Ep. 200 - Mark W. Johnson, Author of Lead From the Future & Cofounder of Innosight

Mark W. Johnson is the author of Lead From the Future and cofounder of the consulting firm Innosight.  Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder, and Mark discuss how companies can better prepare for breakthrough growth and how leadership teams can use future back thinking to better understand the opportunities and threats in a world of constant disruption.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, founder of Inside Outside.IO, a provider of research, events, and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking, tools, tactics, and trends in collaborative innovation. Let's get started.

Interview Transcript

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 with me is Mark W. Johnson. Mark is the co-founder of Innosight, a growth strategy consulting company, which he co-founded with the late, great Clayton Christensen. Mark is the author of numerous books on innovation, including Reinvent your Business Model, Dual Transformation, and his new, forthcoming book called Lead from the Future: How to Turn Visionary Thinking into Breakthrough Growth. Welcome to the show, Mark.

Mark W. Johnson: Thank you, Brian. It's great to be here. 

Brian Ardinger: Well, I'm excited to have you on the show. You have been one of the forefront thinkers in this whole world of innovation and very prolific in your writing about it. So, I wanted to start there. Tell us a little bit about why you decided to write another book about innovation and what's different and what should people be expecting from it. 

Mark W. Johnson: Writing this book, I look at it almost as the culmination of the 20 years at this effort to help companies in disruptive innovation and transformation. The reason I felt absolutely critical to get this book out is that we can innovate as companies and you know, we can try to figure out how to innovate for new growth. That's really the definition of what we talk about when companies need to be more innovative. I think their core business is innovating all the time and they're improving. They're making efficiency improvements. They're continuing to do product development and so forth. They're innovating in the marketing function, but they're really striving for breakthrough growth. 

And what I found was a lot of these breakthrough growth efforts would have good ideas, get the right people behind them, but if you didn't have the right leadership, the strategy behind it, if you didn't have the right enterprise strategy, a long term view that was the basis behind the innovation efforts that in the long run or even in the short run, these more breakthrough innovation efforts just didn't keep the commitment of the individuals that owned the purse strings. 

Really, the book is an effort to tie vision and strategy to innovation and even further, think about what is it that leadership teams need to do together in the process of developing a vision and converting that to strategy in order to become more successful as in just overall top line growth. But in particular, driving these new and different innovation efforts and the book is an effort to integrate the thinking around leadership strategy and innovation, which I feel is so important, if you're going to create sustainability and success in helping companies innovate for the long term and own their future. 

Brian Ardinger: You talk a lot about how leaders in the organization really need to spend some time in the future, wrestling with the ramifications of what that looks like. I don't know if you can talk about examples of companies you've worked with. I know I've read your work and seen a lot about you, and one of the examples you've shared is around the work you've done with a big car manufacturer and how the process of future-back  thinking got them to realign with what they were doing.

Mark W. Johnson: I'll start with that. We worked with the top leadership team of one of the three US-based OEM car manufacturers here in the US. The work there was to look out 10 years into the future and begin to think about what the environment was to be like. This company had been thinking, of course, Hey, we continue to design and develop and produce cars and trucks and other vehicles, but we also have this work around trying to tie into things like connectivity that has become much more of a trend. And how do cars become much more connected in, and of course, that's linked also to autonomous vehicle technology and artificial intelligence and all these kinds of things. 

And then that's tied also to new business models like Uber and Zipcar and Car To Go, and it's also tied perhaps biggest towards a technological potential disruption and change around electrification. Much more than just around the fringes. But what if electrification just took over and then you'd be talking about a whole rethinking of the industry since its really founded the whole supply chain and the whole structure is around the internal combustion engine.

We work to help think about all of these critical trends, but we tied it most importantly to where is the customer going? What's the consumer, and what's going to be most important in the context of the circumstances of the future and begin to think about that environment. What can looking out 5 to 10 years out do? Well in this case, they just had a really strong point of view about battery technology and electrification and thought justifiably at least based on today, and kind of extrapolating forward, that their best path is to be a follower as to how cars and electric is going to work out, because there was just not any evidence that people would pay a premium currently to be in electric cars, regardless of the implications of global warming and so forth.

That combined with for the anticipation that regulation would ultimately turn their hand that they would follow that path. But through the course of this discussion and really thinking more closely about technology trends and technology road mapping and what was happening around the world and the implication if they were not just behind but really behind, it completely opened their eyes and it created a whole different view about the future and the implications of electrification. In that, what we would call insight that came from looking out or that change point of view, led to a practicality that there was a complete change in their level of investment and breadth of effort, as it related to putting electric vehicles on the road sooner and not just cars, but trucks and thinking about vans and how that would work in cities and so forth. That was the power of doing this, was to be able to get those aha moments that would not otherwise come again and spend time in the future. 

Brian Ardinger: I'm curious of how you get management to carve off the time to focus on that transformation and not the traditional optimization stuff that they're doing and think into the future. Is it having them start with a blank slate and imagining things, or what's the process that companies really need to b...