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💥 Ignite your company culture with the Build a Vibrant Culture podcast!
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[00:00:00] Announcer: This is the Build A Vibrant Culture Podcast. Your source for the strategies, systems, and insights you need to turn your dreams into your destiny. Every week we dive into dynamic conversations. As our host, Nicole Greer, interviews leadership and business experts. They're here to shed light on practical solutions to the challenges of personal and professional development.
[00:00:21] Now, here's your host, a professional speaker, coach, and consultant, Nicole Greer.
[00:00:29] Nicole: Welcome everybody to the Build A Vibrant Culture podcast. My name is Nicole Greer and they call me The Vibrant Coach. And I'm on a mission to energize, influence and impact people to lead a more vibrant life through considering what is possible and making it probable. And on the podcast today, I have another amazing guest.
[00:00:47] His name is Ben Bensaou, and I am so excited to have him here. Look at this book. I'm gonna hold it right in front of my face
[00:00:53]
[00:00:53] Nicole: because I have my blurry background on. _Built to Innovate_. And look, we both have the word build, he pointed out to me before we got started, in the title of the book and in the title of the company. And the subtitle, don't miss this, is Essential Practices to Wire Innovation into Your Company's DNA. And that is what we're gonna talk about today. And Ben, I'm so glad you're here. How are you?
[00:01:18] Ben Bensaou: Thank you. I guess it's good morning for you, Nicole, right? Yeah. Okay. So I'm in Paris, so it's afternoon for me, but good morning and I'm really excited to be on the show. Thank you.
[00:01:27] Nicole: Oh, that's great. That's great. And we all wish we were in Paris with you and we could go have cheese and wine.
[00:01:32] Ben Bensaou: Today was a gorgeous day.
[00:01:34] Nicole: Oh, fantastic. Well after you get done, you'll have to run to a park and sit outside and enjoy yourself. All right, so one of the things, Ben, in your book that I love is that you talk about having in part one of the book, having an innovating habit. And for those of those of you who listen to the podcast all the time, you know, I have a methodology and I call it S.H.I.N.E. So if I sit down and I'm gonna work with a company or an individual, I ask them to first self-assess. You know, like, what are you good at? What are you doing? What's your customer need from you? What are your services you provide? How are you doing as a leader? But then number two, h in shine is habits. And so when I read that, I was like the innovating habit. I love that. So will you talk a little bit, Ben, about how a company can put an innovating habit in place and all about that?
[00:02:23] Ben Bensaou: Absolutely. And maybe at some point I'll interject and try to explain where the book is coming from and maybe give a give a few example of what I mean by that.
[00:02:30] Nicole: I would love that.
[00:02:31] Ben Bensaou: Actually when you read the subtitle about the DNA and habits, and then linking it to culture. For me it's all it's all convergent. Building a culture is about building habits. Your audience may find out, we were discussing this actually before the show, a lot of the examples are in manufacturing, but of course it applies equally to services. It applies in B2B, B2C. It even applies within the organization. How do you innovate within the organization and the way we know how to build habits is to embed processes in the organization. And this is something that I've seen this organization that I studied do quite systematically. Yeah. So just maybe to give a sense of the background here. So I'm somebody who's a professor in the business school at INSEAD south of Paris, and I've been doing research and teaching on innovation for, I would say about 20 years now. And I studied many companies in depth you know, around the world, different industries, public sector, private sector, small, big, and all that. And then I discovered some quite fascinating companies, companies that -actually this would be interesting to you, Nicole- have completely transformed themselves. I. It's not something that was built in, in a sense, but they transformed themselves into becoming an innovation powerhouse, if you will. And that's the reason why I got intrigued and I started to study these companies and, you know, as an academic I tried to build some concept and frameworks.
[00:04:06] And one of the key elements here is that to build a culture or to embed innovation, it requires multiple things. It requires to build habits, but to get the habits you need some structural elements.
[00:04:21] Nicole: Absolutely.
[00:04:21] Ben Bensaou: I mean, what we would call a governance structure, you need to build processes, systematic processes. I mean, it can go from how you hire people, how you train people, how they can get involved in building new ideas. So again it might sound complex, but it's a set of elements which are structural, process-wise, cultural. And the second key element, I suspect you would also agree with me, is that to build these habits, everyone has a contribution to make, to get to that point.
[00:04:57] Nicole: Mm-hmm.
[00:04:57] Ben Bensaou: Senior leaders, middle managers, and frontline. And middle managers, big, big, big role, big impact . So again there's no, how would I call it? Silver bullets, not like okay, you do that. No.
[00:05:10] Nicole: Right. Not one idea. Right?
[00:05:12] Ben Bensaou: There's not one idea. And this is where I try in the book to bring examples that shine the spot on one of these elements, the structure. And that can explain some of the structural elements that some companies built in, and you will see immediately how that contributes to the culture. Some of the companies built processes. Processes are routines. You know, how can you build
[00:05:35] Nicole: That's right, it's how we do things. That's right. The procedures manual per se. Right.
[00:05:38] Ben Bensaou: Right. It's and it can go beyond the procedure and 'cause here we're talking about innovation. It cannot be procedural, but just a simple example, asking people to, on a regular basis, go and spend time with their customers in an exploratory kind of manner, you have to build in this process. It's not a procedure. You're just telling people just go. And I mean, as both of us know, there can be some light training or some guidance in the sense, some coaching in the beginning. But once people understand how to observe customers with empathy or they learn how to listen, something I call the silence of the customer. What the customer doesn't tell them, but they observe and they try to detect what seems to be creating a pain point or maybe a great excitement for the customer. How do they pick up that signal and report it back?
[00:06:33] So if you don't build a system, number one. Something for me. It's very important. If you want to build an innovative organization, people have to be given the permission.
[00:06:47] Nicole: Well, that's right. If you're gonna ask them to go spend time with the customer, you better make sure they have some time in their week. Right? They've gotta have a half a day or more.
[00:06:56] Ben Bensaou: They need, they need to have the permission, because you see, when you are going to learn from the customer you must be in an attitude of not trying to sell them something, 'cause that's what I call part of the execution. You see, I make a distinction between the execution part of the organization. I call it the execution engine and the innovating part of the organization, which you know, I call it the innovating engine. And the thing that I've seen in these organizations that I've studied is that they operate with both these engines. And these engines operate at the same time simultaneously and in parallel.
[00:07:36] But they're structured very differently. So, I mean, I'm going fast because we don't have half day here, but, but when people are operating in the innovating engine, they have to be given permission. Let's say like the primitive example I was giving, if they have to go to see the customer, the boss, when they come back cannot tell them, oh how much did you sell? That's not what it is about. It's like, can you share with us any,
[00:08:01] Nicole: What did you see? Right.
[00:08:03] Ben Bensaou: What did you see that we don't know? This is what I mean. And we agree about setting up the habits. There needs to be collectively reinforcing mechanisms. So there needs to be a structure. I mean, for me, it's very important that people know who is in charge in a sense. I mean, if we are saying, oh, we are gonna be supporting an innovation culture. Well, they should know who is the leading coalition behind that. And we would agree that it has to be coming from the senior leaders.
[00:08:34] Nicole: Yes.
[00:08:34] Ben Bensaou: Senior leaders.
[00:08:35] Nicole: It all has to flow from the top. That's right.
[00:08:37] Ben Bensaou: It has to flow from the top at the very least, to give the permission. I mean, people very often smile or laugh when I say this in a group, but if I ask them, if you don't give permission, what do you think happens? People won't do it.
[00:08:53] Nicole: No, they're waiting to be told what to do. And see, innovation is kind of this thing like, we don't want people standing around going, just tell me what to do. We want people to go out and find what to do. It's a whole different thing.
[00:09:04] Ben Bensaou: So in a sense, even people who keep saying, we want you to do this, if it's not verbalized from the very top that innovation is core to the strategy. I mean, maybe it's good for the audience, if I give an example.
[00:09:19] Nicole: Well, you know which one I want you to talk about? I want you to talk about the WL Gore company and talk about Bill and his wife. How do you say Bill's wife's name? Viv?
[00:09:31] Ben Bensaou: Viv. Yes.
[00:09:32] Nicole: Yeah. Yes. I loved this story about how he was fascinated by the innovative potential and the little known substance known as PTFE. A few years later it would be coding for cookware called Teflon. I'm a huge cook.
[00:09:47] Ben Bensaou: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:09:47] Nicole: I was like, this caught my attention because I have Teflon.
[00:09:50] Ben Bensaou: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:09:50] Nicole: And then he started this thing in his company where he was calling it dabble time.
[00:09:55] Ben Bensaou: Yes, yes. And then,
[00:09:57] Nicole: which I love!
[00:09:58] Ben Bensaou: That is a very good example. I have to admit, they're very popular, very famous examples in the U.S. But it was basically not only giving just a statement. It was actually allowing people to spend a certain percentage of the time to work on ideas and they could take that time and come back and propose the ideas. And there was a mechanism, a specific process by which these ideas were pursued.
[00:10:24] And I found some other organization, I mean Gore, of course is famous and very successful. But even like some large organizations, I can give you just to show you the importance of the infrastructure. Huh? I mean, the dabble thing is just one piece, but I've had a few examples in the book of the whole infrastructure and one, one example that might resonate for people is this German company called, I think you pronounce it, Bayer.
[00:10:53] Nicole: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Like Bayer aspirin, right?
[00:10:55] Ben Bensaou: Yeah. Bayer aspirin. So this is, this is the Bayer aspirin, you know? So, of course, aspirin was one of the first kind of big breakthroughs coming from R&D, right? We're talking about innovation equal in R&D.
[00:11:08] Now, in 2014, the board decided to create a structure, I call it an innovating engine, a structure to tap the innovating capability of everybody else. Of the hundred thousand employees within Bayer, this is what we are talking about. Right? When you say build a culture is is about
[00:11:32] Nicole: Right. Just don't leave it over there in R&D. Yes. Get everybody involved.
[00:11:35] Ben Bensaou: It's about tapping and leveraging everybody. So, I could equally say they wanted to build an innovating culture, right? So what did they do? So first, and I'm talking about structural elements, eh? Structure for me is something that you can see, you know, it's almost like concrete. You can see it. It's units, it's titles, it's roles, tasks, information systems, tools. It's something very physical. Right?
[00:12:03] Nicole: Right. Tangible. Yeah.
[00:12:05] Ben Bensaou: Absolutely. That's the word I'm looking for. So what they did is that they, first, they made the whole board responsible for innovation.
[00:12:15] Nicole: Oh, that's so good.
[00:12:16] Ben Bensaou: So everybody in the company that they started actually with one member of the board and then it was not sufficient because it's a large multinational, so they made the whole board. So everybody knew that for the board, innovation was central. Then they -it's a large organization- so they selected 80 senior executive from across all the countries and the functions, and they gave them the title of innovation ambassadors. So these are extremely senior people and they spend their time with middle managers. And they would go around advocating for innovation, helping people get training -because middle managers don't systematically get trained in innovation- sponsoring projects. They would be like the big sponsors of big initiatives. And then they trained and certified a thousand innovation coaches, which they activated around the organization. So you see what I'm talking about here. I'll come to the processes if you're interested later, but these are very structural things. And then they created, it is a little bit the Gore dabble process, but at a large scale they created a platform which they called We Solve. So this is a
[00:13:31] Nicole: Right, all virtual, right?
[00:13:33] Ben Bensaou: Yeah, digital platform. And so anybody within the company, we're talking about a hundred thousand people company, can post a problem that they're struggling with.
[00:13:49] So, you know, I have a problem, with, with a customer or internal, whatever, right? They post it and they can invite suggestions, ideas from around the organization for now. They showed me the statistics when I was at the stage of writing the book, they had 40,000 people who had participated in the We Solve platform.
[00:14:12] Nicole: Can you imagine?
[00:14:14] Ben Bensaou: Can you imagine? And by the way, the other thing which makes it even more formidable, is that the platform was in English and they had only 50,000 people in the company who spoke English at the time. So this is huge participation. But now Nicole here's the big surprise they got. When they started to inspect and look at what was coming out, they found that two thirds, two thirds of the best ideas that were proposed were coming from business unit or function different from the one where the question was posted in the first place.
[00:14:52] Nicole: Right? It's all about a fresh perspective, I think. What do you think?
[00:14:55] Ben Bensaou: Right. So when you talk about culture, you know, 40,000 people getting involved, bringing ideas from a different department and just the participation, I think you're starting to change the culture.
[00:15:10] You have this R&D that is functioning, but you have this latent capability that everybody has. And it can be as simple as I said, I mean, I could give you a great example of that with something that happened to us here with Starwood in Paris.
[00:15:26] Nicole: I would love to hear it.
[00:15:27] Ben Bensaou: So you want to hear it?
[00:15:28] Nicole: Yeah.
[00:15:29] Ben Bensaou: So everybody knows Starwood, of course. I'm not gonna belabor the point here. So they came a few years ago and they had a conference in Paris for 700 of their frontline hotel managers. So we gave them an introduction to some basic concept and tools about innovation. And then what we did is we split the 700 people in 64 teams, and we gave them because we are in Fontainebleau, which is 50 kilometers south of Paris, so we gave them train and metro tickets. We gave them notebooks and cameras at the time, and we just sent them to roam in the streets of Paris.
[00:16:15] Nicole: Mm.
[00:16:16] Ben Bensaou: And their assignment was just to kind of observe and take pictures and capture some experiences, insights from regular, ordinary travelers in Paris. Now, three hours later, they came back.
[00:16:32] Nicole: I'm surprised they came back.
[00:16:34] Ben Bensaou: They came back. They were, they were on.
[00:16:37] Nicole: I'm surprised they didn't phone in. " We're not coming back. We found a brasserie. We're gonna hang out."
[00:16:43] Ben Bensaou: Well actually, I followed a few groups. They managed to get a bottle of wine, you know, enjoy.
[00:16:48] Nicole: I don't blame them, I don't blame them.
[00:16:50] Ben Bensaou: But nevertheless, they came back three hours later. And they had some remarkable insights and ideas. We counted it. They generated 1700 ideas in three hours. Right? Now granted
[00:17:03] Nicole: About how to serve their customers better?
[00:17:05] Ben Bensaou: Well, see, this is the thing. Their assignment was to go take pictures, observe whatever strikes you, just bring it back.
[00:17:13] Nicole: Any old idea.
[00:17:14] Ben Bensaou: Okay. Any, any anything, any observation so they can make with ideas. Some of 'em were ideas, some were just observations.
[00:17:20] Nicole: Yeah.
[00:17:20] Ben Bensaou: Now, I think you're on the spot there is that it is true that many of these ideas or these insights were like small adjustments, small improvements to some kind of existing process or service.
[00:17:36] Nicole: Yeah.
[00:17:36] Ben Bensaou: However, in the lot, there were a few ideas that effectively became the foundation to a global initiative that would be launched by Starwood later. And we have a great example that I show always in class. They generated a program that - the idea came from that experience- where they generated a new marketing program. They called it Famtastic-- fam like Family. Famtastic, where they could develop special packages for families based on research they would do on what children want from a great experience in a hotel. The key point I'm trying to make is that none of these 700 people were specialists of innovation. Right? These were like frontline hotel managers. But the key thing is that they all understood that by simply stepping away from their daily routine and immersing themselves in the life of their customer, that would open the floodgates to fresh ideas.
[00:18:45] Speaker 2: Are you ready to build your vibrant culture? Bring Nicole Greer to speak to your leadership team, conference or organization to help them with their strategies, systems, and smarts to increase clarity, accountability, energy, and results. Your organization will get lit from within! Email her at nicole@vibrantcole.com and be sure to check out Nicole's TEDx talk at vibrantculture.com.
[00:19:11] Ben Bensaou: So this is what I'm talking about. You can give permission to people to just spend an hour every two months going to observe the customer. Give them some tools about how to make observation, because I think the important thing here is-- there are three things I like to insist on. One is to listen to the voice of the customer. So the customer has pain points, they have wishes, they have dreams, so they verbalize them. But what I found, and maybe this is also something that you see in your experience, supply side people are very bad at listening. They're very bad at listening because they tend to hear what they're looking for.
[00:19:56] Nicole: Right, it's a bias. That's a big bias.
[00:19:58] Ben Bensaou: It's a bias. The customer might be telling them something and repeatedly telling them, shouting at them, but they don't connect, they don't hear.
[00:20:05] Nicole: We need to listen, people!
[00:20:08] Ben Bensaou: So we have, we have some tools. We have some techniques to teach people how to listen. And the key word, I mean we all know it is empathy. Empathy.
[00:20:17] Nicole: Yeah. Put yourself in their shoes one minute.
[00:20:20] Ben Bensaou: Put yourself in their shoes. And then the second thing I try to tell people when they do these observation expeditions, is to learn how to listen to the silence of the customer.
[00:20:29] Nicole: Hmm.
[00:20:30] Ben Bensaou: What the customer doesn't tell you.
[00:20:32] Nicole: Mm-hmm.
[00:20:34] Ben Bensaou: And they don't tell you, either because they don't know themselves or they know about it, but they don't think that it's your job to fix it for them, so they will never complain about it. I mean, I have some great stories if you're interested.
[00:20:50] Nicole: Well yeah. Give us an example of that so we can understand that. Yeah, yeah. Give us an example.
[00:20:54] Ben Bensaou: So let me give you a very specific example. This is a manufacturing example, but this is in B2B. So this is the case of a Turkish company, and this company, they make fabric, which is used to reinforce tires, right? So this is fabric, you know, you have the valve, and then you have the reinforcement material, and then you have the rubber.
[00:21:19] Nicole: Yeah. And you can even see it when the tires are worn down like little white.
[00:21:23] Ben Bensaou: Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. So that's what it is.
[00:21:25] Nicole: Okay.
[00:21:25] Ben Bensaou: So they make that and, so actually I got involved with them in 2006. And then and then they learned a few concepts, a few tools, and they started to encourage them to go and observe their customers. So what they decided to do is that they would send cross department teams. People from different departments within their own organization, they would send them to the plants of their corporate customers.
[00:21:50] And actually, it was funny because in the early days, they would show me, they would literally put a tent inside the plant.
[00:21:58] Nicole: That is so fun.
[00:21:59] Ben Bensaou: And they would live like two, three days, observing people on their jobs and, talking to people. Now they don't do the tent thing but they still go and they spend quite a bit of time just observing and talking to employees on the plant. Now they gave me one example. At one plant, their team observed, they saw that the workers, they were struggling. They were having a hard time to offload. See, these are big rolls of fabric, right? They had a hard time to offload them safely from the trucks.
[00:22:35] Nicole: So this is before it even gets in the plant. It's not even inside yet.
[00:22:40] Ben Bensaou: And you have to offload them to bring them in the plant. And then they observe that and they immediately, because they deal with these rolls all the time. They immediately saw that this was a problem that the customers never told them about. They never complained. They never said.
[00:22:58] Nicole: We're struggling. Yeah.
[00:22:59] Ben Bensaou: No they didn't. They were just struggling, coping with it, so what the team did is that they went back and they put a team together, and the team developed a very simple method to offload the trucks. Then they went back to the customer, taught the customers how to do it, and this is what happened. They managed to help the customers, once they were trained, reduce the time and the manpower needed to handle the rolls. So they went from 90 minutes with three people to 12 minutes with one person.
[00:23:39] Nicole: That's a game changer.
[00:23:41] Ben Bensaou: What I wanted to say is that the customers never told them about that. You see what I mean?
[00:23:47] Nicole: Right.
[00:23:48] Ben Bensaou: This is what I call the silence of the customer. So they detected a problem that the customer had, but they never told you about it, and they would never think that it's for you to come and help us with that.
[00:24:00] Nicole: And now they only buy that fabric from that company in Turkey forever. Because you saved us so much money at the dock in the shipping and receiving area. Oh my God.
[00:24:12] Ben Bensaou: But actually what happened is that this company used to be a commodity provider. So this fabric is commodity, right? Right. But now, when they started to do this and other things, then the corporate customer was looking at them differently. They were saying, oh, they're not just like a commodity. I just go and, these guys can bring solutions to me, can bring services. So they became like a, in the industry they call it like a second tier, first tier supplier. And then now they start to do strategic alliance, strategic partnerships. So they tell them more about the things they're struggling. So, they work with them closer and as soon as you walk closer, you can provide more value to the customer. If they tell you, just tell me the stuff and I don't want to hear about it, that's a different story. So.
[00:25:00] Nicole: That's right.
[00:25:01] Ben Bensaou: So people think very often that innovation has to come from senior leaders. Or from
[00:25:07] Nicole: some mad scientist over in the corner.
[00:25:09] Ben Bensaou: Yes some R&D scientist, whatever. And so what I was trying to show is that as a matter of fact, there's a lot of innovating capability that is lying in every employee. First, everyone who is do doing a job in a company has a customer. Either it's an internal customer or an external customer.
[00:25:30] Nicole: Oh, I agree. Right? A hundred percent.
[00:25:32] Ben Bensaou: And the second is that these people, because as you said, they come to work to do what they're told. So there are procedures, there are job descriptions, there's training for that, and that's all they have to do. So whatever thinking they do, whatever ideas they have, they don't voice them. Or if they voice them, they get hit on the head so they never do it again.
[00:25:57] Nicole: Yeah. Go back to what you were doing. What you doing. Yeah.
[00:26:00] Ben Bensaou: Yeah. And you have this huge capability that is lying there in the organization that is getting lost. So the only thing I'm saying is basically, why don't you build a separate engine where you give permission for people to go on an hour expedition.
[00:26:19] Of course it requires middle managers. You give them some time for that. You give them some resources, you might train them a little bit to learn how to listen to the voice and the silence of the customer. And there's another thing that people also don't realize, that there's a whole population out there of what we call non-customers. Non-customers, everybody's focusing on their own customers, but there are so many great ideas out there if you start to listen and observe non-customers.
[00:26:50] Nicole: Ben, we gotta do a second show sometime. You want to do that? You want to come back?
[00:26:55] Ben Bensaou: Oh, I'd love to. I'd love to. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:26:57] Nicole: Yeah. And so, I would love to do that too. Yeah. We have been talking to Ben Bensaou, and he has been talking to us about Built to Innovate. Okay. Essential practices. And he has already downloaded like four great pieces of content. And I think there's about 20 more pieces of content in here that we need to cover.
[00:27:17] Ben, if people want to work with you, if a senior leader is listening to this and they're like, we've gotta do this, we've gotta have the execution engine and we've gotta have the innovation engine. We have no innovation engine. I want one. How do they get an innovation engine? How do they get ahold of you? How do you work with people?
[00:27:35] Ben Bensaou: Oh, get hold of me?
[00:27:36] Nicole: Yeah. Or how do they work with people? I mean, they can read the book, but you know, oftentimes this is this gets them started, but then they need somebody to come hold their hand. Like those people flew to Paris and worked with you? Yeah.
[00:27:48] Ben Bensaou: Yes, yes, yes. So, I have a website. I'm on LinkedIn, so benbensaou.com, they will get on a website. There's a tab for the book, but there's a tab also for all the other training and consulting that I do. And of course I'm a professor at INSEAD so they can also track me there, but I think the easiest one is really the the website BenBensaou, in one word, dot com.
[00:28:10] Nicole: Okay. Fantastic.
[00:28:11] Ben Bensaou: Thank you. I'd love to do another one.
[00:28:13] Nicole: Yes, let's do it. Let's do it. I'll get it set up for, for us to do a second one because I want to know about the voice of the non-customer. I want to know about that, and I want to know about so many more things. Okay. And again, I'm just saying Ben said, did you actually read it? And I'm like, yeah! Because and I don't know Ben, what you think about this, but, forever we've been looking at personality, putting people in buckets and labeling people in their personality. But I have a real creative, curious brain. And when I started reading this, I loved the stories. And so I think the stories are such a good teacher. You know, this isn't just an academic, a professor telling us you should do this. It's like, no, this stuff works and you should think about it.
[00:28:53] Ben Bensaou: Yeah, no, this is stories. And actually, you know, as I told you, I spent two years in Silicon Valley looking at startups, companies all around the world.
[00:29:01] Nicole: Yeah, yeah.
[00:29:02] Ben Bensaou: And the big surprise for me, as people might have noticed from the examples I showcased is that these companies I'm talking about. They are all traditional companies. Think about Bayer. I had another example, right?
[00:29:14] Nicole: BASF is in the very beginning.
[00:29:16] Ben Bensaou: BASF, I had this old company called Fiskars, 400 year old making scissors. And they,
[00:29:23] Nicole: Yes. Oh, all of us girls who scrapbook have the Fiskars. We have that in the house. We've got it.
[00:29:29] Ben Bensaou: So and that's by the way, just to maybe finish up on that, is that the whole idea of the book is to say that you don't need to be a startup or you don't need to be a high tech company. So, of course I talk a little bit about, a paragraph or two about the usual suspects, you know?
[00:29:44] Nicole: Yeah.
[00:29:45] Ben Bensaou: But the book is really about all the others or even the government agencies. You know, there are a couple example of NGOs. I mean, it's. It's the people that we don't immediately think about as being innovative but there's innovation all around us.
[00:30:01] Nicole: I agree.
[00:30:02] Ben Bensaou: That's it.
[00:30:03] Nicole: Yeah. And we just have to raise the awareness. I have a mentor, Ben, and she says all the time a lot of us sit around and we are like, you know what we should do? Like we think about a new thing, a new way, a new process, a new whatever. But then we don't give that, intention attention. Yes. And so I'll go tell her, this is what I think I'm gonna do. And she's like, okay, how are you going to give it attention? And what Ben says in his book is this innovation engine is how you give the intention attention. So it's really fantastic.
[00:30:34] Ben Bensaou: And the idea is really to lower the bar. I mean, very often, people think that innovation has to be a big deal.
[00:30:42] Nicole: Right? Fancy.
[00:30:43] Ben Bensaou: Or it has to be radical new. No, no. Put the bar very low. It's a motivational thing. And the other thing is that, it can be anywhere in the organization. It doesn't have to be changing the world. I think the important is give attention to innovation and the habits is a way to make it part of your daily job. It is part
[00:31:04] Nicole: That's right.
[00:31:04] Ben Bensaou: Of your job. If people think that their job is only about execution you tell them no. In fact, innovation is also part of your job and here's a space.
[00:31:13] Nicole: Right? Dabble time.
[00:31:15] Ben Bensaou: That is dabble time. But I have to admit that people think that this is extra work. No, it's not.
[00:31:20] Nicole: No, no, no, no.
[00:31:20] Ben Bensaou: Right? It's, it's actually leveraging this part of your brain that is not even completely shut off because when you go back home, suddenly you become innovative, very creative. You know, you do things for the kids. You organize for the local community, for the church. People become all creative. It's not that it's not there. It's that the organization does not systematically try to tap it.
[00:31:48] Nicole: Yeah, I agree. Yeah. And I would bottom line it by saying this, Ben said, is that we've gotta give people permission.
[00:31:56] Ben Bensaou: Yes.
[00:31:56] Nicole: I mean, and this is part of your job. Like all my HR people listening right now, we need to put that on the job descriptions. Your job is this plus innovation. I love that. Yeah.
[00:32:07] Ben Bensaou: Let me say something because we're talking about culture. We're talking about culture and because you see, again I would say that you have to give permission. You may want to put structures.
[00:32:19] Nicole: Oh yeah. All that together.
[00:32:20] Ben Bensaou: And processes. These are enabling. But you don't want to replace a tyranny by another tyranny.
[00:32:27] Nicole: Ooh, that's good.
[00:32:27] Ben Bensaou: And let me tell you a story of a Japanese manager. Actually, I was in Japan two weeks ago, and I went to see him. He's retired now, but he's a guy I trained. I think it was in 2002. Okay, so we did this training for a Japanese company. My wife is from Japan, so I'm attached to Japan. I go to Japan quite regularly.
[00:32:47] Nicole: Oh, it's on my bucket list.
[00:32:49] Ben Bensaou: Oh yeah, absolutely, with Paris by the way.
[00:32:52] Nicole: Yeah I told Ben before the show started, but I went to Paris for four days. And like you need 42 days or more.
[00:33:00] Ben Bensaou: It's a, even a lifetime is not enough. But anyway.
[00:33:02] Nicole: No, no, no, no.
[00:33:03] Ben Bensaou: It's the Frenchman speaking. But this guy, that's okay. I went back to visit him and then suddenly he showed me some of the ideas his team has generated. So I very intrigued. I said, how did you explain the concept to them? And he said, I didn't. So I was really intrigued about what he did. So he did two things. Two things, which I think are very central to culture. And for me in a sense, I have a few colleagues who teach about culture and I understand the whole thing, but there's an element which I thought was very interesting. And I just want to highlight that culture is also about the micro behaviors, micro behaviors of these, in particular middle managers.
[00:33:42] And this is something that fascinated me. So I interviewed some of his team and they said, oh, it's very funny because after the training, he changed. I said, what do you mean he changed? He started to say. Thank you. Okay. Oh, okay. So I said, you know, why and then I went to see him and I said did you know about that? And he says, yes, yes, yes, I know. And this is very conscious. And I said, why? Why is that? He said, you know, I discovered one thing. This is, by the way, this is even more amplified because Japanese culture, people are very shy, in public and
[00:34:19] Nicole: That's right. And we respect the leader. Yeah.
[00:34:21] Ben Bensaou: So he realized that he would get hard time to get people to volunteer ideas or to come, so what he did, he started to, every time somebody would utter an idea or come to him with an idea, he would just kind of emphatically, say, thank you! I really, and I said, why do you do that? And he said something very profound. He said that when people are doing their job, the job they're trained for with job description and sometimes it gets even worse. There are KPIs.
[00:34:52] Nicole: Oh yeah, we got a scorecard we gotta hit. Yeah.
[00:34:54] Ben Bensaou: Scorecard. So he says when people are executing their job, they know that the boss at any time can know how well they're doing. Right? Now he said, when it comes to innovation, you don't have this visibility as a middle manager. I cannot tell if somebody has an idea or not. When people provide their innovative kind of juice or their ideas, it is all voluntary. It's coming from them. There's no way for you to know. Right? So he said, when I saw people come to me with a new idea, I knew that psychologically they were taking a risk.
[00:35:38] Nicole: Yeah, you gotta encourage it.
[00:35:40] Ben Bensaou: They didn't know. They didn't know if I would approve if they would be made fun in the meeting, if people would start to think about them. So he says, when people take a risk, if they come to see me with an idea or they express an idea in the meeting, they're taking a risk. And he said, what they're doing is that they're basically giving me a gift.
[00:36:01] Nicole: Oh, I love that.
[00:36:02] Ben Bensaou: And he said, in my culture, in my culture, when people give me a gift, I say thank you. And I thought, wow, this is culture. Don't you agree?
[00:36:13] Nicole: Oh, I agree. I agree. And again, I'm gonna have you back 'cause I want to hear more stories. Okay. All right, so we'll have Ben back on the show. Everybody do me a favor. Go down to the bottom right now and click like, leave a little love note for Ben and go to the Amazon, go to his website and get his book _Built to Innovate_. It will serve you, you can get it copy for everybody on your team.
[00:36:36] Ben Bensaou: Absolutely.
[00:36:37] Nicole: Very good everybody. Thank you for tuning in for another episode. Thank you, Ben, for being here.
[00:36:42] Ben Bensaou: Thank you. Thank you.
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