A long and checkered career as people say, one of the things that were unusual is I got to spend 20 years in two 10 year stints at Price Water House Coopers, which, of course, is a global super mega company, and I also spent the other 20, 30 years of my career as an entrepreneur, having started five different businesses. So I start different Venture backed firms, so I'm going backward and going back and forth. When I left college, went to work for a small start-up. A long time ago, it got acquired by Price Water house. I was the first chief information officer of Price Water House, spent 10 years there, running technology. Then I started a couple of firms, went back to Price Waterhouse, with the chief innovation officer. Then I left them and started another company, and now I'm sort of retired. So I have a lot of experiences and a lot of insights into the differences between working for super large companies as well as, 5 and 10% startups and how they grow.

I was the first chief innovation officer of Price Water House Coopers, and that responsibility was really simple. So Price Water House Coopers is I'm sure all of you know, is a mega-company, offices in 100 countries, all the good stuff. But one of the things that I learned this is sort of late in my career. I've spent a lot of time early in my career doing research and development. So trying to invent innovation, if you will, in this sort of traditional sense. I came to realize that that wasn't very scalable, in other words, you can create a slower and decentered, but it can have limited impact and the real opportunity was, how do you unlock the inherent creativity of all of your employees? When you have a hundred thousand, two hundred thousand people working for you, there are enormous numbers of really bright, smart people with incredible ideas. If you could somehow harness them, get them to drive your business forward. The problem is, in a really big company, you drive that idea of innovation out of young people. The way I describe it is, I said I would go into a meeting with young kids who just joined. And if you've started your career at Price Water House Coopers, you're really excited, right? You hit the jackpot, you're there, you're working for one of the top firms, and their eyes, they are on fire, right. They had ideas and they're excited, we're going to do this, we're going to change the world. You come back, six months or a year later and we've managed to totally dim that light. That's not just true at Price Water House, its sort of the problem of all big companies. My goal as the chief innovation officer was, how do you reignite that passion? How do you get people re-excited about helping make a change when all it's happened to them in their careers is they're beat down and people saying, "Hey, kids, stop bothering me with your crazy ideas". So that's what my goal was at Price Water House Coopers was could we unlock that creativity again and reignite that.

I think the important thing is my focus was internal. I was not a consultant, I was not out there serving clients. I was serving the firm itself. My client was the business and helping get all of these people who work for us, more excited about sharing your ideas and how would we do that? I'll talk a minute about how we tried to do that with some of the real insights which I think are applicable in any business you're in. So who I worked with was, of course, senior management of the firm. I worked for the chairman of the firm, but more importantly, we focused on the various lines of business leaders and tried to help them with their problems. What I realized, the biggest mistake you could make in the innovation business, if you're in a company is having a suggestion box, where people sort of giving unsolicited ideas. It is the single worst mistake you can make, and the reason for this is nobody wants them. Nobody's interested in those ideas that are unsolicited. Not that the business doesn't have problems but unsolicited ideas are distractions and the way to think about that and why this is so important is that in any normal business, everybody is overworked. It doesn't matter whether you're in a small company or a big company. Everybody thinks they got too much to do. You go when you ask anybody. What's your biggest problem? I don't have enough time to do all of the things I have to do between doing your job and training and mentoring people and writing reports. You're always at a 110% capacity. So when somebody comes to you with some crazy idea, you don't have time because you're already at a 110% and essentially your job is to do all of those things in that 110%. That's what you're rewarded for. That's what you get paid for. And so when someone comes to you and says, I've got this idea over here and you go, does that help me with my job directly, and the answer is no. And so that's why people don't, that's what happens with these unsolicited suggestions. So what I did is the most effective way of dealing with that particular problem is, you go to business leaders, you're asking a simple question. You say, Hey, what problems keep you up at night? What are you worried about that you need new thinking about and you use those questions to solicit ideas. So instead of an open innovation box, you have a solicited idea box. So in other words, what you do is you go out to people and say, Hey, here's a problem, do you have ideas about how to solve this problem and then when ideas come in and you go to the business leader, and you say, I got 10 ideas for you about the problem that's keeping you up at night, all of a sudden they're a whole lot more interested in talking to you. And so this is a really important sort of insight to think about. Your job is to help your boss if you will, solve their problems. If you can articulate your ideas about change in the context of solving their problems, they'll be a lot more receptive to you.