Perpetual Innovators and their Key Drivers with Dr. Behnam Tabrizi, Author of Going on Offense

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Dr. Behnam Tabrizi, Author of Going on Offense: A Leader's Playbook for Perpetual Innovation. This week we talk about some of the key drivers that make companies like Amazon, Apple, Tesla, and Microsoft become perpetual innovators. Let's get started. Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week we'll give you a front row seat to what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive In today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest, innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.Interview Transcript with Dr. Behnam Tabrizi, Author of Going on Offense

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Dr. Behnam Tabrizi. He has taught at Stanford University in the executive programs for 25 years. He's the author of 10 books on leading in innovation and transformation, including a newly released book called Going On Offense: A Leader's Playbook of Perpetual Innovation. Welcome to the show. Behnam Tabrizi: Thank you, Brian. I'm excited about this podcast because it's my first podcast on the book, but incidentally, I just received a copy of the book. And the book is not going to be out till August 22nd, so it was a very nice surprise. Given that your interest is innovation, I think we're going to have a lot of fun.Brian Ardinger: You spent a lot of time and research digging into companies to try to figure out what makes companies innovative and, and more importantly, which ones continually innovate versus ones that are one hit wonders. So maybe you can give the audience a little bit of background on the research that you did for the book.Behnam Tabrizi: Sure. Just a little bit of background before the background. Out of the 10 books, two of them are kind of standout. One was The Rapid Transformation I did with Harvard Business Press, which talked about the sociology and structure of how you transform organizations quickly. And this was published in 2007 and in some ways, it was very different than the sequential transformation that was an accepted norm in the world.And then what I realized, and that book did extremely well, and I realized the biggest challenge to transformation is personal transformation. Leadership transformation. I did the book on. Inside Out Effect, which I'm really proud of, it is about leadership transformation. And it was a conversation with a COO, which I talk about in the book with the COO of a Fortune 50 company where he had sent his people to Stanford. Where I realized, you know, there is a third leg that's missing and that is what's the secret sauce of some of the most innovative perpetual organizations in the world. And that's something that I've been thinking about. I even thought about a topic before this conversation. And so, this was six, seven years ago, so I deep dived into this. Had a huge survey of over 6,000 people with executives, consumers, academics in terms of what they think are the best, most innovative organizations.Had an amazing research team where we sorted through data. So, after just looking at all of this, we came up with 26 firms. We wanted to make sure we don't have survivalship bias, which is only looking at successful companies and only talk about successful. So, we also had companies that didn't indeed do well, like Blockbuster, Borders, and others.So, I talk about those 26 companies, but several actually stand out and those are, they're regular organizations that we know as most innovative, which is like App