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Chuck: So first, John, welcome. And thank you for being Innovators on Tap. I know you grew up in Green Lake. And I'm curious what you think about your childhood? How did it inform your beliefs that led you to really getting into the startup or innovation business or maybe not getting into it - made you successful at it?
JZ: So Green Lake is a town of about 1000 people, actually have under 1000. Now, my high school class was 36 kids, and so it's a pretty quiet place to grow up. It's the kind of place where the adults say it's great for kids, but the kids just think it's boring. You know, I had to find I had to make my own fun. I had to find things to do to stay busy. And I was a nerdy kid. So you know, I was drawn to projects, you know, creative pursuits, things that sort of rewarded uninterrupted focus. So I got into music and design and I would do all sorts of dorky things like designed artwork for CDs that didn't exist and draw plans for sailboats that would never be built. And, you know, I think that was where I did just sort of, my interest in work, you know, it sounds weird to like, think of it that way, as you know, for a kid, but like really sitting down and, you know, focusing on something, you know, I'm sure there's a lot of other factors that I could trace back to how I grew up. But I think that one of the constants throughout all my work has been sort of my ability and my interest in focusing on work that really matters and helping other people do the same things.
Chuck: Well, your story about growing up, it reminds me that I was a bit nerdy as well. Yeah, I remember sitting in my basement trying to recreate the Pong game. And I wrote it in basic. I actually made the Pong game and so I'm sure our listeners probably don't know what I'm talking about. But that was like the only video game at the time. Yeah, it was quite a challenge, but the ability to sit there and just spend time thinking and concentrating and it was kind of boundary-less. Until you mentioned your comment, I'm not sure I would have connected those experiences to what I did later. But I think some of that ability to be creative and develop I guess a self confidence really came in handy later in life. And I think for me, it was I always associated positive feelings with that kind of work. And you know, and I was, I was one of those lucky kids who enjoyed school too, you know, it's just sort of like, I never minded like sitting down and putting my mind to something. And so, yeah, I think that's if you have an adversarial relationship with work or focus, it makes it harder to do stuff that matters later on. I think so much of innovation is about taking risk. And it would seem to me based on just the short story that you're pretty comfortable with that, is it learned? Or is it something that's just naturally inside you?
John: I actually think of myself as a pretty risk-averse person. I am always thinking about backup plans and contingencies. There's an interview that I heard once with Brian Koppelman, who's a screenwriter, and he was talking about how there's kind of this narrative out there that if you want to do something different, you should run up to the edge of the pool and just jump and just do a big, you know, cannonball splash into the water, but he thinks that most people really are better served by sort of tiptoeing up to the edge and testing the water and, and you know, only when they're absolutely ready to take the take the plunge. And so that's always how I've approached everything I was doing. I've always kind of had one foot, you know, back behind me and something that was unknown and another foot forward into something new. So, but I acknowledge that, from the outside my actions may look more, you know, sort of tolerant or seeking of risk. And I think a lot of that really has to do with just the, the privilege and the, you know, fortunate way that I grew up, you know, just kind of coming from a family in a place and a system in a society that made me feel like I could try new things and not there wasn't a really, truly a huge risk. Yeah.
Chuck: So it's interesting to me that you describe that you're not really a risk taking person. You said you would do something because you weren't afraid of failing. You knew you could go back. So how is not being afraid of failure? To me, that's a key element of risk. So it feels like while you might be trying to optimize risk and some of what you're doing, you really have something about you that seems very comfortable with this idea of trying something and not being afraid it won't work.
JZ: I'm sure yeah, so I think some of that is the acknowledgement that that failure wouldn't be so bad, you know, tried to extend that way of thinking about failure into, into professional work and into personal pursuits. And, and, you know, always think about, well, if I do fail, what does that mean? You know, if I try something new, and it doesn't go the way that I think it's gonna go, okay, we could call that a failure. But it's not necessarily a failure, right? Like, what can I learn from that? What can I take away from that? And that's especially the case in the design sprints that I would run with, with startups where we would basically construct this this week long process around getting to that failure point, if that if that's what's gonna actually happen, getting that failure point very quickly, but also in a in an environment where the risks are minimized and the opportunities for learning are maximized.
Chuck: So for the for the listeners that may have not read your book, Sprint, sure, can you just give us the thumbnail version of what the concept is and how it works.
JZ: So a design sprint is a five day process that helps teams who are working on something new, very quickly test their ideas with real customers. So there's on each day of the sprint, there's a different task that needs to be done. The sprint emphasizes working face to face, emphasizes working on one important thing at a time sort of not getting bogged down in everything. And I think one of the things that's most unique about it is that it encourages people to think about what type of fake incomplete version of their eventual product or service or whatever they can build as a prototype test with a five person test. So five customers who all fit a very specific profile, put the prototype in front of those customers at the end of the week, have a conversation with them, ask them to step through the prototype whether it's on a screen or in a physical environment or something else and see how it goes.
Chuck: So when I was at cre, I would say that there was something similar. We didn't use the process per se. But it's kind of what naturally happened in that environment. But yet, so many companies don't do it without the recipe, they would never take this approach. What is it that you think gets in their way? What are the barriers that most people are facing? To do this?
JZ: I think one of the big barriers is that there aren't a lot of recipes for these things. And that was why we created and really wanted to spread the word about the design sprint process. At the time, a lot of people were talking about Lean, you know, the Lean Startup was a huge, huge book. A lot of people were talking about design thinking, but we would see a lot of teams, a lot of startup teams that we worked with, they would be really interested in these things. And they would, they would use the buzzwords and they would have some of the vocabulary. But then when it came to actually, you know, the next week, get into the office and decide what they were going to do, how they were actually going to spend their time, they didn't have a playbook, they didn't have a recipe. So they would just kind of go back to the way things were. And there's such a strong inertia around defaults around, sort of the business as usual things that we do. And it's, it's hard to say where they all come from, but things like, you know, sitting down in front of your email first thing and trying to, you know, get on top of anything that seems important, you know, going to every meeting, you're invited to and, and giving that meeting precedents, even if you and everybody else in the room knows that it's not really a good use of your time. There. These defaults exist everywhere. And so what we would see is that even in the startups that have the most amazing people working on the coolest opportunities, you know, these companies who are supposedly on the cutting edge of of innovation, if you would look at what they were doing, they looked just like employees at some big corporation, you know, answering the emails going to the meetings. And so we felt that if we could give people a really concrete recipe, say, just do these things in this order. It would be like baking a cake. You know, if you follow steps and you do it right, you're going to get something delicious at the end. So I see how the process works.
Chuck: I've actually been through a design sprint, and a couple of times. And so I, I buy into the concept and the idea that it works, and I've seen the results. But what I've been working on when I think about innovation is that it's not innovation itself is not a process. It's fundamentally a people thing. And so, I worried that we're leading people to believe if you just follow these steps, you'll get innovation. And I should define what I think of as innovation. So to me, innovation is something new, that solves a problem and creates real value. So I think the design sprint is a powerful tool but I feel like we're short changing this human side that's required to do it. So how do you react to that?
JZ: Well, I would agree with that. I think that, well, a couple things. First of all, the design sprint was really never meant to be an innovation process. Our goal was not to necessarily lead to these breakthrough ideas. A lot of times, the people who already existed at, you know, on these teams and these companies, they already had great ideas, ideas were not the problem. But there were so many things working against them so many reasons why those ideas would never see the light of day. I mean, there was there's, you know, group dynamics and power dynamics that exist in organizations. There's all these messed up defaults that I mentioned about how people spend their time. There's unhelpful narratives about what it's supposed to look like when you're in a startup or you're doing something new and bold. There's there's a lot of pressure that comes from the fact that if you're in a venture backed startup, you're going to run out of money at some point in the future, and you've got a timeline. So we have always with the design sprint process, we have always wanted to enable teams to be their best to help the people that already exist in a company, do their best work together, do their best work as individuals spend their time on the work that is really, really important to their business, the work that solves problems and creates value, as you said, which, you know, I think, under your definition is, is innovation. But you know, you were asking about people and I couldn't agree more. I mean, I think if you don't have great people already, you know, a design sprint is not going to make it's not going to make the team better. But it can make a good team produce great things.
Chuck: I think I want to shift here because you have so much other interesting work you've done. There's something about your time you worked in startups, you worked at Google, you worked at Google Ventures. So you saw a lot of other startups, but well there are some characteristics about people that you said, these guys are more likely to be more successful than someone else?
JZ: Yeah, definitely more diverse teams were much more successful. And part of what the sprint process enabled was, was those teams to come together in a much healthier way than maybe they normally would and create space for maybe some folks who, whose voices were not always heard to be heard in the course of that process. I think companies that didn't subscribe to the visionary leader mythology, they were much more successful. I think that, you know, it's, you know, the most famous example would be the Steve Jobs archetype of you know, like, if you have this one visionary leader who can set the course everybody just needs to follow and it will be amazing. The companies who, who operated in that model, were very unlikely to be successful. In my experience. I think we could shift the way that people approach their work. Obviously, it helped if they if people already had a mindset of, of being comfortable with that, that quiet focus thought that we talked about at the very beginning, if they were comfortable with failure, if they had a certain self awareness and kind of a mature attitude about failure and learning, you know, obviously, if people already had that mindset, then bringing that into the sprint process, but just sort of supercharge it.
Chuck: So, when I was working on my book, I did some research and looked into Google. And they do a lot of interesting experimentation. They fund a lot of interesting projects within the company. But I don't see a lot of innovation based on my definition that has occurred at Google, beyond search and AdWords. Do you think that's a fair assessment? I think they're doing lots of inventing and experimenting, but I don't see it turning into innovation.
JZ: I think a lot of the really successful products that Google has created that have changed the world to use maybe an overloaded phrase, but they have, they have given people a totally different way of looking at things are accessing things. So think about Google Maps. I remember when Google Maps came out, and you could click and you could drag the map. And it was like you had this viewport into a map of the entire world. That was pretty amazing. That was, you know, that shook the world. You know, I think when you when Gmail came out, and you could, you could think of your email as being, you know, effectively, this infinite store of every communication you've ever had with somebody because of the storage space that was available to you and the ability to search. You know, I think they they did a lot of and continue to do a lot of really smart acquisitions. I think YouTube, you know, I don't know that YouTube necessarily was the first to have video online in that way, but the, you know, it's we think back to this stuff. And it all seems so inevitable and so obvious now but a video that played in a web page when it loaded. That was a, that was a very significant new thing. And so. So you know, there's some things that come to mind when I think about Google being innovative, but I don't know, do those fit your your definition?
Chuck: So I think there's an era of Google that's changed, right. And so if I think about Gmail, it's been around how long now? Yeah, probably 10-15 years and Maps. Same way. And so what I look is more recent past on Google and what I'm teasing out a little bit is, so to create value means someone is willing to pay for sure. Right? And you just got to look at Google's results and 88% of the company is really about selling advertising. And it's not a bad thing. I look I it's I'm a huge fan of what they've done and the technology they've brought to us. What I'm wondering is, now that they have success. So much of the work they're doing it. It doesn't have to solve a problem. And when I say it doesn't have to solve a problem, the people working on it have no risk. Part of what I saw happen. And my analogy would say is, it's a little bit like what I saw when I read about the days of Bell Labs, or Xerox PARC, phenomenal invention. But if the person working on it doesn't feel like the company is being bad on their success, and I'm sure you saw this in Google Ventures, right? What's the motivation of this team to have to succeed? Because I believe some of the things Google's tried that they stopped, so they tried to create their own social network. Google could have built a social network if, if it was go out of business, or make that work. I'm confident they have enough smart people that could have figured that one out - understand what I'm getting. There's an incentive that's almost missing and how they're doing this now.
JZ: Yep. Yeah, I think That's a really smart observation. And you know, the thing that is kind of interesting about my time at Google is that most of my time at Google was not really with Google. I was there for 10 years and six of those years, I was with Google Ventures. And that's the VC firm that's funded by Google, but investing in companies that are outside of Google, and I think the, you know, I think the the cold sort of capitalistic assessment of that is, if we're going to be disrupted, we'd like to own a piece of the disruptor. At this point, I think Google Ventures has invested in like, 400 companies maybe and at the time, I was there it was in the neighborhood of about 300. Before I left and, and yeah, there's there's a very different mindset, an attitude that comes when, when your company is going to run out of money, and you have a certain amount of time to to prove that you're, you're on the right track and that you're moving in that direction. quickly enough. And, and yeah, I don't think that that urgency exists inside of large companies that have a really strong and well established business model. Have you seen examples of large companies that are able to create that, that incentive structure or that feeling of urgency?
Chuck: I have an example of what we did at Cree, which is we needed to invent the LED light bulb. And for several reasons, we decided to do it in secret. So we took one of the founders of the company who had come back and was working for me, and he took four people, rented a warehouse, and they went off, but it was, you're going to sink or swim, go make this happen. We told nobody about it, because we didn't want honestly the big company distracting them. But we also told no one about it because we wanted them to feel like they had to figure this out. And in that case, we got all the behaviors you would expect out of a startup now is that because we put them in the secret offsite location, or is that because I took a group of really good innovators? If I had to guess it's a little of both. But if I look at other large companies, you know, I worked for Hewlett Packard, HP Labs was famous for inventing technology we never commercialized. Yeah. And you know, this famous Xerox PARC story, right? So Steve Jobs comes in, sees the GUI interface and the mouse and turns into a product. And I'm not sure if it was sitting in Xerox PARC. It was going anywhere. So a part of this is a big company phenomenon. Yeah. Yeah. And that's why I think Google Ventures is an interesting way to play because you're using your money, the money that's available from the large company, but you're applying it to groups of people that don't have a backup plan. Yeah, they need to make it work. Right.
Chuck: So you came out with your second book about a year ago called Make Time. What led to you writing that book?
JZ: That's a book that I have wanted to write for a long time, too. When I was working in Google Ventures, I met Jake Knapp, who is the guy who started the design sprint process when he was at Google. And we worked together at Google, hand in hand developing the design sprint process, but also working with, with almost 200 startups on all sorts of different challenges. And we learned pretty quickly into our time working together that we were both really interested in how we spent our time and we were, we had been down the rabbit hole of productivity optimization and trying to be super efficient and organized. And, you know, we both had read getting things done by David Allen several times and you know, lived our lives by that system, those types of systems were encouraging us to, to be very efficient, but not necessarily to spend time or to make time for the things that were really important. Both, you know, kind of big picture and life but also just a small picture, you know, like, you know, going to the, to the office for a day and very efficiently, going to all the meetings and answering all the emails and keeping on top of everything, but then getting down to the day and feeling like, shoot, I didn't have time to do my work today. You know, the stuff I'm supposed to be doing the stuff that actually creates value here. So we had this shared interest. And we had talked about writing a book that would combine some of the things that we had learned. But then the real impetus was that my wife and I decided to leave and go cruising. And so I, you know, Jake, and I had a conversation. I said, he was one of the first people that that I told that I was, I was doing this. And he's certainly the first person at work, because at the time, we still work together at Google Ventures, and I said, Hey, this is our plan. And he's like, all right, we got to write the book, then, like, it's got to happen. So essentially, you know, we created a deadline for ourselves. And that was the impetus that really made it happen at the time that it happened.
Chuck: So if you could just highlight some of the key principles of what the books about what are they?
JZ: The core philosophy behind make time is about examining and questioning the defaults of how we spend our time, because so much of what we do every day is on autopilot. It's by default, you know, we wake up in the morning, we open our phones, we check email, we respond, we jump on Twitter or Instagram or LinkedIn or whatever are our drug of choices, you know, we lose track of how much time has passed. We go into work and we give our time freely to other people who ask for it. And we don't necessarily make time for ourselves or for the things that are important to us. And so Make Time is all about resetting those defaults so that you can redesign your time, your day is really around the things that you want to be doing. It contains 87 different tactics. And so these are very concrete specific things that you can try Little things like removing distracting apps from your phone or logging out of distracting websites, to you know, things that are related to your energy, like substituting out a part of your commute with walking so that you're getting some movement in to things that have to do with with planning your day. So you know, one of the big Ideas is this thing called a highlight the daily highlight, which is the one thing that you want to bring your best energy to the one thing that you want to look back on the day and say, yeah, I'm really glad I made time for that. That was the highlight of my day. And so you know, scheduling time for your highlight on your calendar literally drawing in, if it's a presentation, you need to finish if it's, if it's writing up a proposal that you mean to get to, if it's if it's making dinner for you know, you're having friends come over, if it's going for a run after work, whatever it is literally sitting down and putting that thing in your calendar. So it's kind of this recipe book of all these different ideas, all these different little things you can do based around for daily steps of highlight. So identifying what's important to you, laser, which is sort of defeating distraction, energized, which is all about building the energy so that you can make the most of those moments that are important to you and then reflecting at the end of the day, so that you can, you know, look at what worked what didn't work and make changes for tomorrow
Chuck: In retirement, I’ve focused a lot of time on how to be present, to really work on how to manage the things, the stress, that leads to things like anxiety. And when I was reading a summary of your new book, the idea of reducing the noise in your day, by focusing on one thing you're actually being present with that, I actually think your book could be adapted to another problem, which is helping people deal with the things that cause anxiety. There are so many habits that you've described, and you describe them in such a tactical way. So much of what I've learned is, especially with an increase in technology, and tools and screen time, and all these inputs, those inputs have a lot to do with what's driving the increased anxiety in people's lives. You've actually got it a bunch of those same core things that would just be really interesting to see how it could be adapted because I think it's very much a parallel approach to essentially what we try to teach for people to deal with anxiety. So we make it far more complicated than having your books, your books, a great way to kind of break it down and make it simple.
JZ: Well, that's, that is super interesting. And I'm glad that you brought that up. One of the really cool things about writing books and and you know, as you've learned from, from this podcast, I know you've got a book coming out but you just you get to hear from so many people who are trying your ideas and who are kind of running your thoughts through their filters and responding to you and telling you and, and we've actually had a lot of people write to us about make time very much from the perspective of mental health and, and anxiety and issues of you know, feeling inadequate. In this happens a lot on Instagram, too. This happens a lot on LinkedIn where what you're seeing is the best of what people want to share and you know, they don't see all the other moments that aren't so, so, so beautiful. You know, so, so Instagram worthy. And so a lot of people really have written to us and told us about how much time has helped them from that perspective.
Chuck: I think you wrote an article before you guys wrote the book Make Time. I saw this on your medium. And it was about doing one thing at a time. And this makes a ton of sense to me. But we live in this world where everyone seems to believe in this concept of multitasking, which I just don't think works. You've also commented later on some of the dangers of productivity tools, I think you made a comment about how slack you know, you start using it. It's like, wow, I just got to put this away. What is it the multitaskers are missing?
JZ: I think they're missing the knowledge that multitasking isn't real, you know that. It's what we think of as multitasking is actually just switching back and forth. And so if you think about it, Switching, you know that there's a cost, you know, when you jump from paying attention to one thing to paying attention to another, you know, let's say you're trying to write something and somebody walks in the room and, you know, and interrupts you, right, like, now you're not doing a great job at the writing, and you're not doing a great job in that conversation. So when we think about switching in that sense, it's obvious that that's not a healthy way to work. But yeah, for some reason, when we are switching between tasks inside the same context, you know, on on a screen, for example, we believe that it's this magical thing called multitasking. And I don't know what those people are missing. But I think a lot of it's just kind of reframing it, you know, as switching, switching back and forth really fast.
Chuck: Yeah, I think they've convinced themselves that what they're doing is increasing their productivity, when in fact it has the exact opposite effect and in addition, creating a lot of stress on the brain because not only is switching in efficient. You know, that's a lot of extra input to process and it it just gets back to all the more reason why make time your book. Yeah, what it's doing right. It's it's eliminating those distractions.
JZ: Yeah, one of the ways I think about make time is that it's part of a conversation that we are all having about how to make best use of all these new technologies, because the stuff that we're talking about social media, smartphones, really 10 years old, I mean, it's in its current form, you know, I know that that technically, the iPhone, Facebook, a little bit older than that, but in their current form, about 10 years old, and so look at the first 10 years of any new technology, and it's kind of a mess, you know, there's a period of figuring it out. And so that's what we're doing is we're figuring it out. And I think one of the challenges with screen based connected technologies is that there's a kind of a false equivalency between things that we see on screens. So you know, for example, we are tempted to multitask because we see this thing on this side of our screen and this thing on the side of screen and it seems like oh, we can switch back and forth, we can do two at once. When our phone buzzes with a notification, we don't know if it's a text from our best friend, or if it's Facebook telling us that, you know, there's some trending posts, you know, it's like these things are presented in this equivalent way. But they're not actually equivalent. Some things are more important than others. And so one of the struggles, as we figure out how to navigate all this new technology is differentiating and, and resetting some of those defaults and creating our own structures and systems and processes to make sure that we're focusing on the stuff that's really important.
Chuck: What do you know, now that you wish you knew when you were getting started?
JZ: I wish I had more awareness of the value of getting in reps. So repetition. So I think most work environments do not allow you to get in many reps. I think even at a startup that I started, I basically started my career at a startup. My first real job after college, where I wasn't, you know, Wasn't studying anymore. It was at a startup, which seems like it should be the ultimate environment for getting in reps and learning really quickly. And I did learn a lot. But it wasn't because we were in any sort of rapid iterative cycle. It is because I was getting to do a lot of different things. And I was surrounded by people with a lot of experience. So it was a different learning model. But, but when I look at the periods where I've, where I've had sort of transformational learning experiences, it's been it's been because of, of repetition, and specifically kind of that structured learning process of trying something failing, having the information to know why you failed and what you should do differently, and then having an immediate opportunity to try it again. So that's one thing. I also think just as sort of general career advice, I think it's helpful in your first 5- 10 years to assemble a portfolio of something everybody's heard of something that is really interesting that nobody's heard of, and something that is very close to your heart in terms of passion. You know, it's Maybe it's not right. But you know, when you go to apply for a job or people find you on LinkedIn or whatever you want, there needs to be, there needs to be some hook that people have heard of a company that you worked at. And that may not be the best learning experience, it may not be the most fun for you, whatever. But I think it plays a certain role. And so I often encourage people who are early in their career to get that trio of, of a name brand, you know, a intense learning environment, and something that you really care about. I think, also, I wish that I knew, like how much I could get away with. When I was starting out. I was I was raised in a fairly like, you know, rule following structured way. It took me a long time to realize that like, at work, you need to do what you're supposed to do, but there's a lot of leeway. Like you can get you know, and again, we're we're talking to a very sort of privileged, you know, slice of the world here but, in sort of knowledge, work and creative jobs. If you think a meeting is dumb Don't just go do it every week because it's on your calendar, like say something, talk to somebody about it, ask why that meeting exists, you know, don't go to the meeting, see what happens, you know, like, as I got more and more bold with, with, you know, just making my own decisions about what I thought was best for my work, you know, that that that seemed to, to enable me to do work that was more valuable.
Chuck: I spend time with large companies a lot. And people who really feel like they're not empowered to try things or change or do things. And I usually ask them, so in this organization, how hard is it to get fired? And almost invariably, they'll tell me, you basically can't get fired from this place. And it doesn't matter if it's higher ed or I come Yeah. And I always go well, so if you can't really get fired, you pretty much could do anything you want. And they look at me and they're like, well There's a blank look. And it's, I think there's this Aha, that the people actually in the place where they have the least risk of something really going wrong, are also the least willing to take that it's interesting those environments instead of creating opportunity, it does the opposite. Yeah, that's super interesting.
Chuck: Well, I want to thank you for being on the podcast, it has been a really interesting conversation. I've done enough work to have read what you've done. But you've put a context on it that has really helped me think about it in a different way. And even in a way that I think, I think the tool can be used even more than it's being used. Yeah. And I look forward to figuring out how we take this because the concept applies it. When you think of it as a tool for innovation, we've really made it too far too narrow of what its potential is. Yeah, I think we need to almost reframe what it's trying to do. So thank you for being here. I really appreciate your time.
JZ: My pleasure.
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