S1 E8 | Sneak Peek: The Five Bedrock Skills of Innovators and Entrepreneurs

One more prototype and I'm almost there. And it's like, yeah, six months later, it's like, one more. I got one more to do. It's like that aspect of how do we actually innovate in the corporate environment is another place this is really applicable because you start to realize, like, most of innovation is about learning what you don't know. It's not about actually executing on what you know. Right. And so it's the unknowns that actually drive us crazy and figure out. And these five skills are about addressing those unknowns in a very, very systematic way, if you will.

Welcome to the Circuit Breaker podcast, where we challenge the status quo of innovation and new product development. We'll talk about tools and skills and methodologies used to build better products and make you a better consumer. I'm Bob Mesta and I'm the co founder of the Rewired Group and I'm one of your co hosts and we're joined by Greg Engel, who is my co founder and chief. Bob Interpreter joined. Join us now as we trip the circuit and give you time to reset, reorganize, and recharge your brain to build better products.

All right, Bob, so at the end of the year, you're going to have a book coming out.

Yeah.

What's the name of the book?

Learning to Build the five Bedrock Skills of Innovators and Entrepreneurs.

So I'm going to ask you a question and I'm going to make it a very generic question because I want to see which way you answer it, and then I'm going to try to dial it in better.

Yep.

Why are you writing the book?

So I'll say there's the explicit and implicit reasons. Right. The explicit reasons are I feel an obligation to the mentors that I've had through the years who took what I would say is a dyslexic, illiterate kid and poured their knowledge into me and was able to help me basically become an innovator and a creator. And I want to be able to pass that stuff forward. And so because they. They were generous enough to pass it to me, and I feel like I have the obligation to pass it forward to them. So that. That's the first one. Right. I think the. The other one is to realize that how do I say, so how do we. Part of. Part of writing a book is always about, like, so we don't have to repeat ourselves all the time. And we. And it's kind of like we can go like, you know what? Go listen to this or Go read this and then come back. And so part of this is. Is. Is allowing us to start at a different level, whereas we try to help people make progress.

So you said it's. It's about giving back or I don't know which word.

Paying it for, paying it forward.

Why is it important to you to. I'm going to use the word honor your mentors or the thought leaders in your life. Why is it important for you to do something and acknowledge them? Why is that important?

For me, I think part of this is to realize we're in this world. I'll say deeper than maybe I want to share, but we're in this world with people. And the fact is that I will still want to have an impact. And I'd say I'm not as smart as my mentors, but I can actually. But I feel like the mentors that I've had, a lot of the stuff that they've built has subsided or basically kind of is almost like going back into the garden. And so it's not in its original form. And that people actually should take some time to learn some of the things that Dr. Taguchi talked about or Dr. Deming talked about or Clay talks about. And so I think it's that, you know, aspect of it.

And you said the name of the.

Book was Learning to Build.

And why is that the name?

I think the aspect to me is that. That I didn't. I would say the. The phrase I always use is I was. I've been breaking things for 50 years. I've been fixing things for 45 years, but I've been building for 35 years. And the aspect is that I've always been curious and wanting to know how things work, but building has been one of the most satisfying things I've ever done when. Whether it's.

Building anything. And so my aspect is people realize that they want to be an entrepreneur, but they realize they have to build something. And building is that foundation of creation and creating something that's meaningful for you, but also meaningful for other people to create value.

And this might be a hard question to answer, but the mentors that are in the book, how many are there?

Four. There's Dr. Willie Moore.

Okay, hold on. So I want you to name them, and then I want you to tell us what's the. And it's gonna be hard. What is the one main thing they taught you?

Okay, so let's start with Dr. Deming, right? So I met him 18, 19 years old. And what Dr. Deming basically taught me was I'll say the foundation of systems, right? In terms of that everything is a process. And he would always say, like, if you can't explain something as a process, then you don't actually understand it. But the other thing he did is he helped me actually separate words and helped me realize, like, when people talk about things, what's an input, what's an output, what's an action, what's the transformation we're trying to make and understanding that systems are designed to do exactly, to create the exact output that you get. And so in a lot of cases, when we get poor output, it's like, it's a design problem, it's not a people problem. And so what I realized is that at some point, spending the time to design and create is very, very important and to realize that the responsibility of building something is beyond the notion of people making mistakes. And so most of the time, I was always seen as, you did this wrong. But it's more that the system is wrong because it didn't teach me. For example, so Deming is one.

Taguchi was amazing. I met Taguchi a couple years or maybe a year later and had a very long relationship. I'm not sure Demi would ever remember who I was, but Taguchi, I was lucky enough to spend almost 7, 8 years side by side with him on very different projects and different things. And he taught me so much. But his. His whole notion is, is this. This aspect of what I'd say scope and the notion of robustness and that being able to make things work in the face of variation as opposed to eliminate variation and prototyping to learn and being able to realize we don't know. My favorite quote from him always is, there's way more unknown than there is known, and don't ever fool yourself.

And Taguchi also taught me the importance of time and that time is the most precious of all resources and assets. Clay was another. I had almost 27 years working with Clay side by side, and started as a teacher and then a mentor and then a peer, and we would get four hours a quarter for almost 20, 27 years. And. And we would have no agenda. And we'd. We'd just talk about whatever research he was working on or whatever I was working on. And out of that was born jobs theory. Right. In terms of if it was a method I used to kind of hack the way I could see demand. But Clay was one to always be very humble, very causal, and very articulate and always wanting to learn. And the banter we would have would be Phenomenal in terms of just being able to question each other. And I had no problem saying, clay, I'm confused. I don't know what you mean. And. And there were very few people around him who could say that, but it was very special. And then Dr. Willie Moore. She was amazing. She was the first African American woman to graduate from the University of Michigan with a PhD in particle physics. She turned out to be my first manager at Ford. And she taught me how corporate America works and how to use these methods and tools to do things. I think my. My favorite story of Willie was. I think it was my first two or three weeks at Ford. And she said, okay, we're going into this meeting. There's a warranty problem. I want you to take responsibility for it. I'm like, wait, what? She's like, no, I need you to take responsibility for it. I'm like, but I didn't do it. She goes, don't worry about that. Just say, this is my problem. I'll take it. I got it. So we're in this big room. It was back in the 80s, and it was executive at the end and going through everything, and they were talking about this warranty problem and how big it was, and all of a sudden it's like, and so whose fault is this? Him. Willie's, like, nods her head, and she says, And I said, it's my fault. And the executive looks at me like he knew it wasn't my fault, but he's like, why is it your fault? I said, well, this is false. In the area we're doing, we missed these things. Here's what I think. I don't know exactly what to do, but we'll figure it out. And it turns out that the guy gave me that authority, which then all of a sudden, everybody else was pointing fingers at each other. Manufacturing. This was a. Manufacturing. No, this was a design problem, back and forth. But the moment that it came to me, then everybody else took a deep breath to say, all right, I won't get fired for this. And for me, it was like, he wasn't going to fire me anyways, but I didn't know that at the time. But the reality is, she taught me how to step in when the void appears and to really understand how to bring teams together and how to apply these methods. Not only Taguchi and Deming and Clay people, all those things, but how to actually help others do it. So in some cases, she was a very strong teacher, but she was. She was also just so practically thinking, like she'd always have me think about things as a molecule. Like, if you're a plastic molecule, how do you become a mirror case? Right. So all of those kinds of experiences shaped me, but they gave me tools to think and tools to. To understand and tools to make sense. And the other part is they also gave me the hope to be honest that we can all be better and that nothing is random and that everything is caused and that to not give up on the fact that almost like saying that it's random is giving up. So that, to me is kind of the moral of those stories. And those five skills are when I take the hundred or the thousands of people I've worked with over the last 30 years and look at the innovations we've done, I look at kind of those special 10% people who kind of made it very easy to work with or were able to come up with very unique innovations. And what I realized was these five skills are skills that nobody's really teaching or talking about. And it's not about process, it's about the ability to, you know, like the five. Sorry, I've been talking too long.

So, yes, what are the five skills?

Got it. So one is what we call empathetic perspective. It's that ability to see things really good. Innovators and entrepreneurs can see things from many different perspectives. Both, I'll say human. What the finance person is going to see, what the customer is going to see, what's manufacturing going to see. Like, they can see things from all these different. And they can actually start to see the gaps between them, and they can see through time and space, and they can see things at the molecular level, and they can see things at the strategic level. And so they have almost this omniscient ability to kind of see things from all these different angles and then see problems before they happen, or see conflicts or see issues wrapped around it. And what you find is some people have some of that, but most people don't actually have the breadth of empathetic perspective. And the reason why it's empathetic is it's not that they're adding their judgment to it. It's more about trying to make sure they understand how the customer is going to feel or what's going to happen if I'm the customer, as opposed to being judgmental around the customer and saying, this is what they should do. I always think of doctors talking to patients and they should do this. It's like, yeah, but that's not empathetic.

The second tool or the second skill is really uncovering Demand. And it's about basically this whole aspect of being able to see struggling moments. And the tool we use, obviously is jobs, but the aspect is that there's many different ways in which to uncover demand. But intuitively, innovators and entrepreneurs understand not necessarily how to create demand, because demand is actually created in the individual and in the market, or in people, if you will, but how to actually uncover it and actually then build products and systems to go after it. Third tool is what we call causal structures. Basically, they all have not the same, but they have different models of cause and effect, of how they see the world and how it works. And it's built over time. You could say it's systems thinking, you could say it's frameworks, whatever it is. But they have a fundamental way in which to see things but categorize things so they understand how things. Things work. And it's the curiosity to figure out, like, how things work, right? The phrase we always use is the irrational becomes rational with context. So a lot of times when you see somebody do something irrational, it's like, well, that's just crazy. And it's like, yeah, but how do we actually understand their context enough so that we can actually understand the logic of how they actually made that decision? Because most people in their head don't do crazy things. It's the fact this is not from the outside. We see crazy things, right? The fourth one is one that's very near and dear to my heart, which is this whole aspect of prototyping to learn. What's so interesting is, again, as a dyslexic, it was one of those things I realized I didn't know a lot of things. And what Taguchi always talked about is again, more unknown than there is known. And so when we're building a system or building a product or building something, the fact is we don't know what we don't know about it. And so how do we actually figure that out? Taught me methods and tools around orthogonal arrays and design of experiments to understand how to let the system tell me the best way the system should work, as opposed to theoretically building the system and then using hypothesis testing or verification. Most people today use AB testing, right? They verify prototype to verify as opposed to prototype to learn. And so it's a very important skill to be able to prototype very early. And most people say you have to fail. My thing is this isn't about failing, this is about actually learning. And when you can do that, you actually are prepared for when other things happen. That's the other one and then the last one is basically identifying and managing trade offs. Most people work in this world where they want everything to be equal or everything to be perfect. And the reality is there's always trade offs both from the consumer side and the product side. And really good entrepreneurs and innovators realize the trade offs they have to make in order to launch.

And are these skills within you or are they learnable? Can you learn them?

Well, I would say I didn't know them at 10 years old. Right. So I think they're all learnable. That's why I call them skills, because I think there's, I'll say, ways, tools and methods that help you execute on those skills and get better at it. It's like learning to paint. It's like learning anything else. As you do more of it, you actually get better at it. And so my aspect is I believe it's all very learnable. And the problem is that in a instant society, these are not skills that you can learn in a two hour session. They're.

Being in Detroit, we're very familiar with trade schools. I feel like these are more like trade skills that people learn to be craftsmen. So they're craftsman type skills that you hone and refine throughout your life. Right. And when we do interviews, people go like, God, you make it look so easy. We've been doing, we've done over 10,000 interviews, so of course we make it look easy. And to be honest, we don't even know that.

That it's, we don't think it's that hard. And then when we watch other people do it, we realize how hard it is. You're always one that says it's very hard. I get it. Right. But I think Pete Townsend has a great line. He goes, you know, it's hard to make this look hard. Right. And so one of the things is, I believe that that's one of my problems is it's so easy for me to do some of these skills that I don't realize, like how hard it was to actually learn them.

And I would imagine, and from my own experience and yours as well, some skills are going to come easier to some people.

Yes. And I'm not sure that you need to have all five skills. I think the fact is, I mean, you and I have been business partners for over 17 years and I think it's one of those things where we start to realize like at some point you have some of the skills that I don't and you play things out way better than I do. Right. But the fact is, as a team, we actually cover all five skills. Right. And I think that's the magic of how our business relationship has developed. And to be honest, we realize that we help each other with those skills.

So should you ignore a skill you're not good at?

So I have a couple of underlying premises behind it. Like, I feel like you should always be playing to your strengths. I think the notion is that you have to at least try to learn a skill to realize whether how hard it is to actually master. But it's one of those things where, as a kid, they always.

Being dyslexic, they always said, you need to learn how to spell. And I spent almost 30 years, an hour a day trying to learn how to spell. And at 35, I finally gave up to say, I'm just not going to learn this. I can spend my time somewhere else. So I think the reality is, if you want to be an innovator, you need to try to build that skill. But at the same time, you also need to be able to recognize if you can't do it, how do you actually find somebody else who has it? And where's the right fit between doing that?

Well, expecting everybody to be an expert in everything is impossible. You can't be an expert level at everything.

So the interesting part is that as I get older, I realize that being an expert is nobody actually thinks they're an expert until the fact is the person who was the expert is not there anymore. And then you become the expert by default. And even though you might not know much about that thing, if you know more than somebody else, somebody will call you an expert. So it's one of those things where people call me all the time for wine, Right. But I never would consider myself a wine expert. But at the same time, I just happen to know a little more than somebody else about wine, though I do know good wines.

So again, this is going to be a hard question because it depends, right. But who should read the book?

So.

Or what context could people be in that would get value out of the book is probably a better way to say it.

Yep. So in framing the book, we basically talked about kind of like, what progress are we trying to help, who are we trying to help, and what progress are you trying to help them make? And so one is entrepreneurs. Right. I think this is one of those things where, if you're an entrepreneur, most entrepreneurs learn the process, right. And they learn all the kind of the. The mechanisms and the steps. And this is almost like the gaps between all that, that actually kind of make or break you. And so my thing is almost entrepreneurs who are in the thick of it should be reading it. I think entrepreneurs who have actually built something and kind of failed because they'll actually be able to see now what they were missing. I think the other thing is even new entrepreneurs. But I just don't think, because it's a trade like when we try to teach the jobs know process at, at university, it's one of those things where it's, it's so generic and it's so linear that, that it doesn't allow people that aspect of being able to, to really understand how to really innovate in, in the moment kind of thing. And so I think it's more an applied kind of place. People should be learning it.

So what I'm hearing is if you're struggling with understanding what demand is.

Yep.

I'd probably pick up the book.

Yep.

If you're under, if you're struggling with.

How to bring something to life through trying different ideas, it might be a good idea to buy a book.

Are there others? Yeah, I think, I think innovators in a lot of cases where they're, they're almost like, my favorite line is like, I'm, I'm almost one more prototype and I'm almost there. And it's like, yeah, six months later, it's like one more. I got one more to do. It's like that aspect of how do we actually innovate in the corporate environment is another place this is really applicable because you start to realize, like.

Most of innovation is about learning what you don't know. It's not about actually executing on what you know. And so it's the unknowns that actually drive us crazy and figure out. And these five skills are about addressing those unknowns in a very, very systematic way, if you will. So to me, it's also for corporate innovators, whether you're, you know, you've been in five different areas, finance, operations, whatever, but now you're in innovation. It's like, okay, here's the tools that you really, really like, the fundamental tools or skills you got to have to do this. You know, you and I talk about the fact that, you know, there is no one innovation process. There is no one way to develop something. And so to be honest, it's more like, what are the guardrails that we want to make sure we keep? And then what are those skills we want people to hone and refine and.

How many years from first thought.

Yeah.

To Actually writing the book. How many years has it been? Has this book been in your head?

So.

I'm doing a talk in Japan this month, and it's at the Robust Engineering Conference. And I pulled out a notebook that Dr. Taguchi wrote in my notebook in 1990. So that would make it 31 years. He said.

He asked for my book, and in the very open cover, he basically said, write a book. And it says. Then he signed his name. Right? And that's part of the obligation I felt like he gave me. So I've been thinking about this one for a long time, but it was one of those things where I think as we. As I hit and I was so interested in building things, that the reality is I wasn't thinking about passing things on. But as I got into my 50s, it got to be like, all right, I want one is I want to stop explaining everything to people and see if I can find another way to do that so I can continue to build. But I also have to actually figure out how to do that. So it's been a long time. 30 years.

And how is it possible that you can do it now?

That's the other part. So, as a dyslexic, the fact is, at some point, can't read and write how you write a book. Well, there's a company called Scribe Media that has a process that enables me to speak and use graphics and interact with a writer to help actually take my voice and tell the stories and get the things across and help build clarity. And so the way that I've been able to kind of crank out books lately is the fact is that we have a process and a partner to do so. And to be honest, we have five more books coming. I mean, there's just so many different ideas of what thing we can go deep on and that we feel needs to be out there. And it's not about. In some cases, it's not about selling books. But what we realized is that nobody reads anything that's free. And at the same time, you want to make sure that it's adding value. And so Scribe has actually helped me do everything from frame the book, scope the book, write the book, publish the book, get it onto Amazon, and then support it.

And in the spirit of how we kind of always try to land these, is there one question you want people to think about or an assignment you want to give them before the book or as the book comes out?

So my thing is that I think one of the best ways to read this book is for you, the listener to take the time to reflect on some struggling moments that you have and places where you want to make progress but you don't know how, and then read the book to actually help you get unstuck, help you figure out a way in which to prototype, figure out kind of what you mean by things, oh, I want to get healthier, I want to get in shape. Why? Right. How many different ways can you do it? And there's so many different solutions. How are you going to do that? And so I think it's about having.

A project for yourself and understanding how you can make progress will be the best way to read that book.

All right, so the book is supposed.

To be out around, so we're just finishing graphics right now. It's September right now, but it should be out in January. We're shooting for around January 15th and very, very excited to.

Kind of see how it goes.

Perfect. Thank you.

Thank you.

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