Creating a Culture that Takes Risks with David Kidder

Intro: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. Each day, we welcome transformational executives to share their real world experiences and practical advice about scaling yourself, your team and your business.

Matt Blumberg: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. I'm Matt Blumberg, Co- Founder and CEO of Bolster, and I'm here today with my friend David Kidder. David is the Co- Founder and CEO of a company called Bionic, which was acquired last year by Accenture, and I believe is now called Accenture Song. He was Co- Founder of another startup before that called Clickable. He has written a surprisingly large number of books for someone who's been a CEO for a long time, including a great book called The Startup Playbook. David, good to see you.

David Kidder: Great to see you, my beloved friend, Matt.

Matt Blumberg: So here's my question for you today. Your company Bionic, now part of Accenture, spent a lot of time and a lot of energy bringing lessons from startups and innovation into big corporate America. My question for you is, now you having taught big companies how to create more of a culture of startup, a culture of innovation, is how do you get to a culture that takes risks and moves through failure quickly?

David Kidder: Yeah, this is one of the hardest things to do well. And so, I think this idea works with small companies and big companies, and I hope it's an original idea, but it's one of the hardest things to get right. About two companies ago, I created this idea, this iconic cultural value, called the Seven to One Rule. The Seven to One Rule is a ratio of good to bad. We try to do extraordinarily more good, seven, for every one experience that we do poorly or bad in the context of failure. And the admission is, is really is that this is literally an impossible ratio. No one is that good, and yet no one is that bad. And so, it's really an admission that, because we're going to fail, the bigger question is how do we get through failure? If those ratios are off, four to three, three to four, you're probably the wrong person for the company. We still need extraordinarily good and we do bad, but when we do fail, what do we do? And what we're trying to do is encourage people to take risks, because our default state to each other is we forgive each other. And this is really daring because the easiest way to kill a company or kill a relationship is contempt, is the indictment that you're always going to do something. So if you admit you're in a default stage to forgive, and when you do eventually fail, because you will, we want to deal with failure side- by- side, shoulder- to- shoulder, not across the table, " This is your failure" and you pet your failure as if it's a permanent, forever indictment. It's that we want to solve this so that we can work on the problem. And if you have to go work on yourself, work on yourself. But we're going to solve it together so we can end up growing together. Solving it, taking risks, and a way to get through quickly that keeps people intact.

Matt Blumberg: That is such a good way to think about it, is don't be across the table, be arm- in- arm on things. What is the hardest part of everything you just said to inject into big corporate America?

David Kidder: Well, there's not a lot of incentive to take risks and fail, and so they're missing the pressure valve for the instances when things break down, individually. It's sort of like the permission to create risk, the permission to create the grace that it takes to accept failure, just typically isn't there. So you have to create a culture, in not necessarily the whole company, but in parts of the company, where that's valued. Because the value is really the velocity of learning, especially today where the external learning velocity is so significant that it's overwhelming companies. If your rate of learning is just simply asymmetric to the rate of learning outside, that means you literally don't have the permission to take risks. And so, this is a way, sort of a noneconomic, cultural way, to insert the valve you need in a ratio that people can understand, an iconic idea that allows us to take risks, to create failure, to move through it, and to grow.

Matt Blumberg: Permission to fail, I love it. David, thank you for being here.

David Kidder: Always.