Innovation, Ideas, and The Science of Business with Nick Jain, Part 1

In today’s episode, we have Nick Jain, the CEO of IdeaScale, as our guest. Dan and Nick talk about the cultivation of great ideas and opportunities within organizations.

This episode will help you navigate the complexities of business growth and create an idea-rich culture. You will learn how IdeaScale operates like TikTok, but with a slight difference helping organizations foster the brightest ideas.

Join us for a new perspective on empowering creativity!

Show Highlights:

Do you know about this social network of ideas? [03:06]
Where do the great ideas come from? [05:39]
Learn to sort the good ideas from the bad ones [06:53]
A new perspective on post-war Japanese revival [07:33]
The importance of a progressive work culture [08:44]
Discover this key trait of successful organizations [09:34]
The need to separate idea quality from individual quality [13:01]
Can a background in physics help you in business? [15:45]

For more updates and my weekly newsletter, hop over to https://betterquestions.co/.

To learn more about Nick Jain, check out the below websites:
https://ideascale.com/
http://nickjain.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/nickjain/

Transcript:

0:10 All right, hello and welcome to this week's episode of the Dan Barrett podcast. And this is Dan Barrett, the titular Dan Barrett. I laugh every time. How are you guys? I hope you are having a truly wonderful week. And this is the show where we talk about building awesome businesses, building fulfilling lives, and everything that falls in between. This week, I am talking to Nick Jane, who is the CEO of a company called Idea scale, which you can find at ideas scale.com and you can actually sign up for free for that software if you have less than 100 people on your team. We'll get into it in the podcast. I highly recommend that you check them out. It is super cool. But Nick is an absolutely fascinating person. He is not just the CEO of IDEA scale. He is kind of an itinerant CEO hired to bring in and, you know, people bring him in to grow companies. He's got a fascinating background, from being a Harvard MBA to being a poker player. We didn't even get into most of that stuff. I ended up asking about his time leading a trucking company. We talk about AI and its impact on his business, the importance of ideas. We talk about so many things. But the thing I think is really came across to me during my talk to Nick is that Nick is a very organized and rigorous thinker. He's someone who cares a lot about being well read, being knowledgeable, being right, as much as he can be right about subjects that are incredibly complex, and he's someone that really cares about the mission behind his business, this idea of spurring innovation, which is the kind of mission of IDEA scale, it would be very easy to Just pay that lip service and have that be something that does not impact your actual behavior. But Nick is the one that really drove that company to put their money where their mouth is, to serve all types of clients. He is not afraid to stand by his ideas, and he is just a truly fascinating guy. So I cannot wait for you to listen to this conversation with Nick Jane from ideascale.com All right, what is up? This is Dan Barrett. I am here with Nick Jane from ideascale.com Nick, welcome to the show. My friends. Super happy to have you here. Thanks for giving me some of

2:38 your time. Thank you, Dan, so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. All right, so I say this every podcast was like I was we were talking before we started recording. So I want to kind of jump back into this, but I do want to take a step back for people who aren't familiar with you or with IDEA scale, how do you talk about what you do? Because I think, you know, people go to the website, they can see the word innovation that can sound very lofty. How do you think about what idea scale does? Sure we are a social network for ideas. So take Tiktok instead of replace the funny dance videos with an idea. An idea could be a new product, new process, snacks in the kitchen, anything. And just like in Tiktok, people upvote, downvote ideas and algorithm ranks which ideas are best, etc. So we are the social network for ideas. We've been in business 15 years. Major companies, Pfizer, Comcast, major government organizations, us, post office, Coast Guard, use us to crowdsource ideas in a social way from anybody. It could be their employees, their customers, their you know, their shareholders, whatever it is, get all those ideas in one place, use voting and algorithms to figure out which ideas are great, and then turn those good ideas into reality. So Tiktok for ideas is a simple way. Although we've been around a lot longer than Tiktok, I know it's like, that's the that's the tyranny is.

3:54 I hesitated saying, you know, the x of y, because people that you are, like, you know, a startup. No, we are a legitimate business that's been around for a long time, and kind of know what we're doing at this point. I mean, it's, it's better than, like, Uber for ideas or whatever. So I think you're all, I mean, and it does get across, like, people know, the mechanism right behind Tiktok, right? So that makes sense. You post an idea. Other thing, other people vote on it. Pretty simple with some, you know, math behind it. Well, yeah, well, so let's, let's talk about ideas in organizations. And this is something I've been thinking about a lot. I work with a lot of agency owners, typically when I'm working with people, one on one. And one of the things we really try to work on with them is like, Okay, well, how do you make your company learn so that you do not always have to be the smartest person in the room coming up with everything you want your team to start sourcing ideas, right? So what are the things like? For example, if you work at a company like, you know, you've worked with NASA or the post office or whatever, is the problem that upper manage? Is simply not aware of what the people on the ground are actually experiencing or the ways that they think they can improve. Things like, what is the disconnect there between the people having the ideas and the people who you know, at least theoretically have the political pull to actually be able to implement

5:15 them? Yeah, so I'd rephrase the problem the senior managers or executives of any organization, most of them are really well intentioned. They care. They want to do cool things. They're not leading NASA or big company, just to say they're in status quo. They're doers. They're movers and shakers. But the problem is kind of threefold. Number one is, no matter how smart and hard work you are, as you just said, you won't have all the great ideas. So the great ideas, the great opportunities, the great innovation comes from around your ecosystem. That could be a junior employee on the other side of the world, that could be a customer, whatever. So number one, great ideas are not just in the senior person's head. Number two, how do you access those great ideas? Because let's imagine you are a senior executive sitting in Washington, DC or London. How do you connect with the your janitor sitting in a warehouse in Madison with stop I used to run a trucking company, right? How would I, as CFO of a company, connect easily to the guy who's running a forklift in my Chicago warehouse? That's hard, and add language barriers at time zones, at the fact that I'm eight levels up, there's a distance, and that can occur across departments, across hierarchies, whatever. And number three is, let's imagine I even Ico, of a company managed to connect with I have 100 employees. Let's imagine I'm personally staying in touch with all of them. They're all sharing ideas with me. I'm gonna get overwhelmed. And let's be honest, not all ideas are great ideas, not all ideas are worth my time, and not all ideas like, Am I smart enough to figure out if they're good, right? If I'm not a marketing expert, and if someone puts on a bunch of marketing ideas, I'm not well situated to figure out if they're good or bad ideas. So the problem that you need to solve is, like, great ideas come from a lot of places. How do you get access to those places? And how do you sort the good ideas from the bad ideas? And that's the problem that a lot of large organizations are facing, because they're not like six guys sitting in a room that it's easy, they don't need fancy, you know, bells and whistles. Get a whiteboard from Home Depot or Lowe's with some posted 3m post notes. But once you're 1000 people spread across 100 countries or five offices and time zones and languages, it becomes really hard. Yeah,

7:16 it really struck me when I was first looking through what you guys do. What it reminded me of is, like, I remember when I was reading about Toyota, and like, Toyota is like, sort of re emergence, or emergence after the Second World War, and this sort of rebirth of Japanese manufacturing, and the birth of, you know, what became lean, and all these things, right? The thing that always jumped out at me about that story was the whole idea of someone on the line, so someone who is a manual laborer working on the line, having, you know, the and on court, like the court that they could pull that would shut everything down and be like, here's the thing broken, you know, I mean, and being the kind of company where that wouldn't get you fired, that would get you praised, right? I always thought about that as like, Wow, that's so amazing, but it's so hard to implement something like that in practice. So I'm curious, like, do you find that the types of organizations that use this kind of solution, like the people that, for example, really make use of IDEA scale, or really, you know, in your opinion, use it to its fullest. Are they? Is there something different about those types of organizations from the way we think about like, sort of the classical, big corporation or something like, are they particularly open to that? I mean, I'm curious what patterns you see in terms of your clients who really makes the best use of this kind of idea. So look,

8:41 they have to be open minded or progressive. You're really pointing at a kind of very valid point. Look, if someone is closed minded, super hierarchical, they don't want to listen to what their line worker says in it, or even what their executive says across the hall. It could be the finance person not wanting to listen to them, the CFO not wanting to listen to the CMO. It's not just a hierarchical thing. We can't solve that. In fact, like no piece of software can really solve an organization that is broken culturally at the top and doesn't want to innovate. There's two things that solve that. Number one, a board that takes decisive action and corrects that cultural behavior at the top. Or number two, those organizations tend to die. If you don't innovate, you ultimately get out competed in the market, right? If you don't, if you're not innovating, remember your competitors are. It's one of my favorite phrases. So we can't fix that. So and the organizations that do want to innovate, and they typically and over the long run, there's a ton of research that they tend to be more successful organizations once they decide they want to be innovative and progressive and continuously get better, then they start using all the best practices and processes for becoming innovative that includes certain the ways you hire people, the ways you train and incentivize people, the tools and technologies you get them. So the organizations where our software makes the most impact is someone who's already decided, hey, we're gonna make we're gonna get better tomorrow than we are today. We can't help you. We can't help you change that mindset. We can help you once you've made that mind shift, to do that, to actually implement and execute against it. This is sort of a weird question, and I don't know, maybe you guys have tested this, or maybe you haven't. I'm putting my computer on Do Not Disturb because it's being annoying. Are people more likely to submit ideas if they are anonymous or if they're not anonymous. Do you have a sense of that? It depends

10:22 on the context. So our software obviously allows you to do both, right and sometimes we use our own software, and sometimes I submit ideas under my own name, and sometimes I submit them anonymously. The research show the short answer is it depends entirely on context. If I'm submitting an idea that is incredible is going to be controversial, either because political or because I'm saying, hey, this was a terrible part of our product, or this is, you know, a broken part of our manufacturing process, that those types of more negative things where you're criticizing and as something, people tend to submit more anonymously, either controversial or when it's negative. But negative doesn't mean that it's a bad idea. But simply you're saying this is broken. We this is effed up. We need to fix it. And that a lot of people being able to say that anonymously maybe increases both the chance that somebody shares the idea and the chances that other people engage with that idea, either voting with it or commenting on it, on new things, people tend to, on average, want to share their name and say, like, I'm putting my name behind this, the exception being people who tend to be more introverts, and those people tend to almost always want to be anonymous, regardless of the context. And that's just a personality choice where they don't like putting their name out there, and that's okay too.

11:35 Yeah, I was, I just finished reading a book about airline safety investigations, because I don't know, this is one of those things where you're just, you're buying a different book, and Amazon's like, what about this other completely unrelated book? And you're like, that, you know? And then it's $500 later. And but what one of the dynamics he's pointing out is, like, if you have, you have a situation where there's some kind of safety flaw that people know about, but they're not saying anything about, right? You tend to look at that as a real problem with the people in the system. But he also points out that, like, ironically, good things, so for example, like really tight teams who feel really interconnected, sometimes that causes people to be less likely to bring up problems because they don't want to hurt people's feelings or make it on I don't want to get Nick fired, because, you know, I love Nick. We've worked together for 20 years or whatever, right? So there's this weird there's a lot of re I think it's really cool that you guys enable both these sort of anonymous and, like sort of clearly identifiable sort of idea creation, because it does create an environment where if I need to say something uncomfortable, I can and look, if everybody votes it down, at least I said my piece, right? I mean, that makes a lot of sense. I

12:43 want to add one thing to that. What you just said is, like, you don't want to get somebody fired. Like, there, there's an important thing that good organizations do, which is, they separate the quality of an idea, or the quality of somebody's work, from the quality of the individual the which, you know, kind of dumbing it down. It means that smart people can have stupid ideas. You know, they can make mistakes. Humans make mistakes. That doesn't mean the person's stupid. And conversely, dumb people can have great ideas or accomplish great work. And so you need to separate the instance of what somebody's done, right, whether it be good, bad, stupid, great, from the the quality of the individual. And that's really important, right? Great people can have, you know, great athletes can have terrible games. That doesn't mean they're bad athletes. Yeah, absolutely. And I like to think of myself as a perfect example of someone who's done great work but isn't that smart. So, you know, take that with a grandson. Okay, so I want to take a step back. So you ran a trucking company. What was the jump from trucking company to idea scale? Can you walk us through that a little bit because that's pretty

13:42 cool, sure. So I'm a, you know, my profession, oddly enough, is, I'm a professional CEO. People hire me to run companies that are ready for that next stage of success. So that could be a private equity firm, that could be a founder venture capital firm. When a company is ready to go from stage A to stage B, and stage a could be it's a turnaround situation, or it could be this company that's doing well and yet now, how do we make it do super well? That's what I do for a living. So the first such company where I was brought in to do was a trucking company, $100 million in revenue owned by a private equity firm. After turning that around, I was hired to go do to be part of a three person leadership team at a small shoe startup that was renting super high end shoes to folks. And then about two years ago, I was scouted to come run ideas scale. And idea skill was at a kind of three perfect. It was like a perfect storm of three things for me. Number one, I'd always wanted to be in software. I'm a mathematician and physicist by training. I've, you know, been screwed around with software in some way, shape or form, since I was, like, 12 or 13. I'm not an engineer, but, like, I've been coding in some way, shape or form, for a long time now. Number two is, I really like this idea of an idea meritocracy. Like, it's always frustrated me throughout my career, like, how do I get ideas to be heard? And it was. It's really difficult in most organizations, because nobody really cares if you're a junior guy, if, even if you have the greatest idea. And number three. Is it was kind of idea skill was poised at this amazing point where it was a company that had been well established, bootstrapped, so no venture capital behind us that had been profitable since day one. Wow. It was a company ready to be global. We'd been very successful in North America. And the mandate from the board to me was, okay, go make this big. Go make this a billion dollar company. And that was such an exciting professional opportunity and personal opportunity for me too. Yeah,

15:24 that's super cool. I'm curious like so I always ask this whenever somebody references something they are by training. So you said you're a mathematician, you're a physicist by training, right? Do you see, or have you noticed ways in which your background in physics shows up in how you approach your work in business, like, do you see Coronavirus there that you feel like? Maybe people without that background don't see

I would say it affects my behavior in three ways. Number one is, I tend to try and quantify things right, even if using rough estimates as assumptions, I believe that some assumptions in some mathematical framework is better than no framework whatsoever. Number two is, I really focus on detecting logical non sequiturs, like if people, you know, people often say, Well, we'll do this and we'll get, you know, we'll get this outcome. But what's the chain of causality? Because that's really important. You learn the sciences. You need to, you know, just because it sounds right doesn't mean it's actually right. There has to be a causal chain that another intelligent human being can understand. And number three is in the way it affects my style of communication.

Due to the hard sciences, there's, it's this beautiful culture at the, you know, in in the hard sciences, where people can communicate, again, separating the idea from the individual. You're in a study group, you're bouncing ideas back and forth. Smart people have stupid ideas, and that's okay. It doesn't mean you're, you know, my buddy will Much, much brighter than me. Once he screwed up a problem. At no point did I call him an idiot, because, like, I was the dumb one in the group. But once in a while, you know, even, what is it a blind squirrel finds a nut, right? So, and that's meant that I'm much more focused on coming or my communication style is transparent. Let's separate whether you did right or like you as the individual from like the rightness of the answer. And that's something I guess I was trained in at that level, and that's continued as a style of communication to this

17:22 day, that's really cool. I know for a fact that I'm very susceptible to someone hand waving all the steps in between A and where we end up, you know. I mean, we're like, oh yeah, we're gonna, you know, like, we'll open up gym and make a million dollars, and I'm like, a billion dollars, you know? Like, I'm just already there, and it's a thing that I I have to work out so hard, right? Like, I have to write it. If I can't write something out and explain it, which happens all the time, I realize, oh, I don't actually understand this thing at all, you know, I mean, so I think that's like, such a, that's such a, like, phenomenal world view to bring to things. I'm curious. You know, being someone who's whose profession is being in being able to be in different businesses and to thrive and sort of accelerate growth in these very different environments, very different industries, like you said, different countries, how much of business, do you really think is a science versus I don't know if you want to call it an art, but I'm wondering how much of your sort of process you you really view as a process versus something that's more intuitive or sort of different every time, if that's a that's a question that makes sense. So

18:38 each of the three companies that I've run, and I used to work in Wall Street and finance, and was analyzing all sorts of different companies when I joined a new company, there's a tremendous amount of domain knowledge that I need to gain, and that could be industry knowledge, or that could be knowledge about the company and the way its culture works, and what its product is, and so on, right? So when I showed up at trucking, I had never done anything in trucking before, and I it was a lot of hard work to go learn about the trucking industry as well as about how this specific company operated, right? That's not transferable. That just requires a lot of willingness to, you know, go learn, right? Go walk the warehouse floor every night for like six months. Go make sure you understand how forklift works and what the regulations are and how loading docks work. There are other parts that are entirely transferable. And I would probably say there's, there's three things that transit across companies. Number one is your personal skill set of what call it, your communication style and your analytical style, or whatever your personal skills skill sets are. Number two is understanding how businesses work. And the good news, the good slash bad news, is some people understand how businesses work, and others don't. Others just, you know, there's surprisingly many, many executives, including of large, well known companies, that rose up without actually understanding their business's economics. And that's that's challenging number three, and that's bad by the way. I'm like, Well, how would. Impressive, yeah, very nice.

20:01 I mean, look, you know better to be lucky than skilled is the is the old joke, right? And number three is your knowledge of how the functions of a business work, right? Finance kind of works the same, whether you are in a trucking company versus a software company, HR, sales, marketing, the best practices for how you run each you know, a function of a business, are actually entirely transferable. They're not that different, whether you're, you know, working in trucking or government or finance, because there are, there are right ways to do certain things.

20:32

Hey guys, hope you enjoyed part one of this episode. It's just too good to limit to one show. Join us next week to hear the rest you.