Amer Iqbal interviewed on Success Made to Last podcast
Amer Iqbal, Founder & CEO of 5 Ways to Innovate, was recently interviewed by Rick Tocquigny on the Success Made to Last podcast. The conversation was wide ranging, covering topics from Amer’s views towards the current state of corporate innovation all the way through to his philosophy on creating significant impact in the world.
Podcast synopsis
Futurist and culture innovator Amer Iqbal, founder and author of the upcoming book 5 Ways to Innovate graces our show.
He helps organizations think, act, and behave more like startups in order to reimagine their future in the digital economy.
Look at the past, consider patterns, poke holes into trends, tinker, experiment, and keep your atomic habits like "ruthless prioritization," especially as you move to owning your company.
Listen to Amer's advice on experimentation and intentionality with systems in place to close gaps.
Links to the podcast
TRANSCRIPT: Success with Amer Iqbal, Founder of 5 Ways to Innovate
This is an automatically generated transcript. Please note that complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Welcome back to success made the last I'm Rick Tokeny. The show is brought to you by Board's Eye, as well as a couple of other great organizations, Graceful Years Greeting Cards and Edward Jones Financial Advisors and our guests. This evening is armor Ick Ball and he is the founder and CEO of a great organization, five Ways to Innovate of interest. He is ex AMTA and Deloitte Digital.
And I was trying to come up with the proper headline or billboard for you, and I think it's he helps organizations think, act and behave more like startups in order to be effective and significant in a digital economy. So it's great to have you on. Welcome Thank you, Rick, And yes, you nailed it. I think act and behave more like a startup in order to thrive in a digital economy.
I've probably said that sentence a thousand times by now, but you got it. That's fabulous. You have had a wonderful career and we think that you may be one of the futurists that's out in the industry today who actually sees things before they're happening. You've made some great commentary on AI, which I somewhat laugh at because you talk about, Hey, if you're trying to find out about AI, wroant't you ask AI? So it's almost irreverent.
And I want to start with kind of the on the the beginning in mind and which is begin with the ending, asking you about trends in innovation that actually excite you most for the future. Well, look, that's a great question. I definitely steer clear of the futurist title. I think there are too many futurists out there in the world who are gazing into crystal balls.
I think in terms of looking into the future, my philosophy is always to look into the past. So for example, I was just speaking at a large conference just before Christmas which was on the topic of AI, and when it came time for Q and A, everyone raises their hand and they're like, what's the big trend going to be in twenty twenty five? What AI tools? Should we be looking at? That sort of thing? And my perspective is always, well, look, if we look back at the last ten years, there's been lots of technology trends. AI is just the latest in a long string. We had Metaverse eighteen months ago, was this huge thing that everyone was talking about.
We've had x MR before that. We had cloud computing ten years ago, which I think if you look at the trajectory of cloud computing, it kind of went through a similar cycle. Everyone went bonkers for it. There were lots of headlines.
Then people said, ah, this is just going to be like kind of a fun little toy. Now, if you go to any large corporate, any bank, any insurance company, any government on the planet, they have spent the last decade and millions and millions of dollars investing in cloud technology. So that's what I would say when it comes to AI or whatever next year's flavor of the month is going to be. In terms of headlines and emerging tech, Let's look at the past, follow that same hype cycle and assume that there's going to be lots of hyperbole.
Then there's going to be lots of people poking holes in it and saying, you know, I love seeing these headlines. These days, people are like, hey, chat GPT told me to put glue on my pizza. Therefore all AI is doomed. I kind of laugh at those headlines because the reality is going to be somewhere in the middle.
It's going to be very useful. Yes, it's going to transform how we live, work and play. But my philosophy is always just get started, get experimenting, tinker around with the tools. You're not going to break anything, and if you do that, then you'll be well equipped and you won't be one of those people playing catch up for the next ten years.
Ah. Very good. Is that consistent with your philosophy in your upcoming book Five Ways to Innovate? Very much so? So Five Ways to Innovate? The very quick impetus story behind it was this is back when I was working as a management consultant several years ago at Deloitte. We analyzed one hundred different companies to see what makes the best innovators tick.
And what we found is most failures in innovation occur when there's a lack of structured systems. We hear so many companies talking about, hey, we're working on building an innovation culture, which is, you know, culture is not something you buy. You know, you can't go out and buy a coldulture. What you can buy is systems you can put in place.
Structured systems that build innovation competence and culture will be an output of having done the right things, So very much what I talked about with AI. Let's get started, let's get experimenting, but let's put some structures and systems and processes around it. It shouldn't be experimentation for the sake of experimentation. We shouldn't be developing proof of concepts and all these sort of things without any intention of where we're going.
So it's very much about having that intentionality and putting those systems in place. That's where people tend to succeed. And yeah, hence five Ways to Innovate is exactly a system that we came up with off the back of that analysis to say how can companies close that innovation gap between where their aspirations are. Seventy five percent of companies say innovation is in their top three priorities, which is huge, But as of last year, there was a survey done by BCG, only three percent of companies on the planet have the capabilities to actually execute on those ambitions.
So that's a huge gap between where companies want to be and where they actually are. So I would say start with systems. That's got to be the starting point. With that failure rate, you're going to be in business for a long time.
Absolutely. I mean the stat that I always liked to cite. There was a cap Gemini report that said innovation centers have an eighty to ninety percent failure rate, which I always joke like, if you went into a sales team or any other function in the business and say, look, we only succeed ten percent of the time, you would just go and sack the whole department. But for some reason, in the field of innovation, it just has become this acceptable thing.
And I think it's just people over complicate things. I'm all about simplification. Hence five ways is a very simple thing for people to grasp. So yeah, if we just make things simpler and go back to basics, I think that's got to be the key.
Why was Deloitte so folk innovation incompetence? Well, Deloitte helping helping clients with innovation incompetence. I'll tell you a quick story about innovation incompetence. This was I always well. I sometimes like to say one of my superpowers is anger, which sounds a little bit like the Incredible Hulk.
But sometimes it's out of a place of frustration that you have great ideas so we were having a meeting. This is when I was at Deloitte. We're having a meeting with a very large client. There are large home goods retailer.
Went into the meeting with their chief innovation officer and team and they proceed to say, look, we know that your firm has worked with our largest competitor in the field. Can we just copy their playbook? Can you just give us their playbook? And we tried to explain to them, look, your market is different, your customers are different, et cetera, et cetera. They just kept insisting, no, no, no, we just want to copy what our competitor is doing. I kind of flipped my top a little bit, put my foot in my mouth, and I said, look and guys, if all you're going to do is copy your competitor, this is no longer an innovation conversation, and I'm leaving the room.
So the meeting wrapped up. They were very polite. They gave us a nice recommendation for a restaurant to try out while we're in town. It was all very civil, but they chose to go with another firm.
They ended up copying that same playbook. And this is now four or five years later, they still haven't launched any new features, offerings, or business models. So this is for me. Incompetence comes from just copying what everybody else is doing.
And I'm sure you've seen this out there in the market. Brands and companies are just very scared these days to do anything different. It's all become very homogeneous, and logos are all starting to look the same, and products are all starting to look the same. Companies are scared to be themselves and lean into what makes them special and unique, which is something that certainly my work at Deloitte and now my work with Five Ways to Innovate has been trying to combat that.
You're so far ahead of yourself and companies need you. And what's weird. It's not weird, but it's almost sad that the average chief marketing officer or chief innovation officer is there at a company for less than twenty months, and it's almost as if they've been sentenced to the company and they were destined to fail because there was so much pressure and burden put on them and there wasn't an innovation culture that was going to help everybody succeed. It was down to we're going to hire this person and they're going to be our savior.
Yeah. I mean it reminds me a lot of politics. It's very hard to make change when you're coming in for a full ye um or in the case of a s you don't even get it for year term. You get a two term, and what happens on day one? You need to come in and say, Okay, whatever the last guy was doing, we're going to make a complete one eighty turn because I need to put my stamp on this thing and make it different.
Nobody wants to hire a new person who just says, yeah, let's just keep doing what we're doing. So you need to come in. You need to make a big splash, and somehow you need to prove success in a completely unrealistic timeframe. One of my favorite sayings about innovation is when innovation happens generationally, we shouldn't be measuring results quarterly.
And I think that's a lot of what holds you know, these unfortunate leaders who come in and need to make a splash suddenly in a very short amount of time. This is what holds them back. They should be focused on long term initiatives, but hey, like an incoming president. You don't want to lay groundwork for things that are going to happen ten years down the track when you're long gone.
You want to be focused on things that are going to make impact in the short term. And that short term is what leads to things becoming homogeneous and not set up to thrive in the future. Particularly. You know, the word disruption gets thrown around a lot, but we truly now with AI and these new chipsets that are coming out, disruption is truly exponential.
Now. Companies really need to think about how they're going to continuously be evolving because if you're sitting there on some of these companies in traditional industries, they're sitting on a business models that's one hundred two hundred years old. Guess what that's going to be blown up. And we've seen so many industries.
I don't need to name the case studies. Everybody's heard of them. Blockbuster, Kodak, BlackBerry, you name it. Many many companies have been disrupted because they were too stuck in their rut and two focused on doing short term things that just continue what they have been doing rather than reinventing the future.
That's right. In being mindful enough, we had a chance to interview the guy that invented digital photography at Kodak Wow, and it was a wow moment to hear how they the leaders rejected the opportunity because they thought that it was going to Royd rather there was going to be erosion to their film and chemical divisions, and they didn't see. They didn't see what was going to happen. And I'm wondering, how do you consult clients to make sure that they're fully mindful of the playing field and so they're not hitting all those blind spots like Eastman Kodak did.
M great question. Again, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, I'll come back to systems, but maybe talk about it through a case study. So a few years ago we worked with a bank and this was a bank who they weren't a top tier bank. I think they were number thirteen in their market, and they were kind of like, listen, we've been doing all the right things, we've been copying what the leaders are doing, but we just can't make up from place number thirteen.
We can't really see how we're going to jump to number one in this market. What can we do? And so our answer to that was well, we could go in and do a big market analysis, what's the future going to be, all these sort of things, and try and do a bit of that crystal ballgazing, or we could put the right systems in place so that you as a company can continuously do that crystal ball gazing on a continuous basis forever. And so what we did was set up not just one speedboat or startup or experiment. We set up a speedboat factory for that bank, which was what we call a startup studio.
Lots of companies are starting to do this now. Think of it like a corporate venture capital sort of operation within the bank itself. And so within the first six months, they had launched five new businesses that were focused on data technology. So they had a north star.
We're not just going to be a traditional bank. If data is the new oil, we want to be in the business of data. So they'd launched five experiments around data technology. That year, they ended up winning a whole bunch of awards for most Innovative banking product in their market, etc.
And they've gone on since then to sort of make up a lot of ground and become quite a leader in their field. So again It all started with putting in place the systems rather than us coming in and telling them, hey, here's what the future is going to be, and here's the silver bullet solution. I think that's where a lot of consultants or external advisors come in and feel like they need to have all the answers. In my case, really, where I've come back to is the answer is, let's put in place of systems and guess what.
You will constantly be reinventing yourself into the future to build a business of tomorrow. Oh my gosh, you remind me of something that happened at PNG, my old company, and there was a very wise CEO who said, how many scientists do we have on board right now who have patents? And the number was in the thousands. Then he asked how many professors are out there at universities that have patents and the number was in the millions, And he said, let's go talk to them because we don't have all the solutions and answers and product fit product product fits anymore, which was kind of an epiphany of sorts. And then all of a sudden, swiffer, that billion dollar product appeared, which was not invented by Procter and Gamble, but it's from P ANDNG.
So I'd love for you to talk about that abundance mentality when it comes to creating a new system. I love that case study, and I love that you said abundance mentality. The abundance mindset is really really key, I think to surviving in this current landscape. Any company, any leader who's sitting there thinking more in terms of a zero some game.
Hey, when our competitors win something, that means we've lost something. I think that's a very old world mindset that doesn't really survive in the current era. Again, five ways to innovate as a system. We talk about a scale of suitability, ecosystems being one of the large plays that is more of a divested innovation approach.
So exactly what you just said divested is saying, hey, guess what, unless we all wake up tomorrow and we suddenly have ten Steve jobs on our staff, we're probably not going to be the ones to solve all of the world's problems. Internally, maybe we need to look outside of our four walls. And that's where we advise a lot of companies these days in terms of taking a divested approach in terms of looking at the ecosystem, partnering up with startups and incubators. There are entire services out there on the planet that will scan and sense the startup ecosystem.
Say, hey, if you want to become a data technology company, or you want to launch a new home cleaning product, here are a bunch of startups, a bunch of smart people who are working on exactly that problem right now. Why don't you go talk to them, have meetings, set up pocs, build some partnerships and structures, and that's where we've seen a lot of great innovation. I think PNG is a great innovation story, by the way, And so yeah, getting that suitability right. Should we be taking a more invested innovation approach, as in, we do it all ourselves, we do upskilling, we launch innovation labs and the like.
Or should we be taking a more divested innovation approach working with startups in the ecosystem. Even something as simple as making a strategic decision around that can be the thing that turns the tides of an entire company around. Oh well said with that, i think we're going to take a commercial break and I'm going to throw it to you first and tell us how we can contact you your organization and maybe even book and order for your book that's going to be coming out. Thanks Rick.
Yeah, So, the Five Ways to Innovate is a keynote presentation that I've given probably close to one thousand times. So got to a point where we said, let's put that into a book. So we are currently in the process of getting the Five Ways to Innovate book published. What I'd ask your readers, to your listeners to do is to go to five Ways to Innovate dot com slash book and you can learn more about our book.
You can place a pre order there that would massively help us out. And while you're there, check us out at five Ways to Innovate dot com or on LinkedIn just search for five Ways to Innovate. Fantastic. Okay, we will be right back with armor in just a moment.
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So visit gracefully dash yours dot com to buy greeting cards where art and message connect to your heart. And we're now on the back half of this show. And I promised Armor that we're going to ask him some deeper, more philosophical questions on success versus significance, which is what this show is all about. And I told him before the show that he made it on here because I think he's already transcended from success to significance.
In the book he's coming out with is going to be a gift of significance. In our opinion, we think that corporations are stuck when it comes to innovation. We'd love to have you start with what is your definition of success at this age and stage of your life? And then what is the definition of significance. Wow, that is definitely a big philosophical question.
Success It's one of the most subjective things in the world. I've never been the sort of person who measures success by fast cars and expensive watches or anything like that. I think I've always leaned more towards freedom, having the freedom to do the work that I enjoy doing. These days, my biggest advice when I'm mentoring people is just do what's fun.
If you're working on things that are enjoyable to you, guess what, that's probably going to be the place where you're doing the best work of your life. So I try to steer clear of the word legacy just because that has a lot tied up in it. But as I'm sort of creeping through middle age now, definitely some of those thoughts are coming into the mind. So I kind of look at success as my body of work.
What is the impact of the work that I'm doing on the world and in the field that I work in. And I'm very cognizant that I work in the field of corporate innovation, you know, and probably not going to be the person that's saving lives in remote areas of the world. But you know, I've spent the last few years in Southeast Asia where there are a lot of developing economies and helping corporates. I've realized it was never my intention to go out and do a purpose driven thing, but helping corporates, you know, these big banks and insurance companies in telcos, they are some of the largest employers in these very large countries with big populations.
By helping those companies create employment, it's truly creating a new middle class and bringing people out of poverty and changing lives in that way. So that was sort of brought to me by a friend to show me the impact of the work that I've been doing. It's kind of been an unintentional consequence, but as I'm getting older, I think that's more of an intentional thing. How can I help businesses create employment, have good economic impact, but also at the same time have good social impact in the world.
My friend is significance with a cherry on top. Well, I'm glad to hear say that, because I've never really framed it as significance. But yes, I would like to feel. I think everyone wants to feel that what they're doing is significant.
We all want to feel that we meta. We do we do. Indeed, several years ago there was a book out called Blue Ocean Strategy. I've read it six times, if not seven, and I've come to the conclusion that those two professors were just telling the story of somebody else and not really telling you how to innovate, and just kind of stirring the pot on innovation.
How do you want your book to be remembered ten years after it comes out, so you don't have people reading it for the seventh time going I'm still I still don't get it completely. That's an excellent, excellent question. I would like people to have the book on the side of their desk and be using it on a daily, weekly basis as more of a handbook. I have not written this book to be read cover to cover as a novel.
You read it once and you have some epiphany, and then you walk away. I really hope it's the kind of book that people keep coming back to when they run into a business from they go, ah, I read about that in this book, exactly the case study you're talking about about Swiffer. Hey, when the next P and G comes along and says, hey, we want to reinvent the next era of our business. I would hope that Five Ways to Innovate is the book that's there on the bookshelf that they turn to and say, how do we actually put the systems in place to make that happen.
That's truly my hope. So more of a handbook perhaps than a novel. Yeah, well said, I really appreciate that. Speaking of epiphanies, over the last year, we have been asking founders like yourself about the notion of epiphanies and dreams, and I'd love to know what was the last epiphany that you had and have you acted upon it? I'd like to think so.
I don't think I have many epiphanies, but maybe the last significant one I can think of was about a year ago. I just started saying to myself, just say yes and keep in mind I was coming off the back of I had just left Meta aka Facebook, where one of the internal sort of mantras is ruthless prioritization. Did you just say ruthless prioritization. It sounds ruthless in itself, but yes, I understand when you're a company of eighty thousand people, you kind of need to have ruthless prioritization because it's a bit of a fire hose of information people coming at you from all directions.
But when I left Meta to go out on my own, I had lots of friends and founders and people just reaching out on LinkedIn saying, hey, let's have a coffee chat, let's catch up. Can I pick your brain? And I just found myself saying, what if I just say yes? I've gotten so much in this pattern of saying no to everything. You know you've got to be ruthlessly prioritizing your time and protecting your time. What if I just said yes? Truth be told.
There have been a lot of coffee conversations that go nowhere. People would say, hey, maybe that's a waste of time. I don't really believe anything's a waste of time. I end up having interesting conversations and walk away with at least some new insight that I didn't have before.
But I'll definitely say this, it's exposed me to the unknown unknowns if you will, things that I didn't know. I didn't know, made new contacts, brought up new business opportunities, led me into areas like being published, being on podcasts, like winning new pieces of business. So there definitely have been beneficial commercial results from that philosophy. So for me, I would say, if I can spread the word on that one, just say yes, try it for six months.
If you still feel it's a waste of time after six months, you can stop. But I would recommend everyone at a suitable point in their career to try that philosophy just say yes. I think that is revenge against Facebook. I definitely don't see it that way.
And I if I had been saying just say yes when I was at Facebook, I think I would have been not sleeping because it is quite a busy environment with lots of people. But I have the luxury, I suppose, running my own business now to have a bit more flexibility and freedom. It's a good point. I'm going to combine a couple of the things that you just said into a weird question.
It's because I'm writing a our eighth or ninth book on this one's on startups, and I don't see the people that I'm writing about right now. I don't see them as ruthless startup entrepreneurs. And I've seen other people that are just I mean, they go, they step on the gas and they're going one hundred and ten miles an hour, and they're doing it for sixteen hours a day, and they're so passionate and they don't even stop to breathe. And I wonder your advice to people that are leaving corporate America about maintaining that atomic habit of being ruthlessly great at prioritizing.
Maybe that's one of the best skills that you don't want to leave behind. Excellent point, And I think this is definitely going to maybe ruffle some feathers because people have strong opinions about hustle culture. I've found I'm definitely in the camp of anti hustle culture. But Rick, if you'll allow me, I'm going to credentialize myself as an entrepreneur.
First, I started my first business at age eight. I was in second grade and I just learned computer programming. I started making computer games and selling them to my friends for a dollar. My first paycheck was when I was in college.
I was paying the bills by running a Metallica fan site and running banner ads on there, for which I would receive I think it was like two hundred dollars every fortnight or something, which when you're eighteen years old is plenty of money to keep you going. So I feel I've just been destined to be this entrepreneur. And you know, it's funny when you come into the corporate world, everyone says, yeah, we need an entrepreneurial mindset, but then you're surrounded by people who have never worked outside of a large corporate environment with thousands and thousands of people. So my first piece of advice would be definitely try being an entrepreneur at some point, whether that's you quit your corporate job and you go and start it, or you just start a side hustle, you know, selling knitted goods on Etsy.
I don't care what it is, but everybody at some point should try their hand at being an entrepreneur because I think you learn so much and it's not the school of hard knocks. I think It's just the school of learning all of the things that you don't learn when you have this big corporate machinery around you. It teaches you a lot. Now, having said all of that, I'm very anti hustle culture.
I really get turned off when I see these posts on LinkedIn. You know, I wake up at four thirty am, and I'm grinding it out of the gym, and then I drop off the kids at school and then I've made my first ten sales calls before nine am. All this sort of thing really really turns me off. I'm a pretty meditative kind of a guy.
I'm very much into mindfulness. I think the best piece of advice I ever ever received was many years ago when I used to work at an ad agency. We'd been in a pitch meeting where I was quite senior at the time. The bosses had entrusted me to lead this large pitch to retain this big account.
It was a large tourism account of ours. I'd gone into this pitch all guns blazing, and I was just talking a million miles an hour. I think I delivered a thousand different messages in that one hour meeting, and we walked away. We went for just a coffee afterwards, and the CEO he said to me, my one piece of advice, just slowed down.
If you just do that, people are going to be much more receptive to what you're doing. And I've tried to bring that into everything that I do, and in doing so, it forces that prioritization, because when you slow things down, you need to be more focused, you need to be more present. You can't do the thousand things every day and guess what, that's probably going to be better for you because you're selecting the two things you can do that day that are truly impactful as opposed to spinning your wheels, confusing motion with progress, and doing lots of things that aren't particularly productive. So yeah, if I can again spread any advice, that would be it.
I think hustle culture is a bit of a red herring. I think it's turned a lot of entrepreneurs into thinking that they need to be this alpha sort of personality at all times. Just try slowing down, try being more selective. I start my week every week by drawing up a mind map of everything that's in my head, and then I very deliberately prioritize that into a backlog and I run my work week as an agile sprint, so by nature I have to be very selective about the things that I work on.
So that has been certainly a game changer in my career. That is fabulous advice. I think you just answered my last question, but I'll dig up another one just for you. How about that.
Let's do it. This is the final for you. Because you're such a forward thinking person, I've got to ask you. What seeds have you planted that you will never see harvested? Wow, there we go, there's that legacy word coming up again.
I did say legacy. Clearly it's echoing around in my head. Well, seeds that you've planted that you'll never see harvested? I'm a dad. I think it's natural that we think about what are we instilling in our children? What values are we instilling in our children? Hopefully we turn them into great people who live long beyond our lives and who also then create great things out there in the world.
But at the same time, who are the children of the work that I'm putting out there in the world. If I'm going around to these large companies that employ thousands and thousands of people, what are the systems, What are the processes, What are the values that myself and my colleagues are instilling in these companies that then bleed down through these organizations, and truly they impact the corporate world. I think collectively we have a responsibility to bring our authentic selves to work and in doing so the corporate world. Yes, we have economic responsibilities, but I think in recent times we've seen a huge growth in corporate social responsibility in DEI, in ESG.
All of these acronyms, but they're coming up for a reason because we're realizing that the economic motives aren't the only things that are important. We also have a responsibility to do the right things socially, the right things for the environment, et ce. So hopefully there are some seeds being planted in terms of values in the corporate world that breed the right values and create the right outcomes for the future. Very impressive.
Thank you Daddy for that. That's you showed your fatherhood and your idealism with that. Lendscent last answer. He is armor Ickball, His company and his book Five Ways to Innovate are out there for your consumption, and want to give out your website one more time.
It's five ways to innovate dot com. Very good. You are welcome back anytime. You were such a fun and humorous guest amidst all these serious questions, so that was a good time and folks, I hope that you enjoyed the show as much as we did.
As always, we wish you success, but on your own unique way to significance. Have a great week.
