In this fascinating episode, Natalie Born, Founder and Chief Disruptor at Innovation Meets Leadership, shares how she has taken the lessons she learned from inside the “.com” boom and bust and used them to build a scalable framework for innovation
You’ll discover:
– Why you probably need to allow your employees to fail more
– The unfair advantage small companies have when it comes to innovation
– How to move from “Innovative Founder” to a “Highly Innovative Organization”
Episode Transcript
Scott Ritzheimer
Hello, hello and welcome. Welcome once again to the secrets of the high demand coach and I am here with yet another high demand coach and consultant and that is Natalie Born. She’s the founder and chief disruptor at Innovation meets leadership and as an accomplished executive with two approved US patents to her name. And over 15 years of experience leading product development teams, she is consistently willing to share her expertise to ensure companies are designing their products and strategies with the customer at the center of their design. Natalie is also a keynote speaker, a podcast and innovation facilitator. And Natalie, I’m so excited to have you here because what’s really cool is you’re a local, we are the same folks. So, you know, typically on podcast, one of my first questions is Where are you calling in from because, you know, I got someone in Australia one day and then Wales the next and then Cleveland, you know, but we’re both here from basically the Peachtree corners area of Atlanta. So we don’t even have to say Atlanta. So I’m so excited to have a local on the show, and really excited to talk about innovation, because I know this is just what you’ve given yourself to and just have an incredible track record with it. But before we go there, I’d like to just take a step back and say, Well, tell us your story. What were you doing before getting into helping folks in the in the innovation space? And how did you ultimately decide to make the leap into coaching and consulting?
Natalie Born
Sure, thanks for having me, Scott. So you know, my backstory starts in early 2000s, during the.com, boom, right. So we all remember that time, it was such a fun season, and I got brought on, I was 19, I was still in college, and I got brought on had a real job at 19 was working at careerbuilder.com. And ended up just having an amazing career there for almost 11 years. And so what was so cool about that time, and I think kind of what shaped me in that culture was, you know, that organization at the time was growing so rapidly, that if you weren’t getting a promotion every like 9 to 12 months, you were kind of like there’s something wrong with me, am I am I doing something wrong, but we were just growing at such an incredible pace. So I got a job in project management. And I was outsourcing to Indi, West Indies, and Naevus. And I’m not even old enough to rent a car. So I had to bring a colleague down there with me, so that we could, so I could get around. And later, I got introduced into international product development. And that is honestly where my career really took off. And where I kind of found my, if you will, first love of just innovation and a national product development, that career would take me to over 18 countries working on different products, mergers and acquisitions, launching businesses organically and then also just working with founders and I have such a love for the grind and the role that it takes to start something from nothing, right, just building something from the ground up. And so that really launched my career working at CareerBuilder. It was such a blast, it was a great time. And that launched me into product development just in general. And that understanding that when you’re when you’re selling something, it has to be ubiquitous, right? We can’t just sell it to the one person we have to figure out, how do we replicate that again and again. And then not only that, it has to be urgent. So how do you create a project that people love that’s urgent, and then making sure that people are actually willing to pay for it? And so that’s the piece that really launched my career.
Scott Ritzheimer
Wow, wow, fascinating. So we fast forward. You’ve been doing this for a while now, what would you say some of the most important work you’re doing with teams today?
Natalie Born
Yeah, so you know, some of the most important things and I kind of like to put them in three buckets. So mostly with teams, I’m working on one of three things, we’re either creating something new, and that’s kind of that idea of when you’re building a framework for success with a company with a team, you’re asking really three questions, how do I make it repeatable? How do we make it viable? And then how do we make it livable? So if you’re implementing a framework that people can’t live out, it’s not a powerful framework, right? So it’s really focusing on these three things. The other thing that I’m constantly doing is helping people figure out how to disrupt their market. So oftentimes, companies like to kind of play the hand they were dealt, or they play the hand, the industry is dealt. And they’re not thinking about how to actually traverse their industry and look at other industries so that they can find disruptions that they can bring back to their market. And so there’s just a beauty in what I get to do, which is look across all these different industries and say, well, they’re doing this really well over here. Why are we not doing it over here? Like what let’s connect the dots and bring these things together. And so that’s really fun. And the last thing is, is launching just helping people launch big, bold ideas. And so part of the challenge with launch is we want to lower our risk as much as possible because so often, you see these slow moving train wrecks right where people try to launch an app or a thing, now they’re millions of dollars in and they still don’t know what they’re doing. And so we want to de risk and launch quickly, we want to fail fast, fail cheap, and then fail forward so that we can actually accomplish what we’re being called to do in that line. So that’s really kind of, you know, what I do and how I help people think about, you know, how do you create breakthrough in your industry? How do you create breakthrough in your company? And how do you take this thing, that’s an idea and really figure out whether or not it’s viable, and launchable. So often, I think we, you know, the CEO, or the founder has this great idea. And it goes from idea to development. And we don’t take it through its paces to make sure that we are not building something for ourselves, but building kind of that minimal lovable product that people actually want to use and invest in.
Scott Ritzheimer
As we’ve been talking even you’ve kind of alluded to working with organizations from the beginning to bigger organizations, I even know from your background, you’ve worked with some really large organizations. And the question that I have is, does innovation change, you know, bought in these different modes of creating or disrupting or launching? And does it? Does it? Is it different for big organizations and small organizations?
Natalie Born
Yeah, that is such a great, great question. And it’s a question that I think is so important, because working in large enterprise organizations where, you know, we are huge, massive lots of money, what you find the real challenges with large organizations is, there’s a lack of focus, because there’s so many initiatives, yes, they have money, but they’re on these older antiquated software platforms that don’t enable them to move and scale at the rate that you would actually expect. As a matter of fact, if you were actually peer behind the door, the curtain of some of these organizations and saw how old and antiquated the software that they’re on, you’d actually be pretty surprised, you’d be shocked. And so what we find is that the smaller organizations that can come in, they can serve the customer faster, cheaper, better, and they can be more nimble. So people are really surprised to find out that large organizations frequently fear the smaller organizations because of their ability to come up with the idea, validate it with the customer, and move to market much faster. So that’s, that’s the beauty of being smaller and scrappy. Now, part of the challenge also with being smaller and scrappy is, how do you garner the resources you need, right to take this idea and launch it quickly. And so you see, kind of this, these pros and cons, right of both areas. And so that is why right, a lot of these smaller organizations, if noticed, enough, get purchased. Because these larger, larger organizations can’t necessarily deliver on the the nimbleness. And so there is a beauty, there’s a challenge, but there’s a beauty to being nimble. And so a lot of times, again, in large organizations, you have slow moving train wrecks, when trying to deliver, because there’s so many facets to the enterprise that they have to jump around in order to deliver. Matter of fact, I worked at one organization where we used to do this all the time. Okay, great. We’re gonna launch this new project, we have 10 different platforms, because we bought all these, but all these companies and we didn’t integrate them into our platform. So it’ll work on platform a but not Platform C, it might work on Platform D, we’ll have to test it, but it’s definitely not going to work on platform E. And it’s just it’s insanity versus having one scaled platform where you can have an idea, test the idea begin to roll that idea out and deliver it to the market.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, yeah, fascinating. And I couldn’t agree more. It’s It’s interesting how, how much small organizations overvalue the the downside, right, the resource side, I think that’s the game and just totally missed the distinct advantage that they have. And so I love the way that you articulated that it’s just so clear, and it’s really powerful. On the flip side of it, though, how do how do you scale innovation? Right? So how do you, you know, because a lot of organizations that do well that figure that out, right? That figure like, Hey, we’re nimble, fast, that’s an advantage, we’re gonna run with it. Well, then they grow, right? They get more complex, they started having some of these antiquated systems. How do you how do you scale and sustain innovation?
Natalie Born
Yeah, to two main things, and such, youre asking such a great question. Two main things that are required. And I feel like these are so important one, your culture helps us scale innovation. And we can talk about that in just a second. And the other one is your foundation. And so what happens oftentimes is people have shaky foundations. And then they tried to build on top of it, and they can’t figure out why what they’re trying to innovate on continues to crumble. So a lot of what we have to do when looking at an organization is we ask, what is the foundational things that you’ve built your technology your software on? Let’s let’s uncover that and figure out is there stability in that if there’s not stability, there’s no business innovating, right. We have to infuse stability into the structure before we can To begin to think about innovation, and that is truly Step one is to build that stability. Step two is culture. And so we talk a lot about failure, right? Like, what is your tolerance for failure. And again, we want to minimize the number of failures that people have. But we also want them to fail fast. We want them to test it, when it’s small, not grow up big and fail big, right? We want them to test small, fail small. And so a lot of times organizations, they don’t, they don’t allow for failure. And their attitude towards failure is one where it’s detrimental. So you’ll be fired, right? You’ll be publicly shamed. You, you may not lose your job, but you kind of lose your ability to pitch ideas again, right. So we see all these things in an ecosystem. And so culturally, if we don’t allow for failure, and teach people how to fail, then then we’re actually doing them a disservice. And that that actually supports innovation within our organization. So I think a lot about, you know, my kids, like they were taking karate and cause problem Maga. And one of the first things they teach you in that class is how to fall. And then they show you how to get back up. And it’s unfortunate, but oftentimes, in most organizations, we don’t teach people how to fall down and get back up gracefully. So basically, their failure becomes kind of their scarlet letter, right. And then it’s detrimental, and they’re not able to move forward. When enough people see that failure is detrimental. Innovation, ceases to exist with an organization because nobody’s willing to take the risk, because risk equals shame. And nobody wants to go down that route.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, yeah. Well, I’ve felt for a long time, one of the biggest tragedies in larger organizations is the existence of an innovation department. Right? Because almost like it’s never the intent, right? But it almost always leads to Oh, we don’t innovate here. We innovate here. Right? We do it in this confined space. And, and it’s understandable, because essentially, what we’re trying to do is what you said, we want a part of the organization that can fail fast, we want a part of the organization that is small enough and safe enough that we can mess up, and it’s not going to end things. So how do you and I love that you’ve talked about doing this culturally? But how do you do that culturally? What are some of the even some of the rails to run on in a large organization to know, you know, are we smothering things? Or are we actually keeping ourselves legitimately safe?
Natalie Born
Yeah, this is so this is such a great, yes, such great question. So one of the things that I think is really important when we think about innovation is it has to, it has to transfer hands. So oftentimes, when you go to a country company, and you say who owns innovation in this company, you get all kinds of answers, oh, well, the CEO owns it, or while our technology team owns it, or our product development team owns it, or maybe it’s you have a chief innovation officer, right? But it’s always over there. They and when you get into an organization and you say who owns innovation, we say well, we we own it, we all own it, we’re all in charge of innovation, whether I’m a frontline employee answering a customer service, email, or call, or whether I’m the CEO or the CEO, oh, innovation, if we can get the entire organization to believe not just say it, but believe it that that they own innovation, that’s a game changer. So yeah, again, I talked about this, this company, right that I grew up in and culturally grew up in, we had so many different ways of getting innovation out of people’s minds, and infuse into the organization. We had business plan competitions, every year where you would partner up with whoever you want it right out your business plan, pitch the idea, if you got selected, you were flown to another state where you got to present in front of all of all the executives, the executives would vote on the best idea. And the best idea that team got to actually go run the idea. So imagine one day, your head of sales the next day, you’re running a small organization based on your idea. And so you what you see again, Guy and technology it you know it person next day, they’re running this business, so not only was it hey, we want your ideas, they were willing to pay for the idea. So runners up, still got money, the person that one got money, but also in addition to that, they got to go run the idea. So it wasn’t a give us your ideas. We’ll take them and let you know if we think they’re good enough. It was you have the idea. Now go run it, we’ll give you the tools will invest in you will will give you everything you need to do it. And then on the flip side, right, we created these hackathons. And everybody’s kind of familiar with those. But you know, it’s a night or two right up all night with pizza and Red Bull for developers to start to tinker, to dream to be able to build things they wouldn’t normally build. We built in thinking days on Fridays, where you were not allowed to schedule meetings for four hours. And that was a time where you could go take a walk. You could go you know, to your local coffee shop, but the idea was Dream for us. Yeah, you know, 100 heads 1000 heads are better than one. So would you take this time would you a lot, four hours to begin to dream about the future, the rest of the week, you can focus on your today. But we want you to take time to go dream. And so investing culturally in those things is what infuses innovation into an organization and what causes people to believe it’s not over there, I own it, I am in charge of innovation, you’re in charge of innovation, you’re in charge of innovation. And so when we transfer that when we truly transfer and put our money where our mouth is meant, people start to dream, and that’s just an incredible thing.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, I love this. I love it. I love it. Again, I could not agree more. And there’s just so much written richness in here. There’s one place where I find this is really difficult. And I want to kind of zoom in on founders for a second. So founders, especially on the kind of upswing of an organization’s lifecycle, there they are the innovator, right, it’s largely built around them. And then some people to help, you know, and some of them might be more innovative than others. But the big idea comes from a big personality, more more often than not. And so I’ve found, you know, as I’m helping founders to scale, there’s these different series of things where we’re having them let go right and letting someone else step up. And one of the earliest ones is processes, bookkeeping, get that out here, like you don’t need to be doing your bookkeeping, and then operations, right, someone else can, can come through and execute. And then a big one is sales. And what I found is that way, way, way later in the game, there comes this point where you’ve got to decide, am I going to be innovative? Am I going to scratch my visionary itch? Right, which is always going to exceed the resources that are available to me? Or am I going to build an innovative organization? Because those two are very different things? So what would you say to that founder out there? Who’s feeling that they’re like, there’s so much that I want to do, right? There’s so many ideas that I have, I could bury my team in 13 seconds, totally. But I really want to build an innovative company, how do they get how do they get past that?
Natalie Born
That’s such an important point. And here’s here’s something that someone once said to me that stuck with me, they said, the gift of the founder usually is the weakness of the organization. So oftentimes, wherever the founder has the most giftedness that becomes the area that’s weakest. And I do believe that’s because the founder struggles not to re infuse themselves into that area and get so heavily involved, that they kind of step out of their seat and start trying to do the seat of the person that they’ve asked to run that particular area. And so that is something we see a lot. And so I think part of the way for a founder is they need a forum for their ideas to be heard, they need a forum for them to be able to get their ideas out. But guess what, so does everyone else in the company. And so creating some different forums. So pitch day idea day where everyone’s just kind of pitching different ideas. We have this really fun as an innovation facilitator, we have really fun games that actually get work done. And I know that doesn’t sound like it goes hand in hand. But one of those is to come in with a few different ideas, to pitch them. And then to start to break up into teams and rotate the ideas to different teams. By the time it gets back to you, it’s actually not even your idea, it kind of looks like your idea kind of smells like your idea. But it’s a little different. Someone has taken a different spin on it. And then those ideas immediately, within the next few weeks go in front of customers to be vetted and tested. And they come back with scores and rankings on whether or not someone would buy it, will they buy it now, and will multiple customers buy it. So they have they need to have, they do need to have an outlet to get their ideas out there. The challenge is, when it’s when it’s more than just an idea when it becomes a thing that has legs. And they’re asking people to build. And so I’ve been brought in to help launch products that never should have even been created. And so we’ve had to say, Hey, I know you want until you think you’re launching this in two months, but nobody wants it. So let’s back up. Let’s figure out what people actually want. And let’s build that. And that’s always a shame when something gets all the way from idea and nobody questions it. And then it gets to launch and then it gets out there in the market. And we can’t figure out why we’re having such a hard time selling it right. Maybe it’s our sales team. Maybe it’s this maybe it’s that and we don’t ask the question. Does anybody really want this product?
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah. Yeah. Well, stunning, stunning. So alright, and here’s a question that I love to ask all of my guests. And it is what is the biggest secret that you wish was not a secret at all? What’s that one thing that you wish everybody listening today knew?
Natalie Born
Yeah, I think it said, you know, I think we know I’m going to save some part that you know, and then maybe a part you don’t I think everybody knows this that breakthrough innovation is not easy. It’s just not it’s not easy. I think we all know that. But the internet I’ve said it a little earlier, but I’m just gonna say a little stronger, the best companies are learning from their failures, not their successes. So so often, you know, what we care about the most is our successes. That’s what we want to point to. That’s what we want to talk about every week. And nobody’s actually taking the time to pull their failures out into the middle of the room and talk about their failures. The best, most innovative companies learn from their failures and failure should actually for us trigger learning, when we fail, we should learn. And so if those two things aren’t being triggered together, then we’re actually missing out on what that failure was there to create in the first place, which was an unfair advantage, right? When we fail, and trigger that learning that creates an unfair advantage of how we can move forward faster, more rapidly and build what we’re trying to build in a more effective way. So I wish the secret that I wish is that more people would learn from their failures, instead of focusing so heavily on their successes.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah. And, and we’ve all heard the Edison quote, I never failed, I learned the 1000 ways of not doing it, or whatever that may be. But but this is not an easy process, right? Like going through, especially as a team, especially when it was a public launch that didn’t go well, like it’s it’s difficult to unpack failure and really learn from it. What would you say someone, let’s say, someone, and I’m sure there’s someone out there listening in this place, but they just did they did that to some degree of either internally, publicly or externally, publicly, something didn’t go well, they’re at the, you know, the face of failure. What did they do to resolve that?
Natalie Born
Yeah, I think we have to start and again, goes back to this idea of culture, we have to ask ourselves, what’s our organization’s stance on failure? And is that affecting our ability to learn from it? I think we also have to ask ourselves, what was the last time we failed? And how did the rest of the organization actually handle that failure? I think that’s a key to help us understand that a little bit more. And then I want to, it’s almost like, I want to ask this question. Have you ever thought about ensuring that your people you hire are actually able to admit failures, because oftentimes, when we hire people that are not willing to expose failure, we create an environment in the organization where everybody’s hiding the squiggly things right under the rocks. And then those are the eventual things that take us out, versus people being able to openly expose, hey, I failed, let’s talk about why. What can be done next time. And so I think that if we have to, we have to help teams understand that failure is not fatal. Failure triggers learning. And so if we can learn from this, and we can move forward from this and do it differently. Now, if we continue to make the same issue over and over again, that’s a different topic we’re dealing with that could even be incompetent, but failing, and then figuring out what we can do different is different than incompetence, right? Where someone’s making the same mistake over and over again.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, yeah. Fascinating. Fascinating. I love that. Now, I’m gonna shift gears a little bit on you, I’d love to I’m gonna have you take off your your innovation, disruptive consultant hat, I’m gonna have you put on your CEO hat and talk to us a little bit about what the next stage of growth looks like for you and your business?
Natalie Born
Yeah, that’s a great. I love these questions today. These are great, Scott. So you know, for me, one of the things I’ve found is that, you know, everyone that asks me to consult or coach with them is not necessarily the best fit for for me for the time that I have on my hands. And so part of what I’ve been looking at is, what are some ways that I can replicate myself and replicate what I’m doing so that other people can get value from it. And so I’m launching a book called Set It On Fire. It’s all about the art of innovation that’s coming out in June of 2023. And then I’m also put pairing alongside of that some masterclass content. I love helping people. But as you know, Scott, like you can spread yourself really thin very easily and quickly. And so really, what I’m trying to do is give people playbooks that they can take back to their organizations and use to figure out how to launch big ideas, and invest right in their own future. And so that’s part of the way that I’m trying to figure out well, how do I scale some of this content so that other people can garner that and have access to that content?
Scott Ritzheimer
Amazing, amazing. Well, I cannot wait to get my copy. And since coming out in June, give us the title one more time.
Natalie Born
Scott Ritzheimer
I love it, Set It on Fire, so get get your copy. come June 2023. It’s just around the corner. Natalie. Unbelievable. It’s so fun having you on. It’s just such a rich conversation. Thank you so much for being here. Just a quick plug. We’re going to turn the microphones around here in a couple of weeks and we’ll be on your Innovation Meets Leadership podcast. So anyone listening keep an eye out for that as well. And yeah, so just so thankful for having you on. That was just an absolute blast to everyone who is listening. your time and attention mean the world to us. Thank you for being here. Thank you for sharing with us. I hope you got as much out of this call. recession as I know I did and I cannot wait to see you next time take care.
Contact Natalie Born
Natalie Born is the Founder and Chief Disruptor at Innovation Meets Leadership. As an accomplished executive with two approved US patents to her name and over 15 years of experience leading product development teams, she is consistently willing to share her expertise to ensure companies are designing their products and strategy with the customer at the center of the design. Natalie is a keynote speaker, podcaster, and innovation facilitator.
Want to learn more about Natalie’s work at Innovation Meets Leadership? Check out her website at https://innovationmeetsleadership.com/.
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