Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Your weekly hit of insights and actionable strategies for innovation-minded professionals... that just want to get shit done.
Managing the backlog of ideas and challenges within the company can be daunting. Figuring out which issues to address first can be paralyzing.
Brought to you by Brightidea and our premiere community for innovators, this is the Synthesize Pod.
A podcast committed to helping visionaries like you drive change and innovation through practical, real-world examples.
Matt Greeley [00:00:03]:
Ideas, by definition, are always fragile.
Margaret Kelsey [00:00:08]:
No tolerance for failure. No innovation.
Matt Greeley [00:00:14]:
The best ideas you have to win.
Margaret Kelsey [00:00:19]:
This is the synthesize pod from bright idea. It's your weekly hit of insights and actionable strategies for innovation minded professionals that just want to get shit done. Welcome to season one. Just say hackathon. Matt, I've known you now for, what, more than a year?
Matt Greeley [00:00:36]:
Yeah, about that.
Margaret Kelsey [00:00:37]:
Tell me a little bit about, for those folks that don't, haven't known you for a year, who you are, what you care about, what you do, the whole shebang.
Matt Greeley [00:00:45]:
Yeah. So I'm Matt Greeley. I'm the founder of Bright Idea, which is a innovation software platform. We like to say it's kind of like Salesforce for your innovation process, for the innovation funnel instead of the sales funnel. And, yeah, basically been working for over two decades on helping large organizations kind of engage their workforce and starting with something very simple and humble, like a suggestion box, and then moving on to tools to support things like innovation programs, innovation labs, hackathons, etcetera. And I'm basically an innovation junkie. I love new ideas. I love creativity.
Matt Greeley [00:01:24]:
I think innovation is the closest thing to magic that we have. It's like a magic trick where it's not a trick. You actually do make things better. Yeah. Just super excited about this pod and working with you on this.
Margaret Kelsey [00:01:35]:
Yeah, me too. And talk to me a little bit about where synthesize came from as the name for the podcast.
Matt Greeley [00:01:41]:
So we had an annual event called Synthesize, and it was an in person conference, and we'd get people together in San Francisco and just to talk about what was going on with kind of best practices with customers. It was kind of for customers, by customers. And even the name synthesize was like, okay, it's been a year. You've kind of been on the front lines. Let's get together and kind of synthesize our learnings and our kind of share tips and tricks. So with COVID we put that on pause, and we basically, you know, obviously people weren't getting together in person. And then, you know, when we decided to kind of rethink that for 2024, we said, why don't we go out with the podcast? And that way people can, you know, while they're going for a walk or while they're, you know, you know, doing, running some errands, they can just kind of listen to the pod in the background. So super excited to bring that same sort of vibe and energy.
Matt Greeley [00:02:34]:
I think we really created a. At the time, it was a premiere event for corporate innovators. And I think, you know, we can take that into this podcast world and, you know, kind of create the premier community for corporate innovators and really just give people that forum to go find the people that are doing the thing, doing the real stuff, and create a forum for them to share their tips and tricks and then maybe also just kind of discuss key topics of the day and kind of what's evolving in the world of corporate innovation.
Margaret Kelsey [00:03:07]:
I love that because, I mean, obviously when you go to an event and you're in real life, there's a lot of relationship building that happens. But I think podcasts is a really fun way too, to build relationships because you're in people's ears, right? And in their, usually in the spaces, in their private spaces, like at their house or if they're in their car, you know, you kind of get an entry point into their personal lives, which was really fun.
Matt Greeley [00:03:28]:
Yeah, I think it's a great way to kind of passively pick up information, you know? And for me, I, you know, candidly, I like listening to podcasts when they do the laundry because it's such a mind numbing task. I need something to engage my mind. I think we've all kind of, you know, reevaluated kind of where we get our information from and stuff over the past few years, and there's so much to share. It's nice to have a longer format, to be able to get into all the details and not give you just this 32nd clip or some clickbait headline on Laurie.
Margaret Kelsey [00:04:02]:
And so that leads me to ask you, there's obviously going to be, we've planned out for this season that we're going to have a lot of amazing conversations. Is there any particular conversations that you're super excited to have?
Matt Greeley [00:04:13]:
I think the biggest thing is I have this amazing vantage point because I get to see into hundreds of companies that are doing innovation activities. I just want to get that above the waterline because people don't get to see it. We've got one customer that's running 50 hackathons a year. I think when you see that, you're like, that's a lot other companies maybe do one or two a year or four a year, but I think it's a very innovative company and they use that to drive their products and whatnot forward. So I think there's just tons of stories. Some people are really focused on the engagement piece of it and how in a work from home environment, it's really nice to kind of bring people together for a common event and kind of get them collaborating and get them thinking about what's possible again, instead of just kind of surviving. So I think there's going to be a couple themes that come through and I think I just want to build a broader awareness about this, specifically hackathon and that companies are doing this stuff and that it's a really effective technique to drive engagement and to drive innovation that can show up in products or the way a company does business.
Margaret Kelsey [00:05:29]:
I love what you said there about trying to inspire the workforce to go beyond just surviving to figure out or imagine what is possible. And I think that's what I've seen over the last year, specifically with marketers, that that's a really tough thing to do right now. It feels like after the last couple years, as technology has advanced and sped up, that everyone is feeling like they're just trying to survive rather than being bold enough to thrive and to innovate. So have you seen that? Do you have thoughts on that?
Matt Greeley [00:06:02]:
I mean, first, let's say, you know, surviving was a good thing, right? Like, you know, I think we got to do it. Yeah, I remember in the middle of COVID saying like, hey, just getting people to show up every day is victory. And, you know, all the shifts and people were building home offices and getting on Zoom calls and stuff like that. So I think actually people deserve a little bit of a pat on the back for all that and just kind of getting through it and keeping the economy running, etcetera. But now it's like, hey, we're like, the pace of technology doesn't slow down. The pace of business doesn't slow down. It's like no rest for the weary. It's kind of, you're back at it and yeah, I think people have to shift gears.
Matt Greeley [00:06:45]:
I think you can't stay in survival mode. You can't cut your way to growth. Like you can cut your way to profits, but you can't cut your way to new growth and new competitive advantages. And the good news is there's this tremendous library of possibilities. I love that scene in the matrix where they go, I need guns. And it's like all these guns come out of nowhere. And I think we're in a moment right now where it's like, I need ways to innovate and it's like, there's just like 15 different things from, like, space to, you know, energy 2.0 to Healthcare 2.0 to AI to, you know, that's just like, there's like all these tools at your disposal, and it's just a matter of, you know, playing with them and getting familiar with them and then thinking about how that's going to impact your business. So, yeah, I think it's, I think it's a really good time to kind of pivot out of survive mode and shift more into thrive mode.
Matt Greeley [00:07:38]:
And the good news is there's just all these amazing possibilities now at our disposal. Just need to give ourselves a little bit of time to play with the new technologies.
Margaret Kelsey [00:07:47]:
Yeah. And if you listen to this podcast for the full season, I think you'll feel better about innovation by the end of it.
Matt Greeley [00:07:52]:
Absolutely. Okay. What about you, Margaret? Why are you here? What brings you to this pod?
Margaret Kelsey [00:07:58]:
I, for the last decade or so, have worked at the opposite of you when you're talking about helping big corporations innovate. I've worked in software startups for the last decade and even in a venture capital firm that invested in software startups. And so I've seen what innovation looks like, not when you're trying to turn the tide of a big, large organization and get them to innovate, but from a very small, scrappy group of folks. And I love how the software startups that I've worked at and now advise and collaborate with, I love to see those small ideas blossom into large and growing businesses. I think that to me is really interesting and I think that this method of entrepreneurship is really important for our society. I think that I've always worked in sort of b two B software technology, and so it's about people, it's always about making your work life easier. And we spend so much time at work, we spend so much time focusing on our careers and the things that our companies are building. And I love the idea of creating software to make somebody more productive, more energized to then focus on the creative tasks by taking away the rote tasks of the job.
Margaret Kelsey [00:09:09]:
Those things to me, I think, really are just what wakes me up every morning. So I'm happy to explore this with you over the next season and learn from some really innovative companies on how they're doing it at such a large scale.
Matt Greeley [00:09:21]:
I actually thought it would be cool to talk about the insight you had around innovation mindset and how innovation teams, typically companies, have built these innovation teams to kind of foment that kind of mindset. But increasingly you have just normal, everyday managers that are adopting that innovation mindset and why that's important. Any thoughts on that?
Margaret Kelsey [00:09:45]:
Yeah, I think right now I've seen that there's a lot of anxiety about being left behind. Right. This idea of, like, every vertical, every space, every team within every organization is hearing so much buzz about the way that technology is changing and moving. And so I do think it's kind of permeated, instead of just being a straight innovation team that's responsible for this, where it's become part of everyone's, especially every manager's focus, is how do I make sure that my team is innovative? How do I make sure that they're adopting new technology? How do I make sure that we're creating the right technology for the future?
Matt Greeley [00:10:20]:
Yeah, sometimes it's a little hard to see because think about traditional roles like HR, accounting, and you think like, well, that doesn't change that often. That's not like R and Da. Then you have things like LinkedIn come along or whatever, AI job posts or something, you know, and it's like people have to adapt to those new ways of working, otherwise they're going to kind of lose out in the, in the war on talent.
Margaret Kelsey [00:10:41]:
Yeah, absolutely. I think that, you know, it's like, has to go back to even the. This is probably a pejorative term, but, like, back office Betty, you know, still has to think about innovation and technology and how to make sure that everyone is being, I think at the end of the day, it's probably as productive as possible. Right. Is the core focus of innovation productivity, or what do you, you see as the real reason why innovation is important?
Matt Greeley [00:11:05]:
I mean, I think the ultimate brass ring is competitive advantage, proprietary advantage. I mean, like SpaceX, one of my favorite examples. They have a cheaper payload to orbit, so they can do something that no one else in the world can do. And so they've got pricing power, they've got their neutralized competition and allows them to do new things. So the fact that they're putting up this satellite constellation that provides Internet access, eventually will provide cell phone access. I think that's the high watermark. I mean, yes, you can also come in and optimize what you have, and companies have continuous improvement programs and stuff like that to kind of just optimize the current business. But I think the high order bit for innovation is if you can go achieve something, have some hardcore technology or something that no one else can do, then you just get all these sort of benefits of profitability and pricing power and kind of lack of competition.
Margaret Kelsey [00:12:02]:
Yeah. And I'm even zooming it up to the question of, like, why does humanity want to innovate? Right? I understand business profits and, like, that individual companies would. But what do you think the drive is for the human race to continue to innovate?
Matt Greeley [00:12:14]:
I think the best way to answer that is to start at the beginning. And I have a rock in my personal collection. It's a achulean age hand axe, and it's dated to be over. It's, like, amusing grade quality piece, and it's dated to be over a million years old. So I think it's important to realize that it's very fundamental to who we are as humans, that we create tools, that we look at our environment and we try and go out there and sculpt our environment to make it easier and to reduce suffering and make our lives more enjoyable. So people say, oh, innovation is this new buzzword. The act of innovation predated written history by several million years or something.
Margaret Kelsey [00:12:57]:
Written history is innovation. The fact that we could write it down.
Matt Greeley [00:12:59]:
Exactly. Writing paper, pens, history itself, I think that's the first important recognition. I do some of my tweets, I do this thing called innovation isn't new, where someone will post something about a model t in the twenties, and I'll be like, look, innovation isn't new. That's. It's very, very human. It's very central to what we do as humans. I like to say tigers have claws and eagles have wings, and humans have brains that make tools, and that's our way of competing in the ecosystem. So when you pull that forward, innovation was kind of this rare act in the past, and you basically had, like, Italy, they started allowing a precursor to patents around, like, developing, like, recipes.
Matt Greeley [00:13:46]:
Like, you could, like, patent a recipe early on. And innovation was this kind of sporadic thing that, you know, didn't really happen on a kind of recurring basis. But as we've seen how important it is to our quality of life and, you know, just, just improving standards of living, we've, you know, invested more and more in it. And now we're in this world where the flywheel is just kind of spinning on itself, and you're in this, like, massive acceleration. I think it's important to go all the way back and be like, this is something fundamentally human that we do. And I think it's important to look forward and say, where's this trajectory heading? And will our current organizational structures and our current ways of approaching business, are they sufficient to keep up? Because Jack Welch, the former CEO of GE, once said, if the pace of change outside of your business is faster than the pace of change inside of your business, you're going to have a big problem. So I think that's why it's so important is we have so many things changing AI, drones, it's changing how businesses do business, changing how warfare is enacted, and probably going to upset the stability in the world. Being on the right side of this, leaning into this trend of acceleration, I think, is really, really important.
Margaret Kelsey [00:15:05]:
Yeah. You talked a little bit about companies. If the pace of innovation is faster outside of the company than inside of the company, there's consequences. What are those consequences?
Matt Greeley [00:15:15]:
Well, like we said prior, I think people don't like to talk about it, but a business should really have the goal of being monopoly, because when you're a monopoly, you're not subject to competition. Your profits aren't getting competed to zero. So we've had this period of globalization where all of a sudden you have to compete with everyone in the entire world, this kind of hyper competition. So if that world is changing, if you're traditional car manufacturer and electric vehicles are coming on, or self driving vehicles are coming on, and you're not keeping up with it, then all of a sudden your customer base can change quite rapidly and they can opt for a different product or they can opt for a different approach. So really, the business's health and survival is at risk. And more broadly, societally, if a lot of businesses are going through this turbulence, you're basically talking about shaking the, the foundations of society, because if all these major pillar institutions of our world are getting shook, then that's basically shaking the fundamental institutions of our society. I think we're feeling a little bit of that. I think just watching the news, you pick up that there's this reverberation out there in terms of what's going on in the world.
Margaret Kelsey [00:16:34]:
Earlier you were talking about being obsessed with innovation. What was the term that you used that you're an innovation junkie? Innovation junkie, yeah. So what do you think it was about your life or your past that made you so care so much about innovation?
Matt Greeley [00:16:51]:
I have a weird story to tell about that. When I was little, a little kid, I liked magic, like magic tricks. But I was always kind of disappointed when I learned the trick. It was like, oh, the coins, not really behind your ear or there's a card up the sleeve or something. It was kind of like a letdown that there wasn't actual magic in the world. Kind of came up through studying engineering and, you know, and then getting into startups, I realized, like, wait a second, there's this thing innovation, and it's actually like real magic. It's actually a case where, like human beings do something, and there's not a card up their sleeve. It's like they actually made things better.
Matt Greeley [00:17:31]:
So I talked at one of the synthesized conferences about when my son was born and how if you go back, you know, 50 years, like many, my son was born early. And if. If you go back 50 or 100 years, a lot of kids born that early would not have survived their first year. And fortunately, he's still thriving, and he'll celebrate his 6th birthday here in another month or so. I think it's amazing that we can build these tools. We can build these technologies. In his case, it was an incubator, and there was blood pressure drugs for his mom, and there was monitoring systems and all sorts of stuff that made that possible. And to me, that's magical.
Matt Greeley [00:18:12]:
I mean, if you can have more children live to see their fifth or 6th birthday than otherwise would, it's like we've actually made the world a better place. I think very few people disagree with that. And I just think it's sort of this realization of this childhood idealism that you can actually make magic happen. It's not always easy. Innovation is hard work, but if you pull it off, you can actually make things better. That drives me in everything I do. I mean, it's just, how do we accelerate that? How do we make more of that happen, and how do we let the best idea win? Because I think that's often the thing that gets in the way.
Margaret Kelsey [00:18:49]:
That does feel pretty magical.
Matt Greeley [00:18:51]:
What's actually interesting to you?
Margaret Kelsey [00:18:54]:
I did a lot of soul searching. Now almost a year, maybe more than a year and a half ago, when I left Openview, which is a venture capital firm that invests in b, two b software startups, about what actually gets me out of bed every day, and what my red thread is throughout everything that I do and why I care about the things I do. And so to me, it's around this human desire to feel seen and to have a sense of belonging. And through that is creating shared language, right. I think it's really interesting. And speaking of how even language has innovated like it's faster than ever before. Now, there's words that get picked up from certain subgroups and then become part of the main language. But I think anytime that you can create language to make people feel a sense of shared belonging, you then have a superpower, kind of a magic power.
Margaret Kelsey [00:19:51]:
And I think the ability to do that with this podcast, in this world of innovation, which can seem so big and scary, it can seem like, how are we ever going to adopt these technologies or move forward. And how do we get people from surviving into thriving and having enough creative space to innovate? I think we can do that with this podcast through shared language, right? Through making people feel like their problems of trying to get their company to innovate or trying to work through something hairy, or trying to set up a hackathon, they're not alone, right? There's other folks that are doing this, that are doing it successfully. And that, to me, is why I thought this was really an interesting project to take on.
Matt Greeley [00:20:30]:
I think language is super important, is the filter we see the world through. And I think marketing is about telling unique stories around these new things. And it's half the battle with innovation. Right. With innovation, you have to kind of create the product, but then you have to infuse it into society. And that's a whole separate challenge. And I think language is really, really key. Just the word hackathon, I mean, like, if you really want to pick that apart, is like, in my mind, it's a very.
Matt Greeley [00:21:04]:
It has hard consonants in it, so it's almost like a lightning bolt and sticks out. So if you said to someone like, hey, do you want to do some innovation management process work or set up an innovation program? Those all feel like warm and fuzzy kind of rounded thing, then hackathon's like a lightning bolt. Like, it's true.
Margaret Kelsey [00:21:26]:
It's staccato, right? Yeah, hackathon. Right.
Matt Greeley [00:21:30]:
And I think, like, you know, we have this joke in cyber was like, just say hackathon to customers. Because I actually think it's a really good activity for customers to be engaged in right now in this age of AI, to be kind of exploring what's possible and giving people time to adapt to these new modalities. And hackathon kind of cuts through the noise. You know, there's all this, like, chaos in the world right now, and Hackathon's like, kind of cuts through the noise. It's something actionable, it's something concrete that you can. That you can latch onto. Instead of being like, we should really do something about innovating more and making the company adapt to change more quickly. And it's like, why don't we just run a hackathon? And it grounds the thing.
Matt Greeley [00:22:13]:
You get a very concrete date, you can rally the troops around it. You're not making this perpetual commitment of ten people. It's just like, let's get a team together and run this event. We see what results we can get out of it. So, yeah, there's just something about it. The marketing term of hackathon is people know what it is and they know where it fits and they know how to deploy that kind of technique. So, yeah, it's just kind of funny to get into the actual contours of the phrase and how that helps kind of carry the idea forward.
Margaret Kelsey [00:22:48]:
Yeah. I think also the other thing that it does is allow you give people permission to have this space to be creative. And I think that right now lots of people feel overwhelmed. They feel like their workloads are really high. And I think it's permission time block to do something that might fail. And so talk to me a little bit about that. Talk to me about the relationship between innovation and failure.
Matt Greeley [00:23:15]:
Yeah. So there's a lot there. I think, first off, let me address the permission thing. I think that's really, really key to hackathon is that no one's telling you what to do. There are other innovation management techniques you can use where you want to be really directed, but hackathon allows you to be kind of bottoms up and you don't need that permission. So I think that that's really, really key. And people have been, you know, we've had some companies have had layoffs. Some companies have, you know, just kind of shrunk through people leaving.
Matt Greeley [00:23:42]:
And it's kind of been like all hands on deck and just kind of like, you know, just get something done. And it's, it's nice to be able to just pull the release valve for a second and say, hey, just, you know, why don't you just come in and for 24 hours or 48 hours, you know, we're going to get together and you're just going to be able to play with things that you want to play with. Maybe it's things you could never get to during your day job that's really, really, you know, it's frustrating because, you know, if you just had a couple hours, you could, could resolve it. And like you said, some people don't want to, like, take risks or, you know, they don't want to like, you know, have a blemish on their career by, like, you know, having an internal funded project that doesn't go, go that well. So I think hackathon's a really, really great way to go after something that is risky and basically show what's possible. You don't have to deal with all the, oh, is this compliant and does this work in 15 languages? You just kind of charge ahead and slash through the jungle, if you will, and then you're just trying to get to a point where you can show someone a prototype and be like, look at what's possible. Yes, this isn't super robust and we'd have to do a lot more work. But look at this idea I had and look at this prototype that I built.
Matt Greeley [00:24:55]:
And I think that that's the most, that's like the essence of a hackathon is that like the permissionless innovation, no one's telling you what to do. It's bottoms up. You're getting some time to, you know, adapt new technologies and then you're trying to, like, come up with a prototype at the end that like, basically you can show to people and then they get it right. You could all the PowerPoint in the world, all the ideas, all the water cooler sessions, maybe people weren't getting it, but if they just see it working, then that has its own way of persuading people.
Margaret Kelsey [00:25:25]:
Yeah. What keeps coming up in my mind as you're talking is the book deep work. And then this phrase of do less but better. It's this idea that we are so distracted or indistractable, I think is Nirael's book or something like that. So do you feel like hackathons are necessary because we've lost the ability to do deep work?
Matt Greeley [00:25:49]:
I think there's definitely a lot of add culture and people talk about doom scrolling on their phone and the dopamine hits and stuff like that. I think Hackathon's a trailhead to get back in the direction of deep work. And it's like, okay, we know we can't roll out this multi year program that's going to touch every employee and put them through forced, like, training on something. But what we can do is kind of gather a little bit of focus, a little bit of attention, get people together for, you know, 24, 48 hours. And if someone's sick for a day, no one minds. Right. You can tolerate one day out of, out of, you know, the year that like, you know, so give them that time. And then I think that's like, almost like the trailhead where you're like, okay, now created a bubble where we can give people the opportunity to just focus on one thing and go at it and turn off their slack or turn off their MS teams and turn down the calendar and the email and just go at it.
Matt Greeley [00:26:54]:
And then I think when you start to see the fruits of that, that's the beginning of a flywheel that you then kind of continue to invest in and incubate these projects further and then eventually they can become new products and new ways of working. So I think it's a way in this add world to kind of cut through the noise and just give people the opportunity for that intense focus. And then if you come up with some really interesting concepts, then hopefully you can kind of parlay that focus forward and build these new products and services.
Margaret Kelsey [00:27:29]:
I love that idea of it as either trailhead. I was thinking of. I don't know, first taste is free. It's this idea that once you get hooked on TikTok, but it's a short cycle of a dopamine hit, right? Like, I'm going to work on this thing for 24, 48 hours and then get the dopamine hit of actually accomplishing something because I have turned off of all the distractions and because I focused on this thing and because I was de risked for failure. How do I bring that into my other working environment outside of the hackathon? I love that idea as it being like this little gateway drug. This is the word I was thinking of, a gateway drug into deep work.
Matt Greeley [00:28:06]:
We're doing our annual hackathon right now, so we're in like the pre event incubate phase, and we're so about a month of time where people can post ideas and collaborate and join teams and kind of this pre filtering that goes on before the actual event. And I'm just blown away by how much it's pulled our company back together. People, like I said, this work from home stuff. I just love seeing people thinking about what possible for the company going forward and putting their ideas out there and, you know, and seeing what people think. I mean, it's. I don't know, it may sound trite, but it's profound in some way. It's like you can, like, see, like, this is what they care about. This is what they think the most important, you know, next project to work on is, and been in this mode of, like, every hour matters, every minute matters, like, super densely prioritized work.
Matt Greeley [00:29:06]:
It's kind of nice to be like, whoa, let's pull back. Let's take a step back. And the point about just seeing people from different departments talking to each other, seeing what they are talking about, there's this whole engagement layer that's on top of whether you're going to get a new technology or a new prototype to go put into the product. I think it's a way to pull people back towards the, the company and the mission of the company and in a way that is comfortable for them to do that.
Margaret Kelsey [00:29:37]:
Yeah, I advise a lot of heads of marketing that are leading a team, and I always encourage them to try to get out of the red light, green lighting every decision for their team and really create a shared decision making framework because the person then have the most information is the person with the boots on the ground, because they understand how decisions get made, they understand the value structure, the shared decision making framework of how to make a good decision. And they have all the data points of the work that they're doing and the problems that they're seeing. And so what keeps coming to mind with a hackathon is you're allowing for those people to then play around with things that they see as important because they now have the most information about the biggest pain points and the things that if they could just fix or tweak or build something, it would completely unlock, whether it's their workload or the success of their customers. And so that's the thing I keep going back to, is you almost create the shared decision making framework and then allow for the answers to bubble up from the bottom rather than feeling like you have to have this innovation hat and directly inspire innovation from the top down.
Matt Greeley [00:30:46]:
Yeah. And marketing is a great example of function that 30 years ago no one really saw as like the most innovative aspect of the business. I mean, there was certainly creativity in the ads and stuff like that, but it was basically tv ads and print ads, and then Internet comes along, SEO, content marketing. And then since then it's just been like this massive rapid evolution. And now I think we're going through a whole new world where the search engines are being reconceptualized with aihdem. And so you need that, and you need to give people that space. And I heard one group say, like, your young people are your alpha. So Alpha is like, in investing is like how you get like an advantage above and beyond like everyone else in the market.
Matt Greeley [00:31:39]:
And like, basically you have to empower those young people that, you know, are net natives or are, you know, eventually will have AI natives, but because they just see the world differently. And, you know, if the 50 year olds like, are the ones or the six year olds are the ones making all the decisions, like, you're probably not going to be making very crisp, kind of timely, kind of modern decisions. So I think anything that kind of unlocks that potential for the younger generation to get their ideas seen and to show the old folks like myself what's possible is certainly a good thing.
Margaret Kelsey [00:32:19]:
It's such a small and silly story, but I have keep on Instagram this woman keeps popping up and she's an intern at this direct to consumer beverage company. And her whole schtick is that she's trying to show her boss that her social media strategy of just crushing cans in ridiculous ways is better than his official marketing strategy. And I'm sure that this is a trope that they've figured out and whatnot, but she'll even have videos of her call with her boss and he's like, yeah, you really sad? And sales went up, so like, here's some more budget. Here's like a little bit longer time to do this. And I thought the idea of it's so funny, and especially if it was planned out as something where it wasn't just like, let's play around to see if this is a better strategy. But if this was the strategy to show the progression that it is a good strategy, I think is really smart. But that's, I keep coming back with that because it's like, yeah, there's an existing kind of marketing strategy happening. And then the young people are taking to new channels and figuring out really being embedded and how those channels work and how the culture and the communication and the language of those channels, what things will actually resonate with the target audience, and they can move really quick to create stuff that might seem absolutely absurd to us older folks.
Matt Greeley [00:33:32]:
Yeah, and that's another good point, is that with a hackathon, it doesn't always have to be a coding project or physical prototype that you're building. You know, new marketing channels, new marketing approaches. These are all things that just take a little bit of time. Maybe you want to make a video or maybe a short or something like that, but it's really hard as a young person to get an idea adopted. It's like the organization appears like this concrete facade where all the budgets are allocated, all the resources are allocated, and you get your screwdriver and you're trying to get into a little crack and wiggle your screwdriver into that crack to get your idea adopted. So I think things like hackathons are helpful because it's a moment for those executives to pause and take a step back and not worry about their targets for the quarter and basically look around and kind of shop for new ideas and shop for high potential people that have those ideas. So it's kind of a half kidding about this crushing cans, but I think there's a there there. I mean, it's so hard to get attention in today's world.
Matt Greeley [00:34:37]:
You need these creative approaches and you just need the mechanisms and the processes where those things don't just get killed in the crib, but they have an opportunity to breathe a little bit and live.
Margaret Kelsey [00:34:48]:
Yeah. When I think about what we've talked about so far, it feels like there's an interesting interplay with innovation, fear and fear of failure, and then also play. And so I know we've kind of touched on some of these things, but if you were going to synthesize the relationship between innovation, fear of failure on one end and play on the other end, what would you say?
Matt Greeley [00:35:15]:
You know, maybe this is my entrepreneurial genes, but I would pivot your fear. If you have to have fear, let it be a fear of disruption, not a fear of failure or fear of you're not good enough or anything like that. I mean, the good news in innovation is you don't have to be perfect, you don't have to be flawless. You just need to get the next person involved with what you're doing and excited about what you're doing. So I think shift the fear from, like, this might not work to, like, what if we don't do anything, then we're really screwed, right? And I think that's a more concrete fear in my mind, and it's more grounded. I think the best way to think about play is, like, you want to follow your heart, you want to follow your nose, you want to follow your intuition. Again, Hackathon's sort of open ended in that way where no one's telling you, build this feature, create this product. And, you know, I think there's this story of the flaming hot Cheetos.
Matt Greeley [00:36:09]:
I don't know if, you know, it's like a janitor guy. And, you know, he, you know, he was passionate, and he was from a slightly different community than Cheetos core market. And he brought the Cheetos home and flavored them with, like, spices from his culture. And he. And then he brought that back and they. It eventually became spicy hot Cheetos, which is a big success. So again, a sort of form of employee innovation and prototyping. But I think play for him was like, this is who I am.
Matt Greeley [00:36:40]:
This is what I care about. This is what I want to do. And if you truly tap into stuff that you're, I hate to use the word passionate because it gets overused in this context, but the stuff you're just interested in, what looks like work to other people, becomes play to you. Because experimenting with 20 different spices might look like work to someone, but if that person's passionate about that, then it's nothing. So I think if you to kind of put a bow on it, I think fear disruption more than failure and then find the thing that looks like work to everyone else but is played you. That's actually a guy named Naval who's one of my favorite Internet personalities who said that. And then innovation just kind of bubbles out of that because you've got a carrot and a stick, so you don't want to get disrupted and you're doing something fun. And then don't go on innovation necessarily directly, but just follow those two things and good things will bubble out of that eventually.
Margaret Kelsey [00:37:38]:
Yeah. And it feels like hackathons to bring it even full circle. There is that space where you can do both of those things. You can re anchor on. You know, we're not fearing failure, we're fearing disruption. And here's some space to play. And you get to go decide based on where your brain likes to live, on how to solve the problems for the business or how to even come up with a new problem to solve that we haven't even done yet. I think that this is going to be really fun over the next season to explore how to do a hackathon in order to create the environment for both of those things and allow this innovation from the bottoms up to bubble.
Matt Greeley [00:38:14]:
Yeah, we've got a great list of companies and individuals at companies that are doing hackathons, and I'm super pumped to get them on the pod and let them share some of their stories and tips and tricks and just kind of all the nuance of what it takes to make these things successful and create this environment for people to thrive in.
Margaret Kelsey [00:38:35]:
So if you are interested in innovation and specifically hackathons, and if you know somebody in your community, whether it's a co worker or a friend or somebody you're trying to get to know, why don't you go ahead and loop them into this podcast so they can follow along with you and with us and you'll have somebody in your community that you can chat with. When we're releasing new episodes, I promise.
Matt Greeley [00:39:01]:
We'll have some amazing stories for.