Fearless Innovation. Alex Goryachev
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understanding, support, and pure unconditional love. I am also grateful to my parents, Yuri and Tamara, and my sister, Julia, who has always inspired me to seek change and adventure over safety and comfort.
The task of turning this book into reality is shared by so many people, which includes tremendous support from Mark Nelson, Mat Miller, and Zachary Schisgal, Vicki Adang, Amy Handy, Jocelyn Kwiatkowski, and Jenny Douglas. Scott Kirsner, cofounder and editor of Innovation Leader magazine, graciously provided invaluable guidance and archival resources that were essential in researching this book.
And last, but not least, I am grateful to Zach Gajewski, the most amazing editor in the world, who spent countless hours with me bringing this book to life.
Introduction: From Buzzword to Reality
Innovation is a horrible word.
The term has become so buzzy, it seems to have lost all practical meaning. Ask a hundred people to define it and you’ll receive just as many different answers. And, you know what? All of these answers might be right—or they might be wrong.
This is, in part, due to the fact that discussions about the topic are everywhere today. If you actually google “What is innovation?” you will receive nearly half a million results, and according to Google Trends, the number of search requests for news related to “innovation” tripled between 2014 and 2019.1 Not a day goes by without another dozen articles, blog posts, or think pieces on the concept, highlighting how we all need to be more innovative and showcasing the latest process and methodology that should be immediately adopted. We read, listen, and try to keep up, looking for clarity and some type of real-world application of what is seen as a squishy subject with no end.
Today, 63 percent of companies are hiring chief innovation officers, and more than 90 percent of companies are implementing new tech to support innovation processes.2 Sure, that’s great, but there’s a problem here: despite the obvious growth of demand for “innovation,” we remain utterly confused about the concept. In the meantime, most leaders believe that dropping the word into a shareholder letter from time to time or mentioning it at a quarterly employee all-hands meeting is enough to prove that they’re on top of the trend. Let me let you in on a little secret: they’re not.
Many of these organizations relegate innovation to one very special team somewhere in the “hip” part of the office, featuring free snacks and “edgy” motivational posters, and they think they’ve done their job—innovation is enabled; time to celebrate! It’s understandable. With so much information out there on the topic, it’s hard to know where to start, let alone with what goal and for what purpose, even for the “practitioners” themselves. Leaders are enthusiastic about encouraging everyone to be innovative, yet vague about what this means in practical terms. In return, employees have little interest in something that their bosses don’t know what to do with or can’t even describe.
But why does this matter? If “innovation” is such a buzzword, what’s the point? And why in the hell are you reading another book on the topic? Why not stick to business as usual and just ask marketing and PR to make your company appear more innovative? Innovation is an amorphous concept anyhow, the business jargon du jour, the latest flavor of the month. In short, a bunch of bullshit. Right?
Well, I’m here to tell you that though innovation can be confusing, misunderstood, and even pull-your-hair-out frustrating at times (just take a look at my author photo), it is, in fact, far from bullshit. Throughout the centuries, it has been at the core of human aspirations and essential to the world’s most successful companies, organizations, cities, and countries. Innovation is the only proven path to business growth and societal impact, whether measured in money or happiness. It’s not a “nice-to-have”—it’s a necessity.
If leaders refuse innovation, then it disappears in the cracks, left without clear purpose, unmeasured and unaccountable. Even if they give it lip service, without action and reinforcement, it goes nowhere and actually sets organizations on a dangerous and eventually self-destructive path. But when leaders embrace innovation and welcome change, well, that’s another story.
Living with Change
I’m no stranger when it comes to dealing with change. After all, I was born in a place that no longer exists—the USSR. When I was sixteen years old, I witnessed my home country, one of the most powerful in the world at the time, collapse practically overnight, affecting nearly 300 million people and generating sudden economic and societal shifts that will continue to have an impact for generations to come.
Later in my teens, I was transplanted to the United States. Suddenly, I was exposed to shockingly different societal and economic norms than those I had been used to, and I felt a little lost, uncertain where I fit in. I longed for some type of purpose, meaningful connection, and freedom of self-expression that I couldn’t find at first. My English and overall social skills weren’t the greatest, so I invested my time in teaching myself the Linux operating system, hung out with a local hacking community of fellow weird outcasts, and became a supporter of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a groundbreaking nonprofit that was the first to understand the importance of civil liberties and personal privacy in cyberspace. These were the best choices I’ve ever made.
During the early dot-com days, I was lucky to experience the community spirit of Silicon Valley before the boom. I was warmly welcomed in California by a diverse group of free-thinking technology professionals from around the world, and I invested my days and nights in projects that came to define and shape the future of digital entertainment and the music industry.
In addition to co-founding and launching a music touring and production company, I found my tribe and worked nonstop at Liquid Audio, a startup that pioneered a new business model for the music industry, allowing consumers to purchase high-quality music content online, while ensuring artists and labels still got paid. Later, I went to the “dark side” and practically moved in to Napster’s offices, the largest and most controversial online music service of the early 2000s. They were being sued by Metallica, one of my favorite bands at the time, as well as the Record Industry Association of America (RIAA), which was worth billions of dollars, and I was there to help Napster change their technology architecture and business model while they raced against the clock to survive.
Fast forward a decade, and I landed at Cisco, leading the company’s Co-Innovation Centers, setting strategy, and, more importantly, driving co-innovation with startups, key customers, and channel partners, as well as with cities and governments in fourteen countries. These award-winning innovation programs also provide employees, at all levels, with the opportunity to share and implement their biggest and brightest ideas. Even better, they ensure that the rest of the company actively supports these employees in these endeavors.
Besides leading the overall co-innovation strategy at Cisco in the Corporate Development and Strategy team, I’ve worked in numerous areas of the company, contributing to its success and helping to shape its approach to innovation throughout the enterprise. Starting in sales, I worked on ecosystem enablement, then moved to global marketing in an effort to streamline global operations. Among other departments, I also held positions in corporate finance, working on business transformation, and in engineering, developing new emerging technologies and business models. These experiences have provided me with a 360-degree view of how the World’s #1 Workplace operates, innovates, and succeeds.3
Having given hundreds of presentations on innovation and spoken with thousands of people about the topic, I’ve had the chance to regularly share my experiences and learn from my peers around the world. Those with less hands-on experience with the topic, however, tend to ask me the same questions over and over again: Is innovation real, or is it a load of BS? If it is real, how should we innovate? How do we overcome our fear of missing out on trends or failing? Where should we focus our attention? And wait, what’s innovation again?
When I answer these questions, I feel like I’m a part of a support group,