Marylène Delbourg-Delphis: A Pioneer's Perspective on the Innovation Journey

0:00From October 7th to 9th in San Francisco, the Masters of Scale Summit returns. It's where the boldest minds in business, tech, and beyond gather to build the future. And we want you to join us. Hear from the CEO of the New York Times, scientists using cutting-edge technology to find cures, the leader of crypto powerhouse Coinbase, a retired four-star general, and many, many more. They're all on the same stage, and it's not just another conference. It is the gathering for remarkable people. Apply to attend at mastersofscale.com slash remarkable. That's mastersofscale.com slash remarkable.

1:02Helping me in this episode is a very close friend, Marlene Delborg Delphise. She is a serial technology CEO, executive consultant, and board member. For over 30 years, she has empowered organizations to reshape their future by creating breakthrough platforms and applications. Marlene started her entrepreneurial journey in France. She founded a company called ACI. It published the first relational database for Macintosh in 1985. In 1987, she became one of the first European women to establish a tech company in Silicon Valley. I was co-founder with her of this company. She was also, by the way, instrumental in my writing career by encouraging me to write The Macintosh Way, my very first book.

1:54Marlene holds a doctrine in philosophy from, and I'm going to let her say the name of the school because I will never get that pronunciation right. So you're going to listen to her pronounce the school right now. École Normale Supérieure. She was rewarded the French Legion of Honor in 2018, the highest order of merit for military and civil accomplishments. Marilyn has served as CEO for companies such as Exemplary Software, BricksLogic, and Talent Circles. In addition to these achievements, Marilyn has written a new book. It's called Beyond Eureka, The Rocky Roads to Innovating. It's a remarkably executed explanation of innovation and entrepreneurship.

2:39I had the honor of writing the foreword for this book. I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is Remarkable People. And now, here is the remarkable Maherlaine Delborg Delphise.

2:54What is the French Legion of Honor Award? The French Legion of Honor is the highest civil and military honor that you can deserve for your outstanding action or of what you have done. And so it was created by Napoleon, I think. Yeah. So it's for a remarkable pool. Okay. And how does one win that award? You are nominated by people. And actually, I don't really know how it came to me. I think I was nominated by one of the French consuls, Pierre-François Mourier, who used to be a consul, remarkable consul in San Francisco. And he came from the same school as I was, l 'école normale supérieure. And he's a phenomenal Latinist, by the way.

3:52and after you win this award what happens i mean when you fly into charles de gaulle they just walk you through customs or what happens no no no nothing happens it's really a personal honor it's not a stage it's a prestigious but low-key honor and you don't strut around and say hey i'm a member of the legion of honor and whatnot no you don't do that it's it's very private in a way it's both very public because you're the list of people who have been on it but it's not something that you shout about that much okay so i'm so surprised you asked this question i'm curious obviously i could google it but i want to know from somebody who actually won it on this podcast we've interviewed a couple people who have won the macarthur fellowship angela duckworth and Stephen Wolfram.

4:46So I asked them what that like too. And then we actually interviewed the woman who used to run that program to find out how it works. It's in a way similar. And these people don't go around saying, Hey, here I am. And so forth. When you receive an award, the secret is I'm waiting for the MacArthur fellowship for podcasting. So that's my goal in life, but you have to be nominated. All right. So more on target for what you really want to talk about. Right. So let's start with an easy question. I want you to describe Woz. Was Woz an inventor or an innovator? I think he was first an inventor and he became an innovator.

5:34The difference is that when you focus on the invention, you focus on the how-to. When you speak of innovation, you make sure that you insert your invention into a context, a social background, into a market. And I think that Walsh has this double characteristic. He has this double talent because he was an amazing engineer. That's true. But he also understood that he was going to have users. So he was probably helped by Steve Jobs to understand that a market is very important. We have to live to survive. It's not enough to do a great product. You have to stage it. And so I think that the duo Vos and Steve Jobs was pretty amazing.

6:26But I think that those learn what an innovator was thanks to, through capillarity, basically, through his relationship with Steve Jobs. This is the way I perceive it. I hope I'm right. And so you would say Steve was innovator, purely an innovator, not an inventor. Yes. I think that usually people speak of inventor or invention because it sounds more prestigious. It used to it. at least. In reality, an innovator is, I believe, more incredible than an inventor. An inventor focused on one domain. And somebody, Eli Steve Jobs, was able to aggregate several domains and basically use the world as a big store of possibilities.

7:16And so he was able to dramatize, sometimes I say theatricalize what was around him. And he is a phenomenal innovator. So of course, he had patents over 400, but he didn't write those patents himself. And it's still prestigious to have patents, but he is an amazing innovator. Now, does it make sense to you? You know him better than I did. Not necessarily. I think the world is full of people who think they knew Steve Jobs and they didn't. You knew it better than most. Yeah. For better of a while. Well, yeah, but I was inside the reality distortion field, so it's not clear that I knew what I was seeing.

8:06Yes, but you know what? I think you're right. You were inside the reality distortion field, But this is also how innovation operates. You have to believe that the world will bend to your will to actually do stuff. And it doesn't necessarily happen. And you then have to adjust to the world. But you have to be in a sort of reality distortion field. It may not reach the dimensions that Steve Jobs gave to this. But you have to somehow. So aren't you saying in a sense that innovators, they're on the spectrum or they're on some spectrum? In a way. Yeah. I wouldn't be that excessive, but you have to be very realistic, but move away from reality a little bit.

9:02Because they have to come back to reality. Because otherwise people are not going to buy their stuff. Okay. So it's a very strange dance between reality and unreality. Now, it seems to me that you use the term innovator and entrepreneur interchangeably. And I was actually surprised at that because I think you can be an entrepreneur and not particularly innovative. So why do you use them interchangeably? This is what I mentioned in the beginning of the book. Given that it's about innovation, I assume that I was speaking of innovative entrepreneurs only. Because you are right, you can be an entrepreneur and you don't necessarily innovate.

9:53When you create a pizza in your neighborhood, you don't necessarily innovate. So in practice, given that the word entrepreneur is more often used than the word innovator, so I use them interchangeably. But in the beginning of the book, I put a caveat, meaning when I use entrepreneurs, innovator. And do you think that every innovator is an entrepreneur? I mean, by definition, because you're not just an inventor, you're also trying to take it to the market and make it a product or a service that exists and is sold and used. So that's when you cross the line between invention and innovation slash entrepreneurship.

10:38Yes. Most innovators try to be entrepreneurs, try to build a company. It doesn't mean that we'll necessarily succeed because when you innovate, you believe that you have a market. but how well do you evaluate the ability to have this market? Because you assume that people will need it. You assume that people will expect you. And for most innovators, actually, customers don't expect us or they find out about us when we are almost dead. Think of general magic. Innovators are entrepreneurs. always okay because they want to push something on the market the reality is that between what we hope that people will adopt and the fact that they will adopt it there can be a huge gap and there can be a long time so general magic was a very innovative enterprise and built by extraordinary people.

11:49The market was not ready. Some aspect of the technology was not completely mature. And at the time they were getting it almost, it was too late. So that's why I would say that these innovators who fail, but have done amazing things are trailblazers. Usually we speak of trailblazers as the iconic figures like the Steve Jobs and company. For me, all these people who clean the brushes and build up the possibilities of more technologies and build up the path for others are trailblazers. In reality, there are far more trailblazers in history than we believe. all the people who created the PDAs and basically now survive, there are extraordinary trailblazers.

12:46And you don't need to be famous or to be remembered by history to be looked at as a trailblazer. I would say that many of the big icons that we know are incredibly bright trail followers. They follow what others have done. And they come at the right moment, they stage it the right way so that people will be able to absorb them. So I always want to say to entrepreneurs, innovators, that even if they fail, even if their company doesn't survive, they probably have done major things that people will leverage. So all the PDAs, entrepreneurs, basically paved the way for things like the iPhone. Can't you make the case then that being a trail follower or a fast trail follower is a better strategy than being a trailblazer?

13:51We can make this case, but the trail followers arrive when there is enough invention and innovation within the domain, when the domain has reached a level of maturity. So the trail followers who are geniuses, don't get me wrong, trail followers are geniuses who understand, who are able to aggregate all the components of a very large landscape. For example, Edison is a genius. He's also leveraging lots of research on electricity that had been happening for, I would say, 60 years. He integrated this into a hall and make it a city light. The same with Bell, okay? Graham Bell. He did not invent a telephone, but he put together all the pieces of the telephone and make it happen in a context where people could adopt it.

14:54By that line of reasoning, you would say that Alan Kay and Doug Engelbart were the trailblazers and Steve Jobs was the trail follower, right? He took the thoughts of Xerox PARC and he actually brought it to market. So are you saying Steve Jobs is a trail follower? Yes, but I don't like the word trail follower. It doesn't sound as prestigious, right? It's not like the French Legion of Honor, no. No, I rely upon you to find a good word. That's why I didn't use the expression trail follower on my book. Those geniuses have a sense of dramaturgy. They are stage directors. Maybe instead of trail follower, we should say trail director.

15:39Okay. Multi-trail director. I trust you will find phenomenal word for trail follower. But my point really is to render homage to the countless trail blazers. And the same with the pioneers. The pioneers were the soldier who would go first on the front, and they opened up the rest for the army, the space for the army. So I would like the world trailblazers and pioneers be of a wider use than what it is, and encompass more people. I'm sorry.

16:28How would you judge Elon Musk? He is a phenomenal stage director. And he put together lots of trends, just like Steve Jobs. He has not invented electric vehicle or self-driving vehicles. The dream for self-driverless vehicles started with the advent of automobiles, but the technologies were not ready. And so at a given time, things seem to come together. And the genius of these people is to see this happening and coalesce things which were kind of scattered around. So maybe we should say trailblazers and geniuses. Okay. Okay. I'd love to hear your opinion of the value and what people can learn from Walter Isaacson's and various other people's biographies of Steve Jobs or Elon Musk.

17:32What is there to learn from a biography from those kind of people? For very good biographies, I have not read the Elon Musk biography, so I cannot speak, but I have read the biography of Steve Jobs. What I like about biographies is that they are not hagiographic narratives. There is always a kind of sympathy for the person you speak about, but they usually explain more of the ups and downs of the career. Most of the time in business courses, you give these geniuses as the example to follow. without taking into account that their path has been sinuous, complicated, and that in many respects they have been lucky too.

18:25They also have been unlucky. And so what I like about biographies, it tells the story of the life of people and reintegrates genius within the vagaries of life. with a minimal haggographic aspect. And so I prefer also older biographies done by people who are not part of the business world. I love the biographies of Kodak. That's why I selected Kodak, because he was recounting the ups and downs of Kodak, of George Eastman, in a very factual, matter of fact fashion. Well, let me ask you something. So what do you think of books like Burn by Kara Swisher? Because she's part of the industry and she's writing about the industry.

19:18This is the way I have only started it. So I cannot speak in detail. This is the way she felt. So I think it's a testimony of how she perceived the world around her. And for this, I like this approach. We may think, we may have opinions about how she perceives that, how she describes it, but this is how she felt. And this by itself has value. And on top of this, she is a woman. and things may reverberate in her mind slightly differently. I would put that mildly, yes. Slightly differently, yes. Okay. No, we have to respect these kind of initiatives. When I read a book, I try to understand the mindset of the people who read the book.

20:15And when I disagree, I tend to give them the benefit of the doubt. Dare I ask, since you read Think Remarkable, what you think our mindset was? Oh, this is really a book I love. Do you know that? And I like it because it's a summary of a life. It's your perception of the world. It's actually not judgmental. And it's trying to help people build their own personality and put it together and show that we are actually very diverse. We are a multiplicity of people. I really like this book. And it's so much better than any self-help book because it's not normative. I don't know what normative means in that sense.

21:09You're not telling people. you should do this, you should do that. You show them example of people who have done this and that. And then it's up to us to say, oh, maybe I could do this too. Okay. So from now on, when people tell me, ask me to describe the book, I'm going to say, it's not normative and I'm going to hope they understand what I just said. You are too hard on me. Okay. But this is an English word, right? I don't know. you don't okay so you don't give absolute norms you give goals okay because i don't consider myself nor do i ever want to be a self-help guru i don't want to be exactly there's never going to be a guy kawasaki madison nismir course at the ritz carlton where you're in five hours we're going to tell you how to be remarkable.

22:08That ain't going to happen ever. Maybe Madison will do it, but not with my blessing.

22:15But there is one thing is you are able to have a real influence on people. And I'm in a very good position to say it. You helped me so much by who you were when you joined the company when we started the company together i learned so much by capillarity you didn't tell me you should do this and should do that even though you were probably more dogmatic at the time and now but you let me learn from you i think we learned from each other people listening you should understand that because you wouldn't know this marilyn and i I started a company called ACI US and we had a product called Fourth Dimension or a Macintosh relational database.

23:05And it was because of her that I left Apple and I started this company. And, you know, the rest is history. And also, let's just set the record straight that it was because of her encouragement that I wrote my first book, The Macintosh Way. Arguably, without Marilyn in my life, I would not have become a writer. That's a distinct possibility. Well, thank you. But I am forever grateful that you accepted that we would work together because I had no idea of what the Silicon Valley ecosystem was. and it saved me probably years of learning because you had it in your bones already. I learned so many American idioms because remember at the time, my English was fairly academic.

24:05I have kept my accent, but my English, I think, has become pretty decent. And I discovered Asia through you. Mm-hmm. I discovered the art of saying yes before thinking no. This was very important. I do. Very important. I default to yes. That is very true. Yes. And this was very profound for me because as a European and especially French, we tend to argue a lot. No. Here we are. but hearing you say yes when i knew you were not so sure was incredibly important oh okay i don't know if we're going to keep this part in the podcast but while i think about it all right i'm going to ask you two really silly questions but i really want to know okay so i discussed the concept of and i'm i'm going to tell you these two things so that you can tell only the absolute correct way to say these French words because I am not sure.

25:18Okay. So number one is noblesse oblige. Is that the right pronunciation? Yes. You have an American accent, but it's noblesse oblige. Okay. And then we have this person in our book and in our podcast who's very artistic and very talented. His name is Halim Flowers. Yes. And many people consider him the next generation Jean-Michel. And this is, I don't know how to pronounce his last name. Is it Basquiat? Yes. You would say, with a French accent, you would say Jean-Michel Basquiat, who was an amazing artist. But you can say Jean-Michel Basquiat. American people say Because I live in great fear that I'll say noblesse oblige and Jean-Michel Basquiat someplace and some French intellectual sitting in the audience will say, oh, this dumbass American can't even say French words.

26:14I disagree. People who would think this way would just be silly. Okay, back on track here. So now, let's talk about disruption. Do you think disruption is overrated and it's like a bullshit venture capital term? It's definitely overrated. When you look at the history of the word, it really picked up in the 80s and 90s mostly. The word was used before in a completely different context and not in business context. The theme is, if you're not disruptive, you're going to die because somebody is going to do better than you do. Why would you need such a big word to express something which is logical?

27:01If you don't evolve, your company will die. That's about it. And it became a sort of cottage industry world for consultants. We are going to help you disrupt the world. In reality, when you hear an entrepreneur telling you that he is going to disrupt a field, either he is naive or he doesn't know the space. the evolution of technology and the adoption of technology is really progressive. You're not going to change all behaviors overnight. You're not going to kill IBM overnight if you want to kill IBM. It's just very naive. And it's a very negative view of innovation. In fact, innovators wants to build construct more than disrupt.

27:58What's the point of disrupting somebody else? The point is to build a business, right? And I do agree with Rene Mobon beyond disruption. And in my book, I discuss the concept from a more historical standpoint, because the notion of disruption appeared in the 1980s, but the researcher using it did not think of it from the point of view of one company disrupting the planet at all. And the idea of disruption also came in sociological research to show that the evolution of the world history is not linear, it's not cause and effect relationship. And so what happened is that Christensen used a term which was getting trendy in the 70s, 80s, and use it into business.

28:49I think it's a good consulting business term. It does not describe the reality of how innovation happens. And if you, as an entrepreneur or an innovator, your goal is to disrupt everything, you're most likely to fail because people are not going to buy you. So are you saying that when you mention Christensen, you're referring to Clayton Christensen and the innovator's dilemma. So are you saying the innovator's dilemma is not accurate or you're just saying that it's mislabeled? I think it's mislabeled. He gives interesting advice, but like many business books, so you need to have a sort of grandiose term to strike the mind of people.

29:39and to build a school of idea, when in reality, it's our logical, interesting advice to management in the same way as many other authors. We don't need to have those big labels. And certainly we don't need entrepreneurs to think that they are going to be disruptive because first, usually great things start small. you understand you're talking to someone who's trying to make the word remarkable just like the word disruption right no and i think the good thing is that remarkable is more normal okay to be remarkable this is a word that you say in everyday life and so what you do is that you aggregate the various components of being remarkable.

30:38But in everyday life, you say, oh, this is remarkable. This person is remarkable. This book is remarkable. You show how the word remarkable has a wide range of meaning. I must admit, I never use the word disruption. Never. Okay. Okay. Very good. So you make my point here. Yes, exactly. You don't go around. You're not going to buy an Oura ring because it disrupts Bulgari or Kati. To your point, I don't think people wake up in the morning saying, God, I got to buy something disruptive. Exactly not. In fact, you want to buy something which is not disruptive, which is seductive. Yes. You want to be persuaded to buy.

31:29You want to be brought into buying something. You want to charm, not to shock. I knew it was inevitable to interview someone who's French and we'd get to sex somehow. Oh, no.

31:48And I would also make the case that you can only label things disruptive after the fact. You can't predict it. Exactly. This is an after the fact. I don't see the point. And if you say to a customer, it's disruptive, they're going to wait until other people adopt the product because they don't want to disrupt their business. So it's a very negative view. It has probably its usage, but when I hear an entrepreneur tell me that it's disruptive, it's usually that he doesn't know the space very much. it's really you're gonna get my book and podcast banned inside of mackenzie which if he keeps talking about disruption being a bad word it's not a bad word it's a kind of filler word okay it's just when people always use this kind of expression without knowing the origin and the actual meaning, it becomes empty.

32:48I would say that it's empty. People have to stay disruptive to look serious. That's McKinsey. They don't use it more than other people. I think it's just part of the lingo. And one day when the people train in the 80s and 90s are going to disappear, the world is going to disappear. Up next on Remarkable People. Most of the time when we produce innovation, We think that what we do is so great that people will knock at our door and bike in drove. We forget that before we buy the next iPhone, we say, well, do I really need one? And so we hesitate, not because we are unable to make a decision. We say, oh, that's cool, but do I really need it?

33:28And so forth. We have to understand that people don't operate at our speed.