Changing the Way the World Innovates: Tony Ulwick of Strategyn

Narrator: [: 00:00:00

Peter Bronstein: Welcome, welcome, welcome! You're listening to the Ask Brian Radio Show on KHS 1220 and 98. 1 FM. Well, for those of you who have never listened to our show, we are a business show. We talk business, alright? We try to teach something about business to people. Either we'll bring somebody on that has a new concept.

hich is one of the big ease. [: 00:01:00

Traci DeForge: Thank you for the big joy every time you call me an expert, I don't know why. So yes, we are all about the E's on the Ask Brian radio show and podcast, and one of the primary reasons of that is based on our fabulous engineer, Jen.

Jenn: Thank you, you're very sweet.

Traci DeForge: You're very sweet. I am kind of sweet, but I'm also factual. So that's

Peter Bronstein: that's just what does that mean? What does that mean? Oh factual, I think, you know, you're factual and and she says you're sweet. What does that mean? Yeah, well, you wouldn't know what

Traci DeForge: being sweet means. So I do I know how to eat sweets.

Jenn: Yeah, that's not a word that pops in my head for peter. I know how to eat sweets. Where's my chocolate?

Traci DeForge: Yeah, yeah, [: 00:02:00

Peter Bronstein: has an E in it, too. Exactly has an E.

Traci DeForge: Which is my new E for the day. Everything you say today, I'm going to say, exactly. But you mentioned it before, and we're going to definitely get knee deep in education today, but that's because we always have some fantastic experts that we interview on the Ask Brian Radio Show, and Experts, by definition, you know, need to spend a minimum of 10, 000 hours in their specific business niche or category.

And that's usually calculated by working 40 or so week, uh, hours a week, and 50 or so with each year. And if you did the math on that, we end up at about a five year Wait, wait, wait, wait. I

Jenn: don't have enough fingers. Hold on. Peter's using his fingers to count. Look, I'm up to seven. I'm up to seven. Yeah, close, close to that.

ch is better. So our experts [: 00:03:00

And our show is always focused on entrepreneurs that we tend to be very enthusiastic about entrepreneurship. Right, Peter?

Peter Bronstein: And I'm so

Traci DeForge: excited. Okay. I'm

Jenn: going to just turn his mic off.

Traci DeForge: Yeah, I was going to say, and one day our eardrums will be protected because We will not have you yelling in them. But, I am too very excited about our guest today. So, if you want to talk about the movie that you just watched the other night, that will talk about my favoriteie.

nd then we will get into the [: 00:04:00

Peter Bronstein: Yeah, Rocky was very good. Oh, another movie? There was another movie besides Rocky. Oh, I'm sorry. I forgot. What was that? One flew over the cuckoo's nest? Oh, no, that's our show. That's our show. That's a pick me up.

Jenn: All right.

Traci DeForge: Ask Brian.

Jenn: Otherwise, no doubt. You would sit there and choose to watch that. You know what? Sounds fun. Let's do that. But

Peter Bronstein: anyway, the movie that my co host, Tracy, wants to know about, it's called Grease. And in that scene, they go, Grease lightning is, what is it, Tracy?

Traci DeForge: Electrifying, and so are we! And I'm pretty excited that you just watched that baby thing.

You probably enjoyed it with me.

Peter Bronstein: Anyway, our guest is like going, Why am I here? What's going on? And, I'll never do this again. But, are you still there? I'm having a great

Tony Ulwick, CEO of Strategyn: time.

s, hopefully I don't have to [: 00:05:00

I got that. So I have a couple of questions for you. Before we get into your current company, we want to know a little bit about your background. So, and you know, we don't need to go to first grade when you, you know, reading your first book or whatever, but we would like to know what you did, you know, in your career.

So if you can go over a little bit, brief background summary of your career. Sure, I'd love

Tony Ulwick, CEO of Strategyn: to.

Peter Bronstein: Go ahead.

arted my career at IBM in the: 1980

I could have done better. And that's part of the point. I mean, I worked on a product early in my career there called the PCjr, and the PCjr was supposed to change the way home computing worked and the products people buy. We're competing against Apple. This was the early Apple days. So as an engineer, I was really [00:06:00] interested in working on this product.

It was my first product release. And the day after the product was introduced, the headlines in the Wall Street Journal read, The PC Jr. is a flop. I'm not laughing at you, but I'm laughing at this one. Well, we sort of laughed too, but we thought they were kidding, but they weren't kidding. It turns out it was a flop.

It was a billion dollar IBM failure. And I thought it'd be my first product. I thought, you know, how could a company like IBM create a product that would fail in the marketplace with all its vast resources and knowledge? How is that even possible? And I quickly realized it wasn't just IBM that had this problem.

Uh, all companies have this problem. They create products that people don't want. And

.: this

d that take? So, in the early: 1990

And created a process that I've been working on my entire life since that IBM failure that takes the risk, mitigates the risk of failure as companies introduce new products. So I started in 1991, worked with about a third of the Fortune 500 companies over the years, and what we do for them is help to identify opportunities in the market to create better and better products and mitigate the risk.

So very high level. Many companies use what I call an ideas first approach to innovation like IBM did, they just come up with the product concept because technology allows them to do it and then they find out that nobody wants that. Let's flip it around, let's figure out what people want up front and in the IBM example, what really got to me was the people knew that it was a failure the day after it was introduced.

was if we could identify the [: 00:08:00

So it turns out that approach does work a lot of new ones. And that's what we could talk about, but at a high level, I've been working on that for years, still working on it today, we've got at any given time, 20 or so clients, 20 or so projects that we're working on everything these days is AI, of course, but.

We've been working with companies that create software products, services, hardware, we've worked with 35 of the top 40 medical device companies on the globe as well, so we've got a really wide customer base. And what I love about it is every day we're trying to solve problems that consumers have. People have been trying to help companies create products and services that people love.

So it's been extremely rewarding and, uh, I don't think I'll ever retire.

you can do research, right? [: 00:09:00

And if it is something you need, would you be willing to pay for it and how much? Because obviously those are all factors I would think. And I'm just, you know, this is off the top of my head. I have no background at all. I would think those are the areas, but how does the company even know, you know, you don't know what you don't know was a famous conversation I had with somebody.

And that is the question. So how do you know what's a good thing to, even to test, to even see whether or not people are interested in it?

Tony Ulwick, CEO of Strategyn: Well, this is the key. You set that up beautifully because it sounds like guesswork, right? How do you come up with the idea that's going to solve customer needs? What companies often do is they come up with the ideas up front, and then they go test them with customers and see if they address any of their needs.

think, and then they go back [: 00:10:00

That a solution is going to address the top unmet needs in the market without knowing what those unmet needs are. And that's inefficient. So the way we do it, we come at it the other way around. We have to figure out, well, what are the top ten or so unmet needs in the market? And then can we create a solution that will address those top ten unmet needs?

What really makes this unique is what we focus on to identify unmet needs. Most people think that needs relate to a feature, like I need this feature, you know, put this button on my PC, right? Well, that would, of course, be a solution. And what we're trying to figure out is what are people trying to accomplish and how do they measure success?

eard the theory before, but. [: 00:11:00

So, for example, let's say your job is to prepare a meal for consumption for your family, and there are metrics that you're going to use along the way. Each step of the way, like you want to say, I want to minimize the time it takes to set up the portions on the plate, or I want to minimize the likelihood that I overcook the food or undercook the food.

I want to minimize the time it takes to cook the food evenly. There might be 50 or more metrics that you're using to judge if he's executed that job successfully. And so what we do up front is to talk to people about the job they're trying to get done. And how they measure success. So we're doing all this in problem space, not solution space, which is what makes it unique.

what makes us different, you [: 00:12:00

That's what we're doing here. We're spending a lot of time up front understanding exactly what the job is, where people struggle to get the job done, what dimensions, which needs are most underserved, using quantitative research. Then we can figure out now that we know the top 10 limit needs, we can come up with the right solutions.

I'll give you a quick example. I mean, if we've worked with Bosch to help them enter the North American Circulus home market, and they had a beat to Walton Makita. With a better product at the same price point in order to get shelf space at Lowe's and Home Depot. So, we applied our approach. We studied the job.

ple about what features they [: 00:13:00

For Or minimize the likelihood that the clump of extension cord gets stuck on the, on the board as I'm,

.: you know,

Tony Ulwick, CEO of Strategyn: making my cut. And we captured 72 different outcome statements. And once we have those, we then talk to hundreds of people with surveys and we ask them to tell us, of all those 72 different metrics, which ones are really important to you today and not well satisfying?

And we found that there were 14 unmet needs, and then we presented them to the Bosch engineering team, and it took them roughly 3 hours to conceptualize a brand new circular saw, what turned out to be the CS20 circular saw, that addressed all 14 unmet needs. And as they said, It's not as if we hadn't had these ideas before.

we've had thousands of ideas [: 00:14:00

Peter Bronstein: So I didn't mean to interrupt, but you know what, one of our biggest E's that was missed. It's basically the entire concept to you. It's called empathy.

If you are empathizing with your customers, you're going to find these answers. Correct.

Tony Ulwick, CEO of Strategyn: Yeah. I love thinking about it that way. You know, it's a different kind of empathy. It's not empathizing about the solution and what's wrong with it. It's empathizing about what they're trying to do. So just keeping in mind and.

Problem space instead of solution space is really the trick. You eventually come back to a solution space like the Bosch team did when they did their, you know, get together with their ideation effort. But you know, the way I like saying this is, you know, what are the chances that your product is going to address the top 14 unmet needs in the market, if you don't know what those 14 unmet needs are, and if you do the math on it, it's almost zero.

Jenn: Well,

[: 00:15:00

Peter Bronstein: So that's really interesting. And where did you come up with this theory that you have? Okay. You came up with this, the outcome driven innovation.

Process. Yeah. Where did you come up with that?

Tony Ulwick, CEO of Strategyn: Well, I have a background in mechanical engineering, and I've worked on manufacturing process lines, and that was my first job at IBM, and so I come at it with a mindset that says you can, uh, improve processes, like a manufacturing process, there's automation to get the job done faster, there's Statistical process control techniques that you use to make sure there's no variation in the process execution and there's Six Sigma thinking that you use to reduce defects.

s study the job that they're [: 00:16:00

And when that clicked in my head, then I started doing research to try to collect that type of information. And I can honestly say it took years to get it where it is today, but we keep evolving it to make it more efficient and really get at those key metrics that people use to measure success.

Peter Bronstein: So I know everyone has been anticipating and waiting.

Do you have a drum roll? Uh,

Jenn: I do.

Peter Bronstein: And the question was what product or service that you were involved in was the most successful product or service in all your years of business?

Tony Ulwick, CEO of Strategyn: That's a great question. You know, I've worked on lots of different products and we've had lots of successes, but the one I really liked the best was one of my first projects.

It was with a company called [: 00:17:00

Regain market share and regain their position. So I've worked on this project myself. This was one of the first ones I did in my company and we followed the process. We talked to an interventional cardiologist and we didn't ask him what makes a better angioplasty balloon. What we asked him is what job are they trying to get done, which is to restore blood flow to an artery.

And we broke down that job into its component parts and figured out how they measure success along each step of the way. And they would say things like, you know, we want to minimize the likelihood of entering a side vessel when traveling to the lesion, for example. Very technical terms, but this is how they measure success, right?

ictably with better results. [: 00:18:00

And then we held on for a year until they started releasing those products. Then the magic happens, so about a year later when they introduced 19 new products, they all became number one or two in the marketplace. The market share grew from 1 percent to over 20%, and they also reprioritized their resources to focus on addressing one particular unmet need, which was to minimize the likelihood of restenosis, which is the recurrence of the blockage.

said, well, we're working on [: 00:19:00

And that product turned out to be the HeartStent. And that product in itself became a billion dollar business in less than two years. Their stock went from 15 a share to over 108 per share. They were acquired by Cordis Corporation, and they were also smart enough to patent the drug eluting stent, which was part of this package that they came up with.

mensions and you can see the [: 00:20:00

And I seek to duplicate that type of success on every project that I work on.

Peter Bronstein: That sounds fabulous. My question is, as a person who came from IBM, who invented Watson, how is AI affecting your business?

Tony Ulwick, CEO of Strategyn: Oh, AI is like any other technology. It's very interesting. Like, there's been blockchain, there's been Visualization and these terms come along all the time.

I've been doing this for 30 plus years and it's always there's always some technology in the Internet of things, you name it, but no matter what technology that comes along, technologies can only be used to help customers get a job done better. So, the question is always where can we apply this new technology to help customers get this current job done better?

s and ask the questions, are [: 00:21:00

So that's how we look at it. We did the same thing with, um, digitalized farming. We conceptualized that idea 15 years ago before there was digitalized farming. What we found is that farmers, as they grow crops, they, there are about 50 needs that related to information flow, you know, making the right, having the right information at the right time to make the right decisions.

Thank you very much. And it has nothing to do with seed or fertilizer, right? That was a, a digitalized solution and our client became the first company to invest in that and they still lead the market today. So it's always the same answer, right? I understand what the new technology does and see if it can help get current jobs done better.

place various businesses and [: 00:22:00

Tony Ulwick, CEO of Strategyn: Well, certainly not yet, you know, because we've done exactly as you just said, we've, we use AI extensively and doing what we've already been doing better, right? So, you know, instead of going out and interviewing customers to start, we can get on a computer and query it in such a way that we could get a set of potential need statements.

But not one of my clients has ever said to us, Hey, why don't you just do an AI based solution? Don't bother talking to any customers, real customers. So I think that day is not here yet. Our clients feel much better knowing that you've been out talking to real people, and these are real statements that derive from, you know, their experience using products and services.

u know, a lot of that's done [: 00:23:00

Peter Bronstein: Wow. And now my co host, Tracy, has a whole bunch of questions. And she's been saying, Peter, I need to ask Peter, I need to ask Peter. I need to ask. Finally,

Traci DeForge: I get my voice out, which is never a challenge for me as well. I love everything that you've been sharing around your strategy and all of the success in client case studies that you've shared with us, but I'd love to dig in a little bit deeper into your personal.

t. What was also a challenge [: 00:24:00

Tony Ulwick, CEO of Strategyn: Well, no, there's always risk to start a business, as everybody knows, right?

And so the initial risk was having enough cash to sustain a down period, because I didn't know what to expect when I jumped out of IBM. IBM was very secure, you know, having those guardrails there and the paycheck coming in each month was quite nice. I was actually lucky enough to save up enough money in my last few years at IBM, where I actually practiced what I was going to do in my company.

In other words, I became an internal IBM consultant, I worked on projects in a number of different countries and got my footing. And so that really helped to mitigate the risk of leaving IBM and going through some long learning curve on how to become a consultant. And I really appreciated IBM for letting me do that.

now, it's pretty rare that a [: 00:25:00

And, you know, I wanted as few employees as possible. Uh, I wanted to work to scale the approach, the innovation process, and wanted to try it out in a number of different industries. And just work the product. In other words, just keep working my product, make sure it would work in different situations. I did that for about 10 years before I hit my next obstacle in growing.

he Harvard business review in: 2002

How do I train people? How do I bring process to what I do, internal process? So that was really the next obstacle, setting up those internal business processes on hiring the right people. How do I train those people and get them up to speed so that they're learning the approach and making it worthwhile?

So things like that, that came into play.

Traci DeForge: Yeah, I love that. You know, one of the things that you talked about, but I think it's so important to highlight is the fact that you immediately started outsourcing. I think that's such a big challenge, especially for a solopreneur, but then when you're coming from a corporate background like IBM into running your own business, it can be such a big leap for people because they're used to having quote unquote people for that.

They're used to having tech support. They're used to having janitorial services, admin, bookkeepers, like, you know, they're All of that has been essentially a luxury of, of the corporate work experience. And then all of a sudden you're the janitor, you're the tech support, you're the business development person.

[: 00:27:00

Tony Ulwick, CEO of Strategyn: Yeah, that's exactly right. You have to wear all those different hats and it's, it's nice wearing them because you get a good feel for what the business has to do in its entirety in order to be successful.

And then as you scale later on, you can work your way through that. But once you start taking on expense, you have to have the revenue to offset that. And the consulting firm, in many companies, revenue is not guaranteed. Like you don't know what's going to happen day in and day out. The fact that we've sustained, you know, the ups and downs of, you know, the economic situations and so on financially.

Disasters over the past 30 years. I consider myself very lucky and the way we've been able to navigate that is to never get too far ahead of ourselves in terms of, you know, hiring so many people that we are at risk. Like, if we can't sell, if we can't meet our sales numbers. That we,

.: you know,

tegyn: we'll end up in a bad [: 00:28:00

That's the name of the game. You just always want to stay out in front. Make sure that you're investing in. I would invest in more salespeople before I invest in more delivery people, for example.

Traci DeForge: Okay. Well, Penny, this is, as always, been incredibly insightful. You've been an amazing guest. If our audience wants to get in touch with you, what is the best way to reach out to continue the conversation?

Tony Ulwick, CEO of Strategyn: Yeah, so a number of ways. They could simply reach out to me at my email address, which is ovik, my last name, at stratagen. com. That's the company's name. They can also go to a website, um, if they want a free book, an e book or audio book, you can go to jobs to be done book. com, the typhons between jobs to be done and get the free book there.

and that's a great way to go [: 00:29:00

Traci DeForge: I love that. And so for those of you who may not have been able to capture that, um, and want to have that for future reference, don't forget that this radio show, the Ask Brian radio show, is also available as Ask Brian, the podcast.

So go and search wherever you get your favorite podcast, but be sure to search for Ask Brian, spelled A S K B R I E N, the podcast. So you had mentioned something that I actually wanted to ask you about. So you have a book, Jobs to be Done, Theory to Practice. It sounds like you're utilizing it as a lead generation tool, which is really smart.

What was the catalyst for you to publish and what was that process for you?

book out, which I did back in: 2005

So that was my first attempt at a [00:30:00] book. And then the one that you're referring to came out 2016. And the panelist there was just to offer an update in my thinking, and there were other books coming out at the time, I wanted to make sure it was clear, uh, my position in space and how we should differentiate, and as you mentioned, I published that book, self published the second book, and that gave me a lot of flexibility, because I can give away chapters, I can give away the book, which is what I do.

I created the audio version as well, and it's great for lead generation, you know, you're giving people a way to learn about the approach, and in exchange you have some email where you can reach people in a database, so. That's been the foundation of our marketing programs, you know, for all these years.

in: So you wrote this book in: 2005

Now we're at 2024, that's 8 years from the last book, and almost 20 years from the first book. So, give us your concept. What do customers want?

gyn: Oh, that's great, and I [: 00:31:00

But this one is really aimed at the practitioner who wants to take the approach and apply it in their job, in their personal life. So most of the content is written. We're going through the editing process right now, and we hope to have that book out early next year.

Peter Bronstein: It's a whole book, right? So can you just give us one thing, you know, like a hint or something about one thing that's now changed?

you had the banking crisis in: 2008

Tony Ulwick, CEO of Strategyn: And nearly every business, it's changed how people prioritize their needs, not because they have the option of living at home, [00:32:00] they've reprioritized their needs, right?

And so many companies went through this. The virtual experience is a better lifestyle for many people, right? In other words, The virtual lifestyle satisfies customer needs better than this. Let's go to work for 8 hours a day and sit in an office that in and of itself was a big change. And it's quite honestly a better solution for many people to lead more satisfying lives and incorporate their.

Lifestyle into their work and make it all come together in a more meaningful way for them So in that sense, that's one of the big takeaways that we've seen in the past 10 years or so

Peter Bronstein: Well, thank you very much. We've had a great show. We appreciate your time. We'll have you back on again Maybe after you come out with your book, when is that book coming out in january?

Tony Ulwick, CEO of Strategyn: Early next year it's gonna be self-published again, so I don't have a hard deadline.

ed and give us some insights [: 00:33:00

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