innovation culture

My guest today is Shopify co-founder and CEO Tobi Lütke.  We discuss the differences between founders and professional managers, how he’s scaled with Shopify, the constant fight against bureaucracy, how he thinks about innovation in a large company, and how he manages to keep his head when everyone else is losing theirs.

A coder at heart who emigrated from Germany to Canada two decades ago, Lütke co-founded the e-commerce giant Shopify in Ottawa in 2006. The Globe and Mail named Lütke "CEO of the Year" in November 2014,  and in May 2021 the company reported that it had more than 1.7 million businesses in approximately 175 countries using its platform. As of July 2022, Shopify is among the top 20 largest publicly traded Canadian companies by market capitalization, and the company’s total revenue for 2021 was $4.611 billion. Lütke previously appeared on Episode 41 of The Knowledge Project.

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It wasn’t unusual for David Kelley to take calls from Steve Jobs in the middle of the night. This came with the territory, as David worked on designing dozens of products for Apple over the years – including their first computer mouse back in 1980. 

Since then, David and his firm, IDEO, have helped all sorts of companies design new products. David also led the founding of Stanford’s d.school, where students learn to use design principles to solve complex problems.

This week on How I Built This Lab, David shares stories from some of the most notable projects of his career. He discusses how diverse perspectives and backgrounds help teams generate new ideas, and explains how organizations can use design thinking to transform culture and foster innovation.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Drive. Docs. Chrome. Maps. Gmail. Android. What do these products have in common? Of course, they’re all Google, but what you may not know is that they all came to fruition under the management of the same person: Sundar Pichai. This track record in product development ultimately landed Sundar the CEO role at one of the biggest, most innovative companies in the world.  

This week on How I Built This Lab, Sundar reflects on the unique journey that led him to Google, and the values that inspire and drive his leadership today. He and Guy also discuss Google’s recent advances in artificial intelligence, and how the company is reimagining the workplace as offices across the globe reopen.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Humans like starting new things much more than taking care of older things. This is true on both an institutional and individual level: it's more exciting to build a new road than to maintain it; more exciting to lose weight than to keep it off. There's plenty of short-term pleasure and intrinsic motivation when it comes to pursuing something novel, but the effort to keep up unsexy maintenance on what we've already got takes real intent.

My guest today says we've lost that intent and need to revive it. His name is Lee Vinsel and he's a professor of science, technology, and society, the co-founder of The Maintainers, a research network dedicated to the study of maintenance, repair, upkeep, and ordinary work, and the co-author of The Innovation Delusion: How Our Obsession With the New Has Disrupted the Work That Matters Most. Lee and I begin our conversation with how our cultural focus on innovation has come at the expense of attention paid to maintenance and repair, and yet how talking more about innovation hasn't really led to greater progress. We then get into the way the necessity of maintenance, repair, and caretaking has been neglected in business and government, creating a situation where we keep on building new things without investing in the upkeep of our current infrastructure. From there we turn to the way our all too common neglect of maintenance applies not only to big institutions, but also our personal lives, as in the areas of home ownership and health. We discuss how there's less incentive these days to repair things in our disposable society where everything is cheap, and stuff is harder to fix, even when we want to. We end our conversation with how we can revive a maintenance mindset in our culture and individual lives.

Get the show notes at aom.is/maintenance.