Jeff Standridge (Intro):
Welcome to season five of the Innovation Junkies Podcast. In this season, you’ll learn from successful innovators who have influential stories, practices, and strategies that will have your gears turning. Prepare to be inspired, challenged, and empowered. This is the Innovation Junkies Podcast.
Jeff Standridge:
Hey guys, welcome to another episode of the Innovation Junkies Podcast. My name’s Jeff Standridge.
Jeff Amerine:
Hey, this is Jeff Amerine. Glad to be back on. How you doing, Jeff?
Jeff Standridge:
Hey, I’m good. You got new surroundings?
Jeff Amerine:
Absolutely. Actually down in south Texas with a new grandbaby that was delivered earlier this week.
Jeff Standridge:
Congrats. Congratulations, man. How many does this make for you now?
Jeff Amerine:
Up to five. Got enough for a basketball team now, but I think they probably got my basketball skills, so.
Jeff Standridge:
Yeah, no chance. You’ll have a couple of subs.
Jeff Amerine:
There you go. Exactly.
Jeff Standridge:
Very good, very good. Well, our last episode of the season, season five.
Jeff Amerine:
Hard to believe, five seasons. How is it that we haven’t canceled yet is what I want to know.
Jeff Standridge:
We probably have just nobody told us.
Jeff Amerine:
That’s probably right.
Jeff Standridge:
Well, I got a couple of questions here in the last week or two around just what is it that Innovation Junkie does? So, we occasionally will reference it on a podcast. We’ll say, well, when we work with clients in this manner, we do X and Y. I thought it might be good just to give our listeners a little more of a taste of Innovation junkie and what a customer journey with us looks like and see if we can answer some of those questions. What do you think?
Jeff Amerine:
I think that’s great. So why don’t you lead us off on how a typical engagement starts?
Jeff Standridge:
Yeah. Clients come to us with different requests. So they may come in the door and because of the name innovation, they may come to us and say Innovation junkie. They may say, look, I need to do something around innovation or because they know we do a lot of work around strategic growth planning and helping them chart new paths. They may come to us saying, I need some of that, or I need some executive development. And similar to what a good pediatrician will do when a parent will come in and says, my child has green stuff in his nose. I think he needs an antibiotic. A good physician will say, well, you know what? You may be right, but why don’t we step back and do a little bit of an assessment and let’s confirm our hypotheses or confirm our suspicions and maybe do a little discovery work.
So we tend to do that with our Growth DX which can be located at growthdx.ai. That is our proprietary strategic growth diagnostic that it’s a fairly simple process, takes about 30 minutes or so per participant to complete. Usually we have between five and 12 participants from a company and they’re the top executives within that company. Everything from the CEO down to pretty much his or her direct reports because they are the experts in terms of how that business operates. And we actually have each of them individually complete a best practices assessment against probably 70 different best practices categorized into a handful of diagnostic domains like revenue velocity, which is the speed, power, and effectiveness of their sales, marketing and messaging efforts, organizational effectiveness and operational effectiveness, leadership effectiveness, innovation readiness, digital readiness and financial disciplines. And so they assess the company against those best practices. We provide a heat map back to them showing them the red, yellow, green areas focusing obviously on the red and yellow areas for the most part. And then we tend to provide them some type of ROI analysis back that gives them an indication of do they have profits locked up in the company that they might be able to unleash by focusing on a disciplined approach to bringing those best practices out in their company or to practicing those best practices, so to speak. And so that’s generally where we start.
Jeff Amerine:
That’s a good way of turning the mirror back around and it is one of those sort of self-assessment things where, at that point, it’s not us coming in giving them a bunch of advice.
Jeff Standridge:
That’s right.
Jeff Amerine:
It’s their assessment, the people that ought to know the business the best about where they are in some key areas.
Jeff Standridge:
That’s right. We also have a number of open-ended questions where these senior leaders of the organization answer some more open-ended questions about what’s your greatest leadership challenge? What’s your greatest challenge around financial disciplines or around sales and marketing and what have you? And so we analyze that information, both the numerical assessments and the actual qualitative assessments, and we provide back to them, as you said, that mirror. We turn the mirror back and say, this is what the people in your organization who represent the experts in terms of how your business operates, this is what they have to say about your company. And because we’ve been doing this for a number of years and we have a number of clients under our belt that we’ve worked with, we are able to provide them some recommendations to say, this is where we recommend you consider going down this path or this path.
Here are two or three things you might think about. Here are some things that we’ve done with other clients that had similar results from their Growth DX and what we recommended to them and what have you. So that’s our Growth dx. That then usually leads to some type of an engagement. You know what? It may not lead to any engagement. It may just lead to here’s the assessment and here’s what we would recommend and you and your, to the degree that you think that you are ready, willing, capable, and disciplined. You can implement any remediations yourself if you want to. And so we provide all of that back as a result of that
Jeff Amerine:
No obligation. There’s no obligation at that point. We haven’t charged them anything. It’s really an assessment, but we have found is about nine out of 10 times it illuminates things where they really do feel like they need some intervention or they need some help. So what are some of those next things we would typically do?
Jeff Standridge:
One of those things is what we call an innovation sprint. Let’s say that they’re just hung up on several real deep challenges in the organization that they don’t really know how to solve problems. Then we might bring together a little wider group of folks throughout the organization and run a day long innovation sprint or a multi-day innovation sprint where we might pose a challenge question to them, something along the lines of what one problem or opportunity problem if you seized it, if you solved it opportunity, if you seized it would be a complete and total game changer for your organization. And we use a bit of crowdsourcing from folks within the organization to identify what those things are and to provide some down selection, some analysis of those, some down selection of those, and then ultimately help them spin up two or three initiatives around solving those particular challenges.
The next step might be an actual full strategic growth system implementation where we might steer clear of using the words strategic plan because those two words are used so badly and done so badly in so many organizations. Where we find is it’s real easy to put a plan together where the rubber meets the road is can you execute against that plan? So we’ve developed our own proprietary strategic growth system that borrows from some of the best thinkers around the business world, including our own experience and expertise and help our clients develop usually a three to five year strategic growth plan and then an execution system wrapped around that strategic growth plan. That’s usually a 12 month engagement at minimum. A growth DX is a very short term kind of thing. No cost allows us to turn the mirror back on them. Then there’s the innovation sprint that might run anywhere from a day or two to six or eight weeks when fully baked. A strategic growth system implementation is a minimum of a 12 month engagement where we’re actually working with them a couple of days on the front end, maybe another series of a couple of days depending upon the need, and then every quarter we’re coming, bringing them back together and assessing accountabilities against that growth plan and what have you.
Jeff Amerine:
Jeff, a question for you as part of that, maybe to add some additional context In order for a client to get the most utility out of that process, what’s essential, what do they need to do from a senior leadership standpoint to get the most value out of going through a strategic growth system implementation process with us?
Jeff Standridge:
Yeah. First and foremost, they need to be committed to the process. They need to understand that it becomes a way of being and a way of operating, not just a plan that they put in a three ring binder and put it on the shelf and pull it out every six months to see how they’ve done that. It permeates everything all the way down to their organizational chart or a accountability chart as we call it, and their weekly leadership meeting cadence. So not only are they addressing the operational needs of the week, they’re also tying back to their strategic growth plan every single week. So that’s number one. Number two, they need to have the right people at the table and they need to understand that at least 50% of the time, the leaders who engage in this process begin to understand that they have some gaps sitting at the table or not sitting at the table, I guess I should say. And they have to either coach some people up pretty quickly that many times they’ll leverage us to help them do that, or they need to fill some gaps that exist at that table and bring some people in.
Jeff Amerine:
And we’ve seen instances where it was clear there needed to be new senior leadership, new CEO level. It was clear we had some people in the wrong seats. It was clear that there were some people that were maybe good early on, but were at a point where they’d sort of outlived their usefulness and without having this kind of process, it feels like conjecture or anecdotal, but this is a process where you can’t help but see it once you go through this kind of activity.
Jeff Standridge:
That’s right, and the executive teams that have done the best and that have excelled in the presence of a strategic growth system implementation have taken action when they saw it. The ones who have struggled have been the ones who have struggled to take action. Now, action can be everything from shuffling responsibility so that you get the right people in the right place. It can be bringing additional people to the table to provide new perspective and new expertise. It can be coaching some people up who have been maybe historically underperforming, but we weren’t really able to put our thumb on that underperformance, and now we are able to all the way to in extreme cases, having to replace some folks. And that doesn’t happen extremely often, but sometimes it does. And so just like leadership at any organization, we have to make tough calls sometimes, and so we help provide the leaders, the executives, with the information that they need to be able to make those decisions appropriately.
Jeff Amerine:
Absolutely.
Jeff Standridge:
Sometimes that strategic growth system and the Growth DX in tandem will very early on point to a deeper engagement, which we refer to as an organizational transformation engagement. And we’re involved and have been involved in at least three or four of those just in the last few weeks and months where we completely in tandem with the executive team and the board. So one thing I didn’t mention, sometimes the board hires us. Sometimes the CEO hires us with board approval, but almost always there’s some level of board engagement in what we do. And when it’s the CEO that hires us many times we are presenting to the board updates and fielding questions from the board in terms of what’s going on and providing that third party advisory level guidance to the board and to the executive team. But sometimes we find that we need to do a complete organizational transformation to you just pointed out where we helped them search for a new CEO. We’ve done that at least two or three times where we’ve participated in helping them find a new CEO or maybe bringing in a COO or another C-level executive to the team.
Maybe the transformation is focused on a particular area like their sales and marketing organization or their technology organization. And so we’re able to do deep dives into those various functions within the organization as well to help them do that. We’re constantly looking across the organization and all of our interactions for what I would say are the indicators of culture. Back when you and I were working on the line as line managers within large organizations, culture was something that was generally relegated to the HR department. It seldom entered into the C-suite conversation, but since that time, culture, positive, strong, positive work cultures have been positively correlated with virtually every indicator of business performance. And so over the course of the last, call it decade to five years, culture has catapulted itself into the C-suite conversation, and we’ve been able to identify a number of areas of culture, which we call the culture of excellence that we’re constantly observing organizations for.
Jeff Amerine:
Talk more about that with the backdrop of Drucker said culture, eat strategy for breakfast. And I think to reiterate that he really meant the culture is an integral part of a successful strategy, if you had to restate it. So, talk about our culture of excellence that we believe in, that we
Jeff Standridge:
Employ. So we’ve observed a number of companies that tend to do extremely well in creating sustained strategic growth, and there are about six elements that they foster within their organization, which we’ve built into a framework we call the culture of excellence, the first of which is strong leadership. They’ve got the right people at the leadership levels who are committed to the vision of the organization being the destination they’re trying to take, the organization, the mission of the organization, why it exists and what it exists to do. They’re bought into the strategy, which is the playing fields that this organization chooses to play on and the games they choose to play because they know they can win at it. So they’re bought into all of those things and they create the number two item, which is clarity and focus, clarity and focus around all of those items, mission, vision, values, strategy, et cetera.
But also they help to ensure that clarity and focus exist at the individual employer or associate level as well. They help employees understand how they contribute to the common good of the organization versus just coming to work and doing tasks every day. That leads then to the third level or the third element of a culture of excellence, which is engaged and committed teammates. Teammates who are bought in to where we’re going, they know how they contribute to the common good. They have individual competence but also clearly defined in accepted roles, and that drives their engagement. I like to talk about the fact that turnover is when someone quits and leaves, disengagement is when someone quits and stays, and it’s probably worse than turnover.
The next element of a culture of excellence is empowering communication. So leaders that have conversations with folks that make them stronger and more confident in dealing with the circumstances they’re facing, doing their jobs, overcoming obstacles. They may have to have tough conversations on occasion, but they don’t just stop at a tough conversation. They circle back around and try to help that person feel empowered, which is stronger and more confident in moving forward. 100% accountability is the fifth element. That’s a binary equation. If I’m accountable to you, then I’m come hell or high water, I’m going to do what I said I’m going to do when I say I’m going to do it, and the first possible moment I see that there’s a potential snafu there, I’m going to come to you and say, Hey, look, I’m in trouble. There’s a risk with me being able to do what I said.
Are we still on track for the same timeline or can you give me a few hours or a few days? And then finally, this concept of organizational agility, and we generally refer to the management thinker, Peter Drucker and also the management thinker, Mike Tyson, who said, everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. And organizational agility is about yak getting knocked down 10 times and getting up 11 when you get punched in the mouth, but it’s also about anticipating a potential punch, sidestepping that punch, doing things that you can do to prevent that punch and rebounding whenever you do get punched and that within your organization as well.
Jeff Amerine:
I love the Tyson reference and sometimes strategy is about taking $20 million and not punching the other guy at all.
Jeff Standridge
Yeah, that’s exactly right.
Jeff Amerine:
I’m not saying he took a fall, but I’m saying him versus a YouTuber, so who knows.
Jeff Standridge:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sometimes, you just keep your mouth shut and take that 20 and run, right, and hug him through the last three rounds.
Jeff Amerine:
Exactly. Yeah, exactly.
Jeff Standridge:
And so as I said, those organizational transformations and even the strategic growth system or at least 12 engagements, sometimes they’re multi-year engagements and usually our clients do stay with us multiple years in both of those scenarios. We’ve had some clients we’ve worked with for four or five years, some clients we’ve worked with for a couple of years, then they took a break and came back to us, and we’re willing to do that with anyone that works with us. But what we’ve developed most recently, which we’re rolling out in 2025, is what we call our strategic growth forum. So many of our listeners are probably familiar with peer advisory groups. There are things out there, C 12 Vistage, and there are a variety of others out there where there are peer advisory groups that come together on a monthly basis in a very confidential format. They receive some development together with guest speakers, but they also dig into the challenges that each of those businesses are facing, and they serve as sounding boards and peer advisors to one another along with some quarterly coaching and what have you. And so we’re going to be launching that in 2025, very early in 2025 for those folks who maybe don’t feel like that they’re ready for a full strategic growth system implementation, one-on-one with our team, but want to get the benefits of a strategic growth system and maybe leverage a peer advisory group to do that. So we’re going to be rolling that out and be happy to visit with anybody. In fact, we’ve got some information about that. If folks want to reach out to me at Innovation Junkie,
Jeff Amerine:
Well talk a little bit more about what kind of commitment that would mean if somebody’s sort of a C-level person. And maybe a lot of times the reason why these things come about is you feel alone, you don’t have peers you can talk to and confidence. Talk a little bit about what level of commitment from them in terms of their time that would be required, and then also how it might be a little different than what they get at a Vistage or a Mastermind group or something else.
Jeff Standridge:
So first and foremost, the commitment is complete and total confidentiality and discretion. There’s generally non-competitive industries at the table, so recognizing that we can all benefit from guidance and advice that comes from executives outside of our industry, but we also don’t want to have conflicted interests thereby having competing industries. And it’s generally about a day, a month, five to six hours per month, including lunch at the end of each session. There’s generally what I would call achievement planning or goal setting for the following month based upon the content from that session. But a session might look like this. We might come in at the start of the session and 30 minutes we’re kind of just getting caught up with each other on maybe coffee and pastries or what have you. But then when we sit down and dig in, we start by doing a round robin and we go around and get caught up and say, Hey, last month you talked about doing X, Y, and Z before today.
Let’s talk about did you do that? And if not, why And what steps have you put in place to prevent getting distracted next time? And everyone around the table’s able to ask each other questions in that regard. So a couple of minutes of person, nothing intensive. Then we might do a what’s called the hot seat. We might have two or three of those group members who know ahead of time that they’re going to come in and they’re going to have about 30 minutes on the hot seat to unpack a particular challenge or issue or maybe a new product category or a new service opportunity or a potential acquisition. Again, this is all confidential. Everyone signs NDAs and confidentiality statements, so they’re free to actually talk openly about what the challenge is that they’re facing. And there’s a very specific process we go that enables folks around the room to ask questions, clarifying questions.
Once we are sure that everyone understands the challenge, then it’s a session focused just on giving ’em feedback. Have you thought about this? Have you thought about that? In my experience, I did this. You might try so-and-so, et cetera. So that takes about 30 minutes. We might run two or three of those hot seat sessions. Then we’re going to break for lunch, bring in a guest speaker to talk about specific development content that’s generally identified by the group. So we would do a needs analysis of the group and say, what kind of experts do you want us to bring in this year? For instance, we’d schedule those out through the year and then we would close the day by everyone sitting down and doing some focused planning for the coming month based upon either that expert session or maybe the things that they established as accomplishments for last month that they didn’t get done, and now they know what they need to do to regroup or if they sat on the hot seat, their accomplishments for the coming month may have to do specifically with that hot seat discussion. But they plan and share their accomplishments for the coming month. We dismiss and they go about their remaining 29 days of the month,
Jeff Amerine:
And about once a year, we’re also going to use some of our proprietary tools like the Growth DX to see where they are in that journey to go through and do a little bit of that organizational, I guess that’s one of the things that’s pretty significantly different than what you get from a Vistage or other groups and that there are some proprietary tools that we’ll use.
Jeff Standridge:
That’s right. So they’re going to get the opportunity to kind of self implement a strategic growth system. So we would start the year with a Growth DX and a strategic growth planning retreat, and that would take place on the front end. Then we would go through the normal cadence of monthly meetings, and then the start of the next year, we would likely have a couple of people who would roll out and a couple of people who would roll in. And oh, by the way, once a group is established, they generally get input into when and whom we accept new members and whom those folks are. And we would do another strategic growth planning retreat to enable folks to update their growth plan based upon everything they’ve learned in the previous year and hold each other accountable. So it’s a peer advisory, it’s an accountability, it’s a networking and a referral group kind of all rolled into one.
Jeff Amerine:
That sounds awesome. And if our clients or potential clients want to learn more about it, what’s the best way for them to do that?
Jeff Standridge:
Best way is just to email me directly. They can go to innovationjunkie.com and fill out an information form, or they can just email me directly at jeffs@innovationjunkie.com.
Jeff Amerine:
Awesome. I think we’ve just about landed the plane, didn’t we?
Jeff Standridge:
I think we did. Those are really the ways that our customers tend to journey with us, and we tend to journey with our customers. And so we, we’ve been doing this for five seasons, and we’ve never really talked about what we do, although in season three, we did spend some time deep diving into various elements of how we approach a strategic growth system, how we approach a culture of excellence, how we approach a variety of things. So if you want to learn more, maybe deep dive. We’ve talked about the customer journey, but if you want to deep dive into our philosophies and our approach to many of these things, you might look back at season three and we’d be glad to answer any questions.
Jeff Amerine:
And we were younger and way better looking then, too.
Jeff Standridge:
A lot less gray hair.
Well, hey, it’s been a great season, Jeff. As always, I look forward to thinking about what season six is going to look like and sound like. So, I would encourage anybody that’s an avid listener out there to do a couple of things. Number one, subscribe to our podcast, subscribe to our YouTube channel, leave us a review number three and number four, give us some feedback about things you’d like to hear, guests you would like to maybe have us invite onto the podcast or specific content or challenges that you’re facing that you’d love some help with. And we’d love to bake that into the season six plan.
Jeff Amerine:
Man. Outstanding. I’m looking forward to next season already.
Jeff Standridge:
Good stuff. Hey guys, this has been another episode of the Innovation Junkies Podcast. Stay tuned for season six coming before you know it. Thanks so much. See you next season.
Jeff Amerine (Outro):
Thanks for tuning into another episode of the Innovation Junkies Podcast. We hope you gain some valuable insights and inspiration from today’s conversation. Be sure to subscribe for more episodes featuring leaders in the forefront of innovation. And don’t forget to connect with us on social media to continue the conversation. See you next time.