Reinventing Effective Leadership for Disruptive Innovation, with Mike Steep

Welcome to the Athletics of Business, a podcast about how the traits and behaviors of elite athletes and remarkable business leaders frequently intersect the real stories and hard lessons to help you level up your leadership and performance. Now your host, Ed Molitor.

Welcome back to another episode of the Athletics of Business podcast. I am your host and CEO of the Molitor Group, Ed Molitor. And what an unbelievable conversation I have for you today with Michael Steepe, who has been at the forefront of technology for the last 30 years. He's the author of the newly released book First Light of Day, a cautionary tale of our Future. It's an absolutely fascinating read and we'll dive into that later in the podcast. He is also founder and Executive Director of Stanford University School of Engineering's Disruptive Technology and Digital Cities program. In his current role there, Mike has built a bridge between Stanford's Disruptive technologies labs and 30 corporate partners. And those partners include Amazon, Cushman and Wakefield, Hitachi, Visa, and they work together to create new opportunities for innovation and monetization.

In addition to his work at Stanford, Mike is an adjunct professor of Digital Business at the Imperial College London and serves on the Smart Cities Board of London, advising commercial clients on the impact of emerging technology in their industries. Earlier, Mike held management positions for the world renowned tech research firm parc, which is formerly known as Xerox parc, and for tech giants including now get this list, Hewlett Packard, IBM, Microsoft and Apple. In the process he has witnessed firsthand and he'll share these stories with some of the greatest technological breakthroughs and transformations and worked with Companies such as BMW, Google, Procter Gamble, L', Oreal, Airbus, Amazon, Cushman and Wakefield, Hitachi and Visa to develop disruptive technologies for new lines of business.

Now, in addition to the experience and the stories that he'll share with us, we're going to jump into problems inside of the culture with disruptive technology and innovation. Okay? We're going to talk about the lack of awareness at the executive level on what they are missing. You know, go into the three things that they're missing and honestly you can relate this to your world regardless of what field of endeavor you are in. And we'll talk about embracing change. Okay. And not being risk adverse. And one of the things I love that we talk about and think about this the power of having no preconceived notions of what you cannot do. Mike, thank you so much for taking the time to join us today here on the Athletics of Business podcast. I am humbled and I am truly Excited to jump into this conversation.

Well, thank you so much. This is a great pleasure for me to participate.

Well, Mike, you know, our listeners have heard the intro, all the amazing work that you have done, what you are doing now. But can you take us through your journey all the way back to the beginning of where you have been, what you have done, the amazing people you work with, any incredible work that you're doing now?

Sure. I think it all started actually in 8th grade when I went to the premiere of 2001 A Space Odyssey in New York City. And that movie changed my whole perspective on technology and what was possible living on the east coast, which was not focused around technology or Silicon Valley. So I decided after experiencing HAL 9000 computer in that film, to move to Silicon Valley and get involved in technology as early as possible. So the very first job was with Hewlett Packard. I was recruited by them. I was part of the first MBA class. They actually didn't know what to call us, so they called us marketing engineers. And I started working with many computer group in Silicon valley.

And then 35 years later, after a career as an operations executive in various companies, I've gone through numerous transformations of technology and change, almost to the point now where change is simply another rhythm of my lifestyle and what I do. So I launched the first software for the IBM PC and it was called the Assistant Family Series from Software Publishing Corporation, which is one of the three first software companies developing applications for personal computers. And then I also launched the first digital camera at Apple. $1,000. 16 photo, low resolution, hook it up to your TV kind of device, which was an abysmal failure in the marketplace. But it was an amazing experience to go through that.

Sure.

And then most recently at Microsoft, working with the Innovation Organization under Bill Gates and also looking at the introduction of the cloud, the Azure cloud platform that currently is Microsoft's core strategy. I also was Senior Vice President at parc where I saw very early stage technologies being developed commercially. And then after that I decided to start the Disruptive Innovation Program at Stanford. So I'm now at the Stanford Engineering School and we're running an incredible program connecting early stage technology to some 30 corporate affiliate members, including Microsoft, Amazon and others, where we're helping them bridge the gap between their awareness of early stage technology and their ability to build new businesses off of it. So that in short, has been my journey. I decided to write the book First Light of Day primarily as a result of the lesson I learned from 2001.

I didn't want to write a business book I wanted people to associate with the characters 35 to 45 years in the future. But I wanted to use real technology that's developed and available today to show what that is likely to have in terms of impact on our society, political values and economy in the future. So that in quick summary is a synopsis of what I've been doing. And really it's been a fascinating journey.

And fascinating is a word that I use to describe the book. And we'll get into that. But what led you to this point? So what led you to Stanford and to create the disruptive technology and to be doing what you're doing now?

Well, I've been literally heads down in technology transformation for a long period of time, also combating corporate cultures that have almost a viral anti immune response to anything that's new or different within those cultures. So I saw transformations occurring at Apple, at Microsoft, participated in that, but also worked with over 200 strategic accounts at Microsoft, with the innovation offices of all these different companies, including Merck, Airbus, just crossing every major industry segment. So I had a firsthand look at how corporations were dealing with innovation in those different realms.

And the one thing that was really amazing coming out of that was the fact that every CEO we talked to seemed to talk about innovation from a crisis mentality, meaning that they felt that they were in a crisis of innovation, didn't really know what to do about it, didn't really know the cause of it. And so what we ended up doing was a survey at PARC and then later on updated at Stanford to talk to 3,000 executives from 400 companies about innovation. And the results were astounding. So for example, the number one issue in all these different companies, a 95% failure rate in new R and D projects around innovation and new product offerings. Wow, 95% failure rate. That's up 25 points from where it was after the Second World War.

So in other words, if we look at venture at a 90% failure rate, what we're saying is that corporate innovation has a higher rate of failure. If we believe survey results, Venture does, in a conservative environment of which we do linear R and D development, you know, looking at product roadmaps that are very carefully planned out. So that was the first piece of information. The second piece of information from the survey was that CEOs felt that they are completely unaware of where disruptive technology is occurring. And even if they know, for example, of a startup technology or an area, they don't have the proper skills inside their company to bridge to that culture. And so the cultural differences between the company and the startup disruptive technology area is astounding. And then the third area was the risk aversion.

They felt that a lot of their technical leaders were averse to any change. And not only were they not aware of some of this disruptive technology despite being experts in their field, but they continue to follow the same dictum of driving product roadmaps based on their compensation models. So in other words, a lack of compensation for those who are actually being.

Creative about this, is that just a recipe for disaster? Right. I mean, complete failure and utter failure. When you talk about sustaining success and growth and resiliency and risk aversion, don't have the proper skillset. You know, I just really.

It goes back to the tribal culture, which is a drum beating culture that creates rhythms of the business that keep everybody on the same track. And as soon as someone tries to be the outlier to go left or right, there's a strong opposition to corporate antibodies that rise. And so the culture really is very successful at driving consistency over time of doing exactly the same thing. Now there's an article that just appeared in Financial Times, an interview with Satya Nadella, who's the new leader, new CEO of Microsoft, in which he says, and I'm so happy to see this, that culture is the main issue when you're trying to change the direction of a company, that if you cannot change the company culture, it really doesn't matter what else you do.

And in fact, you could be a technology leader and not be able to be successful unless you really address the culture. He hit the hammer and the nail square on the problem set right. And so I'm finally beginning to realize that when we look at all these different innovation initiatives, leadership alone is not enough. You have to understand that what you're dealing with is a cultural problem, not a technical problem. And so, you know, that's one of the things that we're working on at Stanford on the engineering program we have launched.

Okay, so what sort of things are you doing to work on that problem?

Well, we're coming up with a new way of approaching innovation. So we've taken all the lessons learned from all these different companies, including ones that have been successful and not so successful with innovation. And we're creating an entirely new way to approach innovation. And it involves looking at a venture portfolio approach to organizational development and a real focus on what we call the infiltration model. So instead of having an incubation model, what we're talking about is a portfolio of risk in technologies. That make sense for that particular company's industry managed outside of the corporation, of which the main employees of the company can take advantage of stock options that are then offered from that portfolio so that we reduce the amount of angst and opposition to cultural change.

Then we call it the infiltration model because over a period of time we infiltrate the main core organization with experts from the portfolio management piece to make sure that we start changing some of the basic hiring practices inside the company. So it's a hands off approach, but it's an approach that allows for the financial solvency of the startup portfolio versus doing an incubation approach with the same exact management team. And that seems to fail miserably. There are at least 16 major acquisitions at Microsoft that failed primarily because of the lack of focus on cultural integration. So that's one of the things that we're doing with this whole new model. And we're also developing business modeling skills which are sorely lacking in a lot of corporations who don't know how to develop a new business model for a new technology development in an easy way.

So we're increasing the skill set around that. So we're creating a whole series of workshops. They're called Reinventing Disruptive Innovation and we're verticalizing them for each industry. So we're doing one on healthcare, family, office and so forth. So that's one example.

Let's talk a little bit about. You know, yesterday you and I had a wonderful conversation and we talked about awareness, right? Being the number one issue inside of the culture issue. Can you talk a little bit into the CEOs and what their level of awareness is, what they're missing, where they are missing it?

Well, I got to say that compensation has a lot to do with the problem set. They're not compensated for coming up with the new version of sliced bread and then bring it into the corporation. They're compensated for the systematic, repeated effort of delivering the right revenue and earnings growth to drive share price. And their comp packages are usually quite substantial in fact for the whole senior executive team. So we've got this legacy of success to overcome. And that was no more apparent than at Microsoft during the early years before softship took over, where the window success trumped any effort to try to do anything new or different inside the corporation. And failure after failure. The Nokia acquisition for example, to try to turn around the mobile business ended up to be a disaster for the company.

But you know, there are numerous other examples of that as a culture. The success of the past drives the failure of the future. And so that's why a lot of the large corporations we see on the Fortune group list have disappeared over the last 50 years. It's one of the reasons. So you know, it serves a purpose for the CEO to focus on that. But you know, when you're comp do that, you're not really looking to the left or to the right. And tackling a cultural change is an enormous skill set problem. First of all, just to recognize that it is the culture that is actually the problem is what I would call major awareness insight. Very few CEOs see the culture as a problem. If anything, they see the culture as a real asset to drive new product development.

And no more so again in Microsoft and Apple in particular. So we've come up with this analysis called the outside inside out approach. And essentially what we've learned is that the most successful innovation models inside corporations, and the percentage is very low, are those models that take an outside in approach. So let's use two examples. Let's look at Apple. When Steve Jobs left Apple, you know, he was walking the desert with his, I guess last $20 million. I don't know how much he actually had, poor baby. And you know, he joined Disney and Pixar. He joined two industry players that were outside of the mainstream Silicon Valley culture. And he learned everything about licensing of content. He learned about entertainment, he learned how the lawyers drive the licensing model in Hollywood.

So that when he came back to Apple, he already had in his mind a whole set of sea changes from the outside experience that he would drive at Apple. So the very first thing he did was change the name of the company from Apple Computer to Apple. But he also had to replace a lot of the management team and put in place a whole new dictum about what the company's philosophy was going to be, its strategy. It became instead of a computer company, a device company of which content, entertainment content would then be delivered. So the whole business model of the company shifted. So that drove a lot of the success of the company. It wasn't his, just his daughter that created the invention of new products. He already had all of this in mind before he came back.

It was the outside in approach that drove a lot of success of Apple. And I'll give you another example in a startup. So there's a young man by the name of Sam Bertrand who started a company called 1.1. He has no agricultural experience, yet he's developing a solution to grow produce in a vertical shop, a small 10,000 square foot facility that can produce are you ready? 35 acres of food, 100th the amount of fertilizer and 1 10th the amount of water, 20% more nutrition. So you begin to wonder, how is that possible? So I took Sam to one of my keynotes. It was a keynote in front of 300 farmers and companies.

And I brought him with me and they cheered him when he came on stage and he talked about what he was doing and they came after him afterwards saying, oh, we would like to get involved. And then there wasn't a single follow through from the meeting.

Wow.

So why is that? You have somebody has no agricultural experience solving agricultural problems, but then again, you have initial enthusiasm that results in zero. So we explored what that problem was. And most of the owners of these farms are so entrenched with their legacy culture that they don't even know how they would approach working with someone like Sam. And so Sam is an outside in example at the startup stage. He has no preconceived notions about things he can't do. So he sees the world as his oyster. And the way he approaches problems are, you know, from a technical point of view. And he has an expertise that none of the farmers actually have. So he is able to use robotics to create a robotic enabled aeroponic solution. And now he's in the process of raising Series A around.

He's already been able to raise 16 million in venture early stage money. So that's two examples. But I can go on and Satya Nadella is another one. The companies that have tried this have had great success. The maverick model of innovation without changing the culture doesn't work. So we had a very strong willed CTO brought in, for example, the Airbus who helped drive the electric airplane development as a moonshot and that all went to hell. He had to leave the company, went to another company to become cto, at least that's my perspective on it. And they were successful at flying this aircraft with tremendous improvements in virtually everything from servicing. But what ended up happening is the culture simply said we have too much to do, too many problems to solve and we're just barely treading water. How can we suddenly do this?

So after that project was done, there were five brand startups developing electric airplanes that were created and funded. So here you had a company that had the first attempt, successful attempt at developing a new product killed it off from the cultural point of view. The leader left then have startups rising to challenge the major player in the industry. So this happens over and over again. And what we've tried to do is to begin learning the lessons from all this and creating a new way of thinking about disruptive innovation. We don't really talk about methodologies around this, the Peter Drecker approaches, or we really are focusing instead on practical approaches to understand how to focus on the culture as the main driving factor in changing innovation.

Yesterday when you talked, you likened it to almost being inside of a bubble. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Yes. Well, we're all inside of bubbles. And, you know, we each have our own tribal bubble, so to speak, even in our homes, in our home life. And, you know, the tribal bubble is getting even more real with this whole virus problem that we're having. You know, we're beginning to realize, you know, how vulnerable we really are. And, you know, we haven't invested the resources to be able to address healthcare. And we haven't really put together preparation for any of this. We react instead. So we all exist in bubbles. Same thing is true. We bring the bubble with us to the corporation. So our personal lives and our mortgages and trying to keep our family fed. That whole security issue goes into the corporations. You don't necessarily have that with startup mentality.

And so you have people who are instead focusing on the great idea and willing to take a real high level of risk. So it's risk taking. And then the culture builds upon itself, especially if it's successful. You know, so Microsoft, which used to have something called rude questioning, was a very toxic culture before the founders left. So it had to basically take the founders out of the company or have them resign in order to be able to make progress so that, you know, not only the leader comes in, but the leader is also changing the corporate culture that the tribal drumbeat, so to speak. And usually you have to replace people because people get complacent. They become. They oppose because they're not compensated for the new developments, which is a real problem.

And, you know, and then all of a sudden you have to replace them. And that's exactly what happened at Apple and a number of other companies who are making these changes. And I can also point to BMW with the development of the I series cars, what was involved in that and so forth. But that had board, senior leadership involved, and they had to oppose a lot of the culture inside the company and to make them change occur.

So what happened there?

Well, there was a new vision of developing an iPhone on wheels. New vision for the company, not for the world or for the industry. And so you had again, a charismatic leader who came in and he had a meeting with the board at BMW and went through what the idea was that we started creating a data driven experience, not just a hot car on wheels. And the data would eventually drive a completely new model called the continuously connected value chain. A pioneering idea that every aspect of your value chain is continuously connected, where data is constantly accumulated and insights are then driven to change the business model. And so he got $3.4 billion in euros to fund the I series project. And the I series project has morphed into this continuous connected value chain.

So in the very first year of production, I believe that BMW shot up to number three in electric cars. But it wasn't the idea that it was an electric car. It was the idea that it was a continuously connected data chain. And so they've taken that basic concept and move it across all their different models. So if you have a collision control model as an example in your BMW, you get an opportunity basically to, you know, be able to understand all the dynamics of how your car is operating. So that's another example, and we can go through this. The continuously connected value chain is perhaps one of the most significant developments of the last few years. There's pluses and minus to this. There's a book by Shoshana Zuboff, a good friend of mine at Harvard, who developed a book called Surveillance Capitalism.

But, you know, it talks about what the implications of all this new data accumulation are, and chief among which are the privacy. So the profiling is so significant that, you know, none of us can actually escape the environment unless we're planning to go out into the woods for some prolonged period of time. So now that model is also being applied to healthcare and insurance companies. People don't know this, but privacy policies are directed by what agreement you sign when you buy an iPhone, not by the federal government. So when I buy an iPhone, I am under the corporate compliance policies of Apple and I've yielded my rights. So there's a huge amount of misunderstanding about it. I call it the iceberg principle. There's a huge iceberg of which we see only a small portion when we buy our iPhone above the waterline.

And everything that's important is what's occurring below the waterline in terms of data profiling and accumulation.

That is interesting. I look back at this and all these things that are going on, and you go back to talking about the changes that need to be made with Microsoft and the risk taking and how the maverick model didn't work, even though there was so much success with that Airbus, the Airbus electric airplane model. My Question and I want to take this in the direction of this is how much of this relates back to the values that are actually driving the culture of these folks that are so interested in rewarding mediocrity because it's driving the revenue and the numbers that makes the stock, the shareholders happy and things like that. Like how much of that has to change.

Now when you come in and try to change the culture, how hard is it to figure out how to bring the values up a level?

Well, the place to start in my view is the board. And that's always the place to start. And the problem there is that we have a very entrenched culture that drives a lot of what happens inside of corporations. And board is compensated based upon the valuations of stock. And so we don't have a proper metric for figuring out return on investment. If you're doing venture now think about this, the venture model, you're waiting seven years in a portfolio to get your return on investment and you're making risks that have 90% failure rate. So you have to be extremely due, diligent and you have to find ways to sort out the wheat from the shaft. And so we don't have that in the corporate model at all. We really don't.

And we also don't have an expertise level that really understands technology, even in companies that are highly technical. And so at Microsoft, one of the things that I was involved with was managing a SAS division at the company. So were making the transition from stuff like packaged goods software to software as a service. And it was incredible the amount of opposition inside the company. And it had to take a board level action in order to be able to really drive that effectively in the company culture. Now how much of this are actually seen by the senior management of the company? Very little. Basically they do ops reviews as an example of that. Very few people get far below senior executives get far below the chain.

And I go back to what I learned at HP a long time ago, which was managing by walking around sounds absurd, but it works great. And you know, the connection points of going out and speaking to people you normally don't come in contact with are missing in a lot of the way corporations operate these days. It's very hierarchical. We need a new model, in my opinion, in order to be able to drive innovation. And so the culture starts at the very top. And now we have, for example at Apple, a new legacy where we have a superb operations executive. I went to a keynote the other day before this virus outbreak and I asked them how Many people know who the technical leader of Apple is.

And then a couple people actually raised their hand, said Steve Jobs, which is really funny, but most of them did not. And so no one knows who the technical leader at Apple is. They know who it is at Microsoft because he's a technical guy. And so you've got a superb operations manager. And we have very little in the way of what I would call a visionary that's been identified to replace Steve Jobs. I don't think he could replace Steve Jobs. So what have been the great inventions of the last five years? Have we seen a new breakthrough, the equivalent of the iPhone introduction or the iPad? No, we've seen a lot of incremental work that is called innovation. And I myself am, you know, making this call with a pair of the new EarPods Pro, which are superb incremental product.

It's just simply an improvement upon an existing product. But it's not anything revolutionary from that point of view. A lot of the technology has been developed by other companies 10, 20 years ago. So culture is extremely important. And so one other thing is that the expertise level that are inside the corporation is really wanting. You know, I had a cup of coffee with the head of the PhD program for the Computer Science PhDs a while ago, and I asked them, you know, what's it like? You're graduating from Stanford Engineer, you're getting 200 grand a year, which barely makes it possible to live in the Bay Area, by the way. You know, it sounds absurd, but that's true. And you know, how long of a career you go? 35 years, 25 years. And the answer you came back was 15 years.

I said, what do you mean 15 years? He said, well, technology is moving so rapidly forward and exploding at an exponential rate that the expertise level is no longer valid after a certain period of time. And your experience is not enough to actually keep up. So in other words, you've got engineers that are being trained in a given area who cannot keep up, just like a doctor cannot keep up by reading medical journals alone. And so, you know, that's what's so dramatic about what's changing with technology. And it's creating huge opportunities. So what do you do about that? And once again, you know, I'll go back to the early days when I first started working as an MBA at hp. Dave Packard told me in a conversation, you know, the real key is doing two things to change.

He said, one is you've got to continuously spend time on your network. And by networking, it means building two kinds of Connections, one with navigators who understand how to get to other people and make that part of their life. And the other are expertise domain experts. You cannot learn the expertise yourself. So the important thing is to understand who knows the current information and how to acquire them. You know, to be able to aid yourself in your own career development. And so, you know, there's two things I would encourage your listeners to think about for their own career sake. One is how do you actually understand how to network in the appropriate way to get those connections of navigators and experts. But the second thing is to understand your own risk aversion. And that's very important because you're raising a family.

Are you the type of person who's willing to do a startup in terms of risk factor? But you know what, it's going to be something like that in terms of taking that level of risk in the future. And I cover that in the book. You know, in the book we talk about a different society has evolved where you have experts who get the top dollar for everything, but even they are not fully employed. They're that's based on a consulting model of bids. And then you have everybody else and you have a group of people called the zero it's which had no economic value. And so Silicon Valley is actually very much like that today. We have the highest difference between the wealthy and everybody else and we have the highest living expenses, you know, in the country here.

So we already have an existing model that's moving to that. And so in the book, it's a reflection of what happens when you go past it, where technology aids and abets that new system of development.

And you know, before, because I really want to dive into that book here and this is a great segue, but I would be remiss if I let this pass because you talked about something I think is so significant regardless of what industry and where you're at in your career, the networking, finding the navigators and finding the experts. What was the expertise you talk about the navigators. Can you dive in there? Because you said some stuff yesterday in our conversation. It was really powerful about how you identify them, who they are and what they do for you. And you gave a couple great examples.

Well, it's a transaction. You have to learn how to create value at virtually nothing. Sometimes it's your own company, the brand of your company, sometimes it's something else. But you also have to know what it is you're looking for. So I'll give you kind of an example. So some one of our members asked Me, they have very few connections since Apple. And so they asked me, can you find a way to get conversation going with one of the senior executives? The very first thing that I have to do in that thought process was I have to decide whether it's worth it or not. So am I going to use my connection point to help this company in a way that, you know, they can get what they're looking for, but what's the value proposition for Apple?

So I have to think that through then, so it's not to waste time. I have to be able to send an email, for example, to the senior executive who I know personally and describe what the problem is. And he'll either help me navigate or he'll actually answer the problem himself or herself. And so that's what we did for this company. And what ended up happening is I went to a very senior executive inside of Apple. He responded by introducing me to his staff of people who are directly involved in a project similar to what the startup company was doing. And he thanked me for it. They had the conversation with the startup company and found it extremely interesting because they hadn't seen something like this.

And then he came back and so the next time I asked for a favorite, I'm able to build equity. It's like bank equity where I can then do a debit to use on my own behalf. So I spend fully now 50% of my time just on my network and by just on my network I try to do connections with both navigators. But I'm also remember right in the middle of disruptive technology. So the value I can offer other people is insight on what's going on with disruptive technology and how it will impact their businesses. So I've got a huge bank with full of credits and then I have my operating career experience that's also a bank of credits.

Right.

So when you're just starting out, it's more difficult. You have to start out going to organizational groups like the Churchill Club or you know, find ways to do this. And by the way, your manager isn't going to appreciate you are spending 25 or 50% of your time on networking. They won't understand it. So part of the problem is also dealing with the internal culture and what they're used to. So if you're thinking about it, you cannot learn enough about become an expert in a field that's not going to change in a few years. So you've got to find some way to protect yourself. I call it risk abatement by finding out who the experts are, you know, who are likely to be either an asset or a threat to your company.

And so by developing those connections, you know, it's very powerful asset that you're developing that can help ensure that you won't end up out in the street someday after 15 years of a career. Right. Does that make sense?

No, it does. It makes total sense. That's phenomenal. I love it. Now let's jump in. First light of day, a cautionary tale of our future. We've talked a little bit of. Touched a little bit on us, but share us the journey of this book again into the breakdown, the two different parts of the book, and just it's such a fascinating read.

Well, I got to say that everybody discouraged me from writing it. They wanted me to write a business book, right. And so being me, which is not easy these days, I wanted to write a book of fiction. The reason I wanted to write a book of fiction is I wanted to show people a world where they could relate to the emotional reaction to technology of the characters. So I created plot where a new technology is suddenly coming to the world and an engineer, a single engineer happens to be right at the center of it. And he has to make a decision about whether he's going to flip it on or flip. It's going to change everything about the world and how it operates. So there's a moral and ethical dilemma.

Meanwhile, there are a whole series of plots by other characters, including an extremely wealthy businessman who obviously wants him to do the right thing for the company. He's employed by a company as a consultant and he has to struggle with this. But he's been so used to being on the track of just doing the same thing on the engineering side for so long. He's become an expert at it, but he's lost emotional connection to himself. And so, you know, a new technology is developed in psychotherapy that allows him to go back to a childhood incident that changes a lot of his perspective on life. And he's able to re experience the whole relationship emotionally and talk to the dead character.

So the book is intertwined with, you know, examples of characters dealing with their society and dealing with a strategic issue about what to do about including the Russians and the Chinese. So my goal in this is to allow people to see how others react to the change and let them, the reader, make his own decision, his or her own decision about what they want to do in the book. The second part of the book is really unusual. It's a complete factual guide to disruptive Technology. So the first part's a novel. The second part is on disruptive technology. It's literally designed as a research paper to show you all the 10 most significant technologies that I think are demonstrated in the book and how they will go out. There's also a lot of new companies in the book. So I created companies based on.

I identified who I thought what the new Googles are going to be and the new Facebooks, you know, in the fictional account, based on my own business experience. So it's kind of fun. I spent a year writing it, and then I spent a year and a half dealing with the publishers, which are not particularly easy. It's really hard to get things moving in that technology in that business area.

So it took you a year to write it. How much time would you spend writing each day? What was kind of your process?

Well, you know, they give you a guideline. But I'm very fortunate because of the way I operate. I operate entirely remotely. I go into Stanford every once in a while for physical meetings, but for the most part, so were on Cape Cod. That's where I started. So I started it in the bar at the Waquanza Den overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. And you know, I found that it was extremely quieting and it gave me an opportunity to get the outline. And then I used all my business experience from the last 35 years, all the places that I visited and still visit the bars, the restaurants, the cultural places in London and other places to paint the character, you know, create a picture of what it's like to live in that time.

And I decided to put in London because you can't find a more interesting, you know, now all the financial crisis. So there. I believe that they're going to face major change in the way that their society operates as a result of all this. So, you know, I had some fun with it. I remember Queen Elizabeth used to drive everybody crazy because of her Coreys because they got Gourmet meals as an example of what she did. And so I created a character that is an agent like Siri, that is a lord who represents the King of England as part of all this. So I took a lot of liberties with it, but I also used a lot of the current cultural attributes of the country and of the technologies.

Well, that is phenomenal. We will have the link in the show notes for where you can find the book, how you can get the book. Before we get to the last question, where else can we find more about Mike Steep, more about your work, your keynote speaking. There's so much to learn. What other links?

Well, you can Google me and that'll bring up about 100 different there you go sites, including some of the keynotes, but you can also go up to www.mikesteep.com. So I have my own website and it's simple, but it launches you into the also the speaking engagements and the books and the executive retreats that we're doing wonderful.

And we'll have all these links in the show notes. So my last question for you, Mike. I mean we talked about we work a lot here at the Molitor Group and with the brand new athletics of business, we work a lot on building and driving a culture worth fighting for.

Okay.

And as you identify in what you do in your space, in your industry, that culture is the number one problem. What would you say the two to three keys are to change that culture?

Well, one, you need to have the leadership with the backing of the most senior people in the company, and that is the board. And you need to have this model point of view and how you want to approach it from an organizational point of view. Two, you need to have the ability to show some skin in the game for the normal employees who are not part of the innovation team. And that is actually one of the problems with innovation teams. They do show what the real value of it is. And they're also usually funded by the product divisions who quite frankly, they have a 12 month cycle. It's not like that's long term. If you can't show results in 12 months, the funding disappears.

And the third area is you have to understand the difference between the disruptive technology culture and your own culture and figure out how you want to bridge that. So those are three examples. I have a wonderful slide I use every once in a while in the keynote. It's called the left versus the right side. The right side is the attributes of a corporate culture and the left side is what it's like in the disruptive technology space. And then I'll leave you with one last note. Everything has shifted from a finance point of view. $2 in R& D spent by corporate r&d, only. 200 billion or less spent on new technology development. 200 billion outside of the corporation. 300 billion being spent on disruptive technology. So we are no longer developing, you know, new innovation inside of a corporation. We're developing outside the corporation.

It's like two different planets. And the goal of our program is to build a bridge between the two worlds. So thank you very much. I really appreciate the opportunity to speak to your audience?

No. Hey, Mike, thank you so much. It was wonderful to have you here again. First Light of Day, a cautionary tale of our future. A fascinating read. Really enjoyed it. And Mike, wish you all the best. And thank you again.

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