so in 2004 I quit my job and I
followed a fairly traditional corporate
career path until then I studied finance
and engineering and worked in investment
banking and then got my MBA here at
Columbia and I was then working at a big
consulting firm and I love my work and I
love the people that I worked with but
two things happen in 2004 the first was
that I got clear on what my purpose is
and it’s that people love what they do
and the second thing is I wrote my first
book and it took me seven years to write
this book and I didn’t know if I was
gonna write another one so I wanted to
make sure that I got the most out of
this moment and I remember sitting in
the office of my with my manager
explaining what my passions were and
what I wanted to do and asking is there
a way that we can somehow incorporate
this into my work at the firm and
explain to me very nicely politely but
clearly they’ll be happy to support me
as long as I did it on my own time so I
quit and I became an entrepreneur it
kind of made sense that I would have to
become an entrepreneur in order to do
what I wanted to do we kind of have this
idea that it is entrepreneurs that are
the innovators and a lot of people will
support this view that you just cannot
change the world you cannot impact
things from inside established
organizations Clayton Christensen the
Harvard innovation guru that coined the
term disruptive innovation he says that
it’s very decision-making and resource
allocation processes that are key to the
success of large organizations that
hinder their ability to accept
disruptive innovations and John Hagel
another innovation guru he talks about
innovation antibodies that emerge around
new ideas whether introduced inside an
established company and so there’s a lot
of support for this view that really the
innovator is this person their story is
remarkably similar why they’re all white
men is a topic for another day but let’s
break down their story some time in
college they get a big idea they leave
college sometimes before they finish
they go to the west coast with that idea
and they step into a garage
they’re a couple people there with him
we have the hacker we have the hipster
we have the hustler and they build this
solution and then they launch a company
and they disrupt the big guys we love to
tell this story and and I was living
that story doing what I love to do I
then started a firm I wrote three more
books and we were going around the world
delivering these innovation workshops
and we could get people to think very
differently but really secretly we knew
that the ideas that would come out from
the managers brought together really
wouldn’t lead anywhere and they always
hid that bureaucracy that would kill off
the innovative idea right now three
years ago something changed I got a
phone call from someone named gene fuel
and she challenged me she said you think
that the employee and the entrepreneur
is the artist like because they have the
freedom to mix things together to create
new things and you think that as
organizations get bigger that they ask
people to paint within the lines and
then ultimately they ask employees to
just do their job right if you are a
lawyer be a lawyer if you are an
accountant be an accountant if you’re a
marketer be a marketer but she shared
with me a story that came out of a
workshop that she that I delivered with
her and she had proven this view wrong
this innovation she’s a editor at
macmillan and her innovation made it
through into the market and was
celebrated as one of the most major
innovations in publishing featured on
BBC on NPR and so it got me thinking is
she just the outlier so went to meet
with her in her office and spoke to her
and her boss to understand what the path
was that she went through to introduce
this innovation and what she shared
really challenged much of what I thought
was the path of innovation right I
thought that she would be the outlier
that really it is the entrepreneur that
innovates and employees have difficulty
doing that so to test that test her
theory which was she was challenging me
was I looked at the 30 most
transformative innovations over the last
30 years as judged by appellant panel
Wharton professors based off a thousand
submissions and these are the big
innovations right these are the internet
email DNA sequencing MRIs the big
innovations and I said is it really the
entrepreneur that conceives of this idea
so I followed these paths and what I
found that only eight of these
disruptive innovations were conceived of
by entrepreneurs twenty-two of them by
employees if it were not for employee
innovators you woke up in the morning
would not have a mobile phone to reach
for that phone would not connect to the
Internet you would not be able to stand
to email if you got sick
you would not be able to get an MRI you
would not be able to an extent you
wouldn’t be able to go to an ATM the
world is a much better place because of
employee innovators and we don’t know
that we don’t celebrate them who then
builds the idea the entrepreneur builds
seven of these what happens at that
point is some combination of people in
academia and institutions and the
employee start building it and then who
then takes it to market is the
competition so if we would say what’s
the real path of innovation what we have
to say if we want to be truthful is an
employee comes up with an idea they
partner with an academic to develop the
idea that the competition takes it and
sells the idea and the problem is only
that that’s not a very sticky story it’s
not the kind of story that we’d like to
tell right we like the story of the hero
lone innovator and so and you could say
well that’s just the way it is but this
propagation of a story that’s not true
has it cost 70% of employees or
disengaged at work that cost the US
economy four hundred and fifty billion
dollars in lost productivity to put that
into context take the revenue of Google
Amazon Boeing and GE put it all together
and it’s less than four hundred and
fifty billion dollars but there’s also a
humanitarian cost a social cost to this
when people are disengaged at work
they increased worker safety they have
anxiety they have depression damages
family relationships so I wanted to
understand what is this path right and I
first assumed just I think many people
do is that the those who did innovate
they followed some innovation process
recovery I’m a company spent about 350
billion dollars on incubation labs and
accelerators and incubators right we got
chief innovation officer I think that’s
the path by which employees can innovate
from within but what I found is actually
that often what they do is they help the
system get out of the way they don’t
follow the system Chuck house for
example in 1962 at that time he was an
engineer at HP in the R&D lab who’s
working on something called a
large-scale electrostatic display and
mr. Packard came to visit his R&D center
as he did every year and he saw this
project he didn’t like it and he said I
don’t want to see this project in the
R&D lab next year what he meant was I
want you to kill this project and what
did Chuck interpret that to mean I have
12 months to get this into the market
and so what he did on his own time on
his own dime over Christmas holiday is
he took one of these things took it on a
plane showed it to customers came back
in January with orders and now it was in
the market nobody asked him to do that
but it’s because he did that that we saw
a man land on the moon for the first
time if he hadn’t done that that
technology would not have been adopted
we would only heard Neil Armstrong say
one small step for man one giant leap
for mankind eventually he wins the medal
defiance by HP awarded in extraordinary
defiance in the face of adversity beyond
the expectation of what an engineer
should and and laid the foundation for a
technology revolution so why do they do
that so we know that they don’t follow
the system so why do they push for it
even though the company’s not asking
them for it
it seems to be that they do it for a
higher cause because unfortunately they
don’t get rich from doing this you might
think that they want to do it for the
bonus but they don’t do it for the bonus
cat Cole she is the CEO of a company
called Fortune Brands they own Carvel
Cinnabon and a few other brands she’s
before that she was the CEO of Cinnabon
but she started her career as a waiter
at Hooters her single mom didn’t have
enough money to support the family so
she had to get a second job and she
describes a moment early in her career
when the cooks in her restaurant went on
strike they left and half of the waiters
they figured there’s no food to cook so
they hung up their aprons and left but
the other half what did they do they
went into the kitchen to cook and she
went into the kitchen this is what these
internal innovators seem to do they go
into the kitchen in service of something
bigger sometimes it is the organization
sometimes it’s something even bigger
than that Heather Davis she is an
executive at TIAA he’s been behind some
really major innovations which
unfortunate confidentially reasons I
can’t talk about but I can talk about
this one
she owns through her group she owns
twenty five billion dollars in
agricultural real estate they’re the
largest owner of agriculture real estate
in the world they own more wineries that
anyone else in the world and she also
has a son who’s autistic so when she
learned that her farms were having
difficulty finding workers it became
immediately obvious to her that this
type of work this farm work is the
perfect kind of work for autistic people
so she got her company to launch a
program called the fruits of employment
that found fulfilling work for people
with autism and helped farmers
meet their issue and help the company in
the same way so what they’re doing is
they’re serving something bigger so
there is evidence to say that it is
actually advantageous rather than quit
your job to pursue to change the world
from inside an established organization
when organizations start off their
startups their disruptors they take
risks as they grow they introduce
bureaucracies
start narrowing tasks they tightly
narrow those tasks but if they get
bigger there are four things that come
into play you would have if you decide
not to quit you’ll have scale that
entrepreneurs can only dream of you’ll
have capabilities technology and experts
to tap that that would be hard to get as
an entrepreneur you have innovation
resources that entrepreneurs have to
continually fundraise for and you have
the ability to diversify risk to take
multiple bets and reduce the risk of
driving innovation from within and the
good news is that we are at the cusp of
a new stage in the evolution of the
corporation of the organization in
general there are technologies that are
starting to accelerate the pace of
change around our organizations and if
you think about it most of our
organizations are still run like
centrally planned economies well we have
one central authority who decides how to
distribute capital and labor and
capabilities and technology and we know
this doesn’t work but corporations are
evolving builds rating the founder of
Ashoka he talks about that is the pace
of change change accelerates
exponentially that the old ways of
organizing and educating are dying many
organizations are going to die except
for those that are able to activate
internal innovators and so I interviewed
so far 150 internal innovators and I
asked each one what is the biggest
barrier that you face to innovating and
this lays out a framework I call it the
innovate framework of course there’s a
consultant I’ve got to turn it into an
acronym so I’m gonna lay it out innovate
I you’ll see there’s one end that’s
missing I couldn’t figure out how to get
that end in but if you have an idea I’d
love to hear it um and so I laid out
these seven barriers that they seem to
repeat often and what will what they
point is to the contours of a new form
of organization under intense
organizations that survive in the future
are going to give employees their intent
back they’re gonna turn employees into
intrapreneurs under needs we’re gonna
evolve from complex strategic plans that
no one can understand it’s a simple
statements of purpose
tell our employees what that will the
company and the world need as we get two
options we’re gonna see options and
ideas not coming from boardrooms but
coming from hallways we’re gonna see
value not being delivered in just one
way but many different ways of
delivering value of Cree of you that you
can create value for your organization
and the world Act we’re going to move
from a model in which instead of
companies asking people to prove their
idea before they can take action they’re
gonna recognize that innovations require
you to take action in order to prove the
idea teams we’re gonna move from
hierarchical siloed structures in
towards agile teams that can move
quickly and read and reconfigure at will
and we’re gonna see an environment
evolve we’re gonna shift from a
centralized economy into open platforms
where employees can find opportunities
rally resources to change things in
other words what we’re going to see is
the shift in organizations from asking
employees to paint within the lines
towards allowing them to paint outside
of the lines and now I’m not saying that
I necessarily made the wrong choice by
quitting my job but what I am saying is
that you and nobody should have to
choose [Applause]
followed a fairly traditional corporate
career path until then I studied finance
and engineering and worked in investment
banking and then got my MBA here at
Columbia and I was then working at a big
consulting firm and I love my work and I
love the people that I worked with but
two things happen in 2004 the first was
that I got clear on what my purpose is
and it’s that people love what they do
and the second thing is I wrote my first
book and it took me seven years to write
this book and I didn’t know if I was
gonna write another one so I wanted to
make sure that I got the most out of
this moment and I remember sitting in
the office of my with my manager
explaining what my passions were and
what I wanted to do and asking is there
a way that we can somehow incorporate
this into my work at the firm and
explain to me very nicely politely but
clearly they’ll be happy to support me
as long as I did it on my own time so I
quit and I became an entrepreneur it
kind of made sense that I would have to
become an entrepreneur in order to do
what I wanted to do we kind of have this
idea that it is entrepreneurs that are
the innovators and a lot of people will
support this view that you just cannot
change the world you cannot impact
things from inside established
organizations Clayton Christensen the
Harvard innovation guru that coined the
term disruptive innovation he says that
it’s very decision-making and resource
allocation processes that are key to the
success of large organizations that
hinder their ability to accept
disruptive innovations and John Hagel
another innovation guru he talks about
innovation antibodies that emerge around
new ideas whether introduced inside an
established company and so there’s a lot
of support for this view that really the
innovator is this person their story is
remarkably similar why they’re all white
men is a topic for another day but let’s
break down their story some time in
college they get a big idea they leave
college sometimes before they finish
they go to the west coast with that idea
and they step into a garage
they’re a couple people there with him
we have the hacker we have the hipster
we have the hustler and they build this
solution and then they launch a company
and they disrupt the big guys we love to
tell this story and and I was living
that story doing what I love to do I
then started a firm I wrote three more
books and we were going around the world
delivering these innovation workshops
and we could get people to think very
differently but really secretly we knew
that the ideas that would come out from
the managers brought together really
wouldn’t lead anywhere and they always
hid that bureaucracy that would kill off
the innovative idea right now three
years ago something changed I got a
phone call from someone named gene fuel
and she challenged me she said you think
that the employee and the entrepreneur
is the artist like because they have the
freedom to mix things together to create
new things and you think that as
organizations get bigger that they ask
people to paint within the lines and
then ultimately they ask employees to
just do their job right if you are a
lawyer be a lawyer if you are an
accountant be an accountant if you’re a
marketer be a marketer but she shared
with me a story that came out of a
workshop that she that I delivered with
her and she had proven this view wrong
this innovation she’s a editor at
macmillan and her innovation made it
through into the market and was
celebrated as one of the most major
innovations in publishing featured on
BBC on NPR and so it got me thinking is
she just the outlier so went to meet
with her in her office and spoke to her
and her boss to understand what the path
was that she went through to introduce
this innovation and what she shared
really challenged much of what I thought
was the path of innovation right I
thought that she would be the outlier
that really it is the entrepreneur that
innovates and employees have difficulty
doing that so to test that test her
theory which was she was challenging me
was I looked at the 30 most
transformative innovations over the last
30 years as judged by appellant panel
Wharton professors based off a thousand
submissions and these are the big
innovations right these are the internet
email DNA sequencing MRIs the big
innovations and I said is it really the
entrepreneur that conceives of this idea
so I followed these paths and what I
found that only eight of these
disruptive innovations were conceived of
by entrepreneurs twenty-two of them by
employees if it were not for employee
innovators you woke up in the morning
would not have a mobile phone to reach
for that phone would not connect to the
Internet you would not be able to stand
to email if you got sick
you would not be able to get an MRI you
would not be able to an extent you
wouldn’t be able to go to an ATM the
world is a much better place because of
employee innovators and we don’t know
that we don’t celebrate them who then
builds the idea the entrepreneur builds
seven of these what happens at that
point is some combination of people in
academia and institutions and the
employee start building it and then who
then takes it to market is the
competition so if we would say what’s
the real path of innovation what we have
to say if we want to be truthful is an
employee comes up with an idea they
partner with an academic to develop the
idea that the competition takes it and
sells the idea and the problem is only
that that’s not a very sticky story it’s
not the kind of story that we’d like to
tell right we like the story of the hero
lone innovator and so and you could say
well that’s just the way it is but this
propagation of a story that’s not true
has it cost 70% of employees or
disengaged at work that cost the US
economy four hundred and fifty billion
dollars in lost productivity to put that
into context take the revenue of Google
Amazon Boeing and GE put it all together
and it’s less than four hundred and
fifty billion dollars but there’s also a
humanitarian cost a social cost to this
when people are disengaged at work
they increased worker safety they have
anxiety they have depression damages
family relationships so I wanted to
understand what is this path right and I
first assumed just I think many people
do is that the those who did innovate
they followed some innovation process
recovery I’m a company spent about 350
billion dollars on incubation labs and
accelerators and incubators right we got
chief innovation officer I think that’s
the path by which employees can innovate
from within but what I found is actually
that often what they do is they help the
system get out of the way they don’t
follow the system Chuck house for
example in 1962 at that time he was an
engineer at HP in the R&D lab who’s
working on something called a
large-scale electrostatic display and
mr. Packard came to visit his R&D center
as he did every year and he saw this
project he didn’t like it and he said I
don’t want to see this project in the
R&D lab next year what he meant was I
want you to kill this project and what
did Chuck interpret that to mean I have
12 months to get this into the market
and so what he did on his own time on
his own dime over Christmas holiday is
he took one of these things took it on a
plane showed it to customers came back
in January with orders and now it was in
the market nobody asked him to do that
but it’s because he did that that we saw
a man land on the moon for the first
time if he hadn’t done that that
technology would not have been adopted
we would only heard Neil Armstrong say
one small step for man one giant leap
for mankind eventually he wins the medal
defiance by HP awarded in extraordinary
defiance in the face of adversity beyond
the expectation of what an engineer
should and and laid the foundation for a
technology revolution so why do they do
that so we know that they don’t follow
the system so why do they push for it
even though the company’s not asking
them for it
it seems to be that they do it for a
higher cause because unfortunately they
don’t get rich from doing this you might
think that they want to do it for the
bonus but they don’t do it for the bonus
cat Cole she is the CEO of a company
called Fortune Brands they own Carvel
Cinnabon and a few other brands she’s
before that she was the CEO of Cinnabon
but she started her career as a waiter
at Hooters her single mom didn’t have
enough money to support the family so
she had to get a second job and she
describes a moment early in her career
when the cooks in her restaurant went on
strike they left and half of the waiters
they figured there’s no food to cook so
they hung up their aprons and left but
the other half what did they do they
went into the kitchen to cook and she
went into the kitchen this is what these
internal innovators seem to do they go
into the kitchen in service of something
bigger sometimes it is the organization
sometimes it’s something even bigger
than that Heather Davis she is an
executive at TIAA he’s been behind some
really major innovations which
unfortunate confidentially reasons I
can’t talk about but I can talk about
this one
she owns through her group she owns
twenty five billion dollars in
agricultural real estate they’re the
largest owner of agriculture real estate
in the world they own more wineries that
anyone else in the world and she also
has a son who’s autistic so when she
learned that her farms were having
difficulty finding workers it became
immediately obvious to her that this
type of work this farm work is the
perfect kind of work for autistic people
so she got her company to launch a
program called the fruits of employment
that found fulfilling work for people
with autism and helped farmers
meet their issue and help the company in
the same way so what they’re doing is
they’re serving something bigger so
there is evidence to say that it is
actually advantageous rather than quit
your job to pursue to change the world
from inside an established organization
when organizations start off their
startups their disruptors they take
risks as they grow they introduce
bureaucracies
start narrowing tasks they tightly
narrow those tasks but if they get
bigger there are four things that come
into play you would have if you decide
not to quit you’ll have scale that
entrepreneurs can only dream of you’ll
have capabilities technology and experts
to tap that that would be hard to get as
an entrepreneur you have innovation
resources that entrepreneurs have to
continually fundraise for and you have
the ability to diversify risk to take
multiple bets and reduce the risk of
driving innovation from within and the
good news is that we are at the cusp of
a new stage in the evolution of the
corporation of the organization in
general there are technologies that are
starting to accelerate the pace of
change around our organizations and if
you think about it most of our
organizations are still run like
centrally planned economies well we have
one central authority who decides how to
distribute capital and labor and
capabilities and technology and we know
this doesn’t work but corporations are
evolving builds rating the founder of
Ashoka he talks about that is the pace
of change change accelerates
exponentially that the old ways of
organizing and educating are dying many
organizations are going to die except
for those that are able to activate
internal innovators and so I interviewed
so far 150 internal innovators and I
asked each one what is the biggest
barrier that you face to innovating and
this lays out a framework I call it the
innovate framework of course there’s a
consultant I’ve got to turn it into an
acronym so I’m gonna lay it out innovate
I you’ll see there’s one end that’s
missing I couldn’t figure out how to get
that end in but if you have an idea I’d
love to hear it um and so I laid out
these seven barriers that they seem to
repeat often and what will what they
point is to the contours of a new form
of organization under intense
organizations that survive in the future
are going to give employees their intent
back they’re gonna turn employees into
intrapreneurs under needs we’re gonna
evolve from complex strategic plans that
no one can understand it’s a simple
statements of purpose
tell our employees what that will the
company and the world need as we get two
options we’re gonna see options and
ideas not coming from boardrooms but
coming from hallways we’re gonna see
value not being delivered in just one
way but many different ways of
delivering value of Cree of you that you
can create value for your organization
and the world Act we’re going to move
from a model in which instead of
companies asking people to prove their
idea before they can take action they’re
gonna recognize that innovations require
you to take action in order to prove the
idea teams we’re gonna move from
hierarchical siloed structures in
towards agile teams that can move
quickly and read and reconfigure at will
and we’re gonna see an environment
evolve we’re gonna shift from a
centralized economy into open platforms
where employees can find opportunities
rally resources to change things in
other words what we’re going to see is
the shift in organizations from asking
employees to paint within the lines
towards allowing them to paint outside
of the lines and now I’m not saying that
I necessarily made the wrong choice by
quitting my job but what I am saying is
that you and nobody should have to
choose [Applause]
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