Join Jared Simmons and me on his What Is Innovation? Podcast. We discussed the following topics:
- I define innovation as any new way of thinking about or doing something.
- I shared my experience as a 40+ year entrepreneur and professional business coach.
- Jared and I discussed how innovation isn’t just about products, but often about business processes.
- I explained how at Robelle Solutions Technology, we grew 20% annually for five years by identifying and engineering out common support calls.
- We explored how unexamined beliefs can lock people into repetitive patterns that prevent innovation.
- I emphasized that getting unattached to outcomes is crucial for innovation.
- Jared and I discussed how the education system and corporate culture can unintentionally hinder innovation.
Audio
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/62mDo9CLOt90FVzufap4fW
Transcript
Jared Simmons (00:05):
Hello and welcome to What Is Innovation, the podcast that explores the reality of a word in danger of losing its meaning altogether. I’m your host Jared Simmons, and I’m thrilled to be joined by David Greer, an entrepreneurial coach, author and facilitator. He is the catalyst that gets you to fully live your dreams. Now, his book, Wind In Your Sails, helps readers generate concrete action items that will shift and accelerate your business within 90 days. David specializes in working with entrepreneurs challenged with alcoholism or addiction. He and his wife Karalee live in Vancouver, Canada and are committed to each other and their three children, spending time supporting them in their many and married activities. David, I am so excited for this conversation. I’ve enjoyed chatting with you so far and I’m excited to let everyone else in on the discussion. Great to have you.
David Greer (00:57):
Thanks, Jared. Innovation is really close to my heart, I am so thrilled that you focus on that and that we’re going to talk about it today.
Jared Simmons (01:04):
Perfect. Let’s dive right in. What to your mind is innovation?
David Greer (01:10):
Innovation is any new way of thinking about or doing something? I think we complicate it. It’s really simple.
Jared Simmons (01:18):
Yeah, no, I love that. Any new way of thinking about or doing something, and so you’ve naturally upfront teased the part thinking and doing in that definition. Tell me more about why those things are separating your definition and why that matters.
David Greer (01:33):
Well, let’s take the flip side, which is what do I think innovation is not, it’s not doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. I think Einstein had that quote and said, that’s the definition of insanity, right?
Jared Simmons (01:48):
Right.
David Greer (01:49):
We need to think differently about what we’re doing, but I don’t really think it helps to just think about it until you also put it into action in some way. I was reading recently about Newton taking two years to focus and write his principle of Mathematica. Wow. And he just turned everything else off and focused on that one thing. He’s doing this really powerful thinking, but he’s also creating the book that’s going to document it all so it’s not just in his head. The product there is the book, which then for 300 years we all drew from and still do today. Right. If you’re doing non Einstein physics, which most of us do in high school is all Newtonian,
Jared Simmons (02:38):
Right? Yeah. That’s a great example because two years in a lifespan doesn’t sound like a lot, but two years to focus on one topic, not one subject area, but one task. That’s what I like about the way you’ve split out thinking and doing is you can think about new things, as you said, until you put it into action, create something, bring something into the world that wasn’t here before. It’s not innovation.
David Greer (03:05):
Correct. Yeah.
Jared Simmons (03:06):
Got it. Got it. It the thinking and doing piece, that distinction also leaves room to think about can I operate in a way that’s innovative in a domain that’s already known that you’re not creating something new?
David Greer (03:19):
I’m a 40 plus year entrepreneur and I’m a professional business coach, work with a lot of entrepreneurs. I remind them that oftentimes a very innovative business process is actually more valuable than innovating in the product. And I have a couple examples of that. One is I joined this young software startup when I was in university, which was in of itself a very innovative company, and I was the first employee after the founders and one other employee was hired. And for five years there was the two founders and us two employees built that business at about 20% increase in revenue per year for five years without adding staff. Now, one of the ways we did that was my former partner, Bob Green and I, what we listened for was repetition in technical support calls. And then what we did was we found ways to engineer the calls out of the product.
Jared Simmons (04:21):
And so you used the calls as sort of the leading indicator.
David Greer (04:25):
What we like to do is create software. We didn’t like to do support calls,
Jared Simmons (04:28):
Right?
David Greer (04:29):
We did a lot of other product innovation separate from that. But one of the things that led us grow for five years without adding employees is we literally took these common things that people were struggling with and we just found ways to make it so natural in the product that you didn’t need to ask us anymore. You could just figure out the solution on your own without even asking us. And that I think was really innovative, especially for the time and place because talking like the early eighties
Jared Simmons (04:58):
For sure,
David Greer (04:58):
And even a lot of our competitors were not doing that or thinking also, I think it’s a very innovative way to think.
Jared Simmons (05:05):
Agreed. Agreed, yes.
David Greer (05:07):
Another one I cover in my book, Wind In Your Sails is this Clevest Solutions, a local company here in Vancouver who was in workforce management, and again, this was in the early two thousands, and they had mobile devices that people like say an electric company, a utility company, the field workers would go out and get dispatched from a central place work order would come up on this mobile device rather than a piece of paper, and they would fill in when they were done, what happened, what it worked. The sales manager, his struggle was when he went to trade shows, he could not demonstrate end to end the solution, and they were building it on the most modern Microsoft platform. They were actually able to get the whole solution so that the backend piece was on his laptop and the front end was on his laptop, and then he had a mobile device he could take and hand to someone at the trade show because he’d do everything enclosed within the trade show. He was the only vendor that could demonstrate end to end how their solution worked.
Jared Simmons (06:11):
Right.
David Greer (06:13):
From a sales point of view, that generated so much interest in the company. They were the kind of the new kids on the block and utility companies were notoriously conservative, but it got the wow factor so they could keep the conversation going.
Jared Simmons (06:30):
That makes sense. It’s more taxing to create a second and third touch with someone. And so what first jumped out to me about being able to do it end to end in the moment is you reduce the likelihood that you’re going to need a second, third, fourth, fifth touch to move them into your funnel.
David Greer (06:48):
Or if you do need those touches, they’re going to be deeper into the funnel.
Jared Simmons (06:52):
Exactly. And they will have fewer concerns. You have to build trust when you’re the little guy.
David Greer (06:58):
Yes. And I think the people that came to these trade shows were both managers and workers, and I’m sure it was kind of, Hey Bob, like their boss. Come over, look at this, look at see how it’s man, is this cool? And rather than being able to talk about it again, I really do a lot of coaching with entrepreneurs. How can you show people how you solve their problem? Showing can be very innovative. I mean, it can be PowerPoint, it can be an in-person demo. It can be a lot of different things, but rather than telling a person how your product or solution works for them, can you show them? Then the innovation becomes what are the innovative ways we can show our market how our solution really solves their pain point?
Jared Simmons (07:42):
I’m an entrepreneur now, grew up in corporate at Procter and Gamble and some other places, and this show versus tell concept jumps out to me from the market research I did earlier in my career around a prototype. The difference between a one paragraph description of a product and a rough prototype of any kind, and just the night and day difference in the feedback you get the quality and depth of the information you receive. And I think sometimes we underestimate the value of moving that one step, even if it’s made a paper or if it’s whatever, once it’s a thing to interact with versus words to digest. It just moves it to a different place.
David Greer (08:29):
It’s at a completely different level. And also humans are tactile, like we’re tactile beings. While we have this incredible mental capacity and mental capacity to vision things, like to actually see it straight dimensionally and touch it and feel it. There’s this visceral response.
Jared Simmons (08:45):
Right. The other piece of show don’t tell to me comes into the value of testimonials because to me that’s a version of showing Totally. But telling is we make people’s lives easier. Showing is here’s a quote from a person with the same job that you have in a similar company in a different place telling you that we made their job easier.
David Greer (09:08):
You could just quote right out of a section of my marketing chapter in here’s, I have a quote from there, it’s a hundred times more valuable to have a customer talking about you than it is for you to be talking about you.
Jared Simmons (09:23):
Oh, that’s much more elegant and eloquent than the way I put it, but that’s exactly the sentiment I was going after. Very well said. I had a professor in college, I was in engineering school, chemical engineering, and we were learning how to run equipment and write a report about it, report out what happened, and we wrote this long wordy five page report or whatever, and he would just circle entire paragraphs and write table need, circle this next paragraph and write table, table. And then he just paused after a page and a half and he looked at us and he said, if a picture’s worth a thousand words, a table’s worth at least 500. That has always jumped out to me like, okay, how can you make something more visual to where that you’re just interpreting relationships versus digesting words and information.
David Greer (10:14):
Well, because in the reading the words, I have to figure out how to make those relationships in my head.
Jared Simmons (10:18):
Exactly.
David Greer (10:19):
If you just show me on the page, I don’t have to visualize anything. You did the work for me. Again, another form of show.
Jared Simmons (10:30):
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I want to go back to your definition of what isn’t innovation. Explore that a little bit. You talked about doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. There are a lot of smart people in the world that you could look at and say, okay, you’re doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Are there sort of blind spots or what do you think locks people into those patterns?
David Greer (10:56):
Sure. Part of my work as a coach with clients who I have over a period of time is to looking at their belief systems, which typically comes from our family of origin, early teachers, early coaches. We have this whole formation of beliefs and that shape our thinking and we can’t get out of certain patterns until someone challenges us about those beliefs or points them out or shine some light on them.
Jared Simmons (11:28):
And when you say belief, just for general purposes, you’re not saying religious
David Greer (11:32):
Or No, no, not at all.
Jared Simmons (11:34):
Anything like that. You mean notions about oneself or the world?
David Greer (11:38):
You might have a belief that all employees slough off and don’t work hard,
Jared Simmons (11:43):
Right, right.
David Greer (11:44):
And you may not even be aware that that’s one of the things you believe in the world and that you as the entrepreneur, you’re the only one that works hard and they don’t. And there might be a lot of evidence, I might work with someone for a while and hey, the stories I’m hearing would indicate some employees that are really busting their ass. If you’re telling me they’re not, they might be working on the wrong thing, but you’re the leader, that’s for you to point that out to them. That would be an example of a belief that someone has.
Jared Simmons (12:16):
Got it. That’s helpful.
David Greer (12:18):
And beliefs and fears. A lot of us we’re way more afraid of success than we are failure.
Jared Simmons (12:26):
That’s hard to hear, but strikes true. Yeah.
David Greer (12:30):
You believe you can get your business to a million a year and you’re stuck and can’t get it to 2 million and then five and then 10. But there’s a piece of you that’s actually afraid of what happens if you do that. I don’t know. For any individual, it’s going to be different. It’s going to be from their background.
Jared Simmons (12:46):
And I could see how that belief or that fear could lock you into a pattern of staying in a cycle of doing things that keeps you in doing the same things over and over again.
David Greer (13:00):
Yes. And same I’ve experienced in corporate environments, you have a fear of being put down by the leadership if you do things differently, watched it happen to other people. You’re going to keep doing things the same way, no reward for you to do it differently. Leaders have to build a culture that rewards people taking risks, and if they take risks, they’re going to fail. By definition. That’s what has to happen. That’s why we sometimes say fail early, fail often. My coaching belief is that everything in life is an experiment. We’re like a scientist. We have a hypothesis. If we do A, we’re going to get outcome B. Then we go and try A and we don’t get anything close to B. And we call ourselves a failure like, well, I’m never going to try a prime because hey, look, it failed. And if you change that belief as you have a hypothesis, if you do A, you’re going to get B. Go test if that hypothesis is true, and if it turns out it’s not true, then go do experiment two, but learn from experiment one so that you try things differently than you did the first time.
(14:18):
Right, right. Exactly. Then you’re in this experimental mode. Now this is easy for me to say these words. Let me tell you in my own personal life, let alone the clients that I try and help coach, this is much easier said than done. And it’s very hard not to attach personal feelings of failure or inadequate, especially when you’re trying some big experiments, but getting unattached to the outcome is very, very powerful. But again, that requires changing some belief systems typically like I’m a recovering perfectionist, to do A and not get B, that is a complete, I wasn’t perfect. My internal systems, that’s a very emotional, but I didn’t realize this for a long time. I didn’t realize how embedded it was, how it was showing up in the things I was doing.
Jared Simmons (15:15):
Interesting. You mentioned culture as it relates to innovation, and I’m a big proponent of that. I think a lot of times big companies when innovation falters, they go get a new process or they go try to get more ideas. When a lot of times what I’ve seen is the culture is one that doesn’t value experimentation, doesn’t value learning from failure in those things doesn’t value change, doesn’t value change. And when you don’t value those things, you don’t reward them. And when you don’t reward them, they don’t happen
David Greer (15:48):
Completely. A hundred percent.
Jared Simmons (15:50):
And so you can put a thousand ideas into the system, you can bring in the perfect process from whatever company, and it’s not going to change anything. It’s still going to be rooted in that culture. You highlighting that is I think really important, especially someone with your experience and coaching and working with executives. Also, the perfectionist piece, I can relate to that. I think part of perfectionism, at least for me, comes from the way the education system is structured in terms of if you get whatever it is correct, you’re better, and if you don’t get it correct, you’re worse.
David Greer (16:27):
There’s also a very subtle belief system that’s underneath all of that, that there is a right and there is a wrong. Right. Oh, right. I agree. Our schooling systems and our universities to make it easier for them to mark students and judge their progress, they’ve come up with this testing system that’s kind of binary, but nothing in life typically is now you come from an engineering background, I’m a computer scientist. In those disciplines which are very heavily influenced by mathematics, I mean there is a lot of empirical, independent and wrong.
Jared Simmons (17:04):
Right, exactly.
David Greer (17:05):
The problem is when we take our computer scientist, engineering, analytical, mathematical brain, when I went to university, third of my courses had to be mathematics. Wow. It I needed the math. I eventually asked my professors, why do you make me take so much math? Because we think it helps your thinking,
Jared Simmons (17:23):
Right? Yes, I’ve heard that.
David Greer (17:25):
But then I come out of university with this mindset around very focused on the binary that there’s always a right answer. There’s not much room for gray, and I got to analyze everything. I got to analyze everything to the nth degree. Exactly. That’s driving my behaviors because those behaviors were trained into me by my professors and my whole computer science degree.
Jared Simmons (17:54):
Right, right. Exactly.
David Greer (17:56):
Exactly. They did a good job, but how am I going to innovate out of that? I’m going to innovate in certain ways and in certain directions. I’m not going to be open, especially if we’re talking about business processes and things that are much more people oriented and things that go bump in the night and are not binary, zeros and ones, they’re not so amenable to just applying some mathematics to it.
Jared Simmons (18:22):
Exactly. Exactly. I’m glad you kind of walked through that in that way because it’s not to demonize or vilify education and testing or assessments or grading and all those things. It’s just I think any other tool, we have to understand the unintended consequences of it when it’s being applied.
David Greer (18:41):
Yes.
Jared Simmons (18:42):
And I think one of the unintended consequences is that we look at innovation through the lens of efficiency, especially as seventies and eighties with Toyota Way and a lot of other things that came into the corporate culture around efficiency. I think some of that got applied to the wrong sort of objectives, and I think a lot of innovation processes, so to speak, are built with that underlying belief system that the most efficient way is the best way, and failure is inefficient. And I think that’s also part of why companies have trouble seeing failure as part of a productive process. And it kind of goes along with what you were saying about underlying beliefs and all those things influencing outcome.
David Greer (19:31):
Here’s the paradox. If everything is an experiment, then if you’re just counting labor hours, it’s inefficient. But the reality is, if you want to move forward, the more experiments you can do and the more you can try, even though you might have a long period of failures, but over the long term, you’re actually going to get way farther.
(19:55):
I coach with some of my entrepreneur clients. Where do you go to think about the business? They’re just so just locked into the next fire to the next thing. I’m like, what do you like to do? Maybe you care. We’re in the mountains and we’ve got trees and we’ve got the ocean. Maybe you just need to go for a walk on the beach. Well, that’s not efficient. Well, what do you mean it’s not efficient? You’ll probably come up with 10 better ideas than you will staying in the office. Why don’t you go for a walk on the beach every day?
Jared Simmons (20:23):
Exactly.
David Greer (20:24):
But to get them to actually do it, I’ll start with how about we do it every day and then maybe I could get ’em at first to do it once a week. Right, right. But then they start coming up with new ideas and then on their own it’s like, oh, maybe I should try this twice a week. Right?
Jared Simmons (20:43):
Yeah. They see the value in it.
David Greer (20:45):
Yeah. Innovation, an intrinsically creative process. How do we help support our creativity? Most people actually know the things that they should do to come up with more ideas and be more creative. They just don’t have permission or they’re entrenched in a certain environment or they think they’ll be judged or whatever. There’s a whole bunch of things just hold them back from just doing what they already know would really help ’em be more creative.
Jared Simmons (21:18):
And part of that on that list I think, is this not what they’re paid for. If I’m the head of a plant, there’s nothing on my discretionary income or discretionary pay. My bonus metrics, there’s not one for number of walks on the beach,
David Greer (21:32):
But if your bonus is how many widgets you get out the door, and if you get 5% more at the door, you get a big bonus. I’m going to argue if you want to get your bonus, you better go for walks on the beach where you’re going to get the ideas for how you can get 5% more widgets out the door or better is to take your best team and get them offsite or on the beach or whatever to brainstorm and come up with five ideas to try in the quarter.
Jared Simmons (22:01):
And that’s why to me, for you as a coach, you can’t coach every CEO, every plant manager, every innovation leader. You know what I mean? And I think people that don’t have someone like you helping them connect the dots between these seemingly, these intrinsically creative behaviors and moments and their efficiency focused outcomes, helping you connect those dots, if you don’t have someone helping you connect those dots, it’s unlikely that you’re going to be willing to trade time for those behaviors.
David Greer (22:35):
And even in the corporate environment, I think you can structure your environment. Go find a mentor, even someone that you don’t pay, someone who’s been there, done that. There are a lot of people who are willing to be mentors. Go find a networking peer group, another group of people who are your level. Maybe it’s in your geography, maybe it’s got to be virtual. You go to trade shows to try and figure out best practices. Who are the best people that you meet there? Maybe they’re speakers. How can you get more of their time? Do they have a mastermind? It’s just getting out of yourself and not trying to do it all yourself. Because one of the things I talk about in my book is oftentimes look at completely different industries. Sometimes you look at other industries and their need for efficiency is in their markets. It’s like 10 times more than yours. Their profit margins are so much lower. They might’ve done a whole bunch of things like wild and crazy that you’ve never heard of or thought of.
Jared Simmons (23:35):
Exactly. Exactly.
David Greer (23:36):
I mean, you got to take it with a grain of salt, but it’s just even just in your industry, there are lots of places where you can get ideas to help improve.
Jared Simmons (23:45):
Right. That’s such a great point. It also makes me think about the abstraction of the job to be done or the problem, but the abstraction of the problem. If you think about a baby wipe and a brush and a car wash, they do the same things. They clean. And so I think sometimes abstracting the problem and reducing it to basic first principles so to speak, can help you find those not necessarily adjacent, but parallel industries, solving that problem in other ways. Somehow ships are being cleaned. I don’t even know how they’re cleaned, but they come out of the water and they get cleaned somehow. What could someone who’s designing a toothbrush learn from the way people are cleaning ships every day? I love that way of thinking as a way of unlocking innovation and getting people to think differently and more creatively
David Greer (24:41):
And going back to those first principles. Because if you are trying to get 5% more widgets out, we often just look for the low hanging fruit, which quite likely has been solved. Oftentimes we have to go into the process from start to finish. Some people just go in and a new manager comes in, and oftentimes the manager’s first thing is they just literally clean the production facility because the lack of cleanliness and organization is just impeding progress incrementally. But everyone all the time.
Jared Simmons (25:12):
Yes, yes. Death by a thousand cuts, so to speak.
David Greer (25:16):
Yep, yep. And I’m not pretending that most are quite that simple, but again, you got to look at the whole thing kind of start to finish. And again, thinking we need some creative space to be able to actually talk to people, gather information, and creatively think about it and apply our human brains, which are really smart for the problem. If we’re just answering the next phone call, the next email, the next fire, you don’t have any bandwidth to do that.
Jared Simmons (25:47):
That’s well said. And I think that that whole thing about maybe it’s not as simple, I think sometimes it’s harder and rarer to deploy or implement a simple solution because a lot of times when we look at something that’s complex or has been difficult or nebulous hard to wrap your head around, we assume that the solution has to be as complex as the problem, and that is not always the case and can take you down some very expensive and slow ways of solving things.
David Greer (26:23):
I’m back to what’s the next experiment you could do?
Jared Simmons (26:26):
Exactly, exactly. I love it. I love it. David, it’s been a great conversation. Before I let you go, I want to make sure I ask you if you have any advice for innovators.
David Greer (26:38):
Yeah. Go into action. If you’re listening to this and you got a problem or you need something that needs some innovation, I challenge you to do something about it by the end of the week. Take one step, talk to someone else, get some space to think about it. I don’t know what the step is, but take one step into it before the end of this week,
Jared Simmons (26:59):
One step before the end of the week. I’m going to do that, David. I’ll let you know what it is personally. Okay, great.
David Greer (27:05):
I started my conversation. You got to take action.
Jared Simmons (27:08):
Yeah.
David Greer (27:08):
Yeah. I’m all about action. Visit my website, read my book. Every one of my chapters says, take action now as three suggestions for what you can do with the ideas from that chapter to move your business forward.
Jared Simmons (27:22):
That is priceless, and I appreciate your focus on that because it’s easy for people to lose sight of that in the midst of all the stress and the risk and the implications and all those things. It’s easy to forget, well, what thing can I go do now versus being paralyzed by the possibilities.
David Greer (27:40):
Yes.
Jared Simmons (27:41):
Love that. David Greer, thank you so much for your time. It’s been a great conversation. Love your definition of innovation around being a new way of thinking and doing, and I really appreciate you sharing your insights with us today.
David Greer (27:55):
Great. And I do want your listeners to know that I have a free offer, which is anyone that wants, can have one hour free of coaching with me, and that’s just a standing offer I have. If you’re stuck on something around innovation and you want to talk through it, promise you, if you spend an hour with me on a coaching call, you’ll have three ideas to move forward with that within 90 days. And if you just visit my website, my phone number and my email address, the top left of every page or there’s a contact form. I try and make it easy as possible for you to reach out and take advantage.
Jared Simmons (28:30):
That’s perfect. David. Thank you so much for your time, and we’ll make sure we get that website in the description and the comment sections and all those things so that people can find them. Thank you for having me. Alright, take care. Thanks so much for listening. Please subscribe on your favorite podcast platform to get more insights from innovators across the world. You can also subscribe to our YouTube channel for additional content and conversation. I
