In short
Podcast Notes: The Ed Mylett Show - The Microsoft Mindset: How Innovation Fuels Success & Growth
Episode Overview In this episode, Ed Mylett is joined by co-host Candy Valentino, alongside Microsoft Chief Innovation Officers Dean Carignan and JoAnn Garbin. The discussion revolves around Microsoft’s culture of innovation, the importance of adaptability, and practical strategies that can be applied to businesses of any size.
Key Guests
- Dean Carignan: A 20-year veteran at Microsoft, pivotal in driving the company to its first billion dollars in revenue.
- JoAnn Garbin: Formerly the Director of Innovation at Microsoft with 25 years of experience launching innovative products.
Key Concepts and Takeaways
The Importance of Innovation
- Constant Reinvention: Microsoft’s success is attributed to a culture of continuous innovation and reinvention.
- Learn Fast vs. Fail Fast: Emphasizes that learning quickly is more beneficial than merely failing fast, promoting a mindset focused on growth and adaptation.
Strategies for Innovation
- Double-Loop Learning:
- Definition: Moving beyond simply iterating on ideas to reassessing the assumptions behind them.
- Benefits: Helps identify if the right problems are being solved, often leading to necessary changes in business models or propositions.
- Think Weeks & Hack Weeks:
- Think Weeks: Dedicated time for deep reflection on relevant topics, allowing for divergence in thought and idea generation.
- Hack Weeks: Encourages hands-on experimentation where employees can prototype new ideas and collaborate outside their usual roles.
- Self-Disruption:
- Necessary for staying relevant and avoiding complacency, companies must actively seek to disrupt their own processes to innovate.
Metrics & Measurement
- User Kept Rate: A metric that measures whether users continue to use the features introduced, focusing on user retention rather than traditional revenue metrics.
- Key Metrics for Innovation: It is vital for all businesses, regardless of size, to understand and track their metrics to measure success effectively.
AI and Future Implications
- AI as an Enabler: AI is positioned to cover weaknesses in various roles, enabling individuals to focus on creative and strategic tasks.
- Human-AI Complementarity: Emphasizes the importance of collaborating with AI for enhanced productivity rather than allowing it to completely replace human roles.
Building a Culture of Innovation
- Psychological Safety: Creating an environment where team members feel safe to share ideas and experiment is crucial.
- Collaborative Networks: Encouraging teamwork and collective brainstorming can lead to innovative ideas that might not surface in isolated environments.
Practical Applications for Entrepreneurs
- Think Time: Encourage individuals to set aside dedicated time away from distractions to critically think and innovate in their personal and professional lives.
- Decision Matrix: Use a structured approach to evaluate ideas based on mission, values, and potential impact, similar to the practices adopted at Microsoft.
Conclusion The episode underscores that innovation is not just the responsibility of large corporations but can be implemented by individuals and small businesses alike. By fostering a culture of learning, leveraging AI, and encouraging collaborative efforts, anyone can cultivate a mindset geared towards growth and success.
Call to Action Listeners are encouraged to apply these insights to their own lives and businesses to remain competitive in a rapidly changing landscape.
---
Feel free to share these notes with anyone looking to harness the principles of innovation in their personal and professional lives!
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:28So, hey guys, listen, we're all trying to get more productive. $10 ,000 worth of courses that are in there that come with the app. Also, some of the top influencers in the world are all posting content in there on a regular basis, like having the Avengers of personal development and business in one app. And I'm honored that he asked me to be a part of it as well and contribute on a weekly basis, and I do. So go over there and get signed up. You're going to get a free tuition-free voucher to go to an event with Brendan and myself and a bunch of other influencers as well. So you get a free event out of it also.
0:53So go to growthday.com forward slash ed. That's growthday.com forward slash ed.
1:26you options within your budget. Try it today at Progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law. Not available in all states.
1:40This episode is brought to you by Marshalls, where you never have to compromise between quality and price. The buyers of Marshalls hustle hard, working to bring you great deals on brand name and designer pieces. Because Marshalls believes everyone deserves access to the good stuff. Visit a Marshall store near you or shop online at marshalls.com.
2:08This is the Ed Miland Show. All right, welcome back to the show, everybody. So this week is really special for me for a couple reasons. Number one, the lady to my left, Candy Valentino, is joining me here today. One of my dear friends. Thank you for being here. That's right. And you guys have seen Candy on the show a couple different times and have just loved her appearances. And we have a topic today that's very, very heavy business stuff. And I wanted Candy to help me kind of carry the weight of this podcast because of her background in business. So you get a treat of getting a chance to actually listen and watch four of us today.
2:41So anyway, we've got an unbelievable show for you today. Just think Microsoft and all of the inside secrets of how to build and innovate in your company. And Candy, I'll let you kind of take over from here. but thank you for being here. It's great to have you, and I'll let you kind of introduce our guests. Thanks so much for having me. It's always an honor to be, one, trusted with your audience, but this is so much fun, so thanks so much. And we get to have a great conversation today because we have two people who I'm fascinated by their background. We have, first up, we have Dean Kerrigan, who's a 20-year veteran at Microsoft and really played a pivotal role in driving the company to its first billion dollars in revenue.
3:17And then his friend, colleague, co-author, Joanne Garbin, who was formerly the director of innovation at Microsoft, also has a 25-year track record of launching innovative products. So together, they co-authored the latest book, The Insider's Guide to Innovation at Microsoft, which really just gives, I think, everyone a look at that behind the scenes of what does it really take to build a phenomenal company? Because we hear these things in theory, but they are really hard to implement. So first off, welcome to the show. Thanks for being here. And I just want to ask the first question out of the gate.
3:52I'm super curious. You mind if I take the... No, go. I want you to. So I know, obviously, our background in business. It is really easy to talk about these things, right? Like, let's innovate something new. But it is really hard. It's actually a lot easier to market something that already exists than it is to innovate something new. So what is it through your eyes when this has been your entire career of innovating from Xbox to Microsoft Office to all the crazy things you've been involved with. How do you look at innovation? And most importantly, how do you get your team behind it? Yeah, I'm so glad you served with that question.
4:27One of the core themes of the book is that there's a real difference between invention and innovation. Invention is coming up with a new idea, which is much less difficult than innovating, which is taking that idea, building it, testing it, experimenting with it, getting it out into the market, getting it adopted by customers. So by design, we wrote about innovation because it is so hard. We also noticed, Joanne and I, we are innovation nerds. We read every book that comes out on the topic. And one of the things we noticed was that there was a void in the literature. A lot of people would describe the what, where, when, why of innovation, but not the how.
5:10And as we had this really rich canvas in Microsoft, 50-year-old company, multiple products, multiple breakthroughs, we were able to study and get down to very specific practices, which we document in the book. And in the end, I think we did a count towards the end, there's almost 50 distinct practice in the book that people can use in their day-to-day work immediately after reading the book. And you'll see the differences between me and Dean. We leaned in hard on the fact that he's an entrepreneur and I'm an entrepreneur and us entrepreneurs get down to the, what do I actually have to do? Right.
5:48And it's all about something you talk a lot about, Ed, building habits, whether they're tiny habits every day or weekly habits, monthly habits, annual habits. Microsoft, when you really get under the hood of it, has a lot of people with good innovation and habits. And that's what we tried to pull out in the book. Like, you have to have a big vision, but you also have to have stepping stones to get there. You have to have a message that speaks to the value of every stakeholder. So when we talk about those 50 tools, it's really what are the 50 habits and practices you need to adopt as a team and as individuals?
6:30Well, it's really good to read a book that has that, frankly. You know, a lot of books, I want you guys on number one to look under the hood at Microsoft. You both have been there 20, 25 years. That's pretty unique. One of the most innovative companies of all time. But the other thing is it's not just philosophies. There's actually techniques and strategies in the book. And I love stuff. Like you said, especially as an entrepreneur. And that's what I want to ask you about. I kind of, we get an hour. I always want to go get the audience, everything we can. And the great thing about your book is I can ask you 30 questions on this podcast.
6:59They still would have to get the book because there's so much more in it. But I learned so much reading it because I was self-taught as an entrepreneur. So either one of you can grab this one, but I'm going to go right to like tactics that are in the book. Awesome. Tell them a little bit about what double loop learning is. So every entrepreneur, entrepreneur listening to this right now can start kind of going, that is something I don't know. I just learned within the first 10 minutes of the podcast. And it's so powerful. And it's the secret of success of so many businesses and entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs.
7:30So Dean, you mind if I start? Okay, great. So we say innovation is loopy. And one of the primary things, this loop of double loop learning is in single loop learning, you have a set of assumptions, you design a solution, you put it out into the market, and then you iterate between design and develop. In double loop learning, you don't just iterate and design and develop, right? Like you put it out and fail fast and bring it back and correct and put it out again. You actually double loop back to your assumptions and you're like, okay, I'm not just going to iterate on the design I have. I'm going to go back and challenge the very premise of what we built.
8:16Because sometimes what you learn in doing that is we were just off the mark. We were solving the wrong problem. And we can't iterate our way there. We need to just completely rethink our business model or our value proposition, or even our user interaction. And Dean, you have a great example of this in the Xbox history. Yeah, absolutely. I was just going to build on the description is double loop learning is such an important habit, because we tend to at the start of a project, we do think deeply about what's going on in the world, why is this a good idea, why might it work? But then we tend to shift into an execution mode, and we're just executing, and sometimes it's not going the way we thought, and so we try to execute harder.
9:03Double loop learning is a habit of pausing, going back to those assumptions. My team likes to write them down and actually saying, well, maybe the world is a little bit different. Maybe our assumptions were wrong. And so we need to change the way we come at this. So good. I actually talk a lot about the pause, which you and I have talked about how entrepreneurs and companies just want to build and build and build. And sometimes they are building on a foundation that wasn't actually built to sustain what it is that they're now doing. So you have to pause and bring it back. Can you talk about specifically, right?
9:35Because someone's listening is going, well, that's really great, but I'm reading all these things on social media that say, just start and fail fast. Can you tell us how to implement that? Like, are there certain thoughts that go through your mind or questions that you're like, identifying? Did this work? Do I need to pull this back? Do I need to throw this out? Or do I need to force it? How can you discern which way to go? The term we like is instead of fail fast, it's learn fast. And the objective of trying something that's high risk, and that's unknown, is not to fail, of course, but to learn.
10:09Sometimes you do need to fail in order to learn. But it's the learning that's valuable and lets you go back, reconsider assumptions and move on. One of the examples we use in the book is Bing, our search engine. They don't talk about product launches, they talk about flights. We're going to put some new capabilities into the product, we're going to fly it for a couple of weeks. And then we're going to look at two things. Did it deliver good user and business results? But also, what did we learn? And being very specific and intentional about a learning review, it kind of ensures that you're going to bring that information back, change and adjust for the future.
10:54So it's really creating both space and the sort of formal structure for learning to take place in. Yeah, it's about It's about building feedback loops. So again, innovation is loopy. If you put your product out there and you have no way to measure if people are clicking on something, using something, liking something, then you're just throwing things into the abyss and hoping for the best. So put your product into the market with built-in feedback loops, and that can be listening channels or it can be technologies that are built in. But then that's only one half of the feedback. The other half of the feedback is that challenging your assumptions part.
11:36You got to monitor the world. Is new tech coming out? Are there scientific breakthroughs? Has some world event like a pandemic disrupted everything? And you get those feedback loops, and that gives you your context change. So now you're living in between these two worlds of what you're doing today and what you need to be doing tomorrow. And if you're good at it, you can process that into let's stay ahead of the curve. And now we're continuously adapting our products and our businesses to stay ahead of that curve. I'm going to talk about metrics in a minute, which is kind of going down the line that you're talking about.
12:14She talked about metrics in the book. I want everyone to step back for a second. You know, most of you have been raised, if you're listening to my show, in sort of the social media business era, which is the same eight or 10 strategies and ideas philosophically. And we almost kind of look down upon, I don't know what you'd call like traditional Harvard MBA, like type education. And the truth of the matter is the merger of the two worlds is what you're going to need. You're not going to need a Harvard MBA, but you're going to need to know how do these large companies innovate? And a lot of the entrepreneurs that I talk to, it blows my mind.
12:48They don't even know their own metrics. I'm talking about a small mortgage broker who's got three agents with them. They don't know their contact to appointment ratios. They don't know their appointment to close ratios. They don't know their revenue number per close. They don't, they don't even have metrics. They're not real entrepreneurs because they were raised on social media. And there's all this room for growth. If you just started to be a more legitimate entrepreneur, quite frankly, and you actually track your metrics. And it was fascinating to me that in the book, it's one of the first, when you get to the tactics and strategies, it's metric based.
13:24You actually talk about kept rate. So let's just talk about the importance of metrics and maybe let's just flavor it up with what kept rate means. Go just give them an idea of what a company the size of Microsoft does to innovate that they could be doing in their small business. Yeah. And kept rate was one of our favorite things we uncovered in our research. So I'll start it, Dean. The office group, which the office product at the point that they did this was a 30 billion dollar product. And we make the point of they didn't need to disrupt themselves or, you know, they were flying high and were all addicted to the word Excel and PowerPoint, right?
14:07But they looked at the coming changes of AI and they looked at user patterns of their products and they saw the fact that they had all of this functionality that wasn't being used. and they said, we're not going to make anything new, no new features. We're going to start uncovering the features we have in our products using these new AI tools. And the measure of success isn't going to be if we delivered it on time or on budget, or even if our revenue grows, the measure of success is if we serve something up with AI and the user keeps it, we succeeded. If the user then has to further manipulate it, we're not done yet.
14:55We got to do better. So it's all about user kept rate. Almost like retention rate in certain other industries. And you mentioned AI. And I don't know if you want to talk more about metrics. I want to go AI. Because, yeah, I mean, the one stat that I read that you had put on is said by 2030, hundreds of thousands of jobs are going to be consumed by AI. And I think that's something that we all know is coming, but it's almost like, how do we navigate that? Like, how does the average person hear that information, whether they're a small business or they're an entrepreneur and they're working for another company?
15:30How can we safeguard ourselves about that? Because it's exciting, but it's also could also be nerve wracking, right? Both can exist. Go for it, Dean. This is why we wrote the book. Exactly. Could we go back to metrics for one moment, though? Because there's a couple other. Using the word loop, put them together. Yeah, yeah. Because metrics become super important in the world of AI. There was two things that I wanted to build on Joanne's comment. One is that, and also Ed, on your comment about startups versus corporations, the thing that really motivated us to write the book was when Joanne joined Microsoft about five years ago.
16:05she was new to Microsoft. I was about 15, 16 years in at that point. And we just started swapping war stories about innovation. Joanne having done it outside and startups and make caps and me having done it, you know, from within. And what we realized was that the patterns were universal. We were seeing the same practices and patterns play out in companies that were small, medium or large. And that was one of the aha moments that, okay, we're going to write this book, not just for Microsoft, not just for big tech, not just for corporate America, but for everyone, whether you're in large, small or medium companies.
16:43The interesting point about metrics is metrics is one of these things that no matter what size company you're in, it's super important to get that right. And it's also important to innovate in metrics if you're going to innovate in other areas because you can't manage what you can't measure and metrics give you that ability to do it. And in innovation, you're in a super ambiguous environment. And so having something that you go back to regularly and data that you monitor and review is arguably more important for smaller companies than maybe even a big corporation. So I'm 100 % with your point there, Ed.
17:24And I'll just keep going with that thought if it's okay. In this world of AI, all of the metrics of success are going to change. How we measure the value of work is changing. I'm really excited about it, by the way, because I have been frustrated. Dean knows how to code. Dean knows deep data and analytics. That's not me. I'm a business person first and foremost. than a mechanical engineer, but I'm not a mechanical engineer. So this world that we've been living in of software is some people can build things and the rest of us can use the things that are built. That's going away. Now with generative AI, we can all build things.
18:15Yes, it is going to displace jobs that are formulaic because it's formulaic, right? So it's built for the purpose of doing formulaic things, but it can't displace creativity and collaboration and insight and all of these human higher level capabilities that actually we talk about this in the book. It's our favorite takeaway. It actually is the thing that brings us joy. And so many people are disengaged at work and unhappy at work and burnout at work. And a lot of it is that rumule, treadmill stuff. Great. Take it, AI. You can have it. Creativity and collaboration. And that's why we wrote this book.
19:02It's really a handbook on how to work with everybody, how to collaborate from blank sheet a paper to something of proof to scale in this new world where human capabilities are the most important thing and will be valued and measured. Yeah. You know, it's so good. But it was a great conversation. I wish I did more shows like this. You know, I grabbed things from books, let's say for the lower IQ people that read them like myself and but they're big concepts. So, hey, guys, I want to jump in here for a second and talk about change and growth. And you know, by the way, it's no secret how people get ahead in life or how they grow.
19:41And also taking a look at the future. If you want to change your future, you got to change the things you're doing. If you continue to do the same things, you're probably going to produce the same results. But if you get into a new environment where you're learning new things and you're around other people that are growth oriented, you're much more likely to do that yourself. And that's why I love Growth Day. Write this down for a second. GrowthDay.com forward slash ed. My friend Brendan Brouchard has created the most incredible personal development and business app that I've ever seen in my life.
20:07Everything from goal setting software to personal accountability, journaling, courses, thousands of dollars worth of courses in there as well. I create content in there on Mondays where I contribute as do a whole bunch of other influencers, like the Avengers of influencers and business minds in there. It's the Netflix for high achievers or people that want to be high achievers. So go check it out. My friend Brennan's made it very affordable, very easy to get involved. Go to growthday.com forward slash ed. That's growthday.com forward slash ed.
20:38This episode brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game? Shifting a little money here, a little there, and hoping it all works out? Well, with the Name Your Price tool from Progressive, you can get a better budgeter and potentially lower your insurance bill too. You tell Progressive what you want to pay for car insurance, and they'll help find you options within your budget. Try it today at Progressive.com, Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law. Not available in all states.
21:18When did making plans get this complicated? It's time to streamline with WhatsApp. The secure messaging app that brings the whole group together. Use polls to settle dinner plans. Send event invites and pin messages so no one forgets Mom's 60th. and never miss a meme or milestone all protected with end-to-end encryption it's time for whatsapp message privately with everyone learn more at whatsapp.com there's something in the book i took that i want you to talk about and it's it's because we've been a little bit granular i want to get a little bit bigger and i want any person listening to this be able to adopt a strategy we're going to talk about right now it's think week and you know there's so much legacy thinking in business And I think people think well legacy thinking that's sort of like an old insurance company actually Most of you to some extent I say this as a friend you suffer from legacy thinking meaning this is just the way We've always done it So we're always going to do it that way or this is the way the markets always responded So it's always going to respond that way so the amount of things that I call legacy thinking that intrude And then in a business and then impede upon its growth and it's invisible and you don't know why you're not moving It's this stuff that's like repetitive historical thinking that in an AI era and in a high tech era like we're in now is like death to explosive growth.
22:39Right. And so this idea of like think weeks is so healthy for an entrepreneur who's a husband and wife and they've got a bakery all the way up to, you know, one of the five largest companies in the world and your Microsoft. Right. So tell us what think week is and how it might apply to anybody listening to it. Yeah, and maybe I'll ground it in something that Joanne taught me, actually, which is this idea that if you're going to innovate, you're going to go through three phases, at least cognitively, divergence, convergence, and synthesis. and the idea is that if you're going to really have some kind of breakthrough idea or opportunity you have to get out of that mindset that that legacy mindset that you're describing it you have to shed that and you have to start reading thinking talking to people you might not normally talk to reflecting and give your mind the sense to be the opportunity to be exposed to new ideas because that's divergence.
23:38And convergence is where you start to make sense of it, organize it, maybe put a little bit of structure. And then synthesis is where you go and you do something with it. The challenge is in modern society, divergence feels unnatural because we don't know where it's going to take us. You almost feel guilty doing it. Whereas if you're sticking with the legacy mindset, you know what you're doing, you're active, you see a lot of hours in the day that you're doing stuff and you feel like I'm doing what I need to do. I'm working hard, but you might not be working smart. And so that's why that divergence, there's kind of two traditions at Microsoft.
24:17Think Week was a period where everyone was encouraged to stop doing their day jobs for a week and think deeply about a topic relevant to the company, but not something we were doing currently. And then the other sort of activity is Hack Week, which is where I think it's about 40 ,000 people across the company. 75. 75 ,000. Thank you. 75 ,000. So a third of the company take a week off, pick up a project, not just to think about it, but to actually get people together, prototype some ideas, write some code, and actually have a kind of an end-to-end effort on completely new ideas, many of which can make their way into our products and services.
25:03That's so cool. And I think like if the person listening is like, I don't even have two minutes to think in my day. I don't even know what he just said, because I'm probably the least educated person in this conversation at the moment. I want to bring it down for everyone listening so that you actually can like put a little push pin into what you just said, Dean. I think if entrepreneurs and people in general, this could apply to parents, this could apply to someone that's trying to just be a high performer inside of somebody else's business. We are inundated with so much noise all the time, social media, anything we're consuming, this podcast.
25:35Oftentimes we don't just take a minute and think and see like, what do we want to create? What do we want to do? What do we want to build? And I think what's really fascinating about learning from billion dollar companies that have been successful is how can we take something that they're doing and apply it into our everyday life. I call this thinking time. I literally take just an hour or two a week and I put it in my calendar that I'm just going to think and not have my phone, have it on silent, upside down on airplane mode and just be like, do I want to do this? Do I not want to do this? And just maybe this is an oversimplistic way of how you just explained it.
Read the full transcript
26:08But I think for the average person listening, I want to give them something that they can implement. Can I ask you something and I'll ask the three of you. I'm just curious for me. And I have done something like this, not regularly enough, but when I'm really growing and doing well, I take think time away. For me, I have to change my environment. I have to literally get away. Like I can't do it at my house. That doesn't mean that I don't have thinking time in my home, but I found like I'm scheduling a week. I've never done a week. I'd be lying a weekend away where I'm going to go get out of my environment because I think there's triggers and anchors even to environments like just the room you're in.
26:43You've always thought that way in this room. You're in the same room, the same distractions, the same people. So for you, do you get away and do it? And then at Microsoft, are these think weeks offsite? Do they go somewhere? So for me, I a thousand percent agree with what you were saying. Like certain environments are going to trigger a certain state. So back in the day when I didn't have the ability financially to go on a weekend, I would go to a coffee shop. And to me, it would just be like, I'm going to the coffee shop. I'm thinking I'm getting my drink. And it would just be like, when I walked into that space, I knew that this was what I was doing.
27:14And once my two hours was up, I would leave. You could do this in your car. Like I know a lot of busy parents. You can go into your car for an hour or two and just drive around or go to a parking lot. I mean, I used to do all these hacks. Now I definitely, do you ever notice when you're in an airplane, you're super productive? Yes. Because it's like a different environment that you work in. So for me, the person listening, you can do this in just a little coffee shop. You can go away. But what does Microsoft do? Do you guys go on like a fancy retreat? I'll give this one just and I'll let you on bad.
27:42But think week would be people would do it all sorts of ways. But the papers, when Bill Gates was the CEO, they would they would get sort of reviewed and the most interesting ones would go to Bill. And then famously, he would go to a remote location, cabin, hotel, something like that. And he would spend a week reading through the papers and commenting. And the authors would get his comments back. And so if you think of the CEO of one of the biggest companies in the world disappearing for a week just to read and reflect, that's an example of kind of the value of the space that he saw. And today at Microsoft, we have the garage, which is the host of the hackathon.
28:27And we have 15 of them worldwide. And these are their own unique spaces, their maker spaces and collaborative spaces that are away from anybody's office. So you come into the garage and you can go there for an hour. You can go there for the whole hackathon week. It's just that whole, like you're saying, that physical, I got to change the context. I got to change the environment. I got to walk away from the distractions or the business. Me personally, I've taken, I've been really lucky. I've taken some real long sabbaticals throughout my career. I've joked that I've retired three times already.
29:07Yeah. Taking a year off or half a year off. And I spent a lot of time at coffee shops just watching clouds, just like sitting there letting my brain decompress and wander. And Dean knows I went through a whole big health situation over the last couple years. And even that, it was in my work life helpful because for a year and a half, I couldn't think about anything but my health so all the little background stuff was happening and when i came out we started writing this book and it's a fundamentally different book because of that year and a half of me not being in the rush of the work so however you can create it okay thank god you're okay and i have to tell you i can contrast that with someone who has not done enough of it and it's affected my health.
30:02And I think it's affected my innovation. I think I'm fatigued. I think you have more brain fog and fatigue in some of your cases than you realize. And I know a lot of you are saying, saying, Hey, that's great. It sounds good. You know, I'm trying to pay my bills this month. And that's why candy's point of getting in the car or just going to the coffee shop matters. But I can tell you that I believe you're right. And I have to tell everybody that's just listening. Do you have a culture of innovation? So it's one of the big topics of the book. And even if you're a small business, my number one revenue generating this idea this last year came from my assistant, not all the people around me.
30:36And it was the day with me that I did in my home. That was just something I started to say, guys, I'm, I have this tendency to think, and so do a lot of you, I'm the smartest person in our company. I know the most, I've been the most involved. I've been there since the beginning and you can't see outside yourself. My best idea came from my assistant this year. So, you know, there's a lot of things, by the way, that compete with innovation. And in the book, you actually have something you talk about called innovation's primary competitor. Yeah. Like what is what is what is competing with innovation?
31:09This is a question all of you should be asking. I think it'll be one of the best answers on what is already an unbelievable interview. So I'll let either one of you grab that one. So I'll start, Dean, and you build. it's cognitive inertia, which is a fancy science way of saying, I know what I know, and I do what I do, and it works, so I'm going to keep doing it. And that is something, it's actually a survival instinct for us. I figured out that if I go that way, there's lions. If I go that way, there's food, right? It's something we have to actively work against, this habit of staying with what we know.
31:46And it points back to what Dean was saying about making time to diverge and learn new things. It doesn't really even matter what. Listen to some new music. Go to a museum and look at different things. Even just pay attention to your block when you're walking down it and see what's changed. Like get in that habit of absorbing new because you're going to open up new things in your mind and it's going to unstick that natural tendency of us to do what we do and know what we know and ride on that. And to your point about your assistant, talking to other people is one of the best ways to unstick yourself because everybody's walking around in their own movie, right?
32:33Like their world is their reality and we all see things differently. We all think things differently. Things matter differently. So the more you reach out and talk to the people around you and the people around them and the people around them, the more you start picking up these signals of what's important and what's happening in the world. And what are your blinders preventing you from seeing? And what I kept hearing right before you had started talking about that is it's almost like the antithesis of creativity and innovation is chaos. And when we're stuck in chaos, it's like, we can't think straight.
33:13We can't come up with great ideas. We can't innovate anything new because we're kind of stuck in this survival mechanism. And I think about the entrepreneurs that we work with. I think about the people listening and especially with what's going on right now in the world. And they think like, what do I do next? Like what, what, how can I even innovate anything? Because I'm so stressed and worried about what's going on now. Is there anything practical that maybe when there's someone in your team, because it's tough to build a culture like this, right? Is there anybody that maybe was in your culture that really just couldn't almost get out of their own way to see this is the opposite of a fixed mindset?
33:46And is there any tools that you can maybe help that listener with? Yeah. One, I was going to say one thing that the teams that we studied that had really built the most innovative culture had created sort of trust and a sense of psychological safety within the group and an understanding that it's okay to try new things. That, in fact, it's not only okay, it's part of our charter is to test and explore and try new things. They were also very good at asking, before someone would try something new, what's your hypothesis? And Julia Lewison, who runs our developer division that builds all our developer tools, she would always say, anyone can bring me an idea.
34:29Because good ideas can come from anywhere. And I'm going to say, what's your hypothesis? And more specifically, what's your customer hypothesis? Why do you think this new idea would deliver value for a customer more so than the way we're doing it? And if you can answer that question, you get time and maybe resource to go and actually build an experiment to test your hypothesis. What we like about that language as well is when you come back with your results, it's not a I succeeded or I failed. It's a I learned my hypothesis was valid or it wasn't valid. So again, it takes the risk out of trying something new and doing something different, but it keeps the discipline there.
35:15You're not just going off and trying something because it sounds cool or fun or interesting. You're going out to prove or disprove a hypothesis that then you can build upon. I just want to add something because underneath of all of this is a team. No one at Microsoft is innovating alone. No one. Not even our PhD, 30 years in research, brilliant. Not even Bill Gates innovates alone or Satya Nadella. and as entrepreneurs and I've spent most of my career in that space whether I was the first person or the 10th person or whatever you have to create teams your business team of course you need to collaborate with one another and share that cognitive load share those problems and find solutions together, it's not all on any one person to figure out what needs to happen.
36:12But even if you're a solopreneur, I had a group of friends, we jokingly called ourselves EA. We were Entrepreneurs Anonymous. And once a month, we would get together and we would go around the table and be like, hi, my name is Joanne. I've been off the paycheck for six months. and here's what I'm building. And we would help each other. And there was nothing to be gained other than support and creativity and a network of people swimming in the middle of the ocean together, right? So you build those islands, you build those support structures with anyone, your aunt, your kid, your mailman. Like you just got to find the people that give you energy and give you perspective, Perspective is key because you don't want to just have somebody that's telling you the same thing you're thinking.
37:05You want people that see the elephant from all the sides, right? Yeah. That's very good. You know, when I was younger, I like that, by the way, a lot. When I was younger, I was encouraged by Tony Robbins, actually. This is when we had first met. He said, because I was a solopreneur, he said, you need a personal board of directors. Yes. And you're a hustler and you're talented and you'll innovate and you'll be coachable to the ideas. reach out to people further down the road than you and ask them if you know once a quarter they'd meet with you as a group four five six seven people and i did and so for 25 30 years i've had a personal board of directors obviously the board has changed as my influence and reach and scope has changed but to this day i still have and it's sort of an official group to the point now where i do take them away once a year they get a great trip out of it for me but they also know You know, there's a half day if we're going to be skiing or golfing that we're at the whiteboard And we're talking about me and my life and my businesses and so i'd encourage all of you to do it And by the way one other thing everyone listening if you're not innovating your competition is so if you think this doesn't matter I don't care what business you're in.
38:13I don't even care if you're not even an entrepreneur If you're not innovating yourself, which is what we're going to talk about in this next If you're not doing that your competition is That's the world we're in innovation expansion growth change is constant And you've got to change. You've got to have to grow, which leads me to my next question.
38:54beverage ingredients. Visit goodtoknowfacts.org. This episode is brought to you by Indeed. When your computer breaks, you don't wait for it to magically start working again. You fix the problem. So why wait to hire the people your company desperately needs? Use Indeed's sponsored jobs to hire top talent fast. And even better, you only pay for results. There's no need to wait. Speed up your hiring with a$75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. And I'm going to steal the word. In the book, you talk about Microsoft's practice of self-disruption. I actually applied that to me, like personally disrupting me, because that extends even beyond just even business for me.
39:46disrupting my thinking, disrupting my relationship with God, disrupting my body. So I'm taking this self-disruption kind of to a different level. But the application of the book is really specific. So why don't you guys sort of jump on that? Yeah. Yeah. Dean, why don't you take the business? And I'm with you, Ed. I did the self-disruption to myself. So I'll share a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. You know, what's interesting is I and I read about it in one of the chapters that there there was a period in Microsoft's history where we didn't self disrupt, where we sort of had a certain complacency. And we thought that we were at the top, and we would always be at the top.
40:22And the thing that really blew up that perception was when Google became incredibly successful in search, and had these kind of feedback loops in their business that made it impossible to catch them. And one of the things I love about Microsoft is its willingness to say, we screwed up and we better learn from that. And you saw the whole company react to be like, nope, we can't be complacent. We can't take our position for granted. And to really look for the team, the entities that would disrupt us to a point where there are individuals at Microsoft whose job is to disrupt the company is to actually think about what's that thing that's being built in a garage in Silicon Valley that in a year's time might actually come and make us irrelevant in one of our businesses.
41:15And it's just been good to watch the company react to that. And I think it's even more critical in the period of AI because we're into this phase of rapid change where even a very small, even an individual can stand up an AI service that delivers value and that actually takes off. So I think we, thankfully, we've had this habit of self-disruption for a while at the company level, but we're going to have to lean into it even more. But I'll let Joanne talk about this as well. Well, the connection to Microsoft is Microsoft was the kind of instigator of my own self-disruption. I was leading a company up in Boston.
41:56I was the chief innovation officer of a 50-person company. and Microsoft came and said, we need you to come do what you do for us. And it was like, I'm not a corporate. I've only been in corporate once, and it was because they bought us. I don't want, like, I'm not a big company person. And they just kept the conversation going. It took like four years for them to convince me. But in the course of that time, what I did was I applied the same things we would do in innovation to myself. I was like, all right, what's my mission? Like, what am I here to do on this planet? And what I'm passionate about is sustainability and ecosystem degradation.
42:39And I'm like, okay, that's my mission. Where are my values? My values are having impact, learning, having good support structures, having accountability for the things I do. So I mapped out my values. And then I took my mission and my values and I used them to create something we describe in the book, which is a decision matrix. And I was like, all right, I'm going to translate this into three or four principles, guiding principles that will help me decide what to do next. And when I did that and I put Microsoft on the board with seven other options, stay with the company I'm with, build a new company, quit, go live on a beach and paint tortoise shells.
43:24I had everything up there. Microsoft knocked it out of the park. So it was like, okay, this hits my mission. This hits my values. It scores the best on my decision matrix. It wasn't an easy decision. I had to pack up my life of 20 years in Philadelphia with my neighbors and my family all around me, move across the country, join a giant corporation as a disruptor, who disruptors are always inherently facing that cognitive inertia. So it's not an easy gig. And then three months later, the pandemic hit. So it was like, it was one challenge after another. But what that process allowed us to do, allowed me to do was say, no, I feel good about the decision because I made it in a good way.
44:16It's based in my mission and my values. Can I ask you really, can you go a little deeper on that decision matrix, how that works? I think that's really valuable. Yeah. It's super useful and more people involved, the more valuable it is. A good one to look up is the DARPA hard test in innovation because they are one of the most prolific innovation groups in the world and they use it, it's basically creating four or five at most metrics. So it's a combination of metrics and you give yourself an objective and you say, we, like one of the ones from my program at Microsoft was create value for Microsoft, the environment and the communities.
45:06And the and was super specific because it wasn't or, it was whatever we solve has to create value for Microsoft, the environment and communities. And then we had a range. It doesn't do it. It does it a bit. It knocks it out of the park. And every idea we came up with, that was one of the four or five things we would judge it on. And we're like, no, it only creates value for Microsoft. Can we twist it or rethink it or change it in a way that stretches it to create value for all three? Can we combine it with something else that creates value for all three? And it just gave us a tool to not only, it wasn't binary, like, yes, no.
45:56It was, where are we in this thought process? Can we move it to knock it out of the park? And it's really, really helpful when you have lots of ideas coming into the, you know, into the group, into the table and the whiteboard to help filter through them. It's almost like, could you apply that same stretch, right? Like you're trying to say, okay, is this good for Microsoft, but is it also good for these other things? I think sometimes us as humans don't do that in our own lives. It's like, this is a good business decision, but it's going to wreck your family. This is a great family decision, but now I can't pay attention to my business.
46:31So it's almost like if we could adopt that same decision thought process and say, okay, can this be good for all of these things in my life? Can I still be there for my family? Can I still go in on my business? Can I still focus on my faith? And I think what Ed had said, and you guys did as well, is really it just keeps hitting me, is for the average person that's just watching or listening, it's like, how can you self-disrupt your own life a little bit? Like for me, that's what I was thinking. What do I need to self-disrupt or destruct and burn down and walk away from so that I can do something else with greater excellence?
47:08To me, that's what I'm hearing is like the through line messaging of being willing to say, what do we need to innovate differently, think about differently so that we can do this better as a team? And I just I love this conversation. I'm sorry. I'm just so jazzed up. There wasn't a question there. I'm just super excited. And Dean, it's like your assumption map. You got to write it down, right? Like it's you got to take it out of the intuitive and make it concrete. Well, you're reading my mind. So, Dean, jump on it. By the way, everybody, Dean is not Bill Gates' son, even though he looks like he could be if you're on YouTube.
47:42But go ahead, Dean. I think you should talk about that assumption stuff because that was in my list here as well. Yeah, it's so important. And again, we get so busy, we tend not to do it. But it's important to think about what you define as a fulfilling life, what you stand for as an individual. And not just in the office, but your family, hobbies, faith, community. and when you do that and kind of write it down you can look at it and you can look back on a given week and say oh boy i really over indexed on work gotta do something now this weekend with the family or the community and you can kind of start to to balance it the tendency if you don't have that in front of you is to go whatever's urgent and whatever is needing attention more than not that will be work yeah that will be your work and that will expand um and so related to this and this is what's exciting about ai and you'll hear this expression ai is about to give everyone superpowers and i don't necessarily like the expression it's almost right but ai is about to make superpowers available to everyone whether or not you adopt them will be a matter of sort of choice and decision.
49:00But it gives you this opportunity, as Joanne was saying at the start, to look at my work and to say, you know what, there are some things I really don't like doing that don't add a lot of value. It's directory. And there's an AI tool that's going to do that for me. And now I'm going to have more time to actually do the things that I care about that inspire me or more time with my family or my community or other things. And so really encourage everyone. There is a lot of hype about AI now. And so you have to filter and you have to kind of find a couple people to follow that you think are, you know, reasoned in terms of how they describe what's happening and what's available.
49:42But follow the news on AI, make a little time to experiment with it, but be targeted in your experiments. Focus on things that you'd like to stop doing and just start to ease it in there. Let me give you an example of that, everybody. And then by the way, I'll ask them one more question. I'm going to let you have the final one. But I have to say one thing about that. I hate follow up when it comes like sales setting appointments. Like just, I think you have two, you and I were talking about this off camera before we started. Like, I just don't have this follow up detailed brain. I like big things.
50:14Like I'm left-handed right brain i don't even know if any of that's true right but i don't like following up well guess what ai follows up 100 of the time on a call on time every time perfectly and so things like that in sales and marketing and you guys you're if you get good right now the opportunity to increase revenue is i don't think in the history i don't i know in the history of mankind it will cover your weaknesses for you i don't like to follow up i don't like details i don't like the small questions. AI is going to do all of this for me, right? It actually is doing it for me. I think the average person though, you guys listening has no idea what we're talking about still.
50:57Like I heard it, it's like an enhanced Google. It's going to be a better Google. I don't really know what it means to me. I'll figure it out when we get there. I'm really busy. I got to figure out what Trump did today. I got to find out what's going on with my kids. I got a sales call. I got to do. I got to get to the gym. I got to have some water. You know what I mean? Like just life's busy. And you said, fine, Dean, you said, find two people or find some people that, well, I have the two of you here today. Next up is a little song from CarMax about selling a car your way. You want to sell those wheels.
51:28You want to get a CarMax instant offer. So fast. Want to take a sec to think about it. Or like a month. Want to keep tabs on that instant offer. With OfferWatch. Wanna have CarMax pick it up from your driveway? Wanna get it, touch it. You wanna do it? So, wanna drive? CarMax. Pickup not available everywhere. Restrictions and fee may apply. So it'd be crazy for me not to like open floor, say, look, the two mega successful people at flipping Microsoft. Dean, you've been there through Xbox all the way through all the innovations. if someone said bro we're at a coffee shop don't give me the sanitized answer of what microsoft would want you to say you know the the put together one what the heck is this going to mean the next five years and let's see if joanne agrees with you or has a different version of it someone says ai is going to mean and by the way if it's dark dean tell us it's dark tell us the things we should be worried about if we should be i think it's going to move in two very distinct phases.
52:31Right now, the thing that AI is really good at is summarizing documents. That's how I get my tech news now is I just have, I put in a couple of questions. I get a summary of everything that popped in the media in the last 24 hours. If I read research papers, I have AI summarizing. Really good at that. It's also good at generating content, text. I'll use it to get unblocked as a writer. I like to write the final content myself. And the ability to generate pictures and images and even short videos, I'm not really in that creative or graphic design space. But for anyone who needs to put together brochure, website, thing like that, it's really going to be powerful in the longer range.
53:18And I'll throw out one technical term that people can monitor, and it's agents. And agents is exactly what you were talking about, Ed, is where you delegate more of the work to a piece of AI and it may go through multiple steps, write an email, send to the customer, monitor their follow-up, tell me when they've responded, book a meeting. That is a more nascent technology. It needs a little bit of work and refinement, but that'll be where I think we can really start to offload a lot of our day-to-day and then redirect onto other things. Yeah. Really good. In the small business world, balancing the books, checking the inventory, all of that paperwork we all hate because it means we're not baking or greeting customers or selling or whatever you're creating.
54:12All of that in the agentic AI is going to be something we offload to the computers because it's formulaic. Now, our role will still be check your books, right? But you don't have to do all the pushing of numbers around. In the engineering world, a lot of the first pass engineering calculations and stuff that you have to hire out, you don't need to do that. Like the answer is either right or wrong, but the higher level engineering work, the creative solutions, they're going to need to be done by professionals that have experience. This is another great thing for us Gen Xers. We're all turning 50.
54:55And historically, that's been a detriment in the workforce, right? Like, oh, the youngins are coming. We love the youngins. They've got the values driven, mission driven attitude, purpose and all of that. But us Xers and 50-somethings, we've got that experience that we can look at these outputs and we can say, nope, that's wrong. That'll never fly. Those things can't be displaced by AI. The trades, they're not going to get displaced by AI. Anything that has to happen in the physical world, we've been waiting for the robot revolution forever. ever we're not there so interesting okay that's interesting okay yeah yeah yeah i i'm uh i'm happy to hear that i'm happy to hear that about the robots and 3d printing houses you still think even though we're hearing about those things we're a little ways away still yeah them infusion are still quite a while away okay and then good deals the other thing to remember about AI is we determine, we as a society determine how and where and when it will be deployed.
56:08And we like to use the term human AI complementarity. If we're thoughtful about this, we'll get to a future where we're using AI to complement us and do this. Yep. My only fear about that, Dean, and I don't mean to be the least Pollyanna one, is that sort of assumes, it's kind of like the environment, right? That sort of assumes a global buy into that. And, you know, I hope you're right about that part. I didn't mean to interrupt you, but, you know, it does assume, you know, we're not just one country, we're one world now. And that assumes bad actors will buy into that as well. That's a little bit of the unknown for me.
56:43That's good. And yeah, I think you probably agree with that. Anyway, Candy, I promised you the last question. So just I'm going to super for everyone watching, listening. Obviously, we talked about the book. There's been so much fascinating, but there's so much more in the book. So if there's one thing that we didn't hit on today, because I feel like there's so many questions I could ask to be the last one. But if there is something we didn't hit on, and you really want to make sure that the people that tuned in today get, if they hear when you read the book, make sure you get this, what would be that one thing for each of you?
57:11Great question. You first, Dean. Okay, yeah. I think it is that everyone can be an entrepreneur and should be an entrepreneur. There's kind of this perception often that it's a certain group of people, or it's creative types, or it's a research division. What we found in the research, good ideas came from everywhere. They needed everyone to bring them out into the world and make them successful. And the tools are there and they're known and they're available. The tools to be an entrepreneur, we consolidated them in the book. But that for me was the biggest message. Everyone should be and can be an entrepreneur.
57:52Yeah, I love that you said that. That's fantastic. Joanne. Yeah, he's an entrepreneur just inside the walls. I know, I love it. I know, that's why I love that answer so much. It's great. And I would say I really like the full framing of top down, bottom up and outside in. It's, you know, some people gravitate toward grassroots efforts. And some people rise to the top and set the stage and hire lots of people like you all and create these empires. we need both and we need them to find each other. So finding your top down that matches your bottom up and vice versa and empowering each other. But then there's this other framework of outside in too often.
58:42We start where we're at and we try to build out from there. It's super helpful to go as wide out as you can. Like I was designing the data center of the future. Data centers are designed from the chip all the way out to the walls of the data center. And then you run out of time and money and energy and you don't do anything past the walls. What if we start at the country and then go to the town and then go to the land and the people and the community around that data center and then design the walls and everything within it. Outside in, we designed something completely different than what we have today.
59:25So it's in art, they'll tell you, take a painting and turn it upside down and you'll see totally different things in it. So it's just that flip your perspective and build your team. It's so good. One of the best parts of the book is about going wide first. It's so good. This was a great conversation. Thank you. Dina Joanne, thank you guys. It was awesome. The Insider's Guide to Innovation at Microsoft. Thank you so much for being here today. Thank you, Bill. Our pleasure. Thank you. Great to meet you. And Candy, this would have been good with me. It was incredible with you. This was so great. I have so many things to think about.
1:00:00Thank you guys for your time today. And thanks for having me. I loved having you. Everybody wanted her and she's here. Candy's with me. All right, everybody. God bless you. Max out. Share this episode. This is the Ed Myland Show. you
From the publisher
Innovation Secrets from Inside Microsoft
If you're not innovating, your competition is. That’s the world we live in. Microsoft didn’t become one of the most dominant companies on the planet by accident—it built a culture of constant reinvention, adaptation, and innovation. And today, we're bringing you the inside track on how to apply those same principles to your business and life.
I’m joined by my co-host, the incredible Candy Valentino, as we sit down with Dean Carignan and JoAnn Garbin, two Chief Innovation Officers at Microsoft, who played a pivotal role in driving the company’s billion-dollar breakthroughs. They’re here to pull back the curtain on what it really takes to stay ahead of the curve, build a culture of innovation, and apply the strategies of billion-dollar companies to your own business and life.
Dean and JoAnn share the real secrets behind innovation—the kind that doesn’t just create new ideas but actually makes them succeed. From the power of "double-loop learning" to how AI is changing the game for entrepreneurs, this episode is packed with strategies you can implement right now to get an edge.
What You’ll Learn in This Episode:
✅ Why “learn fast” beats “fail fast” every time
✅ The one metric Microsoft uses that small businesses should adopt
✅ How Think Weeks and Hack Weeks can transform your business (even if you’re a solopreneur)
✅ Why self-disruption is the key to staying relevant and avoiding complacency
✅ How AI can cover your weaknesses and free you up to do what you love
✅ The #1 enemy of innovation—and how to overcome it
If you’re looking for the blueprint for lasting success, this conversation is for you. Max out and share this with someone who needs to hear it!
