 I'm so excited to be here in India. It's my third time here in Agile, India in particular. It's been just wonderful. Just to let you know who I am, I'm Andrew Coptiel. And a little bit about my career path, my career story. I started off as a lawyer in my first incarnation. And I realized about nine months in that it was not a career for me. I wanted to build things rather than break things down. And so the next career for me was actually fundraising. I worked for a university helping them to raise money. I worked for the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of California in San Francisco. And after 12 years of basically being doing my dream job at the University of California, I realized, you know, I want to work in a different kind of environment. Cutting edge, more innovative, where things get done faster, where we get to be more productive. So I became a marketer for a design agency. And in my role as senior director of partnerships and growth at Cooper, I oversee our brand, I oversee our thought leadership, and I oversee our work culture. We'll talk more about work culture in a moment. So a little bit about Cooper, just so you understand where we're coming from. Cooper was founded 25 years ago. In 1992, we are the original design agency. We were founded by Alan Cooper, who some of you might know, the father of Visual Basic and also behind Ruby, as well as Sue Cooper, our married couple who own this company together. And we do a business strategy, design thinking, consulting, as well as training. So we have a comprehensive training center as well. And our goal when we work with students and when we work with clients are three things. One, we focus on increasing profits. I think everybody here wants that. We focus on driving innovation. And we try to be really, really innovative with our services and bring innovation to major companies. And then we also work on creating social good to make sure that the things that we do are highly ethical. We've worked with over a thousand companies in our 10-year at Cooper. Many of these you'll recognize companies like GE and Google. We do a lot of really cool, innovative work. I'm not going to go too into it, but we created a mobile digital clinic. We redesigned Rainforest to give it for a museum. We do all kinds of really cool things. A little bit about my background. Again, so I came from this more conservative, traditional background. And I had an office that looked a lot like this when I was at University of California. And so the office had a door on it. It had a name plate on it. And essentially, it was a very conservative environment. My new office when I got to Cooper looked like this, which was probably similar to where you guys work. The new office is bright and open, industrial. It was kind of a whole new world for me and pretty shocking when I got there. This is my old team at the University of California. The women wore stockings. The men wore ties. It was, again, very, very conservative. There's a new dress code for me now. We wear t-shirts. We wear jeans. And that's totally acceptable. At my old office, if we did that, we'd be sent home. When we have fun at work, we'd have cocktail parties. This is actually a cocktail party. I went to a Christie Yamaguchi, the figure skater. We'd dress up. We'd drink champagne. In this new environment, we do this for fun, which is design dodgeball. We put on fake tattoos and compete against other design firms. It was like this whole new world for me and really a shock to me. Another thing you need to know about me is I love India. It's not a coincidence that I'm here. I'm pretty obsessed with India. When I'm asked where I want to eat dinner, everybody knows I'm going to say Indian food. I've been all over the country to seven states. Definitely rode the elephant up in Jaipur experience. People tell me that I look like Yuvraj Singh, which I love. I'm going to take up cricket pretty soon. Let's get to innovation. How do I define innovation? Scott Birkham gave me this definition, significant positive change. Something big, something in the right trajectory, in the right place, and then change, something different. Why is it important? 70% of senior executives in a McKinsey study say that innovation will be one of the top drivers of growth for their companies in the next three to five years. If you want to grow, you want to profit, you've got to innovate. I know this from when I was on the outside world. Most innovative companies make culture look easy. You think it's like a formula of a cool cat t-shirt, a stand-up desk, and unlimited vacation policies, and you have innovation. The truth is it's quite hard. Innovation looks a little bit like this. It's nuanced, it's complicated. It's a lot harder than it looks. I was trying to think of a metaphor for something like that. I could tell you from my own experience, having a lot of chai here in India, it tastes like just really good, it seems simple. I went back to America and tried to make chai. It was horrible. In design, in the design world, we have somebody, an archetype of person that we call a design rock star. Have you guys heard of that? A design rock star is like the really bold front person who comes up with all these new ideas. A lot of us think that that is the trait that represents innovative employees, but the truth is it's actually quite different. I did a little research and I found an article that described these characteristics. I said, hey, Andrew, I want to spend a lot of money on Twitter ads for our classes. I was like, uh-oh, I don't know if we want to spend this money. Ross could do a little research. What did Ross do? He basically went and looked at all the past Twitter ads that we had done, which we spent a little bit of money on. He looked at all the different pictures and how they performed, all the different words and how they performed. Then he looked at our competitors in the same way. He synthesized all that information to a series of understandings and he optimized the perfect tweet. I gave him a little money for that. When he did that, you can see here that tweet performed five times better than any other tweet you had ever put out there. Really allowed us to make a bigger investment in that new approach. Really, that focus on data-driven decision-making was really helpful for us to innovate. It's something that I definitely recommend. Moving on, data-driven decisions are important as are the recipe, but getting back to actual recipes for your chai, you need cloves for any good chai, as far as I'm concerned. Do you guys agree? Okay, good. What about cloves? They're intense. They're really, really strong. If you bite into a clove itself, it's like, whoa, it's really intense. You don't want to do that. It's spicy. It's kind of dangerous, exciting. It adds character to the chai. For me, cloves represent risk. What do I mean by risk? It's trying something that might not work. It's also something that's very important to do. Working between data-driven decisions and risk, that calculated risk is really the best approach to get to innovation. Chinese proverb that I love here is, pearls don't lie in the sea shore. If you want one, you must dive for it. If you want to get to that amazing treasure, it sometimes takes a little bit of risk and a little bit of danger to get there. In our context, how we take a risk. We have an education arm of our company. It's been around for 17 years. We made a commitment to never do classes online, only offer them in-person, high-level classes. A couple of my students that took the class here yesterday can probably attest to this. Very interactive. We've had 12,000 students over the years. We train all the big companies. Everything was good until Udemy came to us and said, hey, we want to produce an online course, an intro to design-picking class. We were like, uh-oh. What did we do? We tried to find data. We went around, kind of comping things, trying to figure out like, should we do this? And it was really hard. There really was no data to actually help us make that decision. So we did it. This is Tans Gritty, who is one of the stars of the thing. It was really a hard decision, but we put a lot of resources into it and decided to do it. And let me tell you the factors we consider before taking that risk. One, we realized that it would bring our team together, so it would really help the flavor of our milk. And so that was a really, really important factor in deciding whether to take that risk. We also realized that it would help us develop new skills and capabilities as a firm. So now that we've done this, we know that we can do it again. And we have a new capability to actually do education on video. Three, we created a data point. So where there isn't a data point, you know, it's nice to actually be able to create one. So now we will know whether to do it or not. In the future. And then four, we created a new revenue stream. So it's revenue positive. We knew that the investment would pay dividends, at least at the base level. So we've done it. We just actually produced it a couple weeks ago. So I will follow up with you to let you know if the risk was worth it. But we think it's worth it regardless because of these other factors. Moving on, the next key element, and I like a lot of this in my chai, is ginger. So ginger is sharp and pungent, and it's in your face. And what that represents for me is radical candor. Have you guys heard of radical candor? No? Raise your hand if you've heard of it? Cool. I'm excited. Okay, so radical candor means two things. That means challenging directly and caring personally about your colleagues. So what that means is being really, really direct with feedback, but also doing it from a place of empathy, from a heart. So Nick is my boss. He's the president of Cooper, and he is the man who represents radical candor. Totally different kind of boss from the kind of person I worked for at the university. So when I got to Cooper, he said, Andrew, make a marketing plan. I was like, oh, rad. Okay, I'll make a marketing plan. I brought all of my experience making plans like this, and basically it looked a lot like this. It was really big stack of paper. I had like lots of tactics and information. It would have been an A plus at UCSF. Well, when I showed it to him right away, he's like, you know, this isn't what I was looking for at all. He's like, this needs to be more visual, more distilled. This needs to be more aligned with, you know, with design. And originally I kind of felt like this. I was like, oh my gosh. Like, I fail. This is horrible. But what it made me do is reflect a lot more and think about what he was actually looking for and whether that was the right way. So my new plan looked a little bit like this. It was more visual. It was more strategic, more aligned with our culture. And really that really made me turn my frown upside down and made me really productive just like this video. And so it's something that I think is really, really beneficial and helps us to be more innovative to have that radical can to represent in our organization. So if you want to do this at your organization, there is actually a method to doing this. They call it H-H-I-P-P. One, just like innovative employees have to be humble, you have to be humble in delivering this information. You have to do it not in a charged way, but actually in a grounded way. You have to do it in service of being helpful. Not in service of hurting the other person, but in service of actually helping them. You have to do it immediately. Don't let it fester. Don't let it bother you for a long time. When you see it and you feel it, you address it right away. You do it if you can in person. And really that helps. If you're doing it on text or on email, the tone can be misunderstood very easily. And when you're criticizing somebody, you do it privately. You never do criticism publicly, but publicly you praise people. And then also thought about personality. So Nick and I are friends. We have dinner every time it comes to San Francisco. But he still gives me that feedback all the time, which is really, really helpful. And it's actually helped me to grow. Now one big caveat about results on radical candor, there was a study that said that companies that encourage honest feedback and open communication had a 10-year return that was 270% more than other companies. So this stuff really, really works. Again, one of the goals here is to innovate and drive growth and truly radical candor will get you there. Now, again, sorry, caveat here. Radical candor has to flow in every direction. That's hard, okay? So Nick expects me to be radically candid with him. So we agree to this approach to working with each other. And when I have an employee, they deliver information to me directly. My colleagues, we talk to each other in that way too. So if you want to have radical candor, it cannot flow just from the top down. It has to flow in every single direction. Okay, moving on to the sixth of nine elements. The sixth element is cardamom, love cardamom. To me, it's kind of a mysterious ingredient. It adds a little element of like, what is that? Especially when you're from the States, you're like, I don't know what that flavor is. It's complex. It's layered. It's kind of like there's different layers and the seeds and stuff like that in it. And it's multifaceted. So for me, cardamom really represents learning. And according to Pew, learning at work is super important. People really crave it. 73% of people in the U.S. consider themselves to be lifelong learners. So they identify with being a learner. Also, it boosts confidence. 87% of personal learners say that learning activities help them feel more capable and well-rounded as employees. So it kind of boosts their confidence. Additionally, it feeds innovations. 69% say that this opened up new perspectives, just like we talked about new perspectives with regard to different types of employees and brains at Cooper. Just learning at work also expands your brain, expands the way that you apply change and innovation to your clients. So how do we do this at Cooper? We have something called the Cooper Exchange. I really recommend some of you try this. Every Friday, we offer an opportunity for Cooperistas. Those are people at work at Cooper to learn something new. It's a one-hour thing. It's optional. Nobody's forced to go. During lunch, it's live. And we bring all kinds of people to present. We teach a skill. Sometimes we lead a game. Sometimes family members will come or friends. Sometimes we'll bring clients. And it's a great way of engaging them. People that we meet in the world will come. And I'll give you some examples of these. This is a virtual reality one where we actually talk a lot about virtual reality, but we actually got to kind of feel it in our hands and experience it, and everybody went to that one. We had a tarot card reader come and do one about horoscopes, which was really, really cool. And you kind of learn about a new way of thinking, new approaches, new paradigms. And also, it kind of inspires you in terms of art. We brought somebody from an adjacent discipline, a video game designer from Double Fine to share his design process, which was quite a bit different from ours. It was really a way, again, to expand our minds and our exposure to a different way of thinking and a different way of design. Marty Cooper, the son of Allen and Sue Cooper, is a famous animator, and he actually showed us his process for animation. We got to create our own little animals that jump around, which was really, really fun and inspiring for us. That's another example. So there's a million examples I could show you. I just wanted to give you some of them. We've had rocket scientists, personal finance people, all kinds of people. So how does learning at work spark innovation? It keeps people kind of electric, energized and engaged. It expands their way of thinking, which is exactly what you need for innovation. To get to that change, you need people to think in new and different ways all the time. It inspires our work product. I can tell you an example of when that happened. We brought a person who is a physical game creator, and we learned about physical games, and when we created a journey map, we created a journey map based on the game of life, which was something that really inspired us. And it exposes us to fresh new perspectives. Again, key to innovation. Now, three more of these. Number seven, I think chai is not chai without sugar. You need sugar in your chai. And sugar just means fun. You know that. Sugar is just fun. So fun is key to innovation. Jack Welch, who is the long-time CEO of GE, says, fun must be a big element of your business strategy. Businesses' ideas and fun and excitement and celebrations, all those things. So you cannot ignore fun. I'm going to show you a video of how we embody fun at Cooper. This is from a work retreat, which we do every year on Alan's farm. Can you hear? Well, I think people are afraid to just mess up. We don't stop playing because we grow old. We grow old because we stop playing. Now, getting everybody in a group and having to stand up and move their body, it's just moving. It's something that you don't do in an ordinary way. These days, we know that in our work, we want to be innovative. We want to be courageous. We want to collaborate curious in what we do and not be frozen by mistakes, but instead celebrate them and push through and play as an incredible way to flex those muscles and actually get us in that state that's going to make us more productive. It's going to make us closer to the ones we love and the ones we work with too. Today, we play icebreakers, the main game, throwing a whoosh one direction and the other direction, and it sort of builds on that. It was cool to see one minor gesture just really evolve and take on something completely different. We're playing games. The kind of games where you... So, continuing on, how we express fun at Cooper is in different ways. We take a lot of breaks. We're working really hard using our brains all the time. We take these 15-minute awesome breaks with our colleagues, get bubble tea. This is me and Winnie, one of our finance people. We do improv games. You saw some of those improvisation games in the video. We do this every Monday. We have an improvisation game. It's a great way to start the week. It's a great way to get to know each other, to expand the way we think, and it's just a level setting that's just incredible. It's a great, great practice. I highly recommend it. Yesterday in class, we did one about forks and knives, if some of you will remember. This is an activity that we do to start off one class where you basically have to start off by drawing a picture of somebody you don't know, and they draw you right away. And then you have to put a little signature at the bottom and your name at the top, and it's a really, really cool way of just starting off on the right foot and creating just a really fun atmosphere. This is something we did when we had a pitch. This is a client that we pitched to at the University of Connecticut, which is a pretty conservative from a conservative part of the United States, over there, and we actually took a picture with him in his cutout and had a lot of fun with him. And when we were on the project, we were really deep in research. We had a really, really, a lot of thinking going on. We said, we need a break. So we went to an inflatable museum and we took this picture. It was really, really fun. Last, our clients kind of were like, hey, we want to have fun too. So with our clients, you can see they're doing all this hard work, all these crazy artifacts around the room and we started doing yoga with them. And they just, it really unleashed a new way of thinking. So don't be afraid to infuse fun into your work. Truly, it will expand the way you think. It will help you innovate. It will help you grow and profit. And people will want to work with you. So what you serve the chai in matters too. It's not just the ingredients. It's not just the recipe. It's actually the context, the cup. So along with the cup is, you know, the environment. So there was a study done by Stanford on workplace design and innovation. And there are three tips that I found that I thought were really helpful. Close proximity increases creativity and collaboration. So an organization that wants to increase its innovation needs to design its architecture with the intent of attempting to maximize encounters between employees. So you want to maximize as many encounters between people to spark that innovation. Everyone works differently. There's introverts, there's extroverts. And so having spaces that are flexible that allow for these encounters, but also that there's some secluded areas, larger meeting rooms, small team rooms, is really important too. Third, if you want to increase people's desire to contribute to the group and help them think in new ways, you should encourage employees to display their own artifacts or physical features and aesthetic details that are meant to embellish and personalize. I'm going to take you on a tour of our office so you can see how we manifest these different tenets. One, this is our new office. And you can see we have a big open bank in the middle. This is my colleague doing yoga too. We can see each other. And it's just a really compact place. And there's a lot of participatoriness that came with creating our new office. So we actually used a design mechanism called a brand experience workshop. We did some like dot voting. We all decided together what we wanted to look and feel like to increase the level of investment and excitement around the new space. It's just a very dynamic environment. We have a chalkboard up on the wall with a different prompt every week with a different kind of question. What book would you read again as an example of that? And so people will just kind of answer. Students will do this. We are all participating. It's a way for us to all feel invested and engaged. This is something that's really fun. So we did, we put up on the board what should we name our new conference rooms. And one of the ideas that came was San Francisco Invention. So Fortune Cookie was invention in San Francisco. The jukebox. So people got so excited about their participation in coming up with that that one of the visual designers made this art project that came out of that which is one of the highlights of the new office. Something that people get really excited about. I said personal artifacts. We have artists in the office. We have people with art collections. So we have a wall that's changing all the time that represents just different art. And it sparks people. It gets people excited. So what makes our environment innovative? One, there's dialogue and participation. We're all part of this thing, making it together. There's a lack of hierarchy. I showed you at the beginning of my old office. I had a big office, big conference room. Here no one has an office. Everybody is together. There's innovation. There's visibility. We can all kind of see everybody else. There's an element of it feels busy and active. There's art which inspires creativity. I recommend that you really think about what art is in your office if you want to get to that innovation thing and change the art. It will change the way that you think if you add that art. And last, diverse and dynamic activity is very important. So you want to have different things going on. I showed you yoga a couple of times. Different people are doing different things and it takes it to a place that just it kind of gets your brain stimulated. It was very different than my old world that we were all kind of in our little offices cloistered away. So the last key element. I know a lot of you guys, you're from India, you're really lucky, you have aunts and grandmas and moms and everybody that makes chai and it's like amazing. I don't have that unfortunately. Maybe in my next life. Really, I love chai wallas I love them because they take pride in their work. When I watch a chai walla, he is really thinking about what's going to go in this chai. I just love watching that process. Also, they own the whole process from the beginning to the end. They're really thinking about the entire process of making a chai. They're not outsourcing, it's not a factory. And three, they add their own unique flair to the chai. They might put a little cinnamon, they might put a little more cardamom, they have a signature flavor to their chai. So for me, chai wallas represent ownership. And I think ownership and autonomy are really, really important elements of innovation. It's kind of the key that makes it into something. In the book Drive, Daniel Pink defines autonomy as the desire to direct our own lives and he says that's one of the major motivators for us. And there was a study done at a university in Liverpool that says 78% of employees perceive work autonomy as important to them. So that's really important to people to feel that they have that autonomy as a directly positive effect on creativity and innovation. So we actually have Nate back there. He's the ultimate Cooper chai walla. He's actually going to be speaking to you on Thursday. And I'm going to share with you why. Nate is really into conversational UI, like super, he has like Alexa skills all over, Google homes all over, and he believes that this is a new frontier for Cooper and for our industry as a whole. So this is his own kind of passion. And so what did it look like? He was a partnership and what happened? So you can see how that resulted. First, he became an expert. He really took it upon himself to read about it, to write about it, and he's become really a thought leader on this already. He drafted a plan. He really decided like I'm going to take the bull by the horns and I'm going to figure this out. He got people subscribed. He got other people in our organization excited about it, got them on board, and then he created a partnership. So he figured out where we needed some additional carbon-5 to help us on this journey. We have Alexa skills and Google homes all around the office. We're creating a smart conference room. We're creating a virtual receptionist. It's going to be really, really cool. Check out our blog for that. And Nate's now speaking all over the world. So he spoke first at Cooper, then in San Francisco, then in Chicago, and now on Thursday in Bangalore. And as a result, we have consulting projects we're doing now. We actually have expanded our practice. We have innovated as a company because of his passion. So, and the most important thing is that Cooper encouraged this. Much like, you know, Google has that rule of 20% of their time they give to people to do work-related projects of their own passion. This is what Cooper does as well, and it really helps us to be innovative. So, how does ownership lead to innovation? One, ownership's a huge motivator. You're going to work harder if you own something just like the chaiwala. I think works a lot harder on their chai because they own that whole thing. Ownership means customization. They're synonymous with each other. They have their own flair, their own thing to it. And in the same way, it turns work into art. And I think that that is really what's going to make people motivated to innovate, to think in new creative ways, and ultimately make your company more productive. So, in summary, the nine keys to chai and innovative work culture are these. One, you need those tea leaves to form the foundation of your chai. That's the leadership. You, as leaders in this room, managers and others, you need to set that tone and set the expectation for leadership and innovation. Two, you need milk for your chai. Your chai isn't chai without milk. So, you need staff. You need people that will help make it real. You need to blend with them. You need staff that's going to reflect your style and leadership. Three, you want to use your resources wisely and make new risky decisions in smart ways. So, really be data-driven. So, that's the recipe. But don't forget to add clothes. You need to take risks. Sometimes you won't know what's going to happen and you need to pursue that otherwise you're really going to have a hard time growing and going into new territories. Five, you need that sharp, pungent, honesty and directness but from a place of empathy and love, you need that ginger. Number six, you want to add that mystery, the cardamom, the layers, that learning. You want people to feel always inspired and learning and expanding. Number seven, you got to have fun. If you don't do number seven, it's not going to happen. You need to go out for bubble tea, try some improv, do games and light-hearted. Spend some time just decompressing. Don't always be buried in the work. It's really important. It will help your work to not be. Number eight, you need to create the right environment for innovation. Just like the cup. You need to serve to the right cup. If you drink it out of a glass, a modern glass cup or a little ceramic thing, it's going to taste different. You're going to experience it differently. So, really think about the environment. And last but not least, ownership. You need to have ownership. That's what I have for you today. I'll take some questions, but after this, I hope you take a chai break and really appreciate it. That's what I have. Thank you. I'm happy to take any questions that you might have. Of course. Oh, interesting. Well, I'm glad to know that now. Okay. Okay. Thank you. I will change my talk for my next India trip. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I will change my talk for my next India trip. I appreciate Radhika. And you did it from a place of love and humbleness. So, you are exactly manifesting that point. You are the ginger from my chai. I think in my view, it's not innovation. Okay. It's marketing. It's a field-play marketing. We are able to create the things to avoid our problems. Very hesitant to do these things. And something I recommend doing is trying to make sure that you have the right environment for innovation. And something I recommend doing is trying it out within a little way. So, again, the recipe is not going to be exactly the same as what we do at Cooper. It's pretty extreme what we do at Cooper. But what I'm inviting you to do is think about maybe one little thing that you can do to create a spark. To create maybe a new way of approaching things. So, I don't think it's going to work to just change it immediately. I think it's something that's incremental. But it is something that, at least in my experience and from my research, it is helpful. Yeah. I can actually make sure that you all receive the presentation as well. Put it on slide share. Do you want me to go back to the slide? Yeah. So, Radical Kinder is essentially about being honest, just like our friend who shared in the back. Being honest and giving direct feedback. But doing it from a place of, again, kind of empathy and really trying to help that other person. Very directly, immediately. And from a humble perspective. Okay. And you want to do it in person. And you don't want to treat people differently if you're friends with them at work as opposed to someone who works with you. You always want to address the real issue at hand to get to innovation, to get to that next point. Yeah. I would recommend that if you have your own team that you say, hey, let's try a new approach to interacting with each other. And it's called Radical Kinder. And all kind of adopt these rules. And let's just see how it works for a week. And it could be a way for you to kind of plant the seed and try this new approach without committing to it for too long. And you could show the results that come from it. Again, there are results that are actual that come from taking that approach. Again, 270% from the companies that don't do it. Okay. We did something very exactly similar to Radical Kinder. So I work with G and we have a new performance development platform. And what we do is we share insights with each other. So it can be a continue or a consider. And you talk to that individual. So for example, if you just come out of a meeting and somebody was just quiet, you talk to that person that, you know, why would you quiet, you should, you know, interact and add your points. And you give that insight to that individual. And it's more of the thought processes that you want everybody in your team to grow. And that's the thought process that, you know, you eventually take back with that empathy and you would share that. But again, I think one of the most important parts is that it flows in every direction. It's only coming from the top down. It really doesn't work as well as if it's flowing in every direction as an employee is also able to be that way with my boss. So another story is, you know, Nick, he really, when I'm not being as direct with him, he kind of calls me and said, I need you to give me your real opinion on this. I need you to move more quickly and have better results because we're actually having an honest conversation. Yes? Apart from work? I mean, I think that there are elements of this that you could definitely borrow in different parts of your life as well. Oh, I get it. So is it about giving, okay, last question, but is Radical Canter about giving feedback as to work product? Yes. And it's not about personality. That's a big part of Radical Canter. It's not about your personal relationship to that person. So you could be friends with somebody at work, but it's about actually being direct about the work related product. Does that make sense? Okay. Thank you so much. Thank you, everybody. Really appreciate the opportunity. Yeah.