Value Through Empathetic Leadership with Chris Shipley, Coauthor of The Empathy Advantage

03/14/23 • 20 min

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Chris Shipley, co-author of the new book, The Empathy Advantage. Chris and I talk about the changing forces driving the great resignation to the great reset, and how empathetic leadership will be the key to navigating change in creating value today and in the future. Let's get started.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage and experiment with the best and the brightest, innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.

Transcript of Podcast with Chris Shipley, Co-author of The Empathy Advantage.

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. In fact, this guest has been on the show before. It is Chris Shipley. She's the co-author of the new book, The Empathy Advantage: Leading The Empowered Workforce. Welcome back Chris.

Chris Shipley: Hey, I'm glad to be talking to you again.

Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm excited to have you on as always. You've been so gracious to be part of the Inside Outside community for so many years, whether it's speaking in our events or the last time we spoke, you had your first book out, the Adaptation Advantage. And that came out right during the middle of Covid.

And so, I wanted to have you back on with this new book, to talk about what's changed and and where we're going. You've got a new book out called The Empathy Advantage. Tell us a little bit about why you had to write a book coming out of Covid?

Chris Shipley: As you said, The Adaptation Advantage, our first book with Heather and I, it launched in April of 2020. So, we had all of these plans having finished the book at the end of 2019 to do all the things you do to launch a book. And the world came to a stop.

We had to adapt ourselves to really get that book out into the world. But what we recognized or what happened is it kind of became this accidental guide to leading through the pandemic, because everybody was without.

We continued to read and write and work on understanding what was happening and changing in the workplace. During the pandemic, what became really, really clear is that the pandemic didn't cause this disruption. It felt very disrupting, but it was, it amplified, it put a lens on what had been happening for a long time.

So, for example, the idea of the great resignation that really took hold about a year ago, people started talking about it. Well, that's been going on since about 2009. The pandemic created; we had a lens to see it maybe more clearly. It wasn't a new idea.

And so what we realized is that the amplifying effect of the pandemic combined with a workforce that was sent home, given a lot of autonomy, a lot of agency, in how they would do their jobs, they're not gonna come back into an office place and say, oh, you know, all of that stuff that trust you had in me, nevermind micromanagement again, I'll be fine with that.

A new kind of leadership is required to move people sort of back into a mainstream new frame of work that really embraces the way in which these workers are more empowered, they have more autonomy and agency. And we think that the bottom line is it's a change in leadership that centers on empathy.

Brian Ardinger: I wrote a book. I started writing it right before the pandemic, and this idea of disruption and changes are coming and how do you start preparing for it? And then Covid hits, and it made it real. Obviously, for everybody in a way that talking about it and seeing it hitting in different industries might not have.

But nowadays we're coming back into the place where, so we've had a couple of years of practice, so to speak to how do we become adaptive in that. But it still seems like there's a lot of folks getting it wrong or trying to go back to the old way and that. So, what are you seeing when it comes to this natural pull to try to go back to quote unquote normal.

Chris Shipley: We're never gonna go back to normal. And I don't think really we ever do go back to a normal, right? We, there's a new normal and it's, it exists for now and then tomorrow it'll be another normal. And that really speaks to being adaptive.

And so I think one of our challenges is that there's kind of a new mold for leadership, but we're still trying to shove the old ways into it. Right, that being a leader meant I needed to know how everyone worked. I needed to be the absolute decision maker. I needed to be the one who could see everything and guide eve...

Transcript of Podcast with Chris Shipley, Co-author of The Empathy Advantage.

Chris Shipley: Hey, I'm glad to be talking to you again.

Previous Episode

Venture Studio Model Innovation with Maisha Leek, MD of Forum Venture Studios

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Maisha Leek, Managing Director of Forum Venture Studios. Maisha has had an amazing career in corporate innovation, company building and venture capital, and we talk about the new Venture studio model and some of the things that she's seeing in the world of venture. Let's get started.

Inside Outside Innovation is podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage and experiment with the best and the brightest, innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.

Interview Transcription with Maisha Leek, Managing Director of Forum Venture Studios

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Maisha Leek. She's the managing director of Forum Venture Studios. Welcome to the show, Maisha.

Maisha Leek: Thank you Brian. I'm excited to be here.

Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you because you've spent a lot of time in all the different cross sections of innovation. So corporate innovation, company building, venture capital. Can you tell us about your path and journey in this innovation space?

Maisha Leek: Sure. I'd love to say it was all brilliantly planned. There's a lot of trial error, error, error, error, and then trial again. I actually got into this world in the interesting route. I was for a long time in Washington DC. I was a policymaker and a fundraiser. And in DC we had oversight of most of the science and innovation agencies. So, everything from NASA to Noah to National Science Foundation, which is about the $54 billion proposition, which is a lot of responsibility.

And we work with your tax dollars, placing the best bets we could to jumpstart the economy or to just position the United States to be competitive. And so that turned in everything from investing in commercial space flight. You see that now with SpaceX and Virgin Galactic and other companies. Those aren't the only ones. And investing in the advancement of batteries, which leads to all of the electric vehicles that we have now and, and sort of their ability to compete with their combustible counter parts.

I knew I was far from all the action that everybody was in, in Silicon Valley and wanted to get closer to it, but by happenstance, met the founder of United Masters. Which was a music and tech company. And did not know what I was doing, except that I was an operator. I knew how to build out teams and build out a company and spent my time doing that.

And we had the right as Silicon Valley goes investors. So had Ben Horowitz on our board. And David Drummond on our board. And was really active in managing those relationships. And when I was thinking about what to do next after spent some time at that startup, I had an executive coach and friends, they were like, you got to get into venture.

And I'm like, that sounds really boring. And their suggestion I think is really apt for folks who are thinking about it. They suggested I would be good in the space because I had experience to do this on Capitol Hill, operating across a range of subject matters. And knowing to be sort of a generalist that can go deep in certain areas and analyze information and make quick judgements.

My first experience was at Adventure Studio at Human Ventures. And that really influenced what I decided to do after that. And most of my time in the venture space, outside of being an angel investor or participating SPVs has really been in the venture studio space.

I love it because of the close connection you can have with the founder and the founding team. It's not sort of like write a check. I'll call you once a month kind of thing. We're in it with them. But it also leans into the place where I'm strong. Which is I'm a really great operator and being able to do that with founders and helping them not make the same mistakes I've made in other companies that I've built or independent of that, also gives me great joy.

So, I've done four Venture Studios - Nike Valiant Labs, Human Ventures, New Lab, which are across the series of categories. New Lab is Frontier Technology. Nike is really best to describe with CPG. Human Ventures, which is in large part direct to consumer. And Forum, which is B2B SaaS. And they all have their challenges. But again, I love the model. I'm an evangelist for the model.

Brian Ardinger: Let's talk about that model. You know, people who've followed the show and that have heard more and more about Venture Studios, and if you've been in the space, you're hearing di...

Next Episode

Lean Startup and Corporate Innovation with Tendayi Viki, Author of Pirates in the Navy & The Corporate Startup

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with the legendary Tendayi Viki. Tendayi is co-author of the book, The Corporate Startup. He's an Associate Partner at Strategizer and one of the major influencers in the world of lean startup and corporate innovation. On this episode, we explore the evolution of the lean startup movement, how corporations are developing the skills to compete and become more innovative, and we talk about Tendayi's brand new book called Pirates in the Navy. Let's get started.

Find the Interview transcript and more at insideoutside.io.

Interview Transcript

Brian Ardinger: Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger, founder of Inside Outside.IO, a provider of research events and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking tools, tactics, and trends, and collaborative innovation. Let's get started.

Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today, all the way from across the pond in London, England, we have Tendayi Viki. Tendayi, welcome to the show.

Tendayi Viki: Thank you, Brian. It's a pleasure to be here.

Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm excited to have you on the show. We had you out in Lincoln at the last IO Summit. For those folks out in the audience, that have not heard of you. He's an author, innovation consultant, Associate Partner at Strategizer. You're the coauthor of the book, The Corporate Startup, which took a lot of the Lean Startup stuff and applied it to big organizations. You've got a new book coming out called Pirates in the Navy, so I could go on and on, but welcome to the show.

Tendayi Viki: Thank you, man. Thank you. no, it’s an honor to be here. And I had a lot of fun when I was in LIncoln. It was a fun conference and good people all in.

Brian Ardinger: Yeah. I think I want to jump in. You've been in this space, this lean startup movement for a long time, and you really did open the door to a lot of this lean startup stuff that started in the startup world. I think applied it to bigger corporations, this whole innovation process, whether you're doing it in a startup or you're doing it in a bigger company, a lot of the same principles apply. What are the biggest challenges or changes that you've seen over the last decade of how this movement is evolved and what's gotten better? What's gotten worse in the whole process?

Tendayi Viki: Yeah, so it was a really interesting movement because it came out with an interesting philosophy, which is that one of the reasons why any innovation, either from a startup or from a large company, any innovation fails when people that are working on the innovations starts scaling their idea prematurely. Which means they start building the full product and launching it and investing a lot of resources and taking it to market before they really understand who the customer is. What the customer wants. How to reach that customer. How to earn from that customer repeatedly. How to retain that customer. How to create value basically in a sustainable way. And also, how to deliver profits and whether customers are willing to pay. And how much they will have to pay. So that was the philosophy meeting, which was test your ideas before you scale them.

The big challenge then became, well, we understand, we agree. How do we do that? And that's where the movement has been sort of incrementally building all the tools and resources you need to be able to do that work over the last year.

Brian Ardinger: Talk a little bit about now where you're at. A lot of the times at the early stages when I started consulting or you started consulting, you had to explain the process. You had to get into the weeds of why this was even important. What's changed from that perspective? It seems like people have at least heard of the movement and heard of some of the processes, but maybe they're doing it wrong or there's different assumptions that they've made about the process in the first place. What are some of the things that you're seeing that are challenging in today's world?

Tendayi Viki: Yeah, so I mean, it's not, it's not as hard as it used to be to convince leaders inside established, successful companies that they need to innovate. I think what's harder is getting them to change how they run their companies day-to-day because some of those processes are so calcified. It's so hard to break into those and have...