my dad landed on Normandy Beach on July
4th 1944 and on that 4th of July he was
able to drive his Jeep off that landing
craft onto the beach and all the way
into France to rejoin the front lines is
a junior officer in the 3rd Armored
Division now the problem that a middle
it became apparent to my dad was that he
didn’t have to drive far in 28 days
since d-day instead of penetrating
deeply in France like they planned our
allied forces were still held to within
20 miles of those beaches now the
problem had actually started hundreds of
years ago when the Normans plant trees
to separate their fields because they
didn’t have enough stone to make walls
in over the years those trees the roots
of those trees grew into massive walls
of Earth 8 feet high in 12 feet wide at
the base called hedgerows in our tanks
could not drive through these walls we
could only go around them on the small
number of roads and the Germans had
anticipated this and they had prepared
an extremely effective defensive
strategy they would knock out all of our
lead tanks creating roadblocks and when
we tried to move laterally down the
walls to blow up in an open section with
dynamite the explosion alerted the
Germans exactly where to redirect their
fire they were simply focused on the
open gap wait for the next time to drive
through knock it out and effectively
reseal the breach in the wall our forces
were losing more tanks in the first
several hours the first several days of
engagement like this then they plan to
lose in the first several weeks the
entire invasion
in the future of the world as we know it
today was in jeopardy of being shut down
in Altered now here’s where the first
remarkable thing happened an
all-hands-on-deck meeting was called
between the commanding officers at the
top including Patton himself all the way
to junior combat soldiers for
suggestions all pride an idea ownership
was gone a new way had to be found not
consider here is the US military the
most sophisticated highly structured
systematic organizational structure you
could imagine temporarily suspending its
normal process to allow those in the
heat of combat to come forward with
their own ideas
now the reason was simple because to the
officers at the top who understood all
the complexities there was imminent
camps it was essentially nothing to work
with so fortunately they invited others
into the discussion that didn’t
understand the complexities but what
these others did have was their own
unique perspectives and it so happens
that a young combat soldier named Cullen
came forward with the idea to put a
giant fork on the front of one of our
tanks McCullen was laughed at at first
but the back story that my dad had heard
was the killer may have grown up on a
farm and he’d seen something similar is
a boy because for years farmers had
placed giant spheres on the Front’s of
their John Deere tractors to be able to
impale giant bells of hay to lift them
up and move them so they built a
prototype and then they secured an open
area field it was protected where they
could test it and the commanding
officers were amazed when they saw how
this type could now Ram these giant
walls of trees with the forks penetrated
deeply cutting the root system in half
releasing huge sections of earth is the
tank appeared to burst through without
hardly slowing down
now my dad was part of a small team that
was given the assignment to fabricate
the first 50 of these head shoppers as
they are now called
as fast as humanly possible so the next
challenge they faced was were could they
possibly find the raw materials to
fabricate these giant for Isis this is
an invasion task force there was not a
minute to waste there wasn’t time to
order materials from England the Germans
as you can imagine or Rican verging
everything that they had to prepare a
massive counter-attack to stop us well
you might recall those images of the
landing beaches where the Germans have
placed hundreds of giant metal crosses
in the surf intended to prevent our
landing craft from making sure well my
dad worked with crews and went back down
to this beaches with cutting torches in
those same crosses the spikes intended
to stop our ships from landing became
the perfect raw materials to fabricate
the forks that enabled us to break
through I consider the irony of that for
a limit so as soon as enough hedge
shoppers were build they were assembled
to the Front’s of our tanks those tanks
were then distributed across the entire
Normandy countryside and our forces were
then able to burst through these walls
it’s so many simultaneous points that
the invasion again became unstoppable
now this was one of many stories that my
father shared with me but it was by far
his favorite because it’s the classic
example of American ingenuity of using
hard work perseverance and incredible
resourcefulness to use what you had to
figure out a solution that no one else
knew how to solve now as a young boy
growing up aspiring to be a designer
like their dad
the story had a huge impact on me how
could it not the future of the world was
a stay there wasn’t a solution inside
and when the solution came it didn’t
come from the most likely source from
the source with the most knowledge it
came from a young mind and from a small
team open to possibilities now is that
reflected on this story something else
also became very apparent to me is that
the people that solved the problem had a
fundamentally different perspective they
didn’t frame the challenge with what do
I need it was instead what do I have to
work with so as I began to shape the
trajectory of my own career
I saw how many others were following a
certain path working with large
sophisticated organizations large
companies with lots of knowledge lots of
resources and lots of structure but I
saw how they were focused often on
incremental and slower progress and I
realized that if I wanted to focus on
innovation I had to find a different
direction and this story provided the
foundation so I began studying
everything I could possibly find
throughout history from science and
technology stories of innovation in
breakthroughs and I saw a very
consistent pattern to the same
principles of historic so that the
examples that immediately come to mind
like Apollo 13 when NASA a large
organization temporarily suspended
normal process and assembled very small
teams and had those teams hyper focused
only on what the astronauts had to work
with to bring them home safely I saw the
same pattern consistently repeated in
the small teams that were initially
Edison the Wright brothers
Kelly Johnson when he broked from
Lockheed to create the skunk works all
the way to more recent examples like
Google where in each of these cases it
was the small team initially that
somehow had the ability to fully
leverage the resources that they
to work with to create extraordinary
breakthroughs often in the face of much
larger more sophisticated competition
now over the years I’ve been fortunate
to learn from these examples and to
develop and refine my own process to
create a range of projects that applied
these same basic principles of reframing
the challenge understanding what you
have and then fully leveraging the
resources around you to create a
solution so a friend of mine is a
pediatric neurosurgeon several years ago
became fascinated with understanding
more about concussions in football and
he did what anyone would do in beginning
a project like this and he studied all
the conventional bodies of information
the science the medical journals and
then he did something unusual on a
parallel path he started asking a series
of questions to enable our design team
to reframe the challenge in a way that
we could understand it
he began asking questions like why are
there certain animals like woodpeckers
but have the ability to take massive
impacts to their house without suffering
any apparent damage and this reframing
question allowed are designed to to
focus on the exact physiology of these
animals their brain suspension systems
so that we could model our own
mechanical system after what we could
find in nature
my friend continued to ask a series of
questions so that we fully understood
the range of forces on the football
field like when a wide receiver is hit
from the side like this and he spins
rapidly well this is a different type of
force than blunt impact this is
rotational acceleration and by reframing
the challenge in this way our design
team again could focus on something that
we understood which is a rotational
bearing so imagine a wheel brought up on
an axis like this and the wheel becomes
the shell of your helmet and the shell
can take impact and it can dissipate
energy while leaving the brain protected
and stable at the center we took these
innovations
and it is evolved into a whole new
generation a football helmet design but
are just now becoming available in the
market they’d have the potential to
provide a much higher level of
protection now the final example I’ll
give is a wheelchair and it uses because
it’s an example that we can all relate
to you either through friends and family
or if we’re blessed to live long enough
we’ll use a product like this ourselves
and this project started with a single
question as a question that was asked to
me
by the head of one of the largest health
systems in the country and he asked why
are we moving our patients around in
this giant Hospital in a 75 year old
piece of technology it was never
intended to provide assistance or
protection to the people that actually
used the product
why is that and you can see with his
leading it was the classic reframing
question and ladder designed to him to
ask questions like well how could you
provide assistance in a wheelchair what
is it what is it wheelchair user needed
well it’s a chair with wheels on it it’s
very difficult to get in and out of so
it would be great to provide a way to
get into the chair and then assist you
to stand well that’s exactly what we did
we created the first integrated standing
assist lifts by using something else
that we immediately could recognize and
understand by breaking it into small
parts with backgrounds in automotive
design we recognize that car seats have
electric motors so we simply apply the
electric motor from a car seat that
everyone in this room can recognize to
the challenge of a wheelchair we
attempted to take this idea even further
this concept of reframing and with this
project we went after going we went
after changing the the very concept of
what a wheelchair could be from
initially the last place that anyone
would ever want to sit to the
possibility of a wheelchair becoming the
most comfortable chair in the house
now whenever I’m tempted to use the
excuse that I don’t have enough of what
I need to solve a challenge in front of
me I think back to the story of these
young American soldiers bending
constraints to use what they had to work
with so if you’re interested in true
innovation let me help you drill into
three specific steps the next time you
face a challenge break into small parts
by breaking into parts you can focus on
the elements but you best understand by
centering what you know you can much
more readily identify the resources
around you that you may have to work
with to form a solution and if you can
form a solution and that solution starts
to work you may find that when you
rephrase when you reface your
constraints that you once thought were
insurmountable you may find that you can
bend them now I have no idea what
challenges you may be facing today but I
am certain of this true innovation from
bending constraints has been proven to
win Wars shape history thank you
[Applause] [Music]
4th 1944 and on that 4th of July he was
able to drive his Jeep off that landing
craft onto the beach and all the way
into France to rejoin the front lines is
a junior officer in the 3rd Armored
Division now the problem that a middle
it became apparent to my dad was that he
didn’t have to drive far in 28 days
since d-day instead of penetrating
deeply in France like they planned our
allied forces were still held to within
20 miles of those beaches now the
problem had actually started hundreds of
years ago when the Normans plant trees
to separate their fields because they
didn’t have enough stone to make walls
in over the years those trees the roots
of those trees grew into massive walls
of Earth 8 feet high in 12 feet wide at
the base called hedgerows in our tanks
could not drive through these walls we
could only go around them on the small
number of roads and the Germans had
anticipated this and they had prepared
an extremely effective defensive
strategy they would knock out all of our
lead tanks creating roadblocks and when
we tried to move laterally down the
walls to blow up in an open section with
dynamite the explosion alerted the
Germans exactly where to redirect their
fire they were simply focused on the
open gap wait for the next time to drive
through knock it out and effectively
reseal the breach in the wall our forces
were losing more tanks in the first
several hours the first several days of
engagement like this then they plan to
lose in the first several weeks the
entire invasion
in the future of the world as we know it
today was in jeopardy of being shut down
in Altered now here’s where the first
remarkable thing happened an
all-hands-on-deck meeting was called
between the commanding officers at the
top including Patton himself all the way
to junior combat soldiers for
suggestions all pride an idea ownership
was gone a new way had to be found not
consider here is the US military the
most sophisticated highly structured
systematic organizational structure you
could imagine temporarily suspending its
normal process to allow those in the
heat of combat to come forward with
their own ideas
now the reason was simple because to the
officers at the top who understood all
the complexities there was imminent
camps it was essentially nothing to work
with so fortunately they invited others
into the discussion that didn’t
understand the complexities but what
these others did have was their own
unique perspectives and it so happens
that a young combat soldier named Cullen
came forward with the idea to put a
giant fork on the front of one of our
tanks McCullen was laughed at at first
but the back story that my dad had heard
was the killer may have grown up on a
farm and he’d seen something similar is
a boy because for years farmers had
placed giant spheres on the Front’s of
their John Deere tractors to be able to
impale giant bells of hay to lift them
up and move them so they built a
prototype and then they secured an open
area field it was protected where they
could test it and the commanding
officers were amazed when they saw how
this type could now Ram these giant
walls of trees with the forks penetrated
deeply cutting the root system in half
releasing huge sections of earth is the
tank appeared to burst through without
hardly slowing down
now my dad was part of a small team that
was given the assignment to fabricate
the first 50 of these head shoppers as
they are now called
as fast as humanly possible so the next
challenge they faced was were could they
possibly find the raw materials to
fabricate these giant for Isis this is
an invasion task force there was not a
minute to waste there wasn’t time to
order materials from England the Germans
as you can imagine or Rican verging
everything that they had to prepare a
massive counter-attack to stop us well
you might recall those images of the
landing beaches where the Germans have
placed hundreds of giant metal crosses
in the surf intended to prevent our
landing craft from making sure well my
dad worked with crews and went back down
to this beaches with cutting torches in
those same crosses the spikes intended
to stop our ships from landing became
the perfect raw materials to fabricate
the forks that enabled us to break
through I consider the irony of that for
a limit so as soon as enough hedge
shoppers were build they were assembled
to the Front’s of our tanks those tanks
were then distributed across the entire
Normandy countryside and our forces were
then able to burst through these walls
it’s so many simultaneous points that
the invasion again became unstoppable
now this was one of many stories that my
father shared with me but it was by far
his favorite because it’s the classic
example of American ingenuity of using
hard work perseverance and incredible
resourcefulness to use what you had to
figure out a solution that no one else
knew how to solve now as a young boy
growing up aspiring to be a designer
like their dad
the story had a huge impact on me how
could it not the future of the world was
a stay there wasn’t a solution inside
and when the solution came it didn’t
come from the most likely source from
the source with the most knowledge it
came from a young mind and from a small
team open to possibilities now is that
reflected on this story something else
also became very apparent to me is that
the people that solved the problem had a
fundamentally different perspective they
didn’t frame the challenge with what do
I need it was instead what do I have to
work with so as I began to shape the
trajectory of my own career
I saw how many others were following a
certain path working with large
sophisticated organizations large
companies with lots of knowledge lots of
resources and lots of structure but I
saw how they were focused often on
incremental and slower progress and I
realized that if I wanted to focus on
innovation I had to find a different
direction and this story provided the
foundation so I began studying
everything I could possibly find
throughout history from science and
technology stories of innovation in
breakthroughs and I saw a very
consistent pattern to the same
principles of historic so that the
examples that immediately come to mind
like Apollo 13 when NASA a large
organization temporarily suspended
normal process and assembled very small
teams and had those teams hyper focused
only on what the astronauts had to work
with to bring them home safely I saw the
same pattern consistently repeated in
the small teams that were initially
Edison the Wright brothers
Kelly Johnson when he broked from
Lockheed to create the skunk works all
the way to more recent examples like
Google where in each of these cases it
was the small team initially that
somehow had the ability to fully
leverage the resources that they
to work with to create extraordinary
breakthroughs often in the face of much
larger more sophisticated competition
now over the years I’ve been fortunate
to learn from these examples and to
develop and refine my own process to
create a range of projects that applied
these same basic principles of reframing
the challenge understanding what you
have and then fully leveraging the
resources around you to create a
solution so a friend of mine is a
pediatric neurosurgeon several years ago
became fascinated with understanding
more about concussions in football and
he did what anyone would do in beginning
a project like this and he studied all
the conventional bodies of information
the science the medical journals and
then he did something unusual on a
parallel path he started asking a series
of questions to enable our design team
to reframe the challenge in a way that
we could understand it
he began asking questions like why are
there certain animals like woodpeckers
but have the ability to take massive
impacts to their house without suffering
any apparent damage and this reframing
question allowed are designed to to
focus on the exact physiology of these
animals their brain suspension systems
so that we could model our own
mechanical system after what we could
find in nature
my friend continued to ask a series of
questions so that we fully understood
the range of forces on the football
field like when a wide receiver is hit
from the side like this and he spins
rapidly well this is a different type of
force than blunt impact this is
rotational acceleration and by reframing
the challenge in this way our design
team again could focus on something that
we understood which is a rotational
bearing so imagine a wheel brought up on
an axis like this and the wheel becomes
the shell of your helmet and the shell
can take impact and it can dissipate
energy while leaving the brain protected
and stable at the center we took these
innovations
and it is evolved into a whole new
generation a football helmet design but
are just now becoming available in the
market they’d have the potential to
provide a much higher level of
protection now the final example I’ll
give is a wheelchair and it uses because
it’s an example that we can all relate
to you either through friends and family
or if we’re blessed to live long enough
we’ll use a product like this ourselves
and this project started with a single
question as a question that was asked to
me
by the head of one of the largest health
systems in the country and he asked why
are we moving our patients around in
this giant Hospital in a 75 year old
piece of technology it was never
intended to provide assistance or
protection to the people that actually
used the product
why is that and you can see with his
leading it was the classic reframing
question and ladder designed to him to
ask questions like well how could you
provide assistance in a wheelchair what
is it what is it wheelchair user needed
well it’s a chair with wheels on it it’s
very difficult to get in and out of so
it would be great to provide a way to
get into the chair and then assist you
to stand well that’s exactly what we did
we created the first integrated standing
assist lifts by using something else
that we immediately could recognize and
understand by breaking it into small
parts with backgrounds in automotive
design we recognize that car seats have
electric motors so we simply apply the
electric motor from a car seat that
everyone in this room can recognize to
the challenge of a wheelchair we
attempted to take this idea even further
this concept of reframing and with this
project we went after going we went
after changing the the very concept of
what a wheelchair could be from
initially the last place that anyone
would ever want to sit to the
possibility of a wheelchair becoming the
most comfortable chair in the house
now whenever I’m tempted to use the
excuse that I don’t have enough of what
I need to solve a challenge in front of
me I think back to the story of these
young American soldiers bending
constraints to use what they had to work
with so if you’re interested in true
innovation let me help you drill into
three specific steps the next time you
face a challenge break into small parts
by breaking into parts you can focus on
the elements but you best understand by
centering what you know you can much
more readily identify the resources
around you that you may have to work
with to form a solution and if you can
form a solution and that solution starts
to work you may find that when you
rephrase when you reface your
constraints that you once thought were
insurmountable you may find that you can
bend them now I have no idea what
challenges you may be facing today but I
am certain of this true innovation from
bending constraints has been proven to
win Wars shape history thank you
[Applause] [Music]
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