“The good corporate explorers puncture the bubble that leadership teams often have around their business that makes them believe it’ll continue and continue and continue.”

In the early days, innovation was viewed as a game best left to entrepreneurs, but a new breed of corporate executives reverses this logic. Corporate Explorers possess the knowledge, tenacity, and discipline necessary to overcome barriers and launch new initiatives inside even the largest organizations.

This week on Be Customer Led with Bill Staikos, we welcome Andrew Binns, co-founder of Change Logic, a Boston-based strategic advising firm. Additionally, he is a co-author of Corporate Explorer and a founding member of The Corporate Explorers Club. Most importantly, Andy is driven by the mission to assist enterprises in unleashing their potential to innovate and delight the globe.

[01:31] Background – Andy discusses his background by recounting his transition from marketing to consulting. Also, he mentions what motivated him to write his book.

[06:27] Corporate Explorer -  Andy explains the concept of corporate explorers and how organizations could empower such individuals.

[11:27] Digital Business Transformation -  Andy points out how critical it is for an organization to be tech-savvy or forward-thinking and how to ensure that the organization develops the correct attitude internally.

[13:47] Three Disciplines - Andy expresses his thoughts on how the client and the workforce contribute to success via the lens of three disciplines: Ideation, Incubate, and Scale.

[19:56] Time is Up – Andy highlights how to determine when it is appropriate to transition to the next discipline. 

[23:39] Success Models – Andy mentions his views about an optimal way to set up business ventures and ensure their success. 

[29:15] Change Agent - Andy explains why he considers the corporate Explorer a pioneer in innovation and transformation.

[33:16] Productive Tension – Andy defines productive tension and outlines how corporate explorers create and maintain it.

[39:27] Role Models -  Andy shares where he finds inspiration and who he admires.

Resources:

Connect with Andy:

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/andrewjmbinns/

Mentioned in the podcast:

Corporate Explorer: How Corporations Beat Entrepreneurs at the Innovation Game: goodreads.com/book/show/58398731-corporate-explorer?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=VZ44lkuwjG&rank=1

Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire: goodreads.com/book/show/44064568-reimagining-capitalism-in-a-world-on-fire?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=efRAVEPXq3&rank=1

Andy Binns on Innovation and Identifying Corporate Explorers

[00:00:33] Bill Staikos: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to be customer led. I'm your host bill steakhouse. I have a very special guest for us this week. Andy bins is director and co-founder of change logic, LLC. And we're going to get into a little bit about what Andy does a change logic. he's also co-author of a book. Fantastic book corporate Explorer.

[00:01:03] Andrew Binns: here. Thank you very much, bill.

[00:01:07] Bill Staikos: gosh. This is a really interesting show. I mean, the book that you wrote is really about. Larger corporations can really beat sort of the startups and other smaller companies at the innovation game, really important topic, but also just the way you laid out the book was fantastic.

[00:01:39] Andrew Binns: Thank you. and thanks for the kind words about the book it's, corporate Explorer is, is sort of a thing I've been thinking about for a long time. And although the title only came relatively recently, that there's lots of threads that have been in, in my career. I was in marketing originally and. I went to an interview with a consulting firm from marketing job.

[00:02:23] I mean, this, in some respects, it taught me what I don't want to do in the future. He told me how I had the exact opposite, the change logic consulting, the exact opposite way to McKinsey. But the IBM experience was, was, was tremendous because I was fortunate to be there at a point sort of when the great turnaround led by Lou Gerstner had kind of been successful and they were trying to figure out how do they establish new sources of growth?

[00:03:04] I hadn't been to one. and I, but here I was with a Harvard and the Stanford professor, and then a few years later, I set up a business with them, which has changed logic. And now we've written this book together.

[00:03:23] Even on some level during my days at JP Morgan, we always talked about, can you innovate faster than the, than the startup can scale? Right. Cause we were so large, that was a big, big conversation. And still is, there are many ways, how do you think of that? So like, why did you like, let's start? Like, why did you, I'm always curious about.

[00:03:51] Andrew Binns: moments? Yeah, we, we have, the book has the subtitle, right? Corporate Explorer.

[00:04:19] I don't think there's any, any point at which is

[00:04:21] Andrew Binns: startups, right? I mean, hello. And I would say that was one of the surprises as I was doing the research, talking to people who are in venture led startups, trying to understand, make sure that, I was reflecting their part of the story in this as well.

[00:04:52] Well, five years that long, right? Okay. Many of them will come from multiple rounds on my third round funding. VC might disagree by first round, so, so there's a lot of tensions in it. And of course there's huge numbers of. Benefits and opportunities that our startup gets from its increased flexibility.

[00:05:21] Bill Staikos: done. Yeah, for sure. I know the ability. AB test with millions of customers out of the gate. I really can add a ton of value in the first. So I, you, you have the book broken out in a number of sections, the first section of the book, explore aspiration.

[00:05:57] We're giving them. The flexibility to flex the corporate explore muscle, so to speak. So I'm curious, like how do you define it and who, what do they look

[00:06:13] That's important because we know that. It's hard to do this in large corporations. And there's this long list of companies that have suffered from disruption and disappeared or gone into bankruptcy, Kodak, Polaroid, Nokia, the story. Right. So we know, and, and when we look at them, mostly it is not because they didn't have the innovation Netflix.

[00:06:59] Is that they're not listening to what they've got. They don't listening to the opportunity, not valuing it. And that's what the corporate Explorer does is the really good corporate Explorer sort of punk. That bubble candidly leadership teams very often have around their business that makes them believe it'll just continue and continue and continue.

[00:07:40] They see something in the world. Th they think should be different, just like an entrepreneur would. And in a way what's, what's different is that they are transforming an industry. They're already a part of. So an example of this would be, the example we start with of Christian Kertesz at the, Austrian, insurance company.

[00:08:00] Bill Staikos: fascinating story that you brought up. I wasn't familiar with it until you, until I read it. I mean, incredible

[00:08:23] And it's not hungry is not a very large country. I mean, it's a hungry, but it's not a huge right. And so for him to go to the CEO, which through a series of steps, he gets to the CEO with this radical concept that says everything you think about your business. You don't need a, and the, he actually has this charts where he has a tower on office tower.

[00:09:14] And, and he's fortunate, his CEO says this is like a nuclear bomb underneath our industry, and we've got to do it. And this is, this is the story is. Leaders with a passion driven by an insight with yeah. The skill to tell the story and get the attention that they need in order to get started.

[00:09:35] Well, I guess it's it's everything, right? If that CEO didn't say let's do this, it would have died on the vine. He may have gone out externally, right. As an example.

[00:09:48] Bill Staikos: Yeah. The point around being a. Tech forward business. Maybe we can, we can call it. How important is that?

[00:10:13] How important is it for. The organization to be tech savvy or tech forward does being, so maybe, I guess my question is to being so make sure that you got the right mindset internally to be able to do this kind of work and rethink the way that. You've done business for the last 50, a hundred, 200 years.

[00:10:51] And I'm like, yeah, there is. But right now, it's not important, relatively speaking. Right? So many of the innovations that we see in, in whatever sector you're in have some flavor of, of digital technologies, of some kind or AI or machine learning. There's something that has to do with learning to add that to a solution, to solve a problem.

[00:11:39] I think that, we talk about Kevin Carlin at analog devices and semiconductors firms are in some ways quite bad. In a lot of their business processes and activities and market view because they haven't needed to be because the only thing they needed to do is generate chips and actually amusing we're back in that situation now with them.

[00:12:16] Bill Staikos: So very, very cool. You bring up in the book, sort of the three, three innovation disciplines, ideation incubate.

[00:12:43] Andrew Binns: Yeah. Good. So I'm going to start that answer with one kind of response and I'm going to appear to radically disagree with myself. Okay. The expectation. Well, wait a minute. What's he talking about now? So the first thing you have to say is that employees are at some level, one of your most important sources of information and possibilities.

[00:13:33] Innovation is at the same stage of development as CRM was 20 years ago. Right. And that at some point we will be able to aggregate information about all of the ideas that we've ever had or ever tested or experimented with. And so when we have that idea again, Well, when the market matures, it makes it possible.

[00:14:12] Right. And the trap is the innovation zoo. There's something about creating ideas and generating possibilities. That is. To humans. We just love being involved in that. And the thing about the ideate incubate scale approach is that it needs, you need to recognize the money gets made in the scale. It doesn't get made in the ideation.

[00:14:56] That is focused towards things that you want to do that you want to invest in. So we talk in the book as you point out about having an ambition, having a really clear sort of compelling strategic ambition. The one I liked best is MasterCard's under RJ banker, right? the financial services guy he is, and he's like, we want to wage a war on cash and I want to convert.

[00:15:47] And then I'll come to my crowd and I'll say, okay, crowd, what are the customer problems that really matter? Or, here are the customer problems we see in the, in the hunting zone. How, how would you solve them? What's your insight. Then you can use that employee energy, that customer energy, the ecosystem.

[00:16:06] Bill Staikos: I want to come back to the three disciplines, but I have a follow-up question for you because there are a lot of platforms out there that are crowdsourcing innovation across your workforce. Fantastic platforms. I've used them in the PLA in the past. But if I take it back to what you just said, though, right?

[00:16:44] And you get the salad in the lunch room. Isn't so good too. Yeah, very, very big, obviously their employees, great employees everywhere who have wonderful ideas that can get voted up, but sometimes also can get kind of drowned out. So do you have to do both to really tap into your workforce?

[00:17:05] I think there's another dimension of employee engagements. there's a different objective you might view for motivation and so on, but even then I want to make sure things have. Right. Cause it's just having a point of view is not right. It's going to happen here. But, so, and there's another way I can point to where, where I feel that this question of being sort of objective led non pipeline led.

[00:17:55] I want to know right upfront, what's your hypothesis. What's this going to look like? And where are you going to get access to? How are you going to get access to capabilities? How are you going to get access to capacity, to bring this to scale? And I want to know that now, because I may need to buy some pretty big stuff, right?

[00:18:19] Bill Staikos: Really interesting. So on the three disciplines, my question is how do when you're ready to move to the next discipline? Like, are there any kind of tells in there that.

[00:18:46] You've got evidence of desirability and you've got some quantification. That solving that problem is, is feasible. And you've got at least some notions of feasibility and, and, and one of the other ones come in, because you want to be able to then frame up, a business design or business model hypothesis.

[00:19:26] Who are the potential partners within this? Why would we be differentiated? You need those things stated, even if you don't know you're right. Especially if you don't know your rights, this is just a straight lift from the scientific method, right. Scientists start with a hypothesis, they test out whether something's going to work.

[00:20:09] Well, that's not necessarily the way it plays out, right? The reality is there's a judgment, which is you validated. To give you or to give your investor sufficient confidence that it's worth the next, the next step and that you never really stop experiments. Well, you do stop, but, but you, you don't stop for some times.

[00:20:47] Right? What's the go to market approach is often something you're still testing, even as you're starting to try out channels that do seem to work and trying to get revenue. Got

[00:21:07] I mean, somewhere between incubation and scale, you're still growing like crazy. That's where you're testing and learning things are changing. You're adding people trying to raise capital, et cetera. Really, really interesting. Let's talk about ambidextrous organization or the organizational structure, right.

[00:21:40] Andrew Binns: preference?

[00:21:46] Bill Staikos: No, no, no. You got to decide for yourself. Right. But I'm curious. That's what I was reading. I'm like, well, I wonder which one he likes, so that's why I

[00:21:56] It's I would say it's the thing that I am most likely to get paid to, to help people. Right. Smart answer. because it's kind of, it is the most vaccine in all kinds of ways. Yeah. Just for your listeners. This notion of the ambidextrous organization is, is one that Michael Tashman and Charles O'Reilly are best associated with in, in, academic circles.

[00:22:40] So the basic principle, I boil down to three things. Firstly, that it's an organization with a shared ambient. All right. So you, everything you're doing is in service of an ambition. Like what war on cash or, or, or some of the others we can talk about, then you have autonomy for the explore business from the.

[00:23:24] Right. And of course it's the access bits that, that causes the most challenge, because this is the place where you're, dealing with the, the, the, the little rowboat against the, the oil tanker. Right. and so how do you, how do you interface the two is where things become most difficult?

[00:24:05] Their work in automotive. This is in healthcare, right. And, highly different capabilities. Not entirely different, cause it's still their same core technologies, but taken into, they actually made some new inventions on top of what they did previous here. You've got to keep that pretty separate from the rest of the business.

[00:24:43] And this is where we come back to this notion of what are you teaching to the business, what capability you building and in a world where everybody's going to need to understand about AI. Digital business models, monthly active users, all of these kinds of AB testing. As you mentioned earlier, all of these kinds of pieces of the digital world you're going to have, if you keep that to separate, what have you learned?

[00:25:32] That's often a great asset sometimes can be troubled, but, but it's often a great asset that you're going to get at. Preferential access to manufacturing, if that's what you need, or in the case of the insurance example, that the actuaries are going to be there helping you put your products together and so on.

[00:25:49] Bill Staikos: as well. Oh man, that's, that's an awesome perspective. One of the, one of the toughest things in any organization, whether it's new, getting people to think about new products, getting team structures to change people change is just changing itself in the book. You kind of talk about the corporate Explorer.

[00:26:28] There's a couple of different kinds of change processes out there that you can certainly follow. But what advice do you have for corporate explorers out there on the change piece? Cause that, it sounds like they've got the innovation piece down, but maybe not so much the change management

[00:26:40] You do need to have both change and innovation. Corporate Explorer is always both, just like an entrepreneur is always selling, right? They're always selling to their VC to customers over there is always on the, so in the corporate Explorer world, they've got to lead change. The most important thing from our research is they've got to build a social network or where leadership movement around that innovation.

[00:27:25] Right. and so, and we, we come to this insight because of the research we've done. What we find is that, the, the leaders that struggle most are those that come in from outside and have no social net. Now unknown quantities. They may have skills. They may have insights. They may have things that are really valuable, but what they lack is the human influence.

[00:28:14] Right? and then, you're going to have some people who are never going to move, who are always going to be opponents. Candidly. Some of them are like from central. I, there, there are, there, there are just some archetypes out there. Yeah. The business unit leader. or product line leader who just doesn't get it is a very common archetype and you need an ambassador.

[00:28:52] So you're going to work this network in a very personal way in order to get, get to your

[00:28:58] Bill Staikos: Yeah, I was, I was actually wondering when I was going through that, that part of the book. I was wondering if, if there's ever an instance where the innovator or the idea person is different than the change person going out and building the network and can.

[00:29:27] Andrew Binns: That's right. Jerry Yang at Yahoo and the other one. And I'm trying to think of the. Google folks, they had the same Sergei Brin and Larry Page. Yeah. And so in a way that kind of duality is one that I think is a, is a smart step for a corporate Explorer to

[00:29:54] So, if you could share it with our listeners, what, and I don't want to, obviously I don't wanna give away too much of the book. I want really people to buy this book because actually it's really important. Particularly if you work in a law in a large enterprise, tell our audience around what productive tension is and how do corporate explorers create it and keep people in those zones.

[00:30:33] That was the ambition framed by Jeff Immelt in like 2012. Right? Hmm. Well, it's interesting. And we might touch when talk to bill, Rood's done a case, bill Rue was the leader of this edgy as has done a case on, on Bill's efforts. And what becomes clear from all of this is that bill was you're working without all of the, equipment to get his job done, basically.

[00:31:19] And why? Because like most humans he liked to maximize comfort is my hypothesis. I've never met Jim at Jeff ML, but my guess is that that affable exterior and he yells and shouts. I'm sure that this is also his reputation, but when it comes to really direct person, Conflict with a peer who you who's helped you need, right.

[00:32:03] Right. They've got to manage that reputation so that there is just as honest about where things aren't working as when things are, because otherwise people will very quickly found them out. and the, that the unfairness of the world is such that that evidence will be treated much more seriously than the good stuff.

[00:32:45] And Eric brings to the senior team that sort of a self-evaluation. Hey team, his eight criteria, doing this well. how do you think you're doing? And it turns out they don't think they're doing as well as they want to either. Right. And so that sort of practice of holding up a mirror, help people see themselves because, usually when, when you're not sort of being told you are wrong, you're like, yeah, actually this isn't, we, we, we're not quite where we were.

[00:33:39] And they're doing their best job. And, and these, these things are. Right. And you've got to help figure your way through the sort of the, competing commitments to sustaining what we have versus creating something new. And that, that that's the job of the corporate Explorer. So

[00:34:06] And on this show, actually, it's not, Shaw's been published, but she was the first chief innovation officer for top three. the conversation she was having, people are like, why should I change? Why is the internet important to me right now? This kind of now around this time you have AI machine learning.

[00:34:40] How important that must be in like, I'm really excited to see the corporate explorers kind of diving into that space and what we will see over the next 10 years as an

[00:35:06] Right? Yeah. But, but, but they, but recently last 10, 15 years, people have got that. There's no option other than to do this for the reasons you state we've looked at the past, we see the disruption threat. We see the world changing even faster. We've got to get on board with it. We've got to figure out how to do this.

[00:35:26] Bill Staikos: I wonder if you can create a recruiting strategy around corporate explorers, that could be actually an interesting differentiator for your company and your book was really inspirational for me. I hope that our listeners do go out and I'm sure they'll get an inspiration.

[00:35:43] Andrew Binns: go for inspiration? Well, I also go to inspiration. Books. I'm reading this book, by Rebecca Henderson at the moment re-imagining capitalism, which I find very inspiring because I do feel that something fundamental we need to rethink about the participant or your POS system.

[00:36:26] it's a, it's a con and, and, and lots of happy accidents as well. Yeah, for sure. It's a, it's

[00:36:40] Andrew Binns: Who do I look up to like

[00:36:43] Like, do you have anyone in industry that you're like, here's a model person that you look up to? So

[00:37:02] Bill Staikos: go for maybe are there business leaders.

[00:37:06] And one of them we talk about in the book is Jensen Wong, right at Nvidia. And so here's my story with Jensen one, 2015. I think it is. I get on the phone with him for a client project and we're trying to understand his strategy and so on. And at that point, The stock price is like $23. And I listened to him and he's telling me, and I described the conversations book and he's telling me about this strategy he has and the insight and the vision and the rest of it.

[00:38:03] Deep computing, autonomous driving. He, he really committed and he committed so long ago that you can't claim that it was luck. Yeah, he had some lucky turns on the way, but I think it's very, very inspiring.

[00:38:22] How corporations beat startups at the innovation game. Thanks so much for coming on. Be customer led. It has been. Delighted

[00:38:29] Bill Staikos: you very much. All right, everybody. Another great episode. We're out.

[00:38:42] Be sure to visit us@becustomerled.com for more episodes. Leave us feedback on how we're doing or tell us what you want to hear more about until next time.