Product management models of despair and awakening

 

How do you build a good product strategy?  A rather classic, default formula is described above. You analyze the competition, you study the market, talk to some experts and persona some customers. Then build and test and role out and pivot and all that tiresome stuff. This is horrible.

Why is it horrible? Because it is the same as a high school essay. You get a prompt, reflect on your life, maybe read a couple books for inspiration, and then cobble together an essay with 5 paragraphs. You probably start writing a terrible paragraph in the beginning, get more succinct as you go along, then rewrite the intro to align with everything else.  In the end you have a coherent product. The downside is that you wasted a lot of time reinventing the "why." 

There is nothing wrong with this approach. But is standard across the industry because for two reasons - it tends to work - and of equal importance, almost anyone can do it. Most universities are not training students to be product managers. It is a generalist discipline. They are trained in business, or computer science, marketing, social science, or humanities. They become product managers because they see an opportunity to supply their broad knowledge with a specific process. They have some level of authority within an organization. I would argue that most people who are product managers do it because they love the idea of the job, and they might also like the product, but probably not as much as the job itself. 

There are other ways to do this. One should indulge in divergent research.  While the image below is amorphous to interpret, it captures the same details as the standard product management model (above) though with a focus on materiality. This element is key. Products are not ideas. They are things. Digital software is a product. Products are intentionally crafted materials that function as a point of change for the user(s). An insurance policy can be a product, because the specific language of that policy was carefully crafted to determine how a person's life will function in relation to a catastrophic event. The distinction between 20 paid physical therapy sessions or 30 can have a major impact on the person's future. A piece of software is no different - if you must spend time searching for features, are uncertain when you need the tool, or ignore half of the software components - the product might not be well designed for you. 

The questions of product development go far beyond immediate usability. They are questions of market fit, acquisitions, and adaptation. How will demand for this product change over time, and who will have that demand? Under what conditions will the product be successful, and when will it not be successful. How much should it cost to build? How and where do people physically acquire it and at what price?

The answers are not easily distilled, nor should the answers be determined lightly. While a simple conversation might inspire a range of insights - everything should be treated as a hypothesis.  But the constant focus on documents fails to capture the material future of the product, and the only way to reconcile the gap, is to immerse oneself into the environments, the populations, and the materials wherein the prospective product will reside. 

So do the work. Immerse yourself. Make things physical. Quit waving your hands. Stop trying to talk to everyone and spend more time identifying the conversations that matter. Stop trying to be clever, and get personal, become a part of the problem you are hoping to solve. Do you have this problem in your life? Do you actively benefit from this product? If your answer is no, then you are probably the wrong person for the job, or you aren't doing your job right.

Product management that matters is a matter of ingress and egress. Like a good anthropologist, you need one foot in the world of the customer and one foot out. How do you know when you made it? Usually because you broke something "in the system" - you crossed a line of distinction, and are no longer an outsider in the eyes of the stakeholders. You are part of the problem. It is uncomfortable. You might be in jail. You might be injured. You might even just be bored, but now you it the line and it is time to pull back one step. 

Do not wave your hands and apply a generic formula for generic people to generic customers. Embrace the magic that flows through the world, dig into the the problem, become the world's greatest expert on the problem from all points of view, and let the solution realize itself through you. Let it awaken.

Engage the world, have a vision, build a city, now go die in it.

Building a company isn't for everyone, and for those who love it, it is an act of sadism. The impetus to build a company is rooted in deep feelings, deep primitive reactions to the world. It is founded on anger, from not fitting in, and from a desire to own your own destiny. It is not a lifestyle or a privilege or an achievement, it is an act of vengeance upon everything that is wrong with society.

Building a company is not the same as making a product. When you make a project, you take an action and you get a response. You put paint on the canvas and it just remains there. It doesn't change. It doesn't talk back. It just sits there until you push it again. As a leader, your job is to create systems for other people to succeed. You must invent systems to hire people, to give them direction, and to help them flourish. You must create systems to help people communicate, to manage each others feelings, and to make progress toward your goal. You must create systems to make them feel considered, to recognize their own visions, and to passionately work toward yours.

But then what happens? You found and inspired people with a codified approach to realize your dream. What does that become? Where does it go? After you build the ship, can you still steer it forward? If there is a challenge ahead, that might keep you grounded, it will make or break you. But what if there is no immediate threat? Where do you go? 

With or without the challenge, you will find a moment of decision, when it is most difficult to remain clear headed and you must persevere. You will find a moment where your previous methods didn't work. You won't working right. You landed the spaceship on the alien landscape and there is no oxygen in place. You try to stick to your gut, or you open you mind, either way you double-down on the direction to see it through. And then you die. There is no air. There was no lifeboat. You were alone and you died alone. 

If along the way you found others who really understand what it is like to drown and resuscitate, then maybe they can give you the right coaching. They can't make oxygen from ether, but maybe they could have told you to prepare and you listened. Maybe they were wrong and you prepared the wrong way. Maybe it all came together and you made it out alive.

Can you make it out alive? All the anger in the world is not enough to save you, and so at some point, the piss and vinegar that gave you fuel to create will ruin you. You must change. What do trap rappers rap about when they become millionaires? Many of them still rap about dealing drugs and fighting gangs. They never cross this chasm. What do great comedians tell jokes about once they told all their personal stories and stories about travel? They need a new act. Many never find one. 

Heidegger said that moments of revelation are when the scrim is pulled back, and you can see the tower on the hill. It was always there, but you could never see it. Heidegger was wrong. The tower is only there if you want it to be, and you don't pull back the scrim, you build the tower. You incentivize others to build it with you and it becomes a city.

Engage the world.

Craft a vision. 

Build a city.

Now go die in it.

Going beyond the method: The separation between great professionals and true experts

From Chadwicks Systems View of Planning, 1971

There is a lot of industry concerned with method. We buy books for cooking and we watch youtube videos to learn how to sing, play piano, knit, and skateboard. 

I suspect a method, however, is a little more developed than a technique. It is a string of techniques, and thus functions as a form of knowledge in itself. 

Back in the 1950s, the world was transfixed by methods. Lean manufacturing, urban planning, and design methods were all developed as ways to intelligently identify, engage, and solve complex problems. The industry is still booming today, with evangelists covering Linkedin and twitter for Agile Coaching, Service Design, and a range of other "isms." Job ads regularly hire based on method as well. Do you know how to do focus groups? UX Research? Rapid digital prototyping?  It is not enough to know how to write the code, you need to know the method to apply the code in a meaningful way.

Personally, I love methods. I collect them. I collect books on methods (like Chadwicks 1971 publication on systems planning, above) and I am constantly trying to learn new methods across many different fields. Consequently, what I find problematic about methods in industry is not the requirement or mastery, but rather the lack of imagination.

Product designers, for example, have thoroughly codified their profession around methods. Interviews, sketch sessions, value mapping sessions, and paper prototyping are a string of methods to inform product development and strategy. They work fairly well, and are therefore repeated across industries and problem sets. 

But what about the creation of new methods? Whose job is to do that? After all, someone invented many of the methods relied upon today. Specific persons pioneered these canvasses and concepts, then shared or taught them with others. 

What I find alarming is that so few designers are inventing methods. Creativity is a foundation principle of the discipline, and yet the methods are redundant. 

Perhaps then, this is the mark of distinction between good professionals and great ones, the question you should ask at your next interview: "Tell about a time you invented a method to solve a problem."

The Persistence of Debating A.I.

There are lots of theories on how you built a team to develop and deploy artificial intelligence capabilities within an organization. It is hard to do. Most people have not done it. Everyone seems to have an opinion and few have real-world experience. Yet the question comes up on how to do it, because there seems to be consensus that trusting our machines to drive actions and decisions for us will have real repercussions in the world.

Just the other day, I found an article breaking the dilemma down into a simple binary question, do we trust data scientists with the questions of creating AI in government, the subject experts who work for those agencies, or someone else - like a program manager? 

Admittedly, I find such articles a little tedious, because they use the word AI like it has a special impact on people, different from the use of other technologies. Do you have car insurance, or life insurance? Then your life has been measured, quantified, and ranked to identify a particular level of risk. This risk decides how much money you pay for your coverage. Insurance has been around for a long time, hundreds of years really, and while the methods of risk analysis have changed over time, the overall experience remains the same. You pay more money if you are high risk and less money if you are low risk. If we had AI/ML/DS then we just end up with a more granular risk to cost ratio. The granularity might create a cost savings for you - or more likely - will better benefit the insurer. 

With such a robust history of calculation driving day-to-day decisions in the world, these questions on AI have sufficient historical context. The power of team building and decision making is multifaceted, and the overall bias of that team is primarily rooted in the interests of those who are driving it in the background. In the case of private sector efforts, we see the shadows of financing and financial goals, and in public sector we have the guardrails of public policy. If there is no policy, then the people on the front lines will have the most influence, for better or worse. 

What is forgotten in such discussions is that the issue is not merely solved by identifying "who" is doing the work. The second part is "how" are they doing it?

Our our processes, our tools, and our communications shape our outcomes. I've hired highly talented data scientists who were terrible communicators and thus failed the project. I've also hired incredibly communicators with deep expertise, and yet they relied upon antiquated methods and therefore their work was not easily absorbed into the organization. Not to mention, tools and code have flavors and bias. 

If we want to build great AI, we have to stop pretending that the open ended questions on "what should we do," can be solved with simple heuristics. Rather, lets education ourselves to better understand the problems, discuss them, collaborate, build, and share our work with each other. We will make mistakes, and with persistence - our mistakes will change - as we also change our tools and our minds. 

It takes an artist to paint a picture

This last year I had the fortune to meet author Anjali Sachdeva, who in 2018 debuted an extraordinary collection of short stories in her book, "All the names they used for God." As much as we all want to ask Anjali about her process, I found that reading her biography was enough to glean some insight. Anjali has lived a full and robust life. She has travelled and lived around the world. She has spent years working with other writers to hone her skills. She is an active reader. She cares not just about the craft of story making, but she has made choices and pursued goals to live a remarkable life from which she can reflect and draw upon.  Her stories come from her, and she has thus invented herself from the bits and pieces of the world so as to create those stories. 

We can do this in business too.

In the last year, I was working with a team to design, build, and deploy custom software for a government office. Like most engagements, it started off with a request for a mobile app, but through engaging in a deep research and design process with robust client engagement - much more happened. 

We never built a mobile app, because after digging into the problem, it was obvious that the problem was just as much about the organization as anything else. We couldn't just say that though - rather, I made a point to travel widely across the country, meeting the people and spending time with them to understand the problems. I made sure we documented these engagements, presenting our work to the client, taking them on the journey too.

We made some software, but better, we delivered and approach and an architecture for change, working closely with the client to lead them on a journey of self discovery and unlocking a range of interventions. The outcome was profound. 

Higher levels of leadership began to discover that they had an internal vision for how their organization could work, leveraging modern technologies and values, to create faster and more effective outputs. The business grew and the work expanded.

And here is the thing I realized:

Leaders often know what they want, but sometimes they need a guide to help them articulate it to everyone else. Especially in a government agency. Federal hiring practices tend to hire the same kinds of people, with the same kinds of background, over and over again. They need someone with sufficient outsider status, but insider language, to help break open the organization and paint the sky a new color.

On another occasion, I once crafted a service blueprint of an entire organization to identify where and how our cloud software will function to change the company. Upon presenting the image, the COO boldly spoke aloud to say, "for the first time, it's like everyone in the room can see everything in my head."

Day after day, this man had been trying to communicate this organizational design to his staff, and yet we managed to achieve it within a matter of minutes. This is not a poor reflection on the COO, but rather demonstrates the challenge to create and live a great story. 

We are not really taught in school or in many career fields how to tell a story. We are instructed on how to relay information with clarity. As children we might be asked to write a story, but rarely have teachers taught how to create one. When you learn to paint, you learn about color, form, and must look at paintings - over and over again. Painters are taught more than technique and materials, but learn about the legacy and personalities of painting. They learn the biographies of painters and trade stories about profound, world changing exhibitions. They learn to create a different world.  

We who make software, algorithms, robots and cars - the hard tackle of 21st century industrialism - could learn much from those artists and writers.

Thinking alone in the world

For whatever reason, there are lots of images in pop culture of the lone genius - the scientist or the artist or the technologist - who takes an idea and turns it into a profound gift for the world. We talk about Jim Morrison wandering through the desert to create the Doors. Steve Jobs picked apples and invited the personal computer revolution. Leonardo Da Vinci created notebooks and paintings in his studio, filling hundreds of pages with profound ideas about flying machines and war battlements. Whats up with this idea of the lone genius? It is a lie. 

For many years, I prioritized the value to build something from nothing. Years later, I discovered the bigger magic act is to build something that really matters - to create profound structural change on a problem, or a set of conditions, or for a group of people. This is the same reason we hire product managers in tech firms, to bring together all the different people and inspire them to deliver a ground breaking change in the world through a product. 

If we think about how this is done, the idea to build something from nothing is misleading. Because the ability to create profound impacts is founded on the ability to discover and pull together resources, expertise, and insights from lots of different places. Creating the thing that matters doesn't happen in a vacuum.

There is a point where one does need to pull away from the world for reflection and to imagine new things. To imagine new things is not easy, it takes dedication.  Anyone can borrow an existing way of living - I want that job, that car, that house. Yet what about inventing a way of life that is less apparent? 

In all the years I worked as an urban planner in fragile states, there were not many people I could look upon as direct role models. I met a few people who did similar work, or had some interaction online, but this wasn't exactly a common way of living or working. 

Much of the ability to imagine a new way of being depended upon constructing metaphors.  In interviews, people would ask about my work, and I'd say "do you like to drive fast? All I'm doing is taking something really boring - urban planning - which is typically concerned with things like zoning, and traffic, and green space and I'm driving fast."

Metaphors enable us to imagine and create a better world, but to create a metaphor, one cannot remain hidden away in the studio. One must engage the world, and learn other ways of living, so as to best give back.

Better science by exploring metaphors

Brewing with champagne yeast. Beverage and music production by Mitchell Sipus

Brilliant campaigns and sharp insights are not tied to rational processes. Business schools overlook this. We train young minds in rigorous and highly structured analysis, and yet, the ability to identify the uncanny and seize it is more frequently tied to open dialogue, fast moving conversations, and slow periods of reflection. In the meanwhile, we do not educate our MBAs to meditate or to work through metaphors.

I once read in Ray Kurzweil's How to create a mind, that Einstein wasn't so much a strong mathematician, but had a strong ability to think through metaphors. Kurzweil described Albert Einstein as a man who would read voraciously and daydream, but unlike most of us, would carry the imagined scenario many steps forward into the realms of abstraction. Once he these dreamlike scenarios were far and distant from reality - he would begin to analyze them, reverse engineering them into plausibility. He didn't do better math - he just did better at dreaming.

Over the last five years I have worked on this technique. While working at the EPA, I built rich metaphors for the organization as a car on a race track and as a dust storm on the moon (yeah, I realize, it doesn't have dust storms). I pushed these metaphors hard, imagining scenarios where the wheels fall off or static electricity evolves into a cosmic disturbance. And then I began to work backwards and sideways, repositioning these extended metaphors and translating them into something real. Sometimes it created value. Sometimes it did not. Sometimes it just gave me a headache. But when I injected the outcome of the effort into daily work - it always had repercussions. My colleague Ben Wilman and I did some great work at the EPA, and I suspect this was part of it.

In the video above, I am creating a metaphor. I was brewing hard seltzer at home and started to film the settlement of the yeast as it interacted with diamonnium phosphate,  a yeast nutrient. Through the camera lens, I found the interaction of the champagne yeast and the nutrient somehow romantic and extraterrestrial. I wrote some music and applied it to the imagery.

What is this? I do not know? How will it shape the next steps in the scientific process of alcohol production that I otherwise am constantly measuring and locking away into a database? I do not know. But by and large, databases only enable greatness, they do not create it. Metaphors can unlock new worlds, whereas science can only study them.

Service Design for Realizing the Invisible

Spotify also uses Service Design to better connect and understand how users interact with their service over time.

I am an avid practitioner of Service Design. I apply it broadly throughout my life, from the design of algorithms to the renovation of rooms in my house like the kitchen or the dining room. I rely upon it because Service Design is the practice to make visible the invisible.

Everyday we conduct sequences of actions to generate some kind of change in the world. Sometimes the relationship between the action and the result are direct - like you add oil to the car engine to lubricate the engine.  But other times we conduct multiple actions to reach a goal. Maybe we go to the grocery store with the end goal of bodily nourishment, or we go to the bar with the end goal of social engagement. Along the way you choose and pay for items.

Along the way you rely upon other persons and their actions. The grocery shelves must be stocked and the drinks must be served.

You rely upon an environment, such as the store or the bar, and expect the environment to be designed so as to support your actions. Food items are clearly visible and the bar has a surface upon which you may rest your drink, or maybe chairs, or at a minimum, enough space for a crowd of people to congregate.

Qualitative atmospheric element will shape these environments and influence your judgement although these elements are not directly connected to your goals or your actions. Within an upscale grocer like Whole Foods the lighting is often dim with dramatic spotlights creating strong shadows.  Is the bar full of energetic young people with nothing else to do or is it full of tired people in their 50s who just finished a day of work?

To provide a radical product innovation in these spaces can benefit from an understanding of how all these different factors - and others - inform and define the product as a service. I've seen AR apps to help people navigate grocery stores - and yet, I wondered "how is this better than the existing signage? Or how is a visual navigation system better than a 2D map?" 

Likewise, in a discussion about security systems, I've wondered how does face recognition on a camera actually improve security? Does it notify guards of unwanted persons? Does it seal the doors so the person can't enter the building?  What is the appropriate action for the venue to apply the technology?

Through service design, one can benefit from a structured approach, to identify the range of human interactions with a set of conditions to accomplish a goal, and how those interactions are distributed over space and time.  In this regard, it transforms the everyday experience into a gold mine of opportunity.

Companies Need Transaction Design for Faster Technology Returns

Many profitable, hard working businesses find themselves burdened over time by their own tools and processes. Maybe a tool like Excel or Quickbooks was the right tool for the job, once upon a time, but now the organization has grown to keep up with customer demand and you find it hard to manage as those tools are now a burden.  Or perhaps your company is competing in a crowded market and you feel a pressure to continually invest in technology to compete. This makes sense, given how companies like Amazon and Shopify have dramatically shifted retail models with their technology-first approach to customer frustrations like shipping, returns, and check out. 

There are usually only two ways that leadership approaches these problems. First invest into optimizing current and known bottlenecks, and this is a sound approach. By and large it's a great approach because you can identify clear metrics and double down on improving the numbers. This is winning. The second is that you invest into novel experiments - new flavors, new materials, or new customer experiences such as a digitized checkout lane or AI voice assistance in the changing room. These projects are expensive, so are limited to small-scale pilots, and performance impact can take a bit of effort to measure. 

I've found that a third model also exists. This model only exists "sometimes, is fleeting, and requires an anthropological rigor to identify. I call this kind of work Transaction Design, when you are able to thoughtfully craft a new kind of financial transaction, often by using a simple technology. For example,  Plaid was created by a startup as an API solution to streamline transactions for investment tools like Robinhood, so individuals can make small investments with lower fees, and do this quickly. Another examples include Sophi's use of housing equity to offset student loans, enabling millennials to buy a home and pay their loans; or the notion that security deposits for apartments can be outsourced as insurance, so that millennials do not need to save 3X the rent, while reducing overhead compliance challenges for landlords.Here is the thing - any time a technology enables a capital transaction that could not previously exist,  it becomes a repeatable model. 

Transaction design can be implemented with speed and low-costs, unlike and expensive tech-heavy pilot of novel gimmicks, and creates new kind of customer insights with less investment. In fact, transaction design can generate rapid returns on existing tools, and give insight into how to design a tech roadmap for future capability needs, not just to amend current gaps. After all, isn't the biggest waste of money to only exist in meeting current market conditions, when those conditions are certain to change? No one wants that - especially share holders. 

How do you conduct Transaction Design in your company? You should not just run out and start trying to slam them into your current enterprise - that's for sure.  Also brainstorming exercises are never the best place to start.  Rather, you need to find the right expert, someone who understands the breadth of conversion models out there and has the means to understand your organization through its data, it's structural design, processes, and people. At the end of the day, it's always about the right people, because that part never changes.

Hire the Right Innovation Executive (CXO, CIO, CTO, CINO).

Executive recruitment is not easy. Hiring great people is always a challenge, but leadership recruitment is a high risk, and potentially costly endeavor.  If you bring on the wrong person for the job,  it can cost the company millions of dollars.

In recent years, corporations have sought to in inject innovation into their operations. Around 2012, companies like Target invested millions of dollars into creating model stores to test ideas, gas spectrometers to streamline produce supply chains, and hired a slew of people trained in design thinking. It also spun up "Project Goldfish," a secret effort to create the store of the future. By 2017 Target shut down many of these projects, as the abstract futuristic research conflicted with the reality poor revenue.

Today,  innovation is at the heart of growth for Target, but not the same 'version' of innovation that was pursued in 2013. The approach today is about solving real problems and making real impact on the bottom line. Today, target utilizes near term and long term methods, and has grown it's data science capabilities to coordinate with design-driven methods.

We can learn many things from this example, but the central narrative is that "research," is not the driver for corporate innovation. "Development" is the engine.  While all the development should be supported by a culture and sound methods in experimentation, exploration, and at the end of the day - you gotta make the thing, keep making the thing, and get results.

The most critical marker to identify the best hire is simple: How does this person drive results in the real world by introducing radical insights with effective action?

By and large, innovation executives focus on the things of technology, data, or the customer experience, or they focus on the how, agile development, user research, and experimentation methods. A good innovation executive will succeed in building these things and processes - yet a better one is far more focused on the what and the why, what will these things do in the world and why does it matter?

Innovation leadership demands the ability to create compelling visions of the future that are connected to existing evidence, but about 3 deviations removed into the realm of possibility. Leadership is the translation of that vision into processes and artifacts through others, to make that vision tangible. If this leader is truly great, then unexpected and unknown obstacles will become assets and new discoveries will further realize the vision, not undermine it. Sometimes this means the first steps are "less innovative," because a particular company weakness needs to be resolved, or because the workforce isn't mobilized.  Yet every every step of the way, this person can translate the profound into the ordinary.

True Innovation Makes No Sense Yet Changes Everything

Over the decades I have spent countless hours with executives who seek to bring innovation to their IT systems or their businesses. They say they want dramatic changes. They are 110% convinced that certain technologies can make it possible.  But what they really want is to increase profits, increase efficiency, improve communications, and have greater control over their company.  Those are all good things and quite often, they want proven conventional methods to satisfy many of those needs. Innovation, however, consists of introducing an unknown variable into the mix, so that one cannot entirely predict the outcome. At first, no one likes that idea. 

In the photo above I am soaking pieces of an apple tree and a lemon in a sanitized bucket of distilled water. After a few days I will boil this water and add sugar. I will then filter out the items, cool it down, and bottle it with a chosen yeast to make a hard seltzer, approximately 4.5% ABV and 100 calories. Everything about this process is standard... except the infusion of apple wood and lemon.  I have only a vague idea what this might taste like, based on my experience of smoking meat with apple wood, the smell of the wood, and my familiarity with lemons. Perhaps this infusion won't work at all, it will make zero perceivable difference, or perhaps it will yield a disgusting result.  

To manage the risks, I am only creating one gallon of alcohol. Furthermore, everything I am doing is based on previous experiences and data, with the exception of the wood and fruit. If the outcome is terrible the cost was low. If it is only "a little" terrible, then I can try another version. Maybe apple wood and no lemon? Maybe pieces of oak under pressure - like this Cleveland-based company that uses a similar approach to age bourbon in merely one week?

The process I just described is not innovation. Soaking some wood in the water is somewhat novel, but thats about it. The overall process is more akin to the scientific method as a structured approach to incremental learning. This is one way, the most common way, to manage innovation. The innovation part is leveraging absurdity. Apple wood is a high risk, untested,  and by all means reckless ingredient that is likely to sabotage my brewed product. Have you ever seen an apple wood flavored beer on the shelf? Is this because it is a proven bad concept,  or did no one ever make the leap to try it, then try enough to succeed?  The only insight to hedge the risk, again, is my personal subjective experience with the wood which I used in a smoker, and that isn't very reliable. 

The risk to take a nonsensical action, and to persist in the nonsense, is at the heart of innovation, art, and insanity. The incredible opportunity is the small, yet viable probability that my reckless action will generate massive returns if all goes well. If it doesn't - well, then we could. have trouble. Creating a process to manage innovation is essential to keeping your company afloat by keeping the risks small.  But this still isn't innovation.

Yet what if, somehow, maybe this apple wood seltzer introduces a new idea about beverages. What if it surges in popularity, so much that it will generate an entirely new market of organic wood infused beverages, demanding an increase in new forestry growth and sustainable forestry practices. Maybe this demand will be high enough that it leads to new kinds of job creation,  and inspires other markets that enhance taking care of the earth. Just maybe, I soak some wood in a bucket, and with constant dedication and determination, transform the entire way beverage ingredients are sourced to stimulate new growth in the rain forests and stimulate new economic models.

This is all possible. Before Uber or Lyft, most people would never have jumped into a stranger's car. Before Starbucks, no one in their right mind would have spent seven dollars on a coffee. And before I started brewing beer in my basement, I never thought about the taste of a tree.

When irrational action meets profound vision to inspire a chain of consequences that forever change the lives of people, businesses, and communities – then you truly innovated.  If you are good at it, you don't need a 10 million dollar team of technicians to start, you just need a 5 gallon bucket and a few small logs.