SoW 170 – Jeff DeGraff – Making Stone Soup: How to Jumpstart Innovation Teams

Jeff DeGraff joins the show today with Jason Hartman. DeGraff is a professor for the University of Michigan’s Ross Business school and has worked extensively in teaching innovation. Today, he joins the show to talk a little bit about his new book called, “Making Stone Soup: How to Jumpstart Innovation Teams” and how it can help you succeed in your business venture.

Key Takeaways:

1:35 – Companies are struggling with innovation on a team level and his new book, Making Stone Soup, talks about some of these challenges and how they can over come it.

4:25 – When you look at the history of innovation, most of these come from conflicting ideas or completely new hybrid ideas to try and make something better.

7:15 – Forget the 80/20 rule. Innovation uses the 20/80 rule.

11:25 – When you look at the patent timeline, it is more incremental than ever before. Jason asks, “Is it because everything has already been invented?”

15:00 – Remember, you’re catering to a completely new generation. Millennials experience the world in a completely different way now.

20:00 –  DeGraff breaks down the four important elements that make innovation happen.

23:00 – Tip: Focus on something that works. Do not focus on trying to fix something that’s broken.

27:00 – You can not start something new unless you give up something you’re currently doing. We simply can’t do it all at once.

28:15 – As you are trying to build or invent something for the first time, remember that you need multiple versions of it before you can truly succeed.

Tweetables

“The 80/20 rule is the kiss a death for innovation. The rule for Innovation is 20/80.” Tweet this!

“Millennials have a radically different social view of how society is constructed.” Tweet this!

“Never try and fix what doesn’t work, because things don’t work for a million reasons.” Tweet this!

Mentioned In This Episode:

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Jeff DeGraff’s boosk – Innovation You, Four Steps to Becoming New and Improved, Leading Innovation,  and Making Stone Soup: How to Jumpstart Innovation Teams.

Good to Great by James C. Collins

Transcription

Jason Hartman:

It’s my pleasure to welcome Jeff DeGraff to the show. He’s the creator of the Competing Values Framework and he’s known as the dean of innovation. He’s author of a new book titled, “Making Stone Soup: How to Jumpstart Innovation Teams.” And you may recognize his name from PBS and it’s a pleasure to welcome him to the show today. Jeff, how are you?

Jeff DeGraff:

Good. How are you Jason?

Jason:

Good. It’s good to talk to you and just to give our listeners a sense of geography, where are you located?

Jeff:

I’m in beautiful Ann Arbor, Michigan. Way up in the northern part of America surrounded by 95% of all the fresh water in our great country.

Jason:

Right, fantastic. Good stuff. Well, it’s definitely beautiful there in the summer time, no question about that. So tell us about the book and how you came to write Stone Soup.

Jeff:

Well, it seemed to me that one of the challenges that groups have is that they don’t know how to put together innovation  teams. They don’t know how to make innovation happen in a relatively way fast way. Now, I do a lot of work with very large companies. You know, General Electric, Apple, and Boeing and what I thought was, “I needed to write a book for everybody else.” The people who can’t really put a project in an innovation lab and they do it in a very visual, very simple way, and o do it with very simple steps that anyone can do.

Jason:

You got several books on Leading Innovation, Innovation You, Four Steps to Becoming New and Improved , and it’s a such an important area. No question about it. What can everybody else take from your work? You’ve worked with a Fortune 1000 for sure, you’ve been behind some big innovations there. Feel free to talk about those, but let’s try and bring it to the personal or small business level too.

Jeff:

Well, first of all there’s a few things that people get wrong about innovation. Innovation isn’t an amateur sport. That’s my favorite one where people say, “Well you know, anybody can do it. They read a book on creativity and all of a sudden they’re great innovators.” Well, of course it’s not true! If you’re trying to do something and you’re a small bio-tech or you’re somebody who’s a small restaurant, you have to actually know something about the industry, but here’s the key, innovation is not produced through alignment. It’s the one form of value that’s produce through constructive conflict.

Innovation is the result of ideas that don’t necessarily agree that force hybrid-ideas. Now another big challenge that particularly smaller organizations have on innovation is that they gather too much data. Here’s the challenge, break through innovations happen in the future for which we have no data now. Excessive data gather is form of resistance. I bet your listeners have been to the meeting about the meeting or have seen the plan about the plan and they get stuck in that cycle.

We’re going to have to do a couple of things to get things going. First of all, we’re going to have to sort of avoiding conflict, we have to create conflict in a  constructive way. Instead of trying to plan our way to the future, we’re going to have to experiment our way to the future. Kind of like a venture capitalist does. Instead of betting on everyone, we’re going to have bet on a few highly practiced people who can actually move ideation all the way to commercialization, whether it’s a product, service, or solutions.

These are common things. One of the things that always help people is the key idea for innovation under any scenario, no matter how large your company is, if they get momentum. Momentum is key. Things take off with momentum. We can talk about how you actually can get momentum and how to think about where to stage the innovation, beginning the big mow is key.

Jason:

The big mow is mow is the key to business in general. That momentum is so important. The big mow. I love it. How do we get there? How do we start that momentum? In Good to Great, Collins talks about it as the fly wheel. Starting it is the hardest part and I love what you said too about this is created out of conflicted, on conflicting ideas. It is created out of conflicting people?

Jeff:

It is and in fact there’s a lot of research that we’ve been looking at since the 1940s and it turns out there’s about 30 places in the entire planet that produce about 80% of the intellectual property. It creates the gross domestic product of this planet, of humanity. When we look at what those places have in common, what they have in common is not in the culture or taxation, it’s not the availability in funding, it’s not a lot of stuff that politicians love that you could talk about, it’s none of that.

What it is is that they’re highly diverse areas. What we believe is the reason that they’re highly diverse and that they have this coalition to innovation is this diversity. People who don’t believe the same things, maybe don’t eat dog food, don’t go to the same places, they have different ideas. When these ideas collide in a constructive way, this is key, constructive. It produces these hybrids.

Now, in order to get momentum, what you need is a little match for this tinder, so what we also find in these highly diverse places are people who exhibit what we call self authorizing behavior or meaning ownership. I want to give you a great example, very early in my career I was an adviser in the early 1980s to Apple for what was called the applied integrated systems. You have to remember there’s no internet yet. We were well before a decade before the internet and I’m a very young PhD in artificial intelligence and I’m trying to provide some advice here.

One of the things I learned from Apple early one and I think Steve Jobs really got right was he didn’t bet on process at all. There wasn’t really any great process. What he bet on were the self-authorizing leaders. He called them Apple Fellows. The exhibit-ist behavior where they could take an idea, develop ownership for it, and navigate through this conflict, through this system, like an ambassador speaking all the languages where you’ve got the vision and you’re connecting it with the process and you’ve got the values connecting it to the goals. These people were amazing at that.

I want you to think about this like maybe a movie that maybe some of your listeners have seen. I want you to think about this like money ball. Remember the movie Moneyball? Where they’re kind of…the Oakland As general manage Billy Beane is kind of messing with the formula and he’s continually trying to find what the right formula is. He is someone that’s exhibiting self-authorizing behavior. Of course, eventually, they get it right, so that’s the first thing.

The second thing is forget the 80/20 rule. The 80/20 rule is the kiss a death for innovation. That’s for effectively wonks. Innovation, the rule is the 20/80 rule and it goes like this, it’s much easier to change 20% of your organization 80% than it is to change 80% of your organization 20% and here’s why – If you threw a bell curve, Jason if you’ve looked at bell curves, sort of imagine a bell curve.

At one end of the bell curve you have a crisis; thing about people when they get into crisis you know, they get a problem drinking, they lose their job, or they get a divorce. Why would people change when they’re in crisis? And the answer is simple, because the reward of staying where you’re at and the risk of trying something radical new is reversed. Now that’s not just true for individuals. I want you to remember. In 1997, Apple was trading below $5 a share. The Wall Street Journal said Apple was dead. The same is true for people, the same is true for small companies, the same is true for big companies, right.

The other end of the bell curve is one a company or a person is on a roll, they’re in love, they get a promotion, they get married, something great has happened to them. It turns around again. This is what we’d call risk capital. The risk of trying something radically new and the reward it’s favorite at is reversed. Now, here’s the mistake people make, they try and launch the innovation right at the middle of the organization which is designed to maintain its equilibrium. It’s designed to get rid of deviants and variation.

Innovation moves from the outside in, not from the inside out, so now we’ve got self-thought rising behavior in a few individuals, gaining momentum. We’re launching from the outside in, where resistance is going to be lower, and finally, you wanna fail earlier. You wanna fail often and you wanna fail off Broadway. I’ll give you a real story…

Jason:

Fail off Broadway. Yeah, I like that. *Laughter*.

Jeff:

I worked on a project many years ago for Coca Cola. It was a project called C2 and the project wasn’t selling very well. It’s the greatest marketing organization, in my opinion, in the world and they have some of the greatest products in the world, but they were having a little trouble with this product. One of the things that we did was we moved the product across the street to where we could work on it and it was kind of hard for people to look over our shoulders and figure out what we were doing wrong, and  we launched the product in many places that were very hard to see in various version. Version 1, version 2, version 3, some versions had different packaging, some versions had sweeteners in them, etc.

What was interesting about this was very quickly off Broadway, where people can’t see an inclosure show, we begin to figure out what people like and of course, when we brought the product back, we repackaged the product. The product was called Coke Zero. Now we had real information because we didn’t fail on Broadway, we failed in New Haven where the critics were watching us. We were able to make adjustments to our show to make it work.

Those are three things right off the bat that anybody can do to get momentum.

Jason:

Really it seems like one of the issues here with innovation is the efficiency of the modern corporation, the software, the systems, the business rules, the business processes. They’re stifling to innovation, aren’t they?

Jeff:

They are.

Jason:

They’re really contrary. Like you said, the 80/20 rule, that’s for the efficiency wads, that’s for the guys and the process engineers, but if want to create something new, we can’t be working with those people and those systems, right?

Jeff:

Well, we can as long as those systems follow the radical innovation. They what we call the ‘Ask’ position. Most of what we take to be innovation systems, stage gating systems, full-management systems are things that happen after ideation and the development of…if you for the lack of a better term, the eureka idea. The problem is that we put them in the wrong order.

Jason:

Yeah, what is stage gating?

Jeff:

Stage gating means that typically when somebody comes up with an idea, there’s a suggestion program or an ideation part, then there’s the business plan, then it goes to manufacturability, and at the very end you figure out how to market it and make a zillion dollars on it. But the way that system is designed, most innovation systems in organizations that are taught to spend very little money at the beginning and at the very end spend all of your money when you’ve worked out all the risk. Of course, the problem Jason, when you’ve worked out all the risk, you’ve also worked out the variation or all the innovation.

Jason:

Yeah.

Jeff:

So what happened is when we looked at patents applied for, this is astounding, America in the past 10 years, and there’s been a lot written about this, we have a lot more patents in the past and the patents are much more incremental than they were in the previous decade. We believe the reason we’re losing our competitiveness in innovation is that we put all these innovations in to these high density fool-proof systems and what’s that done is eliminates the real variation, the alternative way of doing, the blind spot, the non-dominate way of doing it.

Jason:

I sort of wonder though, that reminds me, the head of the patent office is 1890, of course you know this quote that I’m about to say, and I wonder if the reason the patents are more incremental now because as he said in the 1800s, “Everything has already been invented.” *Laughter*.

Jeff:

Some people say that, but boy I don’t believe that for a second. In fact, I believe we are on the beginning of something radical, but very different than what a lot of people write about it the popular press. Let me talk about a little bit about digital natives and digital immigrants. Here’s what’s going on, I’m a baby boomer. I worked on artificial intelligence on applied integrated systems in the 1980s. I worked, like a lot of people, on what would become the Internet.

I worked at the school because when I was a junior professor when SMS was being developed. Short Message Service, right. It was originally developed so line engineers could order parts from other line engineers while there were on the top of telephone polls. It never occurred to anybody in my generation, I believe, that young people would be Twittering with 140 characters. They’d be doing the things that they would do because of this one fundamental social thing that we didn’t anticipate, which is digital natives. These are people that were born between 1990 and now, you know, people born in the world of technology have a horizontal view of the world.

What I mean by that is, they’ve opted out of our big institutions, so let me give you some facts your listeners might be interested in. Now, I’m not trying to be controversial, I’m trying to lay out some ground work here and that is, did you know that over half of the live births to women under the age of 30, last year for the first time, over half are outside of marriage? Young people are not marrying. Did you know that the number 1 job category that young people want to belong to under 30 are what are called NGOs. They’re Non Government Organizations. They’re not for profit.

Young people have opted out of a capitalist system, which is alarming if you’re a business professor who’s been married for 20 some years and finally, the fastest growing religious segment between 2000 and 2010 for people under 30 is atheism. So what we’ve got is we’ve got young people who don’t believe in the institutions that my generation created, but they believe in each other.

The great study from the PEW research, which looked at these millennials and how they communicate, it is quite literally, they text each other more than they talk. They collaborative infinity more than we do. They don’t acknowledge boundaries. They have portfolio lives. They have a radically different social view of how society is constructed. They don’t see race the same way. They don’t see nationality the same way. What’s happening is happening I think that is enormous in innovation and that we’re starting to see not so much the development of radical technologies, although we are seeing some of that, what we are seeing is the application of these technologies in ways that we could not have imagined 20 years ago and that’s the fundamental shift.

They’re not going to work like my generation, they’re not going to buy like my generation, they’re not going to live like my generation. I don’t think most of your listeners out there are prepared for it. You can be judgmental about it, you can say, “Well, I don’t this.” Whether you like it or not, this is what is happening with your people and our voices are going to get softer and theirs are going to get louder. The innovation of the world will pass to them.

Jason:

So can you just elaborate on the horizontal, they see the world in a horizontal way. I mean, contrast that with what..How does a gen x or a baby boomer see it if that’s the way gen y sees it?

Jeff:

A baby boomer sees institutions as opportunities to reform them and move up to them, so we believe in education. We’re the most educated, we’re the most educated group of the history of the world. Baby boomers. Remember our parents, 2% of our parent’s generation had a college education. It completely changes in my generation. With a whole idea of moving up in the corporation, the whole idea of entrepreneurship is to build, take a small a company, and build it into that bold bracket huge company.

We had a student here at Michigan, a couple of decades ago. When I was starting out, Larry Page created this little company called Google and you know, the idea of boomers and x-ers is you’re going to build this into a colossus, into something bigger. We own bigger houses. This is our generation.

This next generation has opted out of that hierarch of Goldberg way of doing things. There’s probably a lot of good social reasons, they haven’t had the opportunities that we’ve had, maybe they’ve seen the failures of our generation, but they’ve taken a very different track. They’re guided by their values, horizontally, where we’re guided by our goals, vertically.

Jason:

So digital natives are gen y and everybody else is a digital immigrant, right?

Jeff:

Basically, yes.

Jason:

Very interesting. In your long work with PBS, you brought a lot of this down, Jeff, to the personal level. I believe that is what your book Innovation You is about is the more personal side of this. Can you talk about how we can use this in our individuals lives or even in the small business solopreneur life as well.

Jeff:

Absolutely. It’s very interesting. Let me tell how the book came about. I think it’ll be interesting. I was writing a book for Harvard Business School Press and it was one of the classic, you know, I’m a business school professor for 25 years, and it was one of those classics, “Let me show you all the kind of complicated stuff that we do to measure innovation and let’s show you what the federal reserve does with their work.” etc, but when the crash of 2008 came, people that I had had as students and people that I had known in professional capacity who should never have ever been unemployed were all of a sudden unemployed.

I was astounded at these brilliant people had trouble applying the same lessons that they had lend their great businesses with to their own lives, so I wrote this book with the assumption or under the idea that what advice would you give yourself and it came down to basically this. Just a few things. Number 1, there are four things that you really need to be able to do in order to make innovation happen and I actually write about it also in Making Stone Soup only I write this on how to jump start teams and small companies. In Innovation You it’s about what you do personally and Making Stone Soup it’s about how to do this as a team in a company, in a small company.

The first thing you have to do is you have to have a high quality target. You get those people who say, “Well, I’m having trouble with my life, so what I’m going to do is imagine a completely different live.” and there’s all that kind of new age stuff out there that you can be anything you want to be, I call it trying to boil the ocean and trying to abstract gold. It’s a formula for failure, because it’s beyond what you’re capable of doing. In my favorite example, look at things like American Idol auditions. People caterwaul, they end up getting 5 million hits on YouTube, because people are making fun of them because they’ve overplayed their hand.

Well the other side of that is people sort of ticker with the dial. They think that they’re higher quality targeted doing slightly different. That’s not what you want to do. What you want to do is look at your capabilities, you want to have a sense of destiny and long term goals, you want that sense of positive affirmation, but you also want to take it step by step, by step, so it’s kind of like losing weight or lifting weights or getting an education. You know, you take Algebra, before you take Geometry, before you take Trigonometry, and so on and so forth.

The idea of a high quality target is something that just a little bit beyond what you can achieve now, because remember, what we’re trying to do is get momentum. We’re trying to get first the momentum, so this is the person who’s trying to build their business, so rather than trying to triple the income of your business this year, what you really want to do in the next 90 days see if you can increase your volume by 5%. Something that you can achieved.

The second step, which people have in their lives, you want to surround yourself with deep and diverse domain experts. This is not amateur hour. If you’re trying to build a business, what you really want to do is talk to people who built the business. Here’s the key, you don’t want align yourself, what you want to do is you want to create diversity. Remember, we want conflict.

I want to tell you why that’s so important. What destroys small businesses than anything is that they don’t look in their blind spots. Maybe it’s a regulation that they didn’t get on top of, maybe they couldn’t manage their cash flow; maybe they didn’t see a disruptive technology, maybe they didn’t see a large or mid-calf company move down in their space. It’s the same with individuals.

You don’t have to be a PhD or some kind of a person that’s built a mega company, it might be that you’re trying to be a parent what you wanna do is talk to a single parent, talk to somebody that’s got 5 kids, talk to maybe a same-sex couple. Whatever it is, try and get a different opinion so that you can actually see the range of options.

Now the third thing you want to do is take multiple shots on goals. This is the part, I guess, the hardest part for people, because people want effortless superiority. You see this when people try to quit smoking or lose weight, they’ll be going along really well for let’s say a couple of months and then something will go wrong, some crisis will happen with family, they’ll have the binge weekend or whatever it is, and most of those people are derailed.

They think everything is lost because a couple of days went wrong. In people who are successful they will tell you, “No.” What you wanna do then is try another track, so maybe eating this would work for you or maybe it’s going to the gym at this time that works for you, but there’s a lot of fiddling around here. The reason is what you’re trying to do is trying to accelerate the failure cycle.

Now, this is very important. This is the most important thing. Innovation is not born from success, it’s born from failure, because all learning is developmental. If you don’t believe that, have your listeners take a piece of paper and draw a picture of their spouse, and anybody can tell at what they age they stopped learning to draw. Speak a foreign language, play an instrument, it doesn’t matter what whether you’re 8 or 80, it’s developmental. You got to learn to do it. Innovation is about what you don’t know how to do now, so if you don’t take these multiple shots on goals, you’re never going to get any smarter. You have to go through the failure cycle and what innovations do is that they don’t avoid it. They accelerate it. That’s what venture capitalists do, that’s what the burn rate is. The burn rate is I’ve hedge my portfolio, diversified it, I’ve turned it over to try and find what really works, what therapies are really going to cure that disease.

The final step, the fourth step, is you have to learn from your experience and experiment.

Jason:

Okay, before you go on and talk about the fourth step. On the accelerating failure, the idea is to fail quickly, learn from the failure, and apply what you’ve learned?

Jeff:

Right.

Jason:

And I mean fail fast, because then…

Jeff:

Fail early, fail often, and you wanna fail off Broadway. Don’t fail in front of big customers, don’t spend a lot of money or time. If you do that, then there’s a real downside to failure and you can’t fail in things you can’t…you know, you’re trying a new surgical procedure. You don’t want to fail. You bringing an aircraft back down, you don’t wanna fail. There are ways to that with larger projects.

The final step is to learn from experience and experiment. I’m just always amazing at people who have failed, but don’t seem to get any smarter. They don’t sit down and talk about what worked and what didn’t work. I have a friend who’s been married several times and he was calling me the other day and was talking about..he’s on his fifth marriage. He’s talking about that he’s having problems.

I keep emphasizing to him. You know, maybe it’s not the lady, maybe it’s you. Maybe you need to sit down with yourself and talk about what doesn’t work and why, what does work and why. Incidentally, to all of your listeners, never try and fix what doesn’t work, because things don’t work for a million reasons. Try and build on what does work, then you want to ask yourself, “What should I stop doing or do less of?” Just like if you’re holding a portfolio of stocks. What should I start or do more of? What should I hold?

Now, again, you wanna stop before you start and the reason is people don’t have capability anymore. We don’t have think time. This is what you might, Jason, about the whole idea of having soap time to work on something. Until you’re willing to stop something, you’re not going to have the capacity to start something.

I was coming back from Shanghai the other day on a plane and the lady next to me was a lawyer and she was telling me about a novel she wants to write. I said, “That sounds great. You know, it’s a great idea.” then I said, “How’s it going?” She said, “I haven’t started it yet.” I said, “Well, how many years have you had this idea?” She said. “About 20. I’m going to write it when I retire.” And I just stopped for a minute. I was very polite to her, but I said, “It doesn’t work that way.”

I’ve written so many books. I said, “It doesn’t work that way.” Writers write. If you’re going to write a novel, you’re going to ever, ever have more time. Ever. Nature course of action, it’s going to fill up your life. What you have to do is start writing now. Then she said, “I don’t have time to write now.” And I said, “That’s why you have to stop some things,” I said, “What are you willing to stop?” And she said, “Well, I’m not really willing to stop anything right now.” and my response, “That’s why you’re not moving on your novel.”

Right? That’s the real cost that your listeners need to get. Everything costs something. Anybody tells you different is trying to sell you something. So what are you willing to stop? Before you start something, make sure you have head time, you have resources, you have money, all the stuff you need. And finally, develop some simple rules about your life. I love Teddy Roosevelt. Teddy Roosevelt was filled with these. Things like, “Do what you can with what you have where you are.” You had a million of these.

Once you go on through the failure cycle, you should be smarter so that the next time you come up with a high quality target, so now you’re on version 2 of your diet. you’re version 2 of your education, you’re version 2 of quitting smoking, whatever it is, you’re that much smarter. The same is true for making stone soup, when you’re trying to create an innovation, when you’re trying to launch an innovation initiative in your small company. You’re not going to get it right on the first version.

If you got it right on the first time out, then your innovation is incredibly incremental or you’re insanely lucky. If you’re insanely lucky, your luck will run out soon or later. If it’s incremental, somebody else isn’t playing it incremental and they will pass you by in the near future. The notion is you create your plan, your launch your team, your create your personal idea with the concept of version-ing that this is version 1.0, there will be a version 2.0, and then so on and so for.

Jason:

As you’re talking, you just remind me over and over again and you’ve driven the point home for very well that life is an iterative process and the lean start-up kind of concept there is great. You do version 1, you look at feedback, you improve it, and you do version 2. Like the lady on the plane that wants to write the novel for 20 years, so many people, myself included many times, I notice this behavior in this thinking at least, and well it turns into behavior unfortunately. I’m trying to get all the stars to align before doing something and the people who really get on in the world and have success, they just kinda jumped in and do stuff imperfectly and just do another thing after that.

Jeff:

Can you imagine, I teach at one of the great research universities of the world. It’s always ranked in the top 20 research universities on the planet. The biggest problem I see in junior faculty is that I try and have them over come is effortless superiority.

Jason:

Effortless superiority? Tell us..

Jeff:

It doesn’t work that way. We all learned..there was always two types of parents on the playground when I grew up, the one that always told the child not to do something and then like, my dad who was always like, “Hurt didn’t it? Ha ha! Rub dirt on it.” Which child learned faster? It was always the second child because they went through that cycle. So we think we’re helping people by saving them from the pain of failure, but imagine if all your dreams came true when you were 16. You know, you married that girl, you got that car, you had that job, would you be happy at 36 with that life?

Jason:

Yeah, you’d be bored by then.

Jeff:

It would be terrible. The great thing about being imperfect is that it pulls us forward. Think about one of my years a Benjamin Franklin, you know a penniless runaway. A guy who starts out as an entrepreneur and then he becomes a syndicate newspaper editor, and then he invents a bunch of stuff, then he creates a library system, but what pulls Benjamin Franklin forward was that at every given turn, he feels that there is more to do. It isn’t that kind of a neat part of life that there’s growing that goes on? That there’s more to do?

Jason:

Oh yes, absolutely. Wonderful.

Jeff:

I think that’s why people innovate. I think people innovate because they want to see what else there is out there. I just really want to encourage people to grow that’s why we’re here.

Jason:

Great point, great points. Well, Jeff give out your website and of course, the books are on amazon with great reviews. Give out any resources you’d like people to have.

Jeff:

Well, I’d just say three things. Making Stone Soup, I’m very proud of it. If you got a team, you’re trying to jumpstart a team, I’m taking all the stuff I learned, the great big things, and I’m giving it to people who don’t have that resource in a very simple way. It’s fill with assessments and videos, how to thing, very inexpensive, really like the way that book was done.

If you’re interested in my work go to JeffDeGraff.com. It’s filled with free stuff. No one will ever bother you. And finally, if you’re interested in innovation and particularly how it relates to life. Leading innovation in life in general, I would recommend that your listeners follow me. I’m one of the original 100 LinkedIn writers. One of the original influences on LinkedIn, so Jeff DeGraff Innovation on LinkedIn.

Jason:

Thanks so much for joining us. That’s Jeff DeGraff everybody and check out his websites and his books. We just really learned a lot today, so that’s for joining us Jeff.

Jeff:

Thanks for having me Jason. I appreciate it.