Building Category-Leading Companies Through Strategic Acquisitions with Jason Wild

Why the lone genius model fails most innovation efforts

00:00Bill Gallagher: Have you ever had a week when you're completely slammed, but somehow nothing actually moved? Is this one of those weeks? That's not really a time problem. It's a busyness habit problem. My new book, Busy Is Broken: Do Less, Scale More, is all about growing by doing less, not more. Read or listen to a sample chapter over at busyisbroken.com. That's busyisbroken.com. It's also on Amazon and other booksellers.

00:26Bill Gallagher: There we are. Hey. So look, a lot of companies innovate once. Why can hardly anybody do it more than once? So the answer is maybe less to do with ideas and everything to do with who's in the room. Who's in the room today is a great guest, so listen in.

00:55Bill Gallagher: Everybody, Bill Gallagher, Scaling Coach, host of the Scaling Up Business podcast. Our show comes to you every week, approaching 700 episodes now, wherever you're getting this. So turn on your like, subscribe, all that kind of thing, notifications, so you get it every week. You can even go to our website, and we have a cool thing in our website now. We just introduced recently, as I record this, maybe long since you hear it or watch it. But we have this new diagnostic called Q20. So scalingcoach.com/q20, and you will get this cool sort of summary of your business with a little bit of me and a little bit of AI, a combo of our look at your business. Just answer some questions, take ten minutes, and I'll give you an interesting thought about your growth path and options and that kind of thing.

01:48Bill Gallagher: Alright. I want to introduce Jason Wild. He's a partner of a firm called Paradox Strategies. He coauthored this book, Genius at Scale, with Harvard's Linda Hill. He's a former SVP at companies you might have heard of like Microsoft, Salesforce, and IBM. He was at Microsoft during that whole OpenAI Sam Altman partnership. You might have heard of them. In these days, kind of in the news, he built Ignite at Salesforce, and he helped launch Watson X at IBM. So he's been involved in innovation across 39 countries. Lots of different interesting companies. He's fluent in Spanish. He co-starred movies with Mr. T and Jane Fonda. Lots of things we could say about Jason. Jason, welcome to the show.

02:38Jason Wild: Thank you, Bill. You've done your research. It's great to be here.

02:42Bill Gallagher: Thank you, AI. AI helps us with our show prep research. Right? Not hard to look it up, that kind of thing. Anyway, so you've led or worked with leadership teams across companies and organizations like NASA, NATO, Disney, and so on. You've worked with so many big tech players and big operators around the world. When did you first realize that this lone genius model of innovation was kind of a problem or not the way to go?

03:13Jason Wild: Yeah. For sure, Bill. It took a few years. I think early in my career, I definitely bought into it. I was a big Apple fan. You know, admiration for Steve Jobs, I think, would only begin to describe it. But for me, when I entered the business world, it was like, oh, all these different options, supply chain and front office, back office, and it was just so appealing to want to work in the space of innovation, of, like, come up with new ideas, challenge the world around us, and try to come up with, you know, something that was better that ultimately could change the way that we live and work. So I was just attracted to the discipline very, very early in my career and kind of learned the hard way in being in a couple of teams in a few places where it was led by a leader who had had prior success, was very smart, and you want to just believe that they always get it right, and they see the world differently. And, you know, what we learned the hard way was as part of a business unit that kind of got shut down that, yeah, well, when those lone geniuses are not right, you know, bad things can happen. So it really opened my eyes, I think, to a lot of things and began the challenge of, I think, a bunch of orthodoxies.

Collaborating with Rio's mayor taught him to listen first

04:34Jason Wild: And I think the main thing was being around people who literally were putting so much sweat equity in their life into trying to come up with something new and accepting ten, twenty, 30% success rates and doubling down more and more on, you know, I know what I need to do. I've got the idea. I see the world differently and trying to will their way to the future. And the defining moment for me was one of the early projects that I worked at at IBM, which was with the mayor of Rio de Janeiro getting ready for the World Cup and the Olympics. And this was all made kind of public. Rio de Janeiro was going to be the final stadium hosting the World Cup final and the host city for the Summer Olympics. So, obviously, a really, really big deal and, you know, a big moment for South America, let alone the city and the country. And after we had met with the mayor and his team several times, you know, he decided to work with us. So we asked, like, why? And he said something that stuck with me and will for the rest of my life, which was, you know, hey, Jason, you can imagine we've had thousands of people pitching us, calling us, and pretty much all of them were saying, here are the 10 things you need to do. Sign here. And you were the first team in the organization that said, let's collaborate. We want to understand what your dream and your aspirations are. And because we listened and we didn't necessarily say we have all the answers was the reason why he decided to want to move forward. So it wasn't something that I've read in a book or I heard somebody, you know, talking about during a cocktail or fireside chat. I was living these experiences directly.

06:17Jason Wild: And with people, right, a mayor being elected with a vision, basically saying, hey, we want to partner with some American organization. We're going to bring the best of his organization, of IBM together, do something that's never been done before. And to me, I think he was signaling that he was really trying to create an environment where the best ideas would surface and win and not the people with the most authority or the biggest title. And that stuck with me. And I think the more that I tried to design and create projects and environments and cultures around that, you just look back and you end up seeing that the odds of success increased because of the way you approach it. So it makes common sense. It's common sense to a lot of people, but I think, you know, we're under pressure. We're under pressure a lot, I think, in general, let alone these days when it's clearly not business as usual. And what happens when you're under pressure? You default to what you know, and you often get into command and control mode and bring me the problems and it ends up being micromanagement. And then what happens is the organization stops thinking, and it waits for the leadership team to tell them what to do. And that's how the process begins with complacency and this feeling of innovation is not my job. It's his job. It's her job, and they'll tell us what to do when we need to. And I think especially in these moments where the world is literally shifting underneath our feet every week, Bill, you need to be in a constant mode of experimentation, collaboration, and learning because nobody has the answers of where we're going.

07:58Bill Gallagher: Yeah. It's interesting to me that there are definitely people who are more creative. Right? And I think a lot of our listeners are probably creative. I know I skew way more creative than others, and then also a lot of our listeners, including myself, would have

08:18Bill Gallagher: A forceful personality. We would be dominant. We would be evangelistic. So creative, dominant, evangelistic. Like, those we think of those kinds of people driving things forward. And sometimes that works because we have a good idea or whatever. But also, as often, it doesn't work, and it doesn't necessarily gel with the team or a broader group of constituents. And we fixate on a particular problem. Alright, not the problem so much, but the idea that we have. We're trying to sell our idea or force our idea into, and then we don't get the best thinking and work from all the people who aren't thought of as creative people, right, that might contribute to the innovation in some way, but perform some of the role in the team.

09:06Jason Wild: No, I think that's exactly right. And I've been blessed to be not just in the business world, but even, you know, as you mentioned, I was in Hollywood, TV commercials. I've been in some extremely creative environments. And I think, you know, early in my career, I think that helped prepare me for the business and corporate world more than I could have imagined. I mean, you know, being rejected hundreds of times before I was 15, it's not something that I would wish on many people, but there are moments when I think about my own kids and say, yeah, we talk about, like, building resilience, but, you know, here's a way to actually practice it. And I'm very, very torn.

09:49Jason Wild: So I've been in situations where there's extreme creativity, and that's why I think it was important for us to differentiate between invention and innovation. And it sounds very much like inside baseball, but invention is just, like, coming up with new ideas and new stuff. Innovation and new ideas, and for us, innovation is not just disruptive innovation. We have a very broad and expansive definition of innovation that also includes, you know, incremental ideas that basically are new and useful. So anything we see that's new and useful is how we define innovation. Yeah. Right? And in that sense, everybody has an opportunity to be creative. And in my co-author's last book, she featured Pixar. Pixar, right, has this really interesting mission statement, which I'll paraphrase, which basically says, you know, we're gonna mess things up, and that's okay. But the role of Pixar is really to activate each individual superpower collectively in a way to do things that move people.

Creative people need purpose beyond compensation to thrive

10:56Jason Wild: What's amazing about that is they're in a space that lots of people have opinions, but pretty much every movie that they've produced has been a huge success. And that's kind of an antithesis of the world of innovation from my experience, which is anytime that I had, like, the corporate strategy or the finance team come to me and say, good job, congratulations, but let's take your success from 50 to 60% to 80 to 90%, it was always like, whoa, slow down. Because I'm not taking enough risks. So there's something about Pixar that they've done really, really well, which is to create a very broad platform that says whatever your passion is, individually and personally, it matters. And it's our job as a leadership team to really harness and activate that into something that's meaningful for why we exist, and that's creating great movies through storytelling that people enjoy and they watch and watch and watch.

11:52Jason Wild: So I think it's this recognition that everybody has a slice of genius, and the real role of leadership is not to enforce authority. And Ellen DeGeneres, right, the comedian, I mean, TV show, guest host, had this great joke many, many years ago, that at the time she left Twitter to go to X. I'm sorry, she left Facebook to go to Twitter at the time, now X. Why? Because who needs friends when you can have followers? And I think that that's a kind of a cheeky way to describe legacy leadership, which is it's about creating followership. It's convincing people to jump into the car with me. And as the leader, this is the best connection. And I think, you know, in the creative world, it's not necessarily the case. Right? Steven Spielberg may get the Oscar, but in a movie, it literally takes a village and a bunch of people to create that output. So very early on, being in my preteens, my teenage years, being in these movies with Jane Fonda and Mr. T, I learned it, and I saw kind of the other side of Hollywood. And from early on, I realized that, like, the great leaders were great at bringing out that creativity that sometimes individuals didn't even see in themselves, and they didn't necessarily believe. And they create an environment and community where innovation is happening naturally.

13:20Jason Wild: And it sounds very commonsensical, but it's very hard to do. And that's why we wrote the book, because I've been around a lot of talented people. And the first chapter of the book, we write about it as Mastercard. CEO Ajay Banga was hired, strategic hire. Something that was fascinating, one of the first things he did was an employee survey asking employees worldwide at Mastercard to rank a bunch of values. Innovation came in twenty-sixth out of twenty-seventh. And he almost quit. And, like, regretted taking the job, but, of course, he didn't. And I think he realized that it was a very big mountain for him to climb in terms of changing the culture of this place.

14:04Jason Wild: Now at the time, Mastercard was focused on what? Credit card services. And that's it. So if you're in a back alley knife fight competitively for the same thing that you've been fighting over, same customer, same product, same markets for decades, not surprisingly, people have dismissed innovation and creativity in general. But one of the first things that Ajay did was he said there's a difference between clarity of purpose and shared purpose. There was clarity of purpose, but there wasn't shared purpose. People were not buying into, you know, what the Mastercard vision could be. So what Ajay did was it was really fascinating. There was a purpose stated for the company—

14:48Bill Gallagher: But people weren't bought into it. It was just on some wall or in brochures or something.

14:53Jason Wild: Yeah, and that's exactly right. We've all been a part of organizations that go out of their way to articulate some purpose and put it on posters and walls in the hallways of their headquarters. But it's not necessarily how they show up. And one of the things is culture is what happens when the CEO leaves the room. Right? And it's like how people really behave and what the real incentives are. And so he realized that it was important to kind of get people to lift up their head and get excited about something different. And what was that? Instead of fighting competitively over the same market of seven or 8% of customers, instead go after the unbanked. And the pivot was moved from a credit card services company to a world-class technology company in the payment space. And that complete reframe got their employees to start to see, okay, I get it. Now innovation is important because we're gonna be going into spaces providing new value propositions to new customers that we don't know, and we don't necessarily understand what makes them tick.

16:01Jason Wild: So that pivot was really important. I think it's a big difference between clarity of purpose and shared purpose. And I think especially for creative people, buying into something that is purpose-centric is really, really important. I mean, as you mentioned, I spent years at Salesforce leading the innovation team. And when you're leading the innovation team, it attracts a range of different people, including incredibly talented people. When I would ask them, why here? And I remember one vividly who worked at Goldman Sachs and worked at IDEO and who could literally work anywhere, and she could write her own ticket. And she told me the reason why she's applying to Salesforce in this team is because she thinks Salesforce just gets it. And I said, please explain more.

16:48Jason Wild: It was like, well, so many organisations talk a big game about their role in the world, but Salesforce is the first organisation that she felt really lived its purpose, and that's why she wanted to join. So it wasn't about compensation or the nature of the projects. That was part of it, but she wanted to be a part of something bigger. And I think values create value. And I think especially for extremely creative people, it's important for humans in general, but especially creative people that have been around, that they feel like they're connected to something that's really meaningful. When they're waking up and they're doing something where they can bring their passions to a platform that's bigger than them, but cares about their passions at the same time.

17:39Bill Gallagher: Yeah. I think intuitively I feel that's right. Like, purpose matters to everyone. Like, feeling like you're part of something that matters, having an emotional center, a driver, something that you're passionate about matters. And yet it does seem like some people would be more swayed and less likely to work, and it does seem like creative people. And there's probably you could do a whole study just on that. Talk about why it connects with theirs. So your journey, right, you went from IBM to Salesforce to Microsoft, right? And you talk about a love for Steve Jobs and Pixar in the beginning. Those are very different kinds of companies. Maybe take us through a little bit of your career arc. And it sounds like were you originally from LA? Did you start there?

Hollywood taught him storytelling and the power of sincerity

18:33Jason Wild: No, I'm originally from Chicago. So grew up Chicago, to LA to do some movie work. Yeah, we did. So it started in the local theater scene. My mom, if you want the whole story, was cast in the first generation of the Mouseketeers. And yes, wow, going way back, and that's Funichello. And but my grandparents had grown up in the depression in Chicago. My grandfather had a job. And when they told him, well, yeah, the catch is you have to move to LA, I was like, well, sorry, no, I'm not gonna quit my job. So, you know, well, you fast forward years later, you have kids. So my mom's dream was carried through with my brother and I. So we started in local theater at a very young age. And honestly, you know, as I got into my forties, I really thought that there was like a different lifetime, different career. It wasn't until I had people coming up to me earlier in their career asking me, how did you get to where you are? I wanna do what you do, that I started to really embrace it. I literally felt that it was irrelevant, but I wasn't being honest with myself. Because when you think about it, like, the best actors don't come across as actors. And we've all been in these conferences. Someone's up on stage and… Yeah, go ahead.

19:53Bill Gallagher: Mom took you to LA to get these parts?

19:53Jason Wild: Yeah, she did. So it started in Chicago at a time when all the talent agents and the casting agents were trying to expand their horizons beyond the typical talent pool in New York and LA. So timing is always important in life. And yeah, so they… We were doing some and eventually we decided to move to, believe it or not, North Hollywood, Studio City. We moved into the same apartment that the crew had lived in a couple of years earlier, and to give it a shot and try to make it in Hollywood. After a year and a half in Studio City, North Hollywood, I lost several parts to River Phoenix, the older brother of Joaquin Phoenix, believe it or not. Yeah. I'd go to a screen test in Stand by Me. Got very close, but I think, you know, what I took away from that was in like the land of fake, not everybody is fake. I think the power of sincerity and being yourself. You're not gonna make everybody happy. Don't try to be somebody that you're not. I think number two, the power of storytelling. We hear it every day, but we also see people who get up on stage and wing it and don't practice and don't rehearse. Right? We've all been in those conferences. Right? Somebody's up on stage. Right? They go through some content, and it literally, like, puts you to sleep. Somebody else talks the same subject, and the hair on the back of your neck stands up. Right? There's a reason why great stories have gone viral for thousands of years. Right? We're programmed, right, to be moved by storytelling. And I think, ultimately, like, knowing your audience and what moves them. And hopefully I'm doing an okay job of that today. So maybe that's the reason why Hollywood took me out, Bill.

21:53Bill Gallagher: Except for the internet. So talk about this arc from IBM, Salesforce, Microsoft, and how you moved and what you saw from that and then that leads to the book. Take us through some of that.

22:05Jason Wild: Yeah, of course. So, you know, after Hollywood, you know, went to college, got my MBA because I was literally attracted by, wow, you can get a two year degree and literally all of sudden be a CEO whisperer with a six figure salary. And the truth was not that far from that somewhat ridiculous expectation that I had in my early twenties, believe it or not. But I had no experience other than being an actor and, you know, pushing paper, doing, you know, making copies for a law firm. So I struggled to get my first job, but eventually did and landed at IBM. It was a dream job for me because, you know, I had been bitten by the bug of global travel. Of course, I wanted to work for International Business Machines, IBM. So I started consulting, mostly focused on regulated utilities. My first consulting project was actually in Evansville, Indiana. And I remember it was supposed to be focused on customer strategy, and we're talking customer, customer, customer, and they say time out. What customers? We have rate payers. Right? We're a regulated utility. And that stayed with me.

IBM to Salesforce to Microsoft shaped his innovation playbook

23:20Bill Gallagher: Customer versus rate payers. That's quite the concept.

23:23Jason Wild: Right? Yeah, it is a concept since it was like 2003 and not 1955. Right. So I realised that many companies had a lot to do around really becoming customer centric. And so focused on customers. And I think the thing with IBM, IBM was very early days around consultative selling, like, really understanding the client's context and not like selling at them, but trying to co-create and do account planning. And I just thought it was very commonsensical, but that was something that as I went to other places, I realised that IBM was kinda special in how maybe the products weren't necessarily very modern, and IBM has had some ups and downs. But there's one thing about IBM, and it's a passion for creating impact and value for customers. And so my experience at IBM took me around the world. I started consulting, eventually got the opportunity to lead a programme called Innovation Discovery, which was really about providing access to IBM's most strategic clients to vaunted IBM research labs, which was really cool. I mean, amazing people working on advanced things, Silicon Valley, Department of Defence. But as I listened to these customers, they said, yeah, that's cool. But what we really want is all of IBM and its ecosystem singularly harnessed into this relationship. And that's what I started to build, and it got the attention of the CEO. And the CEO started having these, you know, meetings with other CEOs, intergalactic Star Wars conversations about co-creating some future in some place. And, you know, they don't want it to be a salesy kind of conversation. So we built the trust around kind of the zen of selling, focusing deeply on these problems with these clients.

25:22Jason Wild: Mapping the solutions, and it ended up being easier to create a relationship that would last for multiple years. So that was a great run with IBM. It really changed my career and my life in many, many ways, but I kind of also felt that there was something more. To be in an environment where, like I told you earlier, where you're investing a lot, a lot of smart people, but accepting like 20% success rates seemed quite bonkers to me. So I was recruited by Salesforce. I joined Salesforce in 2013. Salesforce at the time had 6,000 employees. I was recruited to basically lead the embedded strategy and innovation team, which is also kind of strategic selling, relationship building. First question I asked after I was hired was, what's the biggest partnership you've all signed? And they said, oh, yeah, good question. We're still working on that. And coming from IBM, where people were like sent to Hawaii to shut down cute little programs and clubs, I knew that we had to make hay quickly. So within six months, we had closed the largest deal in the history of Salesforce. At the time, got the attention of the leadership team, and our team went through a rapid scaling period, about 25 people. Within two years later, almost 250 people. Think, you know, former McKinsey, former IDO, high value, really smart people, but not charging for their time. Basically saying, hey, as an investment in the relationship, Bank of America, Siemens, we're going to spend two or three months co-creating your future on something that keeps the board up at night. Almost a value proposition that it would be kind of crazy for them to say no. And it was a great model that we evolved and learned a lot about the why, the what, and how to innovate. I was recruited by Microsoft after eight years at Salesforce. When I left Salesforce, Salesforce had almost 70,000 employees. So in eight years, 6,000, 70,000 employees. So incredible, like, true hyper-growth. Then spent two years at Microsoft trying to help Microsoft with consultative selling, up-leveling how it engages with customers, and leading what was called the CEO Co-Innovation Team, working on some cool futuristic projects that were important to Microsoft. So I've been really lucky, Bill. I've had one of the coolest jobs in tech for the last 20 years.

28:01Bill Gallagher: That is great. Like, and you think about being in that place. Like, you start with your Hollywood experience. Your mom sees an opportunity or is driven, compelled, and then you seize on something, and then you go in search of these things. I think there is something that's common that I see with a lot of people and certainly that I've experienced. It's like we bridge from a thing to a thing to a thing. There's an opportunity that connects something that draws both from us, but also something that's appealing and interesting. And then that leads us to like a cool arc of life, right? So what is it like? At what point do you decide to write this book, your partnership, and talk a little bit about that, and then we'll go into some more of the stories of the book.

28:53Jason Wild: Yeah, no, of course. So about 10 years ago, at the tail end of my time at IBM, it's a little bit more than 10 years ago, I get introduced to a Harvard Business School professor named Linda Hill. And interesting. Okay, happy to talk to a professor. And we hit it off immediately. And I've talked to other academics and analysts before. The reason I hit it off with Linda was she really understood the messy side of innovation. That it's nonlinear, that it can be amazing, but also really frustrating. And it can be a place. Like, I remember one of the first things I told her was that in marketing, the saying is that innovation programs are where marketing leaders' careers go to die. So she was somebody that just, it surprised me almost serendipitously, that here's this incredible management thinker that's ranked, you know, 10 in the world by Thinkers50 that really understands like the dirty, non-sexy side of innovation. So after a few conversations, she invites me to write her next book. And honestly, Bill, at the time, I was thinking this is like the Gilligan's Island version of book writing. It's going to be a two-year or three-year tour, and we'll have this beautiful book. And believe it or not, it's been almost 10 years. Thousands of hours, and every minute has been worth it. So I had no interest in writing a book just to write a book, but I decided to write a book and join this adventure for a few reasons, and I'll give you two. Number one is I've been around incredibly talented people, like even before joining the business world, with the right intentions, the right talent, but seeing people time and time again just approach it the wrong way. And at the core of it is thinking that innovation is all about the great idea or what to innovate. And what I really realized is that it's more about creating the conditions where innovation thrives. And it's more about the how than what. So for me, that was one of the, and I'm a practitioner, so my life is doing projects and helping people on really gnarly, complex, hairy problems with people that I want to help. But when you're going from project to project, it's just, it's going to take a long time. And I've got gray hair, and I'm not getting any younger, Bill. So part of the reason for writing the book is to be able to say, hey, there are tenable paths forward to people that are working on truly unlocking innovation in their communities and their organizations. And I think it came from a sincere desire to help. Because when you think about it, it's like lots of books on innovation, lots of books on leadership, but we found like no books on how do you actually lead innovation. And on one hand, that's not going to be a theoretical book that puts you to sleep with a bunch of frameworks. Or on the other hand, like, with all due respect to Malcolm Gladwell, a book that's interesting but isn't based on data, and it's just based on intuition. So we wanted to really write a book that's kind of a beacon of light to all of these leaders who want to create an environment of innovation but don't know what to do or where to start.

Writing Genius at Scale to help leaders create conditions for innovation

32:37Bill Gallagher: So tell us some of the stories. Like, and you've touched on a couple already, but Pfizer, Botura, Asteria, ANA. Pick one. Share.

32:57Jason Wild: Yeah, no, well, I have kids. So, you know, I love all of my kids equally. Yeah. So each chapter of the book is a different story about a different set of leader or leaders. They're all exceptional leaders. But I think one of them that is my favorite is AvatarIn. AvatarIn, you know, is a spinout of ANA Airways, which is the number one airline in Japan. And so, look at it. It's the Delta, United of Japan. So risk-averse, regulated airline that basically sees its core business as doing two things: selling seats on a plane and then getting the plane from A to B. So our story is about two junior individual contributor engineers, kind of nobodies, new to this organization, who are part of an innovation team. And they start with a question around, why can't humans teleport? And they literally get laughed at, right? And funny enough, it's Bill. It's like the only Nostradamus prediction that he didn't get right. So it's like, just wait a few years. I'm sure it's coming. And part of the reason they got laughed at is because the technology is like decades and decades away. But that question led them to a sharper question, which is, why do only 6% or 7% of people in the West

34:26Jason Wild: Take a commercial flight every year? And that's really what the commercial airline business fights over. That's 6% or 7% of the pie. So one of these guys had a grandmother who's immobile, and her lifelong dream was to take a trip through Machu Picchu in Peru, but the reality was she was never gonna go to an airport ever again. So it leads them, you know, starting with this question around teleportation and then why only 6% or 7% fly, to then basically ignite a global avatar movement that they did somewhat serendipitously. And to me, I love this story because it's against all odds. It's a Japanese airline, highly regulated. There are two junior people inside of this organisation that knew no one. But yet several years later, they convinced their senior leadership team to fund the XPRIZE for $10 million. They leveraged themselves in all different ways to basically ignite a bunch of different use cases around bomb diffusing and people lost and wayfinding in airports and the things you would expect with a physical robot and an avatar. But they also did some really interesting things, Bill, around some use cases like this: ALS patients are able to use avatars to get livable wages and jobs as waitresses, waiters, and busboys in restaurants. Why? Well, you could automate that fully into a digital avatar experience, but they said, well, we don't have to do that. Let's give a chance for people to participate with the economy and the world even though they have this terrible, physically debilitating disease. So the story of how these guys against all odds leverage themselves inside of a highly regulated business to ignite a global movement — and I think that there's so many lessons around that: lesson of hope, lesson of optimism. But I think a reminder that ecosystems are built not by companies, but they're really igniting. They're started by ideas and people. And I think that that's really empowering to the world, especially in a place like Japan that's on the other side of the world. So it's tempting to steal some of the thunder, but I hope you and your readers read the whole book and especially that chapter of the book. But in a time when AI has arrived and it's understandable for lots of people to say, how does it affect me? Is it gonna take my job? When is it gonna take my job? I think it's an important moment to see stories, real stories of people turning lemons to lemonade and taking this technology and creating and igniting a movement that would have been impossible, I think, without them dreaming bigger than what they thought they could do on their own and building trust in low-trust environments. And how do you create something that enables people concretely to wanna bring their individual passion to a platform that ultimately becomes bigger than the founders themselves? So I think it's a little bit of a playbook for a lot of people who have big ideas but aren't sure where to start and how to leverage themselves. And many other stories of big companies that have transformed themselves. But that's one of my favorite stories from the book.

38:02Bill Gallagher: Yeah, so it's definitely a little fantastical, right? We got teleportation, and we've got robotics and things like that. I think one that is not without controversy, but is really remarkable, is the Pfizer COVID vaccine development. Why don't you talk about that one since you've got — and tell us that story.

38:27Jason Wild: Yeah, absolutely. And I don't have time for the whole story, but it is one of my favorite stories. And the leader, Michael Ku, I think is the poster child of the architect. And we talk about the ABCs of great leaders of innovation. So A is architect, B is bridger, and C is catalyst. And they're all interconnected, and each one is individually important. So the role of the architect is really to try to create the environment, the community, where people are willing and able to want to innovate. And it's recognising that innovation is a voluntary act and it's a social process. You can't mandate it. Right? So one of the things that is a misconception, and it's kind of our fault as authors, is when people think of architect, they immediately think of CEO or someone with a big P&L, a CXO, a ton of authority. And that's right. That is a lot of the architects, but architects can also be middle managers. And that's one of the reasons why I love the Pfizer story. So Michael was a middle manager new to Pfizer, not new to the industry, had worked at a couple of startups, was a trained pharmacologist. So he had a very strong patient orientation inside of him before he joined Pfizer. Now if Michael were here, he would tell you that it's better to be lucky than good, a little bit. And what he would mean by that is he did a significant amount of groundwork in the two or three years before COVID hit. And if they did not do this groundwork, pretty sure they would have not gotten the vaccine out in 266 days, which is what they did. Now as a benchmark, it usually takes 8 to 10 years to complete a clinical trial. So Michael and his team within Pfizer did it in 266 days. Meanwhile, while they were managing in parallel all of these other clinical trials that were going on at the same time. They didn't stop that to just go all-in on COVID. They did that on top of everything else. So you can imagine there were many things that they did. I think one of the things that Michael is a ninja and an expert at is the importance of language. And if you think about it, like, language is a world model, and language is at the heart of AI. Well, language is the core part of how we do business and we communicate and interact. So one of the things that he did that I love was he banned the word 'change'. Right? Like, we're not gonna use the word 'change' anymore. Why? Well, we're sick of change. We went through a change management program last year. Change again. Right? And instead, he said we're gonna focus on 'evolve' and 'evolution.' And it sounds kind of like random wordsmithing, but there was genius embedded into the detail. Right? Not only because, right, they're a pharma company, and they're dealing with genetic stuff and all of that, right? So they're talking about evolution literally as a part of their core business. But if you think about it, it's like, who wants to be a part of a team where you're not constantly learning and trying to get better, and you don't wanna keep up with the Joneses? That's the culture he was trying to create, a culture of never done learning. Second thing was he brought this very strong orientation to the patient. The team that he inherited as a clinical supply chain team thought that their work was done when the vaccines or the medicines or the prescriptions got on a pallet and then was being loaded on a truck. It's like, we're done. And Michael got them to see that, no, they're not done until the patient is administering the vaccine and they're taking whatever it is that they need. So to shine a light on everything is important end-to-end, including packaging, and thinking about and literally walking a mile in the shoes of these patients and these caregivers to have them inside of all of the decisions that they're making every single day as they're running really, really fast. And Michael's a big believer that the most dangerous place you can make a decision is what, Bill? The office or the lab? And the importance of being out there in the world and literally internalising the voice at scale of all of these customers.

Two ANA engineers ignited a global avatar movement

43:08Jason Wild: into their clinical supply chain. So I think it's an incredible story of what you can do. I think if at the beginning of this, if he stood up and told his leadership team and the team that reported to him, "Hey, we're gonna break records and do this in 266 days," he would have been laughed at. But instead, he said, "Let's focus on the structure, create psychological safety, and the environment where we're gonna do things that felt impossible when we started this journey," and the rest is history. So I think with Michael, and part of the reason why we wanted to have several stories of regulated industries is to show that you can actually do amazing things, innovation, and how even in highly regulated environments as well, but you just have to approach it differently.

44:04Bill Gallagher: Well, some things I'm hearing today, one of them is a particular focus on a problem. What is the key problem? What is the issue here? That kind of thing. And then I also hear the culture, the environment, the whole team, not just a singular leader, but leadership, broadly speaking, many possible leaders and contributors to something. And then I hear like a great need. Right? Like, in this case, there's this like global imperative and incredible pressure, but also room to make some changes, a different kind of an environment that creates a room for something that isn't gonna happen in another place. Probably a lot of other good stories. The book is Genius at Scale. Jason Wild, thank you so much for joining us today.

Pfizer delivered a COVID vaccine in 266 days by focusing on evolution

44:55Bill Gallagher: Thanks again everyone for listening, for watching. It's been great, and I'm sure there's so much more that you could read on it. You could hear in your speaking of the stories that there's a richness of them that we can't necessarily convey in just a 45-minute show. But anyway, geniusatscale.com is where to go get the book and that. So worth a read, a listen. Thank you so much again for joining us on the show today, Jason.

45:28Jason Wild: It was my pleasure, Bill. I really enjoyed the conversation.

45:31Bill Gallagher: Thanks again, everyone, for watching, for listening. Thanks to my production team, Anna and Wanda, for getting our show ready and out the door every week now for nearly 700 episodes. Thanks again to my friend and mentor, Verne Harnish, who created the whole Scaling Up framework that's the heart of our work. And if you want more information, you wanna do that Q20 assessment or you wanna know about our stuff, you find all that and more at scalingcoach.com. Thanks again everyone for watching, for listening. Until next time, keep scaling.

46:05Bill Gallagher: Thanks for listening today. One last thing. If anything in this episode hit home, my book digs into it further. Busy Is Broken: Do Less, Scale More. It's all about how to stop drowning in work and build a business and a team that scales without you. Available right now with content samples at busyisbroken.com. Go grab it. Be less busy.