Mike Maddock, author and CEO of Maddock Douglas, is featured on the podcast today. Adam and Mike are celebrating Entrepreneurship Week and talking about core values, innovation, and Mike’s new book.
Transcripts:
| Adam Robinson: | Welcome to The Best Team Wins Podcast, where we feature business leaders whose exceptional approach to talent management has led to outsized results. My name is Adam Robinson, and for the next 25 minutes I’ll be your host as we explore how to build your business through better hiring. Today on the show we have Mike Maddock, innovation expert, dare I say mastermind of Maddock Douglas, and author of several books, including Free the Idea Monkey. Mike, welcome to the program.
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| Mike Maddock: | Hey, Adam. Good to be with you.
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| Adam Robinson: | Mike is the founding partner of Maddock Douglas, an innovation consulting company that has worked with storied brands like Philips, AT&T, General Mills, many, many others. He’s also a contributor at Forbes Magazine. If you haven’t gathered by now, this is one wicked smart entrepreneur. Today, Mike, we are talking about the people side of your business. First, let’s start off on the right foot. As is the tradition here, we always start off on the right foot, which is the best business or personal news that’s happened to you in the past seven days. Mike, what’s your right foot for last week?
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| Mike Maddock: | Did the Cubs win the World Series within the last seven days? It’s got to be close.
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| Adam Robinson: | I heard that might’ve happened.
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| Mike Maddock: | I got a chance to go to a game with my family, which was extraordinary… for a father and for a Cubs fan.
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| Adam Robinson: | Yeah. I know you’re a long-suffering Cubs fan. Let’s hope it’s not the only time, but it might be the only time we see one of those.
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| Mike Maddock: | I think we’re in for a pretty good run. Fingers crossed.
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| Adam Robinson: | Let’s hope so. Mike, innovation consulting, what is that? Help our listeners understand what it is that you do at Maddock Douglas.
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| Mike Maddock: | Innovation’s a big word. I would define it this way. If you think of a Venn diagram of just three circles overlapping, t hat’s the definition. It’s the synchronized intersection of circle number one, which is insight, a need in the market, something that the future wants from your company that you have permission and the ability to deliver. The second circle is an idea. It’s the solution. It’s how you respond to that need in the market, whether it’s a new product or a new service or a new business model. It doesn’t matter, as long as it matches that need in a way that people will be delighted by and pay you money for. Then the last circle is the experience, which is the way that you deliver it.
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| What an innovation consulting firm does, or what we do, is we help companies identify big needs in the future that the world needs solved and that they can solve. Then we help them generate new products or service or business model ideas. We test them and help them launch those ideas in the market.
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| Adam Robinson: | That’s helpful as an explanation. What that sounds like is that people are your product at Maddock Douglas. Is that a true statement?
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| Mike Maddock: | Yeah. A consulting firm is only as good as the people behind it. Because of really good people we’ve developed some wonderful processes and some unique ways of looking at the world, but for sure our engine is the people behind Maddock Douglas.
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| Adam Robinson: | It sounds like a pretty specialized skillset. For listeners tuning in that may have a business that requires particularly specialized training or skills, talk about how you find your best people. Would you say that you are hiring for potential and training based on your process? Are you looking for specific expertise and trying to pull people away who’ve already got the skillset you’re looking for?
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| Mike Maddock: | It’s a good question. Occasionally we go looking for a specific skillset, but when you ask the question how we find our best people, the truth is that our best people have found us. They’ve usually been referred to us by someone that knows the company, maybe someone that works in the company, someone that has one of our future or past clients who knows what our DNA … I would say that what makes a great fit has more to do with core values than expertise. We need smart people, but we need people that are aligned with our core values, and the rest falls into place. Said differently, our biggest mistake in the past has been bringing people that were really wicked smart but the values didn’t align with the company.
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| Adam Robinson: | Would you share with us what your core values are at Maddock Douglas and what those mean in practice?
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| Mike Maddock: | Yeah, I’ll give you a couple. One of our core values is starting with “yes,” which is the idea that everything is worth solving, that we enter a situation believing that there is a solution, that no matter how difficult it is, we can figure out a way to get there. Our clients buy hope more than anything else.
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| Adam Robinson: | That’s great.
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| Mike Maddock: | We believe in designing the life you want, which is to say that we have to have people here that lean into adversity but don’t let each other down. We’re entering a world where … Adam, I’m sure you know all about gig economy. A lot of our employees anymore are out-of-state. They’re working at hours that my dad would’ve thought were highly unusual. We lean into adversity here, which is a core value. We take on the hard stuff. We drive ideas forward is a core value. We take the best ideas and we move forward. We’re looking for people that are aligned with those values. As long as we-
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| Speaker 4: | The person who you’re trying to reach is currently unavailable. Please leave a message after the beep.
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| Adam Robinson: | You’ve got a new friend there.
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| Mike Maddock: | Am I the only one hearing that? I hope not.
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| Adam Robinson: | No, that’s going out, Mike.
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| Mike Maddock: | That just happened?
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| Adam Robinson: | That just happened, man. That just happened.
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| Mike Maddock: | Awesome. What’s interesting to me, on the lookback you asked the question: How do you find your best people? That really made me reflect on our best people. And our best people have been referred to us, and it’s always been about values first, expertise second. It sounds like this: “You know what? I know this person, and just feel like they’d do great at Maddock Douglas. Oh, by the way, they’re wicked smart too.” Where we’ve gotten into trouble is when we’ve gone after wicked smart and looked past values.
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| Adam Robinson: | If you were to put your finger on one value, if you’ve made this mistake a couple of times … I’ve certainly made this mistake a number of times. I think most entrepreneurs have made this mistake a bunch of times. What’s the one core value miss at Maddock Douglas that is most often the core value that you had been willing to turn a blind eye to because someone was so wicked smart, as you say?
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| Mike Maddock: | It’s “we start with yes.” To be clear, that was written on the wall. We would fly that value flag. Then eventually we had to say, “Well, that’s clearly no longer a value,” because looking around we had people that didn’t start with yes, and we’d allowed that to happen. We’ve moved back to that, by the way. We are now deeply rooted in the concept of starting with yes. You can imagine how it happens in a consulting firm where you hire very, very clever people. Oftentimes clever people don’t start with yes. They can be intellectual bullies if you don’t watch it. They actually start with no, like, “No, that’s impossible. I’ll tell you why that won’t work.” That’s a death knell for creative thinking.
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| Adam Robinson: | Absolutely. I imagine it’s hard enough to find people. You’ve put the word out that you’re looking for referrals. That in and of itself, you make that sound easy. That’s not easy. It’s not easy to get referrals in, especially the kind of caliber people that you hire. I imagine you do want to keep people once they’re there. How do you do that? You mentioned the gig economy and different ways of working. How do you retain the talent you need when it’s so diverse and the relationship with your company may be different from project to project?
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| Mike Maddock: | Another great question, Adam. The best answer I have to that is to pull them into the creation of our future, which is to say that you don’t want to victimize people by things that they can’t control. The world is changing really quickly. We’re in a business that we spend every day with leaders who are faced with needing to drive change. We’re feeling it too where our industry is changing really quickly. What I’ll do is I’ll bring people together and say, “Wow … ” I think Mike Tyson said everybody has a plan until you get punched in the face. We get punched in the face all the time. Rather than complain about it, I’ll go to our folks and say, “Okay, that hurt. What are we going to do about it? How are we going to move forward? What’s our next best step? What can you do to make our company better, and what can I do to help build your practice or your dreams or whatever?”
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| I want to be involved in … My own values are deeply grounded in making people’s lives better, the people that I come in contact with, so it’s a natural conversation for me. As soon as people believe that they have control of their future, they typically want to hang out and see what they can do with that.
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| Adam Robinson: | Well said. What does that create culture-wise? Say I’m a prospective Maddock Douglas innovation consultant and you need to give me the 60-second pitch on why you and not the other folks. What’s your pitch? Why join your firm?
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| Mike Maddock: | We have a history of planting seeds that have grown into businesses. There are at least seven businesses that have grown out of Maddock Douglas. I certainly believe that our future is planting more seeds, and those seeds are like, “Hey, listen, you’re a leader. You have an idea. This is a garden that can help grow that idea for the good of everyone else here. Then, if it turns into something that can live on its own, there’s plenty of evidence that we’ll get behind that, support you in partnership, and you can have your own business.” That’s what happening. Thankfully it’s worked enough in the past that it’s believable. I think that our best people are actually entrepreneurial. They have to be because they’re thinking about the world in a different way. We attract entrepreneurs or people with the entrepreneurial mindsets and we have to feed them in a way that there’s possibility here for them and possibility outside these walls for them.
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| Honestly, I’ve stumbled upon that over time. I’ve just seen how our best people respond. It’s not like they want to go work for someone else. They want to be involved in something bigger. That’s particularly true with younger people. There’s all this talk about Gen Y or millennials, whatever. They have a lot of skills that the older folks don’t have. Why not feed those skills and give them the tools and the support and the platform to grow something on their own?
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| Adam Robinson: | Let’s riff on that a bit, Mike. What is one thing you see generational difference between a consultant that might’ve worked with you from let’s call it our generation, Gen X, and the millennial/Gen Y folks coming in that want to do that same thing, do that business? What is the difference? What do you see?
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| Mike Maddock: | There’s a bunch. I’ll tell you a story. We used to have every other Friday off here for half the company. I’m a military brat so I have this really strange relationship with time. It’s dysfunctional. I used to show my dad I loved him by being the first person in the car Sunday morning to go to church while he was clenching his teeth because my mom was still putting on her makeup or something. That’s how I was brought up, so now time really matters. Naturally, we started a program where you get to work at 7:30 in the morning, you leave at 5:30. You’ve banked an extra hour a day, so every other Friday, guess what? You have a three-day weekend, which is awesome for people that are nine-to-fivers.
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| Then over time what I noticed was that people were getting in late. They weren’t getting in at 7:30. They were getting in at 8:30 or 9:30. I thought that was a violation of the rules, and so we cancelled the program. That was my bad, because what I failed to notice is that millennials don’t think about life in nine-to-five terms, many of them. They’ll work 24 hours a day. They’ll get up and work at 11:00 at night or 2:00 in the morning. They work differently and they connect differently and use different tools. I was blind to that because I was being pretty black and white about, “No, we have 7:30 to 5:30. You broke the rules, so we can’t do it anymore.” In the gig economy, which I mentioned earlier, you have to be open to people working at different times and in different ways and follow that.
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| Adam Robinson: | As you think about teams, part of what you do is get to work with all of these diverse teams from these companies, large and small, Fortune 100, Fortune 50 companies. I like to hear what other teams look like. That’s part of it. First question would be, after working with hundreds of brands, literally hundreds of brands, what observations have you made about other organizations’ teams? When it goes well, what’s happening? When it’s not going well, what do you observe?
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| Mike Maddock: | I’ll give you an observation about the world of innovation. I don’t know that I’m an expert on teams, but I think I’m getting close to being an expert on types of teams and how they innovate. Here’s the thing: Companies are built to do a certain thing well. That’s their competency. You build teams that know how to do what you did yesterday a little bit better today, to outdo your competition a little bit more readily than you did yesterday. When it comes to innovation, the best that we can do in that kind of a team is to listen, to be more responsive, to be quicker to a solution. That’s innovation. It’s noble and it’s possible and it creates better margins, et cetera.
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| The challenge is that when many … The future’s coming faster and faster and faster, so what many leaders do is say, “Now we have to be disruptive. Now we have to disrupt ourselves.” They don’t realize that’s not the team they built. What happens is you’re asking people to be incompetent. You’re asking people, a team that is trained to kill anything that puts the model today at risk, to stop doing that, and they won’t. What I see happening is leaders who say, “Okay, now we have to be innovative,” which creates fear. It creates frustration from them. Oh, by the way, the small subset of people in your organization that actually know how to do that try, they get beaten down by the other people in the organization who were hired to tamp out risk, and they leave your company. That’s a pattern that’s happening every day across the country. That’s sad and that’s what’s going on right now with many large corporations.
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| I heard a data point last night, Adam, that 75% of the companies in the Fortune 500 list in 2020 will be companies you haven’t heard of yet.
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| Adam Robinson: | Wow.
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| Mike Maddock: | That’s from a Yale study. That’s the world we’re living in.
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| Adam Robinson: | What you’re saying is that companies, once established, almost innovation is antithetical to survival. Is that a fair statement?
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| Mike Maddock: | That’s right, because competency means tamping out risk, not taking it. Guess what, boss? You did that. Congratulations. You created a team that’s competent. Don’t be so upset when your team takes all the big ideas and kicks them down the hall or puts them in a closet or just says they’re scary and they’ll never work.
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| Adam Robinson: | Mike, how do you make that a safe place? Do you walk into brands and say, “Hey, guys, it’s okay that you suck at innovation. I’m going to help you be better”? Is that the pitch?
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| Mike Maddock: | No. It’s defining the different types of innovation. There’s different language for it. We use evolutionary, which means that we know how to do it and we know people want it. Differentiation: We don’t know how to do it but we know people want it. Revolutionary: We don’t know how to do it and we don’t know if anybody wants it. That’s incompetency. Then there’s Fast Fail: which is we have an idea but we’re not sure if anybody wants it. Once you define it that way, what you do is you get much better at doing incremental or evolutionary innovation because your team can do that, and the better they do it, that means they’re listening to the customer, they’re listening to the consumer. That is innovation, and there are margins there. Then you get real clear about, in my humble opinion, that we cannot do revolutionary innovation here, so you build a strategy to outsource that. There are a number of different ways to do that.
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| I want to be clear, Adam. I’m not talking about Google here. I’m not talking about technology companies that’s DNA is built around experimentation and changing really quickly. Those companies are capable of creating constructive innovation. I’m talking about companies that have been doing the same thing for 25, 35, 50 years in conservative industries. I’m talking about 90% of the world. I’m an optimist. This is hard for me to say because it sounds cynical. I’m not being cynical. I’m just being realistic. After doing this for a couple decades, I’ve seen this movie before and I see how it ends now.
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| Adam Robinson: | Sure. How do you prevent that from happening with your own company? Every company’s different. We like on this show to share leadership structure and to share with others how you may be running your own business. What does the leadership team look like at Maddock Douglas and how have you organized it to continue to innovation yourself?
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| Mike Maddock: | It’s fair, good question. The way that we’ve innovated ourselves is gotten behind people in the organization, I mentioned this earlier, that have an idea. We give them the opportunity to experiment with it and we finance it. We also created a venture group thee-and-a-half years ago to start investing in early-stage entrepreneurs that had solved large issues of companies, and we do the same thing. We invest in those companies, we coach them up, and then we match them. We’re investing in other companies. This is one of the strategies. Then internally we use the EOS model. I firmly believe in a balanced team where you have visionary and integrator, or in my language idea monkey/ring leader. We used Kolbe, which is a test to make sure that we’re not all cut from the same cloth so that we have rigorous debates. Then as much as we possibly can we infuse outside perspectives so that we’re not drinking our own Kool-Aid all the time.
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| Adam, the reality is that it is super, super hard for a company, particularly when they’re successful with a certain model, to move away from that model. In all candor, for us we’ve had to get punched in the face by the market consistently before we’d realize, “Oh, my God, we’ve got to move, we’ve got to change.” Usually the market has a way of telling you whether you’re being innovative or not.
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| Adam Robinson: | Absolutely. Thank you for that, Mike. I want to shift gears a little bit. I know you’re working on a new book project. Would you share what that is and how listeners can look out for it?
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| Mike Maddock: | Thanks. Thank you. I’m working on book number four. The book is about destructive leaders. I am keenly interested in people that their super hero power is disruption, or I should say they have a track record of disrupting themselves, industries, teams, for the good of the whole, in a really positive way, and they’ve done it consistently through their career. I’m looking to talk to people like Elon Musk or John Chambers or people that just again and again have created positive disruptions. The book will outline a dozen or so of how they do that well, and then it’ll create a practice for people so that they can be disruptors too. Because guess what? The next-gen leader has to be a disrupter, because that’s the world we live in right now.
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| Adam Robinson: | If folks wanted to view that or any other of your previously authored books, where’s the best place for them to do that?
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| Mike Maddock: | Amazon. Mike Maddock. Just Google “Mike Maddock” and you’ll see a few books. Thanks, Adam.
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| Adam Robinson: | Sure. Maddock with two Ds, everyone. To the closing question we ask every week. Mike, if you were to come back on this show one year from today and report on whether or not you accomplished the most important thing on your plate right now in the next year, what is that one most important thing?
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| Mike Maddock: | That’s a good question. You’ve have a lot of coffee today, haven’t you Adam?
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| Adam Robinson: | Yeah. I’m a couple hours ahead here on the West Coast today, so …
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| Mike Maddock: | I should’ve had more coffee. My purpose is to inspire and empower curiosity, and in a year when we talk I would hope or I plan to make sure that every one of the businesses that I’m involved in are doing just that, that they’re on purpose, that they are fulfilling the purpose of inspiring and empowering curiosity with all the people that are involved in it.
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| Adam Robinson: | That’s Mike Maddock, founding partner of Maddock Douglas, an innovation consulting company, contributor Forbes Magazine, prolific author, and all around awesome human being. Mike, thank you for being on the podcast today.
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| Mike Maddock: | Adam, I’m grateful that you’re my friend. Good luck.
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| Adam Robinson: | Yeah, likewise. Thank you, sir. That is the show for today. Thanks for listening to The Best Team Wins Podcast, where we feature business leaders whose exceptional approach to talent management has led to outsized results. My name’s Adam Robinson. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next week.
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| Adam Robinson: | Welcome to The Best Team Wins Podcast, where we feature business leaders whose exceptional approach to talent management has led to outsized results. My name is Adam Robinson, and for the next 25 minutes I’ll be your host as we explore how to build your business through better hiring. Today on the show we have Mike Maddock, innovation expert, dare I say mastermind of Maddock Douglas, and author of several books, including Free the Idea Monkey. Mike, welcome to the program.
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| Mike Maddock: | Hey, Adam. Good to be with you.
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| Adam Robinson: | Mike is the founding partner of Maddock Douglas, an innovation consulting company that has worked with storied brands like Philips, AT&T, General Mills, many, many others. He’s also a contributor at Forbes Magazine. If you haven’t gathered by now, this is one wicked smart entrepreneur. Today, Mike, we are talking about the people side of your business. First, let’s start off on the right foot. As is the tradition here, we always start off on the right foot, which is the best business or personal news that’s happened to you in the past seven days. Mike, what’s your right foot for last week?
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| Mike Maddock: | Did the Cubs win the World Series within the last seven days? It’s got to be close.
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| Adam Robinson: | I heard that might’ve happened.
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| Mike Maddock: | I got a chance to go to a game with my family, which was extraordinary… for a father and for a Cubs fan.
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| Adam Robinson: | Yeah. I know you’re a long-suffering Cubs fan. Let’s hope it’s not the only time, but it might be the only time we see one of those.
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| Mike Maddock: | I think we’re in for a pretty good run. Fingers crossed.
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| Adam Robinson: | Let’s hope so. Mike, innovation consulting, what is that? Help our listeners understand what it is that you do at Maddock Douglas.
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| Mike Maddock: | Innovation’s a big word. I would define it this way. If you think of a Venn diagram of just three circles overlapping, t hat’s the definition. It’s the synchronized intersection of circle number one, which is insight, a need in the market, something that the future wants from your company that you have permission and the ability to deliver. The second circle is an idea. It’s the solution. It’s how you respond to that need in the market, whether it’s a new product or a new service or a new business model. It doesn’t matter, as long as it matches that need in a way that people will be delighted by and pay you money for. Then the last circle is the experience, which is the way that you deliver it.
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| What an innovation consulting firm does, or what we do, is we help companies identify big needs in the future that the world needs solved and that they can solve. Then we help them generate new products or service or business model ideas. We test them and help them launch those ideas in the market.
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| Adam Robinson: | That’s helpful as an explanation. What that sounds like is that people are your product at Maddock Douglas. Is that a true statement?
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| Mike Maddock: | Yeah. A consulting firm is only as good as the people behind it. Because of really good people we’ve developed some wonderful processes and some unique ways of looking at the world, but for sure our engine is the people behind Maddock Douglas.
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| Adam Robinson: | It sounds like a pretty specialized skillset. For listeners tuning in that may have a business that requires particularly specialized training or skills, talk about how you find your best people. Would you say that you are hiring for potential and training based on your process? Are you looking for specific expertise and trying to pull people away who’ve already got the skillset you’re looking for?
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| Mike Maddock: | It’s a good question. Occasionally we go looking for a specific skillset, but when you ask the question how we find our best people, the truth is that our best people have found us. They’ve usually been referred to us by someone that knows the company, maybe someone that works in the company, someone that has one of our future or past clients who knows what our DNA … I would say that what makes a great fit has more to do with core values than expertise. We need smart people, but we need people that are aligned with our core values, and the rest falls into place. Said differently, our biggest mistake in the past has been bringing people that were really wicked smart but the values didn’t align with the company.
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| Adam Robinson: | Would you share with us what your core values are at Maddock Douglas and what those mean in practice?
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| Mike Maddock: | Yeah, I’ll give you a couple. One of our core values is starting with “yes,” which is the idea that everything is worth solving, that we enter a situation believing that there is a solution, that no matter how difficult it is, we can figure out a way to get there. Our clients buy hope more than anything else.
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| Adam Robinson: | That’s great.
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| Mike Maddock: | We believe in designing the life you want, which is to say that we have to have people here that lean into adversity but don’t let each other down. We’re entering a world where … Adam, I’m sure you know all about gig economy. A lot of our employees anymore are out-of-state. They’re working at hours that my dad would’ve thought were highly unusual. We lean into adversity here, which is a core value. We take on the hard stuff. We drive ideas forward is a core value. We take the best ideas and we move forward. We’re looking for people that are aligned with those values. As long as we-
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| Speaker 4: | The person who you’re trying to reach is currently unavailable. Please leave a message after the beep.
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| Adam Robinson: | You’ve got a new friend there.
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| Mike Maddock: | Am I the only one hearing that? I hope not.
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| Adam Robinson: | No, that’s going out, Mike.
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| Mike Maddock: | That just happened?
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| Adam Robinson: | That just happened, man. That just happened.
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| Mike Maddock: | Awesome. What’s interesting to me, on the lookback you asked the question: How do you find your best people? That really made me reflect on our best people. And our best people have been referred to us, and it’s always been about values first, expertise second. It sounds like this: “You know what? I know this person, and just feel like they’d do great at Maddock Douglas. Oh, by the way, they’re wicked smart too.” Where we’ve gotten into trouble is when we’ve gone after wicked smart and looked past values.
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| Adam Robinson: | If you were to put your finger on one value, if you’ve made this mistake a couple of times … I’ve certainly made this mistake a number of times. I think most entrepreneurs have made this mistake a bunch of times. What’s the one core value miss at Maddock Douglas that is most often the core value that you had been willing to turn a blind eye to because someone was so wicked smart, as you say?
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| Mike Maddock: | It’s “we start with yes.” To be clear, that was written on the wall. We would fly that value flag. Then eventually we had to say, “Well, that’s clearly no longer a value,” because looking around we had people that didn’t start with yes, and we’d allowed that to happen. We’ve moved back to that, by the way. We are now deeply rooted in the concept of starting with yes. You can imagine how it happens in a consulting firm where you hire very, very clever people. Oftentimes clever people don’t start with yes. They can be intellectual bullies if you don’t watch it. They actually start with no, like, “No, that’s impossible. I’ll tell you why that won’t work.” That’s a death knell for creative thinking.
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| Adam Robinson: | Absolutely. I imagine it’s hard enough to find people. You’ve put the word out that you’re looking for referrals. That in and of itself, you make that sound easy. That’s not easy. It’s not easy to get referrals in, especially the kind of caliber people that you hire. I imagine you do want to keep people once they’re there. How do you do that? You mentioned the gig economy and different ways of working. How do you retain the talent you need when it’s so diverse and the relationship with your company may be different from project to project?
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| Mike Maddock: | Another great question, Adam. The best answer I have to that is to pull them into the creation of our future, which is to say that you don’t want to victimize people by things that they can’t control. The world is changing really quickly. We’re in a business that we spend every day with leaders who are faced with needing to drive change. We’re feeling it too where our industry is changing really quickly. What I’ll do is I’ll bring people together and say, “Wow … ” I think Mike Tyson said everybody has a plan until you get punched in the face. We get punched in the face all the time. Rather than complain about it, I’ll go to our folks and say, “Okay, that hurt. What are we going to do about it? How are we going to move forward? What’s our next best step? What can you do to make our company better, and what can I do to help build your practice or your dreams or whatever?”
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| I want to be involved in … My own values are deeply grounded in making people’s lives better, the people that I come in contact with, so it’s a natural conversation for me. As soon as people believe that they have control of their future, they typically want to hang out and see what they can do with that.
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| Adam Robinson: | Well said. What does that create culture-wise? Say I’m a prospective Maddock Douglas innovation consultant and you need to give me the 60-second pitch on why you and not the other folks. What’s your pitch? Why join your firm?
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| Mike Maddock: | We have a history of planting seeds that have grown into businesses. There are at least seven businesses that have grown out of Maddock Douglas. I certainly believe that our future is planting more seeds, and those seeds are like, “Hey, listen, you’re a leader. You have an idea. This is a garden that can help grow that idea for the good of everyone else here. Then, if it turns into something that can live on its own, there’s plenty of evidence that we’ll get behind that, support you in partnership, and you can have your own business.” That’s what happening. Thankfully it’s worked enough in the past that it’s believable. I think that our best people are actually entrepreneurial. They have to be because they’re thinking about the world in a different way. We attract entrepreneurs or people with the entrepreneurial mindsets and we have to feed them in a way that there’s possibility here for them and possibility outside these walls for them.
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| Honestly, I’ve stumbled upon that over time. I’ve just seen how our best people respond. It’s not like they want to go work for someone else. They want to be involved in something bigger. That’s particularly true with younger people. There’s all this talk about Gen Y or millennials, whatever. They have a lot of skills that the older folks don’t have. Why not feed those skills and give them the tools and the support and the platform to grow something on their own?
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| Adam Robinson: | Let’s riff on that a bit, Mike. What is one thing you see generational difference between a consultant that might’ve worked with you from let’s call it our generation, Gen X, and the millennial/Gen Y folks coming in that want to do that same thing, do that business? What is the difference? What do you see?
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| Mike Maddock: | There’s a bunch. I’ll tell you a story. We used to have every other Friday off here for half the company. I’m a military brat so I have this really strange relationship with time. It’s dysfunctional. I used to show my dad I loved him by being the first person in the car Sunday morning to go to church while he was clenching his teeth because my mom was still putting on her makeup or something. That’s how I was brought up, so now time really matters. Naturally, we started a program where you get to work at 7:30 in the morning, you leave at 5:30. You’ve banked an extra hour a day, so every other Friday, guess what? You have a three-day weekend, which is awesome for people that are nine-to-fivers.
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| Then over time what I noticed was that people were getting in late. They weren’t getting in at 7:30. They were getting in at 8:30 or 9:30. I thought that was a violation of the rules, and so we cancelled the program. That was my bad, because what I failed to notice is that millennials don’t think about life in nine-to-five terms, many of them. They’ll work 24 hours a day. They’ll get up and work at 11:00 at night or 2:00 in the morning. They work differently and they connect differently and use different tools. I was blind to that because I was being pretty black and white about, “No, we have 7:30 to 5:30. You broke the rules, so we can’t do it anymore.” In the gig economy, which I mentioned earlier, you have to be open to people working at different times and in different ways and follow that.
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| Adam Robinson: | As you think about teams, part of what you do is get to work with all of these diverse teams from these companies, large and small, Fortune 100, Fortune 50 companies. I like to hear what other teams look like. That’s part of it. First question would be, after working with hundreds of brands, literally hundreds of brands, what observations have you made about other organizations’ teams? When it goes well, what’s happening? When it’s not going well, what do you observe?
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| Mike Maddock: | I’ll give you an observation about the world of innovation. I don’t know that I’m an expert on teams, but I think I’m getting close to being an expert on types of teams and how they innovate. Here’s the thing: Companies are built to do a certain thing well. That’s their competency. You build teams that know how to do what you did yesterday a little bit better today, to outdo your competition a little bit more readily than you did yesterday. When it comes to innovation, the best that we can do in that kind of a team is to listen, to be more responsive, to be quicker to a solution. That’s innovation. It’s noble and it’s possible and it creates better margins, et cetera.
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| The challenge is that when many … The future’s coming faster and faster and faster, so what many leaders do is say, “Now we have to be disruptive. Now we have to disrupt ourselves.” They don’t realize that’s not the team they built. What happens is you’re asking people to be incompetent. You’re asking people, a team that is trained to kill anything that puts the model today at risk, to stop doing that, and they won’t. What I see happening is leaders who say, “Okay, now we have to be innovative,” which creates fear. It creates frustration from them. Oh, by the way, the small subset of people in your organization that actually know how to do that try, they get beaten down by the other people in the organization who were hired to tamp out risk, and they leave your company. That’s a pattern that’s happening every day across the country. That’s sad and that’s what’s going on right now with many large corporations.
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| I heard a data point last night, Adam, that 75% of the companies in the Fortune 500 list in 2020 will be companies you haven’t heard of yet.
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| Adam Robinson: | Wow.
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| Mike Maddock: | That’s from a Yale study. That’s the world we’re living in.
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| Adam Robinson: | What you’re saying is that companies, once established, almost innovation is antithetical to survival. Is that a fair statement?
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| Mike Maddock: | That’s right, because competency means tamping out risk, not taking it. Guess what, boss? You did that. Congratulations. You created a team that’s competent. Don’t be so upset when your team takes all the big ideas and kicks them down the hall or puts them in a closet or just says they’re scary and they’ll never work.
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| Adam Robinson: | Mike, how do you make that a safe place? Do you walk into brands and say, “Hey, guys, it’s okay that you suck at innovation. I’m going to help you be better”? Is that the pitch?
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| Mike Maddock: | No. It’s defining the different types of innovation. There’s different language for it. We use evolutionary, which means that we know how to do it and we know people want it. Differentiation: We don’t know how to do it but we know people want it. Revolutionary: We don’t know how to do it and we don’t know if anybody wants it. That’s incompetency. Then there’s Fast Fail: which is we have an idea but we’re not sure if anybody wants it. Once you define it that way, what you do is you get much better at doing incremental or evolutionary innovation because your team can do that, and the better they do it, that means they’re listening to the customer, they’re listening to the consumer. That is innovation, and there are margins there. Then you get real clear about, in my humble opinion, that we cannot do revolutionary innovation here, so you build a strategy to outsource that. There are a number of different ways to do that.
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| I want to be clear, Adam. I’m not talking about Google here. I’m not talking about technology companies that’s DNA is built around experimentation and changing really quickly. Those companies are capable of creating constructive innovation. I’m talking about companies that have been doing the same thing for 25, 35, 50 years in conservative industries. I’m talking about 90% of the world. I’m an optimist. This is hard for me to say because it sounds cynical. I’m not being cynical. I’m just being realistic. After doing this for a couple decades, I’ve seen this movie before and I see how it ends now.
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| Adam Robinson: | Sure. How do you prevent that from happening with your own company? Every company’s different. We like on this show to share leadership structure and to share with others how you may be running your own business. What does the leadership team look like at Maddock Douglas and how have you organized it to continue to innovation yourself?
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| Mike Maddock: | It’s fair, good question. The way that we’ve innovated ourselves is gotten behind people in the organization, I mentioned this earlier, that have an idea. We give them the opportunity to experiment with it and we finance it. We also created a venture group thee-and-a-half years ago to start investing in early-stage entrepreneurs that had solved large issues of companies, and we do the same thing. We invest in those companies, we coach them up, and then we match them. We’re investing in other companies. This is one of the strategies. Then internally we use the EOS model. I firmly believe in a balanced team where you have visionary and integrator, or in my language idea monkey/ring leader. We used Kolbe, which is a test to make sure that we’re not all cut from the same cloth so that we have rigorous debates. Then as much as we possibly can we infuse outside perspectives so that we’re not drinking our own Kool-Aid all the time.
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| Adam, the reality is that it is super, super hard for a company, particularly when they’re successful with a certain model, to move away from that model. In all candor, for us we’ve had to get punched in the face by the market consistently before we’d realize, “Oh, my God, we’ve got to move, we’ve got to change.” Usually the market has a way of telling you whether you’re being innovative or not.
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| Adam Robinson: | Absolutely. Thank you for that, Mike. I want to shift gears a little bit. I know you’re working on a new book project. Would you share what that is and how listeners can look out for it?
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| Mike Maddock: | Thanks. Thank you. I’m working on book number four. The book is about destructive leaders. I am keenly interested in people that their super hero power is disruption, or I should say they have a track record of disrupting themselves, industries, teams, for the good of the whole, in a really positive way, and they’ve done it consistently through their career. I’m looking to talk to people like Elon Musk or John Chambers or people that just again and again have created positive disruptions. The book will outline a dozen or so of how they do that well, and then it’ll create a practice for people so that they can be disruptors too. Because guess what? The next-gen leader has to be a disrupter, because that’s the world we live in right now.
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| Adam Robinson: | If folks wanted to view that or any other of your previously authored books, where’s the best place for them to do that?
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| Mike Maddock: | Amazon. Mike Maddock. Just Google “Mike Maddock” and you’ll see a few books. Thanks, Adam.
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| Adam Robinson: | Sure. Maddock with two Ds, everyone. To the closing question we ask every week. Mike, if you were to come back on this show one year from today and report on whether or not you accomplished the most important thing on your plate right now in the next year, what is that one most important thing?
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| Mike Maddock: | That’s a good question. You’ve have a lot of coffee today, haven’t you Adam?
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| Adam Robinson: | Yeah. I’m a couple hours ahead here on the West Coast today, so …
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| Mike Maddock: | I should’ve had more coffee. My purpose is to inspire and empower curiosity, and in a year when we talk I would hope or I plan to make sure that every one of the businesses that I’m involved in are doing just that, that they’re on purpose, that they are fulfilling the purpose of inspiring and empowering curiosity with all the people that are involved in it.
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| Adam Robinson: | That’s Mike Maddock, founding partner of Maddock Douglas, an innovation consulting company, contributor Forbes Magazine, prolific author, and all around awesome human being. Mike, thank you for being on the podcast today.
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| Mike Maddock: | Adam, I’m grateful that you’re my friend. Good luck.
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| Adam Robinson: | Yeah, likewise. Thank you, sir. That is the show for today. Thanks for listening to The Best Team Wins Podcast, where we feature business leaders whose exceptional approach to talent management has led to outsized results. My name’s Adam Robinson. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next week.
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