1884 – Unveiling the Limits of Grit with Dean Guida of Infragistics

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0:58with us right now dean guida dean you are the ceo of infragistics and you are the author of the book when grit is not enough also we're going to be talking about the slingshot app and the website for that is slingshot app dot io uh finally dean your personal website uh particularly that has some great information about the book and your thought leadership. And that's deanguida.com, G-U-I-D-A.com. Dean, thank you so much for joining us. Yes, thank you. Thank you. Appreciate it. Just down the I-4 corridor in Clearwater. Well, Dean, give us an overview of your work. Obviously, you do a lot of good things.

1:41I founded Infragistics 35 years ago, And we're in the tech space and we build tools for designers and developers to build simple and beautiful user experiences. And we sell to all the largest ISV software companies out there, many commercial apps built with us, some Fidelity, E-Trade, Charles Schwab, Intuit, TurboTax, Quicken, all the 911 systems. And so our core audience is software developers and designers. but we have branched out into a B2B product with Slingshot. And a lot of the thesis is what I wrote about in my book, When Grit's Not Enough, and all the lessons I've learned over the last 35 years, never taking money, having a global successful tech company and going through all the different cycles of recessions and particularly technology changes.

2:35So Slingshot's really about helping you, and even the book to create a data-driven agile learning organization. And so I'm really passionate about that. Yeah. When you say agile, can you maybe define that just a bit? Yeah. I mean, agility is, I would define it in a couple of ways. One, I'm a firm believer in, you know, having a strategy and really staying focused over the long-term to achieve that strategy, but so many things change in the market, both with technology, with customers buying habits. And so you need the agility to be able to learn, listen, and adjust, still staying strong, true to your long-term vision, but having that.

3:18And then agility comes right down all to the way you work with your teams. And so it's when you really push down this whole growth mindset of learning, using data to make decisions, collaborating on hypothesis of what's happening in your business, in the market, and then having the agility to change and do things in more chunkier ways instead of long, long time from market feedback to reaction by teams and products in your company. Yeah. So I'm tempted. Let's talk about the book first, because I'm interested in this whole topic of someone or a leader who might be saying, well, listen, I can outwork anybody, right?

3:59And our team can outwork anyone. We're just gonna outwork the competition and that's going to get us where we need to get. Give us your little mini TED talk on this if you'd like. Yeah, well, for sure, grit has to be a fundamental DNA of every entrepreneur because you just have to persevere for long periods of time with ups and downs and to realize your vision and to build a company. So the title is When Grit's Not Enough, because it's not enough. You really need to put in place different philosophies, values, processes to create an organization that is really a learning organization. And so I wrote the book, and probably everyone says this, but it starts with the people are the most important and the culture.

4:41But you can be very thoughtful in your processes and the way you do that. So in the books, it goes through everything from goals and the scientific philosophy of how you can drive business outcomes to creating a learning organization, having tough conversations, rhythm of the business, strategic and go-to-market planning. All of these things are kind of like interwoven into creating an organization that is agile, uses data to make decisions. But also you're creating this environment of a learning organization. And it starts with how you hire people so that you hire people that really have that growth mindset that enjoy learning and want to keep learning and are very curious and are always asking why something is happening.

5:28And then it comes down to like, you know, from a long term vision of your strategic plan to execution where people really understand prioritization of your goals and and then working together collaboratively and the ability to adjust, you know, the agility part of it. And I'm very touching on a very high level. There's a lot of detail in there. And I wrote the book to be very playbook oriented so that it talks about these things in a very actionable way. Yeah. So why is growth and development and helping our team members become more, why is that so critical? I used to think it was just the tech space, but certainly the tech space is really hypersensitive to just a lot of change.

6:15And you have to constantly build products where the technology is changing to and the market need is changing to. And so you really, as an individual or as an entrepreneur or as a CEO, of course you need that, but you need your whole organization thinking like that. So when you have a team, instead of things always getting pushed up to manager or director or CEO to solve the problem, you're actually teaching teams to, okay, look at data. Data is like a signal of what's happening in the market, but then you need to collaborate and create a hypothesis. like what is happening and then be intentional about experimenting and testing that.

6:57So like you get data signals, you collaborate with the team to create some hypothesis, what you think is why that's occurring. And then you go and create an experiment of how you can improve a business outcome that you're seeing and test it intentionally, measure it. And then you have this like really fast loop, which creates agility, creates people, pushes the thinking and down to the teams. And when you can create an organization like this, you can really react and withstand a lot of change over time. Yeah. Dean, let's talk about Slingshot for a moment. Where does this fit in within an organization?

7:38Is this a replacement for, I mean, is this a project management and maybe a replacement for Slack? Or kind of where does it fit within the kind of the internal operation stack? Well, we believe the whole organization should use it. But of course, the larger the organization, the harder change is. So we're really successful selling it departmentally to marketing teams. We're also very successful selling it to the mid-market companies between 30 and 1 ,000 employees. And there we are getting the organization to adopt it. But what Slingshot is doing, like functionally, what it's doing is I can tell you functionally, but then purposely, I'd like to tell you what it's doing.

8:22But functionally, it's data analytics. So we're connecting to all your different SaaS systems, all your systems of record. And we're bringing all that data together. And a lot of metrics span multiple systems like your financial, your CRM, maybe your account based marketing system. We bring all that data together. And so we put data at the center of workflow management. So there's project management, there's communication. And the whole idea is that you're collaborating, all your data is in one place from all your different systems, and you're driving fact-based decisions on what's happening in your market.

9:00And you're driving collaboration to talk about that. And then you go and have a workback plan. So everyone's aligned on priority and accountability. And so it's this whole flow of data, workback plans, collaboration, all within one simple and beautiful experience, which is we really focus on from our heritage of building UX and UI tooling. Yeah. And why is that so critical? Are humans, you know, in terms of like maybe in teams or individuals, you know, I know we've got our biases, we've got, you know, kind of our fallacies that, you know, that kind of creep in. Why is it so critical to stay focused on having data and making the data easy to visualize and access?

9:45I do believe in intuition. I do believe in that the feeling part of things for sure. But that by itself is not a good thing. I mean, so when you have data and there's so much data out there, it's really helping you understand really in a fact-based way of what's happening in your business. It doesn't always tell you why, but it'll tell you whether your customer acquisition cost is too high. It'll tell you whether you're, you know, how long it takes you to close business. It'll tell you the quality of your lead. It'll tell you the lifetime value of your customer. It'll tell you many things. It'll tell you how you segment and market to different audiences and is your messaging landing.

10:23And it'll tell you all these things of actually what's happening. Now, how to improve that takes collaboration and hypothesis. But when you inject and drive data-driven culture, you will grow your business. You will make better decisions. You'll have more confidence in execution. You'll get people to align better because it's just not that Josh or Dean thinks This is what we should do. It's like, no, based on this, we're making this and it empowers other people. So like no longer the highest ranking person or the loudest person in the room doesn't get the floor to set our priorities and where we're going.

11:02Data also democratizes anybody to make a very strong point of what direction or how you should go about doing things in the organization. The website for Slingshot is slingshotapp.io. And as it's described here, it's the all-in-one digital workplace boosting team results. Slingshot, it aggregates data analytics, project information management, chat, goals-based strategy benchmarking in one app. And again, that website, slingshotapp.io. And finally, Dean, I'd love to just ask you about what Infragistics is and who kind of your ideal client is for that. You work with some big names, Morgan Stanley, Exxon, IKEA, Fidelity, many more, a lot of enterprise level clients.

11:54Yeah, so we have over 2 billion software developers using our toolkits. And they're a set of UI components on all the different platforms. So on web, it's React, it's Angular, it's web components, all these JavaScript-based. But we also came from the desktop world and the mobile world. So we have these toolkits on these different UI platforms. And maybe like 15, 20 years ago, we really went into the UX user experience part of it. So we've got a really good way of going from design systems to code. And so our app builder integrates with Figma and to big teams or software teams working with designers are designing this design language.

12:40And all of that gets pulled right into our app builder and will generate production code commercial applications for it. So with our UI components, which are all these different grids and data visualizations to our app builder and our design to code methodology, like we're really driving productivity in these commercial teams, these large enterprises. Yeah. The website for Infragistics is just like it sounds, Infragistics.com. Finally, Dean, I just want to ask you about your book, When Grit Is Not Enough. Who should be reading this book? Obviously, it's available on Amazon and everywhere else.

13:17But who needs to pick up and study this book? Yeah, I mean, at this point, I really wanted to help entrepreneurs have better chances at success. And so I wrote it for entrepreneurs, everything I've kind of learned over the last 35 years. So really from a company of 10 and up, and even managers and execs in the enterprise, it'll help them as well. But I wrote it for entrepreneurs to help them get to the next level of growth and success. Yeah. And again, the title that you can search this on Amazon right now, or Dean, they can just go to your website, but it's when grit is not enough in entrepreneurs playbook for taking your business to the next level.

13:56It is on paperback, Kindle, hardcover. And again, the website, oh, it looks like audio book as well. Yeah. And soon to be audio. We just actually approved the audio. I just was told actually today it takes four to eight weeks for it to get to Audible, but it's on its way. on your website, Dean Guida.com. You have not only information about the book, but you actually have, this is pretty cool. Click on, I'll just encourage someone who's listening, click on the button that says audio book resources. You have a, it's a 34 page guide that has all the kind of the illustrations and some really great resource, a lot of really effective charts.

14:37And you can go look at this right now so you can see exactly what you're going to be learning in the book. But again, Dean Guida, congratulations on publishing that. Again, your personal website, deanguida.com. We talked about slingshotapp.io. And finally, infragistics.com. Dean, anything we missed that you would encourage someone to do if they're like, well, I've been enjoying this conversation, but I feel like I'm only scratching the tip of the iceberg here to mix my metaphors. Yeah, I think actually starting with the book is a great way. And then if you're a software or designer or developer, we got some great tools for you.

15:13And then, of course, if you want to create a data-driven, agile learning organization with the book and then Slingshot as a way to digitally execute that in your organization is a really good route to success. Awesome. Dean Guida, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. Thank you, Josh.

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