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Chuck: John, welcome to Innovators on Tap. It is great to have you with us today.
John: Thank you for having me, Chuck. I'm looking forward to the conversation.
Chuck: Well, you have an incredibly interesting career and background. But I want to start with speed skating. So I know you want a silver medalist I think in short track speed skating, I think it's the 94 Winter Olympics. But there's an interesting story on kind of how you got there where it wasn't a very linear path. You were kind of the non best practice guy. Can you kind of give us a little background? And how did you decide to come up with your own approach? How does it leave the Olympic medal? And then, at some point, I think you actually unofficially beat the world record in the thousand meter at one point, so can you give us some background on how you picked that path?
John: at Stanford in my senior year, I managed to get 12th place in the world despite being In California with no coach, no training program, and I thought, okay, after I graduate, I should be able to go from 12 to 16. To first, in the two years, I have to prepare for the next games. And so I graduated, I moved in with the Olympic team, the best, you know, the best of the best. And they put me on a program to fix my weaknesses, which the turns out are many and varied. And it didn't work for me. I went from 12 to 34th, to not even making the team two years later finishing 30th place in the US trials, I have one two years prior. So at this point, I'm sort of ready to quit. But I kept harkening back to really two things, something called design thinking, which is a creative problem solving approach at Stanford, which basically suggests that if you're stuck solving a problem, you're probably solving the wrong problem. And you need to reframe whatever that problem is. And my first coach who always said race, your strengths, design around your weaknesses, and I was like, wait, why am I Am I racing my weaknesses everyday? This doesn't, doesn't jive with what I've learned. So I, I did quit the team, not the sport. Nobody wanted that to happen, by the way, but I did it anyway. And I went off and trained on my own in Milwaukee. And for a year, I kept iterating. My technique to double down on what I do well, which is quite different than most of the skaters are more of a sprinter, an anaerobic athlete, and most of them were aerobic athletes. And I started skating a tighter track that requires more power, but less endurance. And so it was just going less far. And I showed up one year to the day of not making the Olympic team and the same meet. It's called World trials and anomala care. And in the very first race back in a sport or hundreds determined first and second, I broke the record by five and a half full seconds and the world record by more than a full second.
Chuck: Would you have ever been willing to take that risk? If you kind of didn't hit bottom? Do you think?
John: No, I don't think so. And that's, I think it's for me, it's a huge life lesson every time I'm really struggling. With something like so cast back and say, Wait, I'm probably solving the wrong problem here, I'm probably doing I mean, they're doing the wrong thing, or I'm trying to go about it the wrong way. And then when you can get to that place where you're ready to quit something, but you haven't yet. And that can be a job, a major a relationship, anything, you get this brief window, we call perspective. And you can back up and look at the same set of circumstances more objectively more scientifically. And when you can do that, sometimes you compare around the edges and say, Wait, I could go about this differently. Or maybe I shouldn't be doing this at all. I mean, my first job, I was terrible at that man a year, year and a half into that. I was like, wait a minute, I hate this. I shouldn't be doing this. And so it's, you know, it's terrifying. But I went to my boss and I said, you know, for the next project I was in, I was a consultant. So I was fortunate that I didn't have to quit quit. And I was like, for the next project, you know, I think it'd be better fit for me to go into something like marketing or something like that. And They moved me into a marketing engagement, the next gig and immediately life got 10 times better.
Chuck: You know, I'm really struck by this idea of focusing on your strengths and it's logical to me. But then I'm sitting here thinking about my own career. So I, you know, I spend 27 years building cre on the CEO for 16. And, you know, most of my job was building teams, developing people and and really trying to help people become better leaders and a more complex business. And most of my energy was spent helping them work on their weaknesses, because what I thought and what I believed was that was limiting them in whatever role they were in or whatever role they thought they wanted to get into. And so what I'm wondering is, now you're suggesting that both myself and the company would have been more successful if we didn't focus on their weaknesses
John: at risk of reaffirming that notion. I think that's actually true. And I'll give these various specific example I joined, you know, an enterprise after leaving consulting. And I led a team of marketing marketers. And all eight direct reports had the same title. I hired for diversity of experience, background and skills. But the job description was the same. And so I made them do the same job the same way. And then where they were weakened things, I had them double down on that. And I did that for the year and a half and team was not very bonded, and frankly, I had one of the lowest 360 degree reviews in the company. And so then I went off they sent me to Center for Creative Leadership to fix my leadership skills. But when I came back I, I stumbled into while there, the book now discover your strengths. And so I had everybody on the team, take StrengthsFinder and then rejiggered the team, totally unfairly, but I had the analytics do the analysis. I have the project manager to do project management had the greatest to do the creative had the relationship people do sponsorships, and and that stuff. And we went from a low performing unhappy team to one year later and one of the top 10 scores in the 360 review for the company and performance went through the roof.
Chuck: So instead of adjusting the people to the job, you adjusted the job to the people. So you go to undergrad, you said you're at Stanford, you studied I think, under David Kelly, who's kind of the one of the fathers of design thinking, can you just maybe give us the the snippet of what is design thinking at its core?
John: It's a process and that's what most people tend to hang on to, but perhaps more importantly, to mindset as well. The process really is pretty straightforward. The one that David Kelly uses that I use as five steps, it's first you accept the problem. That sounds obvious, but we've all met people with the you know, the ostrich with the head in the sand, right? You can't solve a problem you're not willing to have. So first accept it, then you define it. Do you really understand it and creative people don't like to do this by the way, they want to jump right to jump To ideas, right, you get halfway through your description, your problem, they're already throwing out ideas. But you really need to understand it from multiple angles before you do that. The piece that's really core to design thinking and it's the reason it's also called Human Centered Design is empathy. You not only have to understand and define the problem, you have to understand it from the people shoes you're solving for, then and only then you get to generate ideas. So Id a, and then it's really the Agile pieces, test, prototype repeat, always circling back to do we really understand the problem from the shoes the person we're solving for. The mindset part of it is is is the empathy piece, but it's also this really weird, hard to build mindset of complete abject scientific detachment from the right way to solve the problem. Most people anchor immediately to, Oh, this looks like the solution. Let's do it this way. And they go well on With Maslow's hammer, right, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And then they get frustrated, because they're not getting any progress. Design thinkers are completely detached from whatever the solution is. And then and only then once they select one to prototype, they get very passionate about solving for that person or situation. And then they back up to scientific detachment again, if it's not working, because they're like, okay, gotta look at this different find a new way to solve it. And so that's the mindset piece. It's really important.
Chuck: I tend to get frustrated sometimes that we people have these problems, they throw it, let's just apply this thing, let's, let's just do innovation. Let's apply design thinking, let's do a sprint. And it's like, Guys, it's more than that. And, you know, if I just take design thinking specifically, there are many large companies who have kind of embraced that that's going to be their way to solve their problems. And the example that comes to mind for me is GE, who was both a very large customer of mine, and then actually became a competitor for many years. And in my sense, they used All these tools, but they were never very good at developing anything new or innovative or really getting there. So what do you think? And maybe not GE specifically, but what do you think those? The people that try these tools but struggle? What do you think they're missing?
John: GE really swung to an operator, right? Like they get things done. They can buy other businesses and run them well, but they're not innovative themselves. And I think it does come back to mindset and very specifically the types that they hire. You know, there are more creative people. And there are people that are more linear thinkers and linear thinkers are great for problem solving, when there is one simple solution or when the problem is fairly straightforward. Linear thinkers are terrible at complex problems, or innovation, innovative solutions that break from the norm. And so if you need to just make a business run better, well, you put a bunch of operators in there and that's great. But if you want to create a new business from scratch, you need the kind of people that can think left, right and put things together that don't make sense. And by and large, really greatly run companies have very few of those people because they get pushed out. their ideas aren't welcome, unfortunately.
Chuck: Switching gears you have such an interesting background, I read something about, you happen to have spent time with both. Lance Armstrong who I was a very big fan of at the time when he was winning the Tour de France. In fact, it's probably the only time I ever consistently watch cycling. And then Jeff Skilling, who, before the scandal at Enron, and his, I think his eventual conviction for fraud he led Enron and I believe they were named America's most innovative company for six years in a row. There were moments when you can certainly say they had tremendous success. So before we talk about what got them into trouble, do you think there's things we can learn from them on the positive side that there are good things we could take from what they did?
John: For sure. Those are By the way, Lance and Jeff are like the same person, the way that they talk to you the way that like Hawk like stare the real intense way they carry themselves, how innovative they were. Both of them highly innovative. I mean, Lance fundamentally changed the whole sport from everything from weighing his food. So we wouldn't burn too many calories, but not enough by losing weight or gaining weight, to the aerodynamics to the position on the bike to the pedaling cadence. I mean, you name it, innovate also innovated how to get drugs delivered to secret spots in the mountains of Italy, I demand it off. And and same with Jeff like, different ways to think about accounting different ways to think about derivatives of power and gas and oil and even whether they had a weather derivative that they traded. So all kinds of really fascinating innovations. And they both had the innovators mindset for sure that the one simple piece that was missing is because you have to throw out all the rules when you're thinking about new ideas and you have Throughout even ethics and things like that, because you're bound by all of the preconceived notions of what is right or wrong, you're not going to see sometimes an obvious solution. That can be right. But at some point, you do have to put the filter back in to say, Is this right? And the both of them were either incapable or willing to ignore that filter. And that's where both of them sort of went off the rails.
Chuck: You've spoken a lot about Maslow's hierarchy, and this idea of what got you here, won't get you there. And, you know, this is something I can relate to. Because when I joined CRI, we were startup, and then we became a somewhat successful small public company and then bigger and bigger. And one day we're have over a billion in revenue and 7000 employees around the world and we're this radically different company. And so I constantly faced with my team, essentially the company outgrowing them. And so their challenge was could they keep adapting themselves because the company needs were changing. And so I wonder as you as you take this idea, what do you think the implications are? In that quote, when you're talking to other people that want to be successful leaders?
John: I think this there's a unfortunately sort of a silent miasma that clouds the vision of lots and lots of what I'll call pretty successful people. So if you're climbing Maslow's ladder and you got your safety, security and you got your accomplishments, you've got the the acknowledgement of your peers. And yet so you're you're almost to the top rung, which is self actualization, right? But for most people, I think they find themselves like in this almost like in vertigo, right? They're like, I've worked so hard to get to this place where I have the acknowledgement appears I have all the things that I need, but I, I don't, I don't love this place. Like it's fine. I'm a good accountant. I'm a great consultant. I'm a good business leader. But some part of me feels completely unfulfilled. And now I don't know what to do to get to the next rung is actually a tumble off the edge all the way back to the bottom. And then you have to climb a new pyramid. And so I think for a lot of people, that's what it takes to get to the top of Maslow's hierarchy is that jumped to leave behind everything that got you there. Which by the way, you know, all the things that you need to get there, like expertise, narrow expertise, generally speaking, and risk aversion and focus, then incredible responsibility and discipline, all the things you have to throw out the window. If you're going to take that next leap over where you have to be curious and open to failure and risk tolerant and innovative.
Chuck: So it brings me to this idea of you have kind of these two sets of themes. One of them is discipline, focus, risk aversion, routine and narrow expertise, and they're kind of the things that help you succeed. I think what you would say is originally and to me, I kind of classify those as management skills. And then you have this self actualization thing. And I think you called it novelty, openness, risk, ambiguity and possibility, which, in my simplified way to think about it, those are more what I consider to be leadership skills. Do you think that's a fair way to say that? And what's the implication of that for someone in their own career?
John: Yeah, I mean, I don't think you get to be the leader without learning management skills. And this is this sort of the problem that we keep facing in different macros and micros, you don't get to be successful and really anything without not quitting. In order to be successful. You have to be you know, you have to be persevere and not quit. And then to be really successful. You have to be willing to quit. Right? It's a Scott Adams Scott Adams from Dilbert puts it persistently Awesome, until it's stupid. And this is what keeps happening right? You so you have these base steps you have to do you have to become a manager, you have to have all of this persistence and focus and discipline expertise. And then you have to sort of throw all that out the window to be a great leader and be willing to be wrong and to be open to others ideas and to be curious and to take leaps and take risks. And it's like that gearshift, when to do that how to do that. That's, I mean, that's the leader struggle, right? I mean, that's the hard part. But the great leaders are the ladder.
Chuck: I don't know, I don't know if you'd agree with this. But my sense was the people that we developed that I had a chance to develop people over more than a decade, and the ones that ended up being good leaders as well as good managers. There was something early on that if I look back, you could detect, they understood they had to be able to use those management skills to do their job. But that wasn't defining them. Right? There was an interest in something more. Does that make sense?
John: Absolutely. I, my personal belief is that the leap from manager leader is is the the barrier is fear. You want to demonstrate your expertise, you've got to be a manager by proving your expertise. And so now you want to leverage that prove you're right all the time. And that's actually antithetical to leading teams that are creative and innovative and, and take risks, right? You can't be right all the time. You can have all the answers and that takes confidence, and being willing to face down that fear and say, Hey, I don't know everything. Hey, that idea sounds pretty good. Let's explore that versus that won't work. We've tried that before, which is literally the worst thing you can say. I think in the world in any meeting anywhere I've had, I've had a client once tell me that. And I was like, oh, when did you try that? He's like, that was 93. That's 27 years ago. I mean, the world will change. Might have changed in 27 years.
Chuck: You know, it when you say those words, it reminds me that when, when we were defining as I was running the company, we're building a team, we're gonna bring in a new leader for some position. We had, you know, a set of skills and background experience. But then there were these qualities that what we were looking for. And one of the phrases that was on everyone that I always wanted the team to be on the lookout for, is we wanted someone that was unafraid of failure, but yet they were unwilling to fail. And they could live in that dynamic. And there are people that can live there, and they, in a world especially one when we were going to innovate, it was going to be a different problem every day. They could take on any problem and in fact, I would rather have that skill or that that quality and lack some technical skills, because we could teach them the technical skills, but I didn't know how to give someone that quality if they didn't already have it.
John: Yeah, and I don't know I'm part of me thinks that's really hard to train in AI I struggled as a leader, one of the problems I had was, I as a leader didn't like to tell people what to do. Because the one of the things I value most is like resourcefulness and and just figuring it out, right. And I had some trouble with a bunch of my people that worked for me. And they kept, they kept asking for more job clarity, more role clarity, a deeper we'd like rewrote the job descriptions to have more detail and this was going nowhere. And ultimately, what I realized is that, and I let some of these people go and they went on to be quite successful and basically exact same role somewhere else. So it had everything to do with me. Because I like people that are resourceful and figure things out. And so what I wrote into the job description, I actually narrowed it I made it much smaller again. And the top thing I wrote in there was comfortability with ambiguity. And then everybody hired after that. We made sure that they like to sort of Thrive without a lot of structure, and they did great. And so it was, you know, we ever put together like A speaker or subwoofer? Yes. So if you take a subwoofer out of its box, and you fire that thing up, you actually hear almost nothing. And so environment is everything. So for me, it's like you get the right person with the right skill set that fits with your team. And you shove that speaker into that container and suddenly the whole room thrives with energy. I think that's what happens when you get the right person for the right environment.
Chuck: I want to get a little deeper into questions about you know, mindset and how you view certain aspects of innovation and on Entrepreneurship. And so I wanted to ask a few questions that you can kind of react to and give us your philosophical view on them. So first one is, you think your success has come more from avoiding failure, or embracing it?
John: I think for me, success has been from leaning into failure, but then understanding it. I don't think you can have success without failure. I don't think that's possible. It's how we learn. Right? And until you pursue something fully and fall flat, that's, that's like that's, that's your guardrail, right? Like, you might remember the story but I was at Stanford, I wanted to be a mechanical engineer. I was taking math 202, which is linear algebra. I have no idea what that class is. To this day. I studied my hiney off and I still failed the midterm. I got a 13%. And I thought I was gonna feel terrible, because I knew I wasn't gonna pass that class. I knew I'd have to drop it at that. I couldn't be a mechanical engineer. So there's my whole future that right in front of me. And instead, I felt euphoric. Because I was like, I can't do that. I won't do that. I don't have to do that. I'm not going to do that. I'm going to do something else, I now have choices. And once I had choices, and I found product design found David Kelly and life got 10 times better. I kind of joke about it. But every time I'm like, facing down a big thing, I'm like, oh, something good coming around the corner here. Something really good is about to happen.
Chuck: If you're going to pursue innovation, what do you think is more important for you? Is it the brutal truth, or psychological safety?
John: That's a tough one. I will tell you a stat that I use all the time, which is 94% of companies say that innovation is essential to their future, but only 14% say they're good at it. And then when asked what their barrier is the number one answer by far from CEOs His people and culture. If you read like the culture code by Daniel Coyle, safety is an essential component to a highly functioning work team. Now, safety doesn't mean not taking risks, it means almost the opposite actually, it means that it's okay to take risks and it's okay to fail. So I guess I'm dancing between your two dichotomies here because I think the big hard truths are essential. But if you don't have a cultural safety net for people to to face those truths, or to wade into them and fail, then you're not actually going to get anywhere. You can have all the great ideas in the world and have all the hard truths in the world. And if your team is too terrified to tread into the water, then nothing will change.
Chuck: Yeah, I wonder if they don't have to coexist. And in fact, I, you know, I asked this question purposely this way because I used to think of them as two different ideas and sometimes intention. And I wonder if they're actually not two parts of the same thing. In other words, you can't ever find psychological safety if you're not living with the brutal truths. And yet, you can't get to the brutal truth, if there isn't some sense of cycle. I mean, they coexist. And I think what most people I talked to think of them as a choice. But it doesn't work if you don't have both. So next question is, when confronted with a problem, are you more likely to think outside the box, build a better box or set the box on fire?
John: You know, I have a friend who gave me a new term, actually, for my book, and I hadn't heard it before. So you've got convergent thinkers. Right? And so there's these two people improve the box right? You got divergent secret thinkers that think outside the box and then she hasn't she has a new term I love which is emergent thinking. And these are people that just don't even know the box exists, right? Um, I'm not one of those. I have a couple of people I rely on that are. And so I'm more of an out of the box thinker, but I, I adore emergent thinkers. So I collect them. So I have at least access to emergent thinking to find things that, you know, to burn the box in time and a whole new way of thinking about stuff.
Chuck: Well, it's a really interesting perspective. Because, you know, I'm a, I learned to be a no box guy, but I didn't start that way. But I survived in the company and I was around so many emergent thinkers that it became something that I became way more comfortable with over time, but I think that's a great idea that if you're not, it's not about are you one or the other. It's Do you have access to people that think these different ways because all of them play together very nicely if you get the right mix of them. And that being said, There are times when, just to go back to our Jeff Skilling example. It's actually timehat you want people that work within a box of some sort. It tends to work out way better when it comes to things like accounting. You don't want emerging thinker doing your taxes.
So, decision bias. Is yours to limit your downside or to maximize your upside?
John: Always maximize upside.The hard part is, you don't always know what your strengths are. Right? I mean, I was 45. Before I gave my first public talk. If you had asked me a year before that, you know, would you be a paid keynote speaker traveling to 21 countries and speaking to the royal family in Dubai, I would have laughed like I would have been no God. No, no, no. So the hard part is, we have hidden strengths. We don't always know Know what they are. And, you know, without just taking on new experiences and challenges, it's hard to ascertain what what they can be. And the other you know, the other thing that is true is every strength has a weakness and vice versa. They, the price of having a strength is you almost always have the associated weakness. So if you're a big picture strategists, you're probably bad with details. If you're a detail oriented person, you're probably a perfectionist. If you're calm under pressure, you're probably emotionless if you're practically are probably critical. If you're creative, you're probably disorganized. I could go on right, this is the price of admission to having a superpower and you have to cultivate an environment that is tolerant of the downside of your strengths.
Chuck: When you're evaluating talent, what do you think is most important to someone's future success?
John: For me? least in the kinds of roles I lead, which sounds like we're fairly similar in the kind of environments we created, it was resourcefulness. You know, just figure it out. No rules. No bounce. Figure out a new way to solve an old problem and come back to me with your answers like that's to me that the kind of talent that works with the kind of teams that I built No, I didn't, I wasn't a program manager, I was running a program manager teams would be probably completely different. But for an innovative team, the marketing team that was what was a key sign of talent for me.
Chuck: I want to clarify that a little bit further, if I said that you're going to have to evaluate someone and make your choice. And you have to choose between their mindset or their skill set. Which one do you pick?
John: I would always choose mindset. Skillsets can be developed. And mindsets probably can too. But that's trickier work. And I think there are people that can help people work with their mindset, but that's not I wouldn't consider that necessarily a skill I have out of the box. And so if you get the right person with the right mindset, that's willing to work at developing whatever skill sets necessary, then, you know, sky's the limit there.
Chuck: So is there Anything that you wished we would have talked about or an area that you want to go into, before we wrap up?
John: Yeah, I'm just going to tell you a quick story because it's something that I tend to end my talks with actually the story because it's something that I actually want to remind myself of every time which is around sort of the imprint we leave behind us and around us all the time that we sometimes forget ticularly as leaders that we're casting a long shadow, and it matters. So you know, I went to the games in 94. And then I trained for more years to go to the Olympics, and 98 and I was skating very well, for multiple years there. And then I made the mistake actually joining rejoining the Olympic team the summer before the 98 games, and they put me on the same program, which didn't work. And I went from one of the top skaters in the world to not making the Olympic team again. So instead of the gold medal, I hope to bring home I didn't even make the team. And I can remember sitting with the steps to the Olympic Training Center with Apollo Ono. He was 15 or 16 at the time just you know, we're just so bummed out. And both of us, you know, I'm, I'm done. And he's thinking he's done at 16. And I'm like, No, I don't think you've done yet. But so then I divorced myself in this war had nothing to do with it for more than a decade, I moved to Arizona, I didn't talk about it and read about it didn't watch it had no contact. It was a hard divorce. But then 11 years after that, the NBC called me and asked me to be the analyst for the Torino games. And I couldn't say no to that. So I flew into the Olympics. And there I am back in my sport, you know, the parents and the coaches and the skaters and they knew me and I knew them, then I was warmly welcomed back. And my job was to interview the parents, coaches and skaters and feed those stories to the commentator. So I did that for the 17 days of the Winter Olympics. But on the 16th day, a parent pulled me aside and about 20 seconds change the entire trajectory of my life. That's the only reason we're talking right now. So we're at dinner, and he pulls me aside, he say, hey, john, I want to tell you something's really important. I said, Oh, okay. He looked nervous. He said, I just want to let you know that we wouldn't be here right now if it wasn't for you. And I said, I don't know what you mean. He said, You won't remember. But 12 years ago, you brought your silver metal to a little reception in Bay City, Michigan. You put your metal around my son's neck. Alex, he was 12 years old time he'd never skated before in his life. The next day, sign up for the Bay City speed skating club. And tomorrow, he's skating for the gold medal. That's incredible. And this is the cool part. Like, I have barely remembered that right. But every day we're doing stuff that matters. And the sort of fun dynamize I got a call from Alex about a little over three years ago. And we've become great friends since and he's like, Hey, I just wanted to let you know, I just got off the phone with the US Olympic Committee. I've accepted the head coach position for us. speedskating, I'll be taking the team to the Olympics at Pionchang.
Chuck: It's an incredible reminder of the things that we don't even think we're doing. Each day are just incredibly impactful. And so that if we could just take a few minutes to just be genuine about those moments, you know, I've been reminded that I've had a chance to have some much less significant impacts, but the ones that stick out for me are the things I didn't know were happening at the time. And that, that they somehow help someone in some small way or maybe in a larger way. And while I really thank you for sharing that it has been john, incredible talking to you. Thank you so much for being a part of the show.
John: Awesome. Thanks for having me on. Chuck.