[MUSIC] An organization that empowers its teams to innovate based on a shared mission inherently relies on a blend of culture and business practice, or a mix of people and process. So what additional principles that underpin day-to-day operations help reinforce an innovation culture? Google has established several innovation principles that govern its day-to-day business practice. Here are the three that are built on the garage mind set: focus on the user or the customer. Think 10X or generate big ideas, and launch and iterate coupled with a freedom to innovate. These principles weren't created by Google. Every company focuses on their customers, every company expects its employees to generate big ideas. And every company expects their employees to be bold. These principles have existed for hundreds of years. Where Google is different is how it implements these principles to scale the garage mindset. Let's explore this in more detail. Focus on the user as a business practice may sound common. How often have you heard customer first? But, for us at Google, this focus has two dimensions. First, users aren't limited to the paying customers or people outside of our business. Our employees are also our customers or users. Next, is the user expectation and the same would be true for you. You need to clearly understand user expectation in order to think about how you could add value for them. This is because with the digital age everyone has become connected globally via multiple devices. Everyone has acquired the same expectations when engaging with companies, especially through their devices. Here's an example of what I mean by focusing on your customers and their expectations. Wi-fi on planes was at first a new service and it was differentiating for airlines when it was first available. Now, it's an expectation. Notice that as soon as your customers become exposed to something new that makes their lives easier it doesn't take long for it to become an expectation. The four categories that will help you think about user expectations are access, engagement, customization, and communication. For each category, ask yourself what does the user or customer expect? In answering these questions, you'll make important discoveries about where to invest your efforts. For example, when it comes to access, users expect faster, easier, everywhere, and always on services. When it comes to engagement, they're looking for sources of valued content. Users also expect up-to-date reliable content from multiple fields of expertise. From this, you'd learn that engaging multiple fields of expertise in the process of product development is also crucial for your business success. Next, when it comes to customization, users expect that a product or service seamlessly adapts to their individual needs or preferences. And finally, they expect to be able to communicate with the service provider through a two-way feedback channel. This means that the company also engages in the conversation. When assessing what your employees expect when it comes to communication, for example, you discover that they expect their contributions to matter and that their input fuels the growth of the product or company. For this, there would need to be a two-way dialog with leadership. So take a moment to think, who is your user? And how can you improve or reinvent your products or services by examining user expectations through these four categories? How can you use your discoveries to create value for them? At first, this focus on the user can seem like it's a bad business decision. Let me explain. Google's primary business model is built around ads. This means that when users go to Google's site to search for relevant information, companies bought ad space on either side of the search window. By applying the first rule, focus on the user, Google used its discoveries to update its user interface design removing the ads and showing more information for some search results. 87% of Google's revenue came from ad revenue at the time so this might have seemed like an irresponsible decision. But Google focused on the user and made the changes anyway because, remember, it's mission is to organize the world's information and to make it universally accesible and useful, not to sell ad space. Coupled with the super powers of the cloud, Google actually discovered that an improvement in the user experience didn't negatively affect its revenues. Users actually now have more insight than ever before when they type in just a few letters. Let me give you an example, last Sunday I was deciding between pasta and sushi for dinner. I can cook pasta, but not sushi. At 8:40PM, I used Google Search and typed in Fuki, the name of a local sushi restaurant. I didn't type the word sushi because geolocation knows I live in Palo Alto and so the search retrieves Fuki Sushi in Palo Alto. Immediately, I have a tremendous amount of information. Photos of the restaurant and the restaurant's hours. I see its location on maps, which shows how long it will take to get there. I see in orange font that the restaurant closes soon. A bar chart filled by Android indicates how busy the restaurant is and tells me that the average wait time is 30 minutes. I know that it is now 8:40 and the restaurant closes at 9, so I'm not getting sushi. This is amazing. I type four letters and I know I'm cooking pasta. Users find this functionality useful, which is why they keep coming back. Eliminating ads for some searches and using sponsored links instead has been very profitable for Google. To this day, Google employees follow this principle, focus on the user and everything else follows. 10X thinking is about generating big ideas. It's about transformation over improvement and using technology to achieve that transformation. Improvement projects help make things better by perhaps 10%. There certainly is room for improvement projects in every organization, but they will not help you scale the garage mindset or to achieve the kind of innovative solutions that the super powers of the cloud could help you build. One great example of a 10X thinker was Henry Ford, an early innovator who brought the automobile to mass market in America. He said: "If you had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." Imagine how long it would have taken for the world to experience motor vehicles if everyone thought to only improve what already exists, that's 10% mindset. Let's look at another Google example. In 2008, Google didn't have a presence in the whole of Pakistan, which meant that the map shown on Google Maps was very limited. Improvement thinking would have led Google to make only 10% additions to the map content over time, but instead Google followed the 10X principle and reframed the problem. "How can we use technology to improve the information gaps in our map ten times faster?" By setting this challenge, Google was able to create a software program called Map Maker that asks its users to map their environment, empowering the user to provide Google with the missing data. The University of Lahore then launched a contest for its students to map their journey from home to school using Map Maker. In just two years, with the support of users, we were able to create a highly accurate map of Lahore. What's more is that this data later became vital in 2010 when there were terrible floods. Four million people had to be relocated. A post-flood study found that 400,000 lives would have been lost without access to maps and the work of those students. Just imagine how long it would have taken to build an accurate map if we had applied the 10% thinking? Would it have even been possible? 10X thinking leads to solutions that are simple, empowering, and deeply transformative. Everything you've learned so far comes together with this principle: Launch and iterate. This is the "break and burn" and "fail fast" that you want to encourage in your culture. It gives your employees the freedom to innovate. It's the very practice that enables 10X thinking. So what does it entail? Launch and iterate is the mindset that says you don't have to perfect something on paper. You don't have to have every detail figured out. Launch and iterate says try, learn from the output, and try again. Just think about your garage when you're playing around with new projects. Do you focus on perfecting the plan? Or do you build an initial plan and get your hands messy testing out your plan along with new ideas? The same can apply to your business. Ask yourself, does my project or initiative support my why? Am I applying 10x thinking? How might I use technology to reframe the problem, or find transformative solutions instead of a minor improvement? When you have the answers, start experimenting and building. Seek feedback quickly. And you might fail the first time, and if you do fail fast instead of wasting time perfecting your idea, why? Because in failure you learn quickly. This is the process of innovation that is enabled by a culture of psychological safety. What emerges when launch and iterate is embedded in your thinking is the prototyping effect. The more ideas you try, the more you learn and the more you eventually succeed. Constant ongoing learning and the ability to adapt based on that learning is critical as you adopt cloud technology for your organization. One high profile example of this is Google Glass. This image demonstrates the evolution of Google Glass. The brainstorming discussion probably began with someone asking, if we can get information to people at their fingertips with a smartphone, how might we enable them to retrieve or receive information hands-free? From this, the prototype of the digital glasses emerged. You can see it went through six iterations before reaching it's most recent version. Very early it became apparent that there were barriers to adoption for the mass market, the cost being one of them. Another was social expectations, people felt awkward walking around with them. But Google employees maintained their garage mindset, their ongoing curiosity, which led to an interesting discovery. While mass market wasn't ready for Google Glass, which was an apparent failure at the time, there was significant enterprise demand. Imagine you're a surgeon or a handler in a warehouse or a repair mechanic for large industrial equipment. Hands-free access to information that helps you do your job better is highly valuable, and in those cases the cost is less of an obstacle. So in July 2017, Google launched the new enterprise edition of Google Glass. The initial plan to create and mass market digital glasses did not succeed. But teams learned from each iteration, evolving and adapting at each stage and responding to customer user feedback, which led to new successes. And remember, the ideas that your teams come up with don't have to be limited to hardware or service products. This way of thinking can also be used for any employee- customer or employee to employee interaction. Now you might be thinking, "Hey, Saman, that's all great, but I can't always apply these principles in my organization." And I agree. While these principles help to nurture a culture of innovation, they may not all be applicable to every situation in every case. I'll demonstrate this with an example from the banking industry up next.
