Kris Safarova  01:05

Welcome to the Strategy Skills podcast. I’m your host, Kris Safarova, and our podcast sponsor today is StrategyTraining.com. If you want to strengthen your strategy skills, you can get the Overall Approach Used in Well-Managed Strategy Studies. It’s a free download, and you can get it at firmsonsulting.com/overallapproach. You can also get McKinsey and BCG-winning resume, which is a resume that got offers from both of those firms. And it’s a great example to look at if you’re currently updating your resume, regardless of your level within the current organization you’re working at. You can get that at firmsconsulting.com/resumePDF. And lastly, you can get a copy of one of our books. It’s called Nine Leaders in Action. It’s a co-authored book with some of our amazing listeners clients. And you can get it at firmsconsulting.com/gift. And today, we have with us a very special guest, Leslie Grandy, who has spent more than 25 years leading global product teams at Apple, Amazon, Best Buy and T Mobile, and is currently the lead executive in residence for the product management leadership accelerator at the University of Washington. Leslie, welcome. Very nice to meet you as well. So you began in the film industry and shifted technology. What personal or professional pivot made that transition successful for you?

Leslie Grandy  02:34

It’s a great question, because it wasn’t a planned pivot. I knew I wanted to leave the film industry. After 13 years, I’d accomplished a lot of what I had set out to do. I’d become a member of the Directors Guild of America. I’d worked with a list directors like James Cameron and Brian De Palma, but I was moving into my lifestyle and of a family and wanting more work life balance, and the film industry really wasn’t the place to to achieve that. And so I went back to business school because I realized most of my experience didn’t mean anything to most of the hiring managers I spoke with, because they didn’t know what my work was or what skills it entailed to do my work on a film set. And so I went back to the University of Washington to get my MBA, and I actually entered as an environmental management student, thinking that’s the career that I would want to explore. But when I got into school, I actually took a database class, and I just fell in love with it and technology, and so I looked for an internship in a tech company in Seattle in the 90s. There was limited options, but there were, you know, Microsoft and Amazon, or there were some startups, and so I went the route of working with a startup because it gave me a little bit more opportunity to learn the whole curve of building a business, and also because the person who hired me there actually appreciated my film industry. He had worked in Los Angeles and worked in advertising, and had a lot more empathy for the skills that I probably brought to the table. And he had the perfect project for me, which was to build the IPO roadshow film for Vizio Corp, which was the company that did drawing and diagramming software back in the 90s. And so I went out and spoke to customers and created this film with a production company as my internship. So it made the perfect pivot happen without actually saying I’m going to go find that kind of a job and then intentionally pivot to technology once I’m in one of those kind of marketing or media type jobs, I just happened to find the right person to appreciate what I brought to the table at a right at the right time for that company to have a project that would leverage my skills.

Kris Safarova  04:46

Such a great example where you were able to enter a field that is difficult to enter with the right person who appreciated exactly what you had that other people didn’t have.

Leslie Grandy  04:55

Yeah, exactly. That’s exactly it.

Kris Safarova  04:59

Before we move forward, in the way from film industry, I wanted to ask you if you could share some of the key lessons from that time of your life.

Leslie Grandy  05:06

Oh, yeah, that’s a great question. I love that question because I think it it bears understanding that even if you don’t have a traditional background, skills are re applicable, and understanding what the skills are that you have it being you know when you’re making that kind of pivot, even as a person who’s self aware, knowing what you bring to the table helps you tell your story better. So it’s a great question, because what I realized about the film industry experiences is basically three things. One, you got to grind it out. It doesn’t come to you. You got to work really hard to make it happen, and you have to have that intrinsic motivation to continue, even when it looks like failure is obvious. You just have to keep pushing and making moves and meeting people and trying different types of assignments and different types of communities, whether it’s commercials or television shows or filmmaking, those are all different kinds of communities in the film industry. You have to have that, that intrinsic motivation to grind it out. You have to have the grit. That was the first thing, and and I never wasn’t working. And I only made it into the directors field because I had enough days to qualify. And that all came from grit, just pounding it out every day on the sidewalk, meeting new people. The second thing I think it created was flexibility. No two days on a film set are the same. They just aren’t they. You could have the same number of people in the same goal that you had the day before. But stuff happens. Things break. People get sick, you know. You know, acts of God occur. You know, all of a sudden there’s a power outage because of a electrical storm somewhere. You just have to be resilient and flexible to take with what you have and move forward with it, because you have so many people depending on the outcome, and there’s so many people involved in getting to the outcome that you don’t have really a lot of time to woe is me in that moment, right? You just kind of have to keep up the good fight and look past that momentary obstacle and be flexible around how to get past the obstacle. So flexibility was the second thing, I would say. And then the third thing that really came out in my understanding of what that experience brought me, was my capacity to believe in my problem solving skills. When you’re on a film set, you’re going to see problems you’ve never seen before, or you’re going to be asked to do something you hadn’t done before. I had to secure and decommissioned aircraft carrier to shoot a Kleenex commercial. I don’t know what, in my experience, would tell me how to do that. So you just have to believe in yourself that you can go figure stuff out, that you can find the path forward because you have enough resolve, but also enough faith in your problem solving abilities, that you can look past the that one sounds hard and just dive into, hey, that one sounds hard. Let me go figure it out. And so I think that was the third piece of the puzzle for me, is that if I haven’t seen the problem before. It doesn’t, it doesn’t seem daunting to me. It seems fun, it seems inspiring to go figure it out. It’s it’s the path I like in zero to one products. So that was another part of the natural transition. A lot of people don’t like the ambiguity or the lack of data to tell them what to do. I’m really comfortable in that state, and that came from the film industry, and my ability to live in that, I’ll go figure out how to do this mindset and be comfortable and excited by it, I realized was a special skill as well.

Kris Safarova  08:30

And was there something that you didn’t expect about the film industry, something that really surprised you?

Leslie Grandy  08:36

I think it was pretty much like I knew it would be. But I think if I were to say anything, it was a little surprising to me that I was able to have a career because I had no connections. I was not a Nepo baby. I didn’t know people. I didn’t have an obvious door open for me. I didn’t have a set of introductions that I entered Los Angeles with to meet people I all of it was ground zero, and I am surprised that I was able to make the call when I left, that I knew what I was leaving, because I actually had achieved things so many people go to LA and don’t get to achieve the things they set out to do, not because they’re not talented, but because maybe they’re afraid, right, of knocking on A door cold or presenting someone themselves in a situation they’ve never done before, and that never made me afraid. And so I think that skill working in my advantage was a surprise, because I didn’t really expect to be in the Director’s Guild. I didn’t say that’s my goal, and I’m going to get enough days together. It just organically happened through the process, and I think that surprised me, that I was able to achieve those things and get a career that I could actually build upon, as opposed to waiting for that starting moment which a lot of people who entered the film industry struggle with.

Kris Safarova  09:53

Maybe you can share with us, if you feel comfortable, how did you get your foot in the door?

Leslie Grandy  09:59

Yeah, it’s a great, it’s a funny question. Because for me, it’s funny in that knowing you didn’t know anybody, there had to be some story you could tell that would make someone want to talk to you, or something that you could say. And the very first job that I got was because the one thing you learn in film school is a process at the time called sinking dailies, where the film and the audio are shot differently. They’re shot on different equipment, and they’re shot at different speeds, and then you have to take the film and the tape, and you kind of have to marry them so that people’s voices are heard when their lips move right, like you have to actually sync it up. And that was a skill I learned in school, so I was able to actually leverage that, almost like a trade. And because I had gone to school in Chicago. I actually knocked on the door of a company who was headquartered in Chicago but also had a Los Angeles office. And I said, Hey, I’m from Chicago. I know you folks from Chicago. I can do this kind of low level sinking daily’s job, which I know is a job that not a lot of people want to do. And I think the fact that I showed up with the Chicago connection, and this trade skill that I recognized was leverageable, I gave them a reason to hire me that showed I could contribute, that I had some value to offer, and that my background was at least familiar to them, that I didn’t seem like I was lying Like I knew enough about things to make it seem like, Oh, she seems credible, and I bet she could do this work. And so I think that’s what opened the door, is I just sort of invented a story of why they should care.

Kris Safarova  11:32

And it is similar to how you entered the tech world. You’ve found something where there’s a fit.

Leslie Grandy  11:37

Yeah, exactly. And I think a lot of this, I mean, Kris, I think a lot of people struggle with self awareness and really understanding what they have and how to package what they have. I think they look so much to be the thing other people want that they don’t always tell their strongest story. And I think when you have nothing to go in with, you’ve got to look inward at what do you have to offer? Some money. So they want to give you that opportunity so that there’s a benefit for them, helping you get that foot in the door. You know, you can hope for the kindness of strangers, but that’s not an easy way to build a career. And I think knowing what you bring to the table and being able to articulate it in a way that looks like value, I think, is a really important skill for a lot of people to develop, because I think some people just aren’t as able to highlight what their strengths are, what their superpowers are. Even when they don’t have a long work history, they still have something. Maybe they’re a great organizer for their family, and they plan amazing family reunions, right? Like, what? How do you spin what you’re good at into something somebody would value? Very true.

Kris Safarova  12:41

So you had an incredible career up to date. Thank you so much for writing the book and sharing your knowledge. This is very, very needed in the world. One of the companies you worked for was Apple, and you were actually interviewed by Steve Jobs. I was wondering what stood out to you, not just about maybe his questions, which is also interesting, but about how he listened, anything unusual, maybe how he probed, how he pushed back, anything you could share.

Leslie Grandy  13:09

Certainly, there’s a million stories I have. I’ll tell two that I think are relevant specifically to the way you asked the question. One is the interview process was one I didn’t expect to ace and so I will be really honest, I went in there with the idea that I was going to get a great cocktail party story out of it. In other words, that I didn’t have high expectations, that he was going to love me, and that actually worked in my favor. And by that, I mean I didn’t come in there acting like I was an equal, or that I was somebody that he would benefit from. I just came in there with a confidence that I could answer whatever he asked, and if he didn’t like me, there was nothing I’m going to be able to do about it. And I was going to be able to say I had that moment that not a lot of people get. It was great to have that moment. But it turned out that, like I said, the approach, really, I think, enabled us to have a kind of conversation he wanted. And when I was prepping for that interview with the VP of talent at Apple, he told me, your interview will be five minutes or it’ll be 60 minutes. It’s up to Steve, but he’ll size you up very quickly. And if, after five minutes, he doesn’t want to keep talking to you, he’s not going to waste his time, you’ll know it. Grab your things, go down to the car and head back to the airport because it’s over. And I was like, Okay, well, that’s likely to happen. So good to know, you know, like, I kind of went in there without, without any fear of that happening, and it kind of expecting it. And I think it kind of helped me relax into the moment. And at five minutes, the door opened, his nanny came in with his kids, and I started gathering my things, and he gave them all a hug and sent them on their way and said, sit back down. And I thought, okay, that helped him not feel like I was taking advantage of the situation in some way, that he didn’t have the control he wanted, or that I was trying to put on some sort of facade for him. It was very natural and realistic all the way through. And my aunt. Were very specific. I knew he didn’t want a whole lot of fluff around the answer. So I think that was a really important learning experience for me to work with him later, because he’s very clear on what he wants and when he wants and how he expresses it. And another great story that I would say about what it was like to work with him when when we were in the online store, we were noticing, I ran the online store for the Americas, and we were selling iPods, but we were noticing this huge gray market for iPods, which Tim Cook really didn’t like, and so he wanted us to come up with a way to circumvent the need for people to resell by coming up with a program that would engrave iPods in the checkout process. So once it was engraved, it was harder to resell. And so we thought this was a great technique. We worked through the whole logistics of how this would happen, how we would set it up on the back end, and we found, after just a couple of weeks that people got to that step and then had writer’s block and then didn’t complete the purchase. It meant so much to them to have the permanence of what was engraved on there that they didn’t want to just think of something. And people just had creative blocks at that moment, because they’re in an E commerce flow. They weren’t thinking they were going to be asked for something meaningful to put on the back of their iPod. And so we decided that we would help them, and so we put up a little pop up that gave people the opportunity to see either seasonal kind of things, like Mother’s Day greetings or graduation greetings, but also song lyrics that we thought would be really fun and popular to have on the back of your music player, and a couple of other sort of memes or trends in sort of pop culture. And so we decided, if we did that, it was easy for people to do a multiple choice and pick something they might like rather than drop out. He saw it, and within a day, it was pulled down. He thought it was just so off brand, and it wasn’t part of the experience that he was creating. And he felt that the engraving was okay, but if people didn’t want them engraved, or didn’t buy them right away, that that was fine. He, at the time, was not as focused on the bottom line of sales from his own properties, because he was so busy getting distribution for Apple products at all channels. And so whether it was Best Buy or or at the time Circuit City, getting into those stores was more important than what he sold off his own platform. And so anything that we did to try to advance sales under undermines his view of the brand, because that looked like we were more aggressive than he felt like we should be. And then the last version of that is he walked down the street in Palo Alto on Valentine’s Day in the store had hearts, pink hearts, floating in the window, and he walked into the store and told them to pull them all down. He had such a finite view of his brand and elements that were off brand or trivialized his brand that he instantly was in the weeds and able to act on anything he saw to keep the brand tight and meaningful to him, and in turn, what he believes his customers felt about Apple products.

Kris Safarova  18:12

Thank you so much for sharing all of this. What do you feel was the most important lesson you learned from him?

Leslie Grandy  18:18

I really do think I learned about brand. I don’t know that everybody has that religion. And I would say it was, it was, it was practically a religious thing for him. I never saw a webpage he hadn’t seen first and approved from a brand perspective. He had so much focus on maintaining the perspective of the brand in all channels, in all communications. And he was so engaged in all of that that it was very clear that anybody who asked at any time what they thought Apple was was what he wanted them to think. It was because he was there were no blurry edges around the brand. It was very clear and precise what he thought was in on brand or off brand, and I haven’t really seen that much since then in terms of people’s understanding of how to truly manage a brand.

Kris Safarova  19:07

Very interesting. So building on that, looking back, what habits or mindsets do you think helped you earn credibility in rooms filled with formidable, brilliant people, because you have worked in amazing companies. Anyone would be like to just have one of those on the resume. You have four.

Leslie Grandy  19:27

Thank you for saying that. I think for again, I’ll kind of go back to the thing I said about my interview with Steve. What you see is what you get. I I’m not really great at playing poker or putting on a facade or being political, and in some cases that’s not great. I will say that I’ve seen people who are much better at this succeed in places I haven’t succeeded because they’re able to play the room, or look at the the the game and all the players and pieces, and manage their reaction in that way. I think the people who I’ve. Been successful with whether it was Brian De Palma and James Cameron or Steve Jobs. I think for those kinds of people, they don’t want to feel like they’re being played. They don’t want to feel like you’re trying to kiss up or that you’re trying to do something to get a reaction from them. They want to know what it is that you’re about. And they want to, I think, be comfortable making a decision about their relationship with you, because they don’t have that fear that there’s a facade of some sort. And I remember, I learned this early in the film industry with with Brian De Palma, people were afraid of him. He was very harsh on set and very judgmental and critical and very difficult and easy to anger. His personality was not related to me at all. It was related to everybody. The way he showed up for everybody was the same, and so if you were sensitive to that, you might take it personally, and therefore you might react in a way that makes him uncomfortable. But I really looked back and saw this is who he is, and what he what this kind of person needs from me, right? Is not the look of a deer in headlights. They need somebody they can count on. They need somebody that they can believe will get the job done. And so once he was trying to, this was back in the days of modems, and he was trying to send me a script from his house in Northern California to his house in Los Angeles, and I didn’t know his equipment. It was the first time I’d ever been in his house, but it wasn’t working, and it just wouldn’t do the handshake, and he started screaming at me like it was just my fault completely, and I could have believed it was, and said, You’re right, you’re right. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, which made it would have made it worse. Instead, what I said was, I can’t think while you’re screaming at me, so I’m going to hang up. I’m going to spend 15 minutes trying to figure this out, and I will call you back when I figured it out. And I hung up, and I think to this day, nobody ever did that to him, and he was very shocked, but at the same time, I did come back in 15 minutes figuring out that his computer in one location was newer than his computer in the other, and the modems were also new, and therefore they didn’t have the same default setting. And so once I figured that out, I was able to make the hand chip happen, and we just moved right past it. And from that moment on, I think I built a lot of trust with him again, not trying to say, Oh, I’m so sorry, Brian, I’m so sorry. And you know, make him feel worse about this not happening. I just said, I need to figure it out, but I can’t with you yelling. And so I think the idea that people respect authenticity, especially when they’re around a lot of people who want to get in their favor, I think that’s a challenge for those people they don’t want, necessarily, the people who are just going to tell them what they want to hear. And so I think I’ve been comfortable being that person and even taking a harsh question and not taking it personally. Steve asked me what it was like to be the product manager of crappy products, and I knew it was a baked question, and so I thought, Well, how should I answer this in a way that he’ll respect? And my answer was, nobody sets out to make crappy products. There are a number of factors that happen that make that cause things to turn crappy, and I can give you the exact series of events that got us to where we ended up, which wasn’t where we started. And so I think in that scenario, not being intimidated or impressed in a way that makes it difficult for them to show up in a conversation is a big skill.

Kris Safarova  23:23

I bet that there were a number of people in your career who looked at you and thought, if I could just clone that, that would fix this.

Leslie Grandy  23:30

Maybe, maybe. There might have also been some people saying, Boy, does she not really understand how you, you know, respect your your seniors, you’re the seniority in the organization, or the hierarchy in the organization. To me, it they’re People to People conversations. Yes, that’s the CEO of a company. But at the same time, they don’t have time for me to play those games, right? To play political games, or to, you know, to pepper them with lots of compliments. That’s not what they need at that moment.

Kris Safarova  24:01

Very true. Building on this, and we already discussed some of the behaviors, but did you observe any other behaviors you saw in really successful leaders at any of the companies or any of the leaders you worked with, including the film industry, that really separated them from really competent leaders, but not as successful?

Leslie Grandy  24:22

Yeah, I think there’s, there are a number of traits that all of those people share. One of them is an acceptance of risk and an acceptance that failure might be an option, but they want to plan for success, and so by accepting the failure as an option, you increase the strength of your success plan. And I think their their comfort all of these people with not having a playbook. Breaking New Ground, living in ambiguity is something, again, that this type of personality needs, right? They need to believe that they’re going. Going to be different, that they’re going to be successful looking at the world in an innovative or inventive way. And that’s true in filmmaking. I mean, look at James Cameron and, you know, Avatar, and the things that he was able to do way back in the Terminator, he saw the world in a way that other people got behind. But he wasn’t afraid that nobody had seen it before and it might fail. I think the same with Steve. There were, we don’t talk a lot about the failures that happened while Steve was CEO. And boy, it’s not like he didn’t have some there was a speaker he released that was really unsuccessful. It looked like a cooler. It was huge, and it was meant to compete with sort of a Bose portable speaker. And I think we maybe sold 50 of them. And, you know, he moves past them, doesn’t dwell on them. They don’t define them. They are part of the process for somebody like that. And I think accepting failure and accepting risk really defines a lot of the people who we today consider to be most creative, inventive, innovative. They’re able to accept that as a necessary element on their path to success.

Kris Safarova  26:10

And speaking of Steve, did you notice? How did he approach decisions when he was not sure what to do?

Leslie Grandy  26:17

Oh, he didn’t take long. He was a very decisive person. Because I think if he didn’t think an answer was clear to him, even if it hadn’t been done before, he wouldn’t go make one just to make one. And he was also very reliant on talent around him, like he had curated a very successful and talented team, one of whom I interviewed for the book, Tony Fadell, who talk about the idea that they aren’t always right, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t make decisions right. In the absence of day, they still made a decision, and they were okay that that decision might, you know, complicate their outcome in a way they hadn’t thought about it. But I think when you don’t know what to do, you bring a lot of other people who have different experiences, and he relied heavily on those people. I mean, we all think about Steve and Steve’s brand, but really the people that made it all happen, the people that actually were mechanical engineers or industrial engineers, the people who actually designed hardware and software, which is not his job, was not his role as the CEO. He believed in, and he had faith in and so I think that’s the same with James Cameron and everybody who is, you know, a visionary, they can’t execute it all on their own, so they have to believe in the people that they surround themselves with.

Kris Safarova  27:30

And we already mentioned the book you just wrote, and what I wanted to ask you the first question about it is, what cultural elements inside Apple or Amazon or any of the organizations you work for made creative velocity possible, and which ones actively got in the way?

Leslie Grandy  27:49

Oh, that’s such a great question. You know, I think the things that I’ve seen that in those cultures, one is, I think they all believe good ideas can come from anywhere. I don’t believe those organizations think that innovation or novel solutions are the purview of just a C level group or a VP level group of people. I think in each of those cultures, they almost have an expectation, right, that people will be operating in their role at that level of creative thinking that they would expect from their s level people or their C level people. They want a creative finance person or someone who’s thoughtful in legal to invent a new business model and a contract to go with it. Right? They expect every role is going to show up with that same creative intention, right that the status quo doesn’t seep into the lower ranks while only the upper ranks are the creative thinkers. So I think that’s one really important element all roles all levels are expected to perform at that at that level of creative thinking, and not just at task orientation or process orientation. So I think that’s one really shared cultural norm in those companies. I think the other one, again, kind of goes back to the idea that calculated risk makes sense, and calculated risk doesn’t mean there’s data to back it up, but there’s a good story behind it. And so people, when they do take risks, they probably, and they take smart risks, they probably kind of built the world that looks like what they want, and thought about the things that could go wrong to mitigate that risk. And I think that’s people don’t stand fearful in those cultures of risk. They accept risk as a as a component that they plan for and that they look to manage. But that doesn’t stop them from taking those risks in entering new markets or going after new customer segments or launching whole new product categories. And I think you’ll see even in the book, I reference a lot of companies where it’s taken that for them to. Really get a foothold, they have to reinvent how people see the way transportation is done, right, or the way logistics can be managed, because it isn’t something that people necessarily think is a creative field. But if you can reimagine that and allow people to reinvent how it gets done, then that becomes an innovation that differentiates a brand and a company for the long run. And so I think those companies have been comfortable trying those things that maybe don’t work, like Amazon Go is great, and now they’re closing a lot of Amazon Go stores. But boy, walk out. Technology had its moment. Got tested really well, and now is in the ballparks. It’s everywhere, right? It’s an it’s and so I think how do you leverage those things that didn’t work also into learnings for the other things that are working? And I think all those companies look at that sort of pre mortem, what could go wrong, and then post mortem, what did we miss?

Kris Safarova  30:55

And were there elements throughout your career that you observed that were actually in the way of creative philosophy?

Leslie Grandy  31:02

Ah, yeah. So there’s the most common come from sort of old school brands that have seen a lot of transformation, and maybe are a little bit tired of all the change, right? And so they want status quo for a while. They want, they want things to settle. And so I think status quo as a cultural norm is dangerous. It risks being competitive in your market if you want to stay put. I think along with status quo comes consensus driven thinking where you have to get everybody in the room on board before you can move forward with an idea and that you can’t be scrappy, because being scrappy looks like you’re going around the group. And so I think group thinking, consensus driven thinking, is equally problematic for creative velocity. Those, those two things, I think, are really sort of the antidote for creative velocity. When people are afraid to to accept ambiguity or to face more change, they tend to pull back on the speed and acceleration of learning and then potential innovation.

Kris Safarova  32:14

Do you remember a moment when you actually decided to write this book?

Leslie Grandy  32:18

That’s such an interesting but as a question, but in a slightly different way, like, why did you write this book? But the way you’re asking it? I’m going to tell you, my husband had told me I had a book in me for a long time, and I didn’t think I did. And then when I retired from Amazon, I thought, Well, maybe he knows something, and maybe I have a book idea. I don’t know, but I put together a proposal of about six pages, and I treated it like it was a beta product and I was going out to customers to get their feedback. And so over six months that that six pages became 13 pages, and I would tell you it was the end of the six months when I actually thought I had a book that I could write, because I wasn’t really sure people were gonna think it was a book, like, when I was writing it originally, I had this concern that it would somebody would say, Oh, that’s a great newsletter, or maybe you should write a guest post for somebody on that topic. But I don’t know that it’s a whole book, or I don’t know anybody be interested in the topic. So I kept sort of waiting for the tough love, like, this is cute, but not what you think it is? And I didn’t get that. I just kept getting feedback that made it better, that gave me fuel, and the more fuel I got from the feedback, and I gave it to people who were not friends and family, who would not have felt obligated to be nice to me. I really wanted people who would have told me, get off this train. But nobody did. And I think that moment that you’re talking about occurred at the end of six months when the last person on my list of people to give me tough love said to me, if I like it enough, I’m going to mention it to my acquisitions editor, and if she’s interested in the topic, then I’ll make the introduction. And that was the moment I knew I had a book, because I don’t think I had any clear view it was a book. Up until then, I felt like I was really sure it wasn’t, and I was trying to prove that point in the negative. And then when I finally made it to that door, I realized, oh my gosh, I think I actually have a book. And obviously, a week later I got the green light and the advance, and then I knew I had a book. But that moment was really after the six months of iterating the proposal.

Kris Safarova  34:30

For someone who will read the book, what do you want them to take away?

Leslie Grandy  34:35

You know, I think first of all, the most important thing is that everybody believes they have the capacity to be creative. I think part of my telling this story is I was one of those people in the beginning of my life who wanted to be creative but could not find a single thing I was talented at. And I really thought that creativity depended upon that, that I had to find my platform for creativity, whether it was short story. Stories or drama or music or art forms of some sort. I took every one of those lessons, and I so was not achieving greatness in anything I tried. I wasn’t even a tree achieving goodness. I had a couple of people, including my piano teacher, who told my parents they were throwing good money after bad to keep me in the lessons, like I was really convinced that I was not going to be a creative person in my life, and it was very disconcerting, very disappointing. And then then I realized over time that I’m not the only one who feels like that. I think a lot of people think their job doesn’t require them to be creative, and they’re good at their job, so they’re probably not creative, or they just assume, like I did, that they need an artistic talent to call themselves creative. And so I found over the years of coaching and mentoring teams that I’ve led that thinking big is scary for people because they don’t really know they have that muscle or that capacity, or that the superpower is buried inside, and they just need to unlock it. And I think this was really meant to inspire those people to believe in their capacity to think big, to solve problems they haven’t seen before, to take on challenges that might might seem hairy and unusual, but believe in their capacity to manage through it, right to bounce back if they make a mistake, and to look forward from that mistake into the next thing that they go do. And I think that create, unlocking creativity, is inspirational to everyone personally. If they feel like they’re contributing, if that level, not just at the task level, or in the project or product kind of way, then they they can do anything. And like I said, some of the most creative people I’ve known are lawyers who helped us start new businesses that required entirely new architectures for partnering. And I think those kinds of things are within everyone’s reach. It’s just whether people take the time to access it or develop it.

Kris Safarova  36:57

And if you had to design some kind of masterclass or some kind of training for executives who don’t think that they are creative or who don’t have creative confidence. What are some exercises or practices would you include?

Leslie Grandy  37:14

Yeah, absolutely. There are in the book, at the end of every chapter, there are a bunch of exercises that you can do as an individual or in groups, and they’re not tied to business per se, but they’re tied to the skill. One of the things that I think people have in business is this fixation around how things function, or how things work, whether that’s a literally a product, and this is how it how it does what it does, or whether this is how the business works, this is how we just do things. And so that sense of functional fixedness is really a limiter for creative thinking. And so from my perspective, one of the things you really need to be able to do is break something down to its parts and really understand what everything does and what it’s contributing. Because in that analysis, you might find there’s actually excess cost, or there’s actually an opportunity to replace something with something else to get the same outcome. But I think we accept the way things work too readily, and in that scenario, we get biased by our fixation that this is how it has to work. So there’s a technique called the generic parts technique that I detail in the book, which helps people sort of figure out how to MacGyver a solution from the constraints they have in front of them, which is another really important business challenge that everyone should be able to embrace. I have constraints. How can I think creatively about operating with those constraints? And so the generic parts technique and thinking like MacGyver is the whole first chapter, because I think everybody falls into that trap and so doing this exercises is a great exercise. Similarly, there’s an exercise called scamper, and each letter in the acronym sounds stands for a word that’s a verb that gives you something to do. So for example, if you have a process, what might you drop in the process and substitute something else in for it, or what might you rearrange in a process, which is the R and scamper and a great example of that is when we think about how curbside pickup evolved, we never really imagined that I could order things at the grocery store, pay for them, and then have someone else pick and pack them for me. That’s completely a different order. But unless we broke up that process into those elements and saw how they could be rearranged, what had happened for them to work in that rearranged state, we never would have had curbside pickup. And so I think these moves, once you get familiar with them, become second nature for you to say, Hey, I wonder what we could consider combining with this to make an even bigger solution, which is the CN scamper. So a lot of these techniques are really meant to be part of the activation of your creative muscle.

Kris Safarova  39:50

You have done number of interviews as part of writing your book. What were some things people said that really surprised you stood out for you? Stayed with you the most?

Leslie Grandy  40:01

It’s so funny, because one of the best parts of doing all these interviews has been seeing what people want to talk about in the book, what they find fascinating in the book, what they look at in the book. And so one interviewer was really obsessed with the idea of using AI as a creative partner, because they’ve been so focused on thinking of AI as automation and operational efficiency that they hadn’t really thought about it as a thought partner. And I thought that was fascinating, because each chapter has a section on how to partner with generative AI, on that technique, but just by including it, it sparks someone to think differently about how they were using generative AI, which is not what everybody says when they read the book, but that one person thought, I’ve been thinking of AI differently. This really helped me think about how to practice these techniques and then get good at using them with AI. And I thought, Okay, that’s great, and that that was a good win. Additionally, what I think is people have found fascinating in the interviews is how comfortable everyone is with failure. Everyone I interviewed, whether they were at a big company or a startup, or whether they were working in technology or not working in technology, they all believe that failure is their friend. And I say that in the quotes that they gave, one person said, people have such a fear of failure, that’s why they don’t want to express their creativity, because they’re afraid to fail. And I thought that was great. And somebody else said, we need to rebrand failure, because it’s a necessary part of success. And the more people said that, the more it became a theme that people who interviewed me picked up on, that it appeared, not so much as the Treatise of the book, but actually as a thread across all the interviews. And I think that was another part that a lot of people responded to, which is these disparate leaders who influenced me over my career, and these commonalities and how they thought about it, every single one of them knew how to activate the flow state, which is not something everybody knows how to do, but when they’re blocked, they knew what they needed to do, and they were able to talk about it. So I think the interviews also captured a lot of people’s attention because they were more of a subtle way of endorsing the topic of creative thinking.

Kris Safarova  42:19

Incredible. Talking about partnering with generative AI, how should our listeners think about this?

Leslie Grandy  42:26

It’s so interesting. We’ve been taught that being specific and engineering our prompts gets us a better answer. And in a way, it reminds me of what I remember being taught about search. When search started, you know, in the 2000s we started thinking, you know, don’t give it too many words, because it’s not going to know what to do if you give it a whole question. And so you got to be specific about which words you pick and the order. And so we were taught how to make good searches happen. And so right now, a similar movement around prompt engineering is happening with generative AI, where people are really being taught how to choose words to get the proper answer out of generative AI, the output, you know, versus the input. It’s more of a tennis match. I give you something, you give it back to me. And so I have this expectation, like I did with search, that the quality or caliber of the results will give me what I need, and I can move on what I think is really transformative, if people can think differently about generative AI in this way, they will find that getting into a conversation with generative AI doing the exact opposite of prompt engineering, which is to use more general terms and leave the conversation open ended, to actually engage, as opposed to batting something back and forth, but to actually gage and improve and iterate on both sides, learn more than you might have thought if you ask the question so specifically and so when you ask the question more broadly, it’s going to let AI go explore more broadly. You’ll get an expansive set of results when time is of the essence. That’s not what you want to do. So that’s why prompt engineering is great. It’s speed to answer right time to answer. You want that reduced, and you want it to be precise, and you want it to give you the best answer for the question. But when you use these structured creative frameworks, what you’re looking for is time to think, using that time to evolve a thought into different tributaries of thought that you could go down to see if you really fully understand the implications of certain things, or to challenge the thinking of AI, to take the time to say, Why did you come up with that answer? What are the Why didn’t you think of this answer? Why is this another possibility? And to really make sure that the exploration is expansive and comprehensive. Take something more structured, like these creative frameworks in the book, because then you’re not jumping to the answer in your prompt. A lot of times, prompt engineering gives too much of the answer, and that’s how you narrow the answer you get back if you think about asking how to attach something versus. To staple something, you’re going to get two different things right. The specificity is going to get you something that staples where attaching might get you glued or pinned right or taped. And so I think when we use prompt engineering, we want a specific answer, and the specificity is in the prompt. When we’re looking to explore, to ideate, to innovate, to come up with an approach that might solve the problem that we’re struggling with, then these frameworks act like scaffolding. They really help you navigate, not so open ended that you’re wasting hours of time exploring the fringes, but that you’re using the framework to navigate through the series of questions that help you feel like you’ve covered the domain the way you need to before making a decision.

Kris Safarova  45:45

And what skills do you think leaders should focus on developing given the rise of AI?

Leslie Grandy  45:50

Well, I think again, the patience is a really hard thing for people. One of the things I recently saw on LinkedIn that someone posted about, which I absolutely agree on, is that we want, we want the vision, but we don’t have patience for the time it takes to make the change and iterate it. Well, that’s true in AI too. We want the answer, and we don’t have patience to explore all the possible ways we might get to a different answer that could even be better, because we’ll take the first one if it works. And so I think patience is a really important skill to develop when working with generative AI, specifically because you do have to take the time to challenge the answers, to understand whether or not it actually conforms to the normative values of your audience, your customers, your community, and also to make sure that you imbue it with lived experiences that actually help give it meaning to people, and that takes time. And I think you’re less likely to get a creative answer, an innovative answer, a novel solution, if you don’t take that time, or you don’t leave time for that process to happen, because speed is what you’re you know, biasing for.

Kris Safarova  47:02

Leslie. And now I will ask you my favorite question. Over your lifetime so far, what were two, three aha moments, realizations that you feel comfortable sharing that really changed the way you look at life or the way you look at business?

Leslie Grandy  47:17

Gosh, that is a great cocktail party question. I’m gonna have to steal that for other social scenarios. That’s a really great question, I would say, early on, a big game changing Aha, moment when I was looking for my creative talent, I was in high school, and my schedule landed me into an independent study project, and I was asked to make a film, and a Super Eight film that I made won a young filmmakers award in public television. And that moment gave me focus, gave me purpose, and it allowed me to think about what, where I wanted to go to college in a through different lens. And so I went to Northwestern because it was a great school. My parents really believed in higher education and the quality of education, but I made the compromise of going to a school that had a film program that was relatively successful, because I knew that I wanted to pursue that, and I wanted to find a way to be a part of the of the film community, because it was something that I was recognized as being a contributor to with that award. So it was a game changing moment for me, because I don’t think I would have picked my schools if that hadn’t happened based on the filmmaking, and I don’t think I would have even thought I had a leg to stand on to go to California and build a film career. So since that was really important, I would say the second most important moment for me was in recognizing that I actually built that film career out of whole cloth, and that I had the capacity to do that. I think looking back at what I was able to accomplish really gave me the confidence to pivot a career, as we talked about earlier. I think if I hadn’t been successful there, the pivot might have come with a little bit of licking my wounds, which wouldn’t necessarily have made me as strong a candidate for graduate school or for that internship. And so I think looking back at what I was capable of building out of whole cloth in the film industry, really did make that pivot something I felt I could take charge of like that. I could leave environmental management, move to technology, and begin a career in a in a job I didn’t even know existed before I entered business school. And I think that that comfort with my confidence in solving problems, my creative self efficacy was pretty good, and I felt, even if it wasn’t a talent that I understood what I what, what I was capable of. And so I would say that was the the second, really most important moment, I think the the third moment for me would be understanding what kind of a leader I really could be. I think, in so many ways, you think about leadership based on the culture of the company and how companies allow you. To show up as a leader, or ask you to show up as a leader, or ask you to perform as a leader. And I think you then assume that definition as I’m that kind of a leader, but really, everybody has a sort of innate tendency in how they like to lead. And when I had the opportunity to open the Seattle office of Best Buy. It was a technology development office, and I was the fifth hire, and after the first 15 months, it was the most horrible culture. I couldn’t believe it, because we were hiring for talents, not for anything else, not for whether they were people we wanted to see every day, or whether there were people who had capacities beyond the talent we needed. We just wanted the people in the in the building, on the on their laptops, getting stuff done. And it was the and I literally had gone into that thinking that being a leader was being a leader in the context of that’s what Best Buy wanted me to do. And instead, I realized after that failed so miserably that I had a responsibility to be accountable for how successful those people could be as a leader, and I took a whole lot different, a whole a lot of things personally that made me do things differently. In other words, I saw the failure as me failing as a leader, not them failing or best by failing. I took it personally, and so I did inventory of what I needed to do to fix the problem. And my boss said, I’m going to come out and we were I’m going to help you resolve this. And I said, if you do, you should just fire me, because that’s all that people are going to see, is that you fixed it. You have to let me fix fix this. You have to let me turn this mistake around. He said, I’ll give you 30 days to do it. And in 30 days, we figured out what we wanted to be as a team, what kind of leader that team needed. And everything changed after that, and it became so much clearer to me, those were choices I made as a leader, things I had to do as a leader, how I had to show up for people as a leader if I wanted them to show up in a certain way for me. And it wasn’t the company’s job to do that. It was mine. And I think that ownership of that mistake and that accountability for that mistake really made me personally responsible for fixing it, which then made me look inward at well, what do you want? Where do you want to work? And where will other people want to work, and what will it take to be that place? And that was a huge pivot for me, because after having this ridiculous attrition rate in the first year, I mean, we were in double digits of attrition, which is horrible. My last year there, we had sub 1% attrition, like people just loved hanging out with each other, socially at work, people uh, enjoyed the time they spent with people and saw them as whole people. And again, I don’t think I could have done that just trying to let best fight be the one to tell me how to perform or how to lead.

Kris Safarova  52:52

Leslie, thank you so much. Where can our listeners learn more about you? Buy your book? Anything you want to share?

Leslie Grandy  52:58

Terrific. My website is creativephilosophy.com and you can order the book from there or from any of the booksellers. And then there are also some ways to work with me. I’m doing workshops at corporations, do book clubs, all sorts of ways, and the website would allow you to see that and engage with me on any of those types of projects.

Kris Safarova  53:18

Thank you very much. Our guest today again, have been Leslie Grandy, an author of Creative Velocity, and our podcast sponsor today is StrategyTraining.com. If you want to strengthen your strategy skills, you can get the Overall Approach Used in Well-Managed Strategy Studies. It’s a free download, and you can get it at firmsconsulting.com/overallapproach. You can also get McKinsey and BCG-winning resume, which is a free download, and you can get it at firmsconsulting.com/resumePDF. Thank you very much for tuning in, and I’m looking forward to connect with you all next time.