Episode 444: Three Things Innovative Leaders Do with Robyn Bolton

In this episode, the extraordinary Robyn Bolton explains why innovation is much more than the buzzword most leaders think it is. Throughout this episode, you’ll hear Robyn’s thoughts on the importance of innovation in both personal and professional settings. Robyn shares insights on overcoming leadership challenges that stifle innovation, fostering a culture that embraces new ideas, and balancing the demands of daily operations with the need for long-term innovation.

Steve Shallenberger: Welcome to all of our Becoming Your Best podcast listeners, wherever you may be in the world today. We have a terrific guest with us. She has so much experience. She is the founder and chief navigator of MileZero, where she works with companies that struggle with innovation to confidently and repeatedly create new revenue streams. Her experience with clients runs the gamut from global companies like Nike and Medtronic to mid-sized companies like Curriculum Associates and Hallstar to nonprofits like DonorsChoose. I mean, she’s got a great background. Welcome, Robyn Bolton.

Robyn Bolton: Thank you so much, Steve. I’m so excited to be here.

Steve Shallenberger: It’s fun. I’ve enjoyed talking with Robyn before we got going this morning. This is going to be a treat for every one of us, and we’re so grateful to have you with us today as our listeners. So, let’s just jump right into this. I’d like to tell you a little bit more about Robyn before we get going. She is an insightful and entertaining speaker who compassionately points out when the emperor has no clothes and offers practical advice on how to get dressed. In other words, innovate in a big company or anywhere in your life because these skills—the mindset and skillset of innovation—apply in your company but also in your personal life, in how you solve problems. This is going to be of great value for all of us. She’s spoken at executive events hosted by large companies like WarnerMedia, Alexion, and General Mills, and at industry conferences like The Economist Innovation Conference. She’s got this dialed in. This is going to be a lot of fun. So, Robyn, I know there’s a lot more we can talk about. She’s worked professionally with Procter & Gamble, with a huge background, some of the best marketers in the world, and she’ll tell us more about that as we get into it. But tell us about your background, including any turning points in your life that have had a significant impact on you.

Robyn Bolton: Yeah, absolutely, and it is such a treat for me to be here. My life—I’ll do the quick version because that’s not what folks are here to hear about—but I grew up outside of Cleveland, middle class, outside of Cleveland, then went on a southwestern trajectory down to Miami University, where I got my undergrad. P&G is a local company, so I was very, very grateful—very lucky—to get an offer to join P&G in marketing right after I graduated. It was a time when P&G was really investing in innovation, and I, through pure luck, was put on the team that, a year later, would launch Swiffer. So, I got to be part of that story, the last year of developing and testing Swiffer, and then actually went on to work on developing and launching Swiffer WetJet, which was a global launch for P&G. I think that was one of the pivot points in my life because I had actually not wanted to work for P&G. I wanted to go into advertising, and I wanted to be creative and challenge the status quo. And P&G seemed like the last place where you could challenge the status quo. Aagain, I got put in a role where that’s exactly what I was expected to do. So, it was one of those realizations that you can still be yourself and don’t judge a book by its cover, so to speak. P&G, I thought, was old and staid and process-driven, and it was, but that’s not all it was.

Steve Shallenberger: They are a powerhouse. You’re right.

Robyn Bolton: They are a powerhouse and a truly great place to learn marketing or any aspect of business. So I did innovation at P&G, and spent some time down in Arkansas on the Walmart sales team, which, again, was another lesson of saying yes to things that seem unusual and strange: P&G marketing—you’re on this very clear path to CEO. So saying, “Oh no, I’ll go to Arkansas and work on a sales team,” is not traditional. And if I said it, it was great. Again, I learned a ton—an amazing experience. But at that point, P&G had stopped investing in innovation, so I moved out to Boston, got my MBA at Harvard, still didn’t know what to do, and went to work for Boston Consulting Group. Again, taking that lesson of saying yes to strange things, I spent a year in Copenhagen working there, which was a great experience. Then, after leaving BCG, I went to work for Clayton Christensen’s innovation consulting firm. Again, spent about a decade there. It was incredible to be someplace that was very much at the center of innovation thinking, at the center of thought leadership, and also focused on helping companies change and innovate. It was amazing to learn there, and then, when I left, I ended up starting my own firm, MileZero, which has been non-stop learning and non-stop growth. You talk about being true to your character; you talk about leading with a vision—man, when you’re an entrepreneur, you’re doing that every day.

Steve Shallenberger: You’ve got to have that one down. Oh, what a background! For our listeners, many will be aware of Clayton Christensen. He was a dear friend of mine, and it’s nice that you were able to associate with him closely. What was that like? Tell us what Clayton is known for and the waves that he’s created in the world. And you’re right that he was such a gentle giant. I just loved him, but he really changed our world in terms of innovation and how we all think.

Robyn Bolton: He really made his name, first off, by publishing The Innovator’s Dilemma and later The Innovator’s Solution and by introducing this concept of disruptive innovation. We hear all the time now about, “Oh, this is disruptive. This is disruptive.” But really, at the core of the theory that he was putting forward was the idea that companies don’t fail because they have idiots as leaders. They have really smart people as leaders who are following the data and are investing in serving their most profitable customers and are investing in doing what they do better. That creates a gap at the bottom of the market where products that aren’t good enough—products that appeal to people who aren’t currently consumers of the product—can come in and gain a foothold and then eventually improve and disrupt the folks who were there before. One of the other theories that he made popular that I have often said is a hill I will die on, is “jobs to be done.” People don’t buy products; they don’t buy services just because they want that thing. It’s because they have a need—whether it’s a functional need, an emotional need (they want to feel a certain way), or a social need (they want to be perceived a certain way). They hire solutions to fulfill their jobs to be done, and I think that lens, especially around customer centricity, is just transformative. So, I’m also a big believer in that. But working with him—it was incredible. His first love, his true passion, was teaching. So his heart was always at HBS, at Harvard Business School, but he would come to the office and share his early thoughts. He was very humble in that way—sharing early thoughts, not worrying that they were perfect or provable, being very open, and then always listening so genuinely to the feedback and to the questions. There was no hierarchy in those conversations. He wasn’t the great Clayton Christensen with little consultants under him. He really respected and valued every point of view. So, it was an incredible, incredible time to be working with him.

Steve Shallenberger: Oh, great. Well, thank you for taking a moment on that. From your experience, what are a few things that leaders do that kill innovation, and what can they do to overcome those obstacles?

Robyn Bolton: One of the things that I’ve learned through all of my journeys is that innovation is not an idea problem; it’s a leadership problem. Most companies say, “Oh if we had more ideas, we would be more innovative.” And I have yet to come across an organization that isn’t filled with ideas because people are filled with ideas. But people also learn not to share those ideas because of how leaders respond to them. I am not picking on leaders; I have a great deal of empathy for leaders because it’s a hard job. But often, somebody will come to a leader with an idea, and the leader will be like, “Oh, that’s great. Go talk to this person,” or “We tried that before,” or “That’s not a priority,” and it shuts it down. And people think, “Oh, you don’t want to hear my ideas. I’ll keep them to myself.” What the leader is actually dealing with is 50,000 other things, and they don’t want one more thing added to their plate, which is totally understandable. What the leaders don’t do—and this is one of the things that gets in the way—is explain why. “Oh, I want you to go talk to this person because they have expertise in this thing you’re proposing. Go vet your idea with them because they have the expertise, and then both of you come back and let’s talk about it.” Or, “We tried that before.” I actually had one client say, “We tried that before,” and they thought that was the end of the conversation. I said, “Well, when did you try it?” They said, “1972.” I said, “Well, certainly nothing has changed since 1972, so let’s not try it again.” But just explaining why, as a leader, giving context, giving a reason, you’re building your team. You’re educating them. You’re helping them to learn, to ask questions, and to think critically, instead of just kind of shutting things down.

Robyn Bolton: The other thing that leaders do—and this goes back to the theory of disruptive innovation, and I honestly can’t say I would do anything different—but leaders, like all humans, act based on what they’re rewarded for doing. So when your salary, when your bonus, when your job, when your promotion is dependent on what you deliver this year, why would you invest in something that won’t produce results for another three years or five years? And everyone’s resource-constrained. So, when you have a dollar or a person that you can allocate either to operations or innovation, you know what you’ll get if you invest in operations. You know what the ROI is. You know what the timing is. You don’t know that for innovation, so you take the sure bet. Again, I can’t say I wouldn’t do the same thing, but that’s how disruption happens.

Steve Shallenberger: So, how do you overcome that? As a leader, how do we create that environment, that culture, and that balance—that security of, “Hey, we’re in; we’re going for this”? You probably have some guidelines, I’m sure. But what have you seen that works?

Robyn Bolton: A lot of things that you talk about: the character elements of integrity, honesty, perseverance. I kind of say, and I’ve done this, when you’re trying to do something different in a big company, it’s like throwing yourself against a brick wall several times a day, every day, and you need to celebrate when a chunk of mortar falls out. I used to think you celebrate when a brick falls out—no, when you get a chunk of mortar to displace, celebrate that. So, perseverance, humility, respect for others, and empathy—all of those aspects that are so critical for good leadership become just a magnitude more important in innovation because you’re doing things that are uncertain, you’re doing things that are risky, and you’re doing things that people are going to call you crazy for doing.

Steve Shallenberger: Thank you for that encouragement for all of us. We’re all trying to really raise the bar, fulfill needs, provide solutions, and do it in the best way. Because one thing’s clear is that whatever we did yesterday, things are always changing tomorrow. Why do some companies struggle to innovate? What have you seen?

Robyn Bolton: It comes back to leadership. You have leaders who are afraid, to be perfectly honest. They will never admit to being afraid, but they’re afraid of losing their jobs. They’re afraid of bad press. It’s fear that motivates them, and so they constrict into, “Let’s do what we know, let’s do what feels certain, let’s do what everyone else is doing.” That will keep the company alive for a certain amount of time, but it will never propel your company to the front. You’ll never be better than your competitors if you’re always following your competitors. You’ll never set the trends in the industry if you’re always following the trends. So, this mindset—and I see it most often, honestly, in big, publicly traded companies that have to focus on quarterly results, fiscal year kind of thing—it’s just short-term. We’ve got to hit the numbers, and that seeps through the whole organization. Whereas companies that we look at and say are innovative, you do have big companies like Apple and Nike that have a reputation for innovation, but that’s been woven into their DNA since the beginning and nurtured by leaders. There’s no such thing as failure in those places; there’s only learning, and that’s a huge cultural mindset shift.

Steve Shallenberger: So, from the companies that you’ve worked with, Robyn, that have really been successful consistently over time at repeating this, what are some of the characteristics you see in those companies that allow innovation to flourish and get results, too?

Robyn Bolton: What I see in them is what I call the ABCs of innovation. It sounds very simple—it’s not—but the ABCs of innovation are: A, they have an architecture for innovation. This is strategy, and this is metrics like what do we need innovation to deliver in terms of revenue, profit, cost savings, whatever that may be. They have a structure, so they have teams dedicated to innovation. They have a process for innovation. They have governance, so they treat innovation like a business. They treat it as something that is just how they do business versus kind of a one-off hobby. The B is that they have the leadership behavior that we’ve been talking about, and that’s up and down the chain. It’s behaviors like integrity, perseverance, a learning mindset, and patience—realizing it’s going to take three years to get results versus revenue in one year. But there are little steps and little results you can get along the way. So you have the leadership behaviors. The C is the culture. Culture, ultimately, is the result of your actions. So many companies say, “This is our culture.” So many companies say, “These are our values.” What you do—and actually, I would argue, the worst behavior you tolerate—that’s your culture. And so, if you say, “We support innovation,” but you don’t invest in it, you don’t have a culture of innovation.

Steve Shallenberger: Let’s just say that you’re consulting with me. I’ve got a company that’s going along—whatever it might be. It could be a publishing company, it could be an energy services company, it could be retail, it could be a software company. What would you advise me to do? I’m a leader. What would you come in and say, “Steve, this is what you’ve got to do to make this happen”?

Robyn Bolton: We would start with the architecture. I’d say, “Okay, Steve, why are you investing in innovation? Why is innovation important to you?” And you can give me all the, “Oh, well, it’s how we stay a leader, it’s this and that.” Give me numbers—what revenue, what profit—whatever those numbers are, what does innovation, something that doesn’t exist today, need to deliver? This is actually an exercise I do with all of my clients. I had one client, who shall remain nameless, who was like, “Oh yeah, no, we’re good. We know what number we need for innovation. We’re doing all the right things.” I’m like, “Well, just humor me. This is math.” I was an English Lit minor—I chose my major, marketing, because it had the least amount of math. So let’s just do simple math. We looked at where they wanted to be in five years; we looked at where they were. I said, “You’ve got to create two Facebooks in the next five years. That’s how much revenue you need from things that don’t exist today.” And that was a huge reality check for them, like, “We are not investing nearly enough to achieve that goal.” So, give me the numbers. What do you need from innovation? Then, the next thing would be, “Okay, what’s your resource allocation? How many people do you have working on it? Are they full-time?” Because if you work on something full-time, it’s a job. If you work on something part-time, it’s a hobby. So, innovation is a job. How much money do you have allocated to it? Again, I had a client who had two people, and they had $100,000 dedicated to innovation. And when we met with the CEO, the CEO said, “Look, we need a $250 million business in three years.” And I just laughed. I’m like, “If we could do that with two people and $100,000, we would be out doing that.” Match up what you need from innovation with what you’re investing in it.

Robyn Bolton: Then, I would look at how you do innovation. Do you have a process? Do you have guardrails for it? And through all of this, I would also secretly be gauging how you’re engaging as a leader. Are you asking questions, or are you making demands and giving orders? Are you curious, or do you know everything? So I’d also be looking at how you’re showing up as a leader because how you lead operations—where you know a lot (I mean, you’ve been there, you’ve done that, you’ve seen it, you’ve been great at it)—is very different from how you lead innovation, where you haven’t done it, where no one’s done it. You have to show up differently. So I’d be gauging, are you showing up differently, or is behavior something we also need to work on?

Steve Shallenberger: Robyn, as you’ve gone along, when do you cut bait? We’re talking about patience, and you and I have both been in companies where we’ve done this. We’ve invested a lot. I don’t know about you, but I love the guy who says, “Wow, what an overnight success you are!” When the person actually says, “Well, what you don’t know is we’ve suffered here for 10 years, barely making payroll sometimes.” So, let’s talk about the hard side of things. What advice can you give us to make good judgments and weather the storms?

Robyn Bolton: I love the “overnight success 20 years in the making.” But I’ve also seen—and I think this is maybe more of a corporate phenomenon—zombie projects, the living dead of projects that no one seems to kill, but everybody knows it’s not going to work. It’s because it’s someone’s pet project or pet idea. It’s hard to end things because we fall in love with them. One of the core tenets of innovation is to “fall in love with the problem, not the solution,” but we fall in love with the solutions because we’re problem solvers. So, one of the things that I work with clients to look at is, “What do you need to believe in order for this to be successful?” And if you can believe it, and as you keep working on it, you need more and more data to support your beliefs. Beliefs can’t be wishes. But is it still believable? If it is, keep going. If it’s not, then have a Viking funeral—send it off to heaven with a celebration and a thank you because you learned a lot through the work, and all of that learning is incredibly valuable and is being used. So there’s nothing to be ashamed of. You didn’t do anything wrong. It’s just that not every idea works, but every idea can be learning, can be fuel, and can be fodder for the next idea that could be the great idea. So it’s hard to end things, but not all is lost. You actually gained a great deal by pursuing it and then letting it go when it’s time.

Steve Shallenberger: That’s great advice because indeed what happens is you get deeply into developing something, you become among some of the best in the world, you become more knowledgeable, and sometimes you have insights that lead to a whole other area.

Robyn Bolton: Pulling that thread, like following that—you never know what you’ll unlock. At some point, maybe it’s time to stop following, but other times, that creates a whole new business unit and that creates the next generation of your company. So, don’t be afraid of surprises. I always tell my clients, “Be really excited about surprises—not surprises because nobody told you something, but because you discovered something unexpected, and go learn about it.”

Steve Shallenberger: That’s wonderful. What an inspiration. I love your comment there about what you’re doing, do you believe in it? Is it believable? And believing in the problem and finding solutions. Is that what you said? Don’t get stuck on your solution. Be open to new ideas. Is that what I heard?

Robyn Bolton: Love the problem, not the solution, because you can solve the problem in all sorts of ways. So, if one solution doesn’t work out, there might be one that does, but you can get stuck, as you said, on solutions.

Steve Shallenberger: Good job. In some of my early research before we released and launched “Becoming Your Best: The 12 Principles of Highly Successful Leaders,” I interviewed over 150 CEOs around the world. One of the things we were looking for was what set apart highly successful individuals and teams from everybody else. Well, one of the side questions I asked was, “How many major failures have you had in your career?” And the answer was four major failures—these are big-time failures, not the type you sweep under the carpet, so you have to deal with them. I said, “Okay, how many major successes?” Seven major successes. So, listen, everybody’s out there learning, but the odds are you’re going to have seven major successes.

Robyn Bolton: That’s the thing. It’s not about being perfect; it’s just about having more successes than failures and learning from your failures.

Steve Shallenberger: How true. Well, listen, it’s been a delight having you here. Robyn, it was amazing. I love your energy, your background, your focus, and your experience. So, any final tips you’d like to leave with our listeners today?

Robyn Bolton: So many things I would say. One, certainly, read Becoming Your Best, because the principles in there, the guidance in there, is true for everything, and especially true for innovation. And second, look around your company or even your life, if you’re not seeing the improvements and the changes that you want to see, start by looking in the mirror and thinking about how you’re showing up. Are you showing up curious, trustworthy, and with honesty, and doing what you say? Start there, and then things will ripple out from there.

Steve Shallenberger: Great advice. I love the tips and your sharing today. So how can people find out about what you’re doing?

Robyn Bolton: You can go to my firm’s website, which is milezero.io or you can look me up on LinkedIn—Robyn M. Bolton on LinkedIn.

Steve Shallenberger: Well, to all of our listeners, hasn’t this been fun? We wish you, Robyn, all the best in the things you’re doing. You’re making a difference. This is what makes the world spin right here.

Robyn Bolton: Doing what I can.

Steve Shallenberger: Oh, well, love it. Well, best of luck to you and all that you’re going to be doing—making a difference.

Robyn Bolton: Thank you so much.

Steve Shallenberger: To our listeners, we wish you all the best in what you’re doing every single day—trying to improve, trying to raise the bar—and that’s one of the things that makes life pretty dang exciting. So, thanks for being with us today. This is Steve Shallenberger, your host, signing off.