There is no I in Team, but there is an I in intrapreneur

Intrapreneurs are quite the excitable bunch.  I find myself constantly trying to get other people inside Intuit to adopt the new ideas and techniques that I learn.  Earlier in my career I would often wonder why very few of my co-workers were interested in learning.   They would respond positively when I shared things with them, but I would almost never see them dive in further or apply the techniques I was trying to teach them.

If  only I knew the things then, that I know now.

There is nothing wrong with trying to influence others inside your organization, but change of any kind starts with you.

Whether you want them to or not, your own beliefs are what transfers to others.   Every thing you do, every day is a signal to those around you.  Are you emitting the right signals?   If there is even a bit of doubt in you, then others will pick up on that.

Whatever change you’re trying to make in your organization must start with you.   Continue to practice your new skills until you firmly believe in them.   At that point you should have built significant trust with your team.   They will be much more open to trying new tools & techniques after consistently seeing you exercise them successfully.

Here are a few areas you can focus on as an intrapreneur:

Personal development / Innovation time

BLOCK off 5-10% of your time each week to work on growing your skills as an innovator.   If you don’t set aside time consistently, how will you be able to convince your co-workers that they should do the same?

During this time each week, determine one area from the list below below and begin to apply immediately.     Do not let anyone take this time from you!

 

Personal Brainstorming

Break out your notebook and look at some of the problems / issues you’ve observed recently.   After you have spent a few minutes making sure the problem / issue is stated clearly, challenge yourself to spend 20 – 30 minutes trying to come up with as many solutions as possible.

If you’re interested in some great techniques to help you generate a BUNCH of ideas, check out 25 Useful Brainstorming Techniques.

Not only will this exercise help you be a better at brainstormer, but you will come up with great solutions to your own problems and feel better as a result.

Personal Business Model Canvas

The business model canvas is a great tool for pushing your thinking for a new product idea or a personal business model.   If you’re interested in a deeper dive into this technique be sure to check out the free preview of Business Model You.   By spending the time to document your personal business model you will better understand where you should focus your personal innovation efforts.

After you’ve documented your personal canvas, step back and think about the areas where you didn’t feel confident in your answers.   Were there areas where you wish you had the person sitting here to ask?   These are the areas where you need to begin applying your innovation skills immediately.

If you realized that you don’t have deep empathy for your customers, partners, etc.  You can dive in and start fixing that problem.   If you don’t have the right partnerships in place to move quickly then you can begin the process of building those relationships.

This is not a one time thing, be sure to come back and visit your business model canvas at some frequency to help you stay focused.

 

Empathy for your ___________

Creating new products and services is all about solving problems for customers.   If you reflect this thinking on yourself then you will see that you need to have some significant empathy skills.   You can apply these with your boss, co-workers, partners, etc.   Your deep understanding of the needs of these folks will be invaluable to you and your team.

As you learn about each of these customers, document what you know and share it with your team at appropriate times.    “Hey team, we should consider delivering this report by hand rather than e-mailing since Julie (our customer) spends most of her weekends reviewing email”.   Intrapreneurs think and do differently.

You can gain empathy by observing or interviewing your customer.   As you identify emotions and motivations for each customer you might also want to put yourself into similar situations.

Run an experiment

Your ability to create ultra-rapid prototypes and get visceral feedback from customers is extremely important.   When you can get the answer to any behavioral question in a matter of hours your co-workers will continuously turn to you and ask for help.

Start with something simple, you don’t need to solve world hunger.   Start by getting co-workers to recycle more,  wash their hands more thoroughly or even do something positive for someone else.   Just as you would do with a product, follow the process:

• brainstorm your assumptions
• Choose the leap of faith
• Create a falsifiable hypothesis
• Build an experiment
• Run it quickly
• Document what you learned as a result
• Repeat

The more often you do this, the better you will get and you will also be making a positive impact on your company and co-workers.

 

These are just a few ideas for you, but I challenge you to START TODAY.   Don’t just tell your team mates about these great new innovative practices, SHOW THEM.   After you try some of these, I’d love to hear about your experiences in the comments below.

 

 

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2012 Year in Review – Lean Startup Enterprise and Family

For me, I think this year should be dubbed “The Year of Lean Startup and family”. I tried my best to strike a balance between 34 trips and spending quality time with my family and friends. All things considered it was an incredible year for Maria, Miranda and I. My only wish is that 2012 did not include unexpectedly losing my mom to liver cancer.

In December of 2011, I moved from Intuit’s IT department into HR as a product manager for the Personal Growth and Development team. At that point I was armed with a basic set of product management skills, the right mindset and a few extremely smart and insightful mentors. Through my journey this year, I can honestly say I feel extremely confident as a product manager and look forward to being able to continue to move up the ranks quickly.

I believe this confidence comes primarily from my application of Lean Startup practices both inside and outside Intuit. In January I was asked to provide a “Tech Talk” inside Intuit for our development community. The goal was to give a high level overview of Lean Startup and how it applied Inside

Intuit. At that point Eric Reis was starting to do quite a bit of speaking for Intuit and many employees were still not making the connection between these “startup” ideas and how they apply inside of a multi-billion dollar enterprise like Intuit. The tech talk went great and it made me realize that there was a big opportunity in helping others to apply these concepts.

With that realization, I started investigating the possibility of having an event called Lean Startup Machine (LSM) come to Tucson for Intuit. Having been to the event myself about a year prior I knew it was an extremely high impact event. Through the founder I learned that someone else from Intuit was trying to bring them to San Diego. He was a fellow Innovation Catalyst named Ben Blank. We quickly decided to pilot our own version of the event with a few teams to see if we could create value for Intuit before deciding to pay $60k for LSM.

We had a total of 5 teams for our first Lean StartIN (Lean Startup in the Enterprise) event in San Diego. We were fortunate enough to be able to get Eric Reis to help us kick off the event via skype and Brant Cooper came in person. It was a huge success and the teams were thoroughly excited after the 2 days were over. Ben and I quickly jumped to run a second event in Mountain View.

This event had a total of 12 teams crammed into a small room (high energy!). We were able to get our CEO, Brad Smith and Luxr’s Janice Frasier to participate as judges for the event. Again, the teams accomplished more in 2 days that most Intuit teams accomplish in months! We knew we were on to something big.

After these two energizing events, Ben came up with the crazy idea to do a Lean StartIN World Tour! We would conduct 10 Lean StartIN events across 10 different Intuit sites over the course of 10 weeks. This would allow us to train 100 Intuit teams on Lean Startup and Rapid Experimentation. In early June we ran an updated and improved “pilot” event in Menlo Park just prior to the world tour.

This insane world tour significantly contributed to the 53,906 miles I travelled this year across 3 different countries. In addition to creating a bunch of great intrapreneur driven startups for Intuit, Ben and I learned a ton about the cultural differences between sites at Intuit, ways to effectively coach teams and get them out of the building QUICKLY!

As the article title notes, I tried my best this year to balance my busy work schedule with family time. Historically, I haven’t been very good at this and it seems like something that I’m constantly putting on my New Year’s resolution list. I did a decent job of balancing things this year, but due to the loss of my mom in September I had a little over a month of almost pure family time.

To support my brother, sister and I during the passing of my mom, my dad came out from Thailand for about 6 weeks. It was really incredible to have him around through all of that. He helped with anything and everything he could. I’m not sure that we could have made it through her passing, celebration of life and 2nd funeral (my great aunt decided to put on) without all of his love and support.

I don’t feel like I’m ready to write about the experience of losing my mom, but I can say that it has completely changed my outlook on life. I have actually started including family time in my schedule to ensure that it always happens. I’m intentionally trying to get work that allows me to travel to places on my bucket list. I’ve tried Karaoke and am trying to say yes to anything new that I haven’t attempted before. It seems like such a waste to say things like “I don’t do that” or “That’s not me”. It’s really as simple as saying “yes” and giving things a try.

I think this is best represented in what has happened this year at Gangplank Tucson. We successfully ran 2 Lean Launchpad events for a total of 17 different teams. The first class was quickly pulled together through a grass roots effort in the community in just under 2 weeks. If you’d like to know more, you can read about my lessons learned from putting that class together. Another project for Gangplank is to get our collaborative working space moved downtown. To support this effort I’ve been puttting together stories from our lean launchpad teams about what they have applied after the class and how it has changed their outlook on business. It is absolutely amazing to read some of those quotes.

My adventures this year with Intuit and Gangplank have opened my eyes to a skill that I didn’t realize I had. I have learned that I am a pretty good Lean Startup and Innovation coach. For anyone out there that wants to become an expert in something I would suggest you get a couple books, go get some practice and then start teaching others. This process worked incredibly for me over the last few years. I effectively immersed myself in Lean Startup coaching by teaching 300+ teams for Intuit, and 50+ teams outside Intuit this year.

Now that I’ve taken the time to look back I am amazed at how incredible 2012 was for us. There is absoultely no way I could have accomplished all of this without the help of my super-wife Maria and well behaved daughter Miranda, and hordes of smart people at Intuit, Gangplank, Startup Weekend and Lean Entrepreneur.

THANK YOU ALL for an incredible year, let’s rock 2013!

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Butterflies to Hurricanes – How Innovation & Creative Problem Solving Have Changed My Life

The title of this post may seem a little dramatic, but it’s actually true!   I’m hoping that someone out there might be early in their innovation journey and my story might provide some pointers to help them transform their lives.  This blog post outlines my path from innovation neophyte to Intuit Innovation Catalyst.

The Calm Before The Storm

The butterfly began flapping its wings in early 2010 when I started listening to Phil McKinney’s podcast called “Killer Innovations” in which I started learning all about brainstorming, narrowing and how to assess the quality of innovations.  I’m sure this happens to a lot of people, but I thought this was all about generating good ideas during a team brainstorm or personal brainstorming and not a lot more.  It wasn’t Phil’s fault, I just had no experience in the area.

I tried out a few of his techniques personally and soon got the bright idea that I should try this out on my team at Intuit.  I booked a 2 hour meeting with all of the business intelligence developers to brainstorm new ways that we might use our text analytics system to make things better for our area.  The session went pretty well.  We generated quite a few ideas and due to the fact that I had a really bad narrowing system, we took almost 5 hours trying to prioritize the list  of ideas.

What I Learned:

• The best way to generate killer innovations is to generate lots of ideas
• You need a fast way to narrow ideas, otherwise the team will burn out
• Make sure you know what’s going to happen with the ideas after they are generated.  If there is no commitment to move forward with them the team will flounder.

 

April 28th, 2010:  I decided that I would try something a little bigger.  I got approval from the TurboTax Analytics manager to pull her entire team into an all day brainstorming session.  We spent a few hours brainstorming what we might be able to create if we combined random Intuit data sets.  We were able to generate about 297 different ideas!

After the brainstorming we went through a long and tedious narrowing process.  We put each idea into Quickbase and then gave each one a 1-5 star rating based on how well it met our key criteria.  Eventually we were able to narrow to a key few ideas and we began prototyping them using the whiteboard.   Finally, we voted on the top ideas and wrapped up the session.

At the end of the day, the manager of the team pulled me off to the side and told me about Intuit’s Innovation Catalyst program.  She said it was an intense training where I would be able to learn how to apply Design For Delight in sessions just like I had done.  I was ecstatic as I had no idea the program even existed.  It turned out I was already applying the techniques myself even though I needed a lot more skill and practice.

What I Learned:

• Don’t worry about whether you’ve got it exactly right.  Jump in, execute and make sure you learn from the situation.
• Being a solo facilitator with 9 participants is very difficult.
• Make sure your narrowing criteria are right before facilitating.  Generate a few ideas on your own, run them through the narrowing criteria and make sure it works right.

The Winds Are Strengthening

Around this time I also started listening to Andrew Warner’s podcast called Mixergy.  I was learning a TON about entrepreneurship from him, and one day in the Arby’s drive-through I came across an episode where he opened up and started talking about what it was like for him to be interviewing his heroes.  He gave some pointers on doing this successfully and I realized that  the best way for me to learn more about innovation was to start interviewing!   I went home and bought the  www.innovatorsmix.com domain name, put up a quick WordPress site and tried to find a few people to interview.

June 18th, 2010: The fastest folks to connect with to interview were co-workers at Intuit, so that’s what I did.  I conducted my first 2 interviews and remember being SO excited afterward.  I was learning about things going on inside the company that previously I had no visibility into.  I was hooked immediately, but there was one snag.  The legal team.   They wanted to make sure that I wasn’t letting out trade secrets and asked me to give them a copy of each episode before I published it.  This made the barrier way too high so I decided to stop interviewing Intuit employees.

Finding new folks to interview required a little creativity, but I was learning about Twitter and decided to setup an account for the podcast.  I began connecting with anyone with the word “innovation” in their profiles and attempted to find my next interviewee.  As luck would have it, I found @GreggFraley on the first day (a Friday) and struck up a quick conversation.  After a little bit I got up the guts to ask him about having him on Innovators Mix.  He was extremely kind and offered to let me interview him on the following Monday.  GREAT!

I quickly realized that it would be incredibly rude of me to attempt to interview him without ever reading his novel Jack’s Notebook.   I immediately called my fiancee and asked her to please stop by the bookstore and buy a copy.  She called me back about 30 minutes later and told me that they didn’t have it in stock!   What was I going to do?   I left work early and went home to see if her iPad might have the book.  IT DID!  I immediately dove in and proceeded to read the entire book in about 12 hours or so.

Monday came quickly and I was ready to conduct my first real interview.  Boy was I incredibly nervous, but since he was a pro at this type of thing he was able to take my poorly crafted questions and provide eloquent answers to each of them.  I learned quite a bit from Gregg over the short hour, but there was one piece that really stuck with me.  He told me a story about an exchange between him and one of his early mentors.   Gregg said:

…a guy named, Bill McGrane who was no longer with us; may he rest in peace. But Bill is one of these guys who back and even the middle 70s was challenging all the assumptions, and was a real fresh thinker.  One of the things that he said to me when I was 26 and sort of struggling for what to do and how to do it.

He said, “Become an expert at something.” And I said, “Well, that kind of takes years.” He said, “Not really.” He said, “If you read six books about anything you’re more informed about whatever that is than 99% of the population, and what’s an expert than to be more informed than almost everyone else.”  That, really, was interesting to me because I thought, “Wow, six books.” How long does it take to read six books on one subject; not too long right? For someone, for instance, who wants to be an expert on creativity and innovation, if you read six books, you will along the way, become an “expert” — if you read the right six. In particular I’d hope that Jack’s Notebook would be one of them!  Now, you haven’t got a PhD right? But you’ve got a good start at domain expertise, and that’s what you want.”

What I Learned:

• Creative Problem Solving  had been around for quite a while and there is lots to learn.
• You can break any endeavor down into small pieces to conquer it (ie: becoming an expert at something)
• Don’t let roadblocks get in the way of your dreams.  Figure out how to get around them quickly and keep moving.

Fortunately, I had already read Jack’s Notebook and just needed to figure out what my other “expert” books should be.  I hit Amazon and grabbed a few newly published titles with the word “innovation” in them.  They were “The Innovator’s Toolkit” and “Innovation Tournaments”.  These two books taught me quite a bit about creating and supporting innovation systems inside companies.  How to get teams moving and how to foster creativity.    They were very helpful, but unfortunately weren’t very practical for someone further down in the organization as I was.   I really needed something more hands-on.
September 27th, 2010 :  That something came only a few short months later when Lucy, the same person who had nominated me to become an innovation catalyst asked me to help facilitate a Design for Delight session with her and a few other ICs.  We helped participants go on a customer safari where they watched employees in their native environment, got to learn from them, ask then questions and begin to dip their toes into a deep river of customer empathy.  The end goal was to apply what they learned to design a knowledge management system which would work well for agents across all of Intuit’s businesses.

What I Learned:

• Deep customer empathy takes time and dedication.  Teams that spend 1-2 hours watching their customers will design mildly better solutions, but that is the tip of the iceberg.
• Be willing to make rapid changes – The ICs were pulled together about 2 hours into the session to discuss some areas that weren’t going to plan.  They made a change to the agenda which ended up correcting the issue.

 

Tropical Depression or Tropical Storm?

2/23/2011 – The day for official Innovation Catalyst training finally came in late February.  I was so excited and nervous to finally get to go to training.  I knew it was going to be special, but nothing could have prepared me for the experience I received!   We were immersed in customers, empathy maps, problem statements and point of view exercises immediately.

— To be continued —

 

Rather than having this blog post turn into a book, I feel that it would be better to devote a full post to the Innovation Catalyst training I received and some of the lessons I’ve learned since.   I’ll end by saying THANK YOU to all of the great mentors that have helped me get this far.

Please provide me feedback in the comments below.  How is this story useful or valuable to you?

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Virtual Moving Sale!

There is a good chance we will be moving soon and want to make sure we’re not moving old things that we no longer need or use. Here are the items in our virtual moving sale!

Evenflow baby stroller – $30
*NEW* Godinger FREEDOM PUNCH BOWL W/LADLE – $80
Large girls dollhouse – $90

Graco Pack & Go Baby PlayPen – $25
Gazelle no impact exercise machine – $30
Wurlitzer Piano *Great Condition* – $375
Cosco Alpha Omega Toddler Car Seat – $40
Greenline Girls Cruiser Bicycle – $80
Husky 4550 Portable Generator – $350

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Art or Vandalism? – A sad tour of graffiti in Tucson

My vote is that all of the graffiti I’ve seen has been vandalism.  The thing that I found most interesting about this Human Mosaic Project assignment is the amount of graffiti I was able to find around Tucson.  I honestly didn’t have to hunt at all.  It was found on nearly every corner of every street.  In many neighborhoods it had been poorly covered up, but had obviously been there before.

Very sad indeed.

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Business Lessons From Mexico – Make Time For Family

This is the third post in my Business Lessons from Mexico series.  If you haven’t already done so, please go back and read the first and second posts on “Do One Thing Well” and “Make Sure You’re Protected” for additional context.

One area I personally struggle with, and am always striving to do better with, is making time for family.  Because I enjoy my work, I often find that I’ll try to grab an extra hour here, an additional 15 minutes there, and before I realize it’s time for bed.

This last trip to Mexico, I was unable to get phone or internet service on the beach.  The most advanced technology we used was an iPod to jam out while playing sequence on the beach and playing fart games with unsuspecting visitors.

My wife had the incredible idea to buy a little remote-controlled whoopee cushion.  You take the portion with the speaker and hide it somewhere and then use a remote which looks like a car keychain remote.  Whenever the remote is pressed you get a random and realistic fart sound from the other end.  As juvenile as it sounds, eventually EVERYONE was playing with the little machine.

From little chuckles to long, loud barrel laughs, everyone loved it!  Eventually, once everyone in our little camp had been tricked into believing that the person sitting next to them had no respect for anyone, we had to move on to the neighbors.  They would come over to visit, be invited to the kitchen where grandma would proceed to test their patience.

I don’t think I’ve laughed so much or so hard in a very long time!  The impacts of this 4 day break in Mexico has had on me personally are pretty amazing.  I came back to the United States and have been  hard at work, but things are flowing so naturally.

I don’t find that I’m distracted by Twitter and Facebook as much as I was before I left.  I’m able to whip out blog posts at record speed and I feel I can focus on the things that are most important.  I was able to move a couple of my personal projects forward by leaps and bounds in a matter of days.

I owe this to my family as they have ensured that in spite of a long list of to-dos waiting I always set aside some time with family to be able to recharge and keep from burning out.

Make sure you set aside time to recharge!

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