Positive Deviance in Thought Leadership | Jeff DeGraff

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How positive deviancy drives thought leadership and innovation.

An interview with Jeff DeGraff about the push and pull between bureaucracy and innovation.

Today’s guest is the “Dean of Innovation” Jeff DeGraff, is the founder of the Innovatrium, an innovation consulting firm focusing on creating innovation culture, capability, and community. Jeff is also a business professor at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan and bestselling author of The Creative Mindset.

Jeff sits down with Peter to discuss how positive deviance is the driving force behind innovation. Furthermore, he explains why bureaucracy both can stifle progress by attempting to pull everything into a more traditional standard.

Jeff talks about his business model and how it evolved. In addition, he discusses how finding new applications for established schools of thought has allowed him to create hybrid schools. These hybrid schools have become the key to innovation.

Finally, Jeff tells us the four things you should think about in your life. He touches upon why they are important, and why for better or worse you need to own them!

If you are the creative type feeling stifled by red tape, this episode will give you the insight you need to charge forward!

Three Key Takeaways from the Interview:

• Cutting edge thought leadership will often feel deviant to the norms because it does not fit into the established standards.
• Thought leaders should surround themselves with other talented people that will challenge your thinking and force you to regularly evolve.
• Often there is no career for thought leaders. You’ll need to create your own job and make it up as you go.

If you would like help strategizing your next steps in thought leadership, contact Thought Leadership Leverage. We can assist you with everything from book launch strategies, research, marketing, branding, sales, and more.

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Transcript

Peter Winick And welcome, welcome, welcome. This is Peter Winick. I’m the founder and CEO of Thought Leadership Leverage. And you’re joining us on the podcast today, which is Leveraging Thought Leadership. Today, my guest is Jeff de Graaf, which I’m really excited about today’s episode. Jeff is an advisor to Fortune 500 companies, a professor at the Ross School of Business at U of M. His simultaneously creative and pragmatic approach to making innovation happen has led clients and colleagues to dump him. The Dean of Innovation. He’s written several books. If I went through all the titles, we’d be halfway out of time, probably 7 or 8. And he’s appeared pretty much everywhere. Ink, Fortune, Psychology Today, ET cetera, etc. If you don’t know who he was prior to this, you will after. And you should have. So here we are. Welcome. Welcome aboard, Jeff.

Jeff DeGraff Thanks for having me on, Peter.

Peter Winick Cool. So let me ask you the first the first question, because there is no, in my view, other than the academic side of you, because you’re an academic slash thought leader slash a lot of other things. How did you get here?

Jeff DeGraff It’s really weird. I, when I was really young, was not particularly a good student. And the only reason I went to college was I had a lot of wrestling scholarships and I had to take the test. This is the first year because of, you know, because this was the beginning of when you had to actually take an exam to go to college. And it turned out that I wasn’t a complete idiot. And I skipped my first year. And then I just kind of got momentum and got momentum. And when I got out, I was only 25 years old. I had my Ph.D. I had had an offer at an Ivy League school. And I thought, you know, I just stop for a minute and say, how did I get here? And something really weird happened. I moved to Ann Arbor to take a position to the medical school. Being a professor in the medical school, of all things, my PhD is in an area that you would now call artificial intelligence. But there wasn’t that term back. And I hated it. And I met a guy in a hippie bar. He passed away is there’s Bob Dewar, who worked for a guy who had a 20-minute hour pizza company. And I said, That sounds like more fun to me. And five years later, at $5 billion later, we sold the company or I sold the company. Mitt Romney of Bain Capital was Domino’s Pizza. And I was one of the guys who built the company. So how I got here was I didn’t know anything about business until we started to build one. And so.

Peter Winick Let’s recap. So the way to become a world-renowned thought leader. Not too bright wrestler. Go to a hippie bar and sell pizza. Yeah. So let me write this down. So it has to be in that order not to go there. No, but you really Pizza day.

Jeff DeGraff The Forrest Gump aspect of this. And I have to tell you something, Peter. I’m on all these think tanks and all the most the ones that I know who have done really well in this field, not any differ. You know, one of the guys followed the dead for like three. Yeah. Yeah. He bomb in Jackson Hole and.

Peter Winick Let’s I was talking to someone last week and I say, you know, if you and I were to go to the dentist and ask our dentist how we got here, we can predict the answer to the story, blah, blah, blah. I went to dental school, blah, blah, blah. I’m a dentist. If you ask any of my clients and friends and colleagues how they got here and they gave the answers just like you did, if my dentist gave me that, I’d be out of that chair. So. Right. But in this world, it’s part of the beauty. And the amazing part of it is that there is no logical linear. You’ve got to do Abcd if like it cause.

Jeff DeGraff You there is no career for people like us. You have to make your job, you have to make your career and you’re making it up as you go along. And so those very skills that are get you in trouble when you’re young are the very skills that separate you when you when you enter the workplace, because there is nobody giving you the problem set. You have to figure it out.

Peter Winick Well, so. So let’s go there for a minute. So part of that is I would argue that you would be a horrible employee at a Fortune 500. Right. Because you’re questioning things, you’re innovating, you’re creating, you’re pushing back or whatever, All the stuff that makes you the best at what you do would make you the worst at something else that lots of other people.

Jeff DeGraff There are many people who think I’m a terrible employee at the University of Michigan.

Peter Winick Well, thank God for tenure, right? Yeah. Well, yes, right.

Jeff DeGraff Right. Yeah. But that but that’s the whole thing. The whole aspect. I was just on a call this morning with the government of Singapore. It’s I’ve been advisor to government of Singapore. And one of the things that I was talking to this one guy and it was just amazing. He talked about how he created his lab. And here I am in my lab across the street from the University of Michigan. I build it with a partner and my own money and exhibiting a lot of self authorizing behavior. And he talked about the same thing. And it was really funny encounters the same issues with bureaucracy. Because innovation, Peter, is a form of positive deviance. Correct. Which is created by deviance. I don’t know how to put this. So what happens is in the institutional mode, bureaucracies love to pull things to standardization, and innovation requires the more deviant the innovation is, the more valuable it is. Assuming that it works. Sure. So you can imagine that all bureaucracies basically try and assimilate innovation. That’s why innovation doesn’t happen at the heart of big companies. This is why you get called into all these big companies, right? It happens at the boundaries and only people have lived it. The boundaries are where, you know, there’s a lot of white space, you know, But what the.

Peter Winick Big companies have the balance sheets and the systems and the processes to acquire the innovative and give them more leverage and scale and their theory many times.

Jeff DeGraff No, no. And that’s part of the growth mechanism. If you think about this for a minute, there’s kind of a pyramid here, and it’s but it’s a pyramid that starts at the bottom and then goes all the way to the top with startups and it works the other way around. So if you think about innovation for a minute, the bottom of the pyramid is always going to be research. There’s 21 research universities in this country. I’m lucky enough to teach at the second largest one that, you know, unlocking the secrets of nature. It’s very you know, you live a kind of a monastic life, and I do it, too. Then it has to go to, you know, where you there is technology transfer. And that can happen with companies. It can happen within. Then, of course, finally it goes to either a startup that’s willing to take a chance, you know, and eventually that has to sell out to a larger company that’s got channels of scope and scale. That’s the least that the American system, if you’re talking about Singapore, is going to be different. But that’s our system. And so the real challenge of all of this is living with people who have very different skills and very different views of the world and making those hand-offs work. That’s where we get. Yeah.

Peter Winick I love it. So I want to switch for a moment because I love the Positive Deviants piece, right? Because if you think about it, in the world of a Bernie Madoff, he was actually a brilliant financier, but he went negative deviance. Right. And he actually was on the positive side of that for a long, long time. And, you know, you don’t become president of Nasdaq by being an idiot.

Jeff DeGraff Well, the same is true for drug dealers. Yeah.

Peter Winick Terrorist narcos.

Jeff DeGraff Know what if what if you could turn that positive, right? I mean, right about all the intellectual acumen there.

Peter Winick When you watch all the documentaries on the north coast and one of those, it’s like he clearly could have been the CEO of a startup of the next Amazon or Tesla. But yeah, powder or whatever they were doing. So let’s move to sort of another area. So you’ve got the lab, you speak, you keep there’s lots of things that you do.

Jeff DeGraff Yeah.

Peter Winick Give me the shortened version of the underlying business model because one of the things that we focus on a lot is, okay, so I’m a positive deviant. I’ve got a bunch of great ideas. How do I scale leverage and monetize it? How, how what are the ways that I can turn that into a business?

Jeff DeGraff Yeah, it started.

Peter Winick Out in lots of.

Jeff DeGraff Ways. It started in a really kind of narcissistic way. I just thought, I like to build things and I like to be around new projects all the time and I like, be around new people all the time. So when I came to the University of Michigan, I was brought there by Bob Quinn and Kim Cameron, and I was really in the shadow of C.K., probably maybe the most famous innovation strategist of the 20th century. And I got to be I got to be the crazy guy who did weird stuff. And I was supported by these people and not by everyone else. And so what happened is you start to get kind of I hate to put it this way, kind of a cult following. You know, we had, you know, with a we have a we had a bunch of people when I did pretty well from Detroit.

Peter Winick But the flip side of that cult following is I want to push on this is you were at the time an acquired taste and it’s not for everyone. And that’s okay because I think a lot of people try to placate or satisfy.

Jeff DeGraff Absolutely. And it was early. And one of the things that I had to my advantage, you know, when I was really young, I got to be an advisor, just like all the areas that Apple applied, Integrated systems. I was Steve Jobs advisor. And one of the things that really I was able to do very early on was to make a couple demands. And the first demand was I didn’t teach my business school courses in the school business. I taught them across the street in in the residents college. And the reason for that was I felt like if students were in the same environment, they’d have the same problems. And in fact, when Bob Quinn asked me to come to Michigan, teach MBA, remember, I don’t have a business degree. I remember saying, MBAs are dull, drab and awful. You can hear them think, you know, remember we had taken we had stolen PepsiCo’s lunch money. You know, we great Pizza Hut all around the block and McDonald’s and everybody else. So my view was they don’t know how to think. And his point was, yes, we need to do it. So the first thing was I found somebody who got me. That’s the first step and somebody who protected me because lots of people came after me. Right. Because it’s a business day. And you’ve got to remember, this is way before the books. Remember, this is this is the 80s.

Peter Winick Now you’re just a pain in the neck. You’re not now rap. You’re just you’re just this irritating guy.

Jeff DeGraff Who am I? And then the second thing that started happening was, you know, I started getting on the speaking circuit and I’m pretty I’m pretty glib and I’m pretty fast. And so what happens is on the speaking circuit, the people who liked me a lot were senior executives because I’m telling them the truth. Know a lot of people speak and they tell people what they want to hear. I’m the guy who speaks up, says, You know, your underwear showing. And by the way, this guy is around the corner from you and you think you’ve got an edge on him and he’s going to beat the stuffing out of you. Yeah. And you were you know, we were just talking with Tom Peters. Tom Peters was great at this. And if I learned it from anybody, I learned it from Peters. You know, the whole notion of, you know, we’re not prepared. What do we need to do? And what it started happening was I started taking a lot of these I started taking a lot of these very interesting ideas I had. And I started codifying them into a way to think.

Peter Winick If you’re enjoying this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, please make sure to subscribe. If you’d like to help spread the word about our podcasts, please leave us a review and share it with your friends. We’re available on Apple Podcasts and on all major listening apps as well as at ThoughtLeadershipLeverage.com/podcasts.

Peter Winick And so that let me pause you there. So you fast forwarded through a part that many, many people stumble. So you’ve got some insight, you’ve got some wisdom, you’ve got some ideas, and there’s lots of things that you can do with it going through this process, which is not. Always easy of codifying that into models, methodologies, frameworks, etc. that become the skeleton by which you can build on other scalable pieces is an absolute my opinion, absolutely critical piece that some people are either unaware of. Try to skip over, etc. So. So stay there for a moment. Yeah.

Jeff DeGraff That’s a great observation. And what I did, I basically was the waterboy for Quinn and Cameron, who developed one of the most important models of all time, the competing values framework. And I looked at it and said, you know, this will do a lot more than what you’re doing with it, right? So I was not the founder. Quinn and Cameron founded this year.

Peter Winick Found a new sort of application. Yes.

Jeff DeGraff I said, well, you know, this is really a more of an innovation model, and here’s what I would do with it. And here’s the you know, so it’s a it’s a two story house that you build into an apartment complex. Yep. And the other thing was, most people don’t know. I was the last doctoral student, graduate student, Rudolf Arnott. So those people out there, I listen, we love to talk about design thinking and, you know, God bless John Simon. But Ahronheim wrote the original book on this in like 1938.

Peter Winick Literally, he.

Jeff DeGraff Called it the you know, he’s given us the term visual thinking and all that. So I asked of the Mohicans, the whole field is created by this guy named Max Bernheimer in 1900 Berlin. He’s got these two great students. Aren’t him and Kurt ludicrous positive psychology on him creates this whole field that we call design thinking. So the second thing that I added was all those elements early on into this quitting camera. And also I’m I’m borrowing from my mentors And finally.

Peter Winick Yeah, because you’re giving yourself less credit than, than one might. It’s that cross-pollination, that multidisciplinary approach. So you know let’s not forget that economics has been around for 400 years. Psychology has been around for several hundred years. Those two first had a baby 25 years ago and voila, behavioral economics. Right.

Jeff DeGraff Which absolutely that. And that’s a that’s a great insight. So but I would say the reason I’m saying this to your listeners is I’m a synthesizer. I’m a pattern stickler, right? So when Prahlad came out with core competencies and the fortune of the bottom of the pyramid, what I did was take these three schools of thought and put them together and created one of the one of the key schools of thought enough for innovation, Right. And created this innovation called model the innovation genome or whatever people calling my work. I hear it called a lot of different things these days, but that’s fine. So now I’m speaking and now I’m teaching this kind of model. And then what was interesting is something interesting happened, which is, you know, you write books and I wrote a lot of articles and PBS and the whole nine yards, right? So then I started getting two sets of questions. One was from students, and this was about I’m going to go back to about 20 years where I was kind of frustrated and thinking about leaving being in the academy, because I thought, you know, you guys just want to talk about crap all the time. And I was really worried that our students were really learning how to be innovators. You learn to be an innovator in the same way I did see one do one teach one.

Peter Winick Yeah.

Jeff DeGraff You want to do one? Teach one, right? So I was going to leave and I had a lovely dean who said, Don’t leave. Why don’t you just do what you want to do? Which is very rare for an academic. Sure thing. You know, this is a I’m going to let you go build something on your own. We’re not going to say it’s a conflict of interest rate. So I called a couple of friends, said, do you guys want to throw in and we want to buy the bank across the street, tear the front off of it and give keys to the seven coolest people we know. In fact, one of them you might know is Thomas Seabrook and the great chief scientist at National Right. So these are really cool people. And the only rule was bring it your kids, bring your young people, and you’re only going to work on creative work. So we started doing this stuff as a as a university community. And then remember, this is way before the school. This is a decade before we work. This is way early, right? And what started happening was CEO started picking it and saying, I want my senior leaders to do this. And that’s how, you know, Prudential and GE, Google and everybody else got involved in this stuff over the years. And so what happened was the same process by which we were developing these young people became the process by which we were developing these very seasoned people who had maybe not.

Peter Winick So you took what was an internal process that was built not for commercial application, but as a need. I need to take all those raw material, these really bright young folks, and train them up. And now it has application and value.

Jeff DeGraff And I didn’t build it to make money to offset my cost. Right? And it was a huge surprise to me because anything.

Peter Winick Done deliberately or is everything is at jeopardy sort of the themes.

Jeff DeGraff I think it is serendipity. And I think the issue is this. I think what happens is all of us, you know, there’s a great quote in the Christmas Carol Dickens says and he says, you know, Ebenezer, when good fortune shows up, offer him a comfortable chair. And I just think a lot of people don’t they’re not mindful enough to say this is an opportunity. I’m going to snag it.

Peter Winick Well, I think there’s two reasons for that, maybe more. One is it takes your tuning, if that’s a word to. Be able to listen to the market. And sometimes the market will always tell you what it wants, but you’re not always listening, right? That’s number one. And number two, oftentimes people are creating and I’ll say in the lab, but I don’t mean in the way your lab is, but in isolation, they think this sort of creative process is done in isolation. I know all there is to do. I’m going to build this out to the 11th decimal point and then go out to the marketplace.

Jeff DeGraff Yeah, I think that’s exactly right, Peter. And if I can add to that, one of the things I’ve noticed with other people kind of been mildly successful or really successful at this is they notice anomalies there. Exactly. They look at that doesn’t seem congruous to me. And I, I certainly fit that bill where people tell me stuff all the time and it’s sort of the party line. And I’ll think, sure, that doesn’t make sense. So, you know, one.

Peter Winick Of the things I have to do that almost at the I don’t want to say intuitive level, but before the data is showing it to everyone, it’s almost like you.

Jeff DeGraff I think it is intuitive. I think I think you have to be your facility between the creative part of your neocortex, the creative part of your brain if you’re a neurobiologist. Yeah. Know and the more rational part of your brain, I absolutely think you have to be an ambassador and be able to translate what’s going on in your head. In fact, that’s why the new book is called The Creative Mindset. You know, the new book is called The Creative Mindset. You know, the Mastering the Six Skills that Empower Innovation. And the reason I did this, I took a whole bunch of research and I just tried to make it really digestible for an ordinary person. I’m big on the democratization of innovation. I’m from a blue collar neighborhood. I understand that sometimes it becomes too lofty. So I tried to say, Your brain already does this. You just need to be more mindful and you need a few skills to pay attention.

Peter Winick But that’s another contrarian thing about you is most academics, when they speak in academic is it’s to show other academics that they’re smart, the smartest person in the room, and they’ve just excluded 99.9 99% of the world. Right. So academics are publishing in academic journals. The three people read, okay, well, that doesn’t seem like a gratifying use case of my brilliance if I was an academic. So I like the fact that you’re able to translate it into.

Jeff DeGraff And it’s a common.

Peter Winick English.

Jeff DeGraff Peter It’s a constant struggle I have. The struggle I have is the good. The good news is I’m far enough along and I’ve done enough things in that realm. You know, I have had the big NSF grants and I’ve done all that stuff, but I did. I mostly did it. The same reason a Ph.D. was to punch a ticket. I mean, to tell you I was trying to do something so that I could get to where I wanted to do the work that I wanted to do. This is so it’s not just serendipity. That’s part of it. There’s a lot of work. It’s fun work. It’s super exciting, fun. But it’s work. Lots of airplanes, lots of rejection. Yeah, lots of, you know, putting your shoulder.

Peter Winick To the wheel. So as we start to wrap, one last sort of thought or question for you, So out there now is, is you some number of years ago, let’s say a significant number of years ago, relatively speaking. Right. And there that outsider there, the wrestler at the hippie bar that started a pizza joint. Now it would be a vegan kale. Yeah, a joint. And it’s I don’t know, they’re gluten free and maybe wrestling’s not cool. So I don’t know. Whatever it is, it’s virtual wrestling, X-Games. What would you say? It’s your X-Games, right? So it’s the same person at the gluten free smoothie bar that’s eating, you know, kale flavored pizza chips or whatever. What would you what would you advise them, if anything?

Jeff DeGraff I’d say two things. Number one. Think about your life in terms of four things, and I want you to get feedback from everybody, you know. Number one, what are you incompetent at? And own it. Just own it. Own it. Number two, what are you competent at? But it means your average own it. Number three, what are you masterful at? That’s great. Saw a lot of other people. And number four, what are you unique at? What are you designed to do? And then we put another way, I don’t care at all what you want to do. There’s a lot of people on American Idol auditions who nobody loved them up front. They couldn’t sing, right? What is it you’re designed to do? We gave you your natural gift, what you’ve learned experience. And just do that. That’s the first thing. Know the thing. And then the second thing is. Surround yourself with amazing talent that pushes back on you. Really creative people are not moved by people who believe in the same crap they believe. Sure, they get disconfirming feedback. They look for people who have different ideas and they create hybrid ideas, ideas that normal people on their own can’t get to. I was incredibly lucky that early in my career I had an opportunity to figure out what I suck at and what I was good at.

Peter Winick That’s a gift.

Jeff DeGraff And then I well, it was not a gift. It was more like a beating for a while. But that’s the way it goes.

Peter Winick No tomato, right?

Jeff DeGraff That’s right. And then the second part was, I’ve been extremely lucky in the community, but they’re not as big as our community here. Is that the innovator and the Innovator Institute for Innovation? The the my real community is probably 6 or 7 people.

Peter Winick And yeah, I love it.

Jeff DeGraff And they don’t agree with me and they push back a lot and it makes it I have to grow on a regular basis. That’s what I would advise.

Peter Winick Thank you. Well, this has been fantastic. I really appreciate your time and your effort, and I’ve been a fan of your work for a long time. So I feel like, you know, longtime, longtime listener, first time callers.

Jeff DeGraff Thanks for having me on, Peter. I really appreciate it.

Peter Winick Thanks. To learn more about Thought Leadership Leverage, please visit our website at ThoughtLeadershipLeverage.com. To reach me directly. Feel free to email me at Peter at ThoughtLeadershipLeverage.com. And please subscribe to Leveraging Thought Leadership on iTunes or your favorite podcast app to get your weekly episode automatically.