MEDIASCAPE: Insights From Digital Changemakers
Join hosts Joseph Itaya and Anika Jackson as they dive into conversations with leaders and changemakers shaping the future of digital media. Each episode explores the frontier of multimedia, artificial intelligence, marketing, branding, and communication, spotlighting how emerging digital trends and technologies are transforming industries across the globe.
MEDIASCAPE is proudly sponsored by USC Annenberg’s Master of Science in Digital Media Management (MSDMM) program. This online master’s program is designed to prepare practitioners to understand the evolving media landscape, make data-driven and ethical decisions, and build a more equitable future by leading diverse teams with the technical, artistic, analytical, and production skills needed to create engaging content and technologies for the global marketplace. Learn more or apply today at https://dmm.usc.edu.
MEDIASCAPE: Insights From Digital Changemakers
Tech Pioneer Elizabeth Bieniek on Why Joy Matters in Business
Elizabeth Bieniek takes us on a fascinating journey from aspiring creative writer to tech innovator, challenging our assumptions about career paths and technology's purpose along the way. With refreshing candor and New York-style directness, she reveals how her English degree and outsider perspective became unexpected assets in the tech world.
At the heart of our conversation lies a powerful message: technology should connect humans, not separate them. This principle guided Elizabeth's development of WebEx Hologram at Cisco – a groundbreaking system designed to create genuine feelings of co-presence across geographic distances. Rather than beginning with technical capabilities, she started by asking how to solve real human problems, like helping remote participants feel included in meetings or enabling better understanding of three-dimensional objects.
What's particularly inspiring about Elizabeth's story is her approach to innovation within a corporate environment. Rather than waiting for permission, she created opportunities by attending conferences, exploring demos, and presenting solutions that addressed business needs her leadership hadn't yet recognized. When given a small opening, she "took a mile" – leveraging curiosity and initiative to transform ideas into reality.
After eight years leading this venture, Elizabeth captured her insights in "Cake on Tuesday: 25 Lessons to Unlock Corporate Innovation." The playful title references her team's practice of deliberately incorporating joy into the development process – including a "Wheel of Winning" where team members could win cake deliveries during challenging phases.
Today, Elizabeth helps organizations that are successful in one area but need to evolve to remain competitive. Her advice is refreshingly practical: keep innovations simple, celebrate progress rather than fixating on what's left to do, and never underestimate the power of asking "why?" Her journey proves that with curiosity, initiative, and human-centered design principles, anyone – regardless of technical background – can become a successful innovator in today's digital landscape.
Ready to be inspired to bring more humanity and joy to your innovation journey? Listen now and discover how to unlock your creative potential while keeping people at the center of technological advancement.
Check out Cake on Tuesday: 25 Lessons to Unlock Corporate Innovation
This podcast is proudly sponsored by USC Annenberg’s Master of Science in Digital Media Management (MSDMM) program. An online master’s designed to prepare practitioners to understand the evolving media landscape, make data-driven and ethical decisions, and build a more equitable future by leading diverse teams with the technical, artistic, analytical, and production skills needed to create engaging content and technologies for the global marketplace. Learn more or apply today at https://dmm.usc.edu.
Welcome to Mediascape insights from digital changemakers, a speaker series and podcast brought to you by USC Annenberg's Digital Media Management Program. Join us as we unlock the secrets to success in an increasingly digital world.
Speaker 2:I am so thrilled today on Mediascape to have Elizabeth Bieniuk. You have such an amazing, illustrious background as a Fortune 100 leadership veteran, startup founder, a top 10 most influential woman pioneer in technology. You've spoken at schools that I've actually been exploring with my daughter, which is really exciting. Spoken at schools that I've actually been exploring with my daughter, which is really exciting. And one thing that I really pick up on is that you are human-centered in your approach to AI, and I think that's so important to note, because I also am a firm believer and so optimistic about the fact that using these tools gives us the opportunity to be more human, but also that we need to have humans in everything. So, elizabeth, thank you for being here.
Speaker 3:Thank you for having me, annika. I'm excited to be here and I love talking about that topic to you of connecting humans. When technology works to connect humans, it's amazing, like what we're doing right now, when it gets in the way of that. I think that's we've gone off the rails of what the purpose of technology is for?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and obviously we're talking before we jumped on. I teach grad school at USC. We teach digital media. Everything's changed since the program was created, you know, even just a couple of years ago. Then we started talking just about generative AI and a few tools. Now we're talking about a lot of different tools that people can use in their work streams for every part.
Speaker 3:I have to say, by the way, you didn't make it easy on yourself. You picked a topic that you have to redo the curriculum pretty much every year.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I don't have control over that, but I do have control over our live sessions and so that's where I get to include all the good new stuff. So I'd love to hear a little bit about how you got to where you are today, because I know your background you were in the arts and writing, and then business and education.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I'm happy to talk about that and I love talking to people that feel like they have to get it all figured out and then, like I have to find the right degree and the right path and start with the right job and my path and trajectory are set. Because it's really not. I'm in my 40s and I'm still trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up, and I think that's part of life, definitely. I'm a firm believer in the idea that it's a journey, not a destination, and I don't ever want to feel as if I've arrived, I'm done, because that's when things get boring you always want to be learning and doing new things. So my own background, my undergrad, is in English. I was very firmly believing I was going to pursue creative writing as my career and obviously I have not done that. I am hoping to still continue to dabble in that space. But I fell in love with business and ended up making a bit of a hard pivot. I even took all the. I took the GRE, was ready to go pursue my MFA in fine arts and then it's like, no, no, I want to go into business. And like, oh man, now I got to take a GMAT, got to take a different test, so I had to go through that different route and pursued business instead and I think I just loved. I loved the idea of the way businesses work.
Speaker 3:I went to Babson for my master's and that's a school that builds reputation on entrepreneurship and I always have been fascinated with the concept of entrepreneurship. My mom owned a small art studio. My dad worked for a two-man computer office. For a while. There was very small businesses and I always thought I was going to go that route. But again, life doesn't usually work out exactly the way you planned. So I ended up working for a very large company in the Fortune 100. And then I had an opportunity to build a startup inside of that. So I ended up having a entrepreneurial journey. I don't think I even knew the term entrepreneur before, but it was a way to explore those entrepreneurial vibes inside of large organization and that brings a whole other set of challenges.
Speaker 2:I can only imagine. I have not. I've been adjacent to large organizations my entire career, but I want to talk about that because you were the co-founder of WebEx Hologram for Cisco. So talk about moving this through and getting into business, and then entrepreneurship which I will also say a lot of our students are entrepreneurs in their larger corporations and then getting into technology in a deep way because that wasn't your background. So how did you come to the passion for that?
Speaker 3:It was slow, it took a while to get a passion for it, I think, honestly, my husband, by training, was a biomedical engineer and I used to always joke that I married the engineer. I wasn't the engineer, but we made a cross-country move. We were in Boston at the time and moved to San Jose for opportunities for his work, as I was finishing up grad school and I didn't know anybody in San Jose. It was a new place, a new part of the world, and we were just really exploring and I did actually my last two classes from Babson, correspondence from California, which was a great experience too. I really appreciated the flexibility back when. That was less common when I was graduating from school than it is now. But at the time I just reached out to my alma mater alumni network and trying to find connections in the area and some of it was just you know what neighborhoods do we rent an apartment in? Where do we go grocery shop? It wasn't even necessarily career advice, but I ended up finding several people that had graduated from Babson who were working at Cisco, which in hindsight is not surprising. Big school, big company. It made sense.
Speaker 3:But after speaking to, I think, five different people that were from Babson that were at Cisco. I was really saying, wow, there's quite a diversity of roles here. And I was talking to one gentleman in particular who he was in a corporate learning and corporate training function inside of Cisco and had been for many years I think he was there for like 20 some odd years and I was just chatting with him about what I was looking for after I graduated and he recommended he's like why don't you apply here? And I think I laughed actually when he said that I was like no, no, no, I'm not a technology person. This is not my undergrad's in English, this is not my world. And he kind of laughed back at me. He's like do you think there's only engineers here? He's like how big is this company? He's like look at what I do. I focus on corporate training. He's like I'm not an engineer either and I've made an. He floated around internally.
Speaker 3:I am getting a call from somebody and, long story short, I ended up with a role there at Cisco which was not my original plan or intent and I think I spent the first several years there saying I'm not a technology person and I had roles in different capacities. I worked in finance and operations, portfolio management and things that were technology adjacent, I would say. But just being around it I got more and more entrenched in understanding the world of technology and I had a great opportunity to move into a role, just being aware that career paths don't often follow the trajectory you think, and sometimes opportunities come in the weirdest ways. I ended up getting an opportunity to move from the services side of the organization into the product side of the organization to basically be the right hand person to a woman that was running operations for all of video collaboration. So she was the head of ops for that and she was doing it solo.
Speaker 3:It was a large organization we're talking like a 5,000 person organization, 5 billion annual revenue. I mean, it's a big group. She was doing it solo and just had so much on her plate and so she got approval to hire another rec and we knew some similar people from previous roles. We didn't know each other but it just somebody had recommended me for that and we chatted and like, oh, this could be a good fit. So she pulled me over to be her right hand in that and to kind of train up to take some things off of her blade.
Speaker 3:The caveat, though, I didn't know until I met her in person is she was eight weeks away from going out maternity leave. So she's like I'm going to give you a crash course in this and you're going to cover while I'm out and then I'll come back and then we'll, you know, we'llvy it up. So it was eight weeks of learning everything I possibly could and I just had it in my head okay, I just got to cover this for a few months and then you know, we'll be back, we'll do this. Well, she decided she didn't want to come back. So opportunity presented itself. I had that chance to then turn around and go to my boss, who was the senior vice president of that entire organization, and say at this point, I think she extended her maternity leave I think it ended up being out for six months and then decided she wasn't going to come back. So I had a conversation with him and saying hey, you could hire somebody brand new and take a gamble to take over this role, or? I've been doing this for six months and it's been working pretty well. Why don't we have a chat about this? And so I sat down with, I came in with a presentation and I showed him to you just like. Here's what I've done. I came prepared and he was a great person to work for. He was a very decisive leader, so we just walked out of that.
Speaker 3:He's, like all, a really undersung role. It's something that can mean a lot of different things to different people, but the beauty of operations is you usually get to see how everything works. You have a behind-the-scenes view of all facets of an organization, not only the technology and the operations of the business itself, but also, like the people dynamics. So I had a seat at the table with the VPs for every business organization, all the different functions across the technology group, and I really got a really great view of how the entire organization worked. And I was still claiming I was not a technology person. But after doing that for a while, one thing led to another and I was still claiming I was not a technology person.
Speaker 3:After doing that for a while, one thing led to another and I just we had any large company, the thing there's always reorgs, there's always changes and this and that, and we had some change in management and that senior leader I was working for ended up moving to a different role. We had a new leadership come in. I got slotted around, if you will, into different roles. I ended up being in more of a strategy role, working for the new leadership. And again, opportunity comes in unusual forms. It was a new leader and new senior team to this organization from outside the company and they were really looking for people of who knows what's going on the inner workings of this, were really looking for people of who knows what's going on the inner workings of this. So, even though I was no longer in an operations role, the head of the strategy and partnerships kept tapping me to say, hey, could you give me the backstory in this, like tell me what's going on here? And he and I developed a friendship and he ended up pulling me over to work in his team and again, just new opportunities there. He was another great person I was fortunate enough to work for in that I'm a very opinionated person, originally from New York and I just speak my mind, so he was very good and open to that. If you had a new idea, he would just take that. Whatever you said is like sure, let's entertain that idea.
Speaker 3:And we were having a conversation once. One of the groups he oversaw both strategy partnerships operations and I think there was a fourth group once one of the groups he oversaw both strategy partnerships operations. And I think there was a fourth group and I was focusing on strategic partnerships at the time and he had another team that was more corporate, traditional corporate strategy. So a lot of people from the consulting backgrounds you know the big Ivy League schools and they were working on their long range strategic plan, which is like a three year plan looking ahead, and my input was just to talk about the strategic partnerships that I was managing at the time. So I submitted my piece and then kind of told to go away. Well, we'll go behind this closed door and we'll crank out this corporate strategy.
Speaker 3:And I was having a coffee with my boss who oversaw both those teams at one point and I was complimenting with him like giving him a hard time. To be honest, just being my normal New Yorker self of like hey, why don I mean in technology, three years is not very long range. And like, not to mention your whole team that's been doing this. They haven't left that conference room in like three weeks. How strategic is it if they're not talking to anybody outside the company?
Speaker 3:Because I was in a partnership, I spent all my time outside our four walls. I was really just being a brat and poking, but he was open to it. So he kind of flipped around. He's like, all right, what would you do different? And so I just rattled off a couple of things off the top of my head and stuff. And then he's like, all right, show me. And so he gave me some time to go say, if I were to propose a corporate strategy, what would I propose that the current team's not doing? And then, anytime somebody gives you an inch, take as much as you can take a mile, take as much as you can take a mile.
Speaker 3:So I went outside, I used my current practice of just working with other companies around the Bay Area and just I expanded that. So I started going to all the local conferences. I already had some relationships from the startup incubators and accelerators and like I just started talking to everybody who's investing in what, who's doing this, and I would go to all the free expos. A lot of times conferences can be expensive but the expos could be really cheap. So I'd go to the free or cheap ones and I would just go around the floor and see all the vendors and see what am I seeing again and again. That gives you such a good insight into what's happening and who's investing in what and what's up and coming. I'd try all the demos. This is back before COVID, so we would just put on a headset, put on whatever, just try all the things.
Speaker 3:And I came back to him with a proposal of like hey, here's some areas that I think we should focus on that we're not looking at, and augmented and virtual reality was one of them. We were in the collaboration business and we're not really investing in this space and this has the potential to hugely disrupt the future of our business. And one thing led to another. It was just he's like go deeper. And so I started talking to some other companies in that and coming back with if we were to invest, here's where I think we should invest. If we were to build something, here's what I think we should look at building. If we're to partner, here's what I think we could do. And it just kind of built from there and it ended up coming to he wanted me to then present to the management team on it. So I spent quite a bit of see and what we think we could do to invest in this space and why we should care. And the ask at the time was just for some engineers, a small tiger team, to look at the space and what could we do. And we got approval for that and it ended up turning into a small project. That again just mentioning how life was happening.
Speaker 3:I was eight months pregnant at the time with my first or second kid and I was making a pitch from a strategy perspective of we need to look at this space, we should care, so we should do something here. But it wasn't I want to do something here. It's like someone should do something here. I'm going to go have a baby. So he got approval. They formed a tiger team, put somebody in charge. There was a charter.
Speaker 3:I left, had a baby, came back a few months later and found out nothing had happened. So I was really passionate about it because I spent so much time building the idea for it. I was like why didn't anything happen? And just finding out you know corporate things people had moved around, priorities had changed, the person they put in charge of it had too many other conflicting priorities. He was not really given a fair shake to move it forward and so I took it back over and ended up presenting it a few months later back to the team Once I took over the Tiger team, like let's figure this out.
Speaker 3:And then we came back with a hey, here's a few things we could do here. We could put a tow in, just kind of like, check out, see what the water's nice. Or we could go big and really build something in the space, or do something hybrid, something in between. I learned in business school you always give three scenarios, three options, because they'll pick one. And to my surprise they wanted to go big and that ended up leading to a whole further project of building out. What would this look like? And I can go further into that, but that's how it all started. That's how it all came about.
Speaker 2:But there's a few things here that I think are really interesting. You know, you kept following the breadcrumbs, kept following the opportunities that were presented. You obviously have inquisitive mind, right? You want to keep learning different things. Why is still my favorite question?
Speaker 3:I never grew out of that pace.
Speaker 2:And also it sounds like, even though it's a large ecosystem, at Cisco that they gave room for people to bring ideas for that innovation, creativity which you would assume that you find in big tech companies. But also sometimes you think, oh, it's a really big company, it's probably very slow moving, you know, there's probably not a lot of room.
Speaker 3:You find some pockets of it, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:And so that's one thing that I really notice in the digital media management program is we do have a lot of students going through the program who have a career, who are entrenched in a corporate business, whether it's in entertainment or tech or something, or education or wherever but they're figuring out projects that they can do to add value and to do something slightly different. And you also weren't afraid to speak up, because I think that's another thing. We're often afraid to speak our mind, to share our points of view, and we need that, because that is what breeds more creativity, more innovation, more amazing projects that then come on to be, you know, the go big projects that you're discussing.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, the idea. I'm going through this with my kids. I have three little kids that are 10 and under, and I was talking to my oldest about the idea of asking permission versus taking charge in certain scenarios, and that's a hard concept for a little kid to learn, especially when you have school and teachers and rules and everything that you need to follow, but at the same time, you don't want to never raise your hand or never ask or never say, well, what if we did this different? So we're talking about that concept of where is it appropriate to ask for permission and where is it appropriate to just try something, and I feel like that really made me think about my career and the advice I give other people that are starting out in their career is you have to think about that for yourself in your scenario too.
Speaker 3:When you're early in your career, you're hired for a specific role. You're filling the seat to do a job, but from your employer's perspective, if you can do that job and they're going to be pretty happy about that you can't always go in. Sometimes people look at it as well. I was hired to do this, but I'm really good at this, so I'm going to do this instead Okay, but you were hired to do something else. You do have to fulfill that commitment of what you came in for. But if you can find creative ways to say hey, I've been doing this for a year or two, I've kind of optimized this a little bit, I've got a little bit more room in my schedule, now I can also do this thing really good, what do you think about that?
Speaker 3:And when you take that initiative to just try something new or poke holes at something or present a solution or experiment and you're still meeting your other goals and criteria, that's usually very welcomed. Because when it's presented to your manager, your department head, and they're like hey, I've got somebody who's kind of being a rock star at what they're doing, but it's also bringing this other thing they're willing to do for free, usually they're pretty happy about that. And so if you're thinking about your audience, of your employer, it's like how do you make their lives easier? And if you're solving a need that they know about but don't have a current solution for that's great.
Speaker 3:If you're solving a need that they don't know about but you present it to them and then they can turn around and present it to their boss and they can look like the rock star. That's great for them too. So it's just thinking about them and their motivations. I think there's a lot more opportunity than we realize because we're all worried a little bit about I don't want to rock the boat, I don't want to be the person that's always like why, why, why, why, why? I think, just realizing how it's presented, when it's presented as a win-win of hey, I can bring some of my skillset and do something new and fun, but this is going to help you out too.
Speaker 2:That's a great way to present something, because people get excited by that Like why wouldn't they say yes, yeah, yeah, and it sounds like you did a lot of that. So talk to us about the rollout of the product. How was it received? It was also probably a little ahead of its time. You know, considering the pandemic was when we all started really moving. I mean, I'd used WebEx and different tools, but a lot of people weren't used to just being fully digital.
Speaker 3:Yeah, the timing was interesting because this was I started the project well before the pandemic and it was when remote work was still a fairly commonplace thing, but usually more for certain roles or people who are comfortable with video conversations or audio conversation. But that's it, the opportunity that we're really approaching with WebEx Hologram. So it was an end-to-end holographic system. So think of all my original pitch decks. I used the pictures from the Jedi Council. I'm like I want to build this. The idea was how do you create a feeling of co-presence, how do you feel like you're together when you're geographically distanced? And it was interesting because, again, going back to what we're talking about, the beginning of human-centric technology it was never focused like, oh, it's cool, we can have so-and-so on stage. Why? What problem are you solving? But the origins of WebEx hologram were never technology first, it was always people first. And the problem we were trying to solve was when you do have somebody maybe you have somebody who works remote one day a week usually the complaint that you would get is you know, I can't really participate in the group meetings. I don't. People ignore me when they're having a chat. Most of them are in the room and I'm the one person that's not there. Or you know, somebody did a presentation and brought something in to show people, you know, the new widget. Whatever that they made, I couldn't really see it. I couldn't really understand what they were doing. They're explaining how to use equipment. It's really hard on a 2D screen to understand this 3D equipment. I don't know what they're doing. So we're saying there's certain experiences that you get when you're together with somebody. You feel that camaraderie and if you're talking about something, you're talking about content, you're sharing something you would normally move around. When you're in person, you're like, oh okay, that's cool, let me look around here, let me look at the side, and you can't do that on a flat 2D screen.
Speaker 3:So again, the pitch with the Jedi Council. We're really talking about how life is multidimensional. So why is all of our communication two-dimensional? It's really limiting. So that was the impetus behind it and we were in stealth mode for many years when we were building this. But when we were, I don't know customers beating our door down saying, hey, I want a holographic collaboration system, but at the same time when we were like, hey, we got something, I want to show you what it is. Let me know your thoughts. The responses they would come back were even broader than what we were looking at it for.
Speaker 3:We went with two use cases saying hey, we want to solve remote training, because it's really hard when you're trying to show how somebody's I think of like remote surgical tool training or something like this is how you use this tool. This is how you take it apart and put it together. Anytime you need to understand the spatial relationship between something. It's really hard to do that in 2D. So that was one scenario, and the other one was remote building, like creation of hey, I want to work on this, I want to add this piece there and you add that piece there, like, oh, how do we do this together? And again, you want that multidimensionality. You understand the spatial awareness of it. It's something else. It's really hard to do flat. So those were the two use cases we honed in on. It's really interesting. One honed in on it's really interesting One of the first customer reactions we got, though they looked at it and we were focused so much on content.
Speaker 3:When you have to see the other person, you have to see the content and you have to see how the other person is interacting with the content.
Speaker 3:Those were the use case we're looking at and the customer was interested in the use case that there was no content.
Speaker 3:They were simply saying, hey, we want to use this for executive meetings because when we're hiring a C-suite person like that's a high stakes position, you want to get the right person in there and saying, like we usually do a screening call and then we pay to fly them on site, we have everybody at the same time and trying to coordinate all the senior leadership to meet with them for a day or two. It's so hard and then you find out it's not the right fit. You didn't get the right vibe and then you get started all over again. But they were saying that feeling that we're going after, that feeling of being together. They felt as if you could build rapport quicker, you could establish trust quicker because you felt like you were with that person rather than just we're separated, you're on the other side of a screen, and I thought that was really interesting and really eye-opening to me to realize don't put your customers in a box, because how they might want to use something could be totally different from what you think it could be.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I love that, and it's funny because the first thing I thought of was just having everybody in the room, like the example of the Jedi Council, right, and it almost makes me wonder why aren't we using this technology for virtual classes and virtual sessions? You know because? Then it, because I'm in a lot of programs that are completely online. How nice would it be to feel like you are in the room and just have that extra layer Right.
Speaker 3:Right. Yeah, I think there's a lot, a lot of opportunity in education. I know price point is always a challenge when it comes to educational environments, but things have changed a lot since I have stepped away from that project, so I mean things get cheaper every day, yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, clearly, between the start of that 10 years ago to today where now we have, just like with AI. We didn't know we needed all these generative tools until we had them, and now I know I can't live without checking in with Claude a few times a day and using a few other tools as well. So, that takes us to let's talk about Elizabeth going out on your own and starting your own consultancy. After all of this experience that you had, what prompted that move?
Speaker 3:I think in hindsight, I never expected to stay in a corporate environment quite as long as I did. It was never my original intent. I always thought I was going to go the entrepreneurship route. But I was fortunate enough to have great opportunities and be able to pursue an entrepreneurial venture. But that project. I ended up leading that project for I think it was going on eight years by the time, all said and done. When handed off to the business unit, I hired a product manager. I was able to train her up. She took it over, take it to the next steps of all the things you have to do to make something a product and bring it to life. So handing that off was really a huge like wow, okay, now what, let me take a pause. And I did take a pause.
Speaker 3:I took a sabbatical, I took a break and it was an opportunity to think like, wow, those eight years were a rush, what a wild ride. What did I learn from that? What would I do different going forward? Do I want to do that again with another project? Do I want to start my own startup and build a technology startup outside of the company? And I had all these thoughts of what I wanted to do and I actually started writing them all down as kind of a personal postmortem looking at. I think that's two cents of advice of anything you do with life. But we do a personal postmortem. You end up doing it so often for projects or large endeavors, but we don't often think about it for ourself, of kind of going through all the same questions you would in a postmortem, like what would I do differently? What worked, what didn't, why didn't it work? Thinking through that, I started writing that down for myself and realized I just kept on writing more and more, realizing, page after page after page, like maybe I should do something with this rather than just keep this in a journal for myself. There's a lot of things I didn't know what I was doing going into it and I had to figure it out on the fly and like maybe this would help somebody else doing an entrepreneurial venture or maybe an entrepreneurial adventure. And so I started categorizing all the things into like okay, where does this fit, where does this fit? And a certain logical order started coming out of it and it ended up turning into a book.
Speaker 3:So I wrote my book Cake on Tuesday 25 Lessons to Unlock Corporate Innovation really as it was meant to be a short, snappy read that could distill everything I learned out of the eight-year venture in the hopes of trying to pay it forward. Could this help somebody else trying to do something so they could do it better, faster, easier? And that was the point of the book and how it came about. But with that I started thinking what am I going to do next? What do I want to do? And I did go round and round in all thought processes and realized you know what I really enjoyed the process of thinking through this book and writing this book, and I want to help other people do this. I don't think I want to do it again right now. I want to help other people on their journey, and that started raising all sorts of interesting questions and I started getting really interesting feedback from the book.
Speaker 3:I was obviously focused on the technology space and corporate entrepreneurship, but the amount of people that had, you know, a small business or somebody who's like you know, I'm a single person, real estate, like a solopreneur in real estate just saying like this book really resonated with me and I could use this in my practice. And somebody else saying like we have a small dairy farm and I could use this and I'm like it was really cool to see how it would resonate in different spaces and again going back to the donglorifying it and over-mystifying it and saying like, oh innovation is this ivory tower thing, when really innovation is just doing something new or thinking about something differently and trying it, and that's something we're all doing every day. We're thinking about new ways to hack our daily routine to make it more efficient. How do we, you know, treat three different kids who all grow in three different ways and how do we help them all be raised up to be the best humans they can be Like? We're constantly trying to innovate and do things different and unique, and I like that idea of focusing on innovation. And how can I help companies who are trying to innovate?
Speaker 3:And my sweet spot customer ends up being the kind that is successful in something but now needs to do something else, and that's a really hard and scary place to be because, hey, we were successful in this and there's always that tendency to want to do let me just do more of that. But that's not going to be successful in the long term as the world is changing. So we do need to do something different, but you don't want to leave your core customer base too far behind. So how do you know how far away from my base do I innovate, and how do I bring that about without losing momentum in my existing business? And that's relying on a lot of what I did at Cisco, whereas selling this internally to the business leaders who are going to take over this venture. That is very forward looking, but they still have to meet all their metrics for the current quarter, and so you're positioning things in a way of this is how you, bite-sized, handle innovation, and so that's kind of what led to this whole current path.
Speaker 2:Yeah, fantastic, and I agree with everything you just said, and especially not to. I mean, at this time right in the world when everything's changing with tariffs and economically and there's a lot of uncertainty, finding those little and you know, innovation doesn't have to be a huge, huge leap, it can be can start small but making little changes and figuring out how you can still have a business that's viable, that's successful, and just input things that will make it a little better every day, will have huge results for a business.
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely that. Keeping it small is huge. One of the chapters of my book is all about keeping it simple and my team used to get sick of me saying have a big M. So we talk about MBO, minimum viable offer and say make sure the focus is on the minimum, because scope creep is such a big thing and that's one of the biggest innovation killers is you start adding more and more and more and more before you know it. It's just you're trying to move the Titanic rather than have that small little scrappy change, and so keeping it minimum is really, really important.
Speaker 2:What is behind the name KCON Tuesday KCON Tuesday.
Speaker 3:Well, I think we were talking a little bit at the beginning about my personal journey through education and career and it just it never took the normal path. And when I was going through that with my publisher, we were trying to come up with the name for the book and they were coming up with all these suggestions, which were perfectly fine suggestions, but they just sounded like any other business book and for me, I'm like nothing about this path, nothing about this book, nothing about this journey is like everything else. It's just a wild, crazy, different ride. I want the title to be different. I want it to stand out. So I recommended that. I'm like what about Cake on Tuesday? And my editor was like actually, I kind of like that. There's a chapter in the book that's called have Cake on Tuesday and it's specifically talking about celebrating the journey and how do you have fun and add joy into that, and that's something I'm really passionate about. Actually, I can tell you a quick story. Yeah, absolutely, this makes you think about I just had this flashback to my very first corporate job, which was in publishing.
Speaker 3:Actually, many, many years ago, this was graduating with an English degree. What do you do with an English degree? So I got a job in publishing my first sit down review. So I assume I'd been there a year and had a sit down of like here's what you did well, here's what you can improve on. And the criticism I was given in. The thing I could improve on is my manager told me she's like well, you smile too much, you could look like you're having too much fun, which people could interpret as you're not really working hard. And it just kind of hit me like a ton of bricks. I was like so do you want me to look more sad? Like what is the feedback? What's the actionable advice you're giving me here? And we had a chat and she's kind of like I don't think I really wanted you to change anything, I just want you to be aware of it. Okay, but that always stuck with me. It's like what an absurd thing to say of like you look like you're having too much fun, like that should be in the positive category, not in the negative category. So bring that full circle. Team a lot. And it's a theme throughout Cake on Tuesday of having joy in the journey and really enjoying the ride.
Speaker 3:And specifically Cake on Tuesday came from one season in the project where we didn't have an exciting milestone to rally the team around. We were just making these marginal improvements, trying to get to the next level, and we were starting to lose our fun. And I was having a conversation with our operations manager at the time and her and I were brainstorming like how do we make this more fun, how do we add some levity to the situation? And she had this idea. She's like what if I make this Wheel of Fortune style Wheel of Winning, I want to call it, and she put everybody's name on it. She's like at the end of staff meeting we'll just spin it If it lands on your name. If it lands on your name, it'd be like Annika, you win, and then we would mail you a cake. Because we're a global team, we're spread all over the place, so two days later a cake would show up at your door, regardless of where you were in the world, and our staff meetings were on Tuesday, and so that's where Cake on Tuesday came from.
Speaker 2:Wow, wow, so creative and how fun, right who?
Speaker 3:wouldn't want to get a kid. My shout out to Ashley Havoc, my ops manager. She was fantastic and very, very good at brainstorming creative ways on a shoestring budget to make things fun.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, elizabeth, we're going to have your website in the show notes that people can learn more about you, how to work with you, where to buy your book. But I do want to ask what?
Speaker 3:is a piece of advice that you would have given your younger self, I think I would say there's a business coach called Dan Sullivan who has written some great books out there, and he has one book called the Gap in the Gain. And it's all about why it's important to focus on how far you've come rather than how far you have to go. And I would say that is something I would remind my younger self and I would encourage people to look at, because it's so easy to get caught up, especially when you realize there is no done, there's no arrive, there's no end. It is a journey.
Speaker 3:It's so easy to get caught up with like, oh, I still have this to do, I have so much more to learn, I have this much more to do. We can so easily forget how much we've already done and how far we've come. And then that perspective and mindset shift is so crucial, especially when the going gets rough, to remind yourself of like all right, we've come this far. All right, I've done this much. Okay, we've learned this. So I think that perspective focus on the gain, not the gap Gain not the gap.
Speaker 2:Brilliant, this has been really fun. I'm looking forward to further conversations with you and picking up your book as well, because I'm always looking for more ways to hone in my creativity and turn it into innovation. Awesome, and you know, hone in is one of the key words. As you said, there can be a lot of scope creep when you're interested in a lot of things. So again, elizabeth Bieniak, thank you so much for being on Mediascape and thank you to all of our students, alums and everybody else who's listening to this podcast on your favorite platform. Don't forget to leave us a rating and review and I, or my co-host, joseph Ataya, will be back with another amazing guest to share their story, their journey. Some insights for you on your journey next week.
Speaker 1:To learn more about the Master of Science in Digital Media Management program. Visit us on the web at dmmuscedu.
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