Greg Larkin: This Might Get You Fired

Transcript

[0:00:31] Charlie Hoehn: You’re listening to Author Hour, enlightening conversations about books with the authors who wrote them. I’m Charlie Hoehn. Today’s episode is with Greg Larkin, author of This Might Get You Fired. If you work at a corporation, you’ve probably noticed that your company’s most talented innovators have a tough time quickly turning great ideas into great products. But Greg knows how to break the cycle of stale and destructive corporate habits. In this episode, Greg shares what he’s learned by launching more than 30 new products with Fortune 500 companies and start-ups. He’s going to show you how to gather support within your organization and launch your product in just two months rather than two years. By the end of this episode, you’ll have the tools to develop your entrepreneurial mindset and you’ll know when to prioritize your product over your job. Now, here is our conversation with Greg Larkin.

[0:01:51] Greg Larkin: I began my entrepreneurial life as the head of products for a really gritty, tough, wasn’t afraid to speak truth to power, startup that was called Innovest and our CEO was a guy called Matthew Kiernan and he pushed me very hard to have the audacity to be the only person in the room, I was covering banks during the housing boom. We would get pressure from many of these huge institutions, many of which since failed and to change our analysis to switch our analysis off to soften our language and every time that happened, Matthew Kiernan was just, “That’s how you know you’re doing it right, when they’re threatening you with their legal teams, that’s a good sign. When they’re challenging your opinions but can’t discredit your facts, you’re on target. You know it’s working because people are mad at you.” That kind of rebellious audacity was critical because we were one of the earliest voices in finance to have predicted the 2008 financial crisis. Only because he was leaning on me to not be afraid to swim against the tide and not be afraid to be provocative. Not to be reckless but if your facts are solid, then you can own a virtual monopoly on courage. That kind of disruptive was literally the blood that coursed through our veins, it was not a marketing slogan at Innovest. And we were acquired in 2009. I had to make the transition for being a startup entrepreneur to being a corporate intrapreneur. The extent to which there was so many –

[0:03:34] Charlie Hoehn: Who acquired you?

[0:03:35] Greg Larkin: We were acquired by a large publicly traded financial services company called Risk Metrics and then very soon after that, they were acquired by another company called MSCI and I shifted away and became a director in the innovation department of Bloomberg after that. Through those different transitions, the extent to which there were these barriers to launch that had nothing to do with possibility or efficiency but they were entirely this wall of fear, this wall of ‘can’t’. That was astounding for me, if you jump the post for example, my first meeting with Matthew Kiernan, when a very powerful investment bank called Lehman Brothers had threatened to sue me and I was – I called him and I said, you know, “I’m happy to tend my resignation, this is really – I put you in a very rough spot, I’m sorry about this. You tell me what I got to do, I’m happy to quit.” His response was, “No, this is how you know you’re doing it right. You’re supposed to be in this risk, this is how you know you’re growing because if we’re right, we’re going to own a monopoly on being the only people who got it right.” You juxtapose that with some of my first meetings and get huge corporations that acquired me like Bloomberg with you know, the executive leadership there and that was not the tone of the meeting -

[0:05:00] Charlie Hoehn: No.

[0:05:00] Greg Larkin: At all. The tone of the meeting was, where’s your power point deck, have you spoken to McKenzie or Boston Consulting Group yet? The way in which people were prepared for those meetings, not in terms of how they would affect people’s lives but very much in terms of how not to get into trouble and the degree of risk aversion was –

[0:05:22] Charlie Hoehn: CYA.

[0:05:23] Greg Larkin: Entirely.

[0:05:24] Charlie Hoehn: “Cover Your Ass”.

[0:05:25] Greg Larkin: Yeah, that was such a surprise to me, the extent to which people were predominantly focused on not breaking protocol and not challenging hierarchy, not making sure that their boss likes them, even if their boss had a really incorrect idea. The extent to which that there is this really pervasive fear driven culture. Really meant that people felt they couldn’t do things all the time and I was in meeting after meeting where people felt they couldn’t achieve something that was mission critical for the company’s survival. It was mission critical for someone to take the risk and prioritize their product over their status or over their job or else a start up, would come out of nowhere and eat into market share again and again. There is this enormous cost of not innovating and people neglected that cost all the time, that was a really intense culture shock for me. I think after a little while, I realized that inertia was a choice, people assumed they couldn’t do these things but in reality, they wouldn’t do these things. And the extent to which the willfully left those opportunities, they left that money on the table, they walked by those opportunities without seizing on them so that they could stay safe. It wasn’t simply – it might have been good politics in the short term but over the long term, there is this enormous vulnerability which emerged where you would consistently see that out of nowhere, a company or a product which wasn’t there weeks ago, months ago was suddenly eating in to these stalwart, Fortune 100 income streams that had been there for years where the companies themselves assumed that their defenses were impregnable.

[0:07:16] Charlie Hoehn: Does an example come to mind for you that really jumped out at you?

[0:07:21] Greg Larkin: Sure, a bunch of examples that come to mind. I guess the most acute example was while I was at Bloomberg, a company, a product that was pitched by someone else in the innovation team was actually an exact copycat of a product at my own startup had retired seven years earlier and no one spoke out against it because it was kind of politically, something that had to happen. I knew it was going to fail and it did but it was – I saw, I was in the meeting where it was funded for millions of dollars. It was literally a copycat of a product that my own startup had launched and immediately retired because there were no sales, there was no excitement from the market. All of those indicators that would let you know that it’s something you should double down on and none of those are happening. We failed and we were okay with that, we just put it to bed and moved on. Someone else who had politically positioned it in exactly the right way at Bloomberg pitched the exact same product and it was the positioning that won the money rather than the fact that there was an unmet need in the market and that this product could solve that problem in a differentiated way. I saw that happen all the time. Ironically, one of the products that I had launched at Bloomberg that was politically not positioned properly, that was later a startup called Kensho, built the same thing and they were just acquired two weeks ago for something like 600 million dollars. You know, it was a long time ago but I still see those stories and I’m like that, “That could have been ours.”

[0:09:07] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, but every great entrepreneur has at least one story like that, where you’re like, “That could have been me man,” you have to.

[0:09:17] Greg Larkin: yes, story of my life. I’ve also, especially if you're in the product business and you’re launching innovative new products, basically, you’re a midwife, you know? You’re the person that’s bringing these ideas and turning them into a product in a very short amount of times so that they are stable. There’s some of those products live to this day as you know, huge companies, gigantic revenue streams. For the most part, I don’t have any regrets over the ones that I built when they were young that have grown into huge products now. It’s the ones that didn’t get built that should have. I see someone else built something comparable and those are the ones that always give me the biggest fomo, filled me with the most regret.

[0:10:02] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, what are you most proud of having built?

[0:10:06] Greg Larkin: I’m actually currently right now working on a new product for a major drink company, can’t name them yet or the product yet because it’s not yet on shelves and its’ still being developed. But what’s been exciting about that is that it’s exposed the senior leadership of this organization to an entirely new way of thinking and doing. They’ve always assumed to some extent that coming up with a very quick understanding of building something, putting it in front of the market, validating it, very quickly, designing it properly, that was always something that startups did and that if they became successful enough, they would acquire the startup, they sort of never thought of themselves as an organization that could build up themselves. Literally in eight weeks, we’ve put an entirely new beverage on shelves in a very small number of setting but –

[0:10:58] Charlie Hoehn: That’s fast.

[0:10:59] Greg Larkin: Very fast. First of all, we just broke the speed record slash speed limit, depending on your perspective.

[0:11:07] Charlie Hoehn: Right.

[0:11:09] Greg Larkin: But that same process for this same organization would typically take about two years.

[0:11:14] Charlie Hoehn: Dang.

[0:11:15] Greg Larkin: Would cost tens of millions of dollars.

[0:11:17] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah.

[0:11:19] Greg Larkin: We just moved extremely quickly, got in front of people and listed a few very small retailers who were willing to participate in this experiment where the drink is on shelves. If someone walks by one of the coolers in that area and sees what they like, they would pick up an empty bottle of a drink and you have somebody there and they approach them and say, “Hey, thank you for picking that up, this is actually an experiment, we’ll give you 20 bucks off.”

[0:11:46] Charlie Hoehn: Ever since like no, what have I done?

[0:11:50] Greg Larkin: No, I mean, it answers a bunch of questions around that. Why did you pick that up? What did you think it would do for you? Why does it stand out to you? That’s incredibly important to know that.

[0:12:02] Charlie Hoehn: Totally. You know what? Just a side note, I actually learned that strategy from Tim Ferriss who used the four-hour work week’s test covers in book stores. From my understanding, he put it on books, the cover and he would just sit there and watch to see who picked it up.

[0:12:24] Greg Larkin: Yes.

[0:12:25] Charlie Hoehn: How many people would pick it up. Even though it’s like, you know, not a full, sample size type thing, whatever. Its’ still a good test and you get to learn so much from it. I think that’s awesome.

[0:12:39] Greg Larkin: It’s more than that, I think one of the things that the larger the company is, the further they get away from intimacy with their customer. When the kind of test that we were rounding right now and the one that you just described from Tim Ferriss, that’s very different than a robust sample size, giving you statistically viable data about what they like or don’t like. You get an understanding of why they like it, you see the look on their face – you get to know whether them saying, “Yes, I like this.” “Okay, you like it but on a scale of zero to five, how much do you like it and who are you that makes you like that?” If you were to describe that as a person, how would you describe this person? You don’t get that from – ideally you have both, you know, what you're seeing in a big sample size is reinforced by what you’re learning in a really intimate direct to consumer conversation but the larger company gets and the more its product is measured by the millions of people buying it rather than you know, doubling the number of buyers every week from like 10 to 20, 20 to 40, et cetera. It’s really hard to get that intimacy after a while and sometimes some of the greatest disruption in any industry stems from that. That’s definitely what we’re experiencing right now with this drink, it’s pretty thrilling and I think you're going to see when the story gets written and this company can be named and this product can be named, it’s kind of an amazing inflection point because you know, from my vantage point right now, being on the ground, you can really see how this is going to transform the way they think of themselves, vis-a-vis their customer and it’s going to transform the way in which they think of their products and build their products going forward. Its’ going to become a portfolio strategy rather than just a strategy for a single product. That’s kind of incredible on the extent to which people in this organization who were kind of risk averse initially and very tentative because seemed like a deviation from how they’ve normally done things. They’ve seen the results and seen how it’s an exponential difference from how they would normally, from what they would normally achieve. That’s the best part of my job by the way, when you're just literally on the ground as these seeds just sprout the first green shoot, you know?

[0:15:09] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, you know what it sounds and this is a perfect segue to talk about your book but what it really sounds like, a big part of your personal mission is to infuse the DNA of what makes a lot of startups successful into corporate DNA which definitely has its strengths but certainly has huge weaknesses and chinks in the armor when it comes to continuing to innovate and stay in touch with their customers.

[0:15:39] Greg Larkin: I think that’s true to a point. I think the transition from entrepreneur to ‘intrapreneur’ taught me something that doesn’t get taught enough when people talk about enterprise innovation, it doesn’t necessarily get featured in the cookbook. Which is that an entrepreneur has one job, you have to build a disruptive product and you have to stay disruptive. You have to identify an unmet need in the market and solve it in a competitive way. An intrapreneur in a large organization, you have two jobs, you have to build a disruptive product and you have to make an organization be more afraid of extinction than change. Most people that make that transition and many of the people in the sort of lean startup movement don’t necessarily – they overlook the importance of cultural transformation in intrapreneurship. They underestimate it. The extent to which you’re dealing with a culture where yeah. No one’s going to say they’re anti innovation in any major corporation ever. But day to day, they often are or they’re much more afraid of change than extinction and that sort of dual-pronged mission of organizational change coupled with product innovation. Coupled with disruptiveness in your market. That’s not just infusing the culture of a startup into a huge company, that’s sort of saying, what can you do as a huge company that makes you more disruptive than anyone can be? What makes you uniquely capable of solving this problem and what are the obstacles that come comprised your wall of can’t? Where is the resistance in the company that doesn’t need to be there but just culturally is very much embedded but needs to be changed? Who are the leaders that need to have a voice that don’t have a voice? Who are the skeptics that need to be either neutralized or converted into supporters? Any intrapreneur that starts a product and doesn’t think about that, very explicitly, from the outset won’t launch properly, they’re not going to ever make it out of the gate, they’ll spin their wheels.

[0:18:00] Charlie Hoehn: Author Hour is sponsored by Book in a Box. For anyone who has a great idea for a book but doesn’t have the time or patience to sit down and type it out, Book in a Box has created a new way to help you painlessly publish your book. Instead of sitting at a computer and typing for a year, hoping everything works out, Book in a Box takes you through a structured interview process that gets your ideas out of your head and into a book in just a few months. To learn more, head over to Bookinabox.com and fill out the form at the bottom of the page. Don’t let another year go by where you put off writing your book. Let’s talk about that specific point which is, how do you get them to that point where they are neutralized or they are supporters? I mean, you start your book by saying, the innovation that’s necessary is never authorized.

[0:18:59] Greg Larkin: Yeah.

[0:19:00] Charlie Hoehn: In other words, you’re not going to get a permission slip to go change the company because people don’t want that to happen and so, how do you get those converts, how do you get people on your side?

[0:19:15] Greg Larkin: Yeah, I think there’s a few principles that any intrapreneur needs to embrace. I think the biggest one of those principles is don’t ever pitch an idea, always pitch an outcome. In any major company, it’s very easy for people with power to say no. When the culture of innovation is that you come up with an idea pitch and you present it to the powers that be, you ask for funding, you ask for support and you hope that they don’t say no. Many of those same executives look very powerful for saying no. As an intrapreneur, if you go into those meetings and you present those – you take those opportunities and you’re coming up with results, we have identified an unmet need. We have built a product that is solving that problem in a way that is mission critical for the results of that organization. It is very hard for people to walk away from that. It’s very hard for executive leadership to say no to that. Because they are not just saying no to your idea. They are saying no to an outcome and the sort of implicit message is the question is not whether this can be build. The question is whether it will be built here. And I think a lot of intrapreneurs neglect to put validation and ask for executive leadership to double down on it. They pitch a hypothesis of what validation might look like one day.

[0:20:42] Charlie Hoehn: Can you give an example of a good pitch?

[0:20:46] Greg Larkin: Sure, a good pitch is not in a PowerPoint deck. A good pitch is video footage of people using your products and being blown away by it.

[0:20:56] Charlie Hoehn: I love that. That is genius.

[0:20:58] Greg Larkin: It’s not a wireframe of what this is going to look like. It’s the pictures of, “This is us rolling this out in LA last week and people couldn’t put it down.” It’s an outcome, that’s not an idea, it’s not a pitch.

[0:21:12] Charlie Hoehn: Because you are doing the additional steps to you are eliminating, “Could this work?” You are doing the homework.

[0:21:21] Greg Larkin: You are not just doing the homework, you’re getting the train to leave the station and giving them an opportunity to participate. That’s very different from, “Would you be willing to buy a ticket if we were to have this train leave.”

[0:21:33] Charlie Hoehn: Totally that’s super effective and that right there I think is worth the cost of listening to this interview so that was great.

[0:21:43] Greg Larkin: How much? It depends how much people are paying to listen I suppose then.

[0:21:47] Charlie Hoehn: People pay a lot of money for this podcast Greg. So you talk about the ‘godfather and the secret society’ in your book, what does that mean?

[0:21:57] Greg Larkin: Yeah, it can be a very lonely existence being one of the few people in a major big company who is born with the wiring of an entrepreneur who finds himself working in a huge company. It’s very hard to find your people. What I mean by that is very often, you might find the software developers who know the right coding languages and you might find designers that have emerged from very prestigious design programs. But they don’t necessarily have the cocktail of piss and vinegar that someone whose an entrepreneur has where they can’t stop themselves when they identify an unmet need in the market from going after it where they put an enormous amount of self-worth, I guess, in their sense of fulfillment in their job is a product of how impact they are of what they’re building each day. Everyone has that to an extent but I think people who have the wiring of an entrepreneur, it registers a lot more and it is very hard if you are with that wiring to find your comrades.

[0:23:08] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, great.

[0:23:08] Greg Larkin: One of the things that I’ve identified overtime is that that has to extend to the executive level of an organization. Every entrepreneur I have ever known finds the one who is successful I should say, finds what I call the godfather and the godfather is the executive who has lots of power, who is determined to introduce their company into modernity. They are determined to become an agent of essential change, they want that to be their legacy and they also have the power to enforce it. To make sure that they have favors that they can call in and they are powerful enough so the people who are going to stand in the way are going to have to think twice simply because that person is involved. That’s the godfather, I have never seen a product work effectively without one and then there’s the secret society and that is a much harder thing to find but that is essentially a coalition of people who you may or may not formally have a working relationship within the big company. Who are entrepreneurial, who do understand what it’s like to work at the speed and the impactfulness of a startup and are determined to be of service to other entrepreneurs in the company and to infuse that into the DNA of the organization as a whole. It’s mission critical, I have never seen a product launch effectively that had to depend on people who are not part of that. Who couldn’t build that coalition and send out the right sonar signal, so that the other entrepreneurs in the organization hear it and come running and say: “Hey I hear you are working on this thing. I’d love to be a part of it if that’s possible.”

[0:24:55] Charlie Hoehn: Got it. I was going to toss in a joke at some point during your explanation.

[0:25:02] Greg Larkin: Sorry about that.

[0:25:03] Charlie Hoehn: No it’s totally fine.

[0:25:04] Greg Larkin: I missed that funny joke.

[0:25:05] Charlie Hoehn: No, you didn’t. I realized I hesitated and I was like, “Ah but it’s a good joke, do I say it? Do I not?”

[0:25:11] Greg Larkin: Well now I need to hear it.

[0:25:13] Charlie Hoehn: Well the joke was, “Is the drink you’re working on for the drink company a piss and vinegar drink?”

[0:25:20] Greg Larkin: You know I really can’t say what company.

[0:25:25] Charlie Hoehn: Right, yeah because is not an immediate need in market yeah. So if you give that to corporate fat cats, you will have them in becoming entrepreneurs so -

[0:25:37] Greg Larkin: No the corporate fat cats like liquid gold.

[0:25:40] Charlie Hoehn: I love the term corporate fat cats which is not what you are describing but it is fun to say. Cool, so the godfather secret society, you need those people on your side in order for innovation to happen. The ‘gorilla validation’, that’s the next part, ‘gorilla validation’, I am going to take a stab at this. This is you quickly validating the idea in the way that you described like you’re basically making the pitch by going out and putting it in front of people and then recording those results that you got, before you pitch it.

[0:26:20] Greg Larkin: And after but yes, you have to do it before. Very often that is the pitch, is trying until you get to some degree of validation. And yeah, it’s building the minimum necessary solution. I will say that there is an element of gorilla validation that is unique to a large enterprise. Especially a business to business enterprise which is that you have, in any of these organizations you have people that “own relationships”. They have the relationship with Amazon or Facebook or whatever. And they are extremely territorial about those relationships and so ‘gorilla validation’, very often is saying, is demonstrating to the people that own the major accounts inside of a huge company, “We tested this on someone smaller and its working much better than anything we have in the market right now. We’d be foolish not to pitch this or try to sell this to your major account,” and there is also another piece of that which is at some point this sort of implicit threat is you’re going to have to be worried. If you don’t sell this to your major account because at some point they will figure out that it’s in the market and they’ll ask you, “Why haven’t you let us know?” That is gorilla validation but there’s another angle to it which is getting past the relationship gatekeepers in some of these companies.

[0:27:53] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, that’s what I love about what your approach in this book is you are actually teach the necessary political finesse that comes with working with people who are territorial, who are scared of change, who are all these things in a corporate environment. You teach how to get them on board.

[0:28:14] Greg Larkin: Or neutralize them.

[0:28:15] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah.

[0:28:16] Greg Larkin: Or make it clear to them that there is a risk to not getting on board. I’ve never seen an enterprise product fail because it wasn’t designed slinky enough or because it wasn’t agile enough or because it wasn’t blockchain enough or it wasn’t artificial intelligent enough. That has never been the cause of failure in my entire – I have launched over 30 products in these companies. I have never seen that being the reason they died. The only reason they’ve died is because someone with power wanted it to be killed, every single time.

[0:28:48] Charlie Hoehn: Really?

[0:28:49] Greg Larkin: Really and I’ve also, we also live in a time where there is a big hang over from that and that once it’s built and it’s gaining validation there’s nothing stopping someone from making that product come to life or solving that problem outside of the organization and stealing market share. And I’ve seen huge companies watch that happen without challenging the power structure that prevented the innovation from getting into the market’s hands in the first place. And that for me is the reason I thought this book was necessary because that is the tragedy of inertia and the disruption economy in which we live in. There’s a huge cost to not innovating today that wasn’t necessarily there 10 years ago and the company that thinks they can read The Lean Startup but not solve the cultural barriers to innovation is at more financial risk today than at any point, maybe in economic history. Anyone who is trying to innovate in that context needs to know that. It needs to have an explicit strategy to address that.

[0:29:58] Charlie Hoehn: So yeah, I was going to ask and you kind of answered it but really, with this book being out which is effectively a stronger, more corporate, version of The Lean Startup and Innovators Dilemma, like a guide, a manual to innovate within the corporate structure, what do you hope is the change that this will create. What were you hoping, 10 years from now, because this book is out there, will have happened?

[0:30:28] Greg Larkin: So there’s the change that you can measure and then there’s the change that you can feel, which do you want to hear first?

[0:30:35] Charlie Hoehn: Both.

[0:30:36] Greg Larkin: I think launching a new product in a very big company requires an enormous amount of courage. There is always a person that says, “I understand that building this would challenge very powerful people’s territory. I understand that there are very strong systems that are deeply engrained and the way this organization operates, I understand that I might get in trouble. I understand that I might get fired and I am doing it anyway.” That is not just one of the boldest acts of innovation. It’s one of the boldest acts of entrepreneurship, total startups and corporations alike. The person that is willing to make that stand and willing to enlist a movement behind that. My hope is more people take that stand, more people build a coalition around the product that is required to make that stand. I hope that this sparks that, where the corporations become these communities of courage rather than these communities of sort of –

[0:31:44] Charlie Hoehn: CYA.

[0:31:45] Greg Larkin: I don’t know if its CYA but it is certainly – you know inertia is a powerful drug and it’s a dangerous drug and the courage to break those habits is undervalued. It’s under recognized. The people who stood at those turning points, where those products got launched and made that bold stand, if they were startup founders we would know all of their names no doubt but in the organization, we see retroactively that there is a bump in stock valuation. Or an old company had a new product that came out and it is doing pretty well, people are excited about it. Very rarely do you know who the person was or how that product came to be. In startups, you become a rockstar fast.

[0:32:33] Charlie Hoehn: The rock stars, yeah.

[0:32:35] Greg Larkin: I hope that that changes. I hope that, culturally, organizations embrace that, embrace those people within their midst, recognize that for them to thrive in the modern economy that those people need to have a voice and it’s the organization’s job to make a comfortable home for them.

[0:32:56] Charlie Hoehn: And celebrate them.

[0:32:57] Greg Larkin: Absolutely, celebrate them and hold the rest of the company accountable to performing in that way.

[0:33:03] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, so Greg I want to wrap up here with a challenge that you can give to our listeners. What’s something that they can do from This Might Get You Fired this week that could have a positive impact in their life?

[0:33:19] Greg Larkin: I’m going to turn that into two challenges. One is going to be people in the listening audience who have a product that they know their company needs to build and can build but the company just won’t do it or it’s just not the right time or we have to wait until next year’s annual strategic plan. I would challenge people to just go and build it and run user tests in it in seven days. What is the smallest increment of that that they can build and get it out to the people who they think need it and just go, do it enlist to whatever you need to do, don’t ask for permission. Just go. So that’s challenge number one, build a minimum viable product and get it in front of some customers and get some validation. Number two, the second piece of that challenge is bring someone very powerful in a position of senior leadership in your company along for that journey. Take them out for lunch after you have gotten the product in front of people. You’re starting to see that they love it, that they like it better than what your company is already providing to that customer. And share what you have done, tell them that you are looking for support, tell them, present to them a hypothesis of why you think they should support you and act as your godfather. And those are my two challenges. So build something that matters and find a godfather to make it come to life.

[0:34:51] Charlie Hoehn: I love it and this is not to come on top of that but to double down on what you’re saying. I went through this myself at the company I work for and I had an idea for a certain mobile application or mobile site and I just drew it out on pen and paper and used an app called Prototyping on Paper and then just had people use it until they understood it and they liked it and then presented it and made it, worked with a friend of mine to spruce up the design and the flow and everything. And we did that quick, doubling down on what you are saying, these things can be done and it can be done quickly. One last question, I had to that point is I know it’s going to be easier if you’re working with a big company and you come in and you’re like, “Hey we work with Procter and Gamble. Can we run this little experiment in your store?” What do you say if you are a lot of the people listening to this who work for bigger corporations but what if you are your own entrepreneur, your own self and you want to run these experiments, what do you say?

[0:36:03] Greg Larkin: I want to make sure I understand the question. In other words, how do the lessons of ‘intrapreneurship’ apply to entrepreneurs?

[0:36:11] Charlie Hoehn: Slightly. I am more asking tactically. How do you personally approach stores and distributors and say, “Hey I want to run an experiment with this product, will you have a seat in your shelves?”

[0:36:24] Greg Larkin: Oh I see what you mean by that.

[0:36:25] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, what’s your pitch to them?

[0:36:28] Greg Larkin: Yeah, that is actually one of the hardest things and that is one of the parts of gorilla validation that is extremely difficult. Especially when you are dealing with enterprise clients as opposed to something where you know you are looking for downloads from the app store for example. Those relationships, you have a few options. One you can go to the most accessible mom and pop version of the same industry. So Procter and Gamble is one company. But is there a smaller scale business that is a little bit more approachable where you won’t have to get permission from corporate where you think you have enough of the same set of users that you can get to some degree of validation that is applicable to Procter and Gamble once it starts to work. What’s the ‘Procter and Gamble Lite’ that might be local to your local geography. The other thing is you can cobble together. This is sort of going into the weeds of user testing. But you asked so we are going to go there, Procter and Gamble may not give you permission but people on LinkedIn who work for Proctor and Gamble will definitely respond when you say, “We will offer you a $150 if you would be willing to participate in a user test for an hour.” You can cobble together the right roles and responsibilities within those organizations. You can have a district manager, a field officer, a field technician, a sales rep, whatever and you get all of the people that represent the different users. That you need to interact and you are just doing that gorilla style. You are approaching them and you’re offering money and you can run a user test outside of office hours with the same people and the same roles and if it works eventually they’ll say, “This is awesome! I can see how my boss would need this, would you be okay if I introduce our product to him?” So you can work your way up from a very grassroots beginning when you are running those user test. It requires money though, you have to pay people to participate.

[0:38:33] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, that was what I have taking from that is you’ve got to know the incentives of the person you are trying to work with and speak to that. So it’s not just you coming in and saying, “Gee whiz, we are trying to give this a shot.” Cool so that makes a lot of sense. Now how can our listeners get in touch with you or follow you, connect with you that sort of thing?

[0:38:55] Greg Larkin: Sure, the best answer is they can reach me at my company which is greg@bowery315.com.

[0:39:03] Charlie Hoehn: Bowery.

[0:39:06] Greg Larkin: 315.com.

[0:39:08] Charlie Hoehn: Got it.

[0:39:08] Greg Larkin: That used to be the address of CBGB’s which is the greatest punk club ever in the world and I thought it was apt when I left Bloomberg and started my own company that I embrace my inner punk or they can follow me on Twitter which I am getting better at tweeting but I don’t do it as much as I should and that is @innovationpunk.

[0:39:31] Charlie Hoehn: Innovation punk, excellent well Greg this has been excellent. Thank you for doing this and thanks for writing the book.

[0:39:38] Greg Larkin: Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks for having me Charlie.

[0:39:42] Charlie Hoehn: Many thanks to Greg Larkin for being on the show. You can buy his book, This Might Get You Fired on amazon.com. Thanks again for listening to Author Hour, enlightening conversations about book with the authors who wrote them. We’ll see you next time.