Strategy Meets Reality Podcast
Traditional strategy is broken.
The world is complex, unpredictable, and constantly shifting—yet most strategy still relies on outdated assumptions of control, certainty, and linear plans.
Strategy Meets Reality is a podcast for leaders who know that theory alone doesn’t cut it.
Hosted by Mike Jones, organisational psychologist and systems thinker, this show features honest, unfiltered conversations with leaders, strategists, and practitioners who’ve had to live with the consequences of strategy.
We go beyond frameworks to explore what it really takes to make strategy work in the real world—where trade-offs are messy, power dynamics matter, and complexity won’t go away.
No jargon. No fluff. Just real insight into how strategy and execution actually happen.
🎧 New episodes every Tuesday. Subscribe and rethink your strategy.
Strategy Meets Reality Podcast
Innovation That Survives Reality | Robyn Bolton
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If your organisation keeps saying "we need to be more innovative" while doing everything possible to crush experimentation, this conversation is for you. I'm joined by Robyn Bolton, founder and Chief Navigator at MileZero, to get brutally practical about what it takes to turn a growth strategy into results when uncertainty, incentives and internal politics get in the way.
We explore the core tension leaders face: most people rise by mastering operating excellence in a high-knowledge environment, then get asked to deliver innovation in a low-knowledge, high-assumption world. Robyn lays out a simple, disciplined alternative to big-bang roll-outs: apply the scientific method, break work into assumptions, write hypotheses, and run quick tests starting with the deal killers. Along the way, we unpack why moving fast in the wrong direction is worse than moving slowly in the right one, plus a memorable McDonald's shrimp salad story that shows what happens when nobody checks the maths early.
We also tackle why innovation is rarely an ideas problem. It's a leadership problem and an organisational design problem: governance that rewards wordy papers over learning, incentives tied to the quarter, and corporate antibodies that swarm anything new. We discuss why "lean is the enemy of learning" can be true in exploration, how to define a clear growth gap that forces focus, why portfolios beat single heroic bets, and how to treat AI as a tool rather than a strategy fad.
If you want innovation strategy, growth strategy and corporate innovation to survive contact with reality, subscribe, share this episode with a colleague, and leave a review so more leaders find the practical playbook.
Find Robyn's work here:
https://www.unlockinginnovation.co
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Strategy Assumptions Meet Real Life
Mike JonesMost people do think of strategy that way.
SPEAKER_02Developing a new strategy.
Mike JonesStrategic blind spots. When strategy meets reality. Strategy and innovation.
SPEAKER_02In the strategy world.
Mike JonesDrive their strategic goals. And
Robin Bolton On Innovation Growth
Mike Joneswelcome back to Strategy Meets Reality Podcast. I'm delighted today to be joined by Robin Bolton. Thank you so much for coming on being a guest on the Strategy Meets Reality Podcast.
SPEAKER_02I am so excited to be here. Thanks for having me.
Mike JonesOh no, it's a pleasure. Just for the for our guests, do you mind giving a bit of background about yourself and about a bit of context, what you've been up to lately?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, absolutely. So I am the founder and chief navigator at MileZero, which is a firm that helps leaders who have made a growth decision, get that growth decision moving, get results, and build a team that has a capital capability or capacity, capability to keep doing it again and again. And that's really where my whole career has been based is on growth, primarily through innovation. Started my career, Procter Gamble, was in brand management, was fortunate enough to be on the team that developed and launched Swiffer, which is now a billion-dollar brand. But worked on the Walmart sales team. So got to live, work in Arkansas, see Walmart up close and personal, which is quite the experience. Then moved up to Boston, got my AMB at Harvard, went to work at the Boston Consulting Group for a few years, both in Boston and in Copenhagen, Denmark. And then spent about nine years at a firm founded by Clayton Christensen, kind of best known as the father of disruptive innovation. And so that is kind of where all of my experience in corporate innovation came together and, you know, got to help a whole variety of companies across a whole variety of industries, you know. Seeing the leaders who really wanted to grow had a strategy for growth. And then all of the barriers and the resistance and the things that got in the way of achieving that growth strategy. So was there up until about 2018 and then founded my own firm to continue that work.
Mike JonesNice, nice. I like it. Yeah, I really like your title, Chief Navigator.
SPEAKER_02Thank you.
Mike JonesYeah, I like that. It just brings me into thinking about, especially when you're talking about they've had a strategy and then all the barriers and all that comes. So it's about that. How do we navigate through that? Because I yeah, I see a lot of people when they think about stuff like innovation or growth strategies or anything they bring in, is always context-free. It it sounds great, it looks great, but there's no relation to the context that it has to be implemented or it has to be done on. And that's where, yeah, that's where it hits reality, and you think, ah, this is not as easy as I thought it was going to be.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
Ops Mindset Versus Innovation Mindset
SPEAKER_02And it's the the other challenge is it's so different from everything that got a leader to where they are. So, you know, so many people in organizations, they get promoted because they are amazing at operating, right? Like you build all of this experience and this insight and this intuition in how to, you know, do a function, run a business, and a better and better and better, the continuous improvement. And that is kind of what's called a high knowledge, low assumption environment. You know more than you don't know. So like you can anticipate what competitors are going to do, you know cause and effect, you have tons of experience, so you can give answers to questions. And growth, especially growth through innovation, which is something new that creates value, is low knowledge, high assumption. Like you've never done it before. Your organization hasn't done it before. So you don't have the experience, you don't know how the market's going to respond. You can't produce, predict cause and effect. You don't have, if you're honest with yourself, you don't have answers to all the questions. And so all of the skills, everything that you have that has made you successful as a leader. So many leaders try to just translate that into new growth and innovation. And it's just an opposite world. And so you actually kind of need to be the opposite type of leader to make your strategy move and happen. And that is a that is a hard reality to run into.
Mike JonesYeah. And I see it especially in those leaders that are working in real sort of ops environments because you know, ambiguity is the the devil in those. And and and that's what we're talking about in the the opposite side is that I've got to go from someone that reduces ambiguity, optimizes all the parts, to someone who has to be really comfortable with ambiguity and darkness. That you know, there's there's things that we we don't know, we're not gonna know. And actually, until especially in innovation, we're not gonna know until we we start doing it, and then you know we'll we'll we'll learn pretty quickly if it's gonna work or not. And when you speak to people in ops environment, that is completely alien.
SPEAKER_02Oh, it's completely alien, and I have so much empathy for it. Like, I hate uncertainty. I feel like my career in innovation is like pennant because like I am the person I read the last page of a book first because I want to know who's still alive at the end, so I don't, you know, so I don't get emotionally attached to somebody who may not make it to the end. So I hate uncertainty. And so I have a lot of empathy for those, those leaders. And
Testing Assumptions With Scientific Method
SPEAKER_02so what I talk to them about is, and so many of them are engineers, is actually applying the scientific method to the work that has to be done and saying, okay, scientific method. You have a hypothesis, you run an experiment to prove or disprove the hypothesis, and that's what we're gonna do. We're gonna take whatever this big project is and we're gonna break it down into the assumptions. We're gonna say, what is the hypothesis around each assumption? For each one, we're gonna run really, really quick tests and we're gonna start with what I call the deal killers first. The hypotheses that if we're wrong, just shut everything down now. Because, you know, we wanna sound morbid, but we want to kill the idea as quickly as possible so we can get to the right idea and the one that's gonna work. And that kind of helps because it it doesn't feel like chance. You know, when you don't know something, you feel like you're just guessing. It's like, okay, well, we actually have a system that we all grew up with that reduces the guessing, it reduces the risk. And so let's use that. Let's use that to shrink the uncertainty and manage the risk.
Mike JonesI like it. It's quite a similar approach when you think about execution, because you always think about what's the we call it the main effort. It's slightly different, works in the same sort of way. The main effort is that you know this is critical to the success of this thing, so we must resource it first, you know, and then everything sequentially afterwards. And that's the same way, you leave right what what is the what's the things where you know will tell us if it's gonna work, you know, quicker than others, and then let's do that first. But what what pains me and what you just talked through, which makes perfect sense, you know, you do that, and I like the bit about the doing the small tests, the small because I've just with organizations, and there's none of that. It's like I've got a good idea, let's implement it across the whole organization. Yep, yep. And you think and and then it all starts to sort of just go into chaos, and you're thinking, why why did you just put a why couldn't you just slow down and just tested what you wanted to do in maybe two um two areas that you could have done multiple at the same time, so you can see if there's variance. Uh no, a whole thing.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and that it's so common and like, but we have to move fast, we have to do this. But I'm like moving fast in the wrong direction is worse than moving slowly in the right
McDonalds Shrimp Salad Scale Trap
SPEAKER_02one. And so one of my favorite stories of this is years and years and years ago, McDonald's wanted to put a shrimp salad on the menu. We can debate whether that was a good idea or not. I have my thoughts. Yeah, somebody at McDonald's thought this was a great idea. And so McDonald's did what every company, what you just described, we've got to do this, we've got to do it at scale. And so they spent literally years and millions of dollars kind of engineering the shrimp salad, you know, making sure it would work and not go bad and all of that. And then they got to the point where they're like, okay, we have to procure the shrimp because we know how how much, how many shrimp need to go on each salad to get the price point. And they were having a really hard time in procurement. And then somebody, bless their hearts, sat down and was like, why are we having such a hard time? And literally did the math, like simple multiplication of this many shrimp on a salad times how many salads we think we're going to sell. And the answer was they needed more shrimp than existed in the entire world. You you think about like that mentality. If we need to go fast, we need to get started on this. And I'm like, you spent years and millions of dollars. Whereas if someone just in the first meeting was like, Hey, how many do we think we'll sell in a year? I don't know if we had to guess how many shrimp we put on. Oh, shrimp, there aren't that many shrimp in the entire world.
Mike JonesThis this is the thing with um organizations don't slow down to do stuff like well, we've what you just said, we would call that red teaming or wall gaming, where you know, we invite people to destroy my plan, destroy my idea. Here's my idea. Come along, let's destroy it. And just that bit up front can just save so much time and effort.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
Mike JonesYeah.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. It's just it's it's amazing. And you know, so going the wrong way quickly is is not a good idea. And also, isn't it better to fail small and privately than fail big and publicly? And red teaming gives you the opportunity to fail, I would call it learning, but fail in a conference room.
Mike JonesYeah. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02That's way better than a press release and launching and then failing in the market.
Mike JonesYeah, and it's it's far you see it a lot. There's a lot of companies that do this crazy sell. They'll go into different markets or different um countries and they fail pretty quickly because they haven't. I suppose it's back to my point earlier, they haven't thought about the context. They took an idea context-free and and tried to make that work. Well, you think it's you need to move quick. I always say to organizations, you you have to move as quick as or quicker than the external environment.
SPEAKER_02Yes, because otherwise you're you're always behind. And and that, you know, people hear that and they're like, oh, we have to do everything quickly. It's like you also have to do everything smartly.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Right. So again, your example, like if you go into a market and you do it quickly without understanding the market, you're behind now, actually, because you've wasted a ton of time and resources in the rush instead of taking just that beat, just that pause for a conversation or a week-long trip or whatever it is, to just check the assumptions, check the hypotheses and make sure that they prove out.
Mike JonesYeah, I think it's so important. You it's the same in execution. But I I will see in organizations, the same with strategy and execution and innovation and all that stuff. There's so much nonsense. There's so much nonsense around here. Yeah.
Why Ideas Are Not The Problem
Mike JonesWhat what what are the what are the key things you know in that in that world, you know, of innovation and in your background that you're in? What's that stuff that just is nonsense, but it's just so sticky, it sticks around and organizations still do it?
SPEAKER_02Oh, I think the biggest one is that innovation is an idea problem. So many companies, when you know they they look around and they're like, okay, we want to we want to create something new. We want to grow our business organically, we want to create new businesses, use that as a growth, growth measure. So we need more ideas. And the fact is, ideas are not your problem at all. Because one, ideas are a dime a dozen. People are full of ideas and companies are full of people. Therefore, companies are full of ideas. What innovation and growth actually is, it's a leadership problem. So if you're not not hearing ideas, there's a reason you're not hearing ideas when you have people full of them. And so you have to look at kind of the culture aspect and your leadership aspect. If you're hearing ideas, but you're not moving them forward, you're not acting on them, you have an architecture problem. What are the structures, the processes, the governance that is getting in the way? And, you know, your whole company is designed around making things better, faster, cheaper, which is the opposite of the learning exploration that's required. So it really is a leadership problem. It requires leaders to solve. It's not just we're gonna get more ideas or bigger ideas or better ideas, and then the problem solved. It's like there's a huge the leadership component is actually the critical aspect.
Mike JonesYeah, I do see this, and it makes you laugh because I am I am a consultant, so you know, but um is that you're right, they they do think it's an idea problem, and then you get a consultancy into to come and sell them an idea, but you you can you can have all the ideas you want. If you can't implement them, what's the what's the point? And I give it exactly right with you all in the in organizations. I don't think organizations are troubled for ideas. It's just that I find that leaders are so detached from reality because they don't go down, they don't they they're not going down to the edges of the organization and listening to people, seeing what's going on. If they done that, they'll they'll be full of ideas.
SPEAKER_02Yes, and they would they would be the ideas they hear from people who are on the front lines, they would be able to sift through them really quickly. I mean, I the most important thing, I think, especially in this day and age where everything is moving so fast and you know the hierarchy and reporting is just like you're a month out of date by the time you get a report. You have to you have to get down there on the shop floor, you have to get out there in the market and talk to customers and see what's happening on the front lines. You just have to, yeah.
Mike JonesAnd I've often been accused of being a bit of a governance um anarchist, but um that there's nothing that kills my soul any more than when I hear people go, Oh yeah, we've got this idea, so I need to write a paper. Oh my Jesus Christ, and then they just wordsmith this paper, they spend ages words mything this paper for it to be literally read for a couple of minutes, if that um board meeting with agenda of a thousand things that they need to get through in this board meeting. I'm like, this is not conducive to anything that is, yeah, and again, it's that I think it's that bit you mentioned um a few moments ago around efficiency. We've just we've just turned organizations in this big efficiency machine, optimise the parts and reward leaders for efficiency drives, yeah. And the innovation, you know, or it that that exploit in the future opportunities and efficiency that they are you know they are uh opposing elements, don't mean that they you can't have one and the other, of course you have to keep them balance, but yeah, yeah, if you're only headed toward what towards one, um, it's not gonna do you well.
unknownYeah.
Lean Efficiency Can Block Learning
SPEAKER_02No, I mean, I I heard this great quote. I was uh talking to an MIT professor who studies manufacturing, and he said, lean is the enemy of learning.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02And I just thought, like, wow, that is so true, but that is also such a dagger into the heart of so many people. And then he he told this story, which I don't know if it's true or not, but it's a great story. Is that, you know, in the early, early days of Tesla, Elon Musk met with executives from Toyota. They're like, how essentially the executives were like, How have you gotten so far ahead of us in developing, you know, hybrid car? And Elon just gestured to this warehouse they were sitting in that was just filled with like scrapped parts and just it was a mess. And he's like, because we've been learning. Yeah, and that was so anti, that's so antithetical to you know, the Toyota production system and lean Six Sigma and all that, that like doing something new is inherently wasteful. But you're learning from every single thing you're you're learning from every iteration. You can't just go, you know, from where you are to the end state. And so that idea of lean where we have to operate lean, it's like then you won't learn.
Mike JonesNo, well this is the point, and there's gonna be some people on there because like Toyota and all those things are like you know, the tribal. Yeah, yeah, people are in it, or you're not you're right in a sense that I those things like if I'm gonna go for lean or something like that, that's sort of like you know, we've we've we've we've had the idea, we've we've we've done it to death, we know what we're doing now, we could predict the actions of the outcomes of our actions, yeah. Of course, why why wouldn't you make that as efficient as possible? But what annoys me is that people get all these ideas, and again, comes back to this context-free thing. They go, right, let's let's bring in lean. I saw there was um chief executive of a company I work for um many years ago, so iterations, yeah, but they're still so it's over a decade ago that this person was in charge, but they're still feeling they're still this is how this is people don't realise about these decisions. They're they're still having the side effect of this decision because he he saw all that and decided to bring lean in, so he brought in lean everywhere. So, again, back to our point about not doing small experiments running to the whole organization, but this organization wasn't a predictable force, yeah. It was unpredictable. There wasn't any element in what they do broadly, the cost of their processes broadly, they couldn't predict the um outcomes of actions anywhere. So, why would you bring in lean for that? It just brings efficiency where efficiency is not needed, right?
SPEAKER_02Exactly. And it it it creates, it sounds like this culture where everyone's like, oh, lean, lean, lean, and there's this cognitive dissonance and kind of this, you know, probably this post-traumatic stress disorder around like, oh my gosh, we got to be efficient, but this is an inherently, you know, inefficient thing because we have to learn our way to the right answer. We have more assumptions than knowledge. You're exactly right. Once you know what you're doing, once you have more knowledge than assumptions, absolutely get efficient, like go lean, go six sigma. But if you don't know what you're doing, don't optimize that.
Mike JonesYeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, you're just optimizing nothing. Um, yeah. And and it is crazy when you think about it because we I see it all the time. As soon as there are errors that come in or a dip in performance and performance pressure starts arising, the first thing everyone does is just go internal and everything else gets cut off. So any idea of innovation or anything doesn't just get sort of dropped and secondary, and then they wonder why they can't get their leaders into thinking about all I hate this bit of the moment, where they're going, oh, we need more entrepreneurial leaders, you just need to stop incentivizing the wrong thing. Right elsewhere, then yeah. Um thing. Yeah, and and actually get some balance back into your organization. And funny enough, you get more capacity to have your leaders start to think about the future opportunities.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, exactly. And it the fact that you mentioned incentives, I mean, you just look at how leaders are incentivized, right? It's did you deliver the quarter, did you deliver the year? Innovation, new growth projects, they don't deliver anything in the first quarter or usually even in the first year. And so you have to think about incentives completely differently. But then that's really hard because you have a whole company that's incentive one way, and then you're gonna have these other people incentives another way, and that just like is throwing sand in the system. And so it's really hard. Like, you know, I don't want to diminish how hard this is. It is really challenging, which is why I think so companies, so few companies do it well, and why it creates such an incredible competitive advantage when companies figure out how to do it in a way that is honest. Like you said, we need to be more entrepreneurial. No, you didn't. What does that mean to you? Because you You have designed an entire organization around crushing entrepreneurialism.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02You know, we I talk a lot of times about corporate antibodies. You know, as soon as they see something new, something a little different, just like antibodies in our body, they're gonna swarm it and kill it.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_02So what do you actually need? And how can you protect it? But just saying, like, we need to be more entrepreneurial, or you know, I love that like, we need to be more innovative. Innovative is a, you know, innovation is a strategic priority. Growth is a priority. And I'm like, how are you gonna measure that? Yeah, and how are you good? How are you gonna know when you have achieved that goal? Yeah, what what new growth do you need? How much does that need to produce, and by when?
Mike JonesYeah, or I love it, is like so what makes you think that you're innovative and their point, but look, it's one of our values, Mike. Of course it is, of course, of course, because that's gonna help you. Um yeah, but but the thing is, if you just look and I I think we're leading on the sort of same, same sort of things that if you look at especially efficiency, so you think about manufacturing process efficiency and stuff like that, it's structured and designed in a certain way because it's going like we need to be really efficient to this, so we're gonna have really high divisions of labour. You know, that's why you get like on we have a program over here called Inside the Factory, where you get to go inside the factory and see how like people make stuff, like you know, Mr. Kipling makes his cakes, and now you've got Sally, bless her. Sally's like eight years old, and she's worked for the factory since she was six. Um, and uh, you know, and her whole job is just to put the the cherry on top of the cake, and that's all she ever does, and she does that, and you know, you've got loads of layers, loads of processes stuff, and the reason for that is is because you want it efficient, and it's like with McDonald's, it's like they have the you know, you know, Big Mac, and it's done exactly the same everywhere, exactly the same because we want that. What they don't want is spotty little 16-year-old Kevin thinking, do you know what and make this Big Mac even better? Let's put some chicken nuggets in there as well, wouldn't that be banging? Yeah, so these are structured in a way that that aren't conducive to that. So it's like yeah, so it's like how how do you go against the grain of what they've been taught for so long to suddenly go, well, we actually need some capacity here to be able to look to the future, and that's that's a hard it's hard, it's really, really hard.
SPEAKER_02And that's where you can see like is it is innovation just a value on a wall? Is it just a strategic priority? Because you put resources against the things that are important, right? And so, you know, as an executive, as a leader, you know, I have someone coming to me and being like, hey, you know, if we optimize this process, we can drive cogs down to this and profit up to that, and it will cost this, and you'll have an ROI and um, you know, three quarters will break even in three quarters, we'll see it. And then you have somebody coming through and be like, hey, we think we need to like create a new version of the big mech. And I don't know if we'll succeed. I don't know what'll happen. I don't, I don't know, but we we need to experiment. I'm getting incentivized on like my bonus is based on what I produced this year. What am I gonna put budget against?
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Of course I'm gonna put budget against the sure thing. And so that's why, you know, it kind of comes back to incentives and it also comes back to, you know, the leaders and to the capabilities and the skills of the people in the organizations. Because there are people in every organization who are entrepreneurial, but they're the people who they're not the high potentials that everyone loves to point to because the high potentials have figured out how to succeed in the system. These are the people who are the squeaky wheels and the misfits who are always being like, well, why are we doing things that way? What if we tried this? Maybe even going rogue and being like, well, I'm just gonna, you know, get a $20 subscription a month to Claude and see what I can do on AI. It's those people that that have that kind of curious, creative, I'm gonna tinker with things that you need to say, okay, if we're serious about organic growth, we're gonna kind of move you over here, you know, set up structures, but guardrails that you can bounce off of, not a rail that you keep, and we're gonna protect you from the antibodies. And here are your goals. Like we need to, you know, here are measurable goals that we have for you. Because we need to making this up, like we need to have 25 million in revenue from things that don't exist today in three years. So, you know, it's it's a long-term goal in today's day and age. So it gives the team time, but it doesn't give them so much time that they can just dither around forever. And it's but you have to intentionally create and invest resources to do that.
Mike JonesAnd it and it works out well because the the type of people you're talking about, you know, you've got to put a bit of pressure on them because that's what they want. I think if you gave them too much, then they do it. But it it's adversely the other way. If they were in the organization, they would get fed up because everything's too slow. So it's about how how do we how do we allow that space to be flexible, but also keep some constraints in to keep them focused.
SPEAKER_02That's kind of one of the innovation mantras is the constraints drive creativity.
Mike JonesYeah.
SPEAKER_02Because if you don't have any constraints, you can do anything. So you need the constraints to kind of rule things out, but you don't want to be so constrained, which is kind of what happens in lean, that like this is the step-by-step process, and you have to follow it like a rail, you know, for a railroad. You need you need things that people can bounce in between and not go spiraling off a cliff.
Mike JonesYeah. And you want that because otherwise you're not gonna you're not gonna achieve anything. The payoff is big. Like you think about um, you know, recently things like Nova Nordisk that created the um, you know, the first jab. Their problem, their problem is the opposite to what we're talking about now, is that when they did come up with that idea, they they then couldn't efficiently manufacture it. So there's is it's not all one way about innovation. There is that other part that we're talking about that you do have to be efficient on. Um isn't that the joys of business? It's never simple, is it?
SPEAKER_02It's it's never simple, but some problems are better to have than others, yeah, exactly.
Mike JonesAnd the the the payoff is huge, but I think that it's I always think about some leaders and you think about the decisions they make, and you're thinking you made that decision because it looked great now, but you you you have now gone and um cut something that you know is going to resort in limiting someone in a couple of years, you're gonna constrain them so much it's gonna make it really hard for them.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah, and it's it's so hard because you know, as consultants, we can kind of stand outside of the cauldron and see it. We so many times I'm like, let me just tell you how the story is going to play out because I've seen this before. Let me tell you how this ends. And the reality is is you know, the executives are very much in the here and now. And, you know, with kind of tenure and role shrinking, I think doubts about every two or three years. The odds of that executive making that decision, he's he or she is going to be gone or in another role or whatever, when that in three years, or whenever kind of the everything comes home to roost. So again, you're you're completely logically incentivized to be like, what needs to happen now? We'll deal with tomorrow, tomorrow.
Mike JonesThe the thing is though, so you like we all are, we're um uh consultants and we we look in, and I often get people go, oh, this must be a unique challenge. You sort of laugh and go, it's not that unique, trust me. There's so many uh so many common things that happen. But when when you're you go in as a sort of chief navigator for these, and someone wants to look at growth and innovation, but they've been a pretty much stunted organization because you know normally that happens because they've they've had a a golden ticket for so long and they're so focused on it. Now they now they need to do something. How how would you even start that with an organized um you know, load of leaders saying, how do we go from get our innovative flare back?
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
The Growth Gap That Forces Focus
SPEAKER_02So um the first thing I do is uh kind of you know, I think it's always important to speak the language of the of business and the organization. So the first thing I do is like, how will we know when we've we're successful? And one of the things that I do is define the growth gap. And it's super simple. I was an English literature minor. I chose my major based on the absolute how little math. So I I avoid math, but I say, okay, you know, you have this goal of being. I I did this with a big uh global athletic goods company. I said, okay, you have a goal of being 50 billion, say 50 billion in revenue in five years. Great. What's your revenue now? It's 25 billion. Great. And you know, they've done the strategic plan. So they've said, like, okay, here's how much we think we're gonna grow. We think we're gonna grow, you know, to 30 billion in five years. I'm like, okay, so that 50 minus 30 is 20. That means you need 20 billion dollars in revenue from things that don't exist today in your portfolio. And that's a big number, by the way. The funny thing was a very successful company, they're like, oh yeah, no problem. We we can figure that out. I said, okay, back when we were having this conversation, I'm like, that's two Facebooks. You have to create two Facebooks and get them to the scale of Facebook today in five years. They're like, like and suddenly, like, just that conversation completely changed how they were allocating resources, how they were allocating budget, like that 50 minus 30 equals 20. That conversation changed things. And it gave us a number like if we have to create 20 billion in new revenue, we have to have big ideas. Like, and so that started focusing the strategy on the ideas that come to us have to be, you know, this size or bigger, and we need a portfolio of this many ideas. And so it started kind of one, it started feeling more like a business decision. Like we were able to use terms that we use in the existing business and and bring kind of the discipline and the seriousness to the creative endeavor, endeavor that was required.
SPEAKER_01Yes. Yeah, I like it.
SPEAKER_02Instead of starting from the ideas and being like, oh, which ones do we like? Let's go pursue those. Also, that factors in, but this is still a business.
Mike JonesYeah, yeah. And and you're hedging your bet. I was um a couple of episodes ago, I was uh on having a conversation with Andreas, who's a VC, uh venture capitalist. And it's sort of similar in a way that you know they've got loads of they've got a portfolio of all these that they're hedging their bets on. And but they're not they're not testing those. So it's almost like this is uh we've got all these ideas, let's let's get this portfolio, let's test these out and let's see what what grows and what what goes. But that takes a lot of dedication and you know perseverance to you know to do that type of thing and not get sidetracked by the the news of the day.
SPEAKER_02Right, the news of the day, the tyranny of now. I mean, in in my book, I I pieced together a few studies and looked at okay, how many ideas do you need to have to get one million dollar idea into the market? And so, you know, nobody's kind of put all this together, but if you look at the odds strung across things, you need 40,000 ideas at the start of the funnel to get one million dollar business. I can guarantee you no company is working on 40,000 ideas right now. And so when you you put at it that way, and you're like, okay, so you've you want to invest in one idea, and you think you're gonna just by happenstance pick the one in 40,000 that's gonna be successful, you need a portfolio. Maybe not a portfolio of 40,000, but a handful at least.
Mike JonesYeah, you need that. I'll probably challenge you on that. Um, no organization has 40,000 ideas. I bet they've got 40,000 going on. Yes.
SPEAKER_02Yes, at least 40,000, you know, kind of jotted down somewhere in a sauna or or something that should be getting worked on, but who knows how many are.
Mike JonesI bet they've got like uh I've bet they they've got a HR restructure, you know, they've got uh an efficiency drive, they've got loads of initiatives going on. None of them are about you know future innovation or future value, just to stuff to keep people busy. Um, but that's crazy though, when you think about it. Like when you put it in those terms, you you you you don't you then start to think, wow, that's actually that's that's a lot. You know, that's uh that's a lot of ideas that have to come. And that really brings a bit of expect uh perspective about it, especially when you're thinking about how many ideas you know that's got a serious resource and a team, a dedicated team around that. But do you do you see that often or not?
SPEAKER_02Uh it's it's actually getting rarer and rarer that there are dedicated teams to innovation. I think partially that's kind of just a sign of the times of you know, all the uncertainty managers are trying to reduce uncertainty, reduce risk, and so the focus on efficiency and incremental improvement. And so the pendulums kind of swung from, you know, I'd say five, 10 years ago, companies wanted to disrupt themselves. I got a lot of calls when I was at Christensen's firm. We want to disrupt ourselves. And I would explain what that sentence meant, and they'd be like, we do not want to do that. I'm like, I know you don't. Let's talk, let's talk about what you actually want to accomplish. But things have swung from that to I think the other side where everything is efficiency, everything is incremental innovation, and we need to, and I'm seeing signs that we are kind of coming back down to more of a balance. So maybe dedicated innovation teams will come back. I think companies are starting to realize that like MA is you know, is a great way to bring in businesses and business models that challenge the core because it's just, you know, companies aren't entrepreneurial. They're not going to disrupt themselves. But when business models are shifting, they can, you know, they can bring in, they can buy something that is challenging, but it's hard for them to create it themselves. It'll just instantly get killed by the antibodies.
Mike JonesInstantly get killed. You know, a good a good friend of mine, Patrick Haverstart, talks about this a lot where he's he talks about he he calls it bubble strategy, so where he um they create bubbles around things and protect it a lot to to be of that because the things just don't otherwise as soon as you create something like it always happens, you create a team, and that team now is and you said it earlier. One one lot of the organization incentivised to do A, this is incentives to do B, but everything the whole structure around the business is incentivized for A. So B is is struggling, and it's not long before you talk about the antibodies, disease come and take over that team, and before you know it, they're in that same slump. Um not getting anything. You have to really protect it, which is quite surprising when you said that you know you're seeing you know leaders go, and you see it for fads, because it's like I hate fads, like I really you know, I always look and you know hear the latest buzzwords. I'm like, okay, right, just like you said, playback. What what does that mean? What what what's your interpretation of what that buzzword means? But yeah, it's a shame to think that things are going, you know, you know, away from innovation and sort of being a bit static. Doesn't surprise me. And shame.
SPEAKER_02I mean, and innovation was such a sad. I mean, oh my gosh, the like and and it was it was great for business, but it was sad to see because you would have these innovation teams get set up and like these incredible offices, and they would like they'd have the food so you know, every company was trying to recreate Silicon Valley in a corner of their office. And while everyone else, everyone else in the like 90, 95% of the company is like, okay, so they're they get the best offices, they get all this money to go to Burning Man. Meanwhile, we're over here actually generating revenue that's keeping us all paid. And so it created this haves and have nots, which then of course created this rivalry. And it just went spinning off into some place that was not helpful. Instead of being like, hey, no, innovation is a discipline, it's part of the business. This is our growth engine. And so, yeah, the metrics are different because it's just on a different timeline, it's in an opposite world. But everyone is equally important. The operators are just as important as the innovators because the operators keep the lights on and kind of buy us time to create the the next thing that gets us to the next phase of our growth or you know, the next change in the world or technology or whatever it is.
Mike JonesYeah. I I just wish people would just get back to a bit of no nonsense common sense around this stuff. You know, it's not hard what we're talking about, it's always been the same. Yeah, humans are the same. It's like how do we how do we you know achieve superior value as efficiently as possible today whilst understanding what we need to change now to be viable in the future? Is that is that today and tomorrow continuum, isn't it? Otherwise, yeah, you'll you'll be that human that's completely lost contact with what's going on and you don't adapt, and then you don't adapt, you then go.
AI Hype And Back To Basics
Mike JonesBut there's all these fads that keep coming up and it distracts people. It's like yeah, AI is one of those at the moment. I know it's a huge thing that's going on at the moment, but it is almost like you can't have anything unless it's something to do with AI. Yeah rather than thinking, no, like I'm talking about strategy, and we can talk about you know strategy impacting, but strategy, strategy, just because you've got AI now doesn't mean suddenly strategy has changed, it just means we've got another contextual factor that we need to consider, amongst all the other contextual factors that we now need to consider.
SPEAKER_02Yep, yeah, and the thing is AI is a tool, yeah. It's a tool just like PowerPoint is a tool or you know Six Sigma is a tool, it's a tool. And you know, again, humans, we always go after the shiny object. Like we all just run in the herd and you know, notice very much this kind of freeze or follow thing amongst executives. It's like either right now there's so much uncertainty that they're freezing, and they're like, we're just gonna keep doing what we've always been doing and like keep our head down, and then maybe nobody will notice us and we'll just everything will stay the same, or everyone's just following what everybody else is doing because there's safety in numbers. Yeah, and it's like okay, let's let's just stop for a moment and like calibrate. You know, yes, we have this new tool, it is developing incredibly quick, like every six months, it is something different, but it's a tool in the toolkit. And so really going back to strategy, like what is the problem we're trying to solve? What tools do we need to solve that problem? Just back to basics, yeah.
Mike JonesAnd it's the same with like you know, bringing it in, it's going back to basics with innovation, like what your book is all about. It's like your book unlocking innovation. Like, how do we how do we get to that point where we can we could do that and then we can probably figure out how we want to bring these things in or where we need to bring these things in? But yeah, if we're just looking at as a blunt tool to just increase even more efficient. Yes, yeah, and it's like, oh, now I've got this, I don't need all these people, so let's just get rid of these people. Um, uh and I'd be like, Yeah, see see where that gets you, and you lose all yeah, all capacity to uh to adapt. Yeah, crazy, yeah.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and it's it it's so crazy, and it's so funny that we see it over and over like. Like you said, fads, you know, it just happens all the time. And we're so human. And so we keep committing the same mistakes. And it's going back to something you said of like, oh, but we're different. It's like, yes, you are a special snowflake, but you're still a snowflake like all the other snowflakes. So you're both unique and the same.
Mike JonesYes. And if my measure to see where the fads are, is I go onto LinkedIn and I go see what the coaches now rename themselves to. Yes. That's my measure of where the things are going. And you see all the fads there just by I'm now an expert in this. I'm a coach to a lot. Like, okay, all right, got it. I'm now uh I'm now an ADHD coach. I'm now, you know, an innovation coach. I'm now AI coach. Jesus Christ, here we go.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Oh no, the the AI coaches have have exploded, the innovation coaches have faded out. And it's just, yeah, you gotta look at, okay, well, what are the what are the credentials? What have you actually done? Because if you've just used Claude to create a few agents, are you really an AI expert?
Mike JonesYes. Yes. And you you could tell tell the the ones I've some great ones on here, and you can really tell the the difference in how they're more pragmatic than the doomsday ones that are like, ah, you've got to do it now. Oh, you're gonna burn.
SPEAKER_02Yes. Use this tool, this tool, this AI system will solve all of your problems. It's like yeah, yeah.
Mike JonesAnd it brings us back to the original point, wasn't it? About we're not looking and testing, thinking what our problem is, we're just shoving it in and hoping for the best. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If it was that simple, we'd all do it.
unknownI know.
SPEAKER_02But but it you just feel like you're always behind, so we gotta do something now instead of again taking a beat, being like, what's happening on the front lines? Yeah, what's the problem we're solving? What's the best tool?
Mike JonesYeah, and you know, you're always gonna be behind at some degree, and I think that's just being comfortable with that, you know, comfortable with that ambiguity, that darkness, and the fact that you know, it's there's always gonna be something that's slightly ahead. And then some point when you'll be slightly ahead, it's just a it's just a that's a that's a challenge of organizations and embrace it. Yeah, like you said, take a beat, relax.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah, you don't have to be ahead at everything.
Mike JonesYeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02You know, pick what you you need to be ahead at and what that actually means. Yeah. You know, so many companies are like, oh, we're behind on AI. I'm like, behind compared to who?
Mike JonesYeah, compared to what. Yeah, exactly. I like it. That's why you always gotta look at the people around you and the dynamics, where are they going? Um we don't just sort of just make you know, trite analogies and go, oh yeah, we just need to do this faster. Okay, why?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah.
Mike JonesYeah, yeah. I like it. Good, good more. I like it, Robin. More pragmatic conversations is what we need.
SPEAKER_02Oh yes, true.
Mike JonesYeah, yeah. We'll we'll we're one one episode at a time.
SPEAKER_02But um We'll get there, one step at a time, like you said.
Get Out To The Front Lines
Mike JonesExactly. Before before I let you go, uh, what would you like people or listeners to think about from this episode?
SPEAKER_02The biggest thing I want people to to take away is that you need to get out of the office, away from the computer, and see what's going on in the front lines. There is absolutely nothing that can replace actually seeing and experiencing what's going on on the ground for yourself. There's no report, there's no video, nothing will be as insightful or as memorable or as motivating as actually seeing what's happening for yourself.
Mike JonesI like that. And like you said at the start, you know, your organization's full of people, and that means you you haven't got an idea problem.
SPEAKER_02You don't have an idea problem. You've got more you've got more than 40,000 ideas floating around your company. You just have to you just have to bring the right ones to the top and give them a way to work forward.
Mike JonesYeah, I like it. Thank you so much for being a fabulous guest. Uh enjoyed our conversation.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I love a good practical conversation.
Closing Thanks And Listener Support
Mike JonesAnd and for our listeners, if you enjoyed this, please share, subscribe, uh, comment so that that helps get further reached so that people can get such value from these conversations. And I'll put in the link so you can get in touch with Robin, and also I'll link you to a fabulous book unlocking innovation. That'll be all in the show notes so you can you can digest that and get more value from this episode. So, thank you for listening, and again, Robin, thank you for being such a great guest.
SPEAKER_02Thank you so much.
Mike JonesAwesome. Take care, everyone.