Scott Anthony: Clinical Professor of Strategy at Tuck School of Business

In this episode of Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee, Alex Pascal, CEO of Coaching.com, interviews Scott Anthony, a Harvard MBA and Clinical Professor of Strategy at Tuck School of Business. Scott, an expert in navigating disruptive change, shares insights on innovation, emphasizing the concept of “liberating constraints”—how setting boundaries can unleash creativity.

The conversation touches on Scott’s journey into the field of innovation, inspired by his mentor Clayton Christensen, and his extensive experience at the consulting firm Innosight. Scott and Alex discuss the importance of creating value through innovation, the role of big corporations in fostering innovative cultures, and the challenge of staying relevant in rapidly changing markets.

They explore how organizations can balance the pursuit of innovation with maintaining core business clarity, and the importance of preparing for unexpected events in today’s dynamic environment. The episode provides valuable insights for coaches and organizations aiming to integrate strategic innovation into their cultures

Transcript

Scott: Having the ability to make sure there are the right controls and things is a really important part of innovation. One of the things that I will often tell people is there is a little bit of paradox. One of the things that enables innovation is what I call liberating constraints. You constrain things, you liberate freedom to go and innovate and think in different ways, and you feel like you’re holding it back but, in fact, you’re unleashing creativity by doing it.

(intro)

Alex: Hi, I’m Alex Pascal, CEO of Coaching.com, and this is Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee. My guest today is a Harvard MBA that is currently a Clinical Professor of Strategy at Tuck School of Business. He’s a world-renowned expert in navigating disruptive change. In 2023, he was named the ninth Most Influential Management Thinker by Thinkers50. Please welcome Scott Anthony.

(Interview)

Alex: Hi, Scott.

Scott: Hey, Alex. How you doing? 

Alex: Great. It’s great to have you today. 

Scott: Yeah, great to be here.

Alex: Let’s start where we always start on Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee. What are we drinking today? 

Scott: Well, it is indeed coffee. This is a small batch brew from Cometeer which I discovered in a shopping mall about a year ago. Every month, they send a little collection of flash frozen coffee from small batch growers. This one is from Joe’s, wherever that is from. It’s very nice. How about you? What are you drinking?

Alex: I know that you know the origins of your coffee, so I’m drinking coffee from Blue Bottle, so it’s been a while since I bought beans so I bought some beans, their Hayes espresso Valley blend. I like it a lot. It was nice to actually use the espresso machine. I haven’t used it in months so it was nice. Yeah, it’s a great blend. Have you had Blue Bottle before?

Scott: I have. There is a Blue Bottle branch that’s about a mile and a half from where I’m sitting now and I’ve done some meetings and some work in that branch. It’s very nice. Very nice coffee, I think.

Alex: I’m a big fan, I have to say. We need to get some coffee sponsors for this podcast at some point now that we’ve celebrated our 100th episode, I think this is, so maybe a one on one, and that’s exciting. 

Scott: Congratulations. 

Alex: Thank you. Yeah, it’s nice when it’s coffee, you’re a little more perked up, you know?

Scott: Just have the perk up. One of the things I learned, I lived for 12 years in Singapore and most of the work I was doing was global in nature so that meant there were calls and Zooms and all sorts of things at all hours of the day so I learned how to at least appear to be perked up even if I wasn’t, no matter when the call was. So this is being done at a time that I’m naturally perked up but I can be unnaturally if I needed to be as well. 

Alex: It’s a great skill set. I’ve been to Singapore, it’s amazing. Very interesting place, super multicultural. The food’s incredible. But the time zone is definitely challenging if you’re working with people in the US or even Europe. 

Scott: Yeah. Mostly, when I was there, that’s most of the people I was working with, or for sometimes, were in those time zones so it just led to weirdness and I did a webinar last week that was at two in the morning, I’m like, “Ah, it feels like old times.” I do not miss those times for the most part but, yeah, every once in a while, it has its charms. 

Alex: I bet. I’ve been looking forward to our conversation today. You’ve done a lot of work, I think a topic that’s very relevant today. It’s always been relevant, it probably is absolutely true. Innovation is something we talk a lot about in coaching, in business in general so I’ve been looking forward to our conversation today. Please take me through your journey. How did you end up becoming an expert in this field? It’s not one of those things that I think people grow up kind of saying, “I wanna be an expert in innovation,” so how does one go about getting there? So please take me through your journey.

Scott: I think certainly when I was growing up, no one would talk about being an expert in innovation as the field was a pretty nascent field then. I mean, really, if you look at the academic lineage of innovation, it’s really in the 1950s and 1960s that people even begin to formally study it. So the idea of growing up to be an innovation expert, innovation practitioner when I was growing up in the 70s and 80s, people certainly didn’t talk about it. Today, I think it’s a little bit different. But, anyway, my own journey, that kind of critical moment, the transformational moment and it was about 24 years ago, I was in my second year at Harvard Business School, I took a class called Building and Sustaining a Successful Enterprise by a professor named Clayton Christensen, who, in his doctoral research had identified a phenomenon known as disruptive innovation, loved the class, loved his ideas, decided to stick around and do a couple years of research directly under him. Then, in 2003, I joined the consulting company that he had co-founded a few years prior to that called Innosight, spent about 20 years in the field with Innosight before a couple years ago starting to teach as a way to take everything I’ve learned and pass it on to the next generation. So it really was that meeting with Clay that started me down the path where I got a chance to explore innovation in lots of different guises, sometimes as an advisor, sometimes as a researcher, sometimes as a practitioner. I had times in Innosight where I was leading up activities where we were investing in and incubating new businesses. So, I really have had the great privilege of looking at this field from a lot of different perspectives. And I still consider myself a student, there’s still a lot to learn, more to learn than there is to teach, but, hopefully, I’ve learned a few things that I can teach as well. 

Alex: That’s awesome. And I know Clay passed away recently so I think that prompted a lot of articles and I’ve read a few around his influencing the field and you’re absolutely right, it is this nascent field and it’s interesting that it is so because just we’re living in a time where there’s this acceleration, everything’s speeding up, and I think understanding innovation in these complex dynamic systems becomes even more important. And it’s interesting that innovation is a lot of what’s driving this acceleration as well so I’m excited to unpack some of that and see kind of where we take it and we’ll also talk about some of the implications for coaches and organizations that think about how to implement coaching, coaching cultures, and how that blends into having a strategic approach to innovation.

Scott: There is certainly a lot to unpack in all of that. But, again, one of the reflections I have as you were describing things, I mentioned Clay passing away, he did, he passed away in 2020 right before the onset of the pandemic so January of 2020. And just reflecting on that moment and the outpouring of grief that there was, because not only did we lose a great mind, we lost a truly great, unique individual who was humble, who was a continual learner, who did everything he could to try and help people, and, really, I do my best to live up to his legacy but it’s an awfully hard legacy to live up to because he left a lot behind.

Alex: Yeah, in many ways, one of the fathers of the field and the field that will become even more important as we go on. I mean, when I think about, you look at the news and you look at like Apple and all these big corporations that have stashes of hundreds of billions of dollars and they’re just sitting there and I think the question in many people’s minds and investors is how do you continuously innovate. You have all these cash but having the cash does not necessarily mean that you’ll be able to deploy it properly and I think everyone’s looking for innovation, where it’s coming from, how do you anticipate it, how you prepare for it, and having money and huge R&D departments and expenditures doesn’t guarantee that you will get on the right bandwagon when it comes to innovation. So that’s something that’s been on my mind lately. So, as an organization, how do you think about innovation? Where does it come from? How can it go right? How can it go wrong? And it’s easy to think about creating a culture of innovation and then, well, we’ll have a culture of innovation and it will lead to all this innovation but how does it really work?

Scott: There’s a lot in what you’ve just said. So let me start with a definition because that’s important to make sure we enter into the conversation about everything that comes underneath that with a common language. So, in the last book that I co-authored right behind me, Eat, Sleep, Innovate, the definition that we use for innovation is something different that creates value. It’s a simple definition but each word is chosen with care. You can really break it into two parts. “Something different” is intentionally vague. It creates space for the really big things, life-saving vaccines, hypersonic planes, and so on, and the day-to-day things that make life just a little bit better. There’s room for both, there’s need for both. This reminds us that innovation is not the job of the few, it’s the responsibility of the many. “Creates value” separates innovation from precursors, things like creativity and invention, you need those, no doubt, but it’s the application of that creativity and that invention. Until you have increased revenues or profits in a commercial setting, had more satisfied employees, more engaged employees, more satisfied suppliers, whatever, until you have done those things, in our eyes, you have not innovated. And that reminds us of the Thomas Edison quote, genius, he once said, is 1 percent inspiration, 99 percent perspiration. You sweat a lot when you innovate. So you bring these things together and you see that this really is something that is critical for every organization today in a world where technologies are advancing exponentially, lines between industries are blurring, expectations of everyone is shifting constantly, and shock after shock keeps coming after you. It really is an imperative, an imperative that every organization, and indeed every individual, get good at innovation. Now, there’s a lot to unpack after that. What does it actually take to do it? How do you do it? What do large companies do with their big piles of resources? How do you go and increase the chances of success when there is latent unpredictability in it? I’ll leave the next question to you, because we can go in lots of directions from here. 

Alex: Yeah. I mean, this is kind of one of my favorite topics so I love it. We are living in a time where there’s a lot of black swan events. By definition, black swans are not supposed to happen almost, like it’s like a black swan, but the speed of innovation, the amount of investment, unpredictability of just these very complex times is making events that typically wouldn’t happen happen more often and that places a lot of pressure on organizational systems to navigate through these very treacherous waters in some ways. I mean, when you look at the history of the S&P or the Fortune 500, it’s very hard to stay there for a very long time. So, we know that with this acceleration, it’s going to happen even more often that companies become less relevant. One of the things that you said that I thought was very interesting is like there’s this erosion of it used to be that a company would do and specialize in a specific thing but now you’re seeing companies getting, let’s use the example of Apple again, we would never have thought 20 years ago that Apple would get into the production of movies and entertainment. There are these blurred lines and I think companies want to play through those blurred lines to maybe tap into something that creates the next round of sustainable growth but it also puts pressure on the core of what an organization is and what it does. It used to be that clarity was very important. “This is what we do, these are our customers, these are our products, these are our margins, we understand this business, then we can go and scale.” Now, it’s, “Well, we do these really well but the market’s shifting in this direction so maybe we need to use these resources to tap into this new area of growth.” It always really tapping into this need for innovation? I wonder, in times like these, how much of our time should we spend kind of chasing innovation and how much and how do we go about creating this environment where we will be in a good position to catch the wave of innovation? So I guess what I’m getting at is there’s a need to innovate but if you get into that mode, potentially could be a trap where you’re looking to innovate but you’re not really innovating, you’re just trying to catch that wave. How do you as an individual go about this process and how does that cascade into an organization? Does that make sense? Because I feel like there is this battle between we’re seeking innovation but, in my experience, the more you seek it, the less likely you are to necessarily stumble upon something that truly leads to that new wave of innovation.

Scott: Yeah, it’s a great topic to explore. So let me tell you a little bit about the book project I’m working on right now and then I’ll provide an answer. So the book project I’m working on now is a very different book for me. Every book that I’ve written in the past has been a case study-driven framework book, here are three tips and here’s a two by two and all that. And the book I’m working on now –

Alex: That was back in business school, right? The case study.

Scott: They’ve always been my publisher so it all makes sense. And just to be fair, they are my publisher again, but they actually came to me with this idea. I had an idea for a case study-driven framework book and they said, “Great, let’s have that be the next one,” but for this one, in 2022, Harvard Business Review turned 100, it named four ideas that changed the world, those ideas were scientific management, the idea of maximizing shareholder value, the idea of emotional intelligence, and the idea of disruptive innovation. They said, “You know, you have spent your career thinking about disruptive innovation. What about writing a history book that picks out maybe 10, 12 case studies about disruptions in history. Tell us the story.” And then, from that, you might draw some lessons or you might just have 10 to 12 interesting stories. So I’ve been knee deep in doing research and everything from Julia Child and how she disrupted the recipe book industry, to gunpowder and how that changed the art of warfare and a lot of things in between. One of the things that really strikes you when you go back and look at history, something that I think connects to your question, innovation is predictably unpredictable. Predictably unpredictable. There are very clear patterns to it. There are things that help you distinguish success from failure, there are things that you can see that are keys to success, but there’s always twists and turns and always things that people can’t anticipate. As an example, when Apple launched this, when Apple launched the iPhone in 2007, somebody asked Steve Jobs what is the killer app of the iPhone and he said, “Well, the killer app is making phone calls.” So Steve Jobs did not in the moment when the phone was launched think about the ecosystem that would be created through the App Store because there was no App Store. It was a tightly controlled environment where there were a handful of apps on the phone, only the things that Apple designed you can put on the screen. So as the sales of the iPhone in the early days were okay but not great and people were saying you got to unlock and allow more freedom on this, Steve Jobs backtracked and said, “Let’s create a mechanism where anyone can develop,” within certain rules and regulations, and then you have the birth of the app economy and all the things that go around it. But that wasn’t the vision from day one. And this happens in every story. There’s predictability, people will try different things, they’ll seek profits, they’ll make things better, business models are important, and so on, but there are things that nobody can predict. So what does that mean you do inside an organization? Maximize the surface area. You try as many different things as you can, try as many different avenues as you can, recognizing that a lot of things are going to be dead ends, a lot of things are going to be wrong, it’s very possible none of your internal work will work out and you’ll need to go and partner with or acquire something from the outside, but the journey is important because you’re learning things, you’re creating connection points if you do acquire something, you know what the key thing is that you really have to get to make a market big and so on. So, even if the results of your internal efforts end up being disappointing, you go in with the right mindset and the results for your organization are going to be really good. Last thing I’ll say here, you see in this something that you begin to feel is a very human tension. You have to be comfortable when you’re doing innovation work being uncomfortable. You have to be comfortable with the possibility that the thing that you love will not work out and you’ll ultimately have to shut it down. You have to be comfortable with the fact that you might have to lose in order to win. This is not natural for us as humans, it’s really hard work and we need a very particular environment to make it work. And for coaches providing guidance, it’s really critical that they help people have that confidence that even when they’re uncertain, especially when they’re uncertain, this is a good thing, not a bad thing. How do you not lose your way in those moments of uncertainty? Again, there’s a lot in this. It’s complicated and challenging and also exhilarating and fulfilling at the same time.

Alex: I think you’re really tapping into our relationship with failure and organizational cultures tended to be very risk adverse and the environment is probably one that rewarded being risk averse but with the complexity of the market today, not taking risk is more risky than actually taking risks but that requires a rewiring of how we look at failure. In your experience, what are some of the things that both individuals and organizations can do to become more comfortable with failure to navigate this uncertainty? 

Scott: First of all, I think of all the issues that stand in the way of success of innovation inside large organizations, I think this is the biggest one. People will often say, “Well, we have incentive mismatches because entrepreneurs can earn billions of dollars if they create their own company, you can’t get that upside inside a large company.” That’s not the problem. The problem is the penalties for having something that is perceived to be a failure are so swift and so severe that no one dare take any risk. To some degree, that’s understandable. Innovation is something different, that creates value. Organizations are designed not to do something different but to do what they currently are doing better, faster, cheaper, more effectively, more efficiently. Something different just runs counter to what they historically have done. So, you could understand in that environment where something that’s a deviation, something that doesn’t fit feels like a failure, feels like something that should be punished. But we all know the journey to success has those left turns, has those fumbles, has those false steps, and we need to have those moments where we’re learning something through failed experimentation if we are to ultimately succeed. So what do you do to help create an environment that helps to nurture this? A bunch of different things, but one very simple thing that we talked about in Eat, Sleep, Innovate is make sure that you’ve got some kind of ritual that suggests that failure is not a dirty word, that, in fact, the right kind of failure, if you fail, in the words of Amy Edmondson from the Harvard Business School in an intelligent way, is a good, not bad thing. Very simple. Tata Sons, the largest conglomerate in India, has an award it gets out every year called Dare to Try. To get that award, two things have to have happened. Number one, you have to have failed. This is not heroically overcoming obstacles, it actually didn’t work. And number two, you have to have learned something important from what you have done. You meet those two criteria, you’re eligible to win a high prestige award within the organization. That very simple thing helps to show the organization that pushing frontiers, that trying nobly is a good, not bad thing. Of course, then you can connect into that, leaders can talk about their own times where they have failed in the right sort of way. One thing that I did a few years ago, this comes from Tina Seelig, who teaches at Stanford, I wrote a failure resume. Of course, I’ve got my regular resume that has all the hits, the successes, the wins. The failure resume are all the times you missed the shot, you didn’t get the guy or girl or whatever, your proposal got turned down. Mine was five pages long, there were plenty of things that went wrong in my life, but, of course, you go through that, you recognize that which is what does not kill you makes you stronger. From failures, you learn things. It enables you to succeed in the future, and that failure resume says, “Okay, the next time this happens and I’m staring at something that’s not going to work out, I know it’s not the end of the world, I know something good is going to come from it and I will keep daring to try.” So that idea of rewarding it, tying it to yourself, and recognizing within your own life and within your own career there have been setbacks and struggles begins, at least, to chip away at what is a really deep, really challenging problem.

Alex: This makes me think around kind of having the perspective of like the long-term perspective and taking the long view at things. When you look at the day-to-day occurrences in our world, and, look, we’re going through a very tumultuous time in America right now, but when you look at the patterns from a little bit more altitude, you can see the trends that are more positive, and I think that when you think about the pace of innovation, it’s like taking the long view perhaps provides some relief to the pressure and provides you with a better sense that failures are temporary but the learning from those failures is what allows you to continue in that growth.

Scott: I totally agree. And one thing I’ve been thinking a lot about is this idea of time perspective. I’ve been doing research on a Japanese company that had a CEO come in in 2014. The company is Shiseido, it’s a big cosmetics company. The CEO who came in was the first outside CEO the company had had in its 142 years of existence, and what is really interesting is he really bent the view of time in the organization. What do I mean by that? Well, he looked way into the future. He said, “What I’m doing as a leader is I’m not winning the next month, quarter, or year, I’m setting the foundations for the next century for the company.” And he looked way in the past too. He said, “Let’s look at the origins of the company, 1872, we were all about East meets West, we were all about bringing science to beauty, so let’s make sure that’s the foundation of the work that we’re doing.” You have to win in the present to have the right to go and create the future but by going to the distant past, he’s able to say, “Even in the midst of a transformation where literally I will change everything, I will change the language we speak from Japanese to English, I will change reporting structures, I’ll change the markets that we’re in, actually, nothing is changing. East meets West, beauty and science, the heritage and history of the company remain and we’re doing this not in the pursuit of winning the quarter but in pursuit of winning the century.” And I think once you start to do that, you think incredibly different about innovation. I was talking to somebody who was the CFO in the early years of this journey and I was asking, “You have to write some really big checks, you’re creating these big R&D centers, big investments and all that, that must have been hard to do, right?” He said, “No, it was easy, because we’ve got 100-year view. So with 100-year view, it is obvious that we have to do this.” Now, if I had to think about doing this project versus some little advertising thing that boosts sales in the quarter at the margin, that’s a hard decision. But with a 100-year view, it’s a very easy decision. So that idea of how do we think differently about time I think is a really, really critical one for innovation. Past patterns too, that’s a big thing. If we look at past patterns, yes, we undoubtedly are going through tumultuous times in the United States and many other countries as well, you look at the past, you say, you know, history might not repeat but it certainly rhymes and there have been moments like this before and really bad things can happen in those moments but they also can be moments of rebirth, reinvention, where really new powerful things emerge and you can’t see it in the middle because all you see is the chaos in the middle, but on the other side, you say, “Huh, something really interesting and profound is happening,” which is net, in the long run, a good day. And, of course, in the midst of it, Rosabeth Moss Kanter says everything looks like a failure in the middle and it certainly can feel like it but the long-term view can be a very powerful aid in those moments.

Alex: You remind me of one of my favorite quotes, George Bernard Shaw, if history repeats itself and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must man be of learning from experience.

Scott: It’s a great quote. And as someone who’s working on a book in history, which is a new thing for me, I certainly do appreciate it. But, I mean, it really is. There’s a story that’s burned in my head. So, right now, pick a field, climate change, we’ve got people on this side and this side, artificial intelligence, this side, this side, lab grown meat, this side, this side. This happens anytime there’s a new technology. In the 1920s, in big cities in the United States, there was essentially a holy war. The holy war was between the pedestrians who historically owned the roads, and the drivers who suddenly appeared who wanted to go on those roads. And there were marketing slogans on both sides so the drivers came up with this term, “jaywalker.” A jay at the time was somebody who lived in the country and wasn’t that educated so we’re going to essentially blame the pedestrians for walking on the roads that used to be their right. We’re going to say they’re the ones at fault. The pedestrian said, “We’re gonna blame the drivers were, we’re gonna come up with this term ‘flivverboob.’” Flivverboob was a derogatory term for people who drove too fast. Well, you know who won this battle because flivverboob is a word that if you read it in a Word document, you get little red squiggles underneath it and jaywalker is a word that everybody knows. But you have the exact same thing. They were people on both sides and, ultimately, technology won and there were some bad moments and all of that but we figured out, ultimately, what are safety regulations, traffic lights, ways to manage turns, putting in seatbelts and so on, to enable coexistence and enable economic development and growth. Is it a smooth, easy process? Of course not. Are there people who were not happy with it? Of course, that’s the way that change happens.

Alex: It’s hard to get on the side of the Luddites when you see the track record. But that also sometimes makes me wonder whether we need to have a different perspective around innovation and technology, because, in our world, is innovation or technology applied for everything all the time without really thinking about the implications that that will bring about? Lately, I’ve been thinking about is there a time in human development, in human history, where being a little bit more shy as to saying yes to quick innovation and the deployment of technology is actually warranted? What do you think?

Scott: Well, Luddites made me think about another one of the great finds that I had in doing research for this book. Innovation, many people will view it as close to universal good now, but it was not always perceived that way. In 1548, the king of England issued a Proclamation Against Those That Doeth Innouate, that was the name of the proclamation. He kind of get it, because innovation is questioning the status quo and if you question the status quo, who are you questioning? Well, you’re questioning the king and the king is acting on God’s behalf so that’s a pretty bad thing at the time. It was actually considered to be heresy. So the important lesson that then comes forward, even though there are no practical proclamations against those that do innovate, innovation still casts a shadow. And it’s not a universal good. It is good for some and bad for others. The transition can be really hard. Jobs are gained, jobs are lost. And if you don’t understand that, if you don’t understand the shadow that is cast by innovation, you’re going to have naysayers that will band together and, in the case of the Luddites, ultimately come and destroy equipment, which is what they did in the 1820s. So I think the first point is you want to make sure the shadow that is cast by innovation is one that you’re fully aware of and as you’re investing in and managing it, you know that there’s another side to it and you think about that. Then the second point is there is such a thing as going too quickly. So I mentioned before the idea of intelligent failure. It’s a word that people often skip, the intelligent part. They say failure is good. It’s like, well, some kinds of failure are good and some kinds are bad. So I was at a doctor’s appointment a couple of days ago, imagine I’m at a doctor’s appointment, you’re there to draw blood or whatever, and they instead they take a hacksaw and cut off your arm and say, “Oh, whoops, I didn’t mean to do that but I failed so that’s great.” Obviously, that’s not intelligent failure, that’s just stupid, perhaps illegal, maniacal, and lots of other words. Those types of things are preventable failures, where people take poorly thought-out risks, where they don’t do their homework, they don’t control the things that they’re doing, they’ve not gone and done proper research, not taking proper safety precautions, and so on, those things we don’t celebrate at all. I think it is very good that there are guardrails for how medical- and science-based companies do their research. I think it’s very good that there are guardrails for how people who are working with nuclear materials handle that nuclear material, because you can imagine a world where they’re not and that is not a good world. Having the ability to make sure there are the right controls and things is a really important part of innovation. One of the things that I will often tell people is there is a little bit of paradox. One of the things that enables innovation is what I call liberating constraints. You constrain things, you liberate freedom to go and innovate and think in different ways, and you feel like you’re holding it back but, in fact, you’re unleashing creativity by doing it. And, again, a thing that I tell coaches is if you want to unleash more creativity in your clients, get really specific about the place you want them to focus. Because if you just say be more innovative or be more creative, what do you do with that? Instead, you say, “Well, you’ve got a point of frustration, your morning is not starting in the right way or you’re getting a lull in the afternoon or you’ve got this relationship with your colleagues that you can’t figure out. All right, let’s focus in on this particular thing.” The more you bound the problem, the more creativity you will typically get around it.

Alex: I want to talk about Eat, Sleep, Innovate and I want to talk about some implications for coaches and learning from them. Before we do that, there was one thing you said that I really, really liked. Well, I liked a lot of things you said but this one particularly I think I found it interesting. Winning the present to have the right to influence the future. I mean, that raises the stakes, and when you look at human history, history is told by the winners, so when you take that 100-year view, it puts a lot of pressure that once you understand both individually and collectively and part of an organization or a government or whatever faction it is, being successful and winning, so important, because that is what gives you the right to influence society, to influence the world, whether you’re doing it by selling your technology that you use in your tennis shoes or particular ideas that influence political systems, like that really raises the stakes of winning. And, in today’s world, I think just to be more clean and easy to understand who’s the winner but we live in these complex systems where there’s so many influences and I think part of the problem of modernity or post modernity or post post post modernity, I don’t even know where we are anymore, but one of the challenges is there’s so many competing views and I think kind of what happened with Facebook, “Oh, well, we’re gonna connect people and it’s gonna be great,” well, what ended up happening is you created a billion different silos and everyone stays in their own silos and that kind of fractures unity and, in a way, it actually aligns with post modernism in a way where it fractures the truth system so much that there’s no such thing as absolute truth, everything’s relative, but even relative points can’t see and talk to each other. So, it creates this dysfunction. So what does winning look like in the 21st century? There’s so many competing narratives and products, it’s like, you know, when you’re thinking about influencing the future, how do you go about thinking about that? It’s a big question and it’s, I think, philosophical, there’s a lot to that, but I think it’s really at the core of if you are going to be innovating and it’s really driving you and you have the desire to win, what does it all mean in the big scheme of this very complex system?

Scott: It’s a huge question. I just met earlier today with somebody who is working on a system level effort to try and transform education within the United States in the public system, to which I say good luck to you because that is as complex a challenge as you get. And one of the things that she said is one thing that is an absolute quarter what we’re doing is having very, very, very clear metric for success, because if we have metric for success that everyone can agree, it would be good if students did X, and we can show that the old system does this, the new system does that, we have a chance. So, I don’t know what winning is in every context because it will be different in every context, but having that viewpoint for what X is I think is absolutely critical. And then, two, I think this idea of bending time can really help you with this. If you have a view that is 100 years from now, 50 years from now, 10 years from now, whatever, we want to do X, then you have things that will then lead to X, so you say winning is something that advances us on the journey to get to that destination. I lived in Singapore for 12 years, this is one thing that really struck me was unique about Singapore. Its government was thinking not in terms of what was going to happen in the week, month, or quarter. I mean, of course, it thought about that, but, really, its strategy was grounded in what happens in the next 50 years. And with a 50-year view, some of the short-term things become very, very easy and obvious. If you don’t have that, then you’re just reacting and you’re going all over the place and it can indeed feel very complicated. Having that long-term view can be immensely clarifying in the face of uncertainty, I think.

Alex: It makes me think of this quote that I think is often misattributed, the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.

Scott: Yes, it’s William Gibson. I had to fact trace that because I attributed it to William Gibson, someone said he didn’t say it but I actually found the audio clip and this is not an AI-generated audio clip, the audio clip of William Gibson, the science fiction writer saying it. But one of the things I generally advise people to do is, yes, I believe in that quote, I say find the place where the future meets the present because at that intersection, when you experience tomorrow today, it opens your eyes about future possibility. So, for me, it’s very easy. I’ve got four kids so all I do is I watch what they’re doing and I do it alongside of them and that’s how I’ve learned about cryptocurrency and virtual worlds and digital media and the metaverse and a range of different things. So I say if you’ve got kids, spend time with them. Don’t just watch what they’re doing, do it alongside of them, as crazy as it will drive them. And if you don’t have kids, find non-creepy ways to spend time with young people because the young people are reliable guides to the future because they’re experiencing tomorrow today.

Alex: Yeah, I think I can see where you’re coming from with the non-creepy because I think it was like in Wall Street Journal like how a lot of followers of early teen on Instagram tend to be older man, which is very creepy and bizarre.

Scott: Yeah. We could have a very separate discussion about that, that’s not what I suggest doing, but –

Alex: No, I’m clarifying for our audience that it’s coming from the fear of that. It was just recency effect, right? It was just in the Wall Street Journal, I think. It’s like, yeah, very creepy. It really makes you wonder kind of like if you’re out there and you’re meeting people, check who they’re following on Instagram to kind of find out who they are.

Scott: That’s a good point. But, I mean, if you look at the serious part of that, a lot of people who are in the advertising business are late to the game when it comes to influencers and social media, because it started not among the mainstream but started among the kids. And then when the kids started getting purchasing power, they’re like, wait a second, what is going on here? Why are people making purchasing decisions based on what appears to be weird and random things? When I watch my kids watch some of these YouTube videos, I’m like how does that make you not want to like cover your ears and gouge your eyes out? They’re like, “It’s amazing,” I’m like, “No, it really isn’t,” but whatever, it’s the things that you like and watch and enjoy and that’s, of course, ultimately where advertising dollars go, as they always have. But if you don’t experience it, you don’t get it and then you’re late. 

Alex: Well, generational differences have never been more accentuated because we used to live in a very similar way over time 10,000 years ago, but change was very gradual and you lived the same life that your parents and grandparents and great, great, great, great, great, great grandparents lived. Now, a couple grade difference in school kind of completely changes the way you look at certain things and what you’re into. I mean, it really puts a lot of pressure on society in terms of understanding each other and you hear it, I love watching Bill Maher and he’s always making fun of how they’re like, “Oh, boomer,” and that’s not really a valid argument to disagree with someone, just calling them a boomer, but you’re seeing a lot of these, then, ultimately, it’s really a fractured identity around understanding the whole of what we’re all experiencing and I think it’s driven by innovation and the fast pace of innovation and technology. I think so. I think Eat, Sleep, and Innovate, very interesting book. Can you tell me about the origins? Just looking at the title, it seems to be driving towards like, okay, let’s learn about innovation but in a very practical way that you can actually utilize. So, tell me about the genesis of the book, a little bit about the book, and how it’s applicable for coaches and their clients. 

Scott: The book’s origin story. So, the book was written a few years ago. Its origin traces back to about 2018. I was living in Singapore, I was working full time at Innosight, a growth strategy consulting company that I mentioned before founded by Clay Christensen that specialized in helping organizations navigate disruptive change. I had a question given to me by Paul Cobban, who at the time was the chief data and transformation officer at DBS bank, a big bank in Singapore, that I just had never heard before. He said, “Is it possible to consciously shape a culture of innovation inside a traditional, large, risk-averse organization?” I said I think so but I don’t know because I don’t know any good academic research on that specific topic, research on what culture is, yes, but research on how you actively shape it, no. So Paul said, “Okay, well, I’ve got this specific problem. We’re trying to open a new development center in Hyderabad and we wanna consciously create a certain type of culture. Can you work with us on it?” And, of course, I said yes and a couple Innosight colleagues and I worked with Paul on that problem. And from that project, we said there are some generalizable things that we’re learning. Let’s step back, turn it into research effort, turn it into a book, and that’s where Eat, Sleep, Innovate came from. The co-authors are two of my former Innosight colleagues, Natalie Painchaud and Andy Parker and Paul, Paul Cobban from DBS bank. So it’s a little bit a story of the transformation journey of DBS Bank that went 10 years ago from a slowly moving stodgy bank that biased towards obligatory compliance to regulators to a company today that is known in the industry as being the quickest moving, most innovative, most digital bank, regularly named the best bank in the world. And it’s all about building a culture of innovation. So what exactly is that? I said what innovation was was something different that creates value. A culture of innovation is one in which the behaviors that drive innovation success. Curiosity, customer obsession, collaboration, being adept in ambiguity, being empowered, our natural habits or things that people do without thinking about them. That’s a culture of innovation. And then final thing I’ll say, how do you actually do it? Well, you’re trying to create habits, that means you’ve got to borrow from the habit change literature. What we talk about a lot in the book is an idea called a BEAN, a behavior enabler, artifact and nudge. It’s essentially a reinforced ritual, like Tata’s Dare to Try program that we talked about before, that encourages people following the habits that drive innovation success and it does it in a very conscious way. The habit change literature says you have to fight a two-front battle. There’s the conscious logical part of our brain where we carefully consider things. That’s the behavior enabler, that’s the ritual, that’s the checklist, that’s the coaching, that’s the guide. Then there’s the artifact and nudge that goes after the unconscious part of us, what Daniel Kahneman would call System 1 thinking, where we do things without being conscious about them. So we want to encourage people to do things without them realizing we’re encouraging them to do things, whether that’s something that’s hanging on their wall or on their desktop, gamification principles, what’s known as choice architecture, make the default choice what you want it to be, a bunch of proven techniques that enable people to do things without them realizing it. You bring those together, the behavior enabler, artifact and nudge into a BEAN, tie it to the behaviors that drive innovation success, if you do it repeatedly enough, you get a culture of innovation. So that is the book and I think that was about 210 seconds but that’s the short view of the book.

Alex: That is incredible and so many aspects of what you said that apply to coaching and coaches, System 1 thinking. I think being aware of how people operate for coaches when it comes to helping people navigate through change is incredibly important. So many nuggets from our conversation today that I think are incredibly valuable. Would love to have you again at some point and I know there’s a lot of cool things that are happening in this space of innovation and coaches are super interested. Your next book, I need to know when it’s coming out because I’m going to want to read those 11 stories and see if there’s a thread line to learn a little bit more about innovation across time in those stories. It sounds – honestly, it’s one of those books that when I hear about the premise, I’m like, “Okay, I absolutely got to read this book so I need to buy it when it’s up.” When is it going to be up? 

Scott: Well, that depends on two factors. Number one, I have to finish it. I’m in the middle of drafting the second version of the manuscript, in the middle. I’m about 90 percent done with the second version of the manuscript. It usually takes three versions of the manuscript before it’s good to go so I’ve got to finish doing that. And number two, it has to go through the publishing process. My best guess right now would be, as much as I wish it were the first quarter of next year, 2025, I suspect it’s going to be the fall of 2025, but this being the modern era, of course, the ideas are going to come out on all sides, so some of the case studies are already beginning to appear in short things that I’m writing and so on. It’s been really fun and I think it will be a book that people will enjoy reading as it is a story-driven book with human beings in it, which many business books, including the ones I’ve written, generally are not very human and don’t have many people in them and are pretty boring. So this one tries to be a little bit less boring. I’ve had fun writing it at the very least. Anomalies Wanted: A Brief History of Disruption is the tentative title of the book.

Alex: Oh, thank you for sharing that. That sounds amazing. So I’ll keep an eye out for that and I feel like I’m getting in the way of you actually finishing the manuscript so thank you for joining me today for this episode of Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee. Appreciate it, Scott. 

Scott: Alex, this has been a really fun discussion so thank you very much for having me and happy to join anytime to keep talking about this stuff. Cheers. 

Alex: Absolutely. Cheers.