Latest / The Innovation Show / Chuck House: Lessons on Intrapreneurship & Innovation Resistance
Transcript
- 0:01Before we start, the innovation show is brought to you by Kyndryl.
- 0:04Kyndryl runs and reimagines the technology systems that drive advantage
- 0:09for the world's leading businesses.
- 0:11With a unique blend of AI powered consulting, built on unmatched
- 0:15managed service capability.
- 0:17Kyndryl helps leaders harness the power of technology for smarter
- 0:20decisions, faster innovation on the lasting competitive edge.
- 0:24You can find out more about Kyndryl at K-Y-N-D-R-Y-L Kyndryl.com
- 0:30I wanted to start today with many quotes from the book, permission Denied.
- 0:35We are joined once again by the author of this book, Chuck House.
- 0:38Welcome back to the show, man.
- 0:40Pleasure to be here.
- 0:41It's great to have you back, and from last week's episode of The Innovation
- 0:44Show, which was with three other guests.
- 0:47I kept talking about you, I'll share a little excerpt of what we talked about
- 0:53and see what your thoughts are about this.
- 0:55So here we go.
- 0:57I'm reading this book, permission Denied.
- 0:58It's called 'cause Chuck House, this guy, he was told by Packard,
- 1:04don't be working on this project.
- 1:05I don't wanna see this project in a lab in a year.
- 1:08He interpreted it purposely.
- 1:10He selectively heard what he heard.
- 1:12And he said, okay, so you want it in the field in a year.
- 1:15He was told specifically not to do it, and he did it behind closed doors.
- 1:19And he himself, he's an engineer, went out with his family on a tour,
- 1:24drove around to different types of customers, took out his front seat of
- 1:27his Volkswagen Beetle and put in this machine and showed it to customers.
- 1:31And the only way that project took off was because one of his
- 1:35colleagues had had a heart attack and wanted to see his heart monitor.
- 1:38On a heart monitor, and his wife was a nurse and his wife said, this
- 1:42would be a very valuable project.
- 1:44Now I say all that to say a, he was told by the leader of the company, the owner of
- 1:49the company, the founder of the company.
- 1:50Who, and this is where I did the re do the research.
- 1:54I looked at his book, and in his book he said, give engineers the space to explore.
- 1:59Yes.
- 2:00And that is a paradox that you see time and time again.
- 2:03And I really wanted you guys to share your view of that because you work with CEOs
- 2:08and I think sometimes they believe they're giving people permission, but if those
- 2:13permissions, you mentioned the fire phone.
- 2:15If they fail.
- 2:16Yeah.
- 2:16And I use that term.
- 2:17You keep a receipt.
- 2:18Yeah.
- 2:18You're, you have a blemish in your career.
- 2:20Chuck House said this about himself.
- 2:21He said he did a second project after having that hero project.
- 2:25Yeah.
- 2:25He himself said, we need to kill the project.
- 2:28And he lost all his management.
- 2:30All his budget and all of a sudden he was starting, he was, he went from hero
- 2:33to zero and he had to build that again.
- 2:35Yeah.
- 2:36That is a problem.
- 2:37And that makes people like him give up.
- 2:40Now he didn't, but they're very, very rare and the corporate immune
- 2:43system doesn't let them flourish.
- 2:45And that's because we still have that hero syndrome.
- 2:47It's that one person who needs to fight the system.
- 2:50Like, yeah.
- 2:51Well then you'll get one innovation every, you know, 50 years.
- 2:54So why didn't NE Nestle come up with one Nespresso?
- 2:56Right.
- 2:57Because that's the hero system, right?
- 2:59So what we need is actually a real system that leadership supports.
- 3:03So that many can explore.
- 3:05And if you fail, it's not gonna blemish you.
- 3:07And, and you know, you can love Amazon or hate Amazon, but when j Bezos was CEO,
- 3:12he did say like, you know, invention.
- 3:14He called it invention.
- 3:15Success and invention, like the the flip side, you cannot invent,
- 3:19do new things without failure.
- 3:21And then he would say, which is kind of crazy, right?
- 3:23The bigger we get with Amazon, the bigger our failures need to get, otherwise
- 3:27we're not gonna move the needle.
- 3:28Yeah.
- 3:28But what he didn't say is people will get that one wrong.
- 3:31Everything starts with small failures until they get to a big failure.
- 3:34There's often very many iterations.
- 3:36Right.
- 3:36Yeah.
- 3:37But you mentioned that, right?
- 3:38The Kindle fire phone team was not fired.
- 3:41They, they moved.
- 3:43They moved and be, those engineers came up with Alexa.
- 3:46Alexa afterwards.
- 3:47But what is interesting is you could actually audit a company.
- 3:52To what extent they could embrace that resilience or that thick skin.
- 3:58You just ask, how do you conduct your after action review?
- 4:02Do you write it down to what extent you will share?
- 4:06So in a microcosm.
- 4:09People wrote about it, and you're looking@booking.com, right?
- 4:12They do tons of experiment and engineers need to log their
- 4:17experiment in a centralized system, and then no permission needs to ask.
- 4:22So a junior guy in Sydney can look up what's going on with a VP in amda.
- 4:27Is, you know, right to know, not need to know basis.
- 4:30And so there are actually day-to-day habit, we as external can help
- 4:36audit and to what extent we are embracing radical transparency.
- 4:40Without transparency, there's no learning because knowledge doesn't flow around.
- 4:45Yeah.
- 4:46And I'll just add one point to, because these are very interesting perspectives.
- 4:49Going back to your point about architecture as well.
- 4:51And.
- 4:52I think it's absolutely, you know, you are absolutely spot on about the fact
- 4:56that there is no way to really get to the next breakthrough without that
- 5:01permission to fail and without letting so-called a thousand flowers bloom.
- 5:06And what helps kind of at the company, what's important for you
- 5:10to then succeed with it because you want things to succeed, but
- 5:13then how do they fit together?
- 5:15What's that picture?
- 5:16So you need to be very clear about what do we want to become?
- 5:19As the world is changing, what do we wanna become in, in, in a
- 5:22year from now, two years from now?
- 5:23You know, it's not a one year, two year plan.
- 5:25You can't plan when, when the structure is uncertain.
- 5:28But you need to have a vision of here's what we wanna be, here's
- 5:32the logic of how we will operate one to three years from now.
- 5:34And constantly update that based on how things are changing.
- 5:37But then as these experiments succeed, see how they align towards that.
- 5:41Because you're not just sharing financial returns and this is the only mild
- 5:44deviation from venture capital where.
- 5:46The portfolio model itself is sufficient Here.
- 5:49You don't want this a portfolio.
- 5:50You want architecturally cohesive returns, and so you need to have that vision,
- 5:55that architecture of capabilities, and then say, okay, that maps back here.
- 5:59. So there you go, Chuck.
- 6:00What are your thoughts on that?
- 6:02Man?
- 6:02you captured the essence of of what it was no question about that.
- 6:07I was reading your post last night and you have about 500 quotes of people
- 6:15you know, Galileo and Copernicus and right on down through the list of
- 6:19people that have bucked the system.
- 6:21And the feedback you got was from many people that have had
- 6:26essentially the same experience.
- 6:28And I think you're playing to an audience that understands this issue.
- 6:33It's an issue that those of us that have lived it understand pretty
- 6:38well those that get in the way of it have all their good reasons.
- 6:44And the question is, how can you make that, how can you ritualize that in
- 6:49a more positive way for everyone?
- 6:51And that's why I wrote the book in the first place.
- 6:55And we're gonna get to that chuck has just agreed kindly to do part three.
- 6:59You'll be sick of me, Chuck, by the end of all this as well, because I really
- 7:02want to share Chuck's intrapreneur's handbook because it's so, so valuable.
- 7:06But there in this part, and I'm really focusing on part three or four
- 7:10of the book here, there's so many lines and quotes that are just gold.
- 7:15And I'd love you to elaborate on them.
- 7:17So I'll pull these out.
- 7:18I'm gonna pick up the story here.
- 7:20Maybe you'll give us a bit of context.
- 7:22, Because you said here, you'd just turned down a job with AMD to build
- 7:27the same thing that now HP wanted.
- 7:29And while you'd been very nervous about the assignment at AMD, their reward
- 7:34package was disproportionately higher.
- 7:37And all of a sudden you wondered, oh, have I made the wrong,
- 7:40have I made the wrong choice?
- 7:42Have I made a big mistake?
- 7:43Maybe we'll pick up the story there and you tell us what
- 7:45was going on at this stage.
- 7:47the basic issue was I had been fairly successful at my division.
- 7:53We were a thousand miles from headquarters.
- 7:56We didn't get observed all that often.
- 7:59So you had a fair amount of freedom.
- 8:00And within that Colorado Springs group, I'd developed a reasonable
- 8:06following, I guess you would say.
- 8:08I had credibility and and I was allowed by and large to pick my own projects.
- 8:17And so I had actually gotten pretty used to that and was having a pretty good
- 8:21time and a fair amount of success for the company and for our own projects.
- 8:29And and because we'd been fairly visible in the competitive space
- 8:36I, my name got known elsewhere.
- 8:39And there's a phenomena we call headhunters that they, find you and
- 8:44they solicit You We just had that in college football here in the States.
- 8:49Big hoorah for some of the coaches.
- 8:53But anyway, the point was I got found by one of these groups.
- 8:58They introduced me to the, founder of a MD applied Microsystems
- 9:04which has spun out of Fairchild.
- 9:07The guy that founded Jerry Sanders was a close colleague with the Gordon
- 9:12Moore and Bob Noyce over at Intel.
- 9:15But his decision was, I'm gonna copy what they're doing, and he actually fashioned
- 9:20a a legal document that he could be the second source for some of Intel's chips.
- 9:27And then as these things have a way of happening they got in a war and
- 9:32they didn't want him to have access.
- 9:35And And the point of that all was there was a product line called
- 9:40program development systems was enabling the use of these chips.
- 9:45Basically, you could emulate how the chip performed and have a second computer.
- 9:50You're actually writing the code for that.
- 9:54The microcode for the, for the microprocessor in question, if
- 9:58you could write it for your own microprocessor you being a chip
- 10:03manufacturer you had essentially a heads up a leadership position.
- 10:09A MD all of a sudden didn't have access to the intel chip set or to the emulators.
- 10:17And Jerry Sanders being the enterprising guy that he was deciding he wanted
- 10:21to build a competing program.
- 10:24And so that's what they recruited, that's what they tried to recruit me to do.
- 10:30And this was.
- 10:32Competitive to a degree with logic analyzers, but it was a very different
- 10:36technology, much more software intensive.
- 10:39I was still pretty much a hardware guy and I went and listened and he's a pretty
- 10:46bombastic tub thumping kind of guy.
- 10:50And and he he made the offer pretty attractive Hey, take a look out there
- 10:55in that garage there's a Bentley and a Ferrari and and Aston Martin
- 11:01and I mean, my God, it was a lineup.
- 11:03Now it also happened to be at a time that gas was pretty much at a premium.
- 11:08This would be like 1978 or so, and people are at long lines of the gas
- 11:13station and OPEC had kind of closed down the US supply and, his wife served
- 11:19breakfast in a very filmy kind of thing.
- 11:22She's a, was a model.
- 11:24And she was known for her risque dress.
- 11:28she first of all served us breakfast and I was bedazzled.
- 11:33And then she jumped in one of the cars and drove off and ran outta
- 11:36gas about two miles from home.
- 11:38And so he gets a call while we're interviewing from the fire
- 11:41department who had found her.
- 11:43And she's basically still dressed in this basically Scandy nightgown,
- 11:48but she's out of gas three miles from a gas station, right.
- 11:51So it was it was almost laughable.
- 11:54But anyway, the point was as he described it and how it would work and it would be
- 11:59a partnership with Siemens in Germany.
- 12:01And this was all I'm a Colorado Springs country boy, it's like, holy smokes.
- 12:08This would be.
- 12:09Way outta my league.
- 12:11And so I basically said no.
- 12:13And it took a while and he was unhappy with my decision, but
- 12:17you know, that's how it is.
- 12:18Never spoke to him again in my life.
- 12:21He wouldn't have spoken to me if I'd met And so about two
- 12:26months later, I'm being hosted.
- 12:29I was on a magazine cover and I had even more notoriety and I at a meeting
- 12:34up in Canada and one of HP's vice presidents from California was there.
- 12:40And he asked me to go for a walk along the Ottawa River, and it's colder than
- 12:46blue blazes and fall color around.
- 12:49And he says, here's what we'd like your group to do.
- 12:52We want you to build.
- 12:54Exactly what was asking me to build.
- 12:58And I said that's thank you very much for your input, but you know, I'm in
- 13:02charge of my own program out here.
- 13:04He said, no, I don't think you understand.
- 13:06You work for Hewlett Packard and we call the shots when we need to and
- 13:12you're gonna build this damn thing.
- 13:14go, wait a minute there's no pretty girl in the negative, Hey,
- 13:18there's no Bentley, I don't know.
- 13:20I didn't know what a stock option really was like, did I make the wrong decision?
- 13:25is this?
- 13:26And So it took a little soul searching day.
- 13:30To wrap my mind around it.
- 13:33Years later, I gave a TED X talk.
- 13:35I don't know if you know about the TED Talks, but I gave a talk
- 13:40on, I said, resilience is the most important single thing you can do.
- 13:45in fact, I've been thinking if I did a second edition of the book, I'd have
- 13:48one last chapter that says, what are some of the important things to learn?
- 13:52And resilience is the one, and in this case, the resilience was realizing,
- 13:58a, I don't have a choice with what Palo Alto is telling me I have to do.
- 14:03B why don't you get with the program and decide it'd be a good thing and
- 14:07see let's bring some of that same inventive capability of the team you've
- 14:12already built to this new project.
- 14:15So that's the story.
- 14:17There was a couple of little things here and this one resonated
- 14:20with me on a personal level.
- 14:22It was regards to the PDS challenge and.
- 14:25Here.
- 14:25You said you didn't feel victorious, even though in a way you'd been headhunted
- 14:30inside the organization, this was an honor, but you felt that it came back
- 14:34to control because you liked being in charge of creating change and you
- 14:38bridled when someone else told you what to do and you wondered, had it
- 14:43something to do with the long simmering issues you had with your father.
- 14:46Being ordered to change has often been an emotional hurdle.
- 14:50The reason that I'd love you to share that is I see that as a very common
- 14:55trait with intrapreneurs or change.
- 14:57Change makers for sure.
- 14:59For sure.
- 14:59They don't like being told what to do.
- 15:01that certainly is true in my case.
- 15:03Certainly true in my case.
- 15:05And I guess I did put it in the book that it was probably issues with my father.
- 15:09I don't know whether that's would I say that today?
- 15:13Probably still would.
- 15:14there's always a galvanizing reason for what we do.
- 15:18You look in the mirror and you think you're a pretty good fellow
- 15:21and other people are saying, why the hell is he doing that?
- 15:25And you go I was, when I was four years old.
- 15:27See I didn't get a bicycle.
- 15:29For sure but Chuck, I'd love you to share how that manifested in the
- 15:33workplace, because this often gets us in trouble in the workplace.
- 15:37Oh yeah,
- 15:38In fact, I think you hit the nail on the head.
- 15:41What happens in the workplace is more or less the company thinks that they own you.
- 15:46You're I wouldn't say you're chattel, but you're an employee.
- 15:51They're the employer.
- 15:53They should be able to dictate.
- 15:55What you work on and what the goals are.
- 15:58Okay.
- 15:59And I've I've found that limiting often.
- 16:03And and so, one response to that is, is to design your own world.
- 16:11Another is to fight it.
- 16:12a third is to leave that environment and go become an intrapreneur.
- 16:16And so you have several different choices.
- 16:19But in my case it, that was one of the fueling ambitions, if you will.
- 16:25was to be in control.
- 16:27But a bigger thing for me than often was I just saw something
- 16:32different that could be done.
- 16:33And the people I'm with didn't see it and didn't appreciate it.
- 16:38And so it isn't just a question of you'd like control, it's a question
- 16:42of you just have this dream or this insight and you say, my God, we this.
- 16:49We could drive a MRE through this hole in the front line, and so that more
- 16:55often than not, that's what drove me.
- 16:58But subconsciously, I'm sure it was some of this control element as well.
- 17:02we'll discover later sometimes the innovator, the intrapreneur sees it
- 17:06way earlier than anyone else, and by the time the organization then look
- 17:10at the opportunity, you're number 43 as an entrant into that marketplace.
- 17:15Like, happened with the PDS, but we'll get to that Shook because that's
- 17:19that's a part of the story as well.
- 17:21There's a few key quotes here.
- 17:23That I just loved, and they're just applicable to everybody in, every role.
- 17:28Whether you're an incumbent or a new entrant to a marketplace.
- 17:32You write here that "innovation changes everything.
- 17:35Your opportunity is also open to others who, other innovators, that's who you say.
- 17:41And strange as it may seem, because existing competitors know the old rules.
- 17:46They are among the least likely to be your key competitors in the new order.
- 17:50Very important point.
- 17:51Existing competitors almost always follow the same pattern.
- 17:55First, they redouble their efforts to improve the old existing products
- 18:00to show that the new approach is really not yet necessary.
- 18:04Second, when it becomes dramatically clear that the shift is happening, they'll
- 18:08awkwardly try to meld the two ideas.
- 18:11I'd love you to share that because that happens even today.
- 18:16There's a set of sayings about the four stages that, that people go through.
- 18:20Page 21 of this book, I'll just kinda read it.
- 18:23First year original idea gets ignored.
- 18:26Okay.
- 18:27And then when they realize it's growing, it's seen as a threat its too radical.
- 18:33and so they try to stop it, and then they try to corrupt it.
- 18:38Oh let me here's what's wrong with it.
- 18:40If you could do this, you could meld it in with what's going on today.
- 18:44And then when it finally gets instituted, they say actually that was mine.
- 18:48They take credit for it instead of you.
- 18:50It's just, it's a beautiful story.
- 18:53And it's something that you happened to you many times as we talked about
- 18:56in part one, but he here, I'd love you to give us context of your actual story
- 19:00here because you say in hindsight.
- 19:03You should have seen Intel rather than Techtronics as the real competitor.
- 19:07And this is what happens.
- 19:08You start looking over here at the existing competitors and
- 19:11somebody comes from nowhere.
- 19:12But as you say, it's extremely hard to do, especially if you've been locked
- 19:16in a head-to-head battle for years.
- 19:18And this new idea seems like a breakthrough you've
- 19:21sought for so many years.
- 19:22And of course you'll focus on beating your biggest foe and you go,
- 19:27whoops, who's this other company?
- 19:29So, oscilloscopes had been the, weakness for HP forever.
- 19:34When I say forever something like the mid fifties set up their own Salesforce and
- 19:41took it away from the distributors that were handling both HP and Techtronics in,
- 19:46in switching circuits things like radar, things like computers were just starting
- 19:51to happen compared to analog radio and television and all the things that,
- 19:59that the entertainment world knew about.
- 20:01And so the point was they got a tremendous headstart.
- 20:05We, we were Johnny come lately, we weren't 43rd, but we were like fifth or sixth.
- 20:11And they had a, like a 90% market share.
- 20:14And so I joined in 62.
- 20:18They'd been at that for seven or eight years.
- 20:21We tried end runs.
- 20:22We tried hit head on for like a 15 years and didn't make a whole lot of
- 20:29progress until the Logic Analyzer line.
- 20:31And when, and all of a sudden logic it we're doing better than they are.
- 20:36I'd done a nice job with displays, but that was a kind of a niche area,
- 20:40and now we've got this logic line and we're just, we're whipping them
- 20:44and it was such a delicious feeling.
- 20:47But I, kept feeling and, fretting about we're getting under-resourced for our
- 20:54own development plan and they're gonna redouble their effort and catch us.
- 20:59Right.
- 21:00So that was my entire focus.
- 21:02And then we kept hearing from people that were buying our logic they kept saying,
- 21:07there's this thing called an emulator.
- 21:09What's that?
- 21:11And we, didn't, I mean, we didn't even know the word.
- 21:14And so we for about a year, we keep hearing they're selling as many of those
- 21:20things as you're selling logic analyzers.
- 21:22And you go, oh, really?
- 21:23That's interesting.
- 21:25And, then I'm with the a MD guy you go, he thinks that's the business.
- 21:31How come I don't, and then I'm up in Canada, walking along
- 21:35this river freezing holy shit.
- 21:39This is I've been missing the whole point.
- 21:42is how the new designs are happening.
- 21:45The paradigm has completely changed.
- 21:49And the question is, how do you write the code and then de debug it with our tools?
- 21:55But the question is, the hard job is writing it.
- 21:58And you go, oh, that's our real competitor I mean, this didn't happen.
- 22:04It didn't happen at 10 at night and you wake up with a light bulb it was
- 22:08like a slow you had to, they had to kind of eat away at my belief system.
- 22:16I represent in that case, the old guard and they represent the new thing.
- 22:21And , so the idea that I had to learn.
- 22:24Their way and embrace it.
- 22:25That's a hard thing.
- 22:27And it would've been harder.
- 22:29It is harder when you've been successful doing what you're doing.
- 22:33If I was still looking for a new way to break through,
- 22:36you'd go, oh, hey, that's it.
- 22:38But I'm writing my own success bubble.
- 22:42And so that's what's hard to get your mind out of, I used to describe it
- 22:48with a little diagram and you say you don't know what you don't know.
- 22:51And and the problem is you do know what you do know.
- 22:56And the question is, if you wanna think about an area that you don't know much
- 22:59about, you have to almost forget what you know in order to imagine the new thing.
- 23:05That, that's a tricky proposition.
- 23:07Chuck, I'm gonna, I'm gonna share that diagram 'cause I thought it
- 23:09was brilliant and this is one of the pieces and I'm glad you brought it up
- 23:14because it is one of the key pieces I wanted to share was you were brilliant.
- 23:18You are a brilliant innovator, you're still entrepreneur.
- 23:20You were an intrapreneur, you had a team who was brilliant, who had succeeded.
- 23:25And even with that success, it blinds you to new opportunities.
- 23:29And I think that's the cycle that continues time and time again,
- 23:32there's this, there's a saying I use, which is you cannot read the
- 23:35label when you're inside the jar.
- 23:38So from the outside you're looking at other people and you're kind of going,
- 23:41oh my God, they're such laggards, or they don't get it, et cetera.
- 23:45But when it's your turn, because you've created this reality
- 23:49for yourself, you miss it.
- 23:50The paradigm, so many, so often, and I have a brilliant quote here
- 23:54from you, you say, the biggest resistance to innovation in our place
- 23:58was centered in our own leaders.
- 24:01Our executive staff did not understand, and hence could not support our
- 24:05logic program in good conscience.
- 24:08They had to be shown coaxed, cajoled into understanding the
- 24:12issues enough to quit resisting.
- 24:14Even though they weren't being asked to invent in the new arena, it would've
- 24:18helped if they had fought those who were, but now I was staring head on
- 24:23the fact that, I and my own staff were exhibiting , analogous, narrow-mindedness
- 24:29when seen from Palo Alto.
- 24:32Creativity and innovation, often lauded are actually feared more when
- 24:36they are embraced by most managements.
- 24:38They espouse innovation, but actions belie the words why?
- 24:42True innovation clouds the future and predictably goes out of the window.
- 24:47Most managers really want to avoid risk, especially if visible
- 24:51failure might be involved.
- 24:53Our division management was no exception, and it was a struggle with these attitudes
- 24:58to find an approach to win their support.
- 25:01Such a key paragraph.
- 25:03I'd love you to elaborate.
- 25:05the essay I used to write was you can't see the picture when you're in the frame.
- 25:10Brilliant.
- 25:11what the problem was.
- 25:12And and all of a sudden you say, my God I must look to the new group.
- 25:18Like old group looked to me I we're the stodgy ones.
- 25:24We, we don't get it.
- 25:26And and yeah it took a and and not everybody made that transition.
- 25:33I, when we first put the logic team together we got a, we, it was like
- 25:38putting a draft baseball team together, a rugby in your case, and the, all
- 25:43the old teams give you their castoffs and their aging players and the new
- 25:48recruits that haven't yet made it.
- 25:50they don't really want you to succeed.
- 25:52And so I got all the we did a lot of turnover, and some got it.
- 25:58And a whole lot didn't.
- 25:59And and here I am with this team that I've built and we've just
- 26:04conquered the world, our little world.
- 26:07And now I can't move them either.
- 26:10It's like, wait a minute, I know these guys.
- 26:12These are all good people.
- 26:14These are my people.
- 26:15What the hell's wrong here?
- 26:17And what was wrong was they had learned heavily.
- 26:21Dave Packard used to say, he said those who resist change led the last one.
- 26:28That's it.
- 26:28I have a few little diagrams here.
- 26:30I thought about this diffusion of innovation model, who you're familiar
- 26:35with, which is the Everett Rogers piece about how adoption happens.
- 26:39And you said there, not everybody made it.
- 26:43Like, so this, when you have a change inside an organization,
- 26:47this is really about diffusion of a new technology into society.
- 26:50But you also see it with change initiatives, even with a micro
- 26:53team that you had at the time.
- 26:55And you right here now, I had a new struggle with myself.
- 26:59I and my team were now the re.
- 27:01Calcitrant, at least as viewed from Palo Alto.
- 27:04Alto.
- 27:05We had flipped almost instantly from the proud, successful Maverick
- 27:09Mavericks knocking the ball outta the park into a fearful resistant
- 27:12group, unwilling to tackle the new challenge looming just in front of us.
- 27:16A surprising turn of events, as you say yourself, but I thought this diagram
- 27:21mapped exactly to what you saw in your team, because as you said, not everybody
- 27:26made it to that step When you started to work for Palo Alto, essentially.
- 27:31So you can pick segments of that diagram and our team was in that early
- 27:37maturity phase of logic analyzers.
- 27:41We had no one in that early adopter phase on our team.
- 27:45We, no one, I mean the world had a few people like that,
- 27:49but we didn't have anybody.
- 27:50So we had no one espousing this new paradigm.
- 27:55Other than Palo Alto who and they could see it.
- 27:59They didn't wanna deal with it.
- 28:01They wanted someone else to deal with it.
- 28:03And they said you guys are digital guys.
- 28:05Hell, you're the ones, right?
- 28:07And we were us.
- 28:08Why us?
- 28:09And then you go, oh, why us?
- 28:11Is because seeing from 30,000 feet we're the obvious player.
- 28:16We just aren't the obvious player psychologically or emotionally or
- 28:21technically, or any of those things.
- 28:23You.
- 28:23I'll show the diagram.
- 28:25You mentioned there, Chuck, because I thought this was helpful to
- 28:28understand for people where they sit
- 28:30look on the right side, it says unconscious and conscious.
- 28:34So unconscious are the bottom two boxes.
- 28:37Unconscious meaning it's subconscious, it's not really part of your you can't
- 28:42articulate it, but you probably know it.
- 28:44Conscious is, yeah, you can describe it.
- 28:47You're you're effective.
- 28:49Looking at the top, it says competent and incompetent.
- 28:53You can think skilled or unskilled whatever.
- 28:56But the point is, let's start in the lower right.
- 28:59When you're three years old, you don't know how to tie your
- 29:02shoes and you don't know that.
- 29:03You don't have to learn that.
- 29:05And then usually an older sister comes up and says, ha, you gotta
- 29:09learn this kid, and you go, okay.
- 29:12So you laboriously learn how to tie your shoe laces, and you move
- 29:16up into that upper right quadrant.
- 29:19Now, what you didn't know.
- 29:21Now you know how to tie your shoes, kind of.
- 29:24And somebody, friends come over and you say, let me show you.
- 29:27I know how to tie my shoes.
- 29:29And then you demonstrate that you haven't quite learned it.
- 29:32And so once you get it down, you're over in the do know.
- 29:36You do know, now you know how to do it, and you can do it
- 29:39with practice in a, crowd.
- 29:42And then as time goes on, you get so good at those things you go down to
- 29:47the lower left where you don't know any longer what it is you do know.
- 29:51You just sort of do it automatically.
- 29:53Let me give you an example.
- 29:55I would stand in a group and I'd ask how many people here know
- 30:00the color of their toothbrush?
- 30:02And about two thirds of the hands will go up.
- 30:05And I say to the other third, you're not married, are you?
- 30:08Or you've got your own bathroom.
- 30:10If you share a bathroom, you usually learn your toothbrush,
- 30:13color and the other person's.
- 30:16And so you don't pay attention if you don't have to.
- 30:19And most of our life is that way.
- 30:22So the question is, as you go around that loop, you get better and better
- 30:25at doing things until till you do a lot of 'em just almost automatically.
- 30:30then what happens?
- 30:31You're down in the lower left and the paradigm changes and and you don't
- 30:37realize for a while the paradigm changes because you're still busy
- 30:41doing what it is you do so well, you don't even have to think about it.
- 30:45Okay?
- 30:47But what's happened is the field has moved to the lower right.
- 30:52You don't know what you should know in that field at all.
- 30:57And, so when they talk about jumping the chasm you, you cited Everett Rogers and
- 31:04Rogers and several others or Geoffrey Moore for one described jumping the chasm.
- 31:10The chasm is between the lower left and the lower right.
- 31:14do you jump that chasm and imagine forgetting what you do know so that you
- 31:19can learn what you don't know gracefully.
- 31:22And that's, the problem we were talking about.
- 31:24That's where we were trying to go from logic to PDS.
- 31:28How do you learn this whole new thing and forget about what you had done because
- 31:33it's not relevant to the new case.
- 31:36And yet, you know damn it is, and it's built into your fiber.
- 31:39Brilliant, brilliant job, man.
- 31:40That's that's beautiful and, I'm gonna build on it because you say here, many
- 31:45lessons might be drawn from such a chart.
- 31:48First.
- 31:48It is fair to observe that productivity improvements are usually viewed as
- 31:53moving from the upper right hand quadrant to the lower left hand quadrant.
- 31:58The idea is to move a team from learning the initial concepts to
- 32:01practice in them, and then shift to an intuitive, easy operational behavior.
- 32:05So you go from exploration to exploitation, and then many companies
- 32:10prefer to hire new college graduates.
- 32:13Graduates so they can teach how we do things around here instead of having
- 32:18the new hires, waste time, unlearning at different companies, processes
- 32:22and values or the company themselves.
- 32:26The unlearning part, and I think that piece is so core that you experience
- 32:30was to learn something new sometimes you have to unlearn something
- 32:34old, and that's the difficulty.
- 32:36Well, that, I think that's one of the reasons people get trapped in
- 32:39the fields that they're in, is the unlearning process is, is a, a tough one.
- 32:45You know, You've gotta be introspective, you've gotta be really challenging
- 32:48your own beliefs and is just not a comfortable place to be.
- 32:53I've seen lots of companies that'll get down in the lower left hand corner.
- 32:57They're very good at what they do.
- 32:59And then the sales start dwindling and profits start eroding and and the
- 33:06top management will get together and say, we need to put a training course
- 33:09in to train people in what it is.
- 33:12We learned that the new kids don't know.
- 33:15And so we can actually build a way to make them like us.
- 33:20And what they should be doing is remember the girl "I park my brain at the door
- 33:25" what they should be doing is say, take these new ones and say, Hey, why don't you
- 33:29take a look around, see what we do, and then you tell us what we should be doing.
- 33:34But that's not the way most management teams operate.
- 33:37I used to do that, Chuck.
- 33:38When I had a team and not as big a team as you, , I used to do a thing called
- 33:41reverse onboarding, which was to ask them to report back to me all the stuff
- 33:46we were doing wrong after six to 12 weeks with no receipts kept on them.
- 33:51Every time I change jobs I spent the first week journaling.
- 33:55What is it you're seeing?
- 33:57Because that's, that, that week is you're seeing things with such fresh eyes and the
- 34:03things that are strange to you have gotta be written down because you'll forget
- 34:08it 10 days later, the press of things.
- 34:11But that often is where the jewels are of what the outsider could see at least
- 34:18briefly that no one inside could see.
- 34:21that's key.
- 34:22I think that it's briefly because then you get used to it and you
- 34:25stop seeing it after a while.
- 34:27There's a great quote Alvin Tofler the sci-fi writer in, in Future Shock.
- 34:31I'm sure you've read that book.
- 34:32He said the illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who
- 34:36cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.
- 34:40And that is just branded into my brain.
- 34:43But again, I'm sure there's loads of stuff I do that I can't see the picture when
- 34:47I'm inside the frame to use your, saying.
- 34:51But you say here and I think this is key again, I might put the diagram back up
- 34:55for those people that are watching this on YouTube, because I loved what you said.
- 35:00Imagine that as events move along, things get harder.
- 35:03Profits become more elusive and efficiency's less pertinent.
- 35:08The response often is to try and figure out what happened or what we need to do
- 35:12to recapture what once we did so well.
- 35:15And a classic response often from higher level management in conjunction with
- 35:19HR or a training department, is to go back to the basics, to revisit what
- 35:25made us great in the first place and to reinstill the things we once knew so well.
- 35:29And in effect, the result is, let's go back to quadrant three from quadrant
- 35:34four, instead of trying to move from quadrant four to one and two all over
- 35:39again, I thought that was a core message
- 35:42and so I would interpret that as, okay, you're down in four.
- 35:46The kids you know, that new hires from a couple years ago are stuck in three
- 35:52not doing as well as you'd like, they don't know as much as you'd like.
- 35:55So the quadrant four folk go up to the training team up in quadrant
- 36:00two say, why don't you train them better so they can do three?
- 36:05Right.
- 36:05So they completely skipped that first quadrant.
- 36:10And the point of course of what I was writing is it very often the
- 36:14breakthroughs are in the first quadrant, have to be in the first quadrant.
- 36:19So, yeah, you're You summed it Well
- 36:22Man, I'm just quoting your, brilliance here.
- 36:24Okay.
- 36:25So I'll move along here.
- 36:26So this quote I thought was important to call out as well.
- 36:29You said being open to new ideas.
- 36:31In effect, being willing to stop in the midst of something that has
- 36:35felt comfortable but has changed character somehow is not all that easy.
- 36:40Often it seems that the more expert or powerful someone is or has been, the
- 36:44more they tend to want to stay in the comfort zone rather than admit that they
- 36:49really don't know what to do In this new instance, the new Paradigm, I chuckled
- 36:55as I read that because ironically it's how Thomas Kuhn behaved who, the guy
- 37:00who, for those who don't know, the guy who popularized the concept of the
- 37:03paradigm shift, he reacted like that when you approached him with a new idea.
- 37:08I mean, talk about ironic, here's this guy writing about understanding
- 37:14how new paradigms get adopted and, he missed one himself.
- 37:18But so did I. And I think you'll find late in the book, I've got an example
- 37:24where like 40 years later I was running a digital arts college and we
- 37:29were just talk about blowing it away.
- 37:31We, we were named the number two digital arts college in the
- 37:34world next to one in, China.
- 37:37One in France was third.
- 37:39and And we had this guy who was our director of, these digital films.
- 37:47these were all computer generated films like an eight minute film.
- 37:50And it, it took many hundreds of hours of compute time to
- 37:54do these things and all that.
- 37:57And he came to me and for his team, he wanted to take three
- 38:01people to Cigraph, which is the big international graphics and film show
- 38:08for the computer industry, right?
- 38:11And it turned out it was maybe 10 or $20,000, which
- 38:16our little school didn't have.
- 38:18And so I basically I met with my staff.
- 38:23I was the chancellor of the university, and I turned it down
- 38:27and he just blew a head gas.
- 38:29and and my HR director came to me and says, aren't you writing?
- 38:34I was in the middle of writing the book that you're talking about,
- 38:37and she says, aren't you talking about how great intrapreneuring is?
- 38:41And people inside the organization try to do different things, she
- 38:44said, and you turned him down.
- 38:47And I'm sitting there writing this book about how intrapreneuring
- 38:51should work, and I have just been the chief violator of the whole promise,
- 38:55that's the point.
- 38:56There's another funny one I came across.
- 38:58There's a guy called Howard Gardner.
- 39:00Brilliant writer.
- 39:02The guy who created different types of learning, different kinds of minds that
- 39:05people have, and he met Stanley Milgram.
- 39:09Do you remember the famous Milgram experiments, which were on speaking truth
- 39:13to power or authority bias, where you had these groups of people and they were.
- 39:18There was a, there were actors, but you had an actor, and then you had somebody
- 39:21who wasn't an actor, and the person who wasn't an actor would ask you a question.
- 39:27So it was a learner and a teacher.
- 39:29And then if you got the answer wrong as the learner, I would give you a
- 39:34mild electric shock, but in all cases, and it went up to something like
- 39:3880%, 80% of people were willing to give it a shock that was potentially
- 39:43fatal only by the listening to the person who was wearing a white coat.
- 39:49So they'd turn and they go, Hey, wait a second.
- 39:50What if this guy dies?
- 39:52And they go, it's my responsibility.
- 39:54And then they'd continue.
- 39:55So that's the guy, he did those famous studies and they were about stuff like
- 39:59how atrocities, like the holocaust happen
- 40:02Oh
- 40:02because people just they outsource responsibility, right.
- 40:07But the same guy, Howard Gardner was taking a class with Stanley Milgram
- 40:12and he opposed one of his ideas in the class, and Milgram lost it.
- 40:16And I was like, the irony of this,
- 40:19Yeah, we're all victims of our own space,
- 40:22. big time.
- 40:23It's easy to point the finger.
- 40:25There's a great saying, Chuck, when you point the finger, there's three
- 40:27pointing back to yourself or else or else even worse, that if you've
- 40:32heard of the three asshole rule.
- 40:34So if you meet three assholes in a day, maybe you're the asshole.
- 40:38I love it.
- 40:39Yeah,
- 40:40Yeah.
- 40:41So, okay.
- 40:43Okay.
- 40:43we'll keep going man.
- 40:45So, so you say here, an additional complication is that the new paradigm,
- 40:50the change situation is usually cloudy, fuzzy, and in explicit.
- 40:54The old paradigm, paradigm from which we've come has rules, is
- 40:58well established, and has well articulated procedures and processes.
- 41:03The new one is at best, dimly viewed half conceived and dichotomous, even for the
- 41:09visionary who senses or even grasps it.
- 41:12I think that's the, one of the biggest challenges as the intrapreneur is trying
- 41:16to explain the feeling you have, because usually it's a feeling and usually you
- 41:21sense the world in a different way.
- 41:23That because they're so expert at being managers, they don't, and because
- 41:27maybe we're a bit neurodivergent or we see the world differently, we
- 41:32read different things, we're into different music, whatever it is.
- 41:35You see things differently, but then you try and articulate it
- 41:38and it doesn't make any sense to the person who's listening to you.
- 41:41I've got a diagram where you go from being lost at sea to you're working on
- 41:47the right th you know you're working on effective things, but you're
- 41:50not sure they're the right things.
- 41:52Then you're working right things, but you
- 41:54I'll pull it.
- 41:55it's sufficient.
- 41:56You know that, that.
- 41:57That is the way of somebody trying to work their way through a cloudy situation.
- 42:03so I got rid of a project called Next Gen before the Logic Line.
- 42:10And I knew what I was working on wasn't any good, but I didn't have any
- 42:14vision of what to do different and I started describing some things that
- 42:20we'd seen in the Techtronics booth.
- 42:24I'm, going back to some examples in the book, but we started talking about things
- 42:28we'd seen that were dichotomous in at a trade conference using the competitions
- 42:35newest, latest, and greatest product.
- 42:37But it clearly didn't address the issue.
- 42:40That gave us a clue of some useful things, but it gave the clue to were the two
- 42:45of us that were there, the whole team.
- 42:48Right?
- 42:49Then we spent a little more time and we said hey, a couple of these
- 42:53are actually the right things.
- 42:55They may not be sufficient, but they're the right things.
- 42:58Then you've got this team of 20 and you say, let me describe that.
- 43:02These are the right things.
- 43:03And they say, huh, are you sure?
- 43:05What's the vision?
- 43:06How, they're, back at, level A. You're at level C and, trying to convince
- 43:12them to move from A to C with you takes a lot of time and it works
- 43:19better if you're explicit about it.
- 43:22You can't be explicit because you don't know.
- 43:25And then you finally get the vision to say, oh.
- 43:28know what we ought to do, and they say, are you sure?
- 43:33And you say I think I'm sure, and It, it is not very convincing.
- 43:38There, there's a the the doubting Thomases, the Bourne skeptics the people
- 43:44comfortable in their own domain are just, you have got to be kidding me.
- 43:51And so this traveling, this path, I is a twofold problem.
- 43:56You've gotta travel as the leader and then you've gotta
- 44:01persuade others to come along.
- 44:03When you know where you're going, kind of, but you can't be explicit.
- 44:08You're describing a gut feel or a, an intangible or a
- 44:13an ephemeral kind of thing.
- 44:15It's a it's an interesting act.
- 44:18And it's a huge challenge for the intrapreneur as you tell us.
- 44:22And I think it's really interesting and this worked out beautifully.
- 44:25'cause the next part I wanted to segue to was a challenge that people
- 44:30thinks is easier for an intrapreneur.
- 44:32So I'll set you up here.
- 44:33So you write that one problem that almost all entrepreneurs and
- 44:38intrapreneurs share is how to gain the attention of the sales channel.
- 44:42So something Chuck said, there is that journey that you bring people on.
- 44:47It depends on where they are.
- 44:49So message sent does not always equal message received to the person
- 44:53listening to you because of their different points on the scale of their
- 44:58advancement on the journey for you.
- 45:00But Chuck writes that many people say this and we, I say this.
- 45:05And I realize here that this is actually not always the case.
- 45:10intrapreneurs have it really easy compared to entrepreneurs because there
- 45:14is already a sales force or a marketing force, for example, for your company,
- 45:19and you think they have a head start.
- 45:22But this totally misunderstands a key point that Chuck points out.
- 45:26It is actually harder to get an existing sales force to switch allegiance from
- 45:32existing products that already work, and they know how to sell to become
- 45:37true believers in a brand new product.
- 45:40And then later on, you're right.
- 45:42Did our existing sales channel have the skills and the motivation
- 45:45to sell Logic State analyzers?
- 45:47Nope.
- 45:48We had to train and motivate the whole sales force to sell our products.
- 45:53We had to get specific sales quotas for our product line.
- 45:56We had to get a share of mind of our salespeople.
- 46:00This is if we, if anybody gets anything outta this show, I think this point is
- 46:05probably one of the most important one.
- 46:07I'd say there, there are two important points that I would
- 46:10really make in retrospect.
- 46:12That's one and the other is the management of intrapreneurs is a lot
- 46:19different than being an intrapreneur.
- 46:22And and so I spend time in the book on how to think about
- 46:28being a manager of intrapreneurs successfully and stimulating.
- 46:32I don't spend as much time on this sales question, but you're right.
- 46:36It is a crucial question.
- 46:38And it doesn't take long to think about it.
- 46:41You know what, what happens if you have a startup?
- 46:44done plenty of startups at this point.
- 46:47The true believers come with you.
- 46:49They see what you're doing and they say, hell, I could sell that.
- 46:52I could sell that to a ice cubes to an Eskimo kind of thing.
- 46:56But in in a comfortable.
- 46:59Corporate environment where the sales team has been in place for quite
- 47:03a while, selling something else.
- 47:06And then you say hey, new deal.
- 47:09We want you to take time out of what you're really good at and concentrate on
- 47:14this thing you don't know anything about.
- 47:16And trust me, it'll work out really well.
- 47:18It's just like, you gotta be kidding.
- 47:21And so we We spent an invaluable time finding a few converts
- 47:27that could be in that group.
- 47:30And then the secret of one of the old timers came up with was a chaska
- 47:34that happened to actually build competitive juices around the group.
- 47:40And so, he framed it that if you can sell 10 of these things
- 47:45you'll get a hero badge basically.
- 47:48And and salespeople always go for our I'm kind of stereotyping here,
- 47:54but sales teams love contests so he was able to reframe the problem
- 48:00instead of learning new skills.
- 48:03We'll teach you where to go and get cheap sales, but we'll give you reward
- 48:07if we do it a differential reward.
- 48:10So, yeah, you nailed it.
- 48:12That is and in re retrospect, I didn't spend that much time on it but but
- 48:18I, it was a crisp little nugget.
- 48:22And Chuck , I just wanna tell our audience, for the people who are
- 48:24joining us for this, and I'm pointing to the book on the shelf there behind
- 48:27me, we're gonna go to part three.
- 48:29In part three of this series.
- 48:31We're gonna cover Chuck's guides to be both a manager of an intrapreneur, but
- 48:35also to be the intrapreneur you gotta see it from both sides of the coin.
- 48:40But there was an interesting story, I dunno if you ever heard
- 48:42of this company, Sono site.
- 48:45They create like these if you had an injury on a football field or say your
- 48:50tennis elbow, and they kind of have this ultrasound to check your injuries.
- 48:55So this is an ultrasound, so this company, SonoSite.
- 48:58And the CEO, a guy called Kevin Goodwin, he couldn't understand why they'd produced
- 49:04this brand new version that was half the size of the existing one, but it was third
- 49:10the price and they couldn't sell them.
- 49:12And he is like, what the heck's going on?
- 49:14This is not as profitable for us, but it's more portable for our clients.
- 49:19It's a better product for our clients and nobody's buying it.
- 49:22And they all said they wanted it.
- 49:23So he attended a meeting with his top sales guy, went out with this guy, sat
- 49:29there, and during the whole meeting the guy never took out the new product.
- 49:33And he's like kicking them and nudging them under the table.
- 49:35He is going show 'em the product, show 'em the product, and the
- 49:38guy wouldn't show the product.
- 49:39And afterwards he said, what the heck was going on in there?
- 49:42Why didn't you show him the product?
- 49:43And he goes, what's my job?
- 49:44This is the sales guy.
- 49:45What's my job for you sir? And he is like going, you're to sell.
- 49:49And he is like going to make you money.
- 49:51He goes, I only need to sell one of those.
- 49:54And I need to sell three of those.
- 49:57And it was like it.
- 49:58The penny dropped and he is like, oh my God.
- 50:00And on top of that, think about the commission.
- 50:03I need to sell three of those to get the same commission as one of those.
- 50:07And then you see the real drivers of resource allocation in a company.
- 50:12You find these examples everywhere.
- 50:13I had one daughter was working for a retailer.
- 50:17They sold it was a women's dress shop.
- 50:21Okay?
- 50:21And so they sold dresses and bracelets and scarves and shoes, the whole nine yards.
- 50:30Okay?
- 50:31And, it was a national chain.
- 50:33And all of a sudden she went to be in the top salesperson outta 700 stores.
- 50:39And the and they sent someone out to audit.
- 50:42And it turned out she was in the lower half on most of the items, she
- 50:48was number one on selling fur coats.
- 50:50And and it turns out this was in Louisiana and you shouldn't ever
- 50:54need a fur coat in Louisiana.
- 50:57And so the question was, what's going on here?
- 50:59And she said, the guys on the offshore oil rigs get paid in cash once every
- 51:06four weeks and they get a weekend off.
- 51:10And she said, I would put the fur coats in the hall of the mall on sale, supposedly.
- 51:17And she said I'd sell three coats to the same guy in three nights.
- 51:21And, and one coat was equal to a hundred scars.
- 51:25Brilliant example.
- 51:26And, that's one of the things I shared you was running a workshop with a
- 51:30team and I was suggesting that they, needed to get out of the building more.
- 51:35And I told them the story of your team and , a guy who just never
- 51:38really left his apartment and he accidentally posted his passport.
- 51:42But I told him that story.
- 51:44And for those who don't know that, listen to part one, but the
- 51:47importance of understanding your customer and your customer's habits
- 51:51there, like to your point of the fur coats, that was understanding.
- 51:55The ambition, when they have revenue, when the buying cycle, is this understanding
- 52:01is so vital to the success of a product.
- 52:04And I had one tour, this was during the display days when I was going through
- 52:10I think it was Grumman on the East coast a Navy fighter ship provider.
- 52:16And I didn't know anything about any of their product
- 52:19lines, but I'm going through it.
- 52:21And they had a bunch of tetro scopes that looked like they'd been stripped down.
- 52:26I stopped to look at 'em.
- 52:27I said what's the deal here?
- 52:29They don't have attenuators, they don't have a way to adjust the voltage.
- 52:33How'd this happen?
- 52:35They said we took all that stuff out.
- 52:37I said, have you talked to Techtronics about Why would we talk to them?
- 52:41I said why'd you take 'em out?
- 52:43It turns out they get in the way of the measurement, and they had
- 52:45a couple of technical reasons.
- 52:48and I'm like, So, and back home, like a year and a half later on an entirely
- 52:54different project I'm building a display.
- 52:57I thought, we don't need that stuff, do we?
- 53:01And that's how the display happened without being a scope.
- 53:04Brilliant.
- 53:04Yeah.
- 53:04Just understanding stuff you don't need is important.
- 53:07Yeah.
- 53:08There's a, another important point I've pulled here, and I, for our point,
- 53:11our audience I thought was important to share because sometimes what we
- 53:15think is innovation is just updating or an incremental improvement because
- 53:20this is when you were on the plane, I think you were coming back from Canada
- 53:24here, and you sketched diagrams and a different perspective occurred to you
- 53:29as the plane neared your destination.
- 53:32Actually all the technology and approach of the HP 1600 s was virtually
- 53:38unchanged from the HP 1601 L. So I'll let you fill in the gaps here.
- 53:44But it seemed different because it had been two years later, there was
- 53:49new cabinetry with connections back to true scopes, and there was much
- 53:54more capable features, but it was essentially identical in terms of
- 53:58circuit technology, user interface, display, and signal connections.
- 54:04To the customer it was refinement, not breakthrough.
- 54:07And you say, no one looks far ahead if they feel behind the power curve, giving
- 54:12all their attention to gaining traction in the tough environment of the moment.
- 54:17There's a lot in there.
- 54:18But this idea of being stuck in the cycle of just gradual improvement
- 54:23and thinking this is great, but the customer doesn't really care.
- 54:27Yeah.
- 54:27So the situation you're describing, or that I was describing was we had
- 54:32been let me just think about it from probably early 72 or three until
- 54:41maybe 76, we were building variants of the first logic, state analyzers.
- 54:48And and so we had changed the package from being inside a scope
- 54:53as a scope plugin to being a standalone like our portable scopes.
- 54:58We had expanded the memory depth.
- 55:02We'd expanded the channel count.
- 55:05We, we'd made a lot of improvements based on what customers wanted,
- 55:09and we mistakenly, or at least mistakenly the - way I viewed it
- 55:13on that plane ride -were treating that evolution as a two phase move.
- 55:19Phase one was the first stuff we did and then we learned a lot and we improved
- 55:23it significantly and did it again.
- 55:26But in truth, it was all the same technology driving it, the same technology
- 55:33in terms of screen interaction in terms of the inside signal capture, et cetera.
- 55:39And then we had the inspiration we're helping people design with Microcomputers.
- 55:44Why aren't we using 'em inside our own products?
- 55:48And that generated a whole new wave of product line.
- 55:52So we were calling phase one and two, the first one, and then phase and
- 55:57phase three and four with the new one.
- 56:00And if you backed off, 30,000 feet or even actually several tens of feet, and you
- 56:08looked at 'em, they all looked the same.
- 56:11I had two phases, not four.
- 56:13And once you looked at it that way, then it was easy to see this PDS thing
- 56:18that I'd been ordered to do that I couldn't hardly get my arms around.
- 56:23I saw that as the logical third phase.
- 56:26And I think I've got a picture of three phases of scopes and
- 56:30three phases of these products.
- 56:32If you, maybe you could show that So the one on the left basically
- 56:37had toggle switches for setting the controls for how many channels?
- 56:43it was wrapped in a, portable box that looked just like a
- 56:47portable oscilloscope at the time.
- 56:49it had a conventional screen that we wrote to ones and zeros instead of wave forms.
- 56:57the second one is microprocessor based.
- 56:59So instead of toggle switches, we had a a 10 10 point keyboard.
- 57:05and you could you could dial things and all that much cleaner interface
- 57:10in a very different form factor.
- 57:12then the PDS was actually in a computer terminal, actually a computer console.
- 57:18And so it's got a full ask keyboard, just like any typewriter.
- 57:22It had soft keys across the bottom of the screen.
- 57:25The screen was most of the big display area because you're reading text, you're
- 57:31not reading little numbers very different.
- 57:34I mean, you look at those, you could instantly tell those are three very
- 57:38distinct families of technology.
- 57:40And show, show the scope one.
- 57:42Here's three scopes going from 72 to 75, 78.
- 57:50They all look identical, much.
- 57:53The screen got a little bigger.
- 57:55The knobs all looked the same.
- 57:57This is the same form factor that Techtronics introduced for IBM in 1965.
- 58:02And so you say that works, right?
- 58:04And so everything tech built and everything we built for the portable
- 58:08lines looked the same for like 20 years, whereas in our line,
- 58:13everything changed every three years.
- 58:16And so that's a good way to tell about real phase changes as
- 58:21opposed to evolutionary change.
- 58:24The guys I showed you the clip from earlier on, I was sharing with them
- 58:26how the paradigm shift from vacuum tubes for many of the people you worked
- 58:32with, that paradigm shift left so many people in the dust because they
- 58:37thought maybe they'd be able to take a night course to change their skillset.
- 58:41But it was a really a mindset shift.
- 58:44And that's what you find with this when you see that's being stuck
- 58:48inside the incremental paradigm.
- 58:49But a mindset shift would be something to go we don't need the screen.
- 58:54absolutely.
- 58:55Think about it in a different way.
- 58:56Computers for many years, actually, until my displays you had a
- 59:01typewriter, keyboard printout.
- 59:03That's all you had.
- 59:04I mean, the idea of of your smartphone not having the screen
- 59:08would be pretty awkward, right?
- 59:10There's, there was a, another line here.
- 59:12Chuck, I thought was just gold.
- 59:14That, and I, shared it to a couple of intrapreneurs.
- 59:16I know you wrote that.
- 59:19You call this after the naming party.
- 59:21This part of the book, you said.
- 59:23Successful inventors have a relatively easy task to invent something new.
- 59:28Innovators though have to make inventions succeed in the marketplace.
- 59:32If the innovator is an entrepreneur, the first tasks are to build a motivated,
- 59:37skilled team and find patient investors.
- 59:40After that, a new marketing and sales team can be assembled from true believers.
- 59:45You don't know what you don't know.
- 59:47If the innovator is an intrapreneur
- 59:49however, the first tasks include building a motivated, capable team
- 59:55where the funding and instructions come from the parent company.
- 59:59All too often, the intrapreneur has to persuade the funders at
- 1:00:02headquarters to accept and be grateful for product definitions that are
- 1:00:06more innovative and very likely more expensive than they had imagined.
- 1:00:11If all of that comes to pass, the intrapreneur then has to co-opt
- 1:00:15attention and enthusiasm from an existing sales force that is already
- 1:00:19busy selling a set of products built on an older paradigm, and that usually
- 1:00:23is at odds with the new concepts.
- 1:00:25I thought that whole paragraph, it ties a little bit back into the sales team stuff,
- 1:00:30but the challenge for the intrapreneur here it's a political challenge and
- 1:00:35changing the minds from something existing is actually more difficult than creating
- 1:00:40something brand new in the first place.
- 1:00:43You're getting at the essence of why I wrote the book.
- 1:00:46I have met a hundred, maybe close to 500 intrapreneurs.
- 1:00:52And countless entrepreneurs.
- 1:00:55And the issue for an entrepreneur is relatively straightforward
- 1:00:59once something like the venture capital community existed.
- 1:01:03But the route for the intrapreneur hasn't changed hardly at all.
- 1:01:07And it's all of those points that you listed.
- 1:01:10So I'll give you a specific example.
- 1:01:12So the PDS got me into a job in Palo Alto.
- 1:01:15Boom, I'm in Palo Alto . Now I'm known to the world, as
- 1:01:19opposed to just knowing that.
- 1:01:20Jerry Sanders at a MD. Right?
- 1:01:23And so I got invited to give talks and do a whole bunch of stuff.
- 1:01:27The point is I got invited to the 25th anniversary of personal
- 1:01:32workstations by the ACM association for Computer Machinery, big meeting.
- 1:01:39And and it's gonna be in Palo Alto.
- 1:01:41And and I was one of, I don't know, two dozen featured features, and So I
- 1:01:47go to this thing and , every speaker with one exception plus me had worked
- 1:01:54on early workstations that failed.
- 1:01:58And they were celebrating all of these innovative breakthroughs
- 1:02:03they were magnificent things.
- 1:02:05Things that got baked in later and all that.
- 1:02:08And I'm like the next to last speaker and I said the problem I see in the room is
- 1:02:14we're not honoring the people that built something that sold in the marketplace.
- 1:02:19We've just honored 23 things that failed.
- 1:02:22And I said, and I'm working for a company that believes
- 1:02:25that selling is pretty useful.
- 1:02:27And, two of us have done that.
- 1:02:31And, I think it's just a different perspective.
- 1:02:34Are you an inventor or are you an innovator?
- 1:02:37And an intrapreneur.
- 1:02:40it wasn't a very popular talk.
- 1:02:42I wonder why.
- 1:02:43I wonder why, man.
- 1:02:44But it's the difference.
- 1:02:46It's absolutely the difference.
- 1:02:48But I want to move a little bit forward here and we'll conclude with this story.
- 1:02:52I think , you're now in HP in Palo Alto.
- 1:02:56You've got the new team.
- 1:02:57You have put a new vision together, and you've put Pisces
- 1:03:02together, this new product.
- 1:03:03I'd love you to tell us about this because Pisces eventually, like
- 1:03:07any product, hits a decline phase.
- 1:03:09And you say affirming your fears, HP's logic analyzers sales.
- 1:03:13Soon flattened.
- 1:03:14In fact, they dropped.
- 1:03:15As techs knew.
- 1:03:17This is Techtronics Techs new products took a toll.
- 1:03:20Once momentum is lost, you say it's very hard to regain.
- 1:03:24This was a hard pill for you to swallow.
- 1:03:26Four years elapsed before a significant HP R&D resources were
- 1:03:29again applied to logic analyzers.
- 1:03:32HP didn't regain the leadership mantle for eight years.
- 1:03:36This was a major mistake.
- 1:03:38You never abandoned a hard fought win just as the momentum builds.
- 1:03:42But we did.
- 1:03:43HP did.
- 1:03:44The philosophy behind this error was a legacy of Hewletts, decentralized
- 1:03:49belief that each division can autonomously choose its R&D programs.
- 1:03:54I thought that whole piece, there's a lot in it, but it's important to understand
- 1:03:59how sometimes the rules, you write, as the organization can actually backfire.
- 1:04:04so lemme put a little context on what you say.
- 1:04:07We were in Colorado Springs.
- 1:04:09We were part of the Scope division.
- 1:04:11We had separated out to be a separate reporting division onto the the
- 1:04:18main corporate spreadsheets if you will quota setting and all that.
- 1:04:23But we still, we had what I would call a site management
- 1:04:26team, site being SITE the locale.
- 1:04:31So we had the Colorado Springs Management team managing displays, scopes, and logic.
- 1:04:37I'd started two of the three.
- 1:04:39They were the profitable pieces of the three, but scopes was still the.
- 1:04:45Concern of Palo Alto because of Techtronics.
- 1:04:49We, we had not really blunted techtronics.
- 1:04:52so here's this line that I'm afraid is gonna get cannibalized if we
- 1:04:58have to follow Palo Alto's lead and take the logic team to build Pisces.
- 1:05:03Okay?
- 1:05:04Which we had to do.
- 1:05:05Okay?
- 1:05:06So what happened is two thirds of the logic team moved over to do Pisces.
- 1:05:10And my sentiment with the locale management team was, you ought to
- 1:05:17take most of the resources in the scope line, which has been dog
- 1:05:22beat now for 22 years or 24 years.
- 1:05:25And say, look, that battle isn't worth fighting a whole lot longer.
- 1:05:30We need to reinforce the logic team that we're now, we're pirating, okay?
- 1:05:37And they chose not to do that.
- 1:05:39And Palo Alto's stance was you guys in Colorado Springs are able to
- 1:05:44manage your own destiny best wishes, and if it was a truly strategically
- 1:05:49managed thing from Palo Alto, they would've said, what are you thinking?
- 1:05:53And of course, what they were thinking in Colorado Springs was,
- 1:05:55look, we just put a major second generation logic line on the street.
- 1:06:01It's selling extremely well.
- 1:06:03Why can't I rest on my laurels?
- 1:06:06it'll work well.
- 1:06:07And Techtronics, meanwhile, I was saying, Jesus, those guys
- 1:06:10took it right out of our hide.
- 1:06:12We're gonna try and whip them again.
- 1:06:15And, so to put numbers on it, we were doing probably 50 million a year in logic.
- 1:06:23Pisces looked like it might do 150, but it was only doing like 10.
- 1:06:28We only had the initial salvo.
- 1:06:30The displays are doing maybe 20 and scopes are doing maybe a hundred.
- 1:06:36So you could take that a hundred and say, let download some of that to the 50.
- 1:06:41What happened was tech basically took the 50 we had in Logic and smothered
- 1:06:48it and it declined almost 50%.
- 1:06:52Now not only have you lost the actual sales and the profit from 'em
- 1:06:56you've lost the customer mindset.
- 1:06:59Customers are say, oh the current leader now is techtronics,
- 1:07:03just like they were in scopes.
- 1:07:05So all of a sudden they're back in the driver's seat on both scopes and logic.
- 1:07:10the logic has completely lost its momentum.
- 1:07:13And all of the intrapreneurs have moved over to Pisces.
- 1:07:17Now, Pisces itself went on and became a couple hundred million dollar line.
- 1:07:22In terms of corporate's view, it was great, but its
- 1:07:26competitor was Intel, not tech.
- 1:07:29tech didn't get damaged by us, and they could have been.
- 1:07:32Intel did get damaged, which was good in its own right.
- 1:07:36But my view was, my God we squandered something that was just crazy to squander.
- 1:07:42And of course, the problem I had was my emotions were still with
- 1:07:46the logic line, so I'm sitting there you've just killed my child.
- 1:07:52Yeah.
- 1:07:52Yeah, but that's something I discussed again with Alex Osterwalder
- 1:07:56Sangeet, Paul Choudary, and Howard Yu, and the last week's show.
- 1:08:00Because you also did kill your own project, where with the second
- 1:08:05project, after the display, you decided you were gonna kill it, but
- 1:08:10it's very hard to kill projects.
- 1:08:12And I wondered how you went about that in hp.
- 1:08:15How did you do so other than the way you did, was there some format to do that?
- 1:08:21If you did it were, you frowned upon?
- 1:08:24Did they blacklist you?
- 1:08:25How did it work?
- 1:08:26A lot of projects die of their own weight.
- 1:08:29You've got a schedule, you've got a budget, you've got a set
- 1:08:32of features you're trying to hit that's the project definition.
- 1:08:36Okay.
- 1:08:37And you have an annual review, if not more often.
- 1:08:40You had an annual review from Palo Alto, and you had a quarterly
- 1:08:44review from your own team.
- 1:08:46Or your own management area.
- 1:08:49And we would draw diagrams.
- 1:08:50I think I had a Brunnergram in there somewhere.
- 1:08:53And a Brunnergram allows you to see how are you doing?
- 1:08:56Are you spending a lot of money and making no progress on the schedule?
- 1:09:01That's a bad idea.
- 1:09:02Are you spending just a little bit of money and making great
- 1:09:05progress on the schedule?
- 1:09:06Terrific.
- 1:09:08And so a lot of projects might go three reviews with no schedule progress.
- 1:09:15And then people start saying is this what's wrong here?
- 1:09:18And so a lot of 'em get killed in those kind of reviews.
- 1:09:22That was what was gonna happen to display.
- 1:09:24We weren't, we didn't have any sales.
- 1:09:28We didn't know where you might even sell it, but, so we were making
- 1:09:31good progress on the schedule.
- 1:09:33But when it came time for the market forecast the guy running
- 1:09:37the marketing group said, 30 is all we're ever gonna choose.
- 1:09:41Packard said, oh, that's crazy.
- 1:09:42Why would you do that?
- 1:09:44Which makes sense, doesn't it, Chuck?
- 1:09:45You gotta see it from corporate's perspective sometimes.
- 1:09:48'cause sometimes we see corporate as the enemy, but a lot of it's,
- 1:09:52we talked about timing the core the value of timing being too early can
- 1:09:57also be as bad as being too late.
- 1:10:00And actually too late's probably easier to been too early.
- 1:10:02At least the market's proven by then.
- 1:10:04that was run by a guy who could shield intrapreneurs beautifully got labeled
- 1:10:09the Science Fair Division because they built all sorts of wonderful things,
- 1:10:14including measuring the Perihelion (the point in a planet’s orbit where
- 1:10:15it is closest to the Sun) of Mercury to prove that Einstein was right.
- 1:10:19It turns out not that many people wanted to measure the Perihelion of Mercury.
- 1:10:23Corporate didn't like that one.
- 1:10:25You need to have a balance in all this thing.
- 1:10:27The way a lot of projects got killed
- 1:10:29was all of a sudden the numbers really don't work.
- 1:10:31The schedule isn't working, the market isn't, doesn't look like it's there.
- 1:10:35You can't master the technology of some esoteric thing.
- 1:10:39And, in the case of the one I canceled my conclusion was we were building it be as
- 1:10:46an answer to the big box from Techtronix.
- 1:10:49And, my conclusion standing in their booth was, their big box was gonna be a
- 1:10:53failure, and I didn't need to follow that and which turned out substantially true.
- 1:11:00Yeah, it's, and it's tough, man.
- 1:11:02It's a tough thing to go and kill something.
- 1:11:04I just wanted to tip the hat to how successful, I mean, this is
- 1:11:08a product that you worked on.
- 1:11:09You wrote that in the year 2000 logic analyzer revenues reached
- 1:11:14sales of a quarter billion dollars.
- 1:11:16It had been a $6 billion revenue market for over four decades, 60% of it garnered
- 1:11:22by the Hewlett Pachard and Agilent teams.
- 1:11:25And you mentioned to me as well, Agilent a lot of people
- 1:11:29don't know that's a HP spinoff.
- 1:11:31Oh my.
- 1:11:32Yeah.
- 1:11:32A lot of people don't know that.
- 1:11:34you know?
- 1:11:34Do you want, do you wanna just do, you wanna just say a word on
- 1:11:37how successful this logic analyze revenue was for the company?
- 1:11:42The so there's several metrics you can use, but usually revenue and profits
- 1:11:47are the ones that top managements and shareholders like we we managed over.
- 1:11:54I think if you brought it current, we probably have sold
- 1:11:57$7 billion worth of this stuff.
- 1:12:00that's that's a fair amount of loose change, particularly for essentially
- 1:12:05a field that has no retail market.
- 1:12:08We're selling tools to engineers to do things.
- 1:12:12We're not selling to consumer markets or anything like that.
- 1:12:16$7 billion is is not chump change.
- 1:12:19We, in general, earned on the order of 16% net profit I'm sorry, 16%
- 1:12:26gross profit, which is pretty heady.
- 1:12:29The PC world would typically be gross profits in the three to 4% range.
- 1:12:35so we felt pretty good about it.
- 1:12:37And, Palo Alto felt pretty good about it which was, I suppose that's how I
- 1:12:41got the assignment to go to Palo Alto.
- 1:12:43Yeah.
- 1:12:44Too successful man.
- 1:12:45As you say, it was a kind of a pyrrhic victory for you.
- 1:12:49There, there was a part I thought was really important that which is
- 1:12:52how silos form, and I pulled a little quote here to give it context and I'd
- 1:12:57love you to fill in the gaps here.
- 1:12:59You wrote that in order to create Pisces, our team took advantage
- 1:13:03of a historic strength in hp.
- 1:13:06HP's wildly decentralized divisional organization was a legacy of Hewlett's
- 1:13:10belief that small, nimble teams unhampered by corporate strategic plans
- 1:13:15and rules were best at contribution, creativity, and market success.
- 1:13:19I thought this was important.
- 1:13:20Hewlett's expectation was that divisions would share technologies.
- 1:13:24If you knew somebody in another division with a device or a component
- 1:13:28or a process that could help you, you could ask for their help.
- 1:13:32And it was expected that they would grant that help.
- 1:13:35Parts in production could be transfer that factory costs for your own new design
- 1:13:41and products under development might even be done jointly if both parties agreed.
- 1:13:46For the most part, they did agree, but here's the important piece,
- 1:13:50so I think this has happened to anyone who's been an intrapreneur.
- 1:13:53As groups evolve, the rules change somewhat.
- 1:13:57You were collegial within your own group, but not so much with other
- 1:14:01groups, and particularly if they're taking your resource allocation.
- 1:14:04So you're building, for example, chips or some type of component for the business
- 1:14:10internally and somebody's asking for it, and now you're like going I have targets
- 1:14:15to achieve over here if I don't achieve those targets and be collegial here.
- 1:14:19So sorry buddy, you're on your own.
- 1:14:21So those kind of dynamics play out and can go against the intrapreneur who's
- 1:14:25trading a lot on favors and goodwill.
- 1:14:28Oh yeah.
- 1:14:28so all those passages are, I remember writing that.
- 1:14:33I remember living that.
- 1:14:35and and the reason I got the job in Palo Alto was because
- 1:14:39we were successful at that.
- 1:14:41we melded technologies and product pieces from 14 divisions
- 1:14:47out of 91 to build Pisces.
- 1:14:50In words we were borrowing everywhere and and cobbling all this stuff together.
- 1:14:57So the first secret that Palo Alto noticed about team's leadership was that we
- 1:15:04were able to fashion the system out of disparate parts that different people had.
- 1:15:09And the question was, how did you, how were you able to construct
- 1:15:12that system and make it work?
- 1:15:15A and b, how did you persuade those people to be part of the team given
- 1:15:19that they had their other tasks?
- 1:15:21Okay.
- 1:15:22Now the problem was it wasn't always smooth sailing.
- 1:15:25And I'll use the disc drive division as the stocking horse.
- 1:15:30the disc drive division was building these big wash tub disc drives that would be
- 1:15:3510, 20, 50, a hundred megabyte drives.
- 1:15:38Big whirling dish these are 12 inch to 15 inch platters.
- 1:15:43And, and about that time, the Winchester Drive came out from IBM, was a
- 1:15:48small lightweight relatively minimal disc in terms of memory content.
- 1:15:56But but had some features that, it didn't look like a wash tub.
- 1:16:00It was more like a benchtop kind of product.
- 1:16:04Okay.
- 1:16:04And we wanted that, so we voted for that.
- 1:16:08And they agreed to supply some for us.
- 1:16:12then it turned out that the product they were building it for
- 1:16:15was a product HP called Amigo.
- 1:16:18And Amigo as a technology failed so they were selling maybe a hundred
- 1:16:25a month to their, to the division that defined what they built.
- 1:16:31They're selling 300 a month to us.
- 1:16:33Okay.
- 1:16:34So all of a sudden we're the tail wagging the dog and we're telling them
- 1:16:38about features we want included and the evolution we want, and fixes we want.
- 1:16:43And they're like now wait a minute.
- 1:16:45Our real customers, this one over here, they aren't buying anything, but you
- 1:16:49know, you aren't our real customer.
- 1:16:51Okay?
- 1:16:52So that that was problem one.
- 1:16:55and in fact they at one point threatened to stop us.
- 1:16:59so this caused a little bit of Palo Alto angst.
- 1:17:02I went into the disc drive business.
- 1:17:05I set up my own division of disc drives I, I was given an opportunity to not do that,
- 1:17:11but fairly big meeting, and, they were given an opportunity to be more collegial
- 1:17:17and so anyway, it all worked out.
- 1:17:20But then we put this damn thing on the market and the structure of our
- 1:17:24design was that we were building a shared controller system which
- 1:17:30was the first one of its kind.
- 1:17:31No computer company had built that yet.
- 1:17:34This was something that basically the Unix operating systems allowed, but
- 1:17:40all the major computer players were still building proprietary systems.
- 1:17:44And so we had this thing, we had up to six terminals running with one disc.
- 1:17:49So it's a shared disc environment.
- 1:17:52It's a terrific cost saver compared to a disc per terminal
- 1:17:57which is what the model was.
- 1:18:00The problem was if the disc wasn't reliable, you shut all
- 1:18:03six developers down, right?
- 1:18:06And it turned out the disc wasn't very reliable.
- 1:18:09And so we've got this wonderful system out there that is
- 1:18:13crashing design teams like crazy.
- 1:18:16So I wind up doing a study of failure rates around the corporation
- 1:18:23discovered that the computer group failure rate as a group was 10 times
- 1:18:29worse than the instrument group.
- 1:18:3110 times.
- 1:18:32And so I'm basically building to instrument group standards, and
- 1:18:36they're building the computer group standards and they're making me look
- 1:18:40like the dumbest guy in the world because my stuff is failing at a rate
- 1:18:44nobody in the instrument group ever had . And we were called on the carpet.
- 1:18:47I mean, we had to go to Palo Alto and explain ourselves and explain it
- 1:18:50to all the quality assurance people.
- 1:18:52And it was a real pain.
- 1:18:54and and so the way I, dealt with it, I said they're just terrible,
- 1:19:00and let me explain how terrible.
- 1:19:02And so I put up these graphs of how terrible the entire computer group was.
- 1:19:07Oh man.
- 1:19:07Now I had not just the disc division mad at me.
- 1:19:10I had everybody mad at me.
- 1:19:11So it was a terrific learning.
- 1:19:15It changed the computer group approach to quality, but it took a couple years.
- 1:19:20While meanwhile I'm I was persona non grata.
- 1:19:23What you do for the company.
- 1:19:24I mean, that was the thing.
- 1:19:27When you did the display, there's a quote in Packard's book about you and it says,
- 1:19:32you say in that quote I never considered, I could have possibly got fired.
- 1:19:36I was doing what was best for hp.
- 1:19:38The same with calling out shoddy discs, disc drives.
- 1:19:43You're doing what's best for the company, but somebody inside the company, now you
- 1:19:46have a target on your back and you're kind of going who are we working for here?
- 1:19:49I just find that stuff incredible and it all went well in the end.
- 1:19:54HP and its spin out test company, Agilent sold $6 billion of data domain
- 1:19:59equipment fueling incredible designs of almost every digital electronic
- 1:20:03product that society uses today.
- 1:20:06I thought that was just a nice way to, tip it off, and there's loads of
- 1:20:10personal stories in there as well for people who like the personal story.
- 1:20:14A lot of challenges you've been through Chuck as well, and it's important
- 1:20:18to recognize that as well, because.
- 1:20:20You both managed to be an intrapreneur and create amazing products and manage a
- 1:20:25lot of personal challenges along the way.
- 1:20:28You went through a lot and it's, a great story and I'm so delighted to check to, to
- 1:20:33share it with people and get it out there.
- 1:20:34The book is Permission Denied, Odyssey of intrapreneur Behind Me on the Shelf There.
- 1:20:39Great read.
- 1:20:39Highly recommended available on Amazon, available on Lulu as well.
- 1:20:43And I'll link to that.
- 1:20:45For now, for the end of part two, author of Permission denied Chuck House.
- 1:20:49Thank you for joining us.
- 1:20:51You bet.
- 1:20:51Thank
- 1:20:51you.
- 1:20:52Take care.
- 1:20:52Thanks once again to our sponsor Kyndryl, who run and reimagine the
- 1:20:57technology systems that drive advantage for the world's leading businesses.
- 1:21:01With a unique blend of AI powered consulting, built on unmatched
- 1:21:05managed service capability.
- 1:21:07Kyndryl helps leaders harness the power of technology for smarter
- 1:21:11decisions, faster innovation, and a lasting competitive edge.
- 1:21:15You can find out more about Kyndryl and the Kyndryl institute at
- 1:21:19Kyndryl.com or Kyndryl.com/institute.