The Innovative Leader: Building Systems for Lasting Innovation | Steve Wunker | 570

Who's gonna read your business book? No, really, who is your intended audience? Today I speak with someone who has spent much of his career around thought leadership. When he set out to write his latest book, he knew that clarity around his audience mattered. My guest today is Steve Wunker. The managing director of New Markets Advisors and co-author of the new book, The Innovative Leader. In this episode, we'll explore Steve's new book and how he identified his target audience. We'll also explore how Steve got into the world of business thought leadership alongside two early practitioners, Fred Reichheld and Clayton Christensen. I'm Bill Sherman, and you're listening to Leveraging Thought Leadership. Ready? Let's begin. Welcome to the show, Steve.

Thanks a lot for having me, Bill.

So I always enjoy having a conversation with authors who are on the sort of liminal step of book launch and the conversation, because it's a transition between all of this work that's done reflectively, and then now it's go get the message out. So first off, congratulations on the book.

Thanks. I'm excited for it. But you're right, the hard work begins now.

Absolutely. I mean, and I think a lot of people think it's the manuscript. It's not the manuscript, it's the broadcasting of it. So the book, The Innovative Leader, give me a high-level summary, a sentence or two that sort of frames the context of the book and its core idea, and then we'll get into audience.

All right. This is the book about the how of innovation. How do you make innovation happen in your organization? And how do you become more innovative yourself? It's based on interviews with 50 top innovative leaders, as well as our own experience working with these people for 20 years.

So, why focus on the leadership angle? Because if I go into— the bookstore, hypothetically, or if I go into Amazon, I can find a ton of books on innovation. I can also— some classics and some new. I can find a near infinite number of books on leadership. Why the intersection of the two and why you?

All right. So there are two main reasons there. So First of all, if you think about the gap in the literature, the innovation literature tends to be oriented to people who practice innovation all the time. And it can be fairly specialized. It can also get quite detailed and frankly dry in terms of the step-by-step lists of things that should or should not be done. And conversely, the leadership literature doesn't tend to be very step-by-step. It doesn't tend to be very actionable. It's awfully interesting, but after reading it, you sort of wonder, "What are you going to do?" The gap in the literature was to have a book that tells you about how to make innovation work in your organization without necessitating that you're part of the high priesthood of innovation. You are a leader, you're probably some sort of general manager, and you wanna make it happen in a really actionable way. You don't need fluff, but it also needs to be accessible. So that was the gap in the literature. There's a second part to your question, I think, which is about the target audience.

Yes, and that's exactly where I wanna go.

Cool. So the penny dropped for me, Bill, actually on an airplane flight. When I got seated next to this guy, he was one of the talkers. Yeah, you know, you're, you're there, you got your laptop open, you're trying to do the work, and he wants to talk.

And you're like, I got 30 things to do before this plane lands.

All right, so no, no choice, I, I have to listen. You know, I, I did not really agree to that, but here we are. And this guy went on and on about the car dealerships he owns and the hotels he owns. And it was clear he had a decent-sized business. And he had recently brought in some professor from MIT to lecture to his general managers for a day about innovation. Now, I could have just rolled my eyes and say, "Oh, well, that's not going to get you anywhere." But one of the practices we preach in the book is to listen. And so I listened and I realized, okay, This guy wants to make all these people more innovative without making them professional innovators. He wants to make everybody innovative, not only in the outputs of their organization, but in how they manage innovatively too, that they bring innovation to their management style. And you know, there's a whole lot more of these guys out there than there are Fortune 500 innovation department people. So we need something for this guy.

Well, and quite literally by definition, whether you're talking Global 1000, Fortune 500, et cetera, there's 500 to 1,000 audience for that, right? That's right. Whereas when you say, how do I scale this knowledge for people who need it but may not say, oh, let's build a center of excellence around innovation. Let's, you know, hire some top talent and really take the time to make its own department, right? But how do I equip my people to do this better?

Absolutely. I did a quick check on LinkedIn after that and I found how many people call themselves innovative leader in their title. It's over 30,000.

Which is—

Yeah, that's—

A large number.

500 innovation people.

And with that, it's a little bit buzzy in terms of buzzword as well. What does that mean? What do you do that's different? Is there a way, or, you know, 'cause if I say I am trained in Six Sigma or Lean or Scrum or whatever, or Agile, I have a sense of what the body of knowledge is. With innovative leader, if I just put those as two words in my profile thinking, 'Hey, that's going to help on job placement searches.' Again, what does that mean?

Absolutely. There is a need for a book on the topic when there wasn't. And moreover, given that my main business is having a consulting firm, there's more opportunity there for consulting support from experts who have been there, done that, many, many times versus people who maybe they needed help when they first started out running a corporate innovation department or, you know, some sort of disruptive innovation incubator. But after a while, they don't need that help. If we've done our job decently, they have learned what they need to learn and they can go off and do it.

The model often for consulting should be the intervention, but it's not the lifetime move-in with the U-Haul truck or the equivalent of pharmaceuticals where you'll be on this pill the rest of your life, right? We're not in the pill selling, it's the problem solving.

Right. And particularly having a boutique consulting firm, that is not our business model. I've certainly seen the other side of the coin at big firms. You do want a very long-term relationship. But if that existed throughout all of our clients here constantly, then we couldn't function.

So let's jump back to the plane flight for a moment. You're there in 6C or wherever you are on the plane. You're hypothetically as a hostage.

They didn't take account of the conversational quotient, but yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Hopefully you got the upgrade on it, right? But so you're on the flight. When does the epiphany strike you? Is it after the conversation, during the conversation that this should be a book? Let's dig there for a moment.

It was about two-thirds of the way through, and he had told me about the professor, and I stepped back and I realized, all right, he's talking about an underlying need here where the professor was not a solve. That was an interesting day. People high-fived at the end of it. They asked what's for dinner and everything reverted to exactly the same way it was beforehand.

Well, it's really hard to change the world with Keynote anyway.

That's right. That's right. So I started asking him about why, knowing that I was inviting myself to longer responses. And I heard a little bit about what those motivations were, that he really didn't know what else to do. He thought it would be a good idea. He thought it would be an interesting time. And again, I tried to take my own medicine. So Jobs to Be Done is one of my books. And he was basically telling me about his jobs that he was trying to get done. And he happened to hire the professor to do this, but I realized there were much more effective ways to get that job done too.

And that introduces, and I want to explore for a moment, and we'll take a digression here into your story. You mentioned jobs to be done, and I cannot but think of the body of work innovation with Clayton Christensen, who I know you worked with. But also, I know even earlier to that, you worked with Fred Reichold on Net Promoter Score as well. So I'm going to ask the question broadly. How did you get into the world of thought leadership? Can you share a little bit of that story? Because not everybody gets into the world of thought leadership with the, some of the marquee names that you did. How did that come to be, and what was the experience like?

I think I was lucky and then enjoyed being in that spot where I was lucky. I started out as a consultant at Bain Company in the '90s, and I got staffed for 50% of my time working with Fred Reichheld, who, as you say, he originated Net Promoter Score. He did a lot of things around the economics of customer loyalty, and I helped him research his second book called Loyalty Rules. And then I worked with Bain's CEO to research a book on professional service management too. So I really liked doing that. I knew that wasn't the only thing I wanted to do, but I did really enjoy that. And then I also saw, particularly for Fred, how he was able to monetize that for Bain in codifying certain practices, but also really serving as a, a door opener to new sorts of clients where they might not have had a relationship before. So I ended up years later working with Clay Christensen to turn his writings about disruptive innovation into consulting practices at his firm Innosight. And Clay being Clay, he kept on writing, and I collaborated with him on a few things. And I really enjoyed doing that. And I saw through that as well just how powerful it can be to distill all this complexity of project work down into a fairly simple narrative, which Clay, by the way, was a master at doing. So I spun out New Markets Advisors in 2009, and I realized we needed a book to represent the sort of things that we do as a way to distinguish ourselves, as a way to codify it in ways that are replicable, and to show clients here in very concrete terms is what we do. So I did that and That was the first book, and now I'm on the fourth book. So I guess it's gone reasonably well, or I just am very persistent.

If I think about Fred Reichholdt, and I think about Clay Christensen as well, one of the things that comes to my mind is the clarity of the questions they asked, that they could distill a lot of insight into a powerful question. So the ultimate question in Fred Reichholdt was, "Will you refer others?" Right? And that leads to NPS. Jobs to be done also echoes that of the, no, no, no, no, don't talk about, you know, a lot of the fluff. Let's get down to the substance. What does the client or the customer want done? And let's define that very, very specifically, right? How, if at all, did working with them influence how you think whether as a consultant or as an author in terms of framing thought leadership and reaching your audience?

It's a very interesting question. Fred and Clay were a little different in how they arrived at their theories. Fred was very inductive from the data, looking for the key levers of economic success. He found that customer and employee loyalty, by the way, too, were key drivers. And they wanted to find out what were the key determinants of that loyalty. So very classic Bain. Let's start with the data and then work our way up to a theory.

Mm-hmm.

Clay looked for anomalies through observation. He wanted to see things that were surprising, and then he wanted to create circumstance-based theories that explained why this happened. So disruptive innovation was the thing that he first became really known for, but there were many other instances of his doing that as well. Now, intriguingly, once they both settled on their theory, then it was a similar process of, okay, let's find some stories where we can look in depth at did it really happen this way? And they did the quantitative analysis too, but they really wanted to understand qualitatively Is that the whole story? And of course, that's not the whole story. There's other things going on too. But rather than just rely on data and say, okay, we have this correlation, therefore we have causation, they wanted to dig very deep and really understand the workings of the model inside an organization. Did that apply?

Well, and when I think of Clayton Christensen, I often think of not only the books, but the case studies, right?— and that really in-depth, here's the problem, let's tear it apart and analyze it, right? So you're on book number 4. How did you approach Innovative Leader? And was it data-led? Was it sort of context-led? You're off the plane now, if you will, right? And you're drafting. How does this book come to be and what questions are you asking?

So, I'd break that into two halves as well. There's the overall argument of the book and then there's the way we went about it. Right.

Absolutely.

At a very high level, the argument of the book is that innovation is not about inspiration and lightning strikes. It's about systems. If you have an effective system, you can be innovative both for yourself and for the organization. That I was highly convinced of before. So, I knew we were going to be writing about systems, not about just, I had this great idea in the shower. And I had some senses about the subjects. I knew culture had to be a subject. I knew we had to have innovation strategy as a subject, but just at a very high level. What I also realized though, having worked in a lot of innovative organizations over the years, it's the virtue of being a consultant, you get to see a lot of those, is that there are many different styles of innovative leadership. So rather than just saying, "Well, this is what I think," I should go out and talk to people who are really, really different. And so we surveyed, interviewed, 50 top innovative leaders, and they ranged from Satya Nadella at Microsoft or Chip Bergh, CEO of Levi's, to people in government, to heads of nonprofit or of a school, or entrepreneurial unicorns, or even an entrepreneurial dry cleaner. You can be an innovative leader in a lot of different walks of life. So there I was really trying to be inductive, and yeah, I had a set of questions, but I wanted to hear what they said, and let's distill out some of the things that I may not have thought to put in there. And certainly we got that surface too.

So on building that list of interviewees, right, of 50, some of those are, okay, can I get time on someone's calendar, right? Right. But like you said, also to an innovative dry cleaner, how do you build that? Is it based on experience and contacts or did you start building out a list or did you ask for Who's in it? Did you ask for referrals of who do you know who's innovative? Because I think part of that is how do you get that surface of interviews and the right surface becomes essential for a book like this.

Well, we knew we wanted to be global and we needed a degree of gender balance. And then we didn't want to just be about large corporations. So there are some that of course you're going to take. If you get somebody to offer, well, you know, get a little bit of Satya's time to answer a few questions, well, yeah, of course I'm going to go for that, right? Yeah. The dry cleaner, it's sort of, you, you know when you see it. And it's an advantage of, again, being a consultant. You have a little project with this. We don't get a lot of dry cleaners calling us up asking if You could do project work, but here's a guy who wanted to do something, had some really grand plans, spent half a day with him and understood his operation. And he was really rethinking very long-held tenets of his industry and he was being extremely successful doing it. And I realized, all right, this is a guy who has a story. I don't care what he does, dry cleaning, it could be anything. He has brought fresh thinking to an industry that hasn't changed in my lifetime.

Yeah, I mean, dry cleaning feels like one of the more stagnant ones. Over the course of my life, I remember my dad would go and drop off his dry cleaning, and it's not that different many times between then and now, right? When I was a kid. If you're enjoying this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, please make sure to subscribe. If you'd like to help spread the word about our podcast, please leave a 5-star review at ratethispodcast.com/LTL and share it with your friends. We're available on Apple Podcasts and on all major listening apps, as well as thoughtleadershipleverage.com/podcast. Let's talk about the book itself. You have a couple different options in that. It could be short, light, and something easy to digest. And you made a conscious choice in terms of what the experience of the book would be like, and you talked about that with me. So can you describe the book as a book and an artifact in terms of what's inside?

That's right. So let me tell you about the journey through the 3 other books briefly, because I, I learned some lessons along the way. So my first book was a super in-depth researched book about— called Capturing New Markets, about 70,000 words and 12 very interdependent chapters. I was so proud of that book. I still am proud of that book, but very seldom would people get through all 70,000 words. Even folks who called us up saying, hey, I looked at your book and I'd love you to do some work with us. And you'd use an example from Chapter 2, and that they hadn't read it. So then the next 2 books were shorter, about 45,000 and 40,000 words. And that worked, and they sold more and got read more. But people would also say, "Well, you didn't talk about this. Yeah, you didn't talk about that." And that is true because you have to do a trade-off. When I got to this topic, I knew for one, it was very hard to make a short, meaty book because leadership is such a a huge topic. There are a lot of different angles. And we want to talk about how very different personalities and contexts, people could still be innovative leaders in those contexts. So that created some length too. Ultimately, what we did was we created a narrative first two-thirds of the book and a very tabular, listy back third of the book that would serve as a resource to people for years and years and years. So far, and we're still, we're talking here a little bit before publication, the indicators I've got from people looking pre-publication is that they really like that. They like the readability and the accessibility, but then they also like that it is as well a reference book that if they just look up in the index, they have this issue, they can often find an exact match for it. And there's something that's an infographic or needy to respond.

Or a tool or something that they can apply, right? So it's almost like the conceptual book plus the field guide or the toolkit bundled in one.

That's right. And it's 57,000 words, so it's not short, but that's what it was required. It, by the way, is a lot more work to write than some of the shorter things too, because you had to get all that meat in the back third and support it with the narrative in the front two-thirds. So yeah, I guess be careful what you sign up for, but I do think it's a better product.

So as you mentioned, we're pre-publication while recording. Talk to me about book launch and how you intend to get this book out into the world because if I go back to your seatmate when you were the ambushee in the conversation,— you weren't necessarily— he wasn't cruising through the airport bookstore looking for a book on innovative leader. How does your audience find this book and how are you getting it out into the world?

You are exactly right that they are not looking for the new edition on the shelf of that. So back when I was cool, which was many, many years ago, I used to listen to a lot of indie bands. And there's a lot of great indie music out there that nobody has ever heard of. So that taught me the lesson of to get big, you've got to be good, but a lot more people are good than are big. The marketing of what you do is so critical. So for this book, we need to go both broad and deep. We need to go broad in hitting people where they're at. Which is typically social media is what they're going to be consuming. Hard to get them otherwise. Or in speech events. So keynotes at industry conferences, or perhaps I give a speech at a corporation and they're one of the attendees. Great. And then depth with podcasts, more in-depth articles, occasionally working papers, maybe some additional pieces that will follow based on innovative leaders in different walks of life. That's a way to get people to engage in a much more lengthy, long format sort of way and really get them engaged. You need to get both. Look, Clay's first book, "The Innovator's Dilemma," is a fantastic book, and it took 2 years for that to get— popular.

Absolutely. And that points to one of the things which has been true and continue to be true, that many business books sell more in year 2 and 3, to your indie band point, than they do in the first 60 or 90 days after launch, right? There's sort of a momentum that needs to be built where someone says, "Hey, this is good. Check this out." They tell a friend or they gift it. And that sort of thing, whether to a colleague or to their directs, and say, let's think about it this way. And so you've gotta stay on message for much longer, I think, than a PR campaign for a book lasts.

Oh, for sure, right? The PR campaign might be 4 months and it could take you a year or two. You need to do that whole media mix and do some unglamorous things, right? The indie bands are opening act for some, like, '80s has-been band maybe, and they can do 2 or 3 songs and that's it. But they're out there doing it because, yeah, that's a way to get out the message.

And if you're metaphorically getting your message out by playing the equivalent of a dive bar and you have a small audience, you take those audiences and you keep persistent and passionate with it because what you don't know is who's in the audience and where you're gonna get someone to spark and go because you're, and this goes back to loyalty and engagement, your level of engagement with the content is the ceiling for any audience that you have. So the challenge is just to keep it fresh, not only 90 days, but for 2, 3, 4 years as if you were saying it for the first time.

Yep. And to get there, by the way, you need to play those dive bars first a little bit. I find with a new speech, I need to do it a good dozen times before I've really internalized it and I can go from thinking about what I'm going to say to looking very closely at what's working and what doesn't, fine-tuning it, and then having something that can be replicable. So by the time you're on the big keynote stage, then you've got something which is truly polished.

Well, and we're bouncing around on metaphors here from indie bands, but same thing that a stand-up comic would do is just do a set at a local club and try out a few pieces and start building it and say what works for different audiences and then just really tighten it down piece after piece until you get it under control. It's interesting because you would think having written the book you'd have the mastery of the content, but that's an entirely different delivery format than it is on stage, right?

Well, that's right. And to be really good at marketing a book or any kind of thought leadership, you have to do something that is very antithetical often to who you are, which is make your very nuanced, beautiful point so darn simple.

Yep.

The ultimate question, the book that popularized Net Promoter Score was actually Fred Reichheld's third book. His first two books were much more complex and nuanced and wonderful books, but not remotely as popular as The Ultimate Question and NPS. So I learned that lesson from Fred. You make it simple, then people might engage with the other nuanced stuff that you wrote, but you've gotta have the simple hook.

And I think of that in terms of net promoter score. I think of— since we've been in the world of consulting, trusted advisor, for example, right? With Green Maester and Galway, right? So there, the ability to distill a very big concept into either a couple of words or an equation, something that you can share in 30 seconds and someone go, "Hmm, that's interesting. Haven't thought about it that way." tell me more. The challenge is to frame it, especially in a noisier world, because when Fred Reichold was writing Ultimate Question, it was a much less noisy world than it is now, right? Now you may have 2, 3 seconds at most to capture that first as someone scrolling through a social feed. And that's hard to distill all the nuance, like you said, of your thinking And you're like, wow, I've dumbed it down to the absolute most reductive possible. But that's the entry point for a conversation.

I use the analogy in the book with regard to instilling innovation behaviors of being a little bit like Ronald Reagan, who would say the same 3 things over and over and over again, a limited government, strong defense, traditional values. You could say that, what, 40 years after he was president. Yeah, that's what Reagan stood for.

Yeah, that's a brand.

Yeah, you need to be Ronald Reagan, the great communicator, and just say the same stuff over and over again until you're tired of doing it. I have not always been so great about that, but I've learned that lesson the good way and the hard way as well. Keep it simple and be consistent.

So we've talked about book launch. Let's go give you the magic wand. It's 2, 3 years from now. If you were to define success, both for the book as well as for the idea of the innovative leader, how does the landscape change because of the book?

So I want this to be a go-to resource for the 30,000+ people who think of themselves as innovative leaders or aspiring innovative leaders. And I want the book to be on their bookshelf for years and years to come because there is a lot of content in there. If that is the case, then commercially the projects will flow. There will be a proportion of people who say, "Okay, I need help defining our innovation aspiration to revamp our project review meetings," whatever it might be. There are definitely service offerings in there. That is not a problem. So to get there, I need to be interacting with a broad enough sample of people who will refer the book to others. And then of course, people actually have to refer the book. It has to be good enough to refer the book. So I'm assuming that it is. And so then I work backwards to what does that mean about where I need to be? So I need to be on keynote stages. I need to be giving talks to corporations. I need to have short thought pieces on focus topics that are accessible and that circulate broadly around different email chains and corporates. So if that's the end goal, then you sort of work back to what are the strategies you're going to take to get there.

And I think that piece on strategy is often one of the things that gets neglected when I see someone go into the book writing process. You know, I'm going to write the book and then rainbows and unicorns happen after publication, right? And it's like, not so much, right?

No, I haven't seen a whole lot of those. But yeah, you need to think about what's the end goal. For my book Jobs to Be Done, it was very different. Clay was coming out with a book on jobs. I had done Clay's first consulting projects on Jobs to Be Done. And I saw his manuscript and it was all about why Jobs to Be Done is a really important innovation methodology for you to use, but didn't actually say, here's how you go deploy it. I wrote the companion book basically that says, here's how you go deploy it. And my strategy there was for a decent percentage of people who read Clay's book and say, yeah, that's great, now what do I do? Then they pick up my book and they figure out now what do they do. And there are a percentage of those who want professional help in doing it. And here we are.

Yep. So it's essentially the companion and field guide again to the theory, right? And I think that's a useful distinction. There is the theory or the knowledge transfer in terms of what's the issue we're talking about, what's the fresh perspective that's being offered. And then the second step is, okay, I'm with you, whether that took me a chapter or a book to sort of get with you. Now, how do I apply this and give me the resources so that I have the confidence to implement it or know when I need to raise my hand and get help?

That's right. And you need to know what heavy lifting is being done by your book, what heavy lifting might be done by adjunctive resources that are on the book website, for instance, or with your firm, and then what you need to hire you or your firm or your associates for consulting help to really go make happen.

So as we begin to wrap up, Steve, I want to ask you a question. You've shared your journey of thought leadership, book number 4 on its way, as well as shadowing some of the names in thought leadership who have made a big impact with ideas. Here's my question for you. Based on what you know today, what advice would you give your younger self to do either more or less of when it comes to thought leadership?

Great question. So the number one lesson I've learned, it's probably come out through this conversation, is keep it simple. Yes, you can have all the nuance in the background. You probably should. But keep your core message simple and then be consistent about repeating that core message. Even if you think your core audience has heard it again and again, keep saying it. That's, I'd say, probably the most important one. The second one is more of a business lesson, which is to know your service offering and construct that core message in a way that dovetails cleanly with your service offering. So people don't just say, wow, that's a great idea, but they look at chapter 3 and say, okay, that's a really neat framework. Now how do I go apply this to my really complex value chain? And here we are, we can help you do that. I mean, you try to expose this stuff in a book, but there's only so far you can go. And for people who have the budget, they're going to want professional help to actually help get it done.

We've been talking about bands before, and I think a great place to close on this is whether it's your favorite indie band or your favorite classic band, or today, if you go to a concert, you want to hear them play the big songs, right? And that's the same of if you're on stage delivering a message. They come to hear the greatest hits. And that's what they're looking for in some ways. Might be a little bit of a remix, might be a little bit different perspective, but I love that of staying on message and don't be afraid to repeat the big idea. Thank you, Steve.

You bet. It's certainly a joy to talk. Yeah.

Good luck on the book launch.

Thanks.

Okay, you've made it to the end of the episode, and that means you're probably someone deeply interested in thought leadership. Want to learn even more? Here are 3 recommendations. First, check out the back catalog of our podcast episodes. There are a lot of great conversations with people at the top of their game in thought leadership, as well as just starting out. Second, subscribe to our newsletter that talks about the business of thought leadership. And finally, feel free to reach out to me. My day job is helping people with big insights take them to scale through the practice of thought leadership. Maybe you're looking for strategy, or maybe you want to polish up your ideas, or even create new products and offerings. I'd love to chat with you. Thanks for listening.