Ep. 240 - Tamara Ghandour, Author of Innovation is Everybody's Business on Building Your Innovation Muscles

Inside Outside Innovation

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Tamara Ghandour, Author of Innovation is Everybody's Business. Tamara and I talk about innovation, what it means today in today's changing environment, and what individuals and teams can do to build their innovation muscles. Let's get started.

Inside Outside Innovation is a podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.

Interview Transcript with Tamara Ghandour

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Tamara Ghandour. She's the Author of Innovation is Everybody's Business: How to Ignite, Scale, and Sustain Innovation for Competitive Edge.

You also have a podcast called Inside Launch Street, which I had great opportunity to be on last week when we recorded. And we said, Hey, let's get you on our show and let's share the community. So welcome.

Tamara Ghandour: Thank you, Brian, it's good to see you again. It's been so long.

Brian Ardinger: It's nice to have you on our show. You know, obviously our audience is probably overlapped to some degree, but I thought it'd be an important to get you on our show to talk a little bit about what you're seeing out there in the world of innovation.

And one of the reasons I liked your book and some of the stuff that you're doing...it's not just about the people, it's about the mechanics behind it and the blocking and tackling, and you even have an Innovation Quotient Edge Assessment that people can go through to find out how they can be coming an innovator and that.

Tamara Ghandour: We believe very strongly, and I think science has also shown us that everybody has the ability to innovate. I've been in innovation 25, I don't know so many years, I can't even count now, but you know, this because you're in it too. There was a lot of focus on the process and the initiatives and the kind of structure of innovation. But what I kept seeing time and time again, is that those efforts failed.

And when I really kind of dug into it, what I really realized is that they're failing because they weren't focusing on the people side. Like how do we as humans innovate? How do we unlock that in ourselves and our teams? How do we tap the power of diversity of thinking. How do we drive it from the inside to the outside, to the culture and kind of bubbling up from there.

So I think over the years, that's why our business has transformed into what it is. And why its been successful is because we get people at an individual anda team level to recognize their power of innovation and how to apply that in their daily world. And then from there, the initiative and the culture and the process and all that kind of follow, but I'm sure you've heard this too Brian.

It's like, I can't tell you the number of times I got a phone call from a client who says I've invested a lot of money in whatever the latest and greatest innovation philosophy is, and my team's not doing it. What do I do to get them to do it? And there's always this kind of, you know, awkward silence of, well it's not that you need to do something to connect them to the process. It's that you need to do something to connect them to themselves and how they innovate.

Brian Ardinger: Well, and that's a very important point. I think a lot of people think that innovation is that mad scientist or that founder, the only way you can innovate... So the fact that, we talk about this too, where you don't have to be a founder to be innovative. And, you know, first of all, it helps to define what innovation is for your company. And it's not just creating the next Uber or the next Twitter, but it can be just as simple as, Hey, I've seen a problem in our way we process things. How do we go about making it better?

And so that's what I liked about the assessment. Is it allowed everybody to play a role in innovation because I think everybody does have a role to play in creating new value in an organization.

Tamara Ghandour: Actually, I want to highlight something you said, because I think it's so important. You said that innovation doesn't have to be the next, like Uber, Twitter, Airbnb. I think we put a lot of false pressure on ourselves to make innovation this big blue skies, disruptive thing, but, and I'm sure you've seen this in your work. What I find is that, that the challenge with that is it's great. If it happens. But there's incredible opportunity to just rearrange the box you have.

And I think that when we, as the leaders go to our teams and go, we gotta be disruptive, disrupt or die, like all the cliches, right. I could come up, with what ends up happening is people shut down because they're like, well, but I'm staring at my box and my box is my reality. And you want me to go out the box, but I don't even know where to go outside the box. So like, I think there's this funny struggle that happens unintentionally when we're trying to force the next Uber.

And if you really look at Uber, it actually, isn't what it did ended up being disruptive, but it was just some mapping technology and allowing people to use their cars. And I don't mean that to put down Uber. I love Uber, but I think your question though, was around the assessment. Right?

Brian Ardinger: Tell us a little bit about like, what does it show? And one of the things I liked about it is it talked about the diversity of skill sets and that, that have to come to play, to become an innovative team.

Tamara Ghandour: So, I got super obsessed with how we, as people innovate. And I came to this realization very early on in my career that everybody is innovative. Right, I had some experiences that made me go wait a minute, did Jill and accounts payable just come up with an innovative idea? Like she's not the creative one, hold on. What is this?

Coupled with people constantly saying to me when, I do a lot of keynoting, so when I go off stage and saying things like, well, that's great Tamara that Apple does that, but what about the rest of us? Like, and how am I supposed to apply that? Me, Susie? Right.

We started to dig into the neuroscience, the behavioral psychology, like the real, like the research and the science behind our brains and how we innovate and what we came to uncover and all the research, and combining that with our years of experience, was that everybody's innovative. It's universal. That we all do it.

However, how we innovate is unique to each of us and there's actually nine styles or triggers. So, ways that we can innovate and we all have this thing. Think of it as like an equalizer. It's not that we are a void of all but two, but there are two in there that are your absolute power play, like your wellspring of innovation.

And the way I do it, the two that are me. So, I'm a risk-taker experiential, might be different than like Laura who's on my team, who's a collaborative tweaker, and we can ...