Shift

In this episode, Jocelyn Mangan, CEO of Him for Her, joins us to discuss how her social impact enterprise is building the boardroom of the future by addressing the gender gap in for-profit boardrooms to increase diversity. Him for Her’s unique approach overcomes the networking gap responsible for the sparsity of women in the boardroom by engaging business luminaries such as Stacy Brown-Philpot, Reid Hoffman, Jeff Weiner, Eric Yuan, and many more to connect the world’s most talented “hers” to board service. Since its founding in 2018, Him For Her has built a referral-only talent network of over 2,000 board-ready women and delivered free board-referral lists to over 300 companies ranging from start-ups to S&P 100s.

Brad D. Smith, Executive Chairman of the Board of Intuit shares his lessons in leadership and the role of a CEO in nurturing innovation. He talks about authentic leadership, serially disrupting yourself, the importance of creating a learning environment where people treat success and failure the same way, and how to deliver the numbers today and reimagine the company for the future.

Stephen Ranjan, Vice President of New Product Development at Roche Diabetes Care shares how leaders and teams there are overcoming the unique challenges of innovating in healthcare despite the global pandemic. He shares how they built new capabilities to explore the needs of underserved customer segments and develop solutions at speed in a regulated environment. Stephen talks candidly about how leaders need to exercise new skills and behaviors to focus intently on customers and their problems while encouraging teams to move quickly and get their ideas funded and sponsored by executives.

Bennett Blank, Innovation & Transformation Leader at Intuit, shares his observations on the creativity of small businesses during hard times. He also discussed the grass-roots activation of Innovation tools at Intuit to help small businesses get through this pandemic.

In this episode, we are joined by Michelle Brigman, Director of Customer Experience at 7-Eleven. Michelle shares how, in the face of the global pandemic, 7-Eleven quickly shifted to ensure their over 68,000 store owners and franchisees could continue to meet their customers’ needs. She also provides insight into 7-Eleven’s COVID19 Command Center and how they use this to rapidly collect and respond to insights gained from all parts of their business. She discusses their digital transformation journey using Lean Innovation techniques. Michelle also explains how she is encouraging her team to bring their “whole self” to work and balance competing priorities (along with a few insights into fried pies, frogs, and the gift of time).

Steve Portigal, Author, Speaker, and Customer Research Expert, shares how to drive innovation using the power of strategic customer insights. He reminds us that learning from customers is “messy” because we are complex beings. In order to go deep while interviewing customers, you should have clarity about what is uncomfortable for you versus what is uncomfortable for customers and not conflate the two. His provocation, “No One Cares,” highlights the risk of magnifying the significance of our solutions in a customer’s life and missing the opportunity to focus on things that customers care about.

Katie Hanson, Director of Product Management at Benefitfocus, shares how her company quickly adapted to help their customers find affordable benefits during this global pandemic, and how it led to the creation of a new offering. She also talks about the importance of supporting her team during these stressful times by understanding how they are “really” doing. 

Katie is a consumer experience thought leader and trained innovation catalyst. For almost two decades, she has helped consumers navigate big financial decisions using technology. Her passion for using data to uncover insights and foster innovation has contributed to the advancement of consumer-centric solutions at market-leading companies including Wells Fargo, Renovate America, Intuit, and Global Analytics.

Learn how Roche Diabetes Care used Agile, Lean Startup and Design Thinking to reinvent themselves to better address disruptive forces in Diabetes Care.  Moritz Hartmann, head of the commercialization for EMEA/LATAM shares his leadership lessons learned throughout this journey driving transformation in the highly regulated medical devices industry.

Key take-aways 

• When creating a new innovation program, beware of too much planning up-front. You will have a strong desire to do it “right”, but Moritz advises: “Don’t try to get it all right”.
• Empowering teams to make decisions based on evidence increases their engagement and has a very similar effect for leaders.   The team taking on some of their own decisions can be a huge relief for a leader after a day of back-to-back meetings and non-stop decision-making.  

In this episode of Shift, we link up with Arthur Daemmrich, Director of the Lemelson Center for the study of invention and innovation at the Smithsonian Institution, to discuss the differences between innovation and invention, and whether or not we have truly entered the fourth industrial revolution.

World class companies are winning...and they are losing.  By now, we’ve all heard all of the buzzwords: Product Experience, Marketing Experience, User Experience, but what about Customer Experience? Understanding Customer Experience and how to create delightful experiences for your customers still remains a mystery in most large organizations.

The most successful companies are continuously developing three customer-centric disciplines: Designing for Delight, Delivering for Delight, and Engaging Customers, Talent, and Partners for Delight. Mike Kendall, Managing Director of the Customer Lab and former Director of Customer Experience for Capital One, helps corporations deliver for delight and build loyal champions, not just followers.

In the latest episode, Mike shares critical insights and learnings you need to put to delight your customers to achieve maximum growth potential.

1. Why do organizations NEED to change?
2. How to Design, Deliver and Create Winning Customer Experience?
3. What are key factors behind Customer Experience?
4. How you create a human, customer-centered culture?
5. How can YOU Design for Delight?

Award-winning lean innovation coach and entrepreneur George Ankomah keeps his teams motivated through all obstacles and inspires them to consistently raise the bar for performance and success. Like all coaches, he must also keep growing personally and professionally and make sure his techniques and approach continue to be relevant and effective. How does he do it? In the latest episode of our Innovation Coach Spotlight series podcast, George shares his coaching experience and tenets for personal and team success.

Topics covered include:

• The key elements of successful lean innovation coaching
• The most common coaching pitfalls and how can you avoid them
• How you as a coach can anticipate potential roadblocks and set yourself and your team up for success
• George’s three-word mantra for keeping his coaching skills sharp and his contribution dynamic

George Ankomah is an active member of the Dutch lean startup scene and a former founder and alum of Startupbootcamp. These days he helps corporates in the Netherlands and abroad accelerate their innovation teams, design innovation ecosystems and set up global innovation training programs. His clients include Rabobank Group, Liberty Global and De Volksbank.

Understanding the key to finding the next growth opportunity for your company means you need to start with the right people. However; knowing how to build an inclusive team that best represents your customer takes time, energy and expertise. As the Vice President, Brand & Culinary Innovation at Dunkin' Brands, Dan has world class teams creating breakthrough innovation. But how did he do it?

In the latest episode, Dan shares unique perspective from the battlefield by answering the following key questions about what it’s like to create a high impact team that can find the next big growth opportunity for our organization.

1. How can we strive for extreme diversity?
2. What are key factors that create diversity?
3. In addition to looking for ethnic, gender and functional diversity, how can YOU incorporate team members that view the world differently?
4. How can YOU, as a leader, have a deep understanding of team members?
5. How can YOU apply this to increase the chances of success in situations of extreme uncertainty?

It’s no secret that Financial companies and banks are heavily regulated, highly fragmented. These factors make the journey to innovation more difficult. As the Innovation Manager for Rabobank, Koen Bosma is taking on this incredible challenge.

In the latest episode, Koen shares his experiences in answering the following key questions when it comes to what it’s like to be an Innovation Coach for some of one of the world’s most beloved banks:

1. As a coach, how do YOU make the right decisions at the right time in the right way?
2. What are three common misconceptions about being a lean innovation coach and how do we overcome them?
3. What does continuous growth look like for YOU?
4. Why should we call it a decelerator vs. accelerator?

How can design thinking and lean methodology could help grow your company? This week, Dan Kaiser shares insights and important perspective that he has gained during his successful launch of the CUNA Innovation Center.

In the latest episode, Dan shares his expertise in answering the following key questions when it comes to creating breakthrough initiatives and launching and innovation center in large, successful insurance companies:

1. How do YOU get started with a new innovation center?
2. What are some key aspects of launching an innovation center?
3. How do you balance stakeholders and grow the program in a sustainable way?
4. How do you break through internal political barriers?
5. How do you build internal policies critical to the long term survival of the Innovation center?

In this week’s podcast, Roy Rosin demystifies barriers to growth and how key behaviors can break down these barriers in large, successful healthcare companies.

As Chief Innovation Officer for Penn Medicine, he shares unique insights about his role in creating and inspiring recent initiatives such as Heart-Safe Motherhood program resulting in significant impact across the company.

For over a decade, Roy has served in leadership roles where he built innovation programs that dramatically increased entrepreneurial activity. In his previous role as the first Vice President of Innovation for Intuit (the makers of TT, Quickbooks and Quicken), he increased annual new releases from 5 per year to 30, while time to market decreased from one year to a few months. After five years at the helm of Intuit's new approach to growth, the company had delivered shareholder returns of three times Google and 33 times the S&P 500.

In our very first episode of the Innovation Coach Spotlight Series, we caught up with Jeremy Gardner to some key questions about how organizations can foster and empower their innovation coaches to create sustainable innovation transformation from within. Beyond the buzzwords and script, Jeremiah breaks down what it means and what it takes in this candid interview.

In this episode, MTN Co-Founder Aaron Eden is interviewed by James Carbary of Sweet Fish Media on their B2B Growth podcast.

We narrow in on how marketing professionals can support innovation transformation in their own organizations. Key areas of focus from this discussion were how marketing professionals can:

1) Think big and start small to move quickly.
2) Guard against premature scaling to reduce risk.
3) Behave like a product leader to increase impact.

In today’s episode, my co-host, Aaron Eden, and I are really excited to have our guest, Kyle Nel. Kyle is the Executive Director of Lowe's Innovation Labs and has a very unique approach toward innovation which was fun to explore in this episode. They leverage a narrative-driven approach that uses story (and comics) as a strategic tool to map out the future for Lowe’s that they are working to bring to life.  They then work backward to build that future, rapidly testing technology prototypes to solve everyday problems.

In the episode, Kyle takes us through his journey of making this the working reality of Lowe's Innovation Labs.

Other topics we cover are:

• How to get an innovation lab up and running
• How to use comic books to build leadership buy-in and excitement
• How Lowe’s is applying virtual and augmented Reality
• How to understand the motivation of the people in your organization
• How to leverage behavioral economics to drive organizational transformation

We’re really excited today to have our guest, Ryan Staggs. Ryan is the Assistant Vice President of Integration & Mobility Services at the Hospital Corporation of America. Ryan’s work revolves heavily around increasing innovation within the the IT department and making it more nimble and responsive.  In this episode, we dive into how he’s been able to make that happen. When thinking about innovation, people quickly default to new products so hearing about the impact that Ryan has been able to drive by transforming IT department functions is refreshing.

Other topics include:

• Innovating how the core business works (within IT, HR, finance, et cetera)
• Transforming how the IT department functions to be more nimble and responsive
• Creating a more fulfilling work environment by discovering and creating new value
• Innovating at scale in a Fortune 70 healthcare organization
• Leveraging the SEE model for IT - Stabilize, Enhance, Expand
• Being fearless and willing to fail
• Building an interactive data visualization for ER in 12 weeks

Millennials play a vital part in the workforce of today and tomorrow. Yet per HBR's article, What Do Millennials Really Want at Work? The Same Things the Rest of Us Do, ‘it’s likely that companies pursuing millennial-specific employee engagement strategies are wasting time, focus, and money'.

This episode features a recording from a live webcast discussion between Aaron Eden and Marilyn Gorman!

Aaron Eden focuses on helping organizations act more entrepreneurial as the Co-Founder and COO of Moves the Needle. Prior to MTN, Aaron was the first Product Manager at Intuit (in HR) and played a key role in helping his team stop thinking about HR as a cost center and think about it as a way to drive competitive advantage. As a result, he re-designed the personal growth & development program, university recruiting program and leadership development program. Beyond his work in HR, Aaron played a key role in the development of Intuit's Innovation Program through launching a series of successful Lean Startup workshops within Intuit.

Marilyn Gorman focuses on the intersection of HR processes like Learning & Development and Organizational Design and entrepreneurial skills. Prior to founding the Gorman Group, Marilyn worked with GE and led cultural change initiatives and high-visibility, Chairman-sponsored programs as a Global Program Leader for Executive Development and Culture at GE. She also was Innovation coach for Performance Development transformation at GE, engaging with culture, systems and HR processes.

• The role M&A has in a company’s innovation practice.
• Acquiring technology vs. human capital.
• Ways to prevent culture clash and a deal from going bad.
• How the 3 E’s (Empathy, Experiments and Evidence) apply to M&A.
• How to run experiments on M&A’s.

When trying to transform organizations to become more innovative, it’s easy to forget about the interpersonal side and get caught up in the process.

In today’s episode we dive into just that: how can you better understand your colleagues’ preferred styles of communication and leadership, so you can work together in a way that they’ll be most receptive.

Our guest Tony Cooper, CEO of Market Force, has become an expert at helping people and organizations these traits so companies can remove these “invisible blockers” and drive the impact their after. Our other guest, Kyle McCray, Innovation Manager at American Pacific Mortgage company, shares stories of how he’s leveraged this awareness to drive impact through innovating on the core business instead of focusing on flashy new products.

We also have an offer in there for that’s currently exclusive to our podcast listeners so be sure to check it out.

Today’s episode may be our best one yet (and no, I don’t say that every time).

In this episode, we go through some of the most powerful snippets from all of our podcasts in 2016. In it we have clips from the Operations Lead at Spotify, an Innovation Leader at Intuit and much more.

The topics we cover are:

- What is the end goal of innovation.
- How have Pearson and Spotify scaled their innovation initiatives.
- How does Pearson evaluate and allocate funding to new products.
- How does Intuit measure success.
- What do leaders want to see most.
- Why we’re driving innovation and how breakthrough innovation really occurs.

This one is not to be missed. Also, we’re getting ready to do a Q&A episode so if you have any questions you’d like to hear our founders Brant Cooper or Aaron Eden answer, please pass it along via email to sam@movestheneedle.com!

Today’s episode is hands down one of my favorites as it’s filled with practical tips, tactics and stories to building a more entrepreneurial organization. It’s our first time doing a host chat, where I’m joined by the Moves the Needle Co-founders, Brant Cooper and Aaron Eden. In it, we cover:

- Why you need to start by identifying problems and opportunities within core business lines.
- How to get buy-in by tying innovation into your leaders’ and company’s strategic priorities using the leadership zoom tool.
- Why we need to redefine the word innovation.
- Which mindset shifts leaders need to undertake to create an entrepreneurial culture.
- What sort of results leaders want to see.
- How to navigate the ego’s of your bosses.
- What are some things you can do right now to build more momentum at your organization.

In today’s episode we’re excited to have Sonja Kresojevic, the VP of Product Lifecycle at Pearson. In the episode we cover:
- How teams leverage the product lifecycle framework to focus on the right things at the right time.
- How Pearson funds different early stage projects based on stage specific criteria and metrics.
- How Pearson has scaled lean innovation throughout the business and created a culture that enables innovation.

In this episode, we’re honored to have Bennett Blank, Innovation Leader at Intuit, talk about how Intuit has spread innovation thinking throughout the entire organization. Bennett is a Lean Startup in the Enterprise veteran so you’re in for a treat.

Here’s some of the key things we talk about:

• What customer benefit metrics are, how you can identify them, and how they can set teams up for success instead of focusing directly on business impact.
• How Bennett has gone from working in the trenches as a product manager and designer to leading transformation throughout the entire organization.
• How Intuit applies Lean Startup to HR and other functions throughout the business.
• The strategic levers of transformational change Intuit is using to change the way employees work.

In this episode, we interview Kelly McAdoo, the City Manager of the City of Hayward. We cover lots of ground, including deep dives into topics like:

• How Kelly has been driving impact through creating an entrepreneurial culture within a bureaucratic organization.
• How City of Hayward has been able to drastically shorten the scoping process for new projects using Lean Innovation.
• How City of Hayward is redefining the way public sector entities should function in the 21st century.

- How Spotify manages “bets," strategic decision making and execution with Spotify Rhythm
- How Simon is focusing on creating an environment where employees are comfortable to “tinker in a corner”
- Why Simon is skeptical of over-investing into internal branding when it comes to fostering internal adoption of “innovation initiatives”
- How Spotify manages areas of exploration across a simple portfolio Kanban broken down into Now (stuff being fully productized), Next (pretty confident in problem space, now focused on validating solution space) and Later (exploring the problem space).
- How Simon leads up operations at Spotify, yet remains heavily focused on structuring operations around continuing to innovate instead of just refining existing products
- Why a high-trust environment acts as the foundation for thriving as an organization
- How prior to Spotify, Simon helped The Library Corporation coped with the disruption of libraries
- Why the part-time initiative model isn’t conducive to innovation
- How The Library Corporation introduced Lean Startup into their organization