Podcast Transcript
The following is a special presentation of Tony Kurre Radio. With Dr. Alex Heublein and Dr. Josh Klapow. This is Adapt or Perish.
Josh Klapow:
Welcome to another addition of Adapt or Perish. I’m Dr. Josh Klapow along with Dr. Alex Heublein. I’m laughing already because what you all don’t get to hear before we come on air is Alex and I going back and forth riving each other a little bit, also with, with our producer, Jamie, and I’m still from the last show reeling at Kilroy Was Here, Alex.
Alex Heublein:
Hey, man, what can I say? What can I say that I was at the right place at the right time, right?
Josh Klapow:
But you know what, you know what I, and I should say this, like as both a psychologist and as your colleague, I owe you the respect for being truthful. You could’ve denied it. You didn’t have to share that with me, but you did. So anyway…
Alex Heublein:
Hey, I did verify that that was their last platinum album. So-
Josh Klapow:
But-
Alex Heublein:
It did pretty well, so I think I may have been wrong about it was their most popular best selling album, but yeah. Everybody’s got their own weird musical quirks, right?
Josh Klapow:
Yeah. Well, we haven’t told you then, and I don’t know if I’ve ever said this on Tony Kurre Radio. I’m sure I have on our Kurre and Klapow Show, but you know that Tony Kurre is a fan, as am I, of cheesy 70s love songs.
Alex Heublein:
Oh, I did not know that, right?
Josh Klapow:
Yeah.
Alex Heublein:
So you got the whole Piña Colada Song going through your head back?
Josh Klapow:
No, not that one. There’s some other ones, which we’ll talk about. I don’t even know that that’s disruption. We wouldn’t talk about that. All right. So let’s move forward from our last show. Either the last show we’re talking about disruption and I think about disruption is kind of, even if it’s planned or staged, it’s the spark, right? It’s the little bit of shift that may or may not stick. It may or may not take something in different place, but you brought up this really great idea of going past that to sort of, we think about the Beatles, a revolution. Disruption may live or may die. It may die on the vine, it may stay around but revolution means you have fundamentally changed. It’s a paradigm shift as I remember back from my research methodology days.
What is a revolution? We didn’t see it coming from the Beatles until it happened. And how do we think about that from technology? Or can we think about it in a forward looking way, right? Or can we only recognize whether it’s the Beatles or whether it’s the Stones or whether it’s an Apple or a Microsoft, can we only recognize it after it’s already become a revolution? Or can we plan for a business revolution that we’re going to execute on?
Alex Heublein:
Yeah. I mean, all great questions, right? Yeah. And it’s funny, I mean, going back to-
Josh Klapow:
Sorry, you know what’s so great about this? I get to ask all three questions and you have to answer them, which is that hard.
Alex Heublein:
I know I have to answer them with obscure sticks references, right?
Josh Klapow:
That’s right. Go ahead. I’m sorry. Go, go, go. Go.
Alex Heublein:
So the first band that I ever really got into in my life, the very first band was the Beatles. And it was quite a happy accident. My father had a stereo system and this is, I don’t know, mid-70s. And he had all these old Beatles eight-track tapes, right? Because it was all eight-track back then. And so, when I first got to the age where music was interesting to me, and I wanted to find my own music, I had this selection of eight-track tapes to go through. And there were a lot of the older Beatles albums on. And so, I listened to that stuff because it was all I had to listen to back then. I mean, I just listened to it over and over and over again.
And I came to really love the Beatles. And you kind of look at what they were able to do. Yeah, they really did kind of start a revolution, didn’t they? I mean, they were that first part of that whole British invasion, extremely talented guys, great sound. And people just went crazy over them. I mean, I still look back on some of the old videos of them showing up for concerts and people just went nuts for that kind of music and it really was kind of a revolution. And then, they wrote this song revolution, which was kind of all about political revolution, but I was listening to it the other day. I was actually cleaning my pool, that’s where I get my ideas for the radio shows. I go off with my little net and I clean out my pool and I don’t think of anything else, right?
Josh Klapow:
I do the same thing.
Alex Heublein:
It’s weird, isn’t it?
Josh Klapow:
It is. That is so weird. I’m sorry, just take off. I find myself walking in circles around the swimming pool, cleaning off leaves, listening to classic rock. And at some point I’ve lost how many times I’ve gone around, and I’m down to the last pine needle. So anyway, look at us. We’re like… I don’t know, man. Now, I’m going to forgive you for Kilroy. Go ahead.
Alex Heublein:
There you go. We get our great ideas by pulling pine straw and leaves out of our pools, right?
Josh Klapow:
That’s right.
Alex Heublein:
Yeah. Well, and it’s interesting because you go look at the lyrics of that song. And again, it’s all about political revolutions. It’s kind of more of a political statement. But you know what? I think what’s fun in the business world or where I think in any industry is being able to learn from other industries and learning from things that happen either in other industries or other parts of society or other parts of our culture that maybe don’t have a direct connection, but you can connect them back and see some of the lessons that people have learned over time.
And so, you look at things like political revolutions, right? Those have been going on as long as probably people have existed. There’s always going to be people that think differently. They bring a new mentality to the status quo. They challenge the status quo. And the successful revolutions are ones that are able to overcome the status quo and move on to something different. And I think it’s the same thing in innovation. I mean, we think about innovation, it’s really a very similar type of thing, particularly when you’re dealing with say a large company. And I’ve worked for a lot of big companies over my career, and I’ve tried to start many revolutions in those companies. Some succeeded, some failed, but it’s all about going against sort of the traditional way of thinking. It’s going out and saying, “Look, I know this is how we do business today. Or I know this is how we’ve been set up and optimized to go to market or whatever it is, but I think we should do something different in addition to what we’re doing.”
And so, you find, it’s almost like conducting a political revolution where you have to build consensus and you have to go in and convince people to think differently. And most of those attempted revolutions, if you will, and I don’t think of revolution is necessarily a bad word, although it can be.
You can have political coups and things like that maybe aren’t the right things to do or, or what have you. But this idea of being able to go out and convince people that, “Hey, you know what? We need to think differently. We need to do some things that are different. And let me show you some of the benefits to being able to do that.” It’s kind of part strategy, it’s part innovation. And then, it’s part politics.
You have to get the right people on board with the ideas. And I think we’ve seen the same thing in kind of the music industry, right? You’ve got to go out there a and convince, or at least back then, you had to go convince the record companies that you wanted go and do something different if you were an established band. And most of those guys were like, “No, no, no. We want you to just keep doing what you’re doing. Your album sales are great.” But a lot of bands came back and said, “No, no. We’re going to try something different.” So the Killroy Was Here thing, I think is a good example of that.
I think the Beatles were a revolution partially because those guys… You go read the history, the Beatles, they played every night in a nightclub. I think it was somewhere in Germany, in Berlin or somewhere for years and years and years before anybody had ever heard of them. And then, they finally burst on the scene with just this unbelievable music. Stuff that people had really just never heard before. And so, every time you do that, when you’re in a revolution, you’re really trying to do some disruptive innovation. It’s always about looking at it holistically, right? These ideas don’t necessarily sell themselves. And in fact, a lot of times, you see a lot of resistance to new ideas because we talked about this in the last episode, disruptive innovations and revolutions, they create entirely new markets.
They create entirely new competencies, but they also destroy markets and they destroy competencies as well. It’s sort of that process of creative destruction. And so, the people that stand to lose the most, if there is a revolution, are the people that are going to resist that revolution the most? And so, in companies, you see this happen all the time where great ideas get killed off because that there are people that stand to lose a lot, and those people tend to be the ones that are running the company today. It’s also the same thing with governments. It’s same thing with record companies, so on and so forth, right? People have this fear of losing what they have because they’re very comfortable with it. And you know as a psychologist, I mean, people are resistant to change, right? Most people fear change. But ironically, change is where all the opportunity is in life.
So yeah, it’s really interesting when you look at this whole idea of starting a revolution, and then, you look at it when the revolution does take hold. And I think this is really true in political revolutions. You get the people that start the revolution, and then there’s the question of, “Well, can they actually run the revolution?” Right? Do they have the competencies to do it?
So you see a lot of political revolutions that happen. Somebody might overthrow their domineering, totalitarian government, right? They overthrow their totalitarian government. And then, things just go into this period of chaos, right? Or nobody knows what to do, because the totalitarian guys, those guys were terrible from a right standpoint and a lot of things, but a lot of them actually run their governments pretty efficiently. And so, one of the questions in my head is-
Josh Klapow:
Interesting.
Alex Heublein:
… do you have the same or the competencies required to start a revolution and get it over the cliff there? Are they the same types of competencies that will help you drive that revolution onward and sustain the revolution?
Josh Klapow:
Let me ask you this, both in music. I know that fairly recently, they’ve come out with that second, or I don’t know, second, third Beatles documentary. They found footage that they hadn’t had discovered before, recording sessions, et cetera. And we see this with all kinds of successful bands. They show them writing music together and yelling and screaming and arguing, and one wants to go in this direction and one wants to go in that direction. And we’ve seen it time and time again, you think about the big companies. I know that the companies that you work with Adaptigent. I’m thinking Apple immediately, but I know there’s others. Can a company set out and say, “this is what we’re going to do. We’re going to fundamentally change the way this is happening and here are our plans for it.”? And can they stay on track?
And you get an inside view, obviously, at a view that a lot of us don’t, how do they keep it together to stay? I don’t want to say with their vision, but to stay that way, so that they actually create that revolution? Or is some of it circumstance? The fact that the company can stay together with the right people, and people come and go. Again, we’ve seen it with band members, different drummers, different lead singers, et cetera. Van Halen is a great example. We saw it with Journey. We’ve seen it with CCR and all of those, how does a company start and sustain a revolution? And from your side, being there with Adaptigent kind of on the inside, helping them technologically, how does that happen?
Alex Heublein:
Yeah, and it’s tough, right? It’s not an easy thing to do. Let’s just go back to the music world for a second, and I think maybe we can draw some analogies there. To your point, there are bands that evolved that have had like a million members over the years, right? There’s bands that have been around for a long, long time. And they’ve gone through some very, very different lineups. You take like a band, like Genesis, I don’t know how many members have been in Genesis over the-
Josh Klapow:
That’s true.
Alex Heublein:
… last 60 or however many years, right? But I know it’s a lot, right? I mean, it’s a lot of-
Josh Klapow:
That’s right.
Alex Heublein:
… different people have come in and out of that band, and so I think some bands in order to be able to sustain the revolution, they have to be able to go out and seek out potentially different types of people with different creative streaks, in order to be able to kind of sustain the revolution.
But then, there’s bands that have basically had the same members forever. Again, you take a band like Rush. I mean, outside of their first album, it was three guys for 40 years doing music. And I think the difference there is that those guys just constantly kept pushing the envelope, right? They constantly kept challenging each other to innovate and to get better as instrumentalists, to get better as songwriters and arrangers and to kind of push the envelope. But even they went through multiple producers.
They had one producer for, I don’t know, their first seven or eight albums. And then, they made a change in the 80s. They said, “You know what? You’ve done a great job, but we’re kind of shifting in a different direction. And we want to do some different things creatively. And we feel like we need a different producer in order to be able to do that.” So they went through a series of different producers. So I think it’s not just the band members, it’s also the people that they bring in to help produce the records, to help them with arrangements, so on and so forth.
So, I think that every organization goes through that evolution, as they’re trying to go out and create a revolution. You may have to go out and change out some of the members because it takes startups. For instance, every company out there today, other than sort of conglomerates, was once a startup, right? I mean, it’s crazy to think that IBM one day in the past was this little startup or HP. I mean, that’s a pretty well-known story. They started it off in a garage in California or even Apple, right?
Josh Klapow:
Yeah.
Alex Heublein:
It takes Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, those guys, two guys in a garage, and now the company’s worth $3 trillion. So I think we have to look at it from that perspective that once upon a time, almost every company out there was a startup. And then, they grew the company and they moved from startup mode into let’s call it sustainable mode. And then I think the difference between success and failure at that point is, do you keep thinking like a startup? Do you keep trying to innovate? Do you keep trying to push the boundaries? Or do you need different people to come in and help you? Because I think, you brought up Apple, and I think it’s a great example. Apple did a ton of really, really innovative stuff in the 80s, right? Late 70s to say the mid-80s. And then, they fired Steve Jobs and brought in other people to run the company. And that lasted for, I don’t know, 10 or 12 years. And it was a total train wreck, right? I mean, it was a total disaster.
Josh Klapow:
Yup, yup.
Alex Heublein:
Until they brought him back in, and he said, his first decision was, “Well, what if we made our computers out of transparent plastic with different colors,” right? And they came with the iMacs and things like that, and sort of kick-started the company back in that direction of innovation. So I think Apple’s a great example of a company that started out as an innovator, they thought they needed to bring some different people in to run it in steady state. That was a train wreck. So they brought back one of the founders and were able to then grow the company and keep pushing the envelope and keep innovating with the iPod and the iPhones and iPads and so on, and so forth.
So I think it varies a lot by company, right? There are companies out there that just they’re quite happy to just keep going and doing what they’re doing. And then, there’s companies that are never satisfied with what’s happening. And I think the difference between those, a lot of it is in the leadership and in the culture of the company. Building a corporate culture is really, really hard.
Josh Klapow:
Yeah.
Alex Heublein:
And it’s hard to copy. It’s not like you say, “Well, we’re just going to go implement Google’s culture tomorrow.” Right? That’s a really hard thing to do.
Josh Klapow:
No, I’m laughing because I hear it all the time in the work that I do. I love, “We’re going to establish a culture.” And I hear this from CEOs, and I’ll say, “Great.” But if you think about it, I mean a culture, a culture happens. You try to refine it, you try to shift it, you try to create something, but you as a person, even as a CEO, can’t establish it.
And one of the things I kept thinking about as you were talking, with the whole revolution, and you talk about different producers and staying focused, and again, I think about Adaptigent because you all come in and you can come in. And this is with other technologies. Well, we were talking about this before the show, anything can be done. Is this almost like the contractor or the builder. “Oh, we’d like to have this, is it possible?” Sure, anything’s possible. We can build it. How do you stay? Or do you see this with the Adaptigent of companies that are wanting to go down a certain road, but they’re looking at all the things that a company like Adaptigent can bring or all the software solutions and frankly, they get distracted. And we’ve seen it. We’ve seen it with bands. Sorry, Killroy. It’s an example.
Alex Heublein:
You’re just going to keep going back to it, right?
Josh Klapow:
No, but just sort of they get, I don’t know, they kind of turn their head because there’s lots of opportunity. Anything can be done. I would imagine that with Adaptigent and your software solutions and I’m not just saying this is a plug that you can go in and a company’s like, “Well, we want to do this. Or what about this? Or what about this?” And you all are saying, “Yeah, that can be done. That can be done. That can be done.” How do you mash up both the enabling factors, being able to do almost anything, you can do it with music, right? And then, also staying focused enough to pursue your revolution, to pursue the culture, to move in the direction that you want?
Alex Heublein:
Well, I think you hit the nail on the head there, right? I mean, there are a lot of companies that go out, and they say, “We want to do digital transformation. We want to have this revolution in technology that’s going to change the way our company works, and it’s going to make us more efficient, and it’s going to help us do X, Y, and Z.” But a lot of them get distracted along the way. And you really hit it there. They start off with great intentions, and then they find out that, “Hey, man, this is really hard. It’s hard to change a culture.” It takes years potentially to change a culture, particularly in a big company.
And I think part of it comes down to making sure that as a company, you’ve got the right set of guiding principles for your people. And there are companies that do this really, really well, like Amazon, for instance. Amazon has the Amazon way. And it’s the principles upon which the company believes that they’ll achieve success, and they’ll drive it forward. And guiding principles are kind of interesting. And at Adaptigent, we have our own set of guiding principles. And the very first one is something called innovate like our lives depend on it. That’s one of our guiding principles that if you’re sitting there saying, “Well, should we do the status quo? Or should we go try something new? Yeah, you probably want to default to trying something new rather than just the status quo.”
But they’re guiding principles because they tell you what to do, or they inform your decision when it’s not an easy decision to make, right? You don’t know which direction to go. You don’t know to go left or to go right. And by the way, that’s a lot of business decisions. That’s the majority of them, right, where you don’t have all the data, and you don’t know what’s going to happen. And you’re combining whatever data points you can get with some gut instinct and some research. And it’s kind of this mishmash of things, where at the end of the day though, you have to make a decision about which direction you’re going to go. I think guiding principles help companies make decisions when the decision isn’t obvious. And if you get those guiding principles right, and you can actually get people to buy into them and believe them and use them, that’s one tool that is very effective for helping to change a culture and to drive more innovation, to drive you more towards a revolution.
But there are so many companies out there that have said, and again, I’ll go back to digital transformation, “We’re going to go off on this great digital transformation exercise, and it’s going to be wonderful. And we’ve got all this great new technology from guys like Adaptigent that’s going to really help us out and accelerate the whole process.” And then they forget about the people aspect. They forget about the cultural change aspect. Then again, people don’t like change or at least most people don’t, right? I mean, I love change. I love it. That’s why I got into the IT world and the computer world. When I was 10 years old, I got a hold of my first computer. And I thought, “Man, this is amazing. You can make one of these things do literally anything you tell it to.”
And so for me, every generation of technology, it’s like being a kid in a candy store, right? It’s like waking, but being a five year old and waking up on Christmas morning. I get to see all these really cool new technologies come out, and my house is just littered with technology. My wife yells at me every time I buy something new. She’s like, “Don’t we already have five laptops? I’m like, “Yeah, but this one’s new.” Right?
Josh Klapow:
Yeah.
Alex Heublein:
So being able to have the right guiding principles, to be able to make a very, very clear focus on, “We’re going to change the culture and we’re going to create a revolution here,” I think one of the key success factors is making sure the people are bought in, and that you create a culture that isn’t based on fear of change. It’s based upon recognizing that where there’s change, there’s opportunity and where there’s opportunity, there’s money. And I think that’s true of bands too.
Josh Klapow:
Yeah. But oh, I was just thinking about you and all your computer toys and it’s one thing. I mean, I don’t disagree. I don’t disagree, but as you were talking, I was thinking I saw a lot about the show. If you can see what’s going on in my head, I’m going technology. I’m going family, and I’m going rock bands all at the same time. But you think about it. It’s the band that says, one of the band members like, “Look, man, I got to feed my family.” We can’t afford to, I can’t make a change right now because I got to put food on the table. And what if, what it flops? Or CEO or even board of directors, “We don’t want to take that risk right now because we’ve got our shareholder, and what if we go down that direction?”
And so, it’s interesting that you say there are people absolutely who embrace change, but if you’re a band, if you’re a company, if you’re part of a family, you may not be in a place to embrace change with the collective.
Alex Heublein:
Yeah.
Josh Klapow:
I mean, I just keep wondering how software allows us to transition through the change. This is a little long winded, but one of the things that I see a lot is people love the idea of change, “Oh, this is going to be great.” And they’re okay when they make the leap, and they’re on the other side, but it’s the middle part, right? It’s the leaving where you are to arriving at where you think you’re going to be, that people very often, they chicken out, they say it’s not a good idea. And a lot of times it’s because people don’t want to risk a bad outcome. So how do we do that in business? I mean, can we have calculated change? How does software help us do it? Not so much incrementally, but in a way that maybe has got some safety nets involved.
Alex Heublein:
Well, I think that’s it. I think you hit the nail in the head there. I mean, change is always going to be risky, right? Again, whether you’re starting a band or you’re changing your sound, or it’s a company changing direction and pivoting to a new thing. I mean, there’s always going to be risk. There’s never a risk-free revolution, right?
Josh Klapow:
Well, that’s true.
Alex Heublein:
Or at least not that I’m aware of, right? There’s always risk. And if you’re talking about political revolution, I mean, even taking the United States, right? The founding fathers of the United States, right? Most of those guys got killed-
Josh Klapow:
Yup.
Alex Heublein:
… in the revolution, right. In the revolutionary war. I mean, a lot of the people that-
Josh Klapow:
Yes.
Alex Heublein:
Or they lived some pretty terrible lives. So they did take risks. They took amazing risks that I don’t know if everybody’s aware of that. So yeah. Look, I think there’s always going to be risk. And then, the question to your point is how do we go out and mitigate some of that risk? And I think there’s ways of doing it. I think one way you can do it is through technology. You can use technology to mitigate some of the risks by giving you the ability to go off and try things very quickly and relatively inexpensively. You go out and you do some experimentation to kind of validate your hypothesis. If your hypothesis is, look, the market is going in this direction, and the next big thing is going to be the metaverse or whatever they’re calling it these days, we’re going to go out, and we’re going to do some controlled experiments, and we’re going to go spend as little money as we can to go validate the hypothesis we have that this is the next big, or maybe something else is the next big thing.
So I think if you choose your technology carefully and you have the mentality that it’s okay to fail. I mean, everybody says this, but few companies actually do it, but if you’re going to fail, fail quickly, don’t go pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into something and then fail at it, right? And then, having the processes, formal process to say, are we achieving the goals that we set out for? Are we on the right path and have some go, no-go decisions in that process to where you’re very candidly and objectively evaluating your progress? And then, you know when to pull the plug. Then you can say, “Okay, we’ve got built in checkpoints here to say, we’re either going to keep going with this because things are working about the way we thought they were going to, or they’re not working the way we thought, we’re going to go pull the plug.” Now if I can use software, and I can use technology to accelerate the process, so that I’m not spending a huge amount of money in each of those iterations, then all the better, right? I’m not betting the entire company on it, I’m just betting some relatively small dollars on trying to validate my hypothesis that this is going to be the next big thing, and we can be a player in that market or that space, or whatever happens to be.
Josh Klapow:
Super interesting. I don’t know if this is a stretch on an analogy, but if I’m a band, and I want to take it in a new direction, I throw a song out maybe, right?
Alex Heublein:
Yeah.
Josh Klapow:
You got your new album. And a lot of the stuff sounds really good and kind of the same, but there’s a couple little twists. Maybe I throw in a ballad or something a little more up tempo or something that’s got a little more synthesized, maybe a little more raw, more guitar, whatever. A cover. And you test it out to see how does the audience react to it versus an entire album that may fall flat on its face. And I guess in some ways, technology allows us in companies to do the same thing, try a new product line that’s maybe not like you said, it’s not the entire company shift, but it’s a spinoff, it’s a new song, and we see how it goes. I mean, is that-
Alex Heublein:
Yeah.
Josh Klapow:
I don’t know, is that too much of a stretch?
Alex Heublein:
No, no. I mean, that’s exactly it, right? It’s about sort of this idea of rapid prototyping of something. I read a lot of interviews with band members of bands that I like. And they kind of talk about the history of the band and what happened and yeah, they released this album or whatever. But the thing that strikes me with a lot of bands and a lot of the interviews I’ve read is that what’s obvious to us in retrospect that, “Hey, this song was a big hit.” A lot of times, those guys had no idea-
Josh Klapow:
Yes.
Alex Heublein:
… that a particular hit song, a classic that we see today-
Josh Klapow:
Yes.
Alex Heublein:
… was actually going to do well in the marketplace, right? So I read an interview with Alex Lifeson and Geddy Lee from Rush, one of the other of them, And they were talking about when Tom Sawyer and the whole Moving Pictures album came out, right? They had no idea that Tom Sawyer was going to be a big hit, right? I mean, they thought, “Yeah, it’s a good song. It’s great.” But it actually turned out to be one of their biggest hits, but they really didn’t have that. And so, I think a lot of bands, even when they’re sticking to their own sound, they don’t really know ahead of time whether or not those things are going to be hits, so they try some things, they try some different things to go out there in the marketplace. They see what the marketplace reaction is, and then, they can adjust like that.
So I think it’s the same exact thing with companies. The past is always obvious, right? Everybody has 20/20 hindsight. But when you’re looking forward, and you’re looking into spaces where you don’t really know what’s going to happen, this idea being able to go rapidly, prototype something, get it out into the market, see how it goes, and then, look at the objective data coming back to saying, “Is this working or not?” I think you can do that in a band. I think you can do that in a company. I think you can do that in a government or even a nonprofit setting. So yeah, so I think that you’re spot on there. I think that’s exactly how you do it.
Josh Klapow:
You know who else who can do it with a show like Adapt or Perish?
Alex Heublein:
Yeah, exactly.
Josh Klapow:
I think we are starting a revolution right here. And if you want to listen to us and be a part of this revolution, then you need to tune in to Tony Kurre radio because you have another episode of Adapt or Perish will be coming up next. You’re going to listen to us every week. We’re Dr. Alex Heublein, I’m Dr. Josh Klapow, and this is Adapt or Perish.
This has been a special presentation of Tony Kurre Radio.