Well, hi, everyone. I'm Daniel Williams, senior editor at MGMA and host of the MGMA Podcast Network. Today, I am so thrilled. We have got Tucker Bryant. He is a keynote speaker.

And something else I really like, he's a poet, and he's also a former Silicon Valley leader. And, also, for people who are planning to be in Charlotte, North Carolina for our MGMA operations conference, Tucker is our opening keynote speaker. And as a reminder, that show is gonna be April 12 through the fourteenth. We're really excited about seeing our MGMA members in person in Charlotte. So today, we're gonna be talking to Tucker about innovation, creativity, leadership, a lot of really interesting things, and the intersection of those different ideas and functions there.

So without further ado, Tucker, welcome to the show.

Daniel, I'm so excited to be here with you, and I cannot wait to connect with folks in Charlotte. And it feels like it's a few weeks now. I guess if you if you forget the months, you could just say it's several weeks from now.

That's right. That is right. So in researching you, learning about you, you've had an interesting path. You did that trek over to that little school called Stanford. Many people may have heard of that one.

Moved over to Google, spent some time there. You've been doing a lot of speaking and creative work recently. Give us some highlights. I I share just the highest level for our audience, but what are some things that stand out to you that you really hold in your heart and your accomplishments that have been on that pathway to where you are now?

Yeah. Honestly, I it's it's been it has been an interesting road, but the the highlights are are similar to the ones that you called out. You know, it was really cool to get to study around some cool people and and learn how Silicon Valley did innovation in Stanford and then when I went to Google. And then at the same time, you know, I was also falling deeply in love with poetry. And so in college, I I spent probably more time than my what might have been academically advisable, you know, writing writing my little sonnets about Jasmine tea and this and that.

But, you know, that that led to some really cool experiences as it related to experiencing the artistic scene in the Bay Area and across the country. And so, yeah, between the art practice and then just getting to be around people who honestly were much smarter than me at places like Stanford and Google. It was just very cool to get to, to see how other people think about some of the challenges that we're gonna be discussing at MGMA.

Okay. Really cool. One of the things that you talk about, you talk about innovation and change. People who are MGMA Podcast listeners have heard me talk about it. MGMA went through some organizational shifts and changes so we could really laser focus our attention and our efforts to meet the MGMA members where they need help.

So when you think about innovation and change, where are you coming from? What lens are you looking through?

Yeah. I'm honestly thinking very much in terms of the place we are in today. To me, the current milieu is one in which there are incredible tools that are available to all of us. Right? We now all have access to Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, incredible tools like this that empower us to do really great things.

But now that we have all these tools, the question is how we differentiate ourselves because there's lots that anyone who is a peer or a competitor or a near neighbor can do in the same way that we can with these tools. And so the the goal that I have in in speaking to audiences and communities across the country is getting them to think about what it would mean to not just try to do the same things that everyone else is doing or do the same things better, but instead aiming to do different things differently. And and as the title of this session, that's what we're gonna be discussing when we, when we meet in in April.

Yep. I was just going there. I had the quotes here. Doing different things differently is something that you focus in on. It's a really cool, you know, sort of an alliteration there, but going into poetry.

But when we talk to leaders about that, they're going, well, wait a minute now. We're all looking at the same reports, and we're all looking at the same market trend. So how are we doing things differently? So how do you get that point across to people who are in a boardroom or who are decision makers?

Absolutely. Yeah. It's an interesting thing. I have found and I noticed this not just in Silicon Valley. I also noticed this in my art practice, in my own work, and, you know, the sort of the way the human ego gets into some of these issues of how we try to enact change.

When we fear falling behind, I think we default to imitation. And, you know, it's it's, again, this concept that the biggest risk in competing in an AI arms race or in trying to have a greater, you know, bottom line than our our our nearest competitor isn't that we lose those races because of how much is possible to us now. It's that we end up looking exactly the same as everybody else. And so what I'm trying to get folks to realize is that often taking the unreasonable risk and doing a totally different thing is the only way to, in the long term, ensure our sustainability because the reasonable ideas, the reasonable challenges to take on are likely already being looked at by your competitors, peers, etcetera. It's not a bad idea to be looking at those same challenges.

Like, you know, if there's a fire that you're, you know, near peer or competitors putting out, you probably wanna put out the same fire if it were to come into to your space, but the issue is when we stop there. That's when, you know, there becomes no reason for a user or a a customer to choose us over anybody else. And so I try to get folks thinking about what it would look like to engage in those unreasonable ideas in a way that allows us to distinguish ourselves long term and realize that, actually, that's the safest thing for us to do in a time like this.

That is so cool to think about it that way. I'm a big film guy. Sometimes people on the show hear me go off in that direction. You know, it's been in the news. There's been the big takeover big of Warner Brothers.

You know, Netflix and Paramount have been muscling each other. It looks like Paramount is gonna win out here. But talking about movies, because we we hear about this, they wanna create new art, but then we as consumers, we see they do the same thing. It's exactly what you're talking about. They fall back into that groove, that habit.

Well, somebody had a a hit with a volcano movie, the volcano movie that goes amok or getting lost in space. So we're gonna do our version of that. You know? They don't wanna break that mold, but then you have auteurs, directors like Ryan Coogler, Paul Thomas Anderson.

They're the ones that Oh, PTA, my guy.

I know. Yeah. Exactly. And so they're they're on their own wavelength. They're not going, oh, what does Hollywood want us to do?

We're gonna do what we wanna do. So if we extrapolate that into medical practices, into health care, into decision makers, the people that are gonna be in your audience, how do they get out of that groove? Because because to go back into the arts world, think of a vinyl record. You know, anybody that's played a vinyl record, at least the old ones that I used to listen to, occasionally it gets stuck in that one groove and it just keeps playing that one thing, you know, and you can't get out of that. And that's how we are as humans.

I I was reading what you were talking about where we wanna fall back into those old patterns, those old habits. How do we break that mold? I know I gave you a lot to think about there.

No. No. It's it's such a good setup, and, you know, PTA is such an awesome example

Yeah.

For us to start here start with here because, I mean, he's the kind of artist that I think we could all aspire to be because he tries different things every time.

Oh, yeah.

Every time he puts out a movie, it's like you could almost I mean, maybe just because I'm not a cinephile, but I could almost not recognize one movie versus the other. And, you know, sometimes he's gonna put out, like, a Licorice Pizza, one that I'm not a huge fan of, but then he's gonna put out a There Will Be Blood. And it's that experimentation that allows us to hit on those breakthrough ideas that really change the game. But that was tangential to your question, which is more about how do we resist falling into those grooves that kind of keep us in one pattern for a really long time? You know, one of the principles we're gonna be talking about in April is this idea of looking twice.

Sometimes the best way to a new idea or a new answer to our challenges is just to stop taking for granted that the status quo is the way it has to be. And one of the most effective sort of daily postures that I find in doing this is what I call refusing the first answer. The thing is we all encounter things in our workflows that trigger some default reaction, and usually, that reaction is just whatever we've practiced the most often. Doesn't mean that reaction is incorrect, but it does mean that it's automatic. And so creating the space for ourselves to say, in a moment that we've encountered a dozen times in the past, what's a second thing I can do here?

Even if we don't end up pursuing that second option, that exercise creates room for a more creative or a more innovative solution. And in time, performing that exercise over and over just increases the sort of surface area of possibility we have. And so all of these moments that, you know, we we hear about a patient or a customer complaints or think we have the answer to a certain question. We often do. Mhmm.

But training ourselves to say, this is what I would usually do, and also, I guess, this other thing could be a way that approach this. Over time, that just allows us to open up so many more pathways in the way that we deal with our routines. And and at some point, you'll end up disrupting your own routine if you refute you refuse the first answer that comes to you often enough. And so that's really the place I like to start with folks is saying, hey. There's this this pathway that you've been barreling down for months or years, and it's been working for you.

But what would it look like to start questioning what else is possible at all the junctures and decision points that you encounter every day? And that's when that's when art happens, and that's when innovative ideas happen too.

I love that. Something that you have in your presentation, you see limits acting as a catalyst. Now I'm trying to get my head around that, so explain that concept to us.

A 100%. Yeah. So there's constraints. If I if I maybe I'll make a shirt one that says, I heart constraints. No.

That's really actually, no. I probably shouldn't wear that outside of San Francisco. You can can cut this out if I'm going too far. But constraints, I find, are this thing that people assume are, like, a dead end to a new idea. But the reality is that there's no opportunity, no challenge that we face that doesn't come with some form of constraint.

This this even applies to artists. Right? Like Mhmm. A poet can walk down the street, you know, thinking lots of thoughts about the blue sky and the green trees or whatever, but they're going to have to apply some constraint to those big ideas in order to make their work fit on a piece of paper or to fit within a specific theme or or to be in the form of a sonnet or a Cessna or a haiku or whatever. And so when we realize these constraints exist, often, they force us to encounter and apply new tools in order to get around them.

So imagine a situation in which you had I don't know. Let's say you're you're speaking to someone on your board and you're trying to sell them on an idea, and you have an hour to have that conversation. You're probably gonna do a lot of things in that hour. You might spend some time, you know, warming up the conversation with some small talk, kind of asking how they're doing, sharing every piece of information you possibly could in order to get that idea across as something that your your board member should take on. But if we imagine now that all you had was, like, sixty seconds to do that, that's not only a really restrictive amount of time.

It's also a period of time in which you might not be able to approach that conversation in a typical, good morning. This is my name, and these are the ideas I have, and this is what and so when we ask ourselves what we would do in those situations, we often end up resulting to completely new tools and new approaches to to deal with those challenges. And so in that way, like, I found both in art and in work, those constraints often end up just making us realize there are more than one way to, you know, to skin a cat or to to sell an idea or to come on to a new a new a new product or service that we're we're interested in exploring. And so constraints, I am gonna say, I heart constraints.

Yeah. Let's go back to that because you have just opened my mind because what I immediately went to was Shark Tank. You know? They're not given an hour with 86 slides and a PowerPoint with all these data points and all this stuff. They're forced to really think about what is it this is this product?

What need is it filling? And then trying to pitch Mark Cuban and the rest of the team up there in about a minute or so. And they're they're going, no. I don't have this all the it's almost like we have too much time to try to win somebody over. We're compressing it here.

And what it does, if I'm hearing you right, it's forcing the person to really understand their product and the need that it fills.

100%. And beyond that, it's the product is also the environment. Right? Like, constraints come in so many different ways. I love that you brought up Shark Tank because, you know, a constraint that a lot of people face in that situation or even, like, an American Idol or America's Got Talent situation, you know, mister Wonderful.

He he's, you know, he's he's known as being like, you know, a a stickler. He might might be someone who's like it to poo poo your idea.

Yeah.

But that constraint, I've seen some people who end up on Shark Tank, they treat that as their cannabis. Instead of it being something to work around, they end up using some humor to kind of poke fun at

That's it.

Yeah. And get something positive out of what on its face seems like is a really big hurdle. And so part of the art here is in recognizing that these constraints are actually sometimes, like, the raw material from which a creative approach can arise. And in Shark Tank, it might be calling mister Wonderful Bald and getting a few chuckles and getting everyone else to like you for that reason. It also might have to do with that literal quantitative time period that's less than you might want it to be in an ideal scenario.

Right. So I'm to get in my soapbox, but that

was such a perfect Yeah. And to say that mister Wonderful is a stickler, I think, is being very kind. He I think he would laugh at that. He'd go

I thought he's a really nice guy off off set. Think so. Yeah. That's worth.

I think he is. And to go full circle with movies, he's actually a pretty good actor. He's in Marty Supreme, and he is so good in it, y'all. Anybody who's seen Marty Supreme, he's wonderful in it. Mister Wonderful is wonderful.

So

does his name.

That's it. That's it. So I wanna switch gears to poetry for a second. And I have the first question I have to ask, so poetry isn't dead? Their poetry is still alive.

Let's just start there, Tucker.

No. It's it's such a funny it's a funny thing. Like, I'll answer this in two ways. Okay. Yes.

Poetry is not dead. And I and I mean this in the sense that the poem is that we know or the way that we think of poetry is not dead. But, also, a lot of my work at this point in my creative career is thinking about what what would it look like to give poetry a new life. And so the poems that I write, they're they're not on a page. I'm I'm more interested in how poetry can become an experience, something that you encounter when you're walking down the street or something that you experience when you're on a plane ride.

We're gonna be talking about some of these stories in MGMA. But, yeah, doing different things differently to me is is in in part about taking something like an art form like poetry that's existed for thousands of years and asking, how could this be different? So, yes, poetry is still alive in the sense that we all know it.

Right.

And, also, there's a little more that we can do with it too.

That and let's follow-up with that because it does seem let's go back to constraints again. Twitter now x, it had constraints in how many words you could put in there, how many characters. So you're using a form. I don't wanna give too many too much credit to all the people who have ever posted on x, but there could be a form of poetry involved here where you are having to work within some limit limitations to get your point across. And so it is causing people to really use that form.

And so that's one way. But in other ways, and I've seen this, some poems who are that are classic poems, I've seen artists use those and put them up on YouTube with artwork. You know? So the words are appearing as you're hearing it audibly, but visually, you're seeing this landscape or this incredible artwork opening up to people. Is it is that anything that you have experienced or worked within those forms?

Totally. You're so so on the money. I think something that you're hitting on that I really relate to is this idea that and it again, it is related to constraints. Mhmm. The constraint of a form like poetry, like, in some ways, it may be restrictive, but it also encourages us to ask ourselves what isn't blocked.

Mhmm. What isn't restricted that I can do something to to make this art form come to life? In the videos that you're describing, it's like we're taking a classic poem

Mhmm.

But we're bringing it to life with visuals and music and in a format that people might not encounter it before. And so it's partially about realizing that there are sometimes these imaginary rules that we forget that we're following and having the willingness to say, actually, I think this thing that I've taken for granted that has to be one way doesn't actually and if I remove that rule, a lot actually opens up. One thing we might talk about at MGMA is this idea of making a grilled cheese sandwich. Like, in my house, a grilled cheese, you could put a lot of things in it. All it really needs is these two ingredients, bread and cheese.

Yeah.

But once you have those two things in place, the rest is kinda up to you. Yeah. And so there's some art to recognizing if you're trying to bring an idea to life, what is your grilled cheese sandwich? What are those two ingredients that make everything else either easier or relevant? But then once you identify those things, what else do you wanna put in there?

Do you want some tapenade? Do you want anchovies? Do you want hot sauce or, I don't know, beet juice? Please not beet juice. But it's just finding that scaffold and that makes the idea work and then realizing that beyond that point, it's kinda up to you.

Yeah. And that's when the fun begins.

Yeah. This is what I'm seeing a lot in the workplace, that there is a lot of opportunity for expression. Think about it just even in terms since the pandemic of remote work. I mean, that's a flexibility that might not have been available to a lot of people. Some of our listeners, some of the people that will be, in person with you in Charlotte, they might have they might be on that operational side at a practice.

They might be on the billing side, so they're afforded remote work or flexible work. Others need to be in that clinical setting. They need to be there. But let's think about that. In many ways, medicine and health care is incredibly innovative.

In other ways, it's very bureaucratic and it really locks down. So when you're talking about innovation, it sounds so awesome, but some of our listeners may be going, but I can't present that to my board or to my supervisor. So how do you embolden them? How do you give them the tools or a process or a way of thinking where they can bring innovative ideas up the ladder where they're not gonna be going, what are you what are you what are you thinking? What's going on in your mindset now?

So how do you get them to get that buy in?

A 100%. I think the most useful thing to do in my mind when you're sort of operating up that chain

Right.

Is just to make rooms for make room for these micro experiments. You know, it's it's so common for us to shy away from this opportunity to do things differently because, you know, the goal is to get folks engaging with really unreasonable and really big ideas, but that's not where it begins. Right? All that really matters is that if we have some super, super long term or radical goal that we know what the smallest possible version of bringing that to life might look like, even if that just means a pitch. Mhmm.

It's allowing yourself the freedom to say, look. If I boil this down to its its its micro experiment stage allow myself to not have the perfect idea, but to be able to just make it real so someone else can see the possibility of what would happen if we were to make this shift, that's where the wheels really start kicking. And, of course, like, it's still a reality that, you know, sometimes those bureaucratic forces are are going to push back on us, but I don't think that should be an excuse for us not trying. And I think oftentimes if we make the ask or the idea real and make it small, it's a lot easier to get past some of that friction that comes up when we bring our bouncy castle in the kitchen style idea.

I love that. So for our last question, let's look ahead again to Charlotte, your keynote speech. We know there's gonna be some poetry. There's gonna be some innovation. There's gonna be some grilled cheese.

But what's one other thing you wanna leave that audience with?

Oh, what I'm gonna say is this keynote and this experience, it's going to ask of you to open your minds because poetry innovation, that's a connection that for some might be a hard sell. And it's my job to sell you on it, so, you know, I know what what my role is, but I'm also gonna invite you to prime yourselves to just be open to something different and also be open as an audience member to engage in this session a little bit differently because there might be an opportunity or two like that that you might wanna take the opportunity to if it comes your way.

So, Tucker Bryant, I just wanna thank you so much for joining us today on the MGMA Podcast.

It's been so much fun, and I cannot wait to see you in person

That's it.

In the flesh in Charlotte.

That is it. So Tucker is gonna be there, everyone. MGMA's operations conference. It's April. Charlotte, North Carolina.

There's gonna be poetry. There's gonna be innovation. There's gonna be change management. Maybe even be I don't know if you're gonna have a grill and be cooking grilled cheeses there. So be ready, everybody.

It's gonna be an experience.

Well, you said it. I might have to. Oh gosh.

Alright. Everybody, you can go to mgma.com/events, and you can register today. So until then, thank you all for being MGMA Podcast listeners.