Ken Zakalik is the Director of Innovation at ALSAC, where his team helped ALSAC earn the honor of the number one company for innovators to work at by Fast Company.  Ken describes himself as a career corporate-entrepreneur, and he has helped companies from large fortune 100 organizations to small 10-person startups to create and launch industry-disrupting innovative products, usher in new effective ways of working, and help to drive transformation.

In this episode, Ken and Steven discuss the mission of ALSAC and St Jude Children’s Research Hospital and how their innovation program has helped them adapt during the Covid-19 pandemic. We also talk about his own roots in pursuing a career in making new and different things, and how he’s been able to launch innovation programs throughout that journey. Ken shares some practical tips on getting buy-in from your organization as well as what it takes to scale new and different ideas that you don’t want to miss.

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Links From The Show

Links:

St Jude Children’s Research Hospital

Ken’s LinkedIn page

Ken’s Website

Transcript

Steven Voyles: Welcome to the show today Ken. Thanks for joining us.

Ken Zakalik: Thanks for having me.

SV: You’re the Director of Innovation ay ALSAC. Could you talk a little bit about what ALSAC’s mission is and some of the work that you do there?

KZ: Yeah, Absolutely. So ALSAC is the fundraising and awareness organization for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and our mission is to raise the funds necessary for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital to run. The role of the innovation team is to help promote a culture of innovation, help to inject some innovation into the strategy of the work that they do and to research and prototype the use of emerging technology to ensure that we’re future proofing the organization so that we can thrive for years to come.

SV: Yeah, it’s a fantastic organization and I’m glad to get a chance to promote not only the work that you’re doing but the work of ALSAC and St. Jude as well. Not that anybody doesn’t already know about you guys but it’s always great to try to spread the word.

KZ: Thank you.

SV: Can you tell us a little bit about you personally? How did you first start getting interested in this focus on innovation?

KZ: Yeah. So, I think I’ve always sort of been curious about doing the new and different. I’ve sort of got this theory that there are folks that are openers, people that can start something. There’s operators, people that are excellent at operating things. And then there’s optimizers. People that can come in, see what’s been done and make it better. And not to say that people can’t bleed over in those things, but I really always put myself into the opener and optimizer categories. I’m not the best operator. And so because of that I’ve always been in positions where I’ve though about how any of the companies I’ve worked for could be doing something new and different. How they could be finding value in those things. So I started my career early on at a nascent internet business back when dial up occurred and helped them to explore long distance calling cards before that was an actual, full fledged business and that turned itself into creating prepaid debit cards that you could activate at terminals and creating the technology necessary for those types of things to work. I moved into the startup world helping to build art collection sites, moved to Marvel Entertainment and helped them with their digital comics platform. So that was when apps started to be a thing and nobody was doing that much stuff and said hey, why don’t we put our comic books there and I got to work on that great project. Worked through other companies like Estee Lauder helping them to bring a user centric approach to how they do their internal business operating platforms. I went through other startups and eventually landed at St. Jude / ALSAC and worked as a digital product manager helping them to modernize some of their systems. That’s that optimization piece. Revolutionizing them to do more of a geo location based experience and different iterative tests on donations forms and commerce capabilities. The CEO, during my tenure there, the CEO put out a call to find out if we could be more innovative. 80 people raised their hands and I was one of those 80 people. We were put into four groups. I felt like I was interested in all the groups and because of that was able to be apart of all of them and understand how they were each trying to address specific areas of innovation from process and education and recognition and reward and figuring out what to do with some of the ideas that were in funnel and really stitched those together and as part of that pitched out this idea for an entrepreneur in residence that would help lead the charge. They granted all of those things, I applied for that role, and I was the first member of the innovation team and I’ve been growing it since.

SV: That’s awesome. I think one thing that people are going to be interested in hearing is a little bit more about that journey. I know that you’ve been a part of that journey at several companies, and so it’s both for profits and non-profits and you’ve also been in some startups and some larger companies like ALSAC, so can you  tell us maybe what are some of the common threads. How do you get support for  doing something like what you’re doing right now. It sounds like ALSAC kind of put out the call for you guys but what are the elements that need to be present in an organization for something like this to work and for you to have the kind of support you need to make it work?

KZ: Yeah, so I think it’s sort of interesting. You need leadership support. You’re doing something new and different. You’re deploying resources differently, even if those resources are your own time so you need somebody to say, “yes, it’s okay for you to do this exploration and to do these things that you need to do.”  We can get into how do you sell those things up so that leadership can understand it’s valuable and worth doing, but the other side of the equation is that you need organizational buy in. So, there’s a few different phases of how you would move something through. One, there’s the phase where you need to convince people that a focus on innovation is important and differentiate it enough from the other work being done that it deserves it’s own space. Actually, I just got off the phone with another person at another company that works in innovation. They called it the shower test. You need somebody that would think about the business that they’re in while they’re in the shower. If it’s a split focus thing it becomes really difficult to understand where to focus and how to apply that energy. So, justifying that you need to have dedicated focus is a whole series of conversations about establishing value and doing the new and different and how that would happen and really thinking through the future of what that looks like. How would it return value? What would you need for it to be successful. Then once you get that buy in now you’re in that role, how do you define what it is so that the rest of the organization can rally behind it and move itself forward and I call that organizational buy in. So those are the key factors that I’ve found to be important in every environment I’ve been in. Leadership buying into the fact that you need to focus on this thing and that it’s important, and then you need to be able to deploy that vision in a meaningful way so that others can rally around it and support it and know that they’re acting in concert to achieve the goals of innovation and what that really means.

SV: So, specifically at ALSAC I know how the COVID-19 pandemic has really affected you guys and I think that it’s going to turn out that it’s great that they had you guys around thinking about different ways to do business because of that so can you talk a little bit about how the lockdowns and the COVID-19 pandemic has affected you and the mission of ALSAC and how your group was able to help.

KZ: Yeah. I think that the organization has done a phenomenal job of adapting to a new environment. There’s this meme I saw and it said, “what fueled your digital transformation?” and it listed CEO and the next one was CIO or CTO, and the third one is COVID-19, and I think we like a lot of companies had to adapt to the COVID-19 pandemic by moving virtual. I think luckily, and I think that this happens in a lot of ecosystems, not just innovation ecosystems, but we were working in an agile capacity where we were really fluid with how we use technology and that was our collaborative technology, Zoom primarily. So, shifting to working in that capacity wasn’t a huge burden for us. We were able to carry on like we had before. It felt pretty natural. Obviously there were some nuances that felt a little weird and figuring out how you still have your community time and you joke with each other and you do all of those things, but organizing the work and understanding what we needed to do, that was easy. But, such a huge part of how we operate our business is relational. Because of that, we produce a lot of in person events and those went away. And so the organization did a phenomenal job adapting and moving things into the ecosystems that we had in the tools. Zoom, for example. We as the innovation team also thought along those lines but I like to think that we though about it differently. Right, which I think is that you want your innovation team to always think about things a little differently. We said, look if we’re online now, we know it’s not new, we know that museums have been going online over the course of the last few years. We know that social gatherings have been going on online for years, right. Minecraft, so massive online communities. So we said, okay, let’s forget about reacting. What if we were to design and build a native virtual event? What might that look like? So we stopped for a little while. I think we stopped for almost six weeks, which I got a little nervous about but when you think about building a brand new things from scratch like a startup, six weeks is actually a really short period of time. We did a lot of competitive research. We saw what a lot of people were doing to mitigate the risk of lost revenue from online events in the non-profit, for-profit spaces, and we figured out what would we want to do. We identified a few different plans. One of which we actually just launched and I can tell you about that if you’re interested. The other we’re still building. What does a virtual even look like that would engage our supporters in a meaningful way that doesn’t rely on in-person events. That has nothing to go back to. It’s only ever going to be a future oriented virtual event, and we got buy in around it and we’ve got some really great ideas based upon other people’s great work out in the world, and we’re hoping that it comes around in the next few months. So we’re pretty excited about that shift.

SV: Yeah, that sounds great. I think we’d definitely love to hear a little bit more about specifically the process that you guys are going through to rethink the way that you engage with your donors.

KZ: Yeah, so I don’t, you know and that’s sort of an interesting question right? I think that we have experts that know how to engage with our audience and we like any other organization have new audiences to address. I think what we’re lucky with is that my peer Zach Whitten has done a phenomenal job of identifying this audience in our play live program. That’s our gaming program where donors support our mission. I’ve always felt, and I think he felt, that there was a tremendous amount of room for us in that space for non-gamers. We’ve done a lot of work with influencers in specific categories whether it be fashion and makeup, or cooking, or mom bloggers. We’ve felt as though there were people that were seeking this online entertainment and we found this great company called Wave XR and they started virtual reality concerts. Live performances but in virtual reality. Sort of like Ready Player One. And Matt Ladner, whose on my team, brought this idea up that we should do this. And we joked around and said, “you mean like Ready Player One? Hahaha” and he said, “exactly.” That was over a year ago but we found opportunity in this pandemic to try it and just last week we launched this Wave XR  performance of Lindsey Sterling whose a hip hop violinist who has a huge digital native audience. Did a benefit concert for us, and we had phenomenal results. We used this third party platform, which was fairly new for us, with an artist that we had not used before, with the intention of not going after or cannibalizing our current audience. We went to it looking to acquire a new audience and I think we acquired thirteen thousand views, we did a phenomenal job fundraising through that event. Lindsey Sterling did a phenomenal job on it. I can send you the link if you want to put it in the show notes.

SV: Yeah, definitely.

KZ: That was something that we attempted because of the pandemic and I don’t think we would have attempted it had we not been faced with the circumstances we’re in.

SV: So, talking about leading up to that event and some of the other work that you guys have done. I know that what created that environment was the support that you’ve gotten at ALSAC and I know that recently you guys were named the Best Place to Work for Innovators in 2020 by Fast Company. So, talk a little bit about why you think that they selected you and what kind of culture and environment you guys have at ALSAC that makes it such a great place for innovators.

KZ: I  think that we were born out of innovation, right? I mean, Danny Thomas when he began, really wanted to test different ways of operating a hospital and sharing information, and no family ever pays for treatment, right? We’re eighty percent funded by donors, hopefully like those that are watching and listening to this podcast. So, working new and different I think has been baked into who this organization is. Testing and learning has been something that we’ve been promoting and I think what we’ve helped to do as an innovation team is to help people not only come up with a concept, but walk that concept through. Understand what are the opportunity costs of not doing the new and different. I believe that that’s given this organization the opportunity to invest differently. I believe that that is the crux of the entire culture that we got this great honor for. Being able to present ideas, work with other collaborators in the organization that are experts in their fields to understand the blind spots and the opportunities that are in front of you. Understand that you’ve go to put business behind ideas. Ideas just for idea’s sake never are unique enough or special enough to say, “yeah. Go and do that thing.” So I think that whole culture of, come up with a thing, get the validated information you need to prove that it could work, get the people to put it out there, see the results, and then grow it, and the willingness of the organization to do that has been  a really special thing for the organization. We’ve gotten these accolades, I believe, because of the efforts that we’ve done. The brand new virtual tour that we’ve recently put out, things like the Play Live program, our accelerator program, which I believe is really unique in the non-profit organization. We’ve already done two cohorts. The internal accelerator is a new and different idea where people can come work differently and have dedicated focus for three months on building something brand new. The emphasis on pivots and exploring new and different audiences for each of our business units I believe all of that has contributed to our ability to become a beacon for innovators that want to try new things to find that here.

SV: Yeah, I think it sounds like you guys have a great culture and environment there, but I know you’ve also worked at places where it might be a little bit more challenging and I think that might resonate a lot more with some of the folks that are watching this so when you’re in those environments where you don’t have that support, you know, you talked about the incubator program and being able to start that. What are some of the things that you’ve seen help you to be successful in just getting that type of a program moving in an organization?

KZ: So, developing a program like that’s not easy. It’s gotta be based on results and your ability to deliver and have trust within the organization, not just at the leadership level. I think it comes from grounded business acumen, frankly. It comes to that concept of, an idea is an idea until you put business behind it. So, everything that you put out there now becomes a pitch. If you look at any pitch deck out there in the world they talk the problem, the opportunity, how you’ll solve for it, how you’ll be creating value not only for the organization but also for the constituents that are utilizing the product or the process or the tool. I think you need to be pressing upon that and show that you’ll be creating so much value in these processes that it’s worth the investment, at least in the investment of your time and attention. [SV1] Building innovation out of that platform now just becomes duplicating those same things repeatedly to say, “we can knock it out of the park repeatedly with this same level of rigor and attention to what it is that we’re building and why to the point where we believe that we should have a platform to do this thing. And then that to me becomes your innovation platform, and with resources allocated specifically to building that platform and creating mature, robust processes in it are the fuel that will drive the innovation into the future. I think that we are unique in how we do innovation at ALSAC I’ll say. The ecosystems that I’ve seen and that I’ve worked in have an innovative culture lying within HR, and strategy being a dedicated competency for the businesses, and then R&D being R&D, and we’ve really centralized a lot of that into the innovation team. What we’ve found is we’re able to spread those messages out, and we’re able to have those specific other parts of the business adopt it and own it and grow it and develop it for themselves and their own culture. But, those things that span the organization come to us or we come up with new and novel ways to help those businesses succeed and that’s been the really interesting part of how we’ve established innovation at the organization.

SV: That’s really cool. So I know that there’s a lot of parallels there with agile transformations and digital transformations, right? So, you talked about it can’t just be this one group that owns this process. You’ve gotta kind of develop that competency across the organization and that’s what really makes it work. So it’s exciting to hear that you guys are doing that. So, what’s the biggest piece of advice you would give, you know, you talked a little bit about how you create that environment and how you provide the proof of concept. What’s the biggest piece of advice that you’d give to someone that are actually trying to muddle their way through how do I actually show the value of these things?

KZ: Yeah, so again I think it comes back down to the business case. It’s the same process, but there’s two different executions of it. If you want to do the new and different it comes down to business case. You’ve gotta think of yourself as an entrepreneur or an intrapreneur. You’ve gotta figure out how you validate your ideas being more valuable than doing the other things that the organization could be doing, and you really need to pitch it. You need to pitch it in a way that shows that you’ve been collaborative, worked with others, and you’ve grown something that can add this value, and how it’s going to add value. You would pitch it to your leadership as if they were the investors. You need to have an ask that says, “I want this much money and this many people focused on executing this thing so that we can see this value.” [SV2] There’s tons of resources that you can be looking at to do that.  In fact, even today I go and I research and the amount of times I’ve Googled “AirBnB pitch deck”, right? That simple twelve, not simple, there’s a lot of work behind it, but that simple presentation, twelve page presentation that sold this business model that disrupted an entire industry, hospitality, is so meaningful. And you have to do that, right? You can’t just have an idea and say, “it’s going to be great because I said it’s going to be great.” You have to show how’s it’s gonna be great. The same thing happens if you’re trying to build an innovation function. You need to think through how it’s going to add differentiated value from the rest of the things that you’re doing. You have to show why it’s different than me just telling everyone in the organization that they own innovation as a competency they should have. Why is it not going to be as successful without dedicating this team. And that’s going to be different for every business and every culture. So, depending on how it is your listeners are going to want to deploy what I call this pitch-based concept, execution pitch thing, whatever, for lack of a better term. They’re gonna have to put the rigor into it. It’s not about rolling out of bed and saying, “we should just do this thing.” It won’t happen that way. There’s a lot of work behind it to show how it’s going to produce significant value.

SV: Yeah, I think we see a lot of the same things in digital transformation or agile transformation, right where sometimes I feel like the people I’m working with know so deep down in their hearts that what they’re trying to do is the right thing to do that they have, um, sometimes they struggle to empathize with people who don’t see it as clearly as they do, right? And so it feels like you should just be able to say, “this is the right thing to do and these things will provide benefits” and people are gonna see that naturally, but I think you’re right. I think one of the things that really holds folks back from being successful at pitching digital transformations, or innovation, or agile transformations is their ability to kind of show the proof points and do the pitch to those people in the organization that are gonna be skeptical of allocating resources to something like this. So what are maybe some of the specific, whether it’s frameworks or reference points, where do go? You talked about the AirBnb pitch deck. Where have you gone throughout your career to find examples of how to actually take an idea that I have and put that into a business case format or a format where I can show that to the CFO and make a case for this thing that I’m trying to do? What are some of the reference points that you use?

KZ: Yeah, so I take a really unorthodox approach and I just, I look at what has been successful before internally. So, I find something new or iterative, or something like that, and I try to understand how they were able to achieve that success internally. I think it’s important because it’s your internal culture that you’re selling it to, and coming in and saying, you know, “Google said or AirBnb did” won’t apply. It won’t hit the same levers. And so I think that’s a really great insight point for anybody to say, “what are these internal levers that I need to push and pull in order to get traction here in the organization?” Then it’s about finding how to adapt best in class cases back to that to say, “this is how AirBnb did it, how would I make this resonate with my specific audience internally?” I do want to add that there’s a lot of different things out in the world that will be inflection points that you’ll need to adapt to your culture. For example, I believe in this concept of exploration time. We’ve dubbed it exploration time. Exploration time was stolen from Google as 20% time and the realization that there is no 20% time, and the realization that in technology work it’s formulaic and it’s not one plus one equals two. It’s a whole bunch of little pieces of information and nobody knows that something should be done in a day. You can hypothesize that it should be done in a day, and you can plan that it could be done in a day, and I would build in the exploration because the exploration is gonna make everything a lot stronger. I do want to circle back. When we were doing innovation, just like any other innovation that we want to put out, I didn’t just pick up a copy of The Innovator’s Dilemma, which I recommend that you do. Read The Innovator’s Dilemma, it’s a great book, or Ninja Innovation, or Zero to One or any number of these great great books that tell you how great companies become greater and how frameworks can be developed in moving through. But I’ve contacted a ton of people that were doing innovation in the world. I’ve spoken to other companies that have people in the innovation roles that I wanted to be a part of, and I still do that today. So a mentor network was really helpful, too. So don’t forget to look outside of yourself. The answers aren’t always going to be in front of you or at arm’s reach. Use LinkedIn, get out there, talk to people that have done the thing that you want to do. Contact me, I’m happy to help anybody do anything. But it’s a matter of finding what your organization finds valuable, translating best in class results and examples into that language, and the selling it through. And if you get pushed down, find out what pushed you down and do it again, and iterate it. Failure is only learnings. Just learn what didn’t work and do it again. And, I’m not gonna put it past anybody, maybe you just don’t have the right idea, or the right idea that’s gonna be successful. And that’s okay. I’ve pitched a ton of ideas that were awful and mistakes, and I shouldn’t have, and I’ve learnt that early sometimes and sometimes they’ve been like, yeah do it and it didn’t work. So just remember to keep going, keep doing, and keep adapting. But learn from the feedback you’re getting and iterate. One no isn’t defeat, it’s education. So, there’s a lost in there. Hopefully it’s helpful.

SV: Yeah, a lot of good stuff. I like what you said about adapting things to your culture because I find you know, just like you talked about in creating innovative spaces and agile and digital transformations there’s all these frameworks out there that claim to be, you know, this is the way that you do agile at scale, or this is the way that you increase agility in your organization. The truth is, every organization is different so those things don’t work in every context, but everybody wants to just take this method or this framework that’s been done before, and say, “okay, this is our new playbook.” One, that just doesn’t work. Secondly, every organization thinks that they’re a unique snowflake, and they are, you know there’s a lot of truth to that. So, it’s really about getting back to first principles thinking and figuring out how to take those things that have worked for other people and what does that look like in my context. So I appreciate you saying that. I think that’s a big key that people don’t pay enough attention to.

KZ: Yeah, and it’s really interesting. There’s this framework called the Red Box. It’s the Adobe Red Box, and I saw it, and I called Mark Randall, who invented it at Adobe. He spent time with me. It was really awesome. It’s a great, great framework. But it’s not as simple as printing out the documents and gathering up people to execute their ideas. What we found, we tried it. There’s a lot of work, there’s a lot of selling to people in the organization. It impacts, to do it right, you have to impact almost everybody in the organization and get the buy in for it to get the attention that it needs. I’m on the cusp of writing an article about it for my medium, but learning that you can’t take this framework, print it, slap your logo on it, and make it work; even if you can get the investment for whatever monetary needs the groups will have, was a huge learning. It was a great program and I would endorse it to anybody if they can get it done the right way, but no you can’t print it out and put it into your culture and have it work.

SV: Right. So, that kind of made me think of another phenomenon that I see a lot and I think it’s, you know, it’s across all these worlds that we’ve been talking about around different types of transformation or creating innovative spaces in your organization. I think a lot of this, when you talk about selling these ideas or even running these experiments, I think it creates this need for the people who have these great ideas to also at the same time basically learn how to be the CEO of a startup, right? And that’s just my thought so I wanted to get your take on that and I think a lot of people, you know, so first I think it creates that need for them. And I think a lot of people that have been working in corporate environments for a lot of their careers struggle to make that adaptation. So I’m wondering what you think of that and where you’ve seen that be successful with some people you’ve worked with, and what made them successful.

KZ: Yeah, so that’s really interesting. So, where I’ve seen that be successful is when the organization has a framework that allows for people to grow and scale the thing that they’ve built. So that requires a way to invest in the opportunities that exist, right? That means that you hit certain milestones, like any VC relationship. And you’re able to achieve milestones and you get further investment and further investment and you grow equity in the thing that you’re doing, whether that means equity in the respect that you get from being able to build the thing and the knowledge you have in the space or monetary equity. I can tell you that within corporate innovation programs, any time that I’ve spoke to anybody at any other company  and I say, “tell me about how you graduate the things that you build” everybody takes a second and they all go like this and take this deep breath because it is hard, right? When you graduate something that hadn’t existed before, one you have to find a place where it fits, and if it fits somewhere you have to wonder why it wasn’t an iterative innovation developed out of that area anyway. Then you can measure, okay well the business models are similar of the thing that we’ve built and the thing that we’re trying to graduate it into. But the chances are that it’s so small and it hasn’t produced enough value, to overtake the large thing operating now. So if there’s a twenty million dollar business that’s operating and you’ve got a new one million dollar concept that’s got validity, but isn’t twenty million dollars, how are you, are you gonna pull twenty million dollar resources on the one million dollar thing?  It gets interesting there. So, I think there’s a bunch of different ways that you can do it. One is the graduation model. And that it collaborating, talking things through, making sure that what you’re building in a technology capacity is transferrable or a commitment to rebuild it in a way that is transferrable, which adds cost to the whole enchilada. So you have to be thinking about those things. Or you have to think about how you’re going to scale it. Now if you’re leading an innovation team that’s designed to try new and different things, scaling it creates a disruption in your own business model because who’s gonna focus on it if they’re chartered against building new things. And so then that goes back to this differentiated model of how do you implant a lead over a nascent business and then have that business grow? That’s something that we’re starting to explore now. And I think the best case that we have now is with that Play Live example where Zach Whitten, who founded the program, was given resources and technology to deploy the thing that he thought would be most valuable for his business and they’re killing it. They’re doing this amazing job. So we’ve got a prototype of how we see this emerging business exist. It’s more of a venture model, I think, but now how do you scale that into other things and what’s the lever, what’s the tipping point? When does it become uniquely identifiable as it’s own thing? And why does it become that thing? So I don’t think we’ve cracked that nut, but I do think that the roots of this are in the venture model and you’ve gotta play it in a way that shows that it’s not cannibalizing other parts of the business and that it deserves a differentiated investment.

SV: Yeah, I love everything that you said there. I love the idea of taking that venture capital model and trying to create organizations where our executive or strategic leaders are less directive operational leaders and more venture capitalists that allow those other ideas to emerge in the organization and decide where investments go based on proof points. I think there’s a ton of just absolutely fantastic value to be dug up there.

SV: So Ken, you know, at some point in your career you decided you wanted to try to convince the organization that you were in to do things differently and you weren’t happy with the way things were and just letting them be that way. What was that? Do you remember that trigger moment or that inflection point that caused you to want to pursue this path?

KZ: I think it goes back to what I said in the beginning. I think there’s openers, there’s operators, and optimizers. And throughout my career I’ve always had some ideas. Hey we should do this thing, hey we should do that thing, and I’ve gotten pushback from a ton of people and that’s just made me try harder to prove that we should do it, right? And here’s why, and here’s the value that you could create. And that got me into this whole, create a business case and do a pitch and treat it like they’re investing instead of that they should just let you because.  I’m going somewhere with this. I’ve built things before at organizations. I’d build it, I’d iterate it, and I’ve changed it, and I’ve made it better, and I always got to this point where it just worked. And I was working on it for like a year or whatever and I wasn’t thinking anything new anymore because that was my life, right? That was the environment I knew at that point. I wasn’t getting a lot of different influences because that was my world. And because of that I got bored and I’m not an operator, right? I’m not somebody that can operate a thing for years and years and years. I got bored and I said this doesn’t work for me because I need to have a natural handoff point that I can step away, think about something different, and then if it’s not working they way that we thought or it should be working differently or any number of those things I can come back and I can optimize it again because I’ve got fresh eyes. But I can’t just stick in it for years and I admire people that can. They’re rock stars, but I can’t. And so I think that’s where it was born out of. To say how can I do repeated hits or repeated value increases by doing the different thing and get people to invest in me doing different things and I’ve been lucky enough that I’ve been able to to do that. Even since I’ve started my career working in telecom, and calling cards, and how do we change that to point of sale and I did that for a while. Then I said, no I don’t want to do that. Then I went to Unix administration, and then I went back. I’ve always needed to step out and step back in or step out and learn from the experiences that I had in both and do the new thing, so that’s been my journey. It’s been that I’m not really great as an operator.  I think I’m okay. I’m not toxic, but I’m not great and I’ve known that I’ve always wanted to try and do different things because of the boredom aspect.

SV: Well I’m glad you are because I know that we’re all better for it. St. Jude and ALSAC certainly are. So I’m glad that you had that moment of realization and pursued the path that you did.

SV: So thanks for sharing all this with us. I don’t want to keep you too long but where can people find you? You talked about your Medium, you talked about people being able to reach out to you. What’s the best place to do that? How should people get in touch?

KZ: Yeah, so I think the best place for now is LinkedIn. I’ve been publishing all the stuff I write on Medium into LinkedIn. I’ve got some videos out there.  Just little quick things to how to stay innovative when you can’t talk to the person next to you if you’re working from home or whatever. So LinkedIn is the primary spot. I’m also trying to build up KenZakalik.com, so that website that is not great now but hopefully will be getting better and better over time, is another great way. So I’d say those two ways are the best.

SV: Fantastic. We’ll put links to that in the show notes and to some of the other things that you talked about as well so people can find it easily. Thanks for coming on the show today. I think there’s tons of great stuff in here and people are going to really enjoy it so thanks for taking the time to do it.

KZ: Thanks for having me. I loved being on the show.

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