Full Transcript of Etna Interactive’s Recent Webinar on Spotting the Fix Worth Making
Ryan: All right, it is noon Pacific time, and uh, here on the West Coast, I want to know what is today, the 21st of May of 2025, and we are going to talk a little bit today in a session we’re titling Finding the Fix Worth Making, and before I introduce today’s speaker, I want to provide a little bit of background and context. We’re really pleased today to have a bunch of our clients and partners joining us on the call.
In count year 2024, we had a large initiative inside the organization that focused on encouraging bold experiments. You know, really kind of moonshot kind of things, big, challenging, difficult, time-consuming things to look at impacts for the organization, for our clients.
And as we were doing our strategic planning for calendar year 2025, one of our realizations is, is we had so many great outcomes from that program, but it’s just not at that scale, it’s not sustainable. It’s also difficult to layer across everyone in the organization.
And, um we decided that in this year, we wanted to spend more time and have more conversation around small improvements, and in fact, it’s one of our core values, is pursuing continuous improvement.
But there’s a challenge, right? There’s never a shortage of ideas. We always have those observations of the areas of friction in our life. Um, and the difficulty, I think, is knowing that the thing, the effort, the idea that you want to pursue is going to be worth it. That the possibility is there that that particular fix or that particular change is going to deliver outsized impact for what it takes of us emotionally and practically to actually, um, work to do something different than we’ve done before. And that’s why we found Steve. So, for my team, you guys will all appreciate, uh, he’s done what we do. He is an expert digital marketer, he spent more than a decade at Google. He worked on huge campaigns for Google’s clients, brands that you guys know, like, uh GoPro and the U.S. Government. And, um, while he was there, more than just working on those campaigns, Steve was kind of like an innovation evangelist. He trained thousands of Google’s people on Their culture, their processes, and specifically kind of how to not just embrace, but drive change and innovation.
Today, he’s a consultant, he works with companies all over the world in helping them to embrace innovation and be the drivers of manifesting new ideas inside the organization. And so for our team
Um, our hope today is that we can develop a framework, a rubric, and understanding for the introspection to say.
Um, you know, this idea that I have that I think could make my life, or the output for the client.
Or the company just a little bit better, this is the one that’s worth acting on.
And for our client partners that are here today, it’s really the same idea, that ability to understand when you’re reflecting and looking around your practice.
Um, where and how does driving for change inside the office, where and how’s it going to be worth it? So, Steve, welcome. We’re so glad to have you. One thing, actually, before I turn over to you, I realize I forgot the logistics. So, while Steve is presenting to you today, there’ll be a couple moments in time where he’s going to ask for some feedback.
That’s gonna be the exact moment in time, and he’ll remind you and prompt you to use the chat function located at the bottom of the screen, right? That’s going to be kind of a live, just blurt out an answer back to them.
If you have a question or you want us to explore something in greater detail, you’ll also see an icon on the bottom of the screen for Q&A.
And, uh, I’m going to be moderating at the end, so I’ll be saving up, uh, ordering those Q&A questions and, uh, getting ready at the end of Steve’s presentation to bring your questions to life. So, on that note, Steve, welcome, and thanks so much for being with us.
Steve: Awesome. Thank you so much for having me, Ryan. Appreciate it. Uh, and good afternoon to everybody. Excited to hang out with y’all for a little bit.
And talk about innovation. And I know… I say… I talk about innovation all the time, I say the word innovation all the time. I know it’s a little bit vague, I know it’s kind of a corporate buzzword.
And I know lots of people use different terminology for it. I know the folks at Aetna talk a lot about experimentation.
Um, I know the title of this event, I think it’s something like Spotting the Fix Worth Making Empowered, or Empowered Process Improvement, something like that. At the end of the day.
Whatever you want to call it, all we’re talking about, all I’m gonna talk about today when I say innovation.
Is change. I think innovation is just how we change, whether we’re trying to keep up.
Or to get ahead as the world changes around us. And I think right now, whether it’s from technology or politics, or just the cultural shifts between generations.
The world is probably changing right now faster and more unpredictably, literally, than maybe any point in human history.
Um, the industry y’all work in, your companies, your customers, your employees, they look and they think, and they probably act drastically different in a lot of ways.
Than they would have just 5 years ago, and we’ll probably be saying the same thing 5 years from now.
So, when we talk about innovation, we talk about change, and I don’t think there’s… there’s never been as relevant of a time to have that conversation as now.
You heard this a little bit from Ryan, but I spent about a decade at Google, and as Ryan said, I taught innovation philosophy during that time.
And in the 6 years since leaving Google, I’ve been fortunate enough to work with hundreds of different companies, thousands of different leaders all over the world on innovation, and I know from that experience.
Talking to people about innovation and about change. That probably everyone in the room here today, well, everyone in front of their computers listening today.
And probably all the leaders at your companies would like to believe, would like to believe about themselves, about yourselves, that you are open to change. You probably all want to believe that you’re open to change, you embrace change, you embrace new ideas, new ways of thinking, new processes. We all want to believe that about ourselves, that we are innovative.
But human nature really pushes us in the opposite direction. Human nature makes us extremely threatened by change. It makes us resistant to new stuff. It’s in our nature to think that the old way of doing something, my way of doing something, the way I’ve been doing it for years.
That’s the right way. That’s the better way. The new way, the new approach, the new belief system, the new values, the new types of consumers.
The new way is worse and bad. And it’s a really important thing for us to recognize as we start talking about innovation and change and experiments, to recognize we have to fight against our human nature. And if you don’t think that is a very real part of human nature, to hate new stuff.
Then just think to yourself for 5 seconds, when’s the last time you heard anyone, anywhere.
Say something good, collectively, about Gen Z. The correct answer is never. I don’t need y’all to chat it in, I don’t need it in the Q&A. The answer’s never. No one has ever heard anyone say anything good about Gen Z,
We hate Gen Z. We can’t stop bashing on Gen Z. Their addiction to social media and their smartphones, and their selfies.
Their value system, their work ethic, their attention spans. All we do is complain about Gen Z, but the funny thing about that is, if we went back 10 years ago, we’d probably be saying the exact same things about Millennials. And if we went back 20 or 30 years ago, we’d have similar complaints about the values and work ethics and behaviors of Gen X and Gen Y and Boomers and baby boomers.
Humans are always threatened by the next generation, we’re always threatened by change, and that that threat, when we see change, when we see new opportunities, new processes, new people.
It… it filters not just in us as individuals, it filters into how we… see the world as businesses, as companies, how our businesses interact with our customers.
So I want to start today by showing y’all a video of, sort of.
What this is like in practice, what happens in practice. When a business sees change coming, when they see new technologies available, when they see consumers wanting new things.
New ways of interacting and new demands from you and your company and your industry.
And how uncomfortable that can feel to us. So, I don’t know if there’s any baseball fans in the room. I keep saying in the room, in your rooms.
In the virtual room that we’re in. I don’t know if there’s any baseball fans here, but I’m a really big baseball fan. I love the Phillies. I’ve got some… I got the Philly fanatic. Where is he? Over there.
Um, I see Go Dodgers in the chat. That’s fine, I guess. I’d prefer some Go Phillies in the chat, um, but, you know, what can you do?
Um, so I want to show you a clip. This is from an actual Major League Baseball game.
This was an Arizona Diamondbacks game a few years ago, when the announcers for the Arizona Diamondbacks, who work in the baseball industry, their company, Major League Baseball.
And they saw a group of young women in the audience who, to them, represented change, and they represented new, and it represented, I think.
In their view, as I said earlier about human nature, a threat to them and the way they think things should operate, a threat to them and the way they think their business works and their customers should interact with their business.
So this is what happened on live television, this is 100% real, on live television, when the announcers noticed these young women in the audience.
You turn your sound on. Oh, I guess your sound’s already on, if you can hear me.
I mean, look at the one on the right. Do you have to make faces when you take selfies? Wait, one more now. Better angle.
I love that noise.
Well, check it. Did that come out okay? That’s the best one of the 300 pictures I’ve taken of myself today. Every girl in the picture is locked into her phone.
Every single one is… Dialed in. Welcome to parenting in 2015. They’re all just completely transfixed.
By the technology. David Peralta.
Oh, hold on, I’d take a selfie with the hot dog.
And live television.
Selfie with the churro, selfie just of a selfie. I can’t even get my phone to take pictures.
Go back to the game for one more pitch. Let’s make fun of those girls some more.
Took a picture of your thumb last week, that was good.
For those commenting about the Rockies winning, this is not a game from this year.
Here’s my first bite of the churro. Here’s my second bite of the churro.
Back to the game, back to making fun of the girls.
You know, the beauty of baseball is you can sit next to your neighbor and have a conversation, or you can just completely ignore them.
Alright, this is the best part. This is the end here.
Feralta! Knocks it into center, David tonight, 2 for 2, a leadoff single here in the fourth. And nobody noticed.
And nobody noticed. Uh, I love this video, I show it as often as I can. I think it’s really funny.
What I’d like y’all to do now for a second. Is picture in your head the announcers for the Arizona Diamondbacks, the two people you just heard talking.
You can put in the chat if you want, but just picture them in your head.
I want you to picture their… let’s say, their demographics. Race, age, gender, just who are these people, what do they look like?
Everybody picture it in your head, assume everybody’s got their imagination, they’re envisioning these two people.
You’re 100% right. I know you were 100% white. That’s funny, somebody’s put 52-year-old white guys.
Usually, when I talk about this speech, I say, did everybody have 50-year-old white guys? So, 50-year-old white guys, right on track. Um… And of course they are, that’s who they are, and in addition to being 50- and 60-year-old white guys, there are white guys who have been in the baseball industry for decades. They are former baseball players, baseball coaches, one’s been an announcer for 20 years.
These guys have loved baseball for 55 of their, let’s say, 60 years on this planet.
You know what Major League Baseball doesn’t need any more of?
50-year-old white guys who have loved baseball for 50 years, right? Major League Baseball is every single one of them.
You know what Major League Baseball desperately needs more of? 19- and 20-year-old girls that want to go to baseball games. What Major League Baseball desperately needs more of is people who want to go to baseball games and take pictures and videos, and put those pictures and videos on Instagram and TikTok and Twitter.
These are the greatest customers Major League Baseball could possibly dream of. It does not get any better than this. They all bought tickets.
They all paid the overpriced concessions at the stadium so they could take their picture of the first bite of the churro and the second bite of the churro.
The best customers in the world for Major League Baseball. But it looks a little weird.
It looks a little weird. It looks a little weird to the two guys in this industry who have been in this industry for decades.
It looks a little weird to the establishment, it looks a little weird if we’re looking backwards and thinking about what made us successful in the past, and what has our business looked like in the past.
It looks weird, so we reject it, and we’re threatened by it. And it’s one of the big deaths of innovation, and not just that we’re threatened by change.
But also, is the simple fact that a challenge Major League Baseball faces, and it’s probably true for a lot of your businesses.
I don’t know each of your businesses individually. I’m sure many of them are very successful.
In some ways, that’s the challenge Major League Baseball faces. Major League Baseball has been a profitable, successful industry for 140, 50 years.
It can be very hard when we talk about experimentation, when we talk about innovation, when we talk about embracing change.
To have a willingness to change things that are working. To take something that you already do well, that you’re good at, that you know how to do your job, you’re good at your job, your company’s successful.
It can be very challenging to force yourself to look at that and say, maybe I still need to change. Maybe I still need to grow to evolve to get better, even though it works.
And of course, we don’t want to just change for the sake of changing. I think that’s sort of a lot of what Ryan was saying at the beginning, this idea of figuring out when is it worth it to change. And of course, we change when technology allows us to change, we change when our customers demand changes from us.
But at its core, with innovation, what’s really happening We’re changing when a better way becomes possible, when we identify a better way, or a new way becomes possible.
And I think even that concept is really challenging to understand for leaders like all of you.
What’s possible when we look at our businesses? What’s possible when we look at our teams? What’s possible when we look at technology?
So I want to do a little activity here with y’all, and this is a point where I would love it if people would use the chat, because I’m going to ask you all some yes or no questions in a second here, because I want to get to know what you all think about, sort of about innovation, and about what’s possible, and When we look around at the crazy world we live in with AI and other things, where are we going? What’s going to be possible for us in the future? So, when I talk about this, I like to start the conversation… oh, let me skip these… hold on.
I gotta get past these girls, there we go. I’d like to start by talking about Star Wars, which is really funny, because someone said something about Star Wars in the chat earlier, I think when I was talking about hating new stuff, and they talked about the new Star Wars movies, so that made me laugh. I felt like they already knew my slides
Um, so I’ll talk very quickly about Star Wars. And in Star Wars, which I know technically takes place, I think.
A long time ago, is what the scroll says at the beginning.
But most of these sci-fi things, right, we think of them as very futuristic, right? And one of the great future technologies that we see in Star Wars, that the Millennium Falcon has, is when Han Solo yells, punch at Chewie, and he flips the lever, and all of a sudden, the spaceship’s going so fast, and the stars are whizzing by the windows.
And pretty much every sci-fi story has a version of this. It’s Lightspeed, it’s Warp Speed, whatever you want to call it.
Essentially, what we’re talking about here in Star Wars, traveling at light speed, is traveling at the speed of light, right? I think that’s a pretty fair assumption to make. Speed of light.
If you don’t know, the speed of light is 670 million miles per hour. That’s the speed of light. 670 million miles per hour Um, that’s pretty fast. That’s how fast Han Solo and Chewbacca are traveling when they flip that lever.
So here’s my question to y’all, and again, please use the chat if you want to just throw in a yes or no here.
What I want to know from y’all, from the people in this industry, from the people in this room.
I’d like to know if you think that could one day be possible.
Maybe not tomorrow, maybe not next year, maybe in 100 years, maybe in 10,000 years.
Is it possible that humans will one day travel at 100… when I say 670 million miles per hour?
I see no, absolutely no, no, yes, yes, yes, no, yes, yes, okay, I’m seeing more yeses than no, I think.
Um… I see it’s not physically possible, but wormhole travel? Okay, we’re getting real deep into the… deep into it here. Okay, I’m gonna say I’m getting about 40% yeses.
Okay, somewhere around there. And again, I’m not saying definitive, I’m just saying possible. It’s possible it could happen.
So we talk about Star Wars, I’m gonna do another one of these. Talk about Star Wars.
To be fair, when you talk about Star Wars, always good to also talk about Star Trek.
Now, Star Trek also has a fancy technology for moving stuff around, and they do have warp speed, but they also have these things.
Which I was recently connected, or corrected in a speech when I called them teleporters, and somebody came up afterwards to correct me, a big Star Trek fan, I’m guessing, that they’re transporters.
Transporter, you stand on this platform, you say something, you know, you say, beam me up, Scotty, or whatever.
I don’t totally know how this works. I think they take apart your molecules with, like, lasers, and they send them through the airwaves.
And suddenly, almost instantly, you’re on a different planet or a different spaceship miles away. So again, let’s do yes or no in the chat.
One day, could this be possible? Thousands of years, AI, robots, all this stuff.
Could humans one day invent teleporters, transporters, whatever you call them.
Okay, I’m seeing some yeses, I’m seeing some not happenings, no, yes.
I feel like this is actually pretty even. Okay, again, I’m… ugh, now we’re getting more no’s, here come the no’s. Alright, I’m gonna say, if we figure out quantum entanglement, man, you guys got some smart people in here that are smarter than me, I don’t even know what that means.
Um, okay, I’m gonna say we got around 30% yeses for that one. Still pretty many, though. Okay, so let’s say we got around 40 for speed of light, around 30 for teleporters. We’ll do one more, um, one more sci-fi movie. I want to talk about the greatest sci-fi movie of all time.
If you’d like to throw it in the chat, what you think that is, anybody? Great. This is not, like, an opinion question, this is a fact question.
Serenity, I’ve never even heard of that. Two people said Serenity.
2001, whatever Serenity is. I would say when I do this Dune Inception, Fifth Element, Blade Runner, wow, lots of different opinions. You’re all wrong, um… Sorry to tell you. Probably the guest that I’ve heard yelled out the most is Spaceballs. I don’t know why that gets yelled out the most, but it seems to, and it is a great movie.
But the greatest sci-fi movie of all time, and I forgive you all for not getting it, because some people don’t think of this necessarily as sci-fi, but it’s time travel, so it’s sci-fi.
The greatest sci-fi movie of all time is Back to the Future.
I am not here for a debate, I’m just telling you like it is. I see some yeses.
Uh, I do see some funny movies popping in the list. Meh, someone said, man to… You guys don’t know. All right, well, that’s… Back to the Future is a great movie, let’s just leave it at that.
Um, and their technology, pretty simple to invent, right? We all know how to invent a time machine.
You get a DeLorean, you get a flux capacitor, you get 1.21 gigawatts of electricity, you drive 88 miles per hour, and poof, you’re 30 years in the future, or 20 years in the past So my last question, and usually I lose some people on this.
But, who thinks one day. Could be in the distant, distant future, that humans might invent literal time machines.
Again, yeses and nos in the chat would be helpful. Oh, I’m seeing a lot of yeses for this one.
Usually time… there’s some no’s… I appreciate y’all chiming in. Okay, I’m gonna say… This one’s probably around 40 or 30% too. Usually we lose some people with Time Machine, maybe it’s around 30% we’re getting. And again, I’m not saying it’s gonna happen for sure, just possible. So let’s say we got about 30% of y’all believe in the time machines could eventually happen, maybe 20%, I’m starting to get more no’s.
Um, okay, fair enough. So now let’s do something different. Instead of looking ahead to the distant future, let’s go backwards for a second.
We just spent time thinking about where the world’s gonna be in thousands of years. I want to put you all in the minds of… previous generations. So I tried to think, I tried to do some research. When might have been the earliest time
That people like all of you might have gathered for a presentation like this one. Obviously not over Zoom.
Um, but I found… I found there’s a group, man, maybe y’all know this or are members of this, there’s a group called the American Association of Plastic Surgeons It was founded in 1921.
So it’s very possible, in 1921, a group of people like this could have gotten together for a session like this, and for all I know.
Innovation, experimentation, maybe those were just as much of buzzwords back in the 1920s and the roaring 20s as they were today. So maybe there was a speaker like me.
Who wants to do a similar introduction like this, but instead of being able to talk about Star Wars and Star Trek and time machines and teleporters.
Since they don’t have those movies, they have to describe a different technology to y’all.
So what that speaker does is he gets up on stage and talks to that group, and he says, who thinks one day this could be possible?
And he goes on to say, one day I could have this object, it’s roughly the size of my hand, and I could hold it in my hand and aim it at my face.
And I could do a stupid dance, and instantly. Billions of people in Africa and Asia and Europe could see the dumb little dance I just did. And on the same device, roughly the size of my hand, I could see
Billions of videos from people all over the world, instantly, on that same little device.
Obviously describing how TikTok works. And then I said to those… and said to those people, who thinks one day that could be possible? And before y’all chime in with that, just to… I know no one in this room was probably alive in 19… or 1921, to put you in the headspace of 1921, it was right around the time
That we started nationally selling, nationally producing ice cream cones. So, ice cream cones is, like, the hot new technology in 1921. So, some of y’all are sitting at this meeting with your ice cream cones, and some of you are sitting at this meeting just with
Fistsfuls of ice cream, just eating it like this. I imagine is what we used to do. Um, just blown away by that technology. And the speaker on stage describes TikTok.
How many hands do you think would go up when that speaker says, who thinks one day that could be possible?
You can guess it in the chat if you want, or we could look at it as a rhetorical question, that’s fine.
I’m pretty sure the answer’s zero. I don’t think a single person in 1921, a room full of people blown away by ice cream cones.
Would think that TikTok was even remotely possible. I think it’s more likely they accuse me of being a witch, and try to burn me at the stakes, than that they say, oh, yeah, we’ll invent something like that.
And it’s a really weird thought, considering 1921 is, like, four generations ago, 3-4 generations ago It’s really not that long in the history of humanity, in the history of innovation, in the history of discovery and invention.
That in 1921, a room full of people probably would have looked at something as simple and ubiquitous as a smartphone app.
As more impossible. Then you all just told me traveling at 670 million miles per hour was.
Teleporters, time machines, seem more realistic to us than three generations ago, people would have thought of a smartphone app.
That’s crazy. We live in an insane and crazy and weird and exciting time.
This realization we all have to have that anything is possible. It’s exciting, but it’s also incredibly challenging.
And I think one of the challenges that we face for being business leaders being in any industry.
I think what’s really, really challenging is to realize that innovation isn’t just those things, right? When we talk about anything being possible, it’s not just time machines, it’s not just teleporters.
Embracing innovation, embracing experimentation, means understanding that if we are gonna say anything is possible, we have to apply that thinking to everything.
Not just big stuff, not just scientific breakthroughs, not just inventions, not just discoveries.
But to everything, to little things, to boring things, the most innovative companies I’ve ever worked with, even at a place like Google, huge technology company, tons of money, inventing crazy stuff.
When we talked about innovation, when we talked about anything being possible.
We literally meant anything. We meant that the way we send emails.
Just because we don’t know a better way doesn’t mean a better way isn’t possible. The way we hold weekly staff meetings, the way we do expense reports, the way we come up with our interview questions when we’re hiring somebody.
Anything is possible means everything needs to be questioned. Everything can and will eventually be improved, updated, evolved, made better, made more efficient, made faster.
That’s what innovation means to me. That’s what embracing change means to me. It means looking for it in all aspects of our business.
And what I really want to talk to y’all about today are three sort of core concepts that I saw in place at Google, and that I’ve seen at the most innovative companies and teams, and then the most innovative individuals I’ve worked with.
Sort of cultural elements, cultural building blocks, that I think if teams and leaders put these in place.
It’ll put us in a really good place, a really strong place, to move forward and to be innovative, whether that’s with big, crazy stuff or small, tiny stuff.
Um, so I want to share 3 concepts with you all. It’s about looking for innovation everywhere.
Prioritizing iteration and feedback. And embracing passions, curiosities, and skills. Um, so I want to share some stories with you from Google and a few other places, and sort of talk about how these come to life, and how I hope you all can take them and use them back with your teams, with your offices, with your staffs, with your leadership. So start with the first one, look for innovation everywhere.
When I was at Google, I had a number of jobs.
Mostly, I worked in digital marketing. As you heard from Ryan, I also served as an innovation evangelist.
And at one point, I was asked to start giving presentations on innovation and other things at a place called the Executive Briefing Center. It was this really fancy part of Google’s main campus in California, our headquarters.
Where we would bring, like, the execs from Fortune 500 companies that would come to town. So, like, Nike’s in town, and we’re having big meetings with Google about whatever.
We take on this executive briefing center and just sort of wine them and dine them and wow them and show them cool technology, and just sort of build that partnership.
One of the most common requests we’d get at those meetings was that they wanted to hear from Google’s chief innovation officer, or from someone at Google’s… someone at Google’s innovation team. The people that were responsible for making sure Google goes from a search engine to a smartphone company to a self-driving car manufacturer, sort of pushing that
Evolution. I worked at Google from 2010 to 2019. We didn’t have any of those things at that time. There was no chief innovation officer, there was no innovation team at Google.
It was made very clear to people on your first day of work, and part of my role, my sort of side role as an innovation evangelist, is I talk to hundreds and, I guess, thousands of new employees about the fact that it was their responsibility to drive innovation. It was no one else’s responsibility, it was theirs. It was everyone’s. It wasn’t like coming up with new ideas, challenging the status quo, thinking outside the box.
That wasn’t some bonus extra thing you could do on the side of your legal job or your accounting job, or your engineering job.
It was part of it. It was part of your legal job and your accounting job, and your engineering job. Everyone was responsible for innovation.
So how does that… how do we… how do we manifest that? How do we make that happen? So, I want to start.
First story I want to share with y’all, this one’s from outside Google, it’s about a guy named Richard Montanez.
Um, Richard Martinez was the son of Mexican immigrants who lived in a small town outside Los Angeles.
I think it was the one of, like, 10 or 11 siblings, and they had, like, a 2-bedroom cinderblock wall apartment.
And they all picked grapes for a living. That’s how they made their living, you know, they’re… again, Mexican immigrants. Richard never finished high school, didn’t read and write English too well.
Um, but at one point in the 70s, he had the opportunity to apply for a job to become a janitor at a factory where they made Frito-Lay products.
Um, he had to have someone help him with the application, um, because he didn’t, like I said, didn’t really read and write English too well. But he actually got the job, and it was kind of a big deal for him, because it paid 3 times what picking grapes paid, so it was a really good job for him in the 70s, and he did that job for years and years.
One day in the… I think it was mid to late 80s, Frito-Lay wasn’t doing as well, um, just… just having some rougher years. The CEO of Frito-Lay.
Thinking that innovation should come from everywhere, decided to record a video. Very simple video, just himself talking to the camera.
And in the video, he essentially said. Times aren’t great. We’re not doing that well. And I want you all to care as much about this as I care. I want you to bring all of yourselves to this job. I want you to feel ownership of it. So if you’ve got suggestions, if you’ve got ideas, if you’ve got questions.
Bring them to me. I’m here to listen, because I can’t do it all myself. I’m the CEO, but I don’t have all the answers. I don’t have all the ideas. I want your help.
Simple video, asked it to be distributed to every factory, every warehouse, every office building, and it was.
Now, Richard Montenez sees that video, and he doesn’t know that it’s weird. Again, he’s got no real formal education, doesn’t realize that it’s a little bit weird.
For a factory janitor to pick up the phone and call the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. So, that’s what he does. He picks up the phone.
And he calls up the CEO of Frito-Lay, gets the administrative assistant, she puts him through the CEO, he says, I saw your video, I’ve got this idea. Ceo says, great.
I’m gonna be out in California in a few months, why don’t you put together a little pitch, come into the office, and pitch it to me and my team. So Richard goes home.
Uh, he rents a book on marketing from the library and memorizes a couple sentences that he can say during his pitch.
Uh, he buys a $3 clip-on tie, and he gets 100 little plastic bags, he doodles on them a logo that he came up with.
And he goes into his kitchen and invents his own snack.
Because Richard’s idea, when he saw the CEO’s video, is that Frito-Lay doesn’t have any products.
That speak to the tastes that he grew up with. Hispanic taste buds, Mexican street food, spicier products.
He goes in, he pitches it to the CEO of Frito-Lay, and today, of course, we have Flaming Hot Cheetos.
Um, which Adweek will tell you was the most popular snack food in America in 2018, 2019, and 2020. Billions of dollars from this line of products that Frito-Lay has gotten.
And it’s a cool story, and Richard Motten is a really interesting guy, and there have been movies made about him. He went on to be an executive vice president at PepsiCo.
Really inspirational story. But my takeaway from this story is never about Richard, it’s about the CEO of Frito-Lay.
A CEO of a major, major corporation who was humble enough to say, I don’t have all the ideas.
And if anyone else has one, I’m here to listen. A CEO is humble enough that when he got a phone call from a janitor, he took the phone call. And when the janitor said he had an idea, he scheduled a meeting with him.
Innovation comes from everywhere. I think it sounds… obvious, maybe? It sounds simple, it sounds good, I can’t imagine anyone would disagree with it.
But it doesn’t just happen. This stuff doesn’t just happen. You’d be amazed. The companies that are out there right now, and probably even your own businesses and your own teams.
The ideas that are sitting in someone’s head that never get shared, that never get spoken out loud, because the person with the idea doesn’t know that their idea is wanted.
Maybe the idea is really outside the box. Maybe the idea is related to someone else’s role at the company, and not theirs, and they don’t feel like stepping on toes.
Whatever the reason is, the culture of an organization, the culture of a team, dictates to people whether or not they’re comfortable sharing their thoughts. And all the CEO of Frito-Lay had to do to change that culture was to record a video with himself just earnestly telling his employees, I want your help.
Simple as that. And now he’s got this multi-billion dollar product.
Innovation comes from everywhere, but it doesn’t just happen. We have to make it happen. Our leaders have to make it happen by setting the tone.
And it goes so far beyond, when we say innovation comes from everywhere, it’s everywhere. It’s not just It’s not even just our employees and our people. I like to tell a story from Amazon. This is Jeff Bezos, if you can’t tell, one of the richest people in the world, founder of Amazon.
So when Amazon first launched, I think a lot of people know this, they just sold books. After a few years, they also started selling other types of media, so music, CDs, DVDs, that sort of thing. And the main reason they did that Um, in addition to it being, like, another type of media, is that books and CDs and DVDs were all kind of packaged similarly. Same basic shape, could fit in boxes well together, could fit on shelves well together.
But around 1997, Jeff Bezos decided Amazon needs a third thing. We should expand to a third category, he thought.
But he didn’t know what it should be. Brilliant guy, just didn’t know what the next thing should be. So, in order to get help.
He wrote an email, and he had it sent to 1,000 random Amazon customers. So in 1997, a thousand people get an email from Jeff Bezos.
That simply says, what do you wish you could buy on Amazon?
A thousand people got that email in 1997, and a bunch of them responded, and Jeff Bezos sat down and read the responses, and he will tell you to this day.
That one response always stood out to him, changed his life, and was sort of, in many ways, representative of a lot of the emails.
Email very simply said, what do you wish you could buy on Amazon? And somebody responded, windshield wiper blades. Because right now, my car needs new windshield wiper blades.
Simple as that. That… weird little half-baked, random idea.
Triggered a realization for Jeff Bezos that the thing doesn’t matter. That e-commerce is a solution to timeliness. It’s a solution to need.
That customers would, in theory, be open to buying anything online. We at Amazon should sell everything.
Because some random customer replied, windshield wiper blades. And at its core, windshield wiper blades is a terrible idea. If in 1997 you could go to Amazon and buy books, DVDs, and windshield wiper blades, it would be the weirdest website that’s ever existed.
But Jeff Bezos wanted to get as many inputs, as many ideas as he could from as many different perspectives as he could. He didn’t just look for ideas from e-commerce experts, or from Amazon experts.
Because he’s the e-commerce expert. He’s the Amazon expert, and he was able to filter those inputs, those pieces of feedback, those ideas, through his knowledge, through his brain.
One of… another huge failure I see in organizations who want to be innovative is when we limit our sort of pool of resources to only people who have similar expertise to us. We work on marketing.
We’ve tried to get ideas from marketers. We work in finance, we try to get ideas from finance. We work for a plastic surgeon, we try to get ideas from other plastic surgeon businesses.
That’s so limiting, and it limits our perspectives to ones that look and sound and feel like ours, and that really defeats the point of innovation.
Really innovative people get really comfortable talking about what they do.
The opportunities they face, the challenges they face, and to get comfortable talking about it to as many types of people as possible.
Your employees, your staff, your teammates, of course. Your customers, your friends, your family, posting on social media.
You do not know where the great idea is gonna come from, the question that you need to hear, the little bit of feedback that’s going to trigger the solution for you.
Get comfortable talking about your business. Get comfortable talking about what you and your role are trying to do.
Listen to people, have conversations, you never know what can come of it.
And certainly, as we sit here in 2025, and we talk about sources of ideas and inspiration.
Yes, your customers, yes, your employees, like Frito-Lay, your customers like Amazon.
If you’re not turned into artificial intelligence to get insights and to get ideas, you’re missing out on what is a world-changing amount of resources and functionality. I could give I do give entire speeches just on using artificial intelligence, um, but so many people have started to play with these tools in different ways, and a lot of us use them for creating. We use it to write stuff for us, things like that.
But they are such wonderful sources of ideas, they are such wonderful partners for brainstorming, for ideation. It’s so simple. This is a company I was working with earlier, they, um… had a job posting for a key account manager at this company.
And we wanted to sort of showcase that idea of using these tools just to get ideas of how to do your job better. Simple as that. General ideas. I went to ChatGBT, I gave it a job description from this company, and I said, give me 10 ideas to use ChatGPT to do my job better, or faster, or more efficient.
Just that nature of brainstorming, of asking for ideas, of asking for support. If you’re not comfortable with these tools, get comfortable with them now. And again, don’t just use them to create. Don’t just use them to write, don’t just use them to explain.
Use them to ideate. You wanna… attract more customers, ask AI for ideas. You want to figure out better ways to upsell certain types of people on certain types of products.
Tell AI about your business. Tell AI what you want to do. You need to clean up your accounting system.
Tell AI you want to do that. Ask it for ideas. It is the fastest idea engine you’ve ever worked with, and it’s incredibly powerful.
So, I’ll recap this super quick. We talked about Cheetos, ask for ideas from anyone about anything, and then ask again and again.
They… Jeff Bezos at Amazon, get louder about your goals and your challenges and opportunities to everyone, including your customers, and use generative AI. When you think about things like brainstorming and ideating and experimenting.
Modernize the way you define those concepts, and start incorporating AI into it.
I’ll try to end all three of these sections. With, like, a first step, um, I hope everything I’m gonna say today is gonna make sense, and you’re gonna wanna try all these new things, and think differently, and talk to your team about all this stuff.
If you’re doing, like, a baby step, if you want to go back to your office when this is over and do something to move forward on one of these ideas.
This is mine for the first one. Write an email to your coworkers, or to your customers, or vendor partners, whoever it is. Write an email to some of the people you work with. If you want, tell them about the speech you just saw, that’s a good, like, excuse or a good jumping-off point.
And basically just tell them, hey, moving forward. If you’ve got any ideas or suggestions.
I want to hear them. Simple as that. And outlines them, tell them it’s okay if the ideas are random or weird, it’s okay if they’re only half-baked, it’s okay if they might be unrealistic or unaffordable, and it’s… definitely okay if the ideas or suggestions or questions don’t have anything to do with the job of the person providing that idea.
Make sure the people you work with understand that. And then when we talk about changing the culture of an organization, send that email, and then send another one a week later. Next time you talk to people in person.
Bring it up. Next time you have a staff meeting, bring it up.
You have to keep hammering this stuff. You have to make people know you’re serious about this stuff. You have to get your leadership to echo this stuff.
Um, that’s your baby step. Send an email, tell people you want ideas about anything, questions about anything, you don’t care how weird it is.
Start with that, and see what comes of it. There may already be, like I said, fantastic ideas sitting in your teammates’ heads, and they just… never really felt like sharing it, or never really realized somebody wanted to listen.
Okay, number two. This is my favorite one. Prioritize iteration and feedback, and I think this is probably the one that fits most strongly into sort of the concept that I know Aetna appreciates around experimentation and experimenting.
So Google, for us, prioritized iteration and feedback kind of meant two things.
And the first one, we’ll talk about is prioritized iteration, this iteration idea, and then we’ll get into feed the feedback part.
But the iteration idea always makes me think of this, which, if you don’t recognize it, this is the first ever Google homepage. This is what Google looked like in 1998. This is when they launched. A lot of people don’t remember, but Google used to have an exclamation point in the name.
Um, so a little different looking, but same gist, but if you look right here, right below the search bar, it says index contains 25 million pages, soon to be much bigger.
I don’t remember a lot about 1998, I was 10, 9 or 10 years old. Um… But I imagine in 1998, being able to almost instantly organize 25 million webpages.
Was probably mind-blowingly impressive. It was truly technologically advanced, it was the ice cream cone of its time. People were blown away by Google, I imagine, in 1998.
But right there, on the middle of their one and only product, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who were grad school students at Stanford, and this was their senior thesis.
They wrote soon to be much bigger. And for me, this was the first example of Google embracing this iteration concept, and the way that I have often defined it, the way that some folks at Google define it.
Is it’s a version 1 mindset. Version one. And it’s essentially this belief, this statement, this philosophy, that everything you do Every product you come up with, every process, every way of doing things, again, from the way you send emails to the way you do expense reports.
Should carry a version 1 label, a V1 label next to it When we label things as version 1, it insists, it implies, it sets an expectation that someday there will be a version 2.
At some point, we need to make this thing bigger and better. And that’s what the Google guys were saying when they said, soon to be much bigger.
They said, yes, this is good, but this is version 1. We are committing to that now.
I try to find how many pages are in Google’s index today, and Google… a million people guess at it. Google doesn’t officially release it anymore.
But the last time I could find Google’s index, a number for Google’s index, a credible one, was in 2016.
So it’s probably changed a lot since then. But I’m gonna guess, and again, please feel free to use the chat, but don’t cheat and try to Google this. Um, so from 1998 to 2016, Google’s index went from 25 million pages
To how many pages do you think were in Google’s index by 2016? Any guesses in the chat?
$12 trillion, we’re starting out high. $300 trillion, man, you guys are guessing big. $200 billion?
$5 billion, $25 billion, yeah, usually we get mostly $100 billion. The first two guesses were… the closest. It’s… was $130 trillion. That was something shared by Search Engine Land in 2016. 130 trillion pages in Google’s index. If you do the math, and somebody might have a calculator, I think it’s around 18,000 webpages per person on the planet.
Somewhere around there, um, that were in Google’s index by 2016. That doesn’t happen.
If in 1998, Google says, index contains 25 million pages.
We did it! We did it. We’re the best, we nailed it, pat us on the back, we mastered search, just congratulations to us.
Then this would never happen. But when you say soon to be much bigger, because this is version 1, then someday there’s going to be a version 2, and 3, and 4, and… This is probably version 500 or 5000 of Google Search.
But label everything you do with version 1. That’s the starting point. Now, the second part of this is how do we decide when to go to version 2, or what version 2 should look like, and that’s where the feedback comes in.
How can we get more input, more feedback, more ideas, more suggestions, more responses to our products and our processes? And when I think about that, it makes me think of a story that this guy used to tell. If you don’t recognize this guy, his name is Tony Robbins. He’s probably the most famous motivational speaker to have ever lived. Um, and he also has gigantic hands. That’s, like, the other thing he’s famous for.
Most famous motivational speaker ever, gigantic hands. So Tony Robbins has this story.
He says, before he became famous motivational speaker Tony Robbins, he used to have a sales job. He would give sales presentations.
And ironically, he was really bad at it. He always got really poor customer reviews, always got poor performance reports from his teams, from his manager, from his coworkers, just didn’t do very well. But, as you can imagine, very motivated guy.
So, Tony Robbins goes to his boss and says, hey boss, I want to get better at this. Can you start sending me out on 3 times as many sales pitches? I want to do triple how I used to do them, because I want to get good at this.
So he does, and he starts going out on tons of these sales calls, and he’s gathering up all the feedback from his team, from his boss, from the customers themselves.
Goes on all these sales calls for a couple months, he’s gone on tons of sales calls, finally comes back together with his boss, they schedule a meeting to sit down and review the results.
They look at all the scores, they crunch all the numbers.
And Tony says, we found that the scores were the exact same.
The exact same. And he says, that’s when I realized, and this is probably one of my favorite quotes of all time, and I think a core part of experimentation and innovation. He said, that’s when I realized that practice doesn’t make perfect.
Practice makes consistent. Practice plus feedback makes perfect. Tony Robbins got really good at doing it the way he did it.
And that’s such a fundamental part of how so many of us ideate and brainstorm and innovate. We do it our way. We work on it in our head. We polish it, and practice it and refine it.
Before we ever share it with anybody and get feedback from anyone else.
And sort of how we try to challenge this at Google is about getting feedback as quickly as we can, as early on in the process as we can. And I’ll tell you a story from Google of sort of how this happens in practice.
Um, some of y’all remember these… this product. It launched somewhere around 2011, I believe. It was called Google Glass. Uh, if anyone in the chat ever owned a pair of Google Glass.
Please, please chime in. I will say with confidence that we are not going to see much action in the chat at that question, um… Maybe one, nobody so far. I was given one, I’m guessing whoever said that then threw them away.
Um, not a big hit, Google Glass. Did not catch on, did not become super popular.
Uh, part of the challenge was really bad PR they picked up. I lived out at Google’s headquarters near San Francisco at the time Does anybody know what people who wore Google Glass out to bars and restaurants were referred to by other people and in the media?
Anybody in the chat? The affectionate name… there it is, thank you. Somebody just said nerds.
It was glass holes. People called us glass holes. Um, which is why virtually no one in this chat has ever worn a pair of Google Glass, or owned a pair of Google Glass.
So not a big commercial success, but that’s beside the point for now.
The process of how Google Glass came to be was really important to understand on this feedback and iteration concept. So I’m going to ask another question to the chat.
If you don’t know what Google Glass is, first of all, it’s like RoboCop glass. It’s just smart glasses. This is pre-MetaQuest, pre-Apple Vision Pro, all that stuff. You know, smart glasses, had a little lens in it, you could interact with your hand and with motions.
So the day in the Google X team, somebody walked in and said.
Hey, we need to… we could build smart glasses, augmented reality glasses.
How long do you think it took, from the time someone pitched that idea, and again, I’m looking for guests in the chat.
Till that team had a working, wearable prototype, something you could actually put on. From the time someone pitched the idea.
How long until they had a working wearable prototype? I’ve got 6 months, 10 weeks.
Somebody just said 6, I don’t know what that is. 2 years.
5 years? Alright, these are good guesses. The correct answer is 45 minutes.
The zip, this is the only picture that exists of it, as far as I know, so sorry, it’s not a great picture. This is the 45-minute version of Google Glass.
As far as I can tell, it’s like a laptop inside a book bag with all sorts of cords running to what look like racquetball goggles with a phone glued to it.
It’s absurd, and it’s crazy looking, right? Like, this is not something we’re ever gonna sell.
But the reason they did it this way. Is because as quickly as possible.
They wanted to take that idea out of that person’s head.
And get it in everyone’s head. Get it in a format and a version that everyone in the room could see, could touch, could feel, could put on.
So that everyone in the room could contribute, so that everyone in the room could provide ideas.
Because what usually happens, again, when we’re innovating, is that an idea like this ends up in someone’s head, in someone’s personal notebook, in someone’s computer simulation.
For years, before they start tapping into a broader pool of thoughts and ideas and resources. When we experiment When we innovate, however quickly we can get other people involved, however quickly we can get feedback, makes an enormous difference. And of course, it took years and years to get to the final version, right? Months later, they had a new one. A year later, they had a new one.
Before they were actually selling it. But they got as much feedback as quickly as possible.
Um, again, not a big commercial success. But when you’re moving fast, that happens, and when you go from version 1 to 2 to 3 to 4, you’ll have failures, for sure.
But you also have parts of different versions, and parts of the feedback you got that are valuable. Because even at Google, when Google Glass was failing Some of those early versions, Google developed some of the greatest data and research and insights and engineers on augmented reality and virtual reality the world had ever seen.
And because of that process, because those parts of the journey were successful.
We were still able to capitalize and use that stuff. There was another team at Google at the time called Niantic Labs, which Google has since spun out into its own company as a major shareholder. Niantic Labs also wanted to use augmented reality, but they wanted to use it to make games, so they took those early version 2s and 3s and 4s of all that augmented reality research and virtual reality research.
Does anybody know what Niantic Labs went on to make with all that great data and all that great engineering skill and all those early versions of Google Glass?
I see some answers in the chat, it was Pokemon Go, which last year passed $8 billion in lifetime revenue.
It’s not bad. When you save the early versions of things, when you learn through the journey. It would have been great if Google Glass was a major success. It wasn’t.
But things we learned along the way were incredibly valuable and incredibly important. And when you get this stuff wrong, what happens a lot is we hear the feedback, we see the data, we see the ideas.
And because we’re comfortable, like I said with the baseball people, because we like version 1, because version 1 has existed for whatever part of our business we’re talking about, that we want to experiment on.
Version 1 has existed and worked for a decade. It’s hard to change. And that can be catastrophic to your business, especially in today’s society where the world moves so fast.
So I’ll tell you a quick story about how that happens.
I’m guessing no one remembers the website OPhoto, but it was purchased around 2000 by Kodak.
So Kodak bought this website called Ofoto, and as you can see from this screenshot, people could do 3 things with the Opoto platform on Kodak. You could buy real Kodak prints.
You could share photos online, and you can organize and edit photos. And again, this is around 2001 that this launched.
Not a bad place to be, I would imagine, in 2001. Having a digital platform where you could share photos online and organize and edit photos.
Probably, that sounds to a lot of you like another website, now called Instagram, and it’s funny, if you look at their slogans next to each other, share moments, share life is Kodak.
Capture and share the world’s moments is Instagram’s slogan. So, pretty similar companies with pretty similar missions.
But a decade before Instagram launched. Kodak, who were at the time the kings of photography, a major powerhouse in technology, in photography, big budgets, tons of engineers.
Launched a website that does what Instagram does. So why don’t we all use Ofhoto, and why isn’t Kodak worth hundreds of billions of dollars today?
It’s because when Kodak launched this website. And allowed users to do three things.
All the users, pretty much, wanted to do two things. The feedback they got, the data they got back, was that consumers really liked two parts of this website.
Guess which two parts? Share photos online, and organize and edit photos. You know what the problem was?
Do you know how Kodak made all its money in 2001?
Real Kodak prints. You know, Kodak made all its money in 1991?
Buy real Kodak brands. In 1981, Buy Real Kodak prints. So for Kodak, this website that people loved for these reasons, they viewed it as a failure. This website’s not working. To the point where they even said, we’re not even gonna let people do Bullet 2 and Bullet 3 unless they buy a certain number of Kodak prints
Per month, because that’s what works, that’s how we make money, that’s success. They ignored the feedback, they ignored the trend, they ignored the data, and said, we’re sticking with version 1.
Didn’t work out, as you can imagine. They ended up stripping Ofoto down, tearing it into pieces, selling what was left of it to Shutterfly in 2012, for $23 million. It’s estimated that last year, Instagram made $50 billion in revenue.
Kodak was there a decade sooner. Prestigious name in photography, with more engineers and more budget than Instagram could have dreamed of when it launched in 201 Kodak… fun fact, the first ever digital camera was invented in, like, the 1970s.
By Kodak. They were ahead of the game in every way on this, but version 2 looked too different from version 1, so they didn’t do anything about it.
So, prioritize iteration and feedback. Label everything as version 1, product and process.
From Google Glass, we learned that we have to maximize the amount and the speed of feedback by making sure we brainstorm out loud. It can be uncomfortable for people to brainstorm out loud, to share your idea and get feedback right off the bat, but it’s how innovation works.
And Kodak Industry 10’s customer feedback and data should determine what you do next, not what worked last year or last decade.
It’s rare that a business gets knocked out of the… knocked out of its success, or knocked off its peak.
From some trend nobody saw coming. Usually, it’s businesses that see trends and choose to ignore them and choose to stay their path.
So one last one, and this one… oh, sorry. First step, I always say I’ll do a first step. Do a version 1 brainstorm sometime with the people you work with. Take 10, 15, 20 minutes.
Allow everyone on your team to try to find things at your company, or things in their job.
That are stuck on version 1. Simple as that. Brainstorm on that with your team. It’s a really fun and valuable exercise.
Last one, and this one’s pretty quick. Embrace passions, curiosities, and skills.
Um, so much of innovation and so much of experimentation, so much of getting this stuff right.
Is allowing people to trust themselves, and to do things they want to do, to do things that excite and inspire them.
At Google, we have this concept called 20% time. It’s this idea that, in theory, everyone at Google is meant to be able to take up to 20% of their time.
To work on whatever they want. Projects that they’re excited about, things that they’re curious about, take skills that they have and apply them in new ways.
The reason we do that is sort of twofold. The first one’s kind of obvious. If you let people work on things that excite them and that they’re curious about, they’re gonna work harder. They’re gonna bring more of themselves to the job, they’re gonna be more innovative. They’re gonna embrace change more.
The second part is about collaboration. When we allow people to work on things they want to work on, we end up breaking down silos, because we don’t force marketers to just work on marketing. We don’t force front office people to just work on front office stuff.
So we end up having people connect across silos and across job functions, and that collaboration and that sharing It’s hugely valuable when we’re trying to be innovative. And probably my favorite 20% project of all time.
Was this? I doubt anybody ever had Google Glass, or maybe one, but maybe some of you had this. It was called Google Cardboard. Um, it was two engineers, somebody yelled it out, yeah, it was, uh, two engineers in Paris.
Who felt like the future of the world was gonna be in three dimensions. It was gonna be virtual reality. And again, this is like 2010.
But they felt like the only way to access virtual reality at the time was to buy, like, a $2,000 Oculus Rift. So they felt that underprivileged communities Low-income school districts, third-world countries, we’re gonna fall behind.
So they tried to solve for that by inventing a perforated sheet of cardboard with two glass discs in it, and when you folded it together, it made this little viewfinder. And if you slid a smartphone into the slot.
And access certain three-dimensional content online. You could hold it up to your face and have virtual reality, have augmented reality right there in front of you.
It costs, like, a penny to make, and we gave millions of them away for free.
Really cool project. Cardboard could do a lot of cool stuff, but probably my favorite story from it is when this little girl, whose name is Tegan.
Was born in a Minneapolis hospital, missing one of her lungs, and with only half of a heart.
Uh, the team at the Minneapolis Hospital sent her home with her parents to live out her final days, because that was not something that could be fixed.
The parents, as you can imagine, frantically reached out to hundreds of hospitals, begging someone to take Tegan’s case.
Eventually, they got their case heard by a Miami surgical center at the Children’s Hospital in Miami that was known for being very innovative.
It just so happened that a member of that surgical staff had just weeks before, been gifted a Google Cardboard by their niece and nephew, and had it sitting on their desk. And they theorized That if we could build a three-dimensional model of Tegan’s heart.
And everyone on the surgical team could dive into three dimensions, plan this surgery together, view it together, come up with a diagram and a process together in three dimensions.
Maybe we could do it. There’s a really cool 60 minutes on this, and you can see everybody on the surgical staff holding up their Google Cardboard and looking around at the heart. And it worked! And they saved that little girl’s life.
It’s like a really nice, warm, fluffy story, but of course, if we’re giving our employees a day a week with 20% time to work on whatever they want, it would certainly be great to make some money from it, too.
Other famous Google 20% projects, uh, include the world’s most popular email, the world’s most popular mapping software, and a product called AdSense, which if you’re not familiar with it, is the tool that allows Google to put ads on other websites that aren’t Google.
Um, last time it was reported out separately, which was, like, 10 years ago, AdSense accounted for about 22% of all of Google’s revenue, which last quarter, Google made $90 billion. So These are some pretty valuable products that came from people given the opportunity to explore the things they wanted to explore. Gmail probably being the most famous.
And the one I think we can learn the most from. An early engineer at Google approached Larry Page and Sergey Brin with the idea of Gmail.
And Larry Page, I think one of the most innovative, brilliant minds in the world, famously said no.
He said, why would we need to build an email platform? There’s already so many of them in the world.
But this engineer believed in it, and he said, I’m just gonna do it as my 20% project, and I’ll find other people who believe in it, and I’ll build it up to the point where you will fund it and make it a real project.
We as leaders, we as… whatever your role is at your company, we don’t always get it right.
Right? We don’t always know what’s worth experimenting on, so to Ryan’s point, we don’t always know what fix is worth making, what juice is worth the squeeze, so to speak.
Sometimes it’s important to trust people, and to give people that opportunity to chase the things that they believe in.
20% time is kind of absurd. It doesn’t have to be a day a week, could be one day a year, could be one hour a month, it could be one meeting a quarter, where you bring people together and let them pursue different things, let them collaborate with different people. And Google didn’t invent this, this has been around forever.
3m has had 15% time for 40 years or so, since the 1970s.
They’ve been letting their scientists take 15% of their time to work on whatever they want. There’s an awesome HBR article about it.
But it really highlights what 3M does so well, is it gives its people the opportunity to talk about their work.
So when they’re pursuing something new, when they’re exciting about something new, when they’re experimenting on something, have some new idea.
There are so many platforms and technical councils and technical forums where these scientists get to share what they’re coming up with, what they’re thinking about.
Finding more opportunities for your team to share with each other is huge. It’s how post-it notes got invented. It was some scientist.
Who invented a thing, and spent 5 years talking about his work before finally having someone in the audience named Art Fry of one of his technical forums say, oh, I have an idea of how to use that.
Just getting people the opportunity to talk and to share. I think I’m coming up on time now, so I want to wrap this up here, and I’ll jump to my first step with this, and then I’ll tell one last quick story. Um…
If you want to take a first step away from this, embrace passions, curiosities, and skills. The first step is to find out what you and your coworkers are passionate and curious about, to find out what skills and talents they have.
Start there. Don’t worry about how to apply it. Schedule a lunch, schedule a coffee, schedule a team meeting.
And I’ll… and find out about each other. Learn what parts of the business everybody’s most interested. Learn what people would like to do. If they did have one day a week to work on anything they want.
Find out what makes people curious, find out what makes people excited, and find out for yourself what makes you curious, what makes you excited. Start by learning those things, and then find ways to apply those skills later. But start by learning about each other.
So I talked about 3 things here, and I know I went kind of fast, I know I talk kind of fast. Look for innovation everywhere. Prioritize iteration and feedback, embrace passions, curiosities, and skills. And the last thing I’ll say is this.
I doubt I said much of anything that you all disagree with, other than maybe that Back to the Future’s the greatest sci-fi movie. I think you probably mostly were nodding along as I talked, but yeah, that makes sense. Innovation from everywhere, oh yeah, we should get feedback, yeah, we should try different things.
You probably agree with all of it. But the question now remains, are you gonna do anything different when you… log off of this. When you come into work tomorrow, is anything gonna be different? And I’ll tell you this last story from Walmart pretty quickly here.
Walmart had this, uh… One of the reasons Walmart’s so successful is logistics. They’re incredibly good at logistics, really efficient about moving things around.
One of the ways they do that is they ensure that their trucks are filled to the very top, and in order to facilitate that, every warehouse worker, every truck driver.
Is given sort of a stepladder stepstool that’s supposed to help them fill the truck. The problem is, the ladders they were using for years was bulky and heavy and hard to move around, so a lot of drivers, a lot of warehouse workers just didn’t use them. And trucks were not getting filled as efficiently as they should.
So there was this one warehouse worker, he’s pictured in the background in this picture, who wanted to do his job well, but also hated the latter, so he decided to go into his garage and build his own version at a PVC pipes and plastic and wood, a smaller, lighter weight step stool that would help him do his job better.
And he did that, and he used it for months and for years. He did that.
Till eventually, that design gets bubbled up to Doug McMillan, seen here on stage at a Walmart investors conference. He’s the CEO of Walmart. And he announces to the investors, this idea is so great, what a great job by our warehouse worker, we’re gonna manufacture his design and give it to every… we’re gonna replace all the old ones.
Because this design’s better, we’re gonna replace all the old ones.
He estimated that just by doing this, Walmart is going to save $30 million a year.
$30 million a year in savings by taking this design and sharing it. And that’s a great story, it’s cool, great job by the warehouse worker, for sure. I hope they gave him an enormous bonus.
And I understand why Doug McMillan talks about it in this way at the investor conference.
And it’s the same reason why some of you will leave this meeting, this presentation, and do nothing different tomorrow.
Because a lot of times, we think of innovation, we think of being outside the box, we think of experimenting as, like, bonuses, as add-ons, as, like, something I could do in addition to doing my job. I don’t have to, that’s like a bonus. It’s extra.
So, but when I hear this Doug McMillan story, and he says, we’re gonna have this bonus, we’re gonna have this extra, we’re gonna make 30 million more dollars a year, the way I read this story.
Is for how many years did Walmart lose $30 million? Because no one asked the warehouse workers if they had any idea, because no one asked the warehouse workers for feedback, because no one asked the truck drivers what they were solving for, what they were curious about, because no one collaborated with these people across silo.
For how many years did Walmart lose $30 million? If there are good ideas, and people’s head, and your team and your company, you’re losing money.
By not trying this stuff. If your competition starts being more innovative, starts being more experimental, starts embracing change, you’re losing money, you’re falling behind.
Don’t let innovation, don’t let experimentation be a, it’s convenient, it’s nice if I got time. Make it part of your business. It is essential. There are things you must do.
So with that, I will wrap it up, and I will say thank you all very much for the time. Um, I appreciate it, and uh, yeah, I hope that was helpful.
Ryan: Excellent, Steve, on behalf of everyone, imagine a really big round of applause there. We have a couple minutes for those that are willing to stay on. If you have a question that you want to explore, a discussion topic that you want to go a little deeper on, I’m going to create the opportunity to use the Q&A. For those members of our client partners who are still on, lots to think about there, because
You know, you get so much feedback in the form of, whether they be patient surveys, online ratings and reviews, where there’s just a wealth of information that’s already coming at you about where and how processes can be improved. Interesting that I was minutes before this session, I was reading a review for one of our clients where people are struggling to schedule appointments.
And, you know, it’s a perennial theme. It’s like, well, how do we make that easier. And looking at all aspects of your business and asking the question, where and how can you be a driver for innovation inside your organization is important.
You have the opportunity, we’re going to be recording this session, it takes a couple days for us to process, we’ll share those links out so you can share the recording with practice leaders, other members of the team, to bring them on board with you in your mission.
Obviously, everyone from here inside of Etna, um, you know, we’ve had this experience together. It’s going to be that much easier for us to deploy. So.
Uh, Steve, I just wanted to say thank you again so much on behalf of our client partners and our team, and uh… just excited as all I can be to look at putting this in the action with the team as we get out of here.
I appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you again for having me. Um, and for those of you who don’t have questions now, that’s my email. Reach out anytime. I love talking about this stuff, I’m always happy to talk about this stuff.
Um, but yeah, just really appreciate the time, and, um, let me know if you need anything else in the future.
Thanks, all.
Excellent. Have a great day, have a great day, everyone, and uh…
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