Using Innovation and Creativity as a Career Strategy

Anita Brick: Hi, and welcome to CareerCast at Chicago Booth to help you advance in your career. Today we're delighted to be speaking with Robert Tucker. He is the president of the Innovation Resource Consulting Group, and he is an internationally recognized leader in innovation. He's also the author of six books. And we're going to talk about one of them today called Innovation Is Everybody's Business.

And Robert, it's a great book, and I love the fact that you've kind of turned innovation a little bit upside down and are now focusing, or at least this book focuses on, how can I, as a professional, advance my career through innovation?

Robert Tucker: Well, that's right, Anita, and thank you. It's a pleasure to be on and speaking with you and your listeners. We did want to practice what we preach and turn innovation on its head. We felt there were enough books on, here's how to innovate in your company. There were hordes of those books pouring out every day, and they're, many of them, very good. But this is more about you and your career and how innovation impacts that in a changing world.

Anita Brick: OK, so I have this down as a question—one that I sent to you—but then it came in from an alum as well. So how are we defining innovation in the context of career management?

Robert Tucker: Let's be real basic, real simple. Just to start off, innovation is nothing more than coming up with ideas and bringing them to life. And we can make it complicated and we can put a lot of fancy equations there. But that's essentially what we're talking about. So in a career environment, it's coming up with career ideas—coming up with ideas to further our careers and implementing those ideas.

And I always say to people, wherever you are, it was the ideas that you came up with and implemented that got you there. So if you've achieved your PhD or your MBA from the university, that was an idea at some point in your mind, and then you set about implementing that idea and acting on that idea. So that was the way I define it: the act of innovation.

Anita Brick: So it seems much simpler to me when I think about a product. OK, so I have a product idea. I do the research, I find out who my potential target is, develop features and benefits they care about. How do I then do that for me? How would someone—a student or alum around the globe—where would that person start? I'm not as clear about that.

Robert Tucker: Start with the fact that you are the product. That's where you want to start. And what do I mean by that? You are going to go and achieve and do and create. And in that light, you are the product. So how do we help the individual to achieve their destiny in this very hypercompetitive, fast-changing world that we're talking about?

You can have all the functional skills. You can be great at HR or operations or manufacturing or facilities management or whatever it is that you're into. You can have great execution skills. You can have great people skills. But what you really need in addition to those kinds of skills are “I” skills—innovation skills—today. Because in effect, if you only have some of those skills that we just mentioned, but you don't have I skills—the ability to come up with ideas and bring them to life, that help you, that help your organization to succeed and to change with change ….

Anita Brick: Let's make it practical, because it seems a little bit ephemeral to me, and I know that it's not. I mean, having read the book, but just talking about it, it's like, OK, you know, you're the product and I know we preach that to you and that you need to create branding around it and all of that. But I'm someone sitting in a financial planning and analysis role in a company.

We don't really innovate a lot. We maybe change some processes here and there to make things more efficient. But innovation is not like my friend who's in marketing. He does innovation, I don't. How would it help me and how would it help me advance in my career?

Robert Tucker: Well, I think first of all, you need to rethink your definition of what is innovation or what is innovative thinking on a day-to-day basis. Because as this book is aptly titled, innovation is everybody's business. So it really doesn't matter the department or the function that you're in. One of the people—we interviewed 43 innovators—the non Mark Zuckerberg, the Steve Jobs, they get all the press. We sought out innovators in everyday life, in organizations that were really known for having done something very big. For example, at Starbucks, the payroll chief, a guy named [...] actually succeeded in innovating a lowering of the cost of doing payroll by over 50 percent.

Or Jennifer Rock at Best Buy. She was in the marketing department, but she thought that her greatest contribution was over here in this little sleepy thing that they had called the internet. I mean, they're selling electronic products all day long, but they didn't really utilize the internet. And she said, look, we need to communicate with the field more. So she—her innovation was to use the internet and to recast it and to reinvent it so that it was a listening device. That it was a communication device, a sharing device, a collaboration device.

So she set up wikis. She and her small team began to do all these sorts of things, with the net result that they lowered turnover. In retail, just epidemic. When they started doing all these innovations and really bringing the field closer to headquarters in Minneapolis, they were at 82 percent. And three years in, they had reduced turnover down to about 50 percent.

It was still too high. And then after the fourth year, it was down to 39 percent. And I just talked to her recently. She said, we're still excited to keep reducing that, and it's just been amazing. So those are the [...] and the Jennifer Rocks are people that you don't read about every day, but there are people that are using their I skills to get new things done in their organizations.

Things that are important to the CEO, things that are important to the survival and success of that organization. And not a lot of people know how to do them. So you want to find a need and fill it. You want to differentiate yourself in an organization by having skills and bringing skills to the party that other people don't have.

Anita Brick: OK, so let's start. Let's use her as an example. What specific “I” skills did she bring to the forefront that then allowed her to make this very significant change?

Robert Tucker: Well, I would say with Jennifer, she embodies the “I” skill of having a passion for the customer, and in her case, it was an internal customer. She has an opportunity mindset. She assaults her assumption. You know, a lot of people would have said, hey, senior management may not like this. They may think we're stepping on their toes. Our human resource department may think, hey, this is not what you were charged with doing.

This is what we are charged with doing. So she had to sort of smooth those feathers over. Those are all “I” skills. The ability to, again, as we said earlier, to come up with ideas and bring those ideas to life that have a result of bringing about value added, of bringing about reduced cost, or bringing about a dazzled customer, an excited customer.

I mean, I'm telling you, Anita, the people that we interviewed—this was last year, so it was during a very tough economic period. The people that we were talking to don't have any problem with employee engagement. These are people that can't wait to get to work. These are people that keep saying to us, you know, Robert, I love what I do.

I love the people that I work with. I get to, you know, work with a team of people that are just a lot of fun. And we're doing really exciting things. That was the kind of comment you hear over and over when people are innovating, when they're coming up with ideas and bringing them to life successfully, they are turned on. There's no question about that.

Anita Brick: There was a question from a student. They were asking about what if your culture is kind of risk averse? They don't do a lot of innovating. Their cash cow products or services are still going fairly well. How do you begin to foster a sense of innovation within that context, where things like having a passion for the customer, one of your “I” skills, is becoming an idea factory. How do you actually get buy-in to do this if your company is pretty risk averse?

Robert Tucker: Well, I would say very carefully.

Anita Brick: OK, but how can we do something like take some baby steps? Because I think that what could happen is people can get really frustrated. What are some safe things that people could do if their company is not very innovative and not very open?

Robert Tucker: I would start by reminding our listeners that almost every culture would say that they are risk averse. It’s a matter of what degree? I get that question all over the world. I work a lot in Asia. I'm leaving for South America tomorrow, and I can tell you, during the Q&A sessions of my presentations and seminars if that question doesn't come up it's an unusual day.

First of all, we have to recognize, OK, maybe my culture is not as unique as I would like to think it is. So it's a matter of mastering these “I” skills so that we understand that we're going to face resistance from the old guard or the people that say, well, that's not the way we've always done it, or the people that will raise an objection faster than you can get the idea out there.

So part of creating an innovative culture is to start with the micro culture. Let's say you're in a meeting of three or four people and somebody starts locking their arms or kind of pushing back on you and saying, well, you know, we've always done it that way, right? That'll never get past senior management. All that'll die. You're wasting your time, Anita. Forget it, give up. But no, you don't listen to those people. You get smart, right? You say wait a minute. How do I sell ideas?

Anita Brick: If people are arms crossed and, you know, you hear this a lot: well, we've always thought this way. We are a leader in the field, so we must be doing things right. What's something that you can do to get the ball rolling?

Robert Tucker: Well, I think you have to start with where you are as an individual in your organization. If you're just hired last week, your first objective is not to try to foster innovation and change the culture and go up against these risk-averse people and try to tell them how wrong they are. Now, your job is to establish your reputation as somebody who gets the job done, who executes well, who is accurate in their work, who comes in under budget, those sorts of things.

So there's an initial response to your question, which is where am I in the organization? So if I've been there for a while and I've established a reputation, and I happen to be on a team that is charged with something having remotely to do with fostering a culture of innovation, which many, many companies are dipping a toe in, that's my opportunity to really shine.

That's my opportunity to really contribute and add some value. Because you see, what happens is that most people think they know more about innovation than they really do. That's the unfortunate truth. So we don't even know we don't know. It's a process of taking a simple meeting about something and transforming it into a brainstorming session, where people's eyes are getting excited. People are occasionally slamming their hands on the table and getting excited about … Yeah, we could do that! That would be wonderful!

And getting that enthusiasm, those are your “I” skills coming into play. If you're on your game, if you can bring out the best, the creative and people and get the naysayers to shut up for a little while here, right? Get them thinking differently, or at least get them to be quiet and let people try to get some ideas out there … then you can start getting some traction. These are not skills that you just sort of pick up overnight. But what I suggest to people to take note: why is so-and-so in the company? You know, when you think of a mover and shaker, you think of a go-to person. We always think of so-and-so. What are their skills?

Well, they've got really good collaboration skills. They don't rub people wrong. They take the time to return people's phone calls, return their email. In other words, the basic blocking and tackling that is necessary to create somebody of reputation that can lead an important innovation initiative. And those are the people that we interviewed for this book, after getting beyond their sort of don't make me out to be this hero, I'm a team player and I'm a little bit nervous here talking to you because it makes it shining the spotlight on me. So after I got them over that I couldn't get them stopped because they just have so many techniques that are never really talked about today.

Anita Brick: Well, like, for instance? Give us a for instance of something that you see that even in an organization that is not driven by innovation still works.

Robert Tucker: I would just go to these “I” skills.

Anita Brick: OK. So let's—because I know you've mentioned them a number of times, we'll talk about what they are. So embrace the opportunity mindset ...

Robert Tucker: Embrace the opportunity mindset—that would be no matter how busy we are, always have an eye peeled for opportunity. Maybe it's the opportunity to join some newly forming project group because you know you are your project today, the projects or the resume of today. You want to get in those projects that have to do with the strategy of the company, the strategy, the organization. So it's strategic thinking. That's the opportunity mindset. No matter how busy you are.

Anita Brick: … adding value to everything.

Robert Tucker: That's exactly right. In other words, it's the shift from, “gee, I got to go to work” to “innovation is not what I do after I get my work done. It's how I do my work. It's how I think about what I do.” So the most mundane task can lend itself to creativity and lend itself to innovativeness. If I really think about it, I mean, I was on a on a plane to Chicago and this fellow, we were talking about what we do and I happened to mention the title of the book, and he and he shot back, well, he said, “I'm not sure that I want everybody to make innovation their business.” He said, “that pilot up there.” He said, “I just want him to get me to Chicago. That's all.”

Anita Brick: In one piece right there.

Robert Tucker: I had to concede that I was in total agreement. Let's just go to Chicago. But I said, well, what about after he lands the plane or she lands the plane? Couldn't that pilot participate in innovative sessions having to do with that turnaround time at airports or reducing delays? Customer service ideas, safety ideas, fuel economy ideas?

You see where I'm going with this? If we allow ourselves to sort of think inside the box, we just simply say, well, innovation, that's not my job. They don't want me to be innovative. They want me to just follow the rules. They want marketing to be innovative. They want new product development to be innovative. And that's where I say stop. Please stop right there. I’ve got to coach you because I don't care if you're in facilities management, there's all kinds of things you can do to add value. There's all kinds of things you can do to lower costs to bring forth a result. That's not in your job description? No, no. Those are the kind of people that are becoming indispensable.

Anita Brick: You know, we had someone who was a temp at the front desk and who served as the office manager for a few months while we were looking for someone. So here's a temp who, of course, has really no power in a sense, if you think about it. Certainly not to innovate. And he thought it would be nice to have—and this may sound really silly, but he thought it would be nice to have a jar of candy at the front desk, would make things more inviting. People might just stop in just to say hello, to get a piece of candy, and to have people be more part of this office. It worked. And when he left, of course, it's, you know, if you go there today, it's full.

So the second skill that you mention, and you mentioned it before and I love this one because I'm a big proponent of this: become an assumption assaulter. So blast away the things that impede progress, whether it's personally or organizationally. It seems like that's something that would be interesting, but it could also be a little risky.

Robert Tucker: Well, you're exactly right. But sometimes the risk is doing nothing. Sometimes the risk is listening to that little voice inside saying, hey, you’d better play it safe. Right? The fact of the matter is, folks that we interviewed say, you know, I really had to kind of remove that plank from my own eye before I could start removing it or trying to remove it from somebody else’s.

And that was what sort of got them off the square one and really into a turbocharged career. But you mentioned this temp at the front desk with the jar of candy. I think that's a wonderful example because it is an everyday example. He could have said, hey, I'm the temp, I can’t do anything.

One of the people that I quite often talk about, the receptionist at a manufacturing company in Michigan. She won the innovator of the year award, and my colleague asked her, he said, you know, how did you win this award? You're the receptionist, right? And she said, that's right. She said, but I'm talking to customers all day long and quite often or sometimes they're not real happy about something we did. And by just asking them questions, I could really kind of get the scoop on what happened and get the details. But then I always ask them my favorite question.

The question turned out to be, what do you think we should do so that this never happens again?

Anita Brick: Oh, good question.

Robert Tucker: I just write like mad and I write down their answer and then I type it up when the phone's not ringing. And then I submit that to our new ideas program. And that's how I won the award.

Anita Brick: It's really brilliant. And I mean, to me, it combines two skills: her assumption that it's not her job, and the next, the third “I” skill, which is to cultivate a passion for the end customer. Because she could have just answered the phone and answered the questions, but it seems like part of it was that she already had that skill developed, that she had a passion for the customers.

She really wanted to help. It wasn't just, all right now, I asked this question now, I asked this question she really wanted to know. And it sounds like it made everybody better and the company better at a large.

Robert Tucker: That's right. And whether it's a jar of candy at the front desk, just a simple thing that anybody could do there without getting a bunch of permissions all the way up to the CEO, just go ahead and do something small like that. It really adds tremendous value. And to your point, this third “I” skill, this third innovation skill of having a passion for the end customer all across the board, there's this sort of loss of a real passion for serving.

Other people oftentimes want to be served, whether in a restaurant or hotel or on an airline or wherever. And yet, when it's our turn to serve, we so often sort of drop the ball. And so I think these are people that really try to have empathy for how the customer is going to use our service or our product, whether that's payroll at Starbucks, as we talked about, they're providing a service. They're a service business within a business, right?

Anita Brick: Right.

Robert Tucker: You know, if you don't get paid, this is not a good thing.

Anita Brick: Well, that's totally true. The next thing is probably where my heart lies, because I love the next two skills, which are staying ahead of the curve and becoming an idea factory. Staying ahead of the curve with all the information out there today can be a little tricky, and I know the two go hand in hand. If you don't have fresh ideas and you're not getting fresh input, you're not going to be an idea factory.

How do you decide how much time to allocate to staying abreast of trends and all of those kinds of things, whether there are opportunities or threats? How do you stay ahead of the curve? How do you advise people to do that in their own career?

Robert Tucker: I advise people to read voraciously. You know, in my own life it is increasingly difficult to find time to sit there and read, especially away from the computer. I mean, I'm fortunate personally in the sense that I travel millions of miles every year. I've transformed that airplane into my library. I think of that. I'm going to the library, I'm going to go to my reading rooms.

I have overcome that. But I know this is a tremendous challenge for people. The amount of books and articles and whitepapers, and just open your email and there's 20 things that take up your time, but you've got to stay on top. You've got to stay abreast. You've got to track the trends. If you're going to be an innovator, you can't be misinformed or uninformed.

And so many people say, well, how do you do that? And I say, well, from time to time I want you to audit your information diet and be ruthless about it. Be honest about what's coming in. You’ve got to bring that good stuff in, the good or the good information. You also hear people say, well, I don't read newspapers anymore. I just read things online. And then you start talking and suddenly there's this great article or there's something that has happened, some incident, some news item, and they've completely missed it.

So part of the audit has got to be that it's OK if you're going to read everything online. But if you're missing the important items, that says you’d better change and shift and shore up your diet there, because an innovator, again, needs a robust diet of information.

So you can do this with your personal network trade articles around. Hey, I saw this great article in the New York Times this morning, the Wall Street Journal. Make sure that your network, you can tweet about it, but you really want to think of yourself as the eyes and ears, not only of yourself, but of your organization.

Anita Brick: You are very excited about this topic.

Robert Tucker: Oh yes, because this is really what brought me into the field of innovation. You want to build your network. You want to hang out with people who are forward thinking, who are idea oriented. One of the things that I coach folks on is that when you hear some new topic that seems like it's going to be important, more important to your organization, to your career, to your department, start a file on that.

You know, I'm 56 years old, so a little old fashioned, but I like to start a physical file. That's the way I've done it throughout my career, you know, go to Google and download everything you can find on that particular topic and become an expert on that as much as you can.

Anita Brick: That's a good point. You could also look and see who has RSS feeds that could send stuff, and whether—I do it, and I Google; other people, you know, use whatever reader they do—but then you don't have to remember—it just gets pulled to you. So that makes it easy to …

Robert Tucker: Oh, I swear by Google Alerts, and I'm always changing and tweaking which ones I want to monitor this week or this month. What happens when we do this sort of thing if we read consciously rather than passively, if things happen, they kind of pass our eyeballs. Innovators are much more aggressive about getting and bringing the information to them. If somebody mentions an article, hey, I read this article was a really good article. Oh, they write it down, they follow up, they get that article, they make it a point, jump on it.

Anita Brick: And then you can share it with your network too, which can actually help strengthen those relationships.

Robert Tucker: Exactly. Because what we're doing in that endeavor is we are informing ourselves. We are connecting the dots. And that's what, to your point, that's what thinking ahead of the curve is really all about. It's not that anybody has a crystal ball, and that they can see where the future is going to go. No, but we have to work on that every day because the world is changing so rapidly.

Anita Brick: Right, right. And I think that if you do that, then you naturally become an idea factory because you see connections where other people haven't seen them yet. They will eventually. But if you can be the first or near the first to see those connections, it certainly can help a great deal in it. Having that raw material, like you said, whether it's a physical file or an RSS feed or a tweet, following that can be the raw material to come up with brilliant ideas on many different fronts.

Robert Tucker: That is so true that that's a major part of the work that I do. I mean, I often help companies to establish an innovation process, but quite often they'll have me come in as sort of a facilitator, if you will, a brainstormer expert to help them to devise methods of brainstorming. And that's really what we do. We just create a better idea factory. Get people brainstorming.

One of the things I often do is give people specific homework. I work with all the top dairy companies, and they actually get to cooperate. So we actually brought them all together in a conference room. You know, one person from each company. Well, rather than just kind of show up and plop ourselves there and do some whiteboarding and brainstorming of ideas, we started six months before. I had these executives post, for example, brown bag lunches, where they had to meet with some of their new hires and say, hey, got any ideas on how we can increase milk consumption? Because that was our goal.

And as a result of that, we had a very productive, very results-oriented brainstorming session that the client was just ecstatic about because they opened up all kinds of venues when we started assaulting assumptions, like maybe put milk vending machines in high schools and junior high schools instead of soda machines. So some of the more obvious ideas, but some of the more outlandish ideas too, came to the fore there.

And that's what we're talking about. If you're an idea factory, I'm an idea factory. And if we continue to read the good material and bring that to us and seek out and be around other ideas or people in our network and trade ideas around and say, what do you think about this? And where do you think these trends are going to go? We're going to get to the future first. We're going to figure it out five minutes before our competitors are going to figure it out. And that's really about the amount of time that you have in advance. But that five minutes makes a tremendous amount of difference.

Anita Brick: And I love all this. I think this is really great. The next skills—and we talked about these two a little bit—becoming a stand-out collaborator and building buy-in for the new ideas. Being six and seven, it seems like although not completely, it seems like the first five are rather individual centric, and I'm sure that nobody who's listening would ever be arrogant.

But I could see where you get really good at this and you get confidence and kind of an edge and arrogance, then you get to like, oh, I'm the great innovator now. How do you then translate that individual-centric focus to a collaborative focus to bring in departments across the company, across the globe? How do you go from an individually focused, maybe even ego-driven focus to a more collaborative one to get that idea implemented?

Robert Tucker: Collaboration is where the rubber meets the road, right? And innovation is a team sport. As the CIO, the chief innovation officer at Whirlpool, Nancy Snyder, said. So well in the book, she said, you know, if you think you're going to be the Lone Ranger, the lone wolf, and you're going to be successful in innovation, forget it, because you're not.

It is a matter of having people skills and being able to help people feel honored and appreciated and valued. Those are just kind of baseline things. But so often today, they get left out of the equation. This is an “I” skill that I think is truly, truly important because there's so much to be learned. I mean, you just don't start out as a great collaborator.

It's a matter of sort of smoothing the edges of one's personality, knowing when to say things and when to leave things unsaid. It's knowing what good collaboration looks like. A good collaborator knows that the initial stage is so vitally important. You really want to honor people. You really want to sort of set the ground rules. You really want to inspire people with the mission that we're on here.

It's an ongoing thing. It's not easy. Sometimes we want to just blow up at people and spout off. I think a big part of it is really just looking at the impact of the team. And gosh, a lot of the interviewees would say, you know, things that really came from a very humble heart about the whole thing.

I mean, if you have a teammate that's really screwing up, they're not pulling their weight. Lisa Peters, who led a huge transformation, a merger at Bank of New York and Mellon, she was put in charge. She was in human resources, and the CEO tapped her to kind of lead this whole thing. And so integrating two very different cultures, different histories, different backgrounds took tremendous collaboration skills.

And she was the one that said to me, you know, what do you do if somebody is not pulling their weight? And she said, well, you have no choice really, but to just do their work too. It’s going to come out eventually.

Anita Brick: True. And it sounds like the innovation and humility and a sense of appreciation all go kind of hand in hand in hand.

Robert Tucker: All the way around. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, if we think we're going to do it alone, if we think that because, you know, we're smarter or we have more experience or we have a better idea, whatever, you're going to find that that just divides the team. One of the things that really assaulted my assumptions in doing this research, Anita was interviewing some of these folks, and I would ask them, you know, well, what about if you've got a really talented person on your team and yet they're a real pill?

They're just not a team player, continuing to cause friction, they are an energy suck. Basically, the consensus of these very accomplished innovators was it's not worth it. A single individual, no matter how talented, can drag the collaboration down and create tension and so forth. And that was like a real eye-opener for me, I guess, because I had always assumed that, you know, you had to put up with people like that because they were so incredibly bright.

Anita Brick: Well, but you're telling us that, I mean, not to come full circle, but you're telling us that innovation really is everybody's business, and we all have that power and capacity. If we develop those skills that we just went through and are able to have the courage to bring them to our organization.

Robert Tucker: That's right. And I think what we're not saying here is that everybody is going to be a stark raving idiot here and, you know, come up with a million ideas. They've got plenty of studies and so forth. Michael Curtin has a very famous name in the innovation area, you know, and he basically posits that 50 percent of people, just by natural inclination, are more comfortable changing the system. They don't mind blowing it up. Starting over. That doesn't bother them a bit; 50 percent are more comfortable perfecting the system.

Anita Brick: That's where most value is gained. It's on the margin too. I know that we're almost running out of time, but would you have time for one more question?

Robert Tucker: Absolutely.

Anita Brick: OK. If someone wants to shift into this innovation mindset, it sounds like a lot of it is action. But the first part is mindset. So someone wants to take some action today, tomorrow, the next week. What are three things that you would advise someone to do right away?

Robert Tucker: Well, hearkening back to what we talked about earlier, I think, you know, you're getting informed about some of the key issues having to do with your profession, your department, your company, your organization, your industry. And if not, what changes are you willing to make? Second would be in terms of this opportunity mindset, which is a little squishy until you unpack it a bit.

But most people today are so distracted they're multitasking. They got 100 emails popping in on them. So we're in this kind of constantly overcommunicated, overscheduled, overstimulated mode. So my strong suggestion is to pull away and spend a little time and think about your personal innovation strategy. I mean, where can you innovate? Where should you be innovating to differentiate yourself and to become indispensable in your organization?

And I even recommend that people take a Doug Day. And very briefly, Doug Green was the person who gave me that idea, and he runs a company in the natural foods arena that is growing by leaps and bounds. And Doug said, you know, every month I take a Doug Day, which is nothing more than an all-day appointment with me.

I don't use technology. I don't make calls, I don't do conference calls. I don't do meetings on technology. I just take my sketchpad, my doodle pad, and I'll go for a walk in the woods, go for a hike. And he said, the ideas just come. And that's where I've gotten most of my good ideas. And I think so often that they—and people are so connected, they're just running from one frying pan to the next, one meeting to the next, but they're not doing any of their own thinking.

And so my big coaching is to help people to find the time to carve out the time, to believe they can find the time, to do exactly that, and to take some of these ideas from the book and say, now, wait a minute, does this one make sense for me? What can I do to implement this and to make this a part of my life?

Anita Brick: So the first thing you mentioned was make sure your diet is helping you think broadly and all of that. And then taking that Doug Day. What would your third recommendation be?

Robert Tucker: I would say assault your assumptions on a day-to-day basis. Ask more questions. The next time you go into a meeting, somebody stands up and says, well, now we have two ways we can go on this. And they're just as clear as a bell on this. This is we got option A and B, option B. You say, what would option C look like? And then just be quiet and they will come up with option C. And quite often it will be brilliant. When you say, well why didn't you tell me that? Why didn't you include that? Oh, well because I didn't know. I assume this and I assume that. Yeah, that's what our role as innovators is, to unleash it in other people, to feed other people.

So they got these blinders on. We kind of remove the blinders and we do it in a gentle, loving, kind, humble way. Not arrogantly, not because we're smarter and they're not. And we know more and they don't. And we've got more experience and they don't know it's got to be done gently and lovingly. And it's really just working on ourselves continuously.

So assaulting my own assumptions is a 24/7 endeavor, and occasionally I'll hear somebody say something and I'll say, hey, that's an assumption, let's attack that. And that's kind of how this whole thing starts to audit your information diet. Are you getting the proper diet of the innovator? Take a Doug Day, take some time to think.

Maybe you've achieved that—just an hour at Starbucks where you're just sitting there thinking with your yellow pad: what are my most important things? Where is this company going? Asking yourself some inviting questions, and third and finally, helping to assault assumptions in meetings and one-on-one conversations such that innovation can begin. Because what I always say with audiences and in my books is that innovation begins where assumptions end.

Anita Brick: That's great, and that's a great way for us to end, too. So thank you so much.

Robert Tucker: Well thank you. It's been a pleasure.

Anita Brick: And if you want to learn, obviously I'm excited to go back to your site. Now, Robert's site is dot innovation resource.com. That's dot innovation resource.com. And thank you everybody for the questions that you sent. It helped us create a stimulating conversation. And thank you all for listening. This is Anita Brick with CareerCast at Chicago Booth. Keep advancing.