was a really transformative moment and my career changed. Well, I thought I was going to be a professor in social psychology and here today, I’m a consultant working at Strategyzer.

Alex: What was it about innovation and being in Palo Alto, what was it about that experience that really transformed the direction of your career and turned you into an innovation expert? 

Tendayi: It was a whole bunch of serendipitous things. So I was there kind of a loose end, pretty much on my own a lot of the time. I collaborated with a colleague but we just spent all the time together to collaborate so I was pretty much on my own a lot. And I ended up wondering what’s happening and so I saw like a weekend retreat thing, a webinar slash conference called persuasion technology. I go, “That’s interesting for a social psychologist, let me go find out what that is.” As I went to the persuasion technology, BJ Fogg was running it and I went there to find out what’s happening and I met a lot of people that took an interest in me as a person. So shout-out to Mark Nelson who was there. They took interest in me more as a person and they definitely hung out with me, “Come with us to this place. Come with us to that place,” and so they’re like, “Come with us to Facebook. They’re running their first incubator and their startups there, let’s go see what they’re doing,” so we’d go there. But it was like completely different. It wasn’t something I would have never ended up, it wasn’t a choice I would have ended up making for myself. It was a choice that was made by the people that took an interest in me and it was really nice and so that’s what happened and so, slowly, like two weeks, three weeks, a month, I started to get hooked to that. So ended up putting a lot of time in the Stanford Graduate School of Business, borrowing books, reading, Steve Blank was teaching at Stanford at the time so I’d go to a lot of his workshops. And just like — well, by the end of that 12-month period, I was serendipitously a completely different present that I finally chose to do an MBA, I did my MBA way after I started my academic career.

Alex: That’s very interesting. Where did you go for your MBA?

Tendayi: I did my MBA at the university where I was teaching, because if you’re an academic, you got 50 percent free off.

Alex: That’s a good deal. That’s really —

Tendayi: So it was a two-year program. I paid 50 percent the first year and got it for free the following.

Alex: That’s not a bad deal. So that’s a really interesting time, sounds like, when you were at Stanford then. It’s incredible how your environment can really shape the directionality of your career and your interests. So let’s talk about innovation because it is something that is talked about in business all the time but you’ve done a lot of work around really the concept of innovation, both reading and you’ve written books but you also work as a consultant. So what are some of the gaps between people’s and companies’ focus and obsession with innovation and our ability to actually work in an innovative way and create innovative products and services? 

Tendayi: There’s two gaps. The first gap is the aspiration capability which is leaders are saying that innovation is the number one driver of growth, or at least among the top three drivers of growth, very important, and, at the same time, they’re saying that they’re not satisfied with the capabilities that they have in their organization to innovate. And one of the symptoms of that is the second gap, which is innovators are very obsessed with ideas and products and technology and having a great product or technology is not the same thing as having an innovation. And that’s a really interesting thing, just to push back on folks because in a lot of organizations, people haven’t really moved to that style of thinking yet and the reason why having product is not the same thing as having an innovation, even if it’s breakthrough, even if it’s like AI, robot, digital blockchain, metaverse platform —

Alex: That sounds very innovative. 

Tendayi: If that’s your product, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you call it innovation, but the way you navigate from having a product or technology to an innovation is you have to ensure that your technologies are actually value propositions and that’s a different thing, like a value proposition is something that creates value for a customer which is different from just having a technology. It can be cool but not be a value proposition. And so the question is, is your technology a value proposition? What customer jobs to be done, like helping your customers get accomplished? What are the pains you’re solving for them? What positive outcomes are you creating with your technology? And are you doing that at such a level that customers are really delighted with the value proposition? So that’s the first step away from just focusing on technology R&D towards moving down towards innovation. And that’s just the initial step. There’s another truth that we also learned which is it’s actually possible to have a product that delights customers and still fail and it leads to a lot of like, “Make stuff people want, make stuff people want,” but you can make stuff people want and lose money doing it, which means that the next layer you have to move towards is having a really great business model that is profitable and scalable to deliver that value proposition to your customers and then get value back so you can keep growing and delivering that value back. So once you solve for those elements, now you have a successful innovation, whereas before you just had a great product and technology or some really cool idea. 

Alex: How do you work with teams to make sure that they have a value proposition that creates the foundation for innovation? 

Tendayi: Yeah, it’s tough because people won’t work on that product. Sort of my career coaching startups in startup accelerators because people often think that corporate teams are more resistant to doing great work because they get their salaries paid but even a startup whose whole livelihood depends on the thing becoming successful, they don’t want to talk to customers, they just want to work on the technology, they want to write code. They’re not interested, which is really surprising because your whole future is based on whether or not you’re going to have to get this value from customers. So the way we started with a really, really great technology, but can you just tell me what customer problem you’re solving is? That’s the difference in startup. In fact, I have a friend called Adam Burke, shout-out to Adam Burke if you ever get to listen to this. We called him Adam “What problem are you solving for customers” Burke because he always asks that question. It’s like that’s his thing. What problem are you solving with this? What problem are you solving with this? And you can see teams and startups stumble through that conversation. And so we then say, “Okay, listen, don’t struggle so much with it, let’s use a tool,” so we can use a tool, there’s an empathy map, which is a really great tool, at Strategyzer, we’ve created a value proposition canvas where we first work on the customer profile, like who’s the customer or jobs they have? What are they trying to accomplish? What would ever cause them to stop what they’re doing and reach out into the world and grab your product? What would they be trying to achieve? And then we help the team work through that. What I’ve learned, by the way, when you’re coaching innovation teams, don’t really talk at them. Don’t say, “You’re not really doing this, you’re not doing that.” Just say, “Here’s a set of questions, here’s a tool. Can you map the thing and see if you can actually figure it out?”

Alex: Where did the name for that tool came from? 

Tendayi: The value proposition canvas?

Alex: No, the empathy…

Tendayi: The empathy map. Oh, yeah, that’s an IBM tool. I don’t know. We didn’t create that. That’s an IBM tool, but it’s about like what does the customer see, feel, do, I think are the categories on the map.

Alex: Really putting yourself in the clients’ perspective to understand what the value proposition is for that.

Tendayi: Exactly, because you have to be designing for real human beings, not just designing for yourself. The R&D and sales fights, have you ever seen those?

Alex: Oh, I have, actually. I have. Yeah, yeah, yeah, the videos on YouTube. Yeah. Those are hilarious. 

Tendayi: Yeah, so the R&D guy is like sales don’t know how to sell what we make and the sales guys like R&D never makes stuff people want. So they’re blaming each other, and so the question is, well, why do we even need to do that? It’s not a battle where one is right and one is wrong. Let’s just collaboratively make sure that the cool stuff we’re making delivers value to the customers that we’re serving. 

Alex: That makes a lot of sense. Innovation is just such a fascinating topic. And you mentioned The Lean Startup which Eric Ries let’s in a few minutes talk about what Eric is doing these days because it’s actually really interesting. They just raised a ton of money for it and I think it’s like a very innovative way to think about markets and such, but let’s focus on The Lean Startup. Why do you think that model created so much fuss around it? And it’s been many years, probably over 10 years, and still people talk about it. Why is it such a foundational piece of work to think about startups and innovation? Well, what about it, do you think? 

Tendayi: Yeah, so it was that — so that’s when I was in Silicon Valley, by the way, 2009, 2010, those were the years —

Alex: That’s exactly that period of time.

Tendayi: — so it was like I was just caught up, it was like a whole momentum happening. It was Business Model Generation, the book by Alex also came out, Steve Blank was doing his thing and Eric Ries was publishing The Lean Startup. And I think sometimes it happens in business thinking that there’s a moment where there’s an important shift in thinking that had to happen just because of what’s happening in the world. And so one of the most important shifts that needed to happen was this notion that startups are not a smaller version of large companies. In fact, one of my closest friends or like a really great colleague of mine is Ralph Fitzpatrick and he says the difference between a startup and a business is not the same thing as the difference between a small fish and a big fish, because the small fish and the big fish, they look like, they can do the same things, and so it’s just like the small fish is waiting to grow and become a big fish. He says the difference is actually between a tadpole and a frog. If a tadpole ever tried to do the thing that frog does, it would die. And so even though the goal for the tadpole is to become a frog in the future, in the early days, a startup is not a smaller version of an established company. And that philosophical shift, it was actually started by Steve Blank, means that startups have to think about themselves differently. They have to think about themselves as institutions that are in search of their value proposition and business models versus established companies that are executing on already proven business models and value proposition. And so searching requires different behaviors and those behaviors are in The Lean Startup, and so Eric Ries was really good at taking that thinking, packaging it, making it really accessible, and just easy to understand but it was something that startups needed to hear. When I was — so I started in the startup space, that’s kind of where I cut my teeth. I used to have a rhyme that I used to do just for fun and it was a rhyme mocking startups who are trying to copy an established company and it will be, you’ll have four people in a four-person startup, and every single one of the four people had a C-level title, it’s like the CEO, the CFO, the COO, the uh, oh, oh, it’s like so many Cs.

Alex: That’s funny.

Tendayi: Right. But what does the COO of a four-person startup do, like the chief operations officer? What would that person do? But it’s just like you needed a new car. It’s all these behaviors where you’re trying to mimic large companies, and that’s what we’re trying to stop startups from doing. So that’s why it caught on, it was a pivotal moment in businesses. 

Alex: I like that. That’s funny, because that’s so true, like, “Yeah, I’m the C-level officer at a five-person company.” What does that mean? And what should be appropriate title be and how they operationalize that role. And our audience are coaches so coaches work, a lot of coaches work in very established large companies but a lot of them also work with smaller companies so I think this frame is important and the dynamics with a smaller company, a startup that’s like aiming to gain to hyper growth mode, I mean, it’s a very different landscape. And the clients require a very different perspective and a way of operating for coaches. So as coaches being able to be adaptable and coached in different settings is powerful. And I don’t think from like the coaching side of things, we’ve spent like necessarily too much time thinking about how those startup settings are different and I know a lot of coaches that work with both large companies and startups, some that specialized on either, but it’d be interesting to have more conversations around the differences of working with startups. And I know a lot of coaches that do a really great job with that. So that makes me think about some future episodes and focusing on how do you coach in a startup? What’s different than working in a larger ecosystem, which is really interesting. 

Tendayi: Can I just say something, just real quick? 

Alex: Yeah, of course. 

Tendayi: So those two roles are different in an interesting way. In a large company, you’re coaching the organization to think about how it’s very successful and shouldn’t be complacent. So what are the risks that are out there in the world that it’s from, this company? So that’s the innovation coaching in a large company which is you establish you’re successful, what are the risks, what are the disruption risks and don’t be complacent trying to find new ways to grow. That’s that coaching challenge. With a startup, the question is how close are you even to finding a business model that works? If you could like get a team to just like coalesce around how close are we to finding a business model that works? What are the outstanding questions we still don’t yet understand about our business model and how do we get that figured out? Then you have really great coach for startup, where you’re bringing them along towards success and you’re helping the company to maintain success, which is a different coaching challenge. 

Alex: That’s a great point. I mean, maintaining an innovative culture and maintaining a company’s stature, it’s one of the most difficult things to do. I mean, I think a lot of us have heard that most of the Fortune 500 companies from decades ago are gone. It’s really hard to sustain momentum and to grow and we look at all these super large established companies now and then when we see them in 30, 40, 50 years, they’ll be radically different, if they’re even around. So sustaining momentum and innovation is very difficult. Why do you think it is so difficult for an established company to sustain their position? 

Tendayi: Yeah, no, because the world is always changing so change is constant, change is consistent, and so things, no matter how cool, become obsolete over time. In previous business history, things took longer to become obsolete because, again, change wasn’t as fast, but nowadays change is so much faster so you’ve got change happening all around you, which is kind of trying to drive you out of business because that’s just the competitive landscape, and in the meantime, the feedback loop you’re in is telling you you’re successful because you’ve seen your quarterly numbers, they’re just informing you that —

Alex:  So it’s a mindset. Because all of these companies have tremendous resources and so do you boil it down to having the right mindset for sustaining that innovation?

Tendayi: Yeah, you have to have the right mindset, but the mindset that you need to have when you are successful is you have to be deliberate. You have to deliberately choose to feel insecure when you’re like sitting in plush resources, versus if you’re a startup, you have nothing so you’re really worried or insecure already about your environment. What you need to do and what your environment is giving you as feedback align, whereas if you’re a large company, what you need to do and what your environment is giving you as feedback are not aligned, like you’re looking at your reports, you’re looking at your bonus, you’re looking at your salary, your paid for home, all of these things don’t help you feel motivated to not become complacent. It’s hard to not become complacent when you’re successful. And that’s almost at the heart of all these conversations is the human challenge of like, you know, the whole thing of like, “Make hay while the sun shines,” the reason why that’s even a thing to say to people is because it’s hard to make hay while the sun is shining. When the sun is shining, you want to go to the beach and lie down and drink sparkling water with ice and lemon.

Alex: Right, exactly.

Tendayi: Who wants to make hay while the sun is shining? But you have to remind people of that. And so it’s really your mindset and how do you build that uncomplacent mindset? That’s a huge coaching challenge, especially for coaches that coach successful people. 

Alex: I always like to read about successful people and biographies, it’s like something I — actually, I’m lying. I don’t read those, I listen to those, I can’t see myself, like I love reading and I read a lot of nonfiction but autobiography is just something I like to listen to. So I’ve listened to a lot of them. And the reason that I listened to one that I thought it was fascinating was like the Matthew McConaughey one, Greenlights, which is not about business but I recommend that one. That was really good. But when you look at the success of companies like Amazon, sometimes, they really instill a sense of there’s different strategies to create that environment where people don’t become complacent, so with Amazon, you hear stories about them making desks out of doors and things like that and like there’s this company that’s growing tremendously and has all these resources, and, you know, at the point where they already were experiencing tremendous success, you see them doing things like that that are really about optimizing resources, trying to stay on your toes, because as you go from being that disruptor to more of an established player in the space, it seems like that is the point in time where that complacent mentality starts to emerge. And it makes sense, like you say, it’s like it’s sunny out, just go to the beach, and like we think of that attitude in organizations, it seems like a lot of very successful CEOs, what they do is they create the culture where that complacency doesn’t show up. How sustainable that is, how many decades you can sustain that, I think that’s a different topic, but there seems to be a lot of intentionality by very successful founders and leaders around creating the culture that will not lead to that complacency to emerge, or at least to delay that as much as possible. And then we all know things like Microsoft is referred to as a country club, so they have this rise and then in the 90s, the 2000s, things slowed down a little bit and all these people made all this money, and that’s the other component. A lot of people become complacent because they’re executives but they made millions of dollars as the company grows and now you have this very different culture than compared to where the company was when they were creating all that value but now they harvest. 

Tendayi: Yeah, exactly. And that’s kind of inevitable. You can see with Amazon and Jeff Bezos, I mean, he even named a building Day 1, because he’s got this philosophy that he’s intentionally trying to build in the company that’s always Day 1, they’re always like — and then I think there was this conference, I don’t know if you’ve seen the video, where an employee says, “So when is it ever Day 2?” and he’s like, “It’s never Day 2 because Day 2 is complacency, bloat, atrophy, and eventually death. So that’s why at Amazon it’s always Day 1,” and the whole room just explodes, but he’s great with it. It’s almost like how do wealthy families raise grounded children? Well, you have to be deliberate in how you communicate, how you teach value, because the environment that they’re in can easily make them complacent, proud, etc., so you just have to be deliberate with it. And that’s the hardest. I think it’s harder to coach successful people than it is to coach somebody who is trying to make it, they’re more open to learning, I think, rather than someone who’s already been successful. And I think in my life as well, like you don’t know whether you were successful because you were lucky or whether you were successful because you were good. It’s hard to know because of just the random variables with your life. But, somehow, people who were successful, they give themselves the narrative that they’re the best, and now you’re trying to coach that person to not be complacent. And that’s just hard. It’s really tough to do that. 

Alex: I love that you say that because one of the ways that I think about when you look at a lot of the iconic business people, the way I gauge my level of respect, it’s like comparing luck versus execution and obviously there’s a lot of variables, thinking about would this person be able to do it all over again, regardless of the situation they’re in, will they be able to do it again or will they be like a one-time founder and there’s some that I’m like, no, definitely got really lucky and executed well, and some that are like, yeah, there’s some luck but I can see these person making it every single time. And I think that’s how you separate success from truly hyper successful people. And I’m not going to go through my list here in the podcast, because I don’t want to get all these people complaining about me talking about them but that’s, I think, a good measure of greatness, because we talk about genius and greatness and I think you can separate some of that on some of the iconic business people. And, again, just reading biographies is so interesting and powerful and I think understanding that DNA of innovation is interesting to see it from the perspective of the people that build innovative companies. Speaking of that, Eric Ries has a new project and — well, it’s not that new, I think it was founded about seven years ago, but the Long-Term Stock Exchange, LTSC. Are you familiar with that? 

Tendayi: Yes, no. So here’s the thing, it was the last chapter, that idea, the concept was the last chapter in his book, The Lean Startup, it was like somebody should work on this, a stock market where companies are valued in terms of the long-term value they’re creating in the world, because, ultimately, with The Lean Startup, he was arguing that the whole point, the whole reason you use his methodologies is to build sustainable business models that are scalable so that you have long-term value. And so in the early stages, of course, it’s hard to know so you need a stock market with startups to get a chance to actually create value without worrying about quarterly reporting and all of these things that can sometimes be value destroying. So he was writing about how somebody should start this Long-Term Stock Exchange. And then, fast forward a decade later and he’s doing it, which is really fascinating. So, I think it’s a pretty cool concept. Let’s see how it goes. 

Alex: And that long-term orientation is something that we deeply need. And when it comes to coaching, it’s like Marcia Reynolds has this line around coaching the person, not the problem. So much of the time, we’re kind of solving the immediate without focusing on the long-term implications. And when you look at the stock market, I mean, it rewards quarterly performance. It’s very hard to invest, for companies to invest in long-term sustainability, long-term results when you’re being continuously measured and evaluated on your quarterly results. And it’s incredible to think about the negative impact that has in the world at large where you’re incentivizing the most powerful or some of the most powerful entities in the world and the people that run them to focus on the short term. There’s really very little reward for short-term value creation and I think that explains a lot of the difficult issues that we are facing because when you have that short-term orientation, you’re really not solving for the future. And the future, you know? I love that line, “The future is already here — it’s just not equally distributed.” 

Tendayi: Yes, yes, yes. That’s a really good quote and that’s from the —

Alex: [inaudible]

Tendayi: Yes, exactly. Yeah.

Alex: Yeah, I love all that. I want to bring more of that to coaching because I think it’s not necessarily I know a lot of coaches, I think there’s an appetite to learn more about innovation and startup culture but a lot of coaching historically has been done in larger organizations, but the last decade has seen really an increase in the use of coaching in smaller organizations and fast growing startups, which I think it’s a fascinating development. 

Tendayi: Yeah, I think that’s great. But even in large corporations, I mean, the last Boston Consulting Group survey was showing the leaders really want to build innovation capabilities in their organizations now. I remember when I first started my career, the more difficult conversations I had were trying to convince leader that they need to build an innovation function and now they want to build innovation functions so I think that creates a lot of coaching opportunity because now you’re saying to people who are in a quarterly reporting business that there should be another part of their business that doesn’t answer to that or shouldn’t be obligated to do that. And how do you build a dual culture inside your company? 

Alex: What does the innovation function look like in an organization and is it different in a small and large organization? 

Tendayi: So I think in a smaller organization, the innovation function can probably sit with a leader that’s doing more than one function because it’s a smaller organization and you may not have the humans. One of the bigger battles that we have, the reason why we, especially Alex also and I talk about innovation function a lot, and, in fact, Eric Ries in his follow-up book called The Startup Way which focused on large company, he talks about entrepreneurship is the missing function inside the companies. And he talks about imagining a universe long ago, long, long ago where companies didn’t have a finance function, the universe, these do exist, or companies that have a marketing function. But one of the challenges companies were facing during that period helped them professionalize those functions and make them functions inside large organizations, and I think the challenge for the 21st, 22nd century is entrepreneurship, constantly reinventing it because the world is changing so fast, that’s the biggest challenge that large companies are facing. So it behooves companies to start turning intrapreneurship into a profession that can actually have a critical function inside organizations. So I put it up on Twitter and the backlash that I get is everyone should be innovating. If you have an innovation function in your company, then your company is not really that innovative. So I pushed back a little bit on that and then afterwards, why do we say that about innovation but we never say that about finance or HR? You never hear somebody say, “If your company has an HR function, it is not really good at managing human resources, everyone should be managing.” We never say that, why do we say that about innovation? And there’s a misunderstanding. I think when we say that we shouldn’t have an innovation function, people think that we should have a select group of people that do innovations. But, actually, the job of the innovation function is to create innovators. It’s not to do innovation. And so the goal of innovation function is to create the tools, the processes. It’s kind of like if you’re an innovation team in a large company, you will always run into obstacles because the large company works differently to how you’re trying to do your innovation, so you run into obstacles with legal, run into obstacles with finance, and if you’re a really good political maneuverer, you can navigate your innovation project to success through the politics. But there’s another approach you can take, which is every time you run into an obstacle, you can ask yourself a question of how do we lower this obstacle so that other innovators that are coming from behind don’t have to face the same obstacle again? Can we create processes and hire people or whatever to stop this problem always being there as barriers for innovation? Those people who do that are building roads and bridges and runways for future innovators to run on and those are the pioneers, that’s the job of the innovation function is to build those things so that future innovators are not running up against these blockers, which is a different job to working on an actual innovation, and so that’s the role of innovation function. And for that to happen, the innovation function has to sit at the highest possible inside the organization, like a VP who is reporting to an SVP who is reporting to a CFO who is reporting to the CEO, that VP with four layers in the organization cannot drive these sorts of changes, and so innovation has to really high in the org chart, Chief Innovation Officer, Chief Entrepreneur, so that something can actually be done.

Alex: Could it be that people think about innovation as a mindset and that’s why they push against the function? But in reality, what I hear you say is that the function is supposed to create the foundation for people to have that mentality, that way of thinking about it. 

Tendayi: Yeah, but think about it this way. So let’s say — so I’m a Christian and so I have a Christian mindset, so I’m a Christian, like how would you know in my behaviors that I’m a Christian? Well, you will know that because there are a set of processes and behaviors and rituals that I engage with on Sunday or books that I read or things that I eat, whatever it is. So mindsets are important but mindsets have to be manifested behavior. And if mindsets cannot be manifested behavior, it means that there’s a barrier inside the organization that’s restricting the mindset from being manifested behavior. I started my career doing training workshops, trained people in business model design, design thinking, and then they’re excited and they go back to work and they can’t do any of that stuff because the environment they’re in does not allow them to do that. So it’s not just about mindset. You cannot change people’s mindset by just talking to them, you also have to give them the tools, the processes, and capabilities. You have to give them the things to do the rituals, the artifacts, to sort of express that change in mindset. Otherwise, you’ll never see it. You’ll never see it show up in technological innovation. I could have an innovation mindset all day long and never create innovation because my boss won’t let me do it. He wants me to work with his core products and sell it. So that’s the job of the innovation function is just to allow the mindset to then get a space for expression. Not just to have a mindset. Can I just add one more thing?

Alex: Of course.

Tendayi: Let’s say like psychological safety and diverse teams is a goal inside a large organization, so the one thing you need inside that organization is the mindset that accept that that’s an important thing that should happen inside organizations. But to accomplish that diversity and that psychological safety, you do need a function that owns that, that’s the role of HR is to hire diverse teams, put diverse teams together, create processes for diverse teams to collaborate. You can’t just say like, “If you have a diversity function, then you’re not really valuing diversity.” It’s a mindset.  Like you have to create the space for those things to manifest. So I find that strange. I even find it weird that this is controversial at all. 

Alex: Really? How often is that — did it happen once when you posted something on Twitter or is this an ongoing —

Tendayi: It’s an ongoing conversation, and I’m really surprised that it’s controversial. 

Alex: The Twitter mob is famous for…I don’t really do Twitter —

Tendayi: — controversies, yeah. 

Alex: I don’t really do Twitter. It seems like you can really get addicted to it, just like Cokes. It leads to addictive behavior.

Tendayi: — the slightly smaller version of social media, yeah.

Alex: So tell me about your book. I think your latest book is Pirates in the Navy. So it’s very interesting. When I first saw it, I thought came from the Navy or something like that, but it reminds me of titles like, what’s that book on the spider and —

Tendayi: Oh.

Alex: You know which book I’m talking about?

Tendayi: — web thing like the spider and…yeah, I see what you’re saying, like those —

Alex: Yeah, yeah, those books make you kind of remember, but I can’t even — that’s interesting because I can’t remember them but you know exactly what I’m talking about. Tell us, how did the title come about and what is the book about? 

Tendayi: Yeah, so actually, this title, I stole that from Steve Jobs because Steve Jobs said it’s better to be a pirate than to join the Navy, and what he was talking about was like it’s better to be in a startup than joining one company that has too many restrictions. And so I was like, well, if we’re seeing large companies that innovate, then they need pirates in the Navy and so what are the characteristics of the successful entrepreneur, that’s the focus of this book. What are the characteristics of a successful serial innovator? What do they need to be good at? And it turns out that outside of the more basic things like being innovative and being creative, being self-motivated, all of the things that an entrepreneur needs, the one additional characteristic that you need to be an entrepreneur is political acumen. You need to be able to build relationships. If you can’t build relationships, you cannot be a successful entrepreneur. Because inside large organizations, there is no innovation that succeeds without the hands of other people eventually getting involved, sales, marketing, legal, compliance. And if you don’t have relationships with those people, you can be as entrepreneurial as you like but you’re not going to really succeed on a consistent basis. Your success will be more hit and miss. So that’s what the book is about, how to be a successful pirate in the Navy and what I did was I did some research and I discovered that there’s actually a distinction between just regular pirates and privateers, privateers are like pirates but pirates are hired by specific governments to go raid the ships of enemy governments. There’s a story, so Francis Drake, Sir Francis Drake, was known as Queen Elizabeth’s pirate and he used to raid Spanish ships and then he’d come home with the loot. And so the question for the corporate innovator is are you a pirate or a privateer? And it’s better to be a privateer, a pirate with a commission, a pirate with people waiting for what they’re bringing back, rather than a pirate who’s like if you get caught, if your project gets caught, you have to walk the plank. And so you have to kind of like manage your projects. And so that’s where these concepts come from and it was a fun kind of thing to write about.

Alex: That’s interesting, and I like that frame. And, yeah, as an entrepreneur, you feel like you’re walking the plank a lot of the time. I can relate to that. 

Tendayi: Yeah.

Alex: The Starfish and the Spider was the name of that book and it was on like —

Tendayi: Okay, I don’t know that one.

Alex: Yeah, it’s on like centralized and decentralized business models, which I think it’s at the core of innovation too, because, I don’t know if you’re familiar with that Frederic Laloux book, Reinventing Organizations, that was very popular maybe five, six years ago. I mean, this idea of reshaping the way we organize large companies and even small companies around this concept of decentralization, holacracy, all those concepts, where does that fit in with the innovative mindset and the innovation function, because if you’re trying to innovate in an organization but the organization is not structured to be super innovative, and what I mean by that is there’s still these command and control, centralized bureaucratic approach that tends to happen when companies grow, I think that’s one of lately, and lately, I mean, the last couple of weeks, I’ve seen some articles come out around Google that are describing Google the way people were describing Microsoft in the early and mid 2000s. So, that innovation eventually needs to exist in an ecosystem of an organizational structure that is adaptive and structured for innovation. So when it comes to things like holacracy, for example, it’s like where are we in terms of the evolution of business, the way businesses are organized, where are we and how important is that for innovation? You know what I mean? Like going into these decentralized models that I think captivates people’s imaginations, like [inaudible] that is like a fully decentralized organization, how does that blend in with being able to be successful at innovation? 

Tendayi: Yeah, so the reason why decentralizing or having a decentralization model is interesting is let’s look at the underlying principle underneath that, which is that the best way to get the best ideas or the best innovation is to give innovative autonomy. The more autonomy teams have, because they’re closest to the customer, the more autonomy they have, the more they can act in the best interest of the organization. And so it’s psychological safety, where they can work in the organization, that’s what holacracy and what the decentralized model actually tried to achieve. So the question I get is, do you need holacracy to do that? Are there other models where you could accomplish that? Because I still have a really strong feeling that autonomy has to be given in exchange for transparency, it has to be a trade-off. And you can’t have autonomy and zero transparency.

Alex: That sounds like chaos. 

Tendayi: Yeah, like people just do whatever they want. And innovators have survived on that because they’ve pretended that innovation is a black box so just put us in an accelerator and leave us alone and we’ll eventually produce something cool for you. And then over time, organizations were like, “What’s happening over there? We’re spending a lot of time,” and then try and look. So I believe strongly that you get the autonomy for sure and then you have to bring transparency back to leadership so that they can see what you’re working on, how close those things are to finding a business model that works. Now, the leadership who will get in that transparency also need coaching to ask the right questions at the right time. You don’t want leadership to get the transparency and then kill innovation because they’re focused on revenue this quarter. Whereas this is a three-year, multi-year process. And so they have to figure out a way for leaders to ask the right questions at the right time, teams to do the right things at the right time, and that back and forth conversation is transparent. And innovation governance has to be that way but the idea that innovation shouldn’t have governance, I don’t really believe that at all, because there’s money being spent and the expectation of value to be created. So the fundamental question is, how close is the team to bringing value to the organization? And what are the metrics, what are the innovation metrics we can use to track that in a transparent way? 

Alex: Cool. Makes a lot of sense, and I think this episode is going to be very informative for coaches that are working in these ecosystems, whether they’re working on a small startup, small company, or a large organization, to really start thinking about long-term value creation, thinking about innovation and how you need to work with different clients with an innovation frame in mind. I think it’s going to be powerful. Thank you so much, Tendayi, for coming to our podcast today. Really appreciate it. Any final thoughts that you have for us and all the coaches that are listening? 

Tendayi: Yeah, I was thinking you’re going to ask that question and then I have to think quite quickly on my feet with my final thought. I think coaching is like a noble profession, I think it’s a profession where your goal is to help bring out the best out of people. And from an innovation standpoint, for us, I think the best you can bring out of people from an innovation standpoint is just help them become non-complacent and just challenge their beliefs and look around them and think about how they can get better all the time, thinking about how they can go in different directions, and if you can do that in an individual level and then take it to become an organizational practice, then you’re likely to have these organizations that are invincible, constantly reinventing themselves. I was doing a keynote the other day and I did some research and I found that 45 out of a million companies last 200 years. Only 45 out of them. 

Alex: Wow.

Tendayi: That’s how hard it is. And in 200 years, there’s like 1 out of a billion. That’s how hard it is to stay. Even the 10-year cycle, 40,000 out of a million, which is like, four and a thousand. That’s just insane.

Alex: Yeah, as an entrepreneur, I probably shouldn’t be thinking about that, like we’re entrepreneurs, because no one would take the leap to start a business.

Tendayi: Exactly, exactly. But, again, the ability to sustain your company and the ability to sustain your own career is to better yourself, and so once you get that success, then you need to think about how do you sustain that over time.

Alex: Absolutely. Well, thank you. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and all your expertise and knowledge around innovation. It’s very, very interesting work that you do. So thank you, Tendayi. It was a pleasure having you. Thank you for coming. 

Tendayi: Thank you, Alex. Really appreciate it.