Why innovators and product managers should talk

Welcome, welcome, welcome everybody from all around the world. Thank you so much for posting in the chat and engaging with us. I hope you continue to engage with us for the next hour of our Strategizer webinar session. Thank you very much for joining us from all around the world. My name is Lucy. I am head of content and marketing here at Strategizer and I am based out of Melbourne, Australia. It's 11pm here at the moment, so I'm really glad to be awake first and foremost and joining all your lovely people from all around the world. My goal as as host of Weaponizer is by the end of my tenure, hope to meet someone virtually from every single time zone from all around the world. It looks like we're pretty close at this point with people from Peru, from Sweden, from the US the West and the east coast, someone from Vietnam and Pak. Done so somewhere closer to my time zone. So thank you very much for joining us from all around the world. So I would like to get started and introduce everyone to two of our guest speakers here today. First is Alex Osterwada, founder and CEO of Strategizer. And joining us as a very special guest is Alex Adamopoulos, who is the founder and CEO of Emergen. So today I'd like to get started by giving you guys a little bit more stats and explaining why it is that we're here today and why it is that we're speaking to everyone. So this is one of the stats that we typically like to use as Strategizer and one that I think is really poignant of our time and that is that 78%. So this is out of a McKinsey research paper. 70% of firms rank innovation as a top three priority. We here Strategizer of does. This is our bread and butter and what we do. We try to teach and educate and share process and thinking around innovation. And nearly 40% of CEOs don't actually think their companies will be economically viable in 10 years time. Now that's a really striking number for CEO of a company to think that they no longer will make money in 10 years time for even large multinational organizations. So why is that the case? And this is really the context of why it is that we're talking to you guys here today because you know, only 20% of organizations are really set to scale to be able to innovate at scale and to be able to build transformation into their organizations. So that's the premise of our conversation before we get started. I like Alex and the Two Alexes. So just to save myself a little bit of tongue twister, I will now refer to them as Alex O and Alex A. Both a very, very long sess surnames. So I'd like them to speak a little bit about why it is they're here today and talk a little bit about the alliance as well.

So. Well, I think we're going to get into the content in a bit, but I think it's very exciting to do this just a week after we, we announced our alliance. And I think Alex, Alex A is going to have to take all the credit of having actually the idea how these two organizations kind of fit together, Strategizer and Emergent. So maybe just a quick kind of conversation starter. Alex, where did that insight come from, that Strategizer with innovation and emerging, you know, big in technology, product management transformation could be a good fit. How did you get that insight?

Thanks Alex and thanks for having me on on the webinars. Good to see so many people from all over, as Lucy said. Yeah, I think one of the key drivers for that was if we go back to the days of the agile manifesto in 2001, by the time we started emerging in 2009, we made assumptions. We made assumptions that people were using agile practices inside their organization quite well. That was a very naive assumption to think that because what we learned was although the IT departments were introducing agile practices, you know, agility as we talk about it today, was not even something on the radar. Same thing happened when we started talking about the whole shift from project to product centric organizations. And I believe it was 2015 and we published some data, we had some research and since then we've been following the stats and same thing, Alex, over the last nine plus years, now almost nine years, I would say the same thing has occurred. We have not seen the, the take up of modern product practices across most organizations. And one thing we learned, and this is when you and I started talking, was there was a huge disconnect the way product management was happening inside companies and the way product managers were working, although in some companies very effectively, they weren't necessarily connected to some of the people in the organization driving this thing we call innovation and where the big funding decisions were being made around the next idea. It was a trickle down effect and many times product organizations didn't have the sphere of influence or the ability to change direction. And that's when you and I started talking about how do you, how do you connect the dots?

So what do you think we're going to be able to change together going forward, bringing these two worlds together. Because we already had some conversations, I'd love to hear your vision today, what you think we can bring to the table.

Well, I think it starts with what work you did with Strategizer when you developed this whole Explore Exploit thinking and model. One thing that we learned through using, you know, your, your ip, your intellectual property, your practices, how our organization has really learned a lot from the work that you guys have done is we learned that we're really good at the efficiency and sustaining innovation topics. You know, this is really where we've done our, our best work, even though we have played in the transformative space. And a lot of that is obviously due to some of the work Strategizer has produced and helped us. Where we really go in and do our best work is we help companies on those two other areas of innovation. And so what's natural here is my perspective has been, well, all three areas of innovation need to be connected. You can't just disconnect them and expect that the organizations that we serve are going to be maybe the best they can be, which might be, again, a naive thing, but there are many good examples of businesses doing great at some of these areas. But I think we both share the vision that together, the Explore Exploit spectrum can really be leveraged well with the two kinds of things that we bring to the table.

So, Lucy, maybe get us started on kind of the content we're looking at today because we're specifically going to drive into this whole idea of exploring Exploit, but from the angle of innovation, you know, to product management and transformation. So maybe get us started with that. What are we going to do today? What's our table of contents?

Thank you everybody for participating. Really engaged and lively input. So thank you very much. So please don't put your phone away and don't log off Mentee, because we'll be coming back to these polls really soon. A little bit, a few more times actually, throughout the webinar as well. So next then, topic that we'll be talking about is why innovators and product managers should talk. So again, we have another part on our topic, so if you can please take out your phone again, we'll be asking a question related to. Let me try and pull this up. Related to the topic as well. So can everyone still see the mentimeter?

We can. Perfect.

Great. So here is a hot or not topic. So typically hot or not topics are, you know, statements sometimes that people might find a little bit challenging. And we try to pick a particular point of view and get everyone in the webinar to give us a point of view as not. So this particular statement, product managers should actually lead innovation. In the previous exercise, in the previous question, people have already given their point of view on whether they should be in the same role or they should actually be separate. Not necessarily silo collaborating. But do you think product managers should also leave innovation within your organization as well? So do you think this is hot or not? And I'd love to get both Alex's point of view on this as well.

So I'll let Alex. Alex, a start, because you already talked about it a little bit from the framing. I think it's cool that this question actually came up first. Alex, hot or not?

Oh, it's definitely hot. I mean, I. I am. I'm a big fan of this. I think in. In organizations where people that are either heads of product or have that CPO title or have been chartered with a remit to look after product, they should be part of that conversation. And to some extent, we can define the word lead. Lead is one of those words, like, what do you mean by lead? Do they make all the funding decisions? Maybe they don't make all of them, but are they at the table? Absolutely. I think this is one of the ways you help solve some of these disconnects, especially in larger companies. You know, recently, one of our product directors, Ashley Underwood, and our cto, Fred Hegstrom, they co authored a paper they called Theory Versus Reality in Product Management. And they kind of debunked some of the things that go on in organizations. And this is where I think it's a good read. And by the way, you can, you can download the paper on emergent.com but what's really good about it is they talk about the role and the responsibility of solid product leaders. And, you know, without taking you through the paper, because that's not why we're here. I think one of the key things they say up front, which is excellent, is good product leaders have a massive impact on what happens throughout the organization versus being relegated to here, here's the money, go build this thing. You know, they're at the table earlier and they're helping influence that decision.

I love that framing. And, Lucy, if I can quickly take over the screen for a second, because I want to show something that goes to our insight paper, so maybe you can just spotlight this for a second so I 100% agree with you. Alex, I'd add one thing to the conversation, which is, again, back to something I mentioned before, there are different types of innovation. So in our insight paper we make explicit that the more we're to the right towards the red bubble exploit, the more we're in efficiency, innovation, better processes, sustaining innovation is already new products. That is innovation. And it requires that kind of innovator's mindset. As somebody here, Andrew, I think Andrew Smith or so said, well, the product should be customers of innovation. I think it's actually better to say, well, that should be owned by product. But then the more we go to the left. Here's where I'd make a distinction. When we're talking about future business models. If it's owned by a part of the organization that is within the existing business model, you'll actually be tempted to kill the new looking business model. Right. Because completely different products that might actually cannibalize the old ones or have different revenue streams. So I'd say part of the innovation should live with product. I think that's hot. But then I also believe we do need to create other parts of the organization that are not constrained as much by the current business model or the current products. And it's his ability to actually understand that we have a whole portfolio of different types of innovation that is going to help the company get, get into the, you know, kind of next 5, 10, 20 years. So I liked it when we had these conversations around the different types of innovation and tying part of that back, back to product management, but also acknowledging there are different types of innovation that need to probably have different people and also different constraints and different incentives. Right. Because otherwise there might be a little bit of a clash and the antibodies of the existing business model will kill the new business models. You see what I mean?

Yeah, completely. And I think that's, as one, one of our guests just said, it's very well said. I think that it's a good explanation for why the model can work. I also believe that, you know, if you look at some of the, the fundamental disciplines of doing product management in support of this model, they work like this. In other words, we're not here to teach people how to do product management. This isn't a course on that today. Right. We're making assumptions that many people that have joined are either in the role, touch the role, have a good knowledge of these things. So I think it's very well said.

The one thing I'd like to ask you, because this is something I really learned from you when we started our conversations and made this alliance a lot more concrete, is we talked about you know, exploit, explore, and specifically about product management and your vision that there is this kind of gap, right, between innovation and exploit. And we had this conversation that it's not just about where this stuff lives, but it's about the dual mindset. But you brought in this word transformation, and I love to hear from you bringing together innovation and product management and innovation in products, for example. How does the word kind of transformation play into that? Because then again, if it's just like that, without explanations, another one of these buzzwords, but you have very specific explanation of why this is important and how we bring this into organizations is one thing that emergent does really well.

Yeah, and you're right, I think transformation is another sensitive word. So just talking about that, look, I think for any organization, they're not going to disagree that what really drives transformation, the way we talk about transformation is a mindset change. And one of the key things that we try to do with organizations and the teams we touch is, is get them to think differently about the work. This isn't about whether they're using a particular methodology or a set of practices or whose book they read. All those things matter. But ultimately it's getting to think differently about the work. So I mentioned, for example, the Agile Manifesto earlier back in 2001. There are, there are things out there called Product Manifesto and Mindset Manifesto. That's, that's not relevant. But what I would say is there are, there are some key principles we emphasize when we talk about transformation. And the reason I leveraged or referenced the Agile manifestos, because they use this word over in the middle of their sentences. And I'll explain what I mean in a second. For example, right. We will always emphasize organizing by products and value streams over organizing by function and department. Right? We'll always say funding capability for the long term over funding short term projects. We talk about competing for value propositions over competing for budget. Okay. We talk about governing for discovery over governing for certainty. And then we always talk about cultivating a culture of empowerment over cultivating a culture of control. There's no one that's going to disagree with those things. And they're not easy to implement. But the reason they matter is because that's what drives transformation. When if you look at the word, you're assuming someone's done a complete 180, turned in the other direction and gone somewhere better, not a 360, they don't end up back where they started, they end up in a different place. And the, and the change should stick. So that starts with how you think. And that starts by applying certain disciplines and practices that help people start to believe those things because they're seeing, you know, immediate benefit or near term immediate benefits. So the word, the, the reason the word over matters in those descriptions is because it's not saying instead of, you know, we recognize that companies are still going to do the other things and have to do the other things in some cases, whether they're larger organizations or they have legacy practices, but they can move slower or even at pace towards something different. And that's why that matters for us when we talk about transformation.

Lucy, what do we have next in our hot or not? Let's get the participants to share their opinion. So Alex A and I are not the only ones speaking here.

Absolutely. So the next question we'd like to ask everyone, and this is actually quite poignant because a lot of people have, have actually already started referring to this. Do, does everyone actually need to be an innovator? Do all product managers also need to be in some part innovators as well? Or is this something that needs to be a professionalized service that you should have professional innovators? So there's a couple people in the Q and A that have asked exactly that question. Does everybody need to be an innovator? And if so, does it mean that you need to have professionalized innovators in, in your organization as well? So I'd love to get everyone's opinion on this.

It's interesting how we do navigate always a little bit at the middle. So we have, we have people are on one side or not. Right for the hot is not. This is a topic I'm extremely passionate about and I have very strong beliefs. Again, world is obviously not black and white, but I'm just going to kick us off on something and a little anecdote. So I remember being in a meeting with senior leadership of media company and the CEO was saying, oh, Alex, I get it. So I need to infect everybody with the innovation virus. I said, not really. What you actually need is a space. And I'm not talking a physical space, but a mindset space with the right processes and metrics where anybody can innovate. But saying, not everybody has to, but those who want to, you should let them start. And you should have a process with the right metrics that allow teams to get started, maybe with some funding. That's just time. And then you have very clear metrics of how you're going to kill the project if they don't bring the right evidence to the table. So my belief is actually more we need to let everybody start if they. Because ideas can come from anywhere. So I don't really believe in that aspect of the professional innovator. We can get back to that afterwards. Everybody should be able to innovate, but you have a very clear process of how they need to proceed, what kind of evidence they need to bring to the table to actually get funding over time. So that's my kind of take on everybody needs to be an innovator. I believe everybody should be allowed to be an innovator and then you have clear processes so they can prove they are innovators or not. Alex, what's your take on the topic?

Well, I agree with, I agree with your viewpoint and how you articulated it. I guess again, it comes back to what do we mean by innovator? So, you know, does everybody get the right to spend money and write a check? Does everyone get the right to decide that this is the next position we should take in the market? Don't think we would say that's true. So I, I guess it's defining what we mean by innovator and innovate in the context of an organization. But your point about creating an environment or a sandbox where people have the freedom to do these things, don't disagree with that at all. But I do think it has to come with a set of definitions so people under understand their boundaries or their sphere of influence. Otherwise, like the word transformation or like the word agile, we end up having misconceptions about what we mean when we say these things.

I, I knew it's a good idea for us to enter into a partnership because I always learn something every time we speak. So I love this framing of actually the roles and responsibilities in innovation. And it made me realize, I just learned something now that the way you framed it is interesting because then we can say product managers are guides in innovation, so they don't necessarily need to come up with the ideas. Right. That's the part that can come from anywhere. But they are professional in product management or there are innovation coaches that are professional in accompanying the team, or there are portfolio managers that help orchestrate so that some people can make the investments. Right. So we're getting clear on the roles and responsibilities in innovation and product management through this kind of conversation. So I like that framing. Really interesting. Yeah.

And we still, again, we still are challenged by the reality that at least this is what current research tells us. Whether you're reading, you know, a recent report that McKinsey published or, you know, I was looking actually at some research. I had, I had the, I had the privilege and the honor of spending time on a somewhat frequent basis with Clayton Christensen before he passed away. One, one of those reasons was we were both from Boston and another reason was we ended up in the same location once or twice a year. And you know, he often talked about how nearly 3/4 or 75% of product management investment in products fails commercially. You know, and we see similar data today. And this is going back, I don't know, at least five or seven years with him when he kind of published that research. And we still know that 3/4 of organizations today still struggle implementing these things. And one of the reasons, by the way, is lack of clarity on what we mean by certain terms, on what we mean by the definitions of words. And we throw the words out there, but we don't really provide enough structure around them. So people aren't always clear on what we want them to do.

I love that. And the idea of a shared and clear language is something that's really important to us at strategizers. That's why we come up with visual tools. So we take it out of the world of definitions into something where you can make an artifact, right? A business model, business model canvas, or your value proposition, you can make that explicit. So you don't have to just rely on the definitions, but you actually bring in visual tools to manage that process better. Right? And I think that's what's interesting. In the conversations we're having, this stuff we're doing together, we're refining the practice of these different domains and showing how they come together with the right tools and processes and the definitions of the terms.

So there's a really interesting question that I think is quite relevant here. So I always says that the question is we've created innovation pipeline within our organization to go through different phases to find out if there's new opportunities to add business value to the organization. And he talks about is there a way for us to embed more agile or rapid processes. So that's a, it's a. Again, I feel like agile and rapid is another catch all term sometimes. It'd be really interesting to get your perspective on what is that definition and how can it be applied in helping companies build out that innovation pipeline.

If I can jump in, Alex, I would say I love the idea of innovation pipeline. We sometimes refer to it as an idea pipeline as well. I think, I think organizations benefit from having these things again, where do they live is important and who gets to talk about them is also important how they practically play out. You know, this, this is where I think some of the, some of the work Strategizer has done with things as simple as the business model canvas or the volume value proposition canvas. This is where you can take some of these tools and you can start testing, you can start experimenting, you can start publishing and sharing for a wider group of consensus or agreement to look at what do these ideas mean? But again, who's doing that work? Who's publishing that work? In many cases, you would expect good product leaders to be involved in doing that and therefore they should have some level of influence or you know, at the table to help push these ideas along. Practically, you know, testing ideas is something again, I think most people on this call are very familiar with. But being able to take an idea pipeline and have some environment, maybe to Alex's earlier point, and a sandbox or an environment where people can innovate or test, would love to see that become more of a standard thing. And especially in larger companies.

What do you think the aspect I would add to that framing like 100 on board with everything you said and in particular, again, back to the roles and responsibilities, who does what? I remember somebody in one of the workshops I was talking about innovation, how it lives in companies, was asking, oh, so do we need innovators to come up with the ideas? No, you don't actually. The best ideas come from wherever in the organization, but that's maybe just the starting point that feeds the funnel. And then you can let the teams, you know, those who came up with the ideas, do some of that work. But here's the thing, when we bring in the processes, the first time you do this, you're not very good, right? So there is something there to be said about professionals that accompany the process, right? Innovation coaches, product managers, product owners, agile coaches. So we need to actually start to get a bit more explicit around those roles and responsibilities. And when we say we're going to make processes more agile, we're just looking at a sliver of the roles and responsibilities there. So this one thing I realized, starting talking to you and other people at Emergent Alex, so you can do iterative testing and learning at a micro level, you have an idea of a new product or feature, but if you're learning stuff and you have no mandate to kill that product or that feature, it's not going to happen, right? So an innovation pipeline or feature pipeline or whatever with Agile working can actually remain innovation theater. If there is not what we talk about now, this Dual mindset where there's a connection back to the decision makers.

Right.

So people who decide on funding. Right. Who's that? Is it the teams? Well, maybe not. So we're looking at this from a very high level ideological point of view where we throw things in. But I believe this is becoming a profession where we can be very explicit about roles and responsibilities and need to design those into the organization. And that's where, just working with you on the Insight paper, I realized some of those links, those bridges that are broken today so an innovation pipeline can look great on paper, still not work because they're broken links between decision makers, funding mechanisms and those that actually innovate. Yeah.

And you know, you remind me of something that we did a few years ago with an organization where we, they had this idea pipeline. Again, this was a very large enterprise and what they, what they wanted to do is they wanted to figure out how do, what do we fund and what do we do next? Because all the ideas look really good and we don't know what to do. So which idea should we, should we go after? And in this specific scenario, we were able to get stakeholders from all the areas of the business that played a part in bringing a product to life. So you had finance, marketing, sales people from all areas of the business. And we grouped them into teams and we were able to run an event with them over three days. It almost became like a bit of a Dragon's Den or Shark Tank thing where they were able to pitch their ideas in a very creative way and then gain consensus from the peers and the other teams, you know, in a non competitive, non threatening environment to decide. But what really drove that was this idea of having an innovation pipeline, recognizing that all the ideas mattered, but they didn't all matter at the same time.

Thank you both for your involved conversation. I do have another question here related to exactly, exactly that innovation process. So Alex, you mentioned, you know, getting people involved or the decision makers important stakeholders. And Moog asked, well, how does data play a role in this innovation process? How does data help with informing those decisions on what ideas get progressed or doesn't and what does data informed decision making actually mean?

So I like to call it evidence. And you were talking about Clay Christensen. Right. He used to say that data can say anything you want if you just manipulate it the right way. But so I do think back to this whole idea of evidence based decision making where you show that some of your assumptions were true or not. If we go back to the innovation process and it's the Same for new products, new features. There are actually two things, two big buckets you need to look at. One is strategic fit. Does it fit with your vision of the company and where you want to go? That has nothing to do with data. Right. That's just, does it fit your vision of the future and where the company wants to go? And that, you know, you have decision makers who are the gatekeepers there. But here's the other part that senior leaders in particular are not very good at yet is there's this second part where you fund the progress of the team. You let them get to the next stage if they bring the right evidence to the table to show that they were right with certain hypothesis in the first place. All you need to prove is customers actually have the jobs, pains and gains you assume they're having. Right. Some people like to call that problem, the problem framing. I like to call it. What are people trying to get done? Do they actually have that challenge? Once you've proven that you have sufficient evidence, we talk about strength of evidence, etc. Then you can give them funding to go to the next stage. Can we come up with a solution that is going to address those job spins again? Again, you bring evidence to the table. So I like to look at those two buckets, strategic fit and evidence that supports the idea. Because one of the things I've realized with senior leaders, they're always in this absolute. That's a great idea. That's a bad idea. Well, you can say that's a strategic fit. And so far the team has proven that that challenge exists in the market. Let's give them more money so they can start to prove that we can find a solution that addresses that challenge. Right. So you, you just decide not, is that a great idea or not? Are we giving the team more money to further explore and bring more evidence to the table? And when we say data, it's not just on and off. Oh, I have data to prove this is right. No, they're phases.

Right.

So I like to look at in those kind of two big buckets when we talk about data and then just, you know, the strategic fit.

Yeah, that's good. I, I have a completely different take on that, which it doesn't, doesn't disagree with your view. But last weekend I, I did something sassy. I said, I'm going to go on two different Gen AI platforms, I'm going to ask it a question. And I basically, I asked the question, I asked two questions. One was, will Genai replace the need for product managers and will Genai slow down innovation in large companies. And thankfully both platforms gave me the right, the, the same answer. Right. Which was not yet, you know, and especially on the first question, what the point that the response made. Again, I don't know where it's pulling its data, but this is part of the fun of asking it because I imagine our customers are using these platforms and asking questions or doing research. But one of the key things that it talked about in this regard was that while it's not going to replace the need for, you know, product managers, at least not in the near future, we have to recognize that product managers are still responsible for defining vision strategy, data collection, market research. So depending on what you mean by data, the role of a product manager, also understanding the integrity behind the role, like data integrity, data quality, ethical issues, how data is used, all the things that might go into doing research to decide on a product that somebody said go fund, that's where I think data will matter. But that's where I also think the role of the people is still very relevant. Isn't going to be replaced by some machine pulling data just yet.

And you bring, you bring, actually make you realize something. So I know Lucy is going to push us to the next starter. Now I just want to bring this one thing. It's actually, it's. I got this email from Jean Francois Manzoni, the president of IMD Business School, and he was sharing a paper that was showing that generative AI comes up with better ideas when it comes to brainstorming. It wasn't just ideas without any experimentation. They actually went through a pretty rigorous process. Right. So I think one of the things we need to get familiar with is generative AI as an extremely powerful helper in the process of innovation and product management. So we can't afford to wait anymore. We need to embrace it. I don't think it's going to replace it. I think it's going to make the great product managers and great innovators better and faster and more effective. And those that are not so good are actually going to go away because they're going to be those, I believe a certain category of professionals will go away, but it will create a whole new pressure on those that are already good to get even better with these tools. So that paper blew my mind. It was really not what I would have expected.

Thank you both. Okay, so we will move on to our last section of the day, which is all around leadership. There's quite a few people asking questions already around, how do you get leaders more involved and More engaged around innovation. And so the question I'd like to ask here is do transformation fail based on lack of leadership? So here we have a hot or not question. I'd love to get everyone's point of view, which is do you believe that transformation fail based on lack of leadership? Is it something that you come across, you see often? Do you experience the pains of lack of leadership firsthand as an innovator or product manager within your organization as well?

Okay, I'm already excited, I'm already excited to hear Alex say, well, we can't, we have to be more granular because we, we asked the question in a way to have a little bit of fun. Right. But it's, it's a, it's a bit of a like, you know, doing politics for black and white. So this is gonna be fun.

You're getting to know me too well, I think. Okay. Transformations fail based on lack of leadership.

Sure.

That's what, that's what the data tells us and that's what research tells us and that's what conversations often tell us. But to go exactly where you think I'm going, I would say that there are two things that I would break down under the word leadership. And this is where I think this is the reason they fail. Expectation management. So I think there's a lot of great leaders out there who have big jobs and who are, you know, running around all week trying to run an organization. But sometimes the expectations that need to be set for the teams aren't, aren't as clear as maybe everyone needs them to be. So therefore sometimes expectation management throws people, you know, to the left or to the right and they're not really sure what needs to get done. I think the other reason though is what we said earlier, right? There's a, there's a misunderstanding on what we mean when we say certain things. So we've seen leaders who are very good and when they, when they invest in change, forget the word transformation, when they invest in something they believe is going to take the organization further and they understand that implementing new ways of working new practices, different principles around thinking like the five that I shared, which I, I posted on the chat earlier for people, then that organization is less, less likely to fail because then those leaders will follow through on those things. They'll stay connected, they have follow ups. You know, one of the best examples I saw was a, a company a few years ago that is in the E Commerce space. They had created these large kanban. This is before we were all remote. Now they, they had Most of their employees in this very large building. And they created these large Kanban boards from the executive floor all the way down to the first floor. And these Kanban boards basically ran all, all the initiatives left to right on what the organization was doing. And each floor you would go on below with, with different departments at the next level of WIP and then the next level of wip. And they were all connected. And that's because the CEO and his team at the time were hugely invested in making sure that this happened right. And they set clear expectations and they clearly defined goals and outcomes. Obviously, when that doesn't happen. Yeah, you get, you get this whole transformation fails based on leadership.

I like the way you framed it because we asked, you know, transformations fail based on lack of leadership. They also succeed based on leadership. Right. So we could frame it the other way. And I like to say, you know, that innovation is bottom up and top down. Right? Ideas come from bottom up, but without the top down kind of context setting and that drive you just mentioned, innovation will not happen. Right. So I, you know, have some role models like Uber Jolie who turned around Best Buy with really, really good leadership. Right. First fixing the core to get the exploit working again and then investing in the future and starting Explore. And then Corey Mary, who's leading the innovation part, becoming CEO, which started very rare that somebody who's leading innovation becomes CEO. She did. So I, I think, you know, while I believe a lot of leaders are today not equipped to let me be very careful. Very smart people running, you know, really substantial businesses. So I'm not running a multibillion dollar company, so it's easy for me to talk, but there's not yet a clear understanding of what innovation really means. Again, the term is very fuzzy and that's also why we came up with this concept of the dual mindset. Right. Which is just our take on the whole literature around ambidextrous and exploit. Explore that the best leaders today understand you need to run the core, manage the core, and you need to invent the future. And those are two different worlds and you need to keep both in your mind. Once leaders embrace that, you can really make magic happen. Because I always say, oh, the startups, you know, are going to create the future. I believe established companies, small or big, are better equipped. They have resources, they have intellectual property. Now, with the right leadership and then the right systems in place, we're going to see innovation machines emerging and coming up with disruptive innovations. So it doesn't always have to just come from the Startup world. So I'm pretty confident.

Yeah. And you know, one thing you often say, Alex, is that you, you know, when a CEO is spending 40% or more of their time on this topic, it turns out well for a company. And I liked, I like what Bogdan's quote was saying earlier. Sometimes, you know, you involve the CEO too much. You know, I, I, I, I hear what he's saying. What I would slightly change on that comment though is sometimes the CEO is involved, but then they're expecting the organization to go execute a particular way and sometimes the exit, the organization struggles. So it's not that the CEO or the right leader isn't involved. Sometimes it is a skills or a capability or an understanding thing that you have to address. You just can't wave the wand and say, go innovate. You need to equip people with the right skills and capabilities to do it. And you know, one recent example we had was very, a very successful organization, again, Fortune Co. You know, and a lot of these companies are amazing businesses. They're doing well. I mean, no one's going to walk in there and say you're not innovating. But they also recognize they have to change and they have to stay relevant in their space. And this is what's driving the conversation. And one of them had the honest, the honesty to say, look, we've got an amazing bottom line. We have great market share and reach, we're doing well. But we also recognize that we actually don't know what a product is like. How do you define product? How did we know what great product and portfolio management look like? How do we define innovation? And I love, I love the, the fact that they had already figured out how do we define things? Because the definition of things starts the journey really well.

I know Lucy's getting impatient, so I think we just started the conversation. Alex, I think we're gonna have many more of these and push out some, hopefully some inside papers and content over time. So, Lucy, I'll throw it back to you.

Thank you both. We are almost right out of time, but I just wanted to say thank you both to Alex A and Alex O for sharing your insights and your wisdom. I know if you're both very busy, you know, running companies, writing inside paper, so really appreciate it for sharing your thinking behind this and Alex A for, for giving us more nuanced point of view. So very much appreciated. Before I let everybody go, we would love to get a little bit of feedback from everyone as so I will launch a poll on Zoom and so please. It'll be great if everyone can give us a feedback. We always love running our webinars and join them and hope everyone enjoys it as well and always looking for new topics and content to share with everybody as well. And we hope that this is a worthwhile of your time. So I'd love some feedback on whether you think this webinar was worth the time and the effort and also the engagement that you've given to us as well. So thank you very much for participating and we'd love to invite you back next month as well. So I believe on the 6th of November we do have our next webinar coming up, so I'd love to get you involved in the next one as well. So before I let you go I would love to also see if anyone would like us to get in touch. So if work in a large organization and would like to learn more about what Strategizer does, Emergent does, what we're collaborating on, our alliance or you know how we can help in your organization as well, please send us your email address and we'll be sure to get in contact with you as well. Thank you again for your participation and we hope you can join us next week as next month as well. And lastly the dual mindset organization so the paper that both Alexis has co wrote, this is where you can can download it and find more about it as well and we've shared it in the link in the chat as well. So thank you very much and we hope to see you again next month.

And thank you Lucy for being our host. Thanks Alex for joining.

Thank you all. It's great to be here. Thanks.

Bye bye.