Louis Gump With Cambian Solutions

Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studio in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Atlanta Business Radio, brought to you by Kennesaw State University’s Executive MBA program, the accelerated degree program for working professionals looking to advance their career and enhance their leadership skills. And now, here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: Lee Kantor here, another episode of Atlanta Business Radio. And this is going to be a good one. But before we get started, it’s important to recognize our sponsor, CSU’s executive MBA program. Without them, we wouldn’t be sharing these important stories. Today on the land of business radio, we have Louis Gump, who is the president of Cambian Solutions. Welcome.

Louis Gump: Thank you. Lee. Great to be here.

Lee Kantor: Well, I’m so excited to get caught up with what you’re up to. Tell us a little bit about Cambion Solutions. How are you serving folks?

Louis Gump: Oh, happy to do that. So we’re helping teams to both drive innovation and also excel at team performance. And we’re doing that with companies based in the US and international ones. And as it happens, because of my book that published last year, The Insight Innovator, we’re speaking to teams about excellence in entrepreneurship or innovating within larger organizations.

Lee Kantor: Now, for folks who aren’t familiar, can you share a little bit about the definition of intrapreneurship versus entrepreneurship? How do they compare?

Louis Gump: Happy to do that. So entrepreneurship involves creating value through innovation and growth within a larger organization. And an entrepreneur is typically someone who does this. They act like an owner. They, you know, work with responsibility often. They are leaders of business units or leaders of initiatives or people who are driving incremental innovation, but they aren’t necessarily the owner or the founder of the company. An entrepreneur often is the owner or founder of a company, or both. They have both the opportunity to guide the organization and also the responsibility of kind of everything from, you know, meeting the needs of customers to ensuring that team members are taken care of. So each one has its value, but they’re very distinct disciplines. And as I was, you know, along my career journey, including leading teams at places like The Weather Channel and CNN and then serving as CEO of two small businesses, it became abundantly clear that the two practices are very different.

Lee Kantor: Now, how is an entrepreneur different than like a project lead or a director of, you know, one of the divisions of an organization? How do you see the distinction between that?

Louis Gump: It’s a very important question, and it has to do in a lot of ways with the type of work that’s being done. Sometimes they’re one and the same. For example, when I was responsible of for mobile at The Weather Channel and we were building the mobile business, I was both a division lead and also an entrepreneur. On the other hand, if you have someone, let’s just take an example, someone who’s running a call center or responsible for essentially making sure that operations go well and smoothly. Often that will be essentially a maintenance mode sort of role, not necessarily an innovation sort of role, but not necessarily. It depends, again, on the nature of the work if you’re constantly looking for ways to improve. If you’re constantly looking for ways to contribute to the growth of the organization, not just the ongoing operations, that’s when you look a lot more like an entrepreneur.

Lee Kantor: Now, one of the big distinctions to me, entrepreneur versus entrepreneur and entrepreneur has stakes their skin in the game. If it fails, that’s going to cost them either financially or reputation. There’s something to lose. What? How does that kind of track with an entrepreneur?

Louis Gump: You’re putting your finger on one of the most important distinctions, along with size and complexity of organization in many cases and that sort of thing. And that is an entrepreneur typically is taking more risk, and an entrepreneur typically is able to mitigate the risk somewhat by relying on a larger organization. Just to be clear, uh, you know, regardless of what type of role you take on, you know, there’s no guarantees in general. Rather it’s just how you want to weigh that type of risk. In the case of an entrepreneur, often, you know, the whole payroll is on your shoulders. The success or failure of the organization is on your shoulders, and also the rewards that come with that. As an entrepreneur, you often have a broader organization, and especially if you’re leading a growth A team within a larger one than the way this plays out often is that. And again, I’ll use a media company just as an example, although there are many other places within industry that this happens, and nonprofits for that matter. But let’s say you have an existing organization and it’s got a TV network, and the TV network has been successful for a long time, and it generates a lot of cash. And then you’ve got a growing desktop web business, at least over time. And that also generates cash, although it’s much smaller. And then you have a nascent organization. And with some of the trends today, let’s say it’s an AI driven product, and it’s not necessarily making money, but it can be funded by the rest of the organization. Whether you hit your goals this month or next month or the one after, it really doesn’t matter that much to the health of the organization overall. And so you have a lot more latitude to move. If you’re an entrepreneur, you kind of got to hit some of your goals for many reasons, including it It’s in, uh, a very high percentage of the time. Uh, specific revenue and profit goals.

Lee Kantor: Now, is your recommendation that organizations have just, uh, teams of intrapreneurs or is it something that, hey, we need a lot of management people to make sure the trains run on time and everything happens very predictably and reliably. But also, we should be investing in some of these people with some more out of the box thinking and more, um, innovative ideas and throw some resources to them as well. Like how do you balance the two?

Louis Gump: So it’s very important for organizations that want to grow to have intrapreneurs in their organization, where the concentration is and whether you have teams of them or whether they’re sprinkled through. It’s very situational. My preference from the perspective of building a sustainable growth organization Innovation is to have a high representation of entrepreneurs, but especially be attentive to business unit leads. I recently met with a group of senior executives, and most of them were CEOs, and we were talking about the top characteristics of entrepreneurs, which I’d be happy to comment on a little bit more if that’s helpful. And after the conversation, he pulled me aside and he said, hey, Louis, you know, you just helped me to see something with clarity for the first time. And that is one of my divisions, has a leader that perfectly fits the characteristics of someone who’s naturally wired to be a successful entrepreneur. And one of my divisions actually doesn’t. And I have to figure out how to manage through that. And by the way, there are different ways to manage through it. In some cases it is, you know, shifting responsibilities. In some cases it’s training up. But regardless, the status quo doesn’t work so hot. And so what I would say in general is that anyone who’s leading an organization and wants to drive growth should be very intentional about the placement and the support of entrepreneurs.

Lee Kantor: So why don’t we get into a little bit about what do you see as the qualities of a good entrepreneur in an organization?

Louis Gump: I’m happy to do that. So as I was writing The Inside Innovator, I decided really quickly that I didn’t really want it to be a narrative sort of book, even though there are a bunch of stories in there. Rather, I wanted it to be a practical guidebook and to make sure that it was a practical guidebook. I went and did as many interviews with a set set of questions, and what came out of that research is that there are five core characteristics of successful entrepreneurs that bubble to the top, and then there’s a set of other ones that are required as well. And I’ll focus on the top five. The first one is curiosity. Essentially this desire to learn. This sense of adventure, this willingness to explore things that haven’t been done before. The second one is action orientation. It’s it’s one thing to be curious and to want to understand. It’s much more important from the perspective of entrepreneurship. If you have the combination of curiosity and the intention to turn that into action, to move forward, to make things happen. The third one, and this 1st May be a little bit predictable in some ways, and it turns out to be especially powerful for the people who do it well. And that is the ability to build bridges with other people. If you are, you know, working inside an organization that has 50, 100, 200 or more people and you are trying to make things happen in a growth business or an initiative, then often you’re having to work with, you know, five, ten, 15, 20 or more people.

Louis Gump: Any one of whom can say no. And if they say no, you can’t move forward. So someone who has those relationship skills and is able to build bridges to understand what other people need, what their concerns are, what their opportunities are. They tend to be much more effective. The fourth one we’ve already touched on some, and that is risk tolerance, not necessarily the same risk tolerance as an entrepreneur, but still the willingness and ability to say, hey, we’re going to try things. They might work, they may not. If they work, we’ll do more. And if they don’t work, we’ll learn from it. And lastly is this sense of optimism that came through the research. Anyone who is going to be effective at this over a longer period of time, it helps to be able to connect the vision to a sense of possibility and then in a very pragmatic way, in a very grounded way, understand, hey, we’re going to keep this moving forward. We think we see a path to make it work. And having a kind of a practical understanding how to apply that to a growth initiative.

Lee Kantor: Now, as an organization, a lot of organizations are at least give lip service to. I’m okay with taking risks. I’m okay with, um, you know, innovation and things like that, but really, they’re okay with it as long as it works. They’re sometimes less okay when it doesn’t work. And then the leader who is championing that gets kind of punished or fired or moved or something negative happens to them. How do you coach these organizations to really kind of keep their word when you’re doing something intrapreneurial? Because like you said, throughout this whole thing, there is a risk involved. This may not work.

Louis Gump: Sure. So we could do an all day seminar on this topic for, for starters, an answer to your question how would you coach someone? This is where I’m fairly direct. If you’re going to behave that way, you’re going to fail. It’s just a matter of time. If you aren’t willing to take some risks and adapt to change, then in the current marketplace especially, there just isn’t an easy way to succeed over a longer period of time. You can make it work for a while. So my starting place is it’s essential that you be willing to take calculated risks over a reasonable period of time. Next, I want to add that of course, we’re in an environment where some companies are required to manage for efficiency. So not every last thing you need to do needs to be high risk, but you should have an appropriate blend in the mix. And then the third thing that I would point out here is having processes to evaluate ventures. So you can essentially de-risk them, decrease the level of risk, increase the probability of success, but then understand that anytime you’re trying new things, you aren’t going to bat a thousand. In fact, a good batting average in baseball, you know, is let’s say, 300. And so it’s worth keeping that in mind. And the last thing that I would point out here in terms of coaching is it’s very helpful to be intentional about assigning the right people to these sorts of adventures, these sorts of ventures, so that when you get started, you have people who understand both through experience and through, also through natural wiring. Hey, here’s how to succeed and let’s make it happen. And oh, by the way, when you find someone, don’t just push them off to the side, but help them to articulate what they need and then advocate for them so that they can be successful instead of frustrated.

Lee Kantor: I just see so many organizations that just would like that, but they aren’t. When it comes time to do that or to accept something that didn’t work, the team is punished in some manner, and the morale of the whole organization and the culture of the whole organization becomes distrustful, and then it makes them less likely to put their stick their neck out for any type of new initiative, because the the cost is too high. And in today’s job market, I mean, people are looking for any reason, you know, to leap to another opportunity.

Louis Gump: I think that’s right. There was a study by BCG in the last year or so that said that 70% of companies that they surveyed said that innovation is in their top three priorities, but only 3% of them think that they’re doing it well. And I think that’s an indication that some of the behaviors that you just described are alive and well in corporate America. And when we look at that, then I think the more enlightened leaders are going to say, okay, what do we do to get better at this? You know, for companies that are good at it. And I would, you know, with with all due respect to the many, uh, smaller companies that are doing this well, and I’m familiar with some of them, you know, a couple of the best known companies that have, by and large, innovated pretty well over time are ones like Amazon and Apple. They’ve been willing to take on risk. They’ve been willing to, uh, empower their entrepreneurs. They’ve been willing to kind of finance growth. The thing that I would emphasize on those examples, those though, is those are so big, but you don’t have to be really big to behave in a similar way.

Louis Gump: And furthermore, one of the best ways to run off your most talented employees is to essentially close down the paths for them to innovate and have a voice. And so if you think you aren’t as far along as you want to be as a as a company leader or as a company advisor, sometimes you start small, you pick one initiative. Maybe you look at ways to change the budget process so that instead of allocating all the dollars to things that are proven, you allocate 1 or 2 or 3% of the dollars to things that that aren’t so proven. Maybe instead of the CEO saying no to the next gathering about, you know, uh, innovation in, uh, an area that’s important and And strategically aligned. The CEO shows up and when the CEO shows up, they don’t just listen, but they engage and they encourage. A lot of this is done by example. And so if a company is struggling to innovate, the first place for the top leaders to look is in the mirror.

Lee Kantor: Now when a company raises their hand and say, Louis, we’d like you to come in, uh, we have some challenges. We’d like your thoughts on them. What does that first kind of, um, the first project look for you. How do you typically get your foot in the door somewhere? And then, uh, what is typically the evolution of a kind of a relationship with you and your firm?

Louis Gump: Oh, thanks for asking. My first comment is that what I found is that it’s almost all referrals. You know, I’m trying to advocate for entrepreneurs. Uh, the book has been a very helpful platform. And over the last four months in particular, I’ve started to expand publicly on that with weekly posts. And as that has happened, more and more people have been engaging and the starting place tends to be somebody I know or somebody who has come across some of the material related to the inside innovator. They said, hey, Louis, could we have a conversation? And I spent a lot of time listening, and I think that’s a really important part of what we do at Cambian Solutions to understand, hey, is there really a an opportunity here, and is there willingness for this leader or this group of leaders to really address the opportunity? So that’s an assessment stage. And then after that we go to problem identification and saying, well okay, if there’s a willingness and there’s opportunity then what are the barriers. And once we get past that, then it gets down to very specific aspects of projects so that it’s practical and applied. And the additional piece that I would say is that we tend to be pretty Inclusive of team members, wherever that is practical. So we understand the perspectives. A phrase that I use a lot of the time is if you can’t find the keys, look in your pockets. And what I mean by that is in the context of entrepreneurship. If you think you have opportunities to grow and you’re struggling to do it, there’s a very good chance that you have both the knowledge and the people power to affect the change that you want to. And if you don’t, you can get there in a small number of steps.

Lee Kantor: Now for, uh, the leaders who are listening that are buying into this and say that they want to kind of lean into more of this entrepreneurship culture change. What are some what do you need first? Do you need to identify some potential entrepreneurs in the organization, or do you have to identify some opportunities?

Louis Gump: I would go even earlier than that. I would say you need the vocabulary. I was just talking with somebody earlier this afternoon about this, uh, who said, hey, Louis, I just read your book. And so did my team members. And one of the team members, this was an entrepreneur, and her whole team read it. And, uh, one of these team members said, hey, that looks like me, but I didn’t even know what the word entrepreneur was. And so, Lee, I would certainly say start with understanding. And for anybody who’s curious about this, I can point folks to a lot of resources, whether it comes from me or others. But it’s learning about the discipline. Uh, after that, I would say that what you said about identifying people is critically important. You’re exactly on target because in so many cases, entrepreneurship is not just about process and structure, but it’s also about having the right people and then giving them care and feeding. That said, process and structure both matter. In the case of process, there’s a big difference, for example, between an annual budget cycle. So you essentially have one bite at the apple every year versus, you know, a line item that says we’re driving innovation and. Increasing the speed. And also for certain ventures that need fast growth and essentially not to be misdirected or interfered with by other divisions, you need some kind of structural protection. All of this is situational. Um, you know, you can read something like The Innovator’s Dilemma and get a sense of it. However, I’d say the practice of an entrepreneur is largely about the application with the right people.

Lee Kantor: Now, is there a story you can share that maybe, um, illustrates how this could work for an organization? Uh, you don’t have to name the name of the organization, but maybe share the problem that they had and how you were able to help them get through it and maybe get to a new level.

Louis Gump: Uh, I’ll be happy to do that. And are you okay if I use an example from when I was in an operating business, does that work for you?

Lee Kantor: Anything that you think would illustrate how this could work for an organization, whatever serves you?

Louis Gump: Uh, I’m happy to. And one of my favorites among a large collection of them at this point, including with the folks that I interviewed. But one of the favorites is is one that I experienced myself, and it was at the Weather Channel, and I arrived there in 2001 intending to focus on desktop web. We had some changes in the organization, and the person who was leading weather.com went to the person who was leading wireless, went to weather.com, and we needed someone to pick up the business development responsibility for mobile. And we quickly found that in order to succeed in mobile, we were going to have to make some fairly dramatic changes. And the first thing we did was build a generation of applications using technologies like Java, Brew, Windows and Symbian. A couple of those work better than others, especially our Java apps and brew apps with 2 or 3 of our partners. And then we built some made for mobile video, and then we came back around to mobile web. And then we did some pioneering work, both inside and also in the industry with mobile advertising.

Louis Gump: And then we came back around to apps. And in 2008, The Weather Channel launched both our brand new iPhone app and a new Android app. And especially in the case of the iPhone app, it became the most downloaded app in the App Store, and we became widely recognized as a leader in the space. There are many reasons I love this story, but one of them is that we chipped away at it for a while. We were seeing some success early, and then it grew and it grew, but it didn’t grow linearly, linearly. And so I describe our experience at the Weather Channel in Mobile as a seven year long overnight success. Where we worked on it, we worked on it, we worked on it, and then it took off. And for anyone who wants to be an entrepreneur sometime, especially with incremental innovation, you’ll get the immediate satisfaction. But for a lot of us, it requires some thoughtfulness, alignment with strategy and hard work. And then the payoff comes over time. And when it comes, it tends to come very fast.

Lee Kantor: Now, when it was kind of maybe not meeting expectations or the growth was slower than you would have liked. What was leadership saying? Like did you? How how close were they to pulling the plug of the whole thing?

Louis Gump: So in the early times they were very close. We were like, oh, is this really worth it? And as we got further in, it was less about pulling the plug of the whole thing, and it was more about saying, how much do we invest, especially in the second half of the journey. And, you know, we were a frugal company. We weren’t willing to put large amounts of money into unproven, untested ventures very often. But we what we were willing to do is to try experiments and put a modest amount of investment with the right people in the right place, right places. And when I say the right places, that doesn’t mean that it worked all the time. We had a couple that went sideways. We had a couple that didn’t work at all, and we had more than a couple that worked really well. So one of the things I also advise for people who are interested in innovating is think of this more as a portfolio strategy. And one of the most dangerous things someone can do, whether it works or it doesn’t work, is to assume that one test will give an indication of how you’re going to do over time. If it fails, then you know you’ve got the story for five years. Oh well, we tried whatever it was and it didn’t work. And if the first one works, that’s great mostly, but it’s not all great because it can set the expectation that everything will work. So I think going in with eyes wide open and the understanding that you’re going to succeed in some places with thought and hard work almost always, and then being ready for the journey, that’s key. And oh, by the way, being willing to invest regardless of whether you know, it’s high or low. And then when you really have a hit, be willing to double down.

Lee Kantor: So if somebody wants to learn more, have a more substantive conversation with you or somebody on the team, what’s the website? What’s the best way to connect?

Louis Gump: Oh, thanks for asking. They can reach me on LinkedIn at Louis Gump. Louis Gump. My email address is Louis Louis at cambian. Solutions.com. Uh, and I’m also pretty easy to find at Louis Gump. Com where there’s a lot of information on the book, and some folks have said some nice things about it. I’m I’m pleased to say that the book has been well received, and so that’s been a large part of my focus recently.

Lee Kantor: Well, Louis, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing important work and we appreciate you.

Louis Gump: Thank you Lee, I’m so happy to do it. And especially for those people who are interested in executive education and growing, this is a perfect topic.

Lee Kantor: All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on Atlanta Business Radio.