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How to apply smart growth and disrupt yourself to be yourself
In part one of this episode, Jeffrey Saviano, EY Global Tax Innovation Leader talks to Whitney Johnson, CEO of Distribution Advisors, S Curve Learning coach, Disrupt Yourself podcast host, and an award-winning author.
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In part one of a two-part episode, Jeffrey Saviano welcomes Whitney Johnson into Better Innovation. She is the CEO of Distribution Advisors, S Curve Learning coach, Disrupt Yourself podcast host, and an award-winning author. In this discussion, Johnson breaks down the key principles from her latest book, Smart Growth: How to Grow Your People to Grow Your Company. Johnson is the leader in the application of S Curves to personal growth. This book comes at just the right time, as many are contemplating jumping S Curves for personal growth. Are you ready for a change in your life? Listen as Johnson guides you through the journey.
For your convenience, full text transcript of this podcast is also available.
Introduction
Jeffrey Saviano
Better Innovation. It's Jeff. We are moving through season five together. As always, our Crack Better Innovation team has been working seems like around the clock to bring to you today's best and freshest innovative minds. We have such a special guest with us on the show today. Whitney Johnson is with us in the studio. She's somebody who just does it all. She's the CEO of Disruption Advisors. She's a Thinker's 50 top ten leading business thinker in the world, that's right. Top ten, leading business thinker in the world. What is an award winning author? A Harvard Business School lecturer, and she's also a podcast host. Today, we're going to lean into her author side and talk about her latest book. Whitney's known for her leading work on S Curves and how they apply to personal career growth. Her latest book is called Smart Growth: How to Grow Your People to Grow Your Company and it just came out in January. I read it. I loved it. I was just blown away by Whitney's ideas and her theories. I can't recommend it more to our audience. I'm recording this introduction just after the interview and it is one of my favorites. In fact, it was so good that we decided to split it into two episodes. So, let's do it. Here we go. Episode one of two. a Conversation with the great Whitney Johnson.Whitney, welcome to the show.
Whitney Johnson
Thank you, Jeff, for having me.Saviano
I have to say, Whitney, what a treat for our Better Innovation audience to get to know you a bit today. And let me just start by saying thank you for spending time with us. You have lots of choices that you can make to talk about your work and we appreciate you coming on today.Johnson
Well, thank you. That makes me feel so very welcome. But I have to say, Whitney, to be completely honest, having you on the show has created a fair amount of anxiety for me. That's true, because the one thing that we share is that we're both podcasts. And I think you are really good hosts. So, you know, that's what I'll do today. I'm going to interview a great interviewer. And, you know, I like to think of it. I was trying to think of an analogy and the best one I could come up with. It's like if I was making dinner for a friend who also happened to be a famous chef and every bite that he took, I'd be wondering, okay, so how's it going so far?You know, it's so funny that you say that because I don't think about that at all. It's like we're in the moment having this conversation, but yeah, that's interesting. Well, thank you. I'm glad that you think I'm a good chef. Here's the bad news. I am not a very good cook. I can make cookies, but that's about the best that I can do.
Saviano
I think too Whitney, this will be really good for our audiences. I've been personally influenced by your work, and I'm excited to get into that a bit, but first, I thought it'd be nice for our audience to get to know you a little bit.And so, let's start at the beginning with where you from, where you grow up. And if there were any early influences in your life, how does that sound?
Johnson
Yeah, sounds great. So, I grew up in San Jose, California, which many now know is Silicon Valley and I think one of my biggest early influences, not surprisingly, is my mother. My mother was someone who this is back in the sixties and seventies. She was a schoolteacher. She also worked in retail. She had been a model when she was still single. And so, I always had in the back of my mind that my mother could work and my mother had aspirations, and therefore I could as well. And there were also many aspirations that she had that weren't fulfilled. She, for example, wanted to be a doctor. And people said to her, you know, girls are doctors. And there's a wonderful quote from Jung, Carl Jung, who said, one of the greatest influences on the life of a child is the unlived life of their parent. And so, I oftentimes think about how while didn't become a doctor. But my mother had dreams for example, she wanted to write a book. And it turns out I've written a book I've now written for books. And so, she was definitely an important influence on me in terms of aspiration and what I believed might be possible.Saviano
And was she vocal about that. I'm just so interested if she was vocal in telling you the story of and you could see the visible accomplishments of what she was able to do. But also, perhaps it wasn't as visible the things that she didn't get a chance to do. And I'm just curious whether she was open about that and if that stuck with you as you then had aspirations in your life.Johnson
Yeah. So, I remember, for example, when I'm being in fifth grade and going to something at school and my mom came and I was just like so proud of her because she was very accomplished. So that was something that I was proud of. And I also remember her. Yes. She was vocal about how she had wanted to be a doctor. And I also was proud of the fact and I only became aware of this more recently as she grew up in a really, really, really, really small town in southeastern Arizona. And girls didn't go to college. And she actually not only went to college, but she went to college out of state. And this is back in the fifties. And I have as an adult come to recognize and realize what a big deal that was of what she had done leaving this very small town and not only going to college but going to college out of state.Saviano
Yeah. Very unusual at the time. And to see that and to hear that story. And was there something about also how you grew up that you certainly have an entrepreneurial spirit and we'll talk about all of the different things that you do and the entrepreneurism. Did you, do you feel like you got that from your mom as well, or were there others in college and university that that perhaps influenced that entrepreneurial spirit that you have?Johnson
You know, it's a really great question, Jeff, because I've never thought of myself as entrepreneurial and yet in retrospect. So, I mentioned that my mother was a teacher, but she became very interested in interior design and went to school and taught herself how to do it and had a very successful design practice for a number of years. And specifically, while I was in high school and my early college years. And that was very much being an entrepreneur. And so even though I've never thought of myself as being entrepreneurial, I suspect, now that you're asking me this question, I'm realizing, oh, yeah, that probably did influence me where I saw my mother running her own business.Saviano
It's so funny, and I've heard that before. That, I think is also a sign of the times that that, you know, certainly back in the sixties, seventies and eighties, that that perhaps the entrepreneurs didn't really refer to themselves as entrepreneurs, but they were launching businesses. And, and you look back and see that they certainly had that spirit but yes, I would certainly classify you as an entrepreneur with all of the all the great interesting ventures that that you've been involved in and at some point, so that journey led you to Wall Street and you found yourself in Wall Street in a number of positions. And maybe talk about that a bit about what got you to New York.Johnson
Yeah. So, it was definitely unexpected. I remember I studied music in college and I had been quite good on the piano growing up. But when I graduated from college, as sometimes happens, I wanted to individuate as the oldest child and I wasn't going to do what my mother wanted me to do, which was to study music, and I was going to do something different. And I had also just gotten married. And so, my husband and I were in New York. He was getting his Ph.D. at Columbia. We needed food on the table and I turned out to be the designated breadwinner. And so, I started working. But because I was a music major and because I was a woman and because this was the late eighties, my first job was working as a secretary. If any of you have ever seen Working Girl, that was basically me. I had the big hair and all of that. But as I went to work every single day and saw this ball pan across from me and these young Turks, if you will, trying to open up these accounts and saying things like throw down your pompoms and get in the game. And at first, I'm super offended because I was a cheerleader in high school and at that point in time, I was going to I had some vague notion that now that I was married, I was going to have children. But I think as I started working, that thing that I had put on the back burner around the modeling that my mother had done for me started to kick in. And I thought, you know, my husband's Ph.D. is going to take at least five years. It turns out to seven years. And I thought, why am I going to make X if I can make ten X? And so, I started taking classes at night. Accounting, finance, economics, and then I had something happen that did not happen to my mom, which was I had a boss who believed in me, who gave me a shot, who allowed me to move from being a secretary to a banker. And those of your listeners and there are probably more than a few who are in financial services, know that you don't move from being a secretary to an investment banker. But I had a boss who made that possible for me, and that put me on the track that I'm on today.Saviano
Well, what a great story. And was there something about the atmosphere of being on Wall Street and starting as a secretary that, was the atmosphere intoxicating? Did you did you love the pace of it and investing and all that? All that just really gelled with you Whitney.Johnson
Yeah, I just I loved it. Intoxicating is a great word. I mean, again, this is the late eighties, early nineties. It's Liar's Poker and it's Bonfire of the Vanities. And it was just an exciting, exciting time. And so here I am. I moved from suburban California to New York and I'm in this place, and it's just, you know, I'm an oldest child. I like the brass ring. And I just was like, I want this. It was really a very exciting time.Saviano
And there is, especially around the time I love you mentioned, you know, Bonfire of the Vanities and Liar's Poker, that there was a romanticism about investing in Wall Street. I think a lot of it comes from the movies that they make around their time. And it sounds like you just you just loved it and you rose all the way to become an equity analyst. And from what you've written about that, you were really good at it and you enjoyed it for a period of time.Johnson
I was, yeah. So, what happened is I moved into banking, and then I was doing that for about four or five years, and I had a boss who got fired, and they probably would have fired me too, except that I had good performance reviews and I was pregnant, which was a good insurance policy. So instead of firing me, they just moved me. But they really shoved me into equity research, which turned out to be a career maker. So, they I was very much disrupted and it turned out to be a career maker because I was really good at picking stocks. I was really good at spotting momentum. And so over the next eight years, I was an equity analyst covering the emerging markets in Latin America and was institutional investor ranked for eight years. And as you pointed out, I was, I was really good at spotting momentum in stocks and building financial models and picking stocks. And I really, I loved it, it was thrilling. It was so fun to, you know, put a buy on a stock and the stock goes up a couple of percentage points or put a sell on a stock and the stock goes down.It was very exciting.
Saviano
I'm glad you mentioned it was eight years because I was actually looking for that, getting ready for today, trying to piece together your life on the outside. How long you spent in these positions or eight years is a fair amount of time and to gain expertise. But it sounds like I'd love to have you tell the story that that there was something about it that perhaps wasn't completely fulfilling for you.Johnson
Yeah.Saviano
And obviously that led you to pivot and to jump S curves but talk a bit about your own disruption and S-curve journey and take us back to that. I'm just so interested in that inflection point and, and why you made such a bold career move.Johnson
Yeah, there were a few things that happened. So, the one that begins to the first one that stands out there are two.One is that this is now 2003 2004. I've been an analyst for six, seven years. And we do a training for all of my colleagues. And I was responsible for this particular training of my peers. At the time, American Idol was at its zenith, and Tom Peters had just written A Brand Called You. And so, I thought, wouldn't that be fun if we compared all of us to a contestant on American Idol, you know, the comeback kid, the Diva, and also, what brand are we? Are you a forensic analyst? Are you an industry expert? Are you graded earnings estimates, etc.? And so, I spent an inordinate amount of time thinking through all of this and as I did that, I thought to myself, I am spending time doing this, thinking about this when I don't need to be thinking about work. And I found that I didn't really think about stocks when I didn't need to be thinking about work. Now, to be fair, I was working 80 to 90 hours a week, so that may have something to do with it. But there was something about this that was just so compelling to me as spotting the momentum of a person. What does that look like and what can I do to help drive their momentum? So, yes, go ahead.
Saviano
I love how you said that spotting the momentum of the person ends was that, just so interested. Was that your motivation that you had this team around you when you were looking for ways to make them better and to improve how that team was functioning? What were you trying to accomplish with that, with that exercise?Johnson
Yeah, you know, Jeff, it's a really good question. Here's what I know. I know that long before I ever started officially coaching, there was something about me. And I think this goes to one of my superpowers, but I didn't know what it was, is this ability to spend some time around a person and to have a conversation with them and to somehow be able to, I don't know how else to describe it, other than to say to name them to see their superpowers and to see things that they could do to build momentum, whether it was personally or professionally. And I wanted to grab on to that name that so that they could then go out and make progress so that they could go out and, you know, put a buy on the stock and the stock to go up. But in this case, that happened to be human capital. So, I don't know exactly how that all came about, but it is one of my superpowers and people would say to me, you're a great coach. I'm like, I don't even know what coaching is and who wants to be a coach? I'm an analyst. I work on Wall Street. But there was something that about that that innately came to me. And I just, I was just good at it, and I loved to do it.Saviano
It reminds me too of stories that you hear from time to time of professional athletes who the coaches around them knew that they would be a coach someday. So, they were playing like they were in the game and there would be another coach on the field. And I always heard that about Jason Kidd, who was the point guard and ultimately went on to be a coach in the NBA that, you know, people around him just kind of knew that that he sort of had it in his DNA. And I wonder maybe if some of that is true with you as well, Whitney, that that did I have heard that about coaches once a coach like you've probably always been a coach, always trying to help and support people. I wonder if some of that's true.Johnson
You know, it's interesting that you say that. And I think there's an interesting, something for us to look at here for just a moment, because I remember that there were many instances where I would have colleagues say to me, in fact, I remember one time someone said to me, oh, well, you're an institutional investor ranked because people like you. And I remember being so hurt by that. Somehow, of the thought that I wasn't a good stock picker. I wasn't good at building financial models, but just that they liked me.Saviano
Probably meant that as a compliment, too. I would imagine you did.Johnson
Yes, they did. But this is what I want to point out. Is that sometimes the things that we do the best because they're so easy for us and they're so reflexive for us, we don't value them. And so, when people point them out and say, you're really good at that, we actually take it as a slight in some way. And so, the reason I'm mentioning that is that that's why we say it when people say, well, what are your strengths? What are your superpowers? I don't know. That's because when people point them out, you either dismiss it completely or you don't want to hear it because it's something that's easy for you.Saviano
It didn't say that you were great at flipping through ten Ks and financial statements and picking stocks, but they focused on something else that is really, it is really interesting. And it's I just love to hear you to tell that story because and then the rest is history, as they say that led to the books that you wrote. And I have to admit to that I did have a bit of a scheme today to get you on the show is one other way to say thank you that your work is really influenced my career. And then I was at a similar inflection point and I thought it may be fun to share a little bit of it to say thank you, but just to let you know, you know how to disrupt yourself back in 2015 really influence me.Johnson
Oh, I absolutely want to hear tell us what is the story.Saviano
So, I was and I've been at EY like forever and ever. It'll be 30 years this summer. From when I started being right out of law school. And from my first days at the firm, I became one of the practice areas around state U.S. state taxation and I started serving clients there, led teams, and ultimately, I led that practice in the U.S. and the Americas of a couple of thousand people was really humbled, and I loved that it was practice and team that I grew up with. And we typically like to rotate leaders after, let's say, four or five years or so. But I loved it so much that I managed to convince my bosses to let me stay for nine years. So, I stayed in the role for a long time. A couple of years before that, the firm gave me a side job to spend some time focusing on innovation. What is this innovation word and what could it mean there was a little law that passed in the U.S. called the Affordable Care Act. And I was asked to find ways to help our clients deal with this complex law. And I really caught the innovation bug, and that was actually around the time we met a mutual friend of ours, Dave Duncan, who's been on our show, who was so helpful to me in those years. I had two jobs, and I was rotating out of my main one and I was scared to death like I was about to turn 50 and I was thinking, so what am I going to do now? I have at least another ten years or so left at the firm, so what am I going to do? And it was around that point when I had to make a choice and I read Disrupt Yourself and listened quite a bit to the podcast. And it was, gave me a little bit of extra dose of courage to take that leap into innovation and to a new S-curve. I needed it and it was not comfortable for me to do it. And so, I do want to thank you for that, that it was the content, but a lot of all of what you built around it, that was quite helpful as I was in that moment. You must hear stories like this all the time.Johnson
Well, they never get old. All right. So, let me get this straight. You are working in state taxes and you've been there for about nine years. And they basically said to you and I know we'll get to this in a second, but you're at the top of the curve. In fact, you've been here for a long time and you've got to jump to a new curve and you're saying, I don't know if I want to jump to a new curve, but I know I have to. Let me go try this innovation saying we've got the Affordable Care Act. And what you're saying is that as you thought about the ideas of personal disruption and applied that framework that we think about for products and services to yourself, it helped you make that leap and say, ‘I can do this’.Saviano
It did, and it helped to know that. And we'll talk about some of the great stories in smart growth. But the stories in Disrupt Yourself and the people coming on the show, on your show that talked about their journey of these mid-career that, you know, when you choose your career, you can actually pivot and you can do something else. But this that there's a methodology for it. And you know what it also made me think of and just and also getting ready for today we had Steve Blank has been on the show a few times and I love when he talked about like before he got to work there was no stack there was no stack for entrepreneurism. You just sort of studied business and I think, you know, that also could apply here before your work in your focus of disruption on careers and personal S-curve. That the way that you've organized that content and created that framework is something that resonated for me to know that others have been here before and all. And I can learn from them about how do you do it and how can you be effective at it.Johnson
Okay. Well, you, of course, just made my day comparing my work to Steve Blank. So, thank you very much Jeff for that.Saviano
He's great. And it's. And so, thank you for that. It did. It helped me. It helped me quite a bit. And it was it just helped to understand. Well, now where do I go from here and what resources do I need around me? And what are some of the principles from just wrapped yourself? But enough about me. You have such an impressive portfolio of books, which we'll talk a bit more about articles and other media, like your podcast. Let's compartmentalize that a bit. Let's focus on your books for a few minutes, beginning with Disrupt Yourself back in 2015 and then build in a team a couple of years later. 2018. And what were those books about and how did they influence your latest work Smart Growth.Johnson
All right. So, let me just reiterate, thank you again for sharing your story with me. That was just really fun to hear. All right. So, Disrupt Yourself. That's the 2015 book. And that came about because when I was working on Wall Street as an equity analyst, I was I read Clayton Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma, and at the time this is the early 2000. And I find that every single quarter I'm building my financial model and I have these estimates about what wireless is going to do and what wireline is going to do. And every single quarter they were beating my estimates and I was trying to figure out what was going on. And then I read The Innovator's Dilemma and I said, ‘Oh, that's what's happening.’ Wireless is disrupting wireline and so I now have this explanatory mechanism for what was going on with this this product and this service in the emerging markets. And it wasn't too far of a leap. And we talked a few minutes ago about some important events that happened that got me to do what I'm doing today. Here comes the second event, and that is, that I had gone to my boss and said, you know, I really would like to do something new. And he basically said to me, we like you right where you are. So, I had a different boss than the boss that you had. And I had now read The Innovator's Dilemma and had this kernel of an idea that this theory wasn't just about products, it was about people. And I'd already been thinking about momentum of people, not just stocks. And so, it wasn't too much of a leap for me to start thinking about personal disruption. And I had this sense of if I'm going to do what I feel like I'm meant to do on this planet. And I think all of us have some vague notion of what that is, I'm going to need to disrupt myself. And so, this book, the first book Disrupt Yourself, was taking the theory of disruptive innovation, applying it to the individual. There are seven accelerants that I talk through, but at its simplest, what's happening is the thesis is, is that with disruption, you've got Netflix disrupting Blockbuster on the telephone, disrupting the telegraph and wireless, disrupting wireline. But with personal disruption, you're both the upstart and the incumbent because you are disrupting you. And so that book walks you through that process, which you've just articulated you followed to some extent when you were disrupting yourself and moving to an innovation practice. So, that's the first book in this in this trilogy, if you will. The second book, Build in a Team, came about because people would say to me, well, is this just for your career? And I said, Well, yes, it helps for your career. But disruption, personal disruption is actually a mechanism by which you make progress. And it applies not only to you, but to your team. And so, Build an A Team is all about using these ideas to build a team a team that is optimized for growth in innovation. Now, smart growth, why did I write this book? Well, in Disrupt Yourself and Build an A Team. I had something called The S-curve of Learning. For those of you who are familiar with the diffusion curve, think about it from a product curve. Growth curves. You're familiar, Everett Rogers popularized this back in the sixties. We were using it at the Disruptive Innovation Fund to figure out how quickly an innovation would be adopted. I had this insight, this is back like in 2011, 2012 that we can also use the S-curve not just to look at innovations, but how do people learn and how do they grow and to understand the emotional arc of growth. And so, I had talked about it in those two books, but it was always a backup singer. And people kept saying, Let's talk about the S-curve of learning. And so, I decided I needed to write a book where I did a deep dove on the S-curve of Learning as a map to think about where you are and what's next and apply it to people and to teams and to organizations. So that's what this book is about.Saviano
And it also seems to be and I just I wonder if I if I have this right, that it's a bit of an amalgamation of if Disrupt Yourself was really about, as the name implies, about disrupting yourself, you know, personal disruption and building an A-Team, about extending that and how do you build great teams. And I love in smart growth the depiction of, if you focus on your own personal growth to then lead others within your organization to ultimately change your organization. And it in that respect, it seems it's a bit of a mash up of some of the principles of very inward centered focusing on yourself to your team leading to an organization. Did I get that about right?Johnson
Yeah, absolutely. And so, my premise is, is that the fundamental unit of growth in any organization is the individual. And so, what I did very purposely is this for anybody who reads through this, you can read through the narrative part of the book, which is focused on you, the individual. And then I have interludes that are very practical around how do you apply this as a manager, you know, running a team. But yes, I focused on the individual, but I like the idea of it's an amalgam mash up. I think that's accurate.Saviano
And the framework for Smart Growth, it's organized for our audience's benefit in three, three phases aligned to the S-curve of learning, a launch point and then your sweet spot and then mastery before we unpack the various growth stages from the book, I thought be helpful would need to talk about the framework itself, those three phases of this curve learning.Johnson
Yeah, absolutely. So, as I said a minute ago, what it does is it's a map to help you understand what growth looks like, the emotional arc of growth, and to talk about the three phases generally is that your brain, whenever you start something new, is running a predictive model. And at the outset, you're basically at the bottom of the mountain and your brain is saying, What do I need to do in order to get to the top of the mountain? And so, it's running all of these it's making all of these predictions. And many of those predictions are inaccurate. And because they're inaccurate, your dopamine is dropping and so you're having this experience of your dopamine is dropping. You're on a new in a new place. And so, your brain is trying to map the territory and as it's mapping the territory, it's cognitively very taxed in doing that. See, I got tax in at least once. I'll try to do it one more time.Saviano
I love it. My new favorite guest on Better Innovation. That's awesome.Johnson
And then the third thing that's happening is that you're having this identity shift and you talked a little bit about this earlier is that you're doing this thing of a state tax and now you're going to do innovation and you have this identity.But now who am I if I'm not who I was? And so, it's very discombobulating So at the launch point, you can feel thrilled and terrified and discouraged and overwhelmed and impatient and it's not the growth isn't happening because if, you know, the diffusion curve growth is absolutely happening, but it's not apparent. And so, you have this experience of it feels like a slog It feels slow. So that's the launch point of the curve. And so, it looks flat, but it's actually not flat. The next phase of the curve. Oh, and one other thing. That's why it's really hard to start new things because your dopamine is dropping. Okay, next part of the curve. Sweet spot. What's going on with the predictive model? Well, now you're starting to be accurate with your predictions. In fact, you're getting increasingly accurate. And so, as you're increasingly accurate, your brain is giving you lots of dopamine saying, yep, that's right. You got that? Yep, you got it. And that is why. Oh, oh, by the way, everybody, why when a company beats its numbers, the stock price goes up, if only beats it a little bit, it doesn't go up very much. But if it beats by a lot, it goes up a lot. That's because it just said dopamine in dopamine and everybody rushes to buy the stock here. What's happening is things are still unfamiliar, but they're not so unfamiliar. And your identity self to be deliberate about what you're doing. But it's gradually starting to shift. And so, this is the place, this is a steep slope back to the curve. This is a place where growth is not only fast but it feels fast. And then you get mastery. What's happening in mastering the predictive model? You figured it out, you got it it's done. So, there's a little bit of dopamine, not very much. Not much do to see here. You've all figured it out. So, your brain starts to get bored. It needs a challenge. The dopamine just a little bit. Identity. Yep. Status quo. You got that. But your brain says, ‘I need more dopamine’. Basically, growth is a dopamine management exercise. And so, you've got launch point, which is slow, sweet spot, which is fast mastering, which is slow. So slow, fast, slow is how you grow. And when you learn how to navigate this growth cycle, and the faster you can iterate, the faster you can grow, the better you can growth. This is the good kind of growth, then the happier, more productive you will be.