Miniseries: Business Reimagined – Episode 2: Breaking the Innovation Barrier

Welcome to Business Reimagined, the latest miniseries for Empires of Innovation. With Ozan Sonmez, we'll explore the evolving world of corporate innovation, where legacy structures meet groundbreaking ideas, and where the old rules get reimagined. We'll dive into the complex journey of reshaping corporate culture, fostering entrepreneurship, and crafting an environment where innovation can thrive even in the largest organizations. We'll examine how companies can overcome entrenched barriers and balance risk and stability and align with emerging trends to stay ahead in an ever evolving world. Whether you're a corporate leader, an aspiring intrapreneur, or just someone fascinated by how businesses transform, this series is for you. Join us as we uncover what it takes to build a future focused company culture and rethink the meaning of success in today's business landscape. Now let's jump into today's episode of Business Reimagined. Welcome back. Great to have you. How you doing? Thank you.

Yeah, good, good.

Of course. Always the grind never stop.

Yeah, life.

Well, it's great to have you back. I'm excited to dive deeper into the corporate innovation side of things that we've been discussing. Last time we spoke about corporate innovation and really just touched on a lot of different topics. We introduced how innovation becomes a part of the corporate world and how teams like yours can come in and support corporates and their entrepreneurship programs and foster innovation and new ideas. And the billion dollar discussion that we sort of started to have was company culture and the role that that plays in fostering or even allowing innovation to really flourish in an organization that's been around for a while. So we know, because we talked about it last time, that innovation isn't necessarily inherent in a large organization or a and it's especially not always inherent for folks that have been hired by corporates to fit a certain expertise or role or position. So I want to open up that company culture discussion a little bit more and really dig deeper into how we can nurture a culture of innovation at corporates and what that means for an organization.

So the famous saying, I mean, it's not certain if Peter Drucker said that, but it's a culture eats strategy for breakfast. When I moved to Middle east Almost more than 10 years ago, I wrote a piece because I was reading a lot about culture in different places and I said culture eats breakfast at hummus in the Middle east for instead of strategy. And I think that still holds true because this invisible thing, this unmeasurable thing, of course there's academic ways to kind of measure certain different Certain aspects of culture that is the triggering factor that is not controllable. 100% when you have more than 50 people in the organization, and I think there is, it could be also biological and evolutionary. When we have more than 100 people, it becomes a little difficult to manage things like a lot of the evolutionary studies have shown 100, 100, 520 is kind of the maximum size a village gets or a community, small community gets before it needs to branch out and move forward to something else. Because I think it's also a self sufficient and self manageable organization without hierarchy. I think that's, that's the kind of upper limit of human interactions. And so many studies have been done about that. And it kind of translates back to the, what I kept reading about companies. When the founder starts not knowing the names of the people inside the company or when the founder meets people that are working in his company that he has never met before in his life, that's when it starts becoming difficult to have a direct relationship between what you have in mind as a founder, what you want the company to be feeling like, to be acting like. And it's probably at that time the culture is set like it's very difficult to change the culture of an organization when you're about 100 people, when you don't know the people, when the connections are now limited to the people at the top echelon. And it's important because the culture is this unmanageable, undetectable source that kind of influences everybody's decision making. Yes, of course company has values. It's usually in large companies it's what you see when you print, it's in the printed on the wall. And most companies try to communicate how people should behave through deciding on those values. But we know in real life the companies do not act based on what they put on those fancy walls or on their website. One famous example is Enron. They had values. Like all the companies who did something wrong had values written somewhere else. The problem is people did not believe the values that were printed out were actually being conducted or the company was not making decisions based on those values. And values is kind of this visible turn of the culture. Like whatever the culture is, you kind of verbalize it in your values. If you have, if you want an open culture, if you want a culture where dissent or not agreeing with your management is a key point to, to progress, then you put their honesty and you put their avoiding mediocrity. But at the end of the day, if you don't apply these as the leadership, then it does not translate into a hundred people. It's very easy to observe this, but when it gets above a certain level it's very difficult. And that's also kind of triggers down to how people and company sees innovation. Innovation is about risk taking. You don't know the outcome. And in corporates, when it goes to a certain size, there are many things that cannot be managed with unknown circumstances or unknown results. Especially in technology fields or engineering related companies. R and D becomes the leading factor of designing new things. But R and D usually has a budget, has KPIs and they don't like the word failure. They don't like to say to their bosses that their efforts, the money they spend, did not produce anything. So that's why they start doing things that are agreeable, that are predictable, that are manageable, that they will not fail. So they stop trying audacious stuff. And all of a sudden you start seeing the company having a great product at the start, but then not being able to deliver the same amount of innovation going forward or same amount of creativity, same amount of crazy ideas start not coming out from the company because everything is set. The people hired are hired to do an exact job. They don't have a lot of generalists. Now there's silos of decision makers, whether it's an R and D or in marketing. So innovation is not only about technology, by the way, it's all about how the company's functions move forward. Like it can be a very difficult thing also to start seeing this on marketing, on messaging, there could be trials and errors and new things that could be tried. But if the people in the marketing department are not able to get that out, get those ideas out, then they start lagging behind anyone who's here. So this happened a lot in the last 10 years, especially when mobile came out or mobile marketing came out or social media marketing came out. A lot of the traditional companies did not know what to do with that medium. They were very accustomed to do with traditional media. So they, they kind of waited out a little too long until they start doing something meaningful in the social space. Same thing could work with finance. A lot of the finance departments were freaking out about how to do their best when there is this thing called crypto came around. And not many of them had ever attempted to try and turn that new wave into an asset creation phase. I mean I blame myself for not buying hundred bitcoins when it was really affordable. I only did what I could do with the mind that I had. I could have retired far, far longer ago now. But when I look into the corporate side of things, they're just starting. They waited out too long to understand. So that's about risk taking as well. So the culture of a company starts not taking risks, starts not appreciating the upside, but starts seeing the downside more importantly. And that's why they don't innovate as much as they started out. But like we should also remember every company that something now were just an idea with a couple of people when they started. So they had a different culture and now they have a completely different culture. So that's also kind of the evolutionary cycle of companies. That's why companies die. And that's okay. Like there's nothing wrong with companies perishing or being acquired or disappearing but. And that's the natural of life as well, like the circle of life. So if you are running a company, this is what will happen. It's like you are a person, you're going to die. You build a company that's going to die. If you don't want it to die within your lifetime, you have to do things differently. There are so many different things a company founder, a company leadership can decide to do to survive and to last the company, to give a few hundred more years to the company. But it's a very limited approach because we also have, have the deficiency of understanding time in our own human way. We don't see this company as something that could last longer and we decide on things that as if it's, it's alive. Like we do decide things. A 60 year old is not expected to start skiing or bungee jumping or doing something crazy because like oh you, you lived your life. Why are you taking this risk now? It's, it's a human thing. So it actually represents kind of falls back into the same shadow of mortality in a way. But again as leaders, the companies can survive. Companies and entity of itself. So it can renew itself, it can build something else and there are tools and there are like research available to be able to do that. But the culture changes. Of course our culture, individual cultures have changed Our, the way we look into things have changed. When we were 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, it's a different thing. We are not the same person and the company is not the same company could have the same logo, same door, same wall, but it's a different company. So we have to understand the requirements to refresh it and bring it back new energy, bring it, bring new things into the company. It's not the natural Rhythm of things. So additional effort has to be spent on revitalizing that starter's culture, founders culture, founders mindset. And it's hard so because we're not going to live forever. So that's kind of the default of how we react and we think and I think that's a culture of companies that's kind of very much tied to the founders culture. Founders mindset, founders age. So that's a, that's a no for sure.

I, I'm curious then. You know, when we think about a regular Joe or somebody who works at a corporation, has a specific job, how can they understand the value of innovation for the company that they work for, that, you know, lets them buy their bread for the day or whatever.

Right.

It's, it's not an emotional connection. It's, I mean sometimes it is, but most of the time you're just looking at it as a transactional relationship. You know, I do my, my 40 hours, I get my paycheck, I live my life. So is that where leadership comes in to communicate the value of innovation or really how does, how do you ensure that innovative, you know, ideas and solutions can really come out of a corporate world like this?

So I think the challenge is the connection to the human psyche is very important because you cannot expect and workforce that has 50 years of average age to all of a sudden start doing things differently than they were doing yesterday or the day before, the year before, 10 years before. That's not going to happen. There might be individuals who are different in their mindset and you see these people, it's, it doesn't take too much time to figure out who has a different mindset regardless of age, different mindset of exploration, different mindset of trying to error, different mindset of doing new things. You, this is kind of embedded into the human psyche. Some people are always risk averse. They were probably even more risk averse than their peers when they were 20 and now they're 80 or they're 50, they're 60, they're, they're 40. Risk averse attitude will stop innovation at any point in the corporate cycle. And this is the difficulty of grassroots movements actually impacting the company. Even if you have younger people who wants to do something else in the company, they are not in decision making powers. The people who are in decision making powers are 30, 40, 50 go up. They might be the most innovative workforce of that entity, but the things they will create will be hampered, down, looked up. It's not going to work out, it's not going to climb the ladders. So it's known by the founder, people will chop them off regularly. So once it's presented or ever presented to somebody higher up to make a call, it will be the super vanilla thing that everybody knows will work out. There's almost no risk attached to it. So this is important to know because top leadership gives this insights, give these inspiring speeches, talks about this brings people from outside to talk about innovation. And nobody in the community will say, oh, we don't like to be innovative. Nobody in the community will say, regardless of status, regardless of position, regardless of age, nobody will say, oh, we should never be innovative. Everybody will say, ah, yeah, we have to be innovative. But then when it comes to show, they start judging with their same lenses, same perspective and say, okay, yes, we want to be innovative, but we don't want to take this much risk. Like, dude, that's the a, that's the purpose. And the top management is not there to make decisions for them. It's already been delegated. There's a reason of delegation. The company's grown larger. You cannot make decisions. So all you can do is like inspire. But like at the end of the inspiration, and we see this a lot, people get inspired, they start generating crazy ideas and all of a sudden the crazy ideas are down, dumped down. So the, the way this could work and the way I think it always worked out is getting these people who would like to do something, giving them new playgrounds, new sandboxes that they have a direct access to people in position of decision making, position of power. And there's a structure to do it, the structure to do it in a sense that they do not risk their jobs, they do not risk their careers. They a structure that enables. They do not risk their bonuses, they do not risk penalties against in that's already been set into the culture. Like you can set penalties or you can be very rigid on financial regulation, especially if you're a IPO company, you can do a lot of, you should do a lot of things that are rigid. But there has to be structures that protect people from making absurd claims and even spend some money that's following that claims without the scrutiny of the finance department. Because any financial professional, I was one will never approve anything that does not have a KPI at the end of it. Because my job is to protect. I am hired to do a certain job. And I think this is also very important to understand when you hire people to do a certain job of protection, protection of value of your brand in the marketing department, protection of your values in the assets in the finance department, protection of your regulatory structures in the legal department. You cannot expect the same people to look into one case and say, hey, you know what? I'm going to be innovative today. I'm going to do this very risky thing. On a regulatory perspective. Those people will be not, will not be doing their job if they let that happen. So all of a sudden the people in marketing, finance and legal, which is usually where decisions are kind of chopped down, you hire these people for safekeeping and now you're telling them to be innovative and to let things go. They won't do that. They can't do that. That's actually when, when they do it, they should be fired. That's why the people say, okay, I, my job is something. So you should take these decisions and in order to sprout that, do not go to their direction because that's their job. They'll cut them off. They're not bad people. They're tasked with something and you want them all of a sudden to change everything. But not everything, because if they change everything, everything will go shit show. I'll change this little thing. Oh, let this happen. They can't. So you need to create a separate sites function which has of course connections to finance, legal and marketing and finance, marketing and finance, legal. So all of a sudden the separate group will have autonomy. That's why it's always best to remove out the brand of that company away from this innovation cycles because then the brand will not be harmed. Remove the financial decisions of that innovation entity or innovation project because then the normal finance people will not freak out. You remove the legal aspects of that company so there's a little bit more room to change, to try to new thing, to do something new that is in a gray area which the legal office will definitely hate. So you have to have all these three functions servicing the people that will do innovation. So everybody's focused on we have to have innovative people. We have to, you know, yes, great. So you can fill out your company with hundreds of innovative people. But unless you give them the separate sidetracked decision making routes, the same innovative people that you suffered so much to hire, they will fail if you keep them in the same loop and decision making and companies, this is where leadership plays the biggest role. So they have to decide if we want to not just do lip service to innovation, but do it. We need different structures and the successful companies we have worked with have built these different structures. They are super tight in it. They use what the company has in terms of brand Sometimes in terms of financial resources, of course. How are they going to finance it otherwise? And in terms of legal aspects. But they're not part of the same operating cycle. They are in a different structure. Whether it's a different department who has a direct access to decision makers, whether it's a different company who's completely, entirely, kind of having being outsourced. The whole innovation idea works very closely to the people inside. But then you also have to communicate. If you do this transition to more innovative structures, innovation, enabler structures, you can say, because the structures by itself is not innovative at all, then you can have these people in your company try new things. It's like a safe playground. They can go back and do their job. And when you have an idea, when you have something you really want to work on, you need guidance and you need a different structure. So you move out of that regular work cycle into a different mindset. And you can change the culture here. The new organization will have a better culture in terms of innovation. Better is not the right word maybe, but enabler culture, so people will not freak out because they're still part of the large entity. They're funded by it, they're managed by it, they're governed by it, but they don't have the same rules of operation. And I think most companies fail to do that because they assume if I yell enough to my people that they have to be innovative, they will be innovative because I'm the top dog. I could do. I could have people do whatever I. But it doesn't work that way.

Definitely it doesn't. I think we've seen a lot of failures like that happen before, and I think that's a good segue to ask really about the culture of failure and how to really accept that at an organization that is so structured and oftentimes very rigid and not very accepting of change or innovation or failure.

Right.

Those all go hand in hand. So I think maybe the question is how can companies really constructively deal with failure so that it adds to the culture, that it adds to the innovation that's happening at the organization?

I think this is where geography plays a big role. Because if failing is an option in the marketplace, if the company is in a marketplace so competitive, then it can actually fail as a company, even without innovating, even with the existing tools and technologies and services they're providing, they could actually lose the market. They can actually go bankrupt or be bought by somebody else. That is a real threat. And when there's a real threat of disappearing, the leadership acts Differently because they know they can fail to keep up the company alive. Whether it's a smaller company or larger company, midsize company, once there is this competitive aspect of the market they're working in, there is an external push to change things, to do new things or to. You cannot do what you used to do and remain in the same position if it's a very competitive market. And I think that's when geography plays a role because not all business markets are like that in the US the reason why so many companies are being bought and sold even without a lot of revenue, even without a lot of team members, so many companies not only in Silicon Valley and Bay Area, but also in other parts of the US There is a culture of buying something from other people because you missed out building that. If you see there's a market opportunity moving forward and you don't have the resources to catch it, or you failed to catch it, you have failed to understand the market, then the second best thing you can do is like bring some tools and resources and leverage them to buy out whoever is trying to do it. So you infuse that novelty into your own company structure. Large companies do it all the time, like the Microsoft Apples and Facebooks and Googles. I mean, they are operating in a different set of obstacles. Things are changing a lot faster in the consumer market especially, but it's not only through the consumer appetite change, but also about the business appetite change. So things are changing a lot faster than they used to compared to 50 years ago. And now failure becomes a real threat. We can fail to exist. Then of course, everybody in the organization will have a little bit more interest in trying to do new things. Because guys, we're losing market share. We're not going to keep up losing market share unless we do something different. That is a push that's coming primarily from the external markets. But the internal organization has to act. And then, yes, innovation becomes an existential crisis inside the company. Then you don't see all these ideas being shut down because everybody knows we have to survive. So all these rules and regulations get a little sidestepped when you actually have to do something in order to survive, because doing what you used to do will not make you live another day. So that's a different dynamism that gives a lot of different dynamism. Unfortunately for the emerging markets, that's not the case though. So there's very few threats coming from outside. And when there's very few threats coming from outside, the people inside the organization lose that survival instinct like if there are companies in Turkey, for example, or in Europe, that if you get in when you're 20, you will get out, unless you do something crazy and unlawful and legal and unethical, they're not going to kick you out. That is one difficulty that Europeans are facing and they have been reporting this for a very long time. Why are we losing our edge? Why are we not doing enough? Why are we not innovative enough? Because the social structures that enable this prosperity and welfare, and I would say equal equality, also hinder the ability to grow. What is positive on one end might turn to be very negative on the other hand. But that has to be matter, it doesn't have to be that case. So there are still a lot of innovative companies coming out of Europe, startups coming out of Europe, but the pace is different, the structures are different, regulations are different. You see this even in emerging companies, countries that have a much difficult sense in dealing with failure, like Korea. Now they're trying to push their people to try new things, to try to not agree with their bosses all the time. And all these amazingly innovative companies coming out of from Far east and let alone China, like Japan, Korea, dominating the technology space for many, many years, are now struggling because the culture that made them very efficient, use very little resources to achieve a lot are now hindering them. Like they, they are now like stuck in a way and they're trying to breathe in new innovation, new ideas into their operation culture. It's tough, it's very difficult. So it's not just understanding failure, but in the culture you're operating, the culture you're living with. If you don't see so many examples, then it becomes a tricky thing to be the first ship to let loose. China is a different case. Like everybody, a lot of billions of people out got out of poverty, got into wealthy year for years and years and years and years and years. Now there is a fear of losing that ability to grow. And that kind of adds into the dynamism. It's very, very fast. So there's speed in this. And of course when there's speed in this, the risk of failure is difficult. But again, that's why it's still a lot government mandated or operations mandated. Of course they're hugely successful entrepreneurs, but they're always operating under the lens of a bigger structure, under the lens of the bigger organization. So countries have their own cultures, which translates to how individuals think about those cultures, which translates into how the companies those individuals build translate into action. So it's mixed in everything where you live, where you're from what kind of different cultures you've been exposed to, what kind of diversity of opinions and operations you've been exposed to changes how you look into what you build as well. So this is one reason America, regardless of its, its problems, still push its own people with the culture that is always try something new, try it out, go sell, be more vocal, be more energized. So that's a culture that's kind of pushing the entrepreneurship agenda, but also that's the culture where it's also ruins a lot of stuff in terms of consumption, consumption, consumption, consumption. So there is no balance yet in life, either in the corporate life or in personal life regarding the corporate culture or culture and faith.

Certainly, I mean, I think, you know, stepping back from the corporate lens just on the example of Silicon Valley in California, you know, it's, it's almost every entrepreneur's dream to, to have a moment to live in that space and really feel that external culture and that influence of innovation and progress and moving forward and stuff like that. So certainly agree.

Yeah, I mean you, you, you were raised and you were born and raised there, so. And then you started living your life in other cultures and now you see the stark differences, which is partly culture, partly economics, and partly, I think, a general feel about the society.

I mean, in my day to day, I feel like I'm a recovering American because the pace of life in Europe is so much slower that I can take a step back and take a deep breath and be like, ah, I don't need to run, you know, so it's totally different. It's really interesting to think about it, you know, from the perspective of an entrepreneur or a growing startup or a corporation who, you know, has been established for a while and is really, you know, still going. And I think, you know, we have a lot of good examples coming out of California, out of Silicon Valley, out of the US And a lot of them focus on diversity and inclusion as being the answer to innovative cultures. And I would love to know your take on that, how that fits into, you know, other markets around the world and opportunities for, for corporates to drive an innovative culture.

So it's, it's, it is something that I was trying to understand when I moved to San Francisco. Wow, 2016. So even before that I, I was traveling a lot, every couple years. I was spending a good amount of time, I had friends, but I never understood the whole, like, how did this happen? And then I dig, started digging deep and reading shit, tons of books. And then I kind of brought all together, in my way, which is, and I talked about it in a TED talk, which is in Turkish, unfortunately, but we can maybe put some English notes. I see different parts of the world's history that played a huge role in shaping what became Silicon Valley. So one of those is the very ambitious projects in railways. So US was the most disconnected continent for a very, very long time. And the reason for that is like huge space in between the west coast and east coast and not very friendly territory in between. So when the big cities started forming up and smaller cities kind of became adjacent, there were still huge land masses that were primarily owned by Native Americans. And then the US already, like, already was in war with Native Americans. But then it started becoming much more aggressive and a lot of massacres happened, a lot of, well, you can call them genocides because now they're hundreds of hundreds percent of less NATO Americans living in their confined spaces. So they were dominated. But in order for that to happen, there needs to be railroads and transportation of things and soldiers and assets and everything else. So what happened at the end was there was not enough manpower in the US to get that done. That's why a lot of foreign workers, especially Chinese workers and workers from all over the world were embedded into that structure. So there was this huge influx of foreign workforce into the whole thing. Add to that the gold rush, which became very, probably became the first international common desire globally, because everybody in the world, one way or another, knew there was gold to be found in this remote place called the United States. So all of a sudden you had this influx of risk takers and like risk takers in a way that they don't have anything but a freaking shower and they go out, they take a boat, road, boat trip all the way from Latin America, all the way from Europe, all the way from Australia, all the way from Asia, because there's something valuable there. It's perhaps the first, biggest, first oversized marketing effort. Not intentionally, of course. Like I, I don't think anybody in the US wanted to get the word out. So other people come in, but the word got out and all of a sudden you had this huge influx of, you might say, crazy people that land in a very small place called San Francisco and adjacent porch and start influxing, going into the countryside, going into North California and going into, deep into the America's Wild West. And all that created a dynamism and requirement to feed them, to bring them new innovation. So there was emergency in innovation building. The amount of new tools developed in that short amount of time that facilitated Faster digging, faster sorting, faster shipping. So everything that had to be fast because you go into a place, you need to decide very quickly if that's where you're going to get stuck and that's where you're going to land and set things up, your mind up. Because if you can't find something here and if you try to move out, it's already too late. Somebody's already there. So this whole dissemination of crazy people, whole dissemination of crazy ideas, things that needed to work out really fast. And it's not only about mining, in in particular, anything regarding people's psyche that needed to change rapidly. Needed to change rapidly because now we don't have time to sue stuff. If our clothes get worn out, we'll be sick. So we need stored your clothes. Oh, here comes the blue jeans and jeans as a, as a material like that's tent material on your legs, they don't tear up, you don't spend time sewing them up. It is an innovation that came out from a necessity. Oh, we have to stay up late to dig more. Oh, there is this thing called coffee that the Ethiopians discovered a while ago. Their goats used to go crazy and work around all night. Why don't we use this? All becomes the reason why America is a coffee culture is the gold rush. And bring on top of that, the whole wealth that was accumulated and had almost nowhere to go, so it had to be spent inside. So where can you go if you all of a sudden became the richest, one of the few richest men, and there are a lot of richest masses in the US changing day by day almost. When they find gold, when they build railways, when they start building these companies that sell these stuff, there's enormous wealth. But unlike in Europe, they can't go anywhere else. Like in. If you're in Europe, you can go anywhere very quickly, relatively quickly. But when you're stuck in the US you have to spend that money in US and all of a sudden this whole crazy philanthropic stuff happens. And guess what? One of the largest philanthropic stuff that happens is a university called Leland Junior Stanford University. So all of a sudden this whole money, whole availability of people being transferred with railways, people that have different mindset, the crazy ones, people that have international mindset that are the Chinese and everybody else. So all of a sudden this whole place is full of money, full of new people, crazy people and full of international people. And you mix that shake up well for a very long time. Of course, this is a different culture. Of course this is not even replicable inside of us. You can't replicate that in Texas, you can't replicate that in Minnesota. It doesn't have these elements. So all of a sudden, like I got this when I was getting a lot of education in the US on incubation management, et cetera. And I used to get that from Silicon Valley. And the organization I was putting us through at one point said, you should come and teach people in other places in the U.S. i was like, wait, what? Like I am Turkish living in Middle east, why should I come? What makes you think I should come and teach people in Minneapolis or Mississippi or different places? I was like, oh, because you understand the culture better than the people already in the U.S. i was like, ah, okay, now I get it. Because it's a different culture. So all of a sudden this whole, had, the whole stuff was triggered on top of that was triggered by the necessity and urgency of war. The Second World War is the reason why US is what US is today and not because they were very far away from the misery and pain geographically. So nobody attacked us in a way that other countries were demolished. So they had a lot of places that could keep the, keep them safe, but they can just ship out and fight somewhere else. They also needed to do fast, fast technology, faster than anybody else. So all this accumulation of different cultures, diverse cultures, a lot of revenue, a lot of like wealth stuck in the US kind of pushed forward the technology agenda. And Steve Blanks talks about this very neat thing is in species and how the Second World War impacted the technology space, of course, how it became, how it pushed it to become Silicon Valley and everything else. But even before that, the ground was set, everything was ready. A lot of diverse attitudes, a lot of Internet interesting people, a lot of crazy people with roots in different places. So it was already a place of diverse backgrounds and diverse attitudes. So I think that helped a lot. The one diversity that did not happen, and I think, I think still did not happen as much as it should, is gender diversity. And I don't want to go through all this, the, the other he she day dump stuff, but it's, it's basically any gender outs other than men, white men, white Christian men still has been, is not being treated right or equally. Of course the colored people suffered the most, but I mean there's no end to suffering for the colored people. There's no end to suffering for the, for, for women. So that is also changing, that is also becoming something different. And I think that's the diversity that's missing. And I think the founders of our age understand the need to embed that sort of diverse thinking into their operation cycle better than the people who set these companies up in 1950s and 70s and even like 2000s. So it's a different world now. Even companies built in this decade, the last 24 years were very different than the ones that were set before. And the ones that we are seeing now are also very different than the ones that were set 10 years ago. So I think it's moving into the right direction slowly but surely. And that is also going to create a lot of new innovation, new thinking because the more female. Empowered. Empowered females get into the corporate cycle that was 20, 30, 40 years ago. Now they're becoming a lot more experienced. Now there are a lot of university graduates that are ambitious and now they're working on things that white men did not work on, like female health or mindset stuff or wellness. So these were seen to be in the domain of the feminine energy. They were not utilized, they were not developed by. Because the guys did not care about this stuff most, mostly, to be honest. And now it's changing. Femtech is becoming something heals productivity. Technologies are becoming something because it wasn't a thing 20 years ago. Because men usually don't have productivity problems like we, we are giving with a lot of stuff. We can spread it out as much as we can. But that's not the same case with, with women. So all of a sudden this whole idea of the bringing diverse thinking, bringing international thinking, bringing multirational thinking is going to help create new industries for. And I think that's a very, that's, that's very interesting to kind of observe and watch.

I mean, we're seeing huge strides in, you know, the time span of, I don't know, four, five, six months. Crazy things are happening these days. Very impressive. I think this is a, I mean, we only barely touched on the concept and the ideas of culture and stuff like that, right? This could be its own little mini series, just generally not even in the context of corporates and stuff like that. I think it's really interesting to take this historical look because it's often forgotten. Even as Californian learning about the gold rush. You never think, you never connect the dots when you don't talk about it. Right? So it's super interesting to touch on that. I think it's really important that, you know, any, any corporates out there are considering where their culture really plays a role in their future, in their innovation efforts, in the steps that they're trying to take forward or at least just stay where they are in terms of their their market share or their value. I really appreciate it. I think this is super valuable and will certainly come up in the next couple of conversations that we have talking more about corporate innovation and innovative solutions in large organizations.

Awesome. Looking forward. Thanks for the prep. Thanks for intriguing questions.

We'll keep it going. We hope. Today's conversation has offered fresh insights into the world of corporate innovation and sparked new ideas for reimagining what's possible within established organizations. Don't forget to subscribe to Empires of Innovation for deeper dives and more forward thinking discussions. For more about Ozan's work on the innovation space, visit www.mrozonsonemets. com. This is business reimagined for empire's innovation.