Ep. 240 - Tamara Ghandour, Author of Innovation is Everybody's Business on Building Your Innovation Muscles

03/02/21 • 26 min

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Tamara Ghandour, Author of Innovation is Everybody's Business. Tamara and I talk about innovation, what it means today in today's changing environment, and what individuals and teams can do to build their innovation muscles. Let's get started.

Inside Outside Innovation is a 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 Transcript with Tamara Ghandour

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 Tamara Ghandour. She's the Author of Innovation is Everybody's Business: How to Ignite, Scale, and Sustain Innovation for Competitive Edge.

You also have a podcast called Inside Launch Street, which I had great opportunity to be on last week when we recorded. And we said, Hey, let's get you on our show and let's share the community. So welcome.

Tamara Ghandour: Thank you, Brian, it's good to see you again. It's been so long.

Brian Ardinger: It's nice to have you on our show. You know, obviously our audience is probably overlapped to some degree, but I thought it'd be an important to get you on our show to talk a little bit about what you're seeing out there in the world of innovation.

And one of the reasons I liked your book and some of the stuff that you're doing...it's not just about the people, it's about the mechanics behind it and the blocking and tackling, and you even have an Innovation Quotient Edge Assessment that people can go through to find out how they can be coming an innovator and that.

Tamara Ghandour: We believe very strongly, and I think science has also shown us that everybody has the ability to innovate. I've been in innovation 25, I don't know so many years, I can't even count now, but you know, this because you're in it too. There was a lot of focus on the process and the initiatives and the kind of structure of innovation. But what I kept seeing time and time again, is that those efforts failed.

And when I really kind of dug into it, what I really realized is that they're failing because they weren't focusing on the people side. Like how do we as humans innovate? How do we unlock that in ourselves and our teams? How do we tap the power of diversity of thinking. How do we drive it from the inside to the outside, to the culture and kind of bubbling up from there.

So I think over the years, that's why our business has transformed into what it is. And why its been successful is because we get people at an individual anda team level to recognize their power of innovation and how to apply that in their daily world. And then from there, the initiative and the culture and the process and all that kind of follow, but I'm sure you've heard this too Brian.

It's like, I can't tell you the number of times I got a phone call from a client who says I've invested a lot of money in whatever the latest and greatest innovation philosophy is, and my team's not doing it. What do I do to get them to do it? And there's always this kind of, you know, awkward silence of, well it's not that you need to do something to connect them to the process. It's that you need to do something to connect them to themselves and how they innovate.

Brian Ardinger: Well, and that's a very important point. I think a lot of people think that innovation is that mad scientist or that founder, the only way you can innovate... So the fact that, we talk about this too, where you don't have to be a founder to be innovative. And, you know, first of all, it helps to define what innovation is for your company. And it's not just creating the next Uber or the next Twitter, but it can be just as simple as, Hey, I've seen a problem in our way we process things. How do we go about making it better?

And so that's what I liked about the assessment. Is it allowed everybody to play a role in innovation because I think everybody does have a role to play in creating new value in an organization.

Tamara Ghandour: Actually, I want to highlight something you said, because I think it's so important. You said that innovation doesn't have to be the next, like Uber, Twitter, Airbnb. I think we put a lot of false pressure on ourselves to make innovation this big blue skies, disruptive thing, but, and I'm sure you've seen this in your work. ...

Interview Transcript with Tamara Ghandour

Tamara Ghandour: Thank you, Brian, it's good to see you again. It's been so long.

And so that's what I liked about the assessment. Is it allowed everybody to play a role in innovation because I think everybody does have a role to play in creating new value in an organization.

Previous Episode

Ep. 239 - Johnathan Grzybowski, Co-Founder of Penji on Graphic Design Service On-Demand & Growing a Startup

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Johnathan Grzybowski, co-founder of Penji and on-demand graphic design service. Johnathan and I talk about the changing face of graphic design and the new trends making it easier for folks to build and launch new things. 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.

Interview Transcript with Johnathan Grzybowski, Co-Founder of Penji

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 Johnathan Grzybowski. He is the Chief Marketing Officer and co-founder of Penji, an on-demand graphic design service. Welcome Johnathan.

Johnathan Grzybowski: Brian, thank you so much for having me appreciate it.

Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm excited to have you on board. I wanted to have you on as a founder to talk about what it's like to build a startup outside the Valley, but I also want to talk about some of the new tools and trends that we're seeing that's making it easier for folks to build and launch new things. Penji's one of those. And so, what is Penji and what do you do for them?

Johnathan Grzybowski: Penji is an on demand graphic design service, where our customers can essentially sign up for the service, get immediate access to the top 2% of graphic designers in the world, and be able to receive a completed project in under 48 hours. That's essentially the nuts and bolts of it.

We want to make graphic design more easily accessible and not necessarily this commodity where you have to spend thousands and hundreds and thousands of dollars in order to receive something really good and custom and unique to you. So, we're really trying to just challenge that mindset, that old school mindset of graphic design.

Brian Ardinger: So, talk a little bit about the genesis of Penji. How did it start and how did it grow?

Johnathan Grzybowski: We were a digital marketing agency that necessarily wasn't the best at a lot of things. However, a lot of people kept mentioning about how good our graphic designers were. So, we started interviewing people and we talked to them and we said, well, what are some problems that you have, or it comes to the marketing space.

And we started to see trends and people say that they had an issue with finding reliable talent. And then we realized that that talent translated to somebody who could execute the graphic design. So that's one aspect of it, but more so we also thought about the big picture of who we wanted to be as a company.

We are a digital marketing agency. We only helped, you know, maybe 10, 15 customers a year, new customers a year. People cancel people, come and go and et cetera. And I remember the time when I sat inside of a meeting at Rutgers with like a chancellor of some kind. And they wanted like a website. And I just remember sitting there, and this person's like talking to me and sharing to me about like what they want to do and how they want to promote to get more people.

And I realized that the thing that we were creating was only benefiting like the higher ups. It wasn't necessarily benefiting the actual students or, or anything like that in which we really wanted to change the philosophy and say, who do we want to be when we grow up? And we thought to ourselves, well, we want to make an impact.

Well, how do we make an impact? And then we kind of put the two, all of the pieces of the puzzle together. To basically say we want to make graphic design more easily accessible. So, you know, your company can actually come in and get some really cool graphic design work done. Or what about like Jimmy who decides they have this amazing idea, but they can't necessarily hire somebody full time in order to complete their idea, their app, their whatever it may be.

And then what about the person who is. A marketing manager in a really big corporation. They have all these brilliant ideas. They don't have the time or the technical skill to actually do graphic design themselves, but they don't necessarily have the ability to hire somebody else for their right hand. All of those scenarios are really essential as to why we created Penji.

Brian Ardinger: It's interesting you mentioned impact. We talk a lot about on the show, we're kind of entering this age of impact, where, you know, access to new...

Next Episode

Ep. 242 - Stefano Mastrogiacomo, Author of High Impact Tools for Teams on What it Takes to Align Teams, Build Trust, and Get Better Results

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Stefano Mastrogiacomo, Author of High Impact Tools for Teams: Five Tools to Align Team Members, Build Trust and Get Results Faster. This is part of our IO Live was recorded in front of the live audience. And Stefano and I talk about what it takes to align teams, build trust, and get better results. 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.

Interview Transcript with Stefano Mastrogiacomo, Author of High Impact Tools for Teams

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to our IO Live event. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. As always, we have another amazing guest. This is our first Inside Outside Innovation podcast of 2021, that we're doing live. We're super excited to have a special guest here. Stefano Mastrogiacomo is the author of High Impact Tools for Teams: Five Tools to Align Team Members, Build Trust, and Get Results Fast. Welcome Stefano to the show.

Stefano Mastrogiacomo: Thank you for inviting me. It's an honor and hello to all of our listeners and viewers.

Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you on here. I think you wanted to show some slides and give the audience a little bit of background on the book and then we'll get into a Q and A session.

Stefano Mastrogiacomo: Yes, of course. Thank you. So, I'm going to share the screen right now. This book, High Impact Tools for Teams, fully integrates with the Strategizer series. And as you know, the Strategizer series proposes amazing tools to help team innovate and deliver creative products and services. In this journey, in delivering innovation, I started working with teams in 2000.

So as a project manager, I've been using many of these tools, starting from delivering a banking application for large teams. We thought that there was a gap to be covered, which is the human side of innovation journeys. And mostly what I'm talking about here is how can we help cross-functional teamwork do better.

In particular, make us more successful team members, because these are journeys in very difficult conditions. A lot of uncertainty. Things keep changing all the time. And so the idea was how to help us become more successful team members and more successful project managers, knowing that there is real room for improvement. This was a study entitled we waste a lot of time at work. Where they reported that 50% of meetings are considered unproductive and a pure waste of time.

And that was true before the pandemic. I don't know about you, but at least for me, I've participated in numerous Zoom meetings now, where actually I felt that that statistic could be even worse when the meeting isn't structured, unfocused, and on top of that, we have the barrier of distance, and all the constraints of these new communication channels.

So, we published that book. It's been a long journey, been like 15 years in the making. Where we designed, experimented, draw into many various disciplines like psycholinguistics, evolutionary anthropology, things that could help us design tools that help create better alignment in the team. As things keep changing all the time, build more trust and psychological safety. And we know the, I'll come back on that later, the impact of trust, the direct impact of trust, on the capacity to innovate in a team, and in more generally, how to communicate better.

So, this was prior to the pandemic. You know how important it is for us, that things are visually shared by the team. That's why we designed these canvases. And that's how we used to work prior to the pandemic. And if you allow me and let me share you a workshop that took place last week. Same setting, but this time online having in parallel Zoom and digital whiteboard.

So, what you see here is 110 agile professionals together. Establishing a team contract. You have 110 agile professionals arguing and exchanging, brainstorming on rules of the game to hold more productive meetings, using one of the templates that is presented in the book, namely the Team Contract. So that tool, called the Team Contract, is a tool designed to help teams very quickly define and agree together on team rules and behaviors.

Why do we believe this is important, but first of all, let me show you an example of how it works. So, the idea is we sit together in front of that poster, whether it's in the same room or on a digital whiteboard. This is a simplified version of a real Team Contract. And that's where every team member, before we e...