Elizabeth Bieniek – Getting “innovation” out of the corner office and back in the streets where it belongs.

Welcome to the Glow Up! Fabulous Conversations with Innovative Minds. Today I'm here with Elizabeth Bieniek, Author, Innovator, and Consultant, Elizabeth, it's so good to see you.

Good to see you again, Nathan.

Amazing. To get us started, could you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your journey in building innovative companies and products?

Absolutely. I am coming out as a veteran from big tech. I spent a couple of decades working for a Fortune 100 company and some time before that in other industries, publishing and education. I am leveraging my experience in all those areas, which the last decade or more has been really focused on purely innovation inside of big tech. I ran a small innovative startup, like a stealth startup inside of a large corporation. Antithesis of entrepreneurship, if you will. And having moved on from that, I am now going out on my own and leveraging all the lessons learned through that process to see if I can help other people who are trying to be movers and shakers inside their corporations, make that journey a little faster and a little easier than I did.

I love that term, intrapreneurial. How would you describe intrapreneurial mindset for those who are just encountering this term?

A really stubborn entrepreneur that's willing to put up with all the red tape of a corporation. How's that?

Oh, I think you nailed it both in description and and emotion as well. Here at the Glow Up, I am. So interested in, in these exact conversations, right? How do you stay on the playing field long enough for your idea to hit? How do you take an idea and really craft it until it fits really well with a customer, whether it's at a giant mega corporation or, in some sort of B2C relationship. Can you talk about any times where you've Changed or changed the focus of the work that you do or that you've responded to opportunities and challenges within your entrepreneurial journey?

Sure. I think that idea of persistence and stick with it ness, if you will, is very key in innovation because there is a long tail there. A lot of times you are very, very far out ahead. You're coming up with an, an idea or a product that this time has not quite come. And that's what you want. You want to be before, but there's challenges that come with that too. So you have to stick with it long enough that it's time does come and you're able to successfully navigate that wave, if you will. I took the opportunity of between leaving one career. And as I'm launching my next career and I wrote a book about the process that I've been leading. This organization at my previous company and all of the lessons learned largely in hindsight, looking back when you're in it, you don't always realize it because you're just going a hundred miles an hour. And looking back at it. My book is called Cake on Tuesday: 25 Lessons to Unlock Corporate Innovation. And it's broken down in five sections. And the first three sections are all about starting because starting is very hard. But the fourth section is exactly this topic. It's called"leading through the barren middle." And everything in that section is all talking about dealing with that slog, space of time where everybody else wants to quit. You yourself want to quit, but you simply won't because you're too stubborn. And how do you get through that? And so I have five lessons that I learned through that process. One of which I'm happy to talk about today, which was be careful who you listen to. And for me, this was huge because there was definitely wisdom in many counselors. I think getting advice from different people, getting opinions from different people, it really helps well round your viewpoint and understand what you're facing, but the realization that if you want to go somewhere that no one has ever gone, you're going to have to go it alone. And there's a lot of opinions that do not count, because they have never been there, and a lot of times they're going to be a bit more of a naysayer. And you really have to scrub those feedback loops that you have, prune those loops, and be mindful of who you're listening to, because if you listen to people telling you what you can and can't do, it's all going to be can't, because nobody's done it yet. So when you're trying to do impossible, careful who you listen to.

ooh. I, I'm a little speechless. I'm somebody who really values the, input and the feedback from my mentors and advisors. And I find, when I'm checking in with them. I refine my understanding of the problem, I can sort of see things from different perspectives, but this, this catch of be careful of who you listen to. I'm sure the book Cake on Tuesday, by the way, fantastic title, I'm sure the book goes into more details about how you make that decision, but how do you learn to, to trust that intuition, that entrepreneur, your own entrepreneurialism in a moment like that?

I think really being Rock solid excited about an idea and understanding that people might look at you a little crazy when you have an out there idea. But there's really nobody in history that's ever done something cool or amazing or earth shaking that wasn't called or considered crazy at some point. So I think it just comes with the territory. If you want to work and live in innovation, you're going to be a little out there. You're going to be a little fringe. And You get used to embracing that and so you hear a lot of that."Oh, that can't be done or oh, we've never done it like that before. Oh, you know, that's not going to work. That's going to you kind of hear it so often. It just becomes white noise. So I think after a while the negative opinions you almost automatically start to filter them out because otherwise they just drag you down. So you start listening a little bit more to the people that are not the ones that are like, oh everything you do is flowers and roses and this is going to be amazing, but more the"hmm. Nobody's done that before because this is really hard. But if you're looking at this, maybe, maybe there is a chance." And then you start having those back and forth opinions of, okay, don't just shy away from it because it's hard. Is there something that could be done in that hard opportunity that pushes everybody else away? Cause they're not as stubborn as you. So maybe you've got the leg up there. Maybe you've gotten an edge and say,"you know what, I'm going to push this through to the end. And I think people have quit. Just shy of success. I think I could actually do this." And so you start giving yourself a little bit of a pep talk and there's times you do have to be your own cheerleader and, and push yourself forward and kind of say like, you know what? Everybody else gave up here, but I think this can work. I think this can work. Keep on pushing, keep on pushing.

This is absolutely a metaphor that I'm going to steal for myself, I'm building awesome future right now and looking at, the direction of what we're doing and this idea of when you feel like you're on the edge where you've you may have reached somewhere where nobody else has been before, that that's actually a very good sign because you've lasted the longest with the idea.

Yeah. I've always, there's a quote, something along those lines of"people can't lead where they've never been." And I, I always liked that concept, that idea of. Be mindful of your mentors. I mean, sometimes we get it caught in our heads of like, we need this one mega mentor that's been in all the areas I ever want to go and they're going to be my guru and Sherpa and guide me through it. And it's usually not the case. You might have a mentor for one area cause they know more than you in that and mentor in another area knows more. But if you're trying to do one area, one facet that nobody's really done before, then you might have to be going that part alone. And so you can still take guidance and wisdom from other people, but listen to your gut. If you've got a good idea, you got to run with it.

I would, yes, and that there's maybe one set of advisors, if you will, that you may want to listen to pretty strongly. And that's your customers, right? So often when we're building a cool technology, we're surrounded by people in cool technologies with Lots of experience in cool technologies but when we're thinking about technologies that might be used for work or that are a viral consumer technology, those are often used by folks who don't really know and aren't as familiar, not as patient with technologies or, Innovation. Sometimes even really skeptical of it. Do you have a story or a way that about how you've learned from customers in your journey on innovation or, or how you're advising folks to include that voice of customer in their innovative journeys in this new book?

You definitely want that feedback. The first thing that comes to mind is an early customer feedback session during Webex Hologram, when we were vetting our original use case and we were using real customers to say, here's what we think, but tell us what your, what your thoughts are. I think the biggest thing for us was being open to ideas that we hadn't considered. We already knew we were pushing the envelope of taking just for background on that. Taking video collaboration into the 3D realm, going holographic. And so we had an idea of where this could go and wow, you could revolutionize this, you could change this. We show a customer like, we think it'd be awesome for this. What do you think? And they tried the experience and like, yeah, that's cool. What about this? And it was a totally different area we hadn't thought about. So I think being open to that, you definitely want that, that customer feedback and validate it for sure. But there's, there's a whole spectrum there. I think you, you can easily get caught up in the getting too limited in the questions that you ask of the, the whole Henry Ford thing."If I ask somebody what they want, they want a faster horse." Like you don't want to be so specific and how about I give you this exact little thing, what kind of feedback you want? You do want to kind of open ended, but you want to be able to open up a new idea that they might not be considering and say, Hey, let me look, just dream with me a little, what about this? But then. Be open to the fact they might turn that around on you. You're like, you thought you were offering something really innovative and they might just piggyback on that and say, well, what about this? You're like, whoa, we just moved into a whole other level here. So it has to be a collaboration with your customers because ultimately if nobody's going to buy or use what you're creating, what's the point? So you need that back and forth, but. Don't, the same way your thinking shouldn't be put in a box, don't put your customer interactions in a box either, because they periodically blow your mind a little.

What a cool place to be when your technology or your idea is at a spot where it inspires your customers to think about something else in what they do. And when we talk about Bye. In design thinking, you often look to solve the right problem first and then solve it the right way as sort of your next step. That that feedback getting that you're getting from customers may point you into,"oh, well, that's that is absolutely part of the problem that I'm looking at. But. I'm actually thinking about this half on the back end that you didn't even see." You have to tell me, where did Cake on Tuesdays come up and how often of a ritual did that become for you?

Well, cake, I mean, who doesn't love cake? So I think we get into this, this high stakes world of tech innovation and we get, Okay, it's going to be this, it's going to be the amazing technological solution. We kind of forget the little things that really become the big things. And so for me, my big surprising secret to success was cake. The book came from this, from actually what we were talking about a minute ago of leading through the barren middle of that sort of slog period that everyone's going to run into a dry spell. You're going to hit a patch where it's just, like wading through molasses on a cold day. And we had a particular one of those where being a company inside of a company, you're waiting for approval and the right hand to talk to the left. And sometimes despite your best efforts, things are just moving slowly. And it was, we were in a particular stretch of that time where we were not the exciting beginning, we were not this satisfying conclusion. You're just plodding along. And I was having a conversation with my ops manager and she had this brilliant idea of what we were talking about, how do we inject some fun and excitement back into this? Despite the fact we're in between major milestones. And she had this idea of"what if I create this wheel of winning?" It was kind of a wheel of fortune style. And our staff meetings were on Tuesday. So at the end of their staff meeting on Tuesday, she'd spin the wheel of winning and whoever's name it landed on. You would just get this brightly colored rainbow cake arriving at your doorstep sometime that week just because. And it was, it was so much fun. I mean, how do you not smile when you're like, you're the winner today? You get a cake. Everybody loves cake. And that inspired my title of, focusing on the little things because the little things are the big things. And how important that is to your overall journey.

As a founder and a leader in innovation, one of the struggles sometimes can be that your level of investment in an idea is not always the same as the people who are helping to build it. And what a lovely way, one, to make staff meetings a beloved milestone in the week, but two to know that almost any week you had the opportunity to win, is gives great project passion to the team. I absolutely love that. And it's it's proactive instead of like the typical reactive pizzas when there's an emergency, right?

Culture, culture is something that is very crafted, very curated, and it, it's fragile. It's very fragile. So if you create an amazing culture, you have an awesome team. You have to proactively work to protect that and make sure that everything that started off on this good path is still moving forward at that same trajectory. Otherwise it falls apart and things don't progressively just get better on their own unless you're putting effort into them.

This totally. Spawned a bit of a side quest for me. Sometimes when a founder has an idea the best thing that they can do is stay in that lane and really focus on being the shepherd for that idea. And sometimes the additional work of bringing on staff, growing a company that extra complexity can really be a distraction from that core mission and that product. How do you, as somebody who's gone through the ups and downs in innovation over time, how do you balance stay, staying in your strengths, focusing on the most important things for you, but then also, being in engaged in culture how do you balance those, those demands of, of leadership?

This is making me think of a conversation I had just earlier today with a founder of a company who is a decade more in And doing very well to the point of, of staffing up significantly at this stage, looking to make a significant hire and torn between two very different candidates. And just kind of asking for advice at the end of a call, like,"what's your take on these two without knowing the whole backstory and all that." And we just got talking through that. We had talking about the importance of culture and we, started talking about the qualities of each of these candidates, both very capable, both could do the job, if you will, but one was more aligned to the culture and ethos of the company. And one was a different approach. And we got talking about that whole bit of. What makes your company what it is? What, what, what is your unique value proposition? Why do people come to you and why have you been successful? And if that is working, why would you change that? If you've created a culture and a drawing power, that's working, you got it. Dive farther into that. You need to find the person that aligns to that culture, helps be an extension of that culture, helps be an extension of you, and that's going to move you forward. If you right pivot right now, that's because somebody looks qualified, looks good, has the right pedigree, has the right whatever. That's the wrong move for moving your ethos forward.

I am loving the message that I am getting today, Elizabeth, of this founders and innovators need to trust themselves, need to really understand, that problem, that vision, and hold on to and nurture it at all costs. It's really the key to success in so many ways. With the work that you're building now, what's one of the core problems that you're looking to solve?

It's a very simple, deceivingly simple problem, I would say, in that it's been around for a long time and the answers to it are not new or novel, but at the foundation, specifically when we're talking innovation, specifically when we're talking corporate tech innovation, we tend to look to technology for the answer. to the point that we overlook or over rotate against the people, away from the people. And to me, this is huge because I've spent many, many years in technology saying it's not about the tech. It's not about the tech, which is kind of funny working on a tech startup inside of the office of the CTO. in a big engineering organization, but it's really not. And I think most innovation projects fail because the leadership is over rotated on the capabilities of the technology and under focused on the capabilities of the team building the technology and the people using the technology. So that is my passion is people. I really am jazzed by relationships and dynamics and understanding the individuality of everyone on your team, what they can bring and how you can put them all together in this masterpiece that is so much more than each of them could be on their own because they're bringing their own special talents to that. But that requires so much effort and focus and getting to know people on a personal basis. What drives them, how they relate to the world, what currency they trade in, what communication styles work best for them. I think true leadership really happens in these quiet moments. You're getting to know your people, addressing their needs. What makes them feel validated? What makes them feel like they're giving their all, makes them want to give their all? Plug that all together. That's what creates great leadership. And again, this is not new. This is not rocket science. But I think when we get Into the more technical, the solution we're trying to build the easier it is for us to overlook or forget that. And so I think this is a really big challenge specifically in innovation and specifically in tech innovation.

I'm trying not to show how many ways my mind just got split into little

I can see, I can see the wheels turning. I can see the wheels turning.

I'm, so enamored with this vision and this core problem. It's It's not the technology, it's the people. I can imagine walking into a room full of, tech executives or executives excited about technology and needing to pivot or wanting to pivot their opinions, to thinking from thinking about the great tools that they could build. And right, like this idea of like, how do you learn about the working and communication styles of your team? How do you enable this team that you have today to become the team that you want in the future? That feels like a steep hill to climb. How, what, what levers do you use to get tech executives excited about people?

Well, it might stem from the fact that I was an English major. I was going to pursue my master's in fine arts and writing before I hard pivoted into business and then sort of fell into tech. So maybe that original, taking that original path and applying it to the work I've been doing for the last several years, that may have helped for one. But when you're, when you're trying to get someone to see your point of view, one of the chapters in my book is nobody cares until you make them. You really have to focus on what their care abouts are and why, and you have to translate your message into something they can receive, they can receive now, they want to receive, and they want to retain. So that, that is very complicated. There's a lot of nuances to that. That's focus on mastery of the English language. Definitely helps some in that area because you're constantly playing translators. You're getting to know new people. So much of innovation is selling. You're, you're selling to either get your idea funded, whether that's entrepreneurially through a VC or intrapreneurially through executive sponsors, you're selling to get that funding. You're selling to get the people and resources for it to build your team. You're selling each milestone. You're selling for the next milestone. You're selling to the people that are coming to your team to build it. And trying to vision cast such that it's not just you excited. And they're like, yeah, yeah, I'm here for a job. You want them excited about it too. They need to be bought into it. And so you have to convey not only the excitement about the end result of where you could go, but it can't be, Hey. Guys, let's work really hard to build this thing and it's going to be great for me. It's got to be what's in it for you. What do you get out of it? How was it great for you? How does this move you forward in your career and your life and the things you're personally passionate about? So you're continuously translating things into the language that people can receive. And when it comes to selling executives, We tend to put executives in this like different box or bubble of like, there's just all hard numbers and facts. I've done a lot of sales pitches with hard numbers and facts. That's does not move people. That does not, that's not how decisions are made. Every person, whether they show it or not, is an emotional social creature. And we make decisions based on emotion, not on logic. And so you have to buy into what is this executive's fear? What is their desire? What is the legacy they're trying to leave? How does this tie into that? And you have to weave your tale in a way that aligns with the narrative they're trying to create. And then you do it again, and then you do it again, and you do it again. And so you're constantly playing translator.

As a professional communicator, I fully endorse this line of thinking. I love it. So your, your goals and your problems are, are kind of big, right? We're talking about changing the way folks relate to technology. How do you know that you've made it or that you've been successful with an idea this audacious?

It comes down to getting feedback from people. We were religious in my team about regularly soliciting feedback from my team. And some things that were formulaic or formalized to an extent, it could be like sending out a survey after a phase was done or a part of a post mortem. And there's a time and place for all of those things. But I also tried to make sure at least twice a year, for every person that was on my team or an indirect part of my team that I was sitting down for coffee, whether that's in person or virtual. And you're not having an agenda. You're having a heart to heart chat. What's working? What's not? Where are you going? Where are we going? How does this align? What can we change? What can we do? And that all comes from relationship. You have to have those conversations, but you have to over time show that you value those conversations and take action based on those conversations. There's a lot of people that would do that as lip service, and then it's like in one ear and out the other, and don't take an action on it. And that's the quickest way to lose credibility with your team. But if you are taking those inputs, and especially if you're soliciting feedback from everyone on your team, you start to see some trends and some patterns emerge and say like,"Hey, guys. Talked to everybody here. Got this feedback here. Heard this from more than one source. I'm hearing it. Resonating with, how about we try this? You can throw a couple options out there." That immediately builds credibility. It builds trust of the fact of,"hey, I brought up this issue before, and not only did you listen to it, but you did something about it. So next time, I might not wait for you to ask me. I might just Reach out to you and say, Hey, I have an idea. What if we did this? Hey, this isn't working. Could we change this? Hey, I heard that this was not working for so and so and they might be too shy to come to you, but what if we change this?" And you start getting better and better improvements on your overall process and it just makes everything smoother. I don't know if that answered your question about how do you know if you're successful, but when I start hearing that feedback from people of, and you start seeing people be more engaged because they are really now dedicated to the cause and the outcome and they care. It becomes internal to them. To me, that's success.

absolutely. really where where I'm trying to get at with that question, right, is what are the tools that you need, to be that sustainable, ethical business that can grow, that can grow the product and the, the employees and company, that, that your, your vision really deserves and where you took us was you have to make sure that your team understands the vision, that they understand your leadership style. You have to make sure that they feel trusted and that when you can get a team that begins to proactively, listen, identify and solve for this feedback, whether it's from coworkers or customers that you get out of that solutioning in boardroom, you get out of that solving for the bosses problem, and, and you really start to make your alignment on what the core problem is becomes so powerful that it's almost inevitable. I got a ton of inspiration off of this idea that, if your team feels empowered and engaged and they know the vision, that's how you know you're going to succeed. I, that's a wonderful milestone for anybody trying to, to build an idea or a or, or a team. Who are you looking to connect with and how can they find you?

I am very passionate about this mission of really bringing the focus on individuals to allow us to have better corporate leadership. I think that that is the key to success. So everything that I will be doing from here forward is really focusing on that message. My book Cake on Tuesday comes out October 15th, it's available for presale. Now you can go to Amazon, find it on page. So any interest in that, if you are interested in anything I just said, I talk about lots of stories and examples and make fun of myself and whatnot in the process. Anything that can help you along your journey. I've tried to distill down into a short snappy read in that book. My website, www.elizabethbieniek.com is where I will be posting all of my information there and on LinkedIn is primarily what I use for my social media presently. So find me anywhere there, have a talk on the journey. I am really focusing on writing, speaking, and consulting on these core areas because it's near and dear to my heart.

Oh my goodness, Elizabeth, thank you so much for your time today. I've learned so much and have been re inspired about some of the things that I've been thinking about. So definitely going to take to heart that as a founder of an innovative idea, you have to be just tenaciously passionate. And focused on that idea to be brave about going places that no one else has gone before, and to make sure that the people involved both understand, and can support the vision that you bring. That's such fantastic advice. Thank you so much for your time today.

Always good to chat, Nathan.

Awesome.