#138—JoAnn Garbin: Decoding Innovation at Microsoft and Beyond

JoAnn Garbin is a sustainability and technology innovator with a 25-year track record of leading teams “from nothing to something to scale,” creating numerous innovative products and profitable businesses. Her career predates the concept of climate change, and her long career in sustainability combined with her tenure at Microsoft as Director of Innovation in Microsoft’s cloud business, have given her ample insight, into how innovation can and should be a repeatable scalable process. 

In this episode, we discuss highlights from The Insider’s Guide to Innovation at Microsoft, a book co-written between Joann and Dean Carignan, who among his long and rich career has spent 20 years at Microsoft, guiding new businesses—including the early internet division, Xbox, and multiple AI efforts—through the critical growth phases to their first billion dollars in revenue. More than just insights and case studies into how Microsoft has woven innovation into the fabric of their ecosystem, Joann shares with us a proven framework to innovation.  

In this podcast, we discuss:

• How innovation cycles mirror nature’s adaptative processes—constantly regenerating from the ashes, much like companies must continually innovate to curtail disruption 
• A breakdown of the four innovation patterns that each provide specific tools and strategies for effective innovation 
• How innovation is—contrary to common belief—beyond technology, able to happen through business models, customer experience, and non-tech-oriented areas 
• Some fascinating insider examples of how Microsoft learned critical lessons through successes and failures in various products lines—like the Xbox, Bing, and more

_______________________________________________________________________________
Episode Timeline:
00:00—Highlight from today's episode
01:28—Introducing JoAnn+ the topic of today’s episode
03:35—If you really know me, you know that...
05:12—What is your definition of strategy?
07:01—Why the book isn’t just about Microsoft 
09:10—The four patterns of innovation 
10:31—JoAnn's background in sustainability
13:01—The meaning of regenerative sustainability? 
13:50—Is having a bold goal necessary for innovation
16:13—Pattern I: Innovating every day means
17:52—How to innovate every day in practice
20:35—Pattern II: Innovating over the years 
23:55—Pattern III: Innovating with everyone
26:54—An example of innovating with everyone 
29:05—Enabling boundary crossers to connect 
32:04—Pattern IV: Innovating beyond technology 
33:38—Going against conventional wisdom 
36:22—Defining BXT (business experience technology)
37:50—How can people follow you and continue learning from you?__________________________________________________________________
Additional Resources:
Personal website: www.joanngarbin.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/joanngarbin
Link to book: The Insider’s Guide to Innovation at Microsoft

Thank you to our guest. Thank you to our executive producer, Karina Reyes, our editor, Zach Ness, and the rest of the team. If you like what you heard, please follow, download, and subscribe. I'm your host, Kaihan Krippendorff. Thank you for listening.

Follow us at outthinkernetworks.com/podcast

Transcript

Kaihan Krippendorff:  Thank you so much for being here. We've been trying to get you on the podcast for a while. I know that with this the new release of your new book, you've been all over the place. So thank you for landing here with us for a little bit to share.
 
 JoAnn Garbin: Yeah. Worth the wait.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: We'd like to start with two questions that I ask every guest. The first is just so we get to know you a little bit more personally, and I know you were on Rita McGrath’s podcast. Her answer to this was, and I know her fairly well, and I didn't expect this that she loves country music. So it may have nothing to do with work, please complete the sentence for me. If you really know me, you know that.
 
 JoAnn Garbin: I could answer this depending on the day, 15 different ways. But with the launch and how much we've been running, I'll go back to something that I remember my college bestie saying. I nap more than any person she knows. So I run really hard when I have to, and then I lay down and I sleep. And if it's 02:00 in the afternoon or 10:00 in the morning, I put my head down.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: How long does it need to be for it to count as a nap or to be worth it?
 
 JoAnn Garbin: Yeah. Like, ninety minutes. Like, I need, like, a half a sleep cycle.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Oh, yeah. Do you listen to anything while you're sleeping or you can just
 
 JoAnn Garbin: Sometimes, I do have a couple of podcasts that I like to fall asleep too, and I just hope that I'm learning my osmosis.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Oh I see, gotcha. Okay.
 
 JoAnn Garbin: Okay. Or some, you know, music, but a lot of times, no. I just I need my brain, and everything just needs to go quiet, and I need to reset. So before I got on here today with you, I took a nice nap.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Nice. Nice. Love it. What's your definition of strategy?
 
 JoAnn Garbin: Strategy to me is intentionally creating the future you want. So it's a bit more philosophical, I think, than some people may use. Like, yeah, I think strategy for me is the mindset, and then innovation is the tool set.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Just explain that a little bit. The difference in mindset and tools tool sets.
 
 JoAnn Garbin: For me, they I can't separate them, there's like, innovation without strategy is just playing in the sandbox or tinkering. You know? And strategy without innovation is just white papers and PowerPoints. You're not gonna get there.
 
 Both of them are trying to create this future. Strategy gives you the direction and the why. Right? It tells who are we, why are we on this path, you know why us, why now, why this. Innovation is adopting that and saying, alright.
 
 How do we do it? How do we get it done?
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Yes. I love that. That's brilliant. I hadn't thought of it that way before. I think that makes a lot of sense, and you don't get to choose.
 
 You gotta have both. Gotta have. Right?
 
 JoAnn Garbin: Yeah. But more and more every day because everything's changing faster and faster.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Right. Right. Okay. So we could we could tug on that further, but I really wanna get into so much in the book that I wanna cover, and we won't have time to cover all of it. Luckily, you've got a lot of podcasts and you've got a great book and other resources so people can go there.
 
 We're really gonna touch on a few things. But before I get there, I want to emphasize that as I read the book, you know, I realized it's not a book about innovating at Microsoft. It's not a book only about Microsoft. Right? So just tell us a little bit about that, why did you write the book and who did you write it for?
 
 Because you didn't just write it for people that work at Microsoft.
 
 JoAnn Garbin: Right. Yeah. It's a blessing and a curse that we named it the insider's guide to innovation at Microsoft. Because it is an insider's guide to innovation at Microsoft. We built it.
 
 It you know, Dean and I are both Microsoft days. I'm now in Alumnus. We wrote it by interviewing dozens of other Microsoft days where we cross the orgs and up and down the chart and across the years. But, really, the impetus to use Microsoft as the character and the stories was that it gave us this fifty year, very consistent history. Meaning, not that Microsoft hasn't changed over the years, but it's always been Microsoft.
 
 It's only had three CEOs. The mission has been fundamentally the same. You know, bring these tools, these technologies, to as many people as possible to help them do what they're doing. It's always been a platform company. And so we saw an opportunity in the world of innovation literature where most books have to explore many companies and then pull the lessons together and you're left to kinda go, okay.
 
 How do I normalize this? We were able to, you know, use that common denominator to find those truly foundational building blocks of a good, repeatable, scalable, responsible innovation practice.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Great. Great. Yes. And we could go into that. Yeah.
 
 Because, you know, Microsoft was, as you say, is found as a platform company. It was in between the hardware and the software. It was born as an ecosystem company and the dynamics in which most companies now compete. So great lessons to learn there. Tell us about the four patterns, please.
 
 JoAnn Garbin: Yeah. And there's you know, it's a little bit of an artificial divide between them, but we wanted to make it digestible. You know, take this big life cycle of innovation and break it down into habits and tools that you could actually pick up and play with them. So we break it down into innovating every day, innovating over the years, innovating with everyone and then innovating beyond technology. And if you take all of those and stack them or combine them, puzzle piece them together, you get a complete practice of innovation we also include the fifth chapter, which is kind of a hybrid case study and pattern of responsible innovation because it's fundamental to what Microsoft is doing.
 
 It's fundamental to my practice as a sustainability person and Dean's practice as a responsible AI person. For us, you would you wouldn't pursue your responsible innovation. Like, for us, it's move fast and don't break the things that matter, which is obviously not what everybody believes, but at the scale we operate, we can't afford to break privacy and security and sustainability and these other things. So I would say there's five patterns.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Well, tell us if you don't mind just I know your kind of professional history a little bit more, but for our listeners, just tell us a little bit about sustainability and what you have been doing in sustainability that and what you did at Microsoft.
 
 JoAnn Garbin: I'm an old head now. It's kinda funny. I'm twenty five years into working professionally and sustainability. I predate climate change. Like, we use to call it global warming.
 
 And before that, we didn't call it anything. We call it energy efficiency and water efficiency. So I came into it in the late nineties as a mechanical engineer that wanted to work in the energy efficiency space and operational efficiency space. And early in my career, it was just the timing of the .com error and software as a service just coming out. My sustainability career merged with a tech career in, like, the first year of my professional life.
 
 And so I've always been at the center section of helping large global corporations and large portfolio companies figure out how to do what they do more effectively, efficiently, and responsibly, and using technology to enable that. So I've been in the circuit of the sustainability speaking world for a long time. And somewhere in the history, I crossed paths with Brian Janice, who ended up at Microsoft. He was the left not too long ago as the VP of Energy. And when he started building out a sustainability team at Microsoft, he's like, I remember this woman from Philadelphia.
 
 She's she lives here in this space of sustainability in tech, and that started the conversation with Microsoft. And they brought me in. I was the head of the data center of the future program, which really, we went back to blank sheet of paper, and we tried to reimagine what a data center needs to be five, ten, fifteen years out with all the business changes, environmental changes, people changes, and it ended up becoming the regenerative data center of the future. So it had regenerative design was its driving design focus.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Just explain to us what you mean by regenerative. That's a bold goal.
 
 JoAnn Garbin: It is. And I may I may abstract it a bit further, but so did my teammates. So it's on us. Regenerative sustainability is how do you participate with nature in a way?
 
 How do you integrate your man made systems into nature in a way that your existence is a benefit to them because you're benefiting from them. So reinforcing feedback loop with nature. But we expanded that into economy and culture and education. We're like data centers are this engine of modern life. So there's all these opportunities to make them regenerative in a lot of different directions.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Mhmm. Do you think I'm I keep wanting to go back to the four patterns. We're gonna get to the four patterns of those, but just to just to tease this out with one more thing. Do you think that having a kind of bold and possible kind of goal like this is a requisite for innovation?
 
 JoAnn Garbin: I do. Yes. And of 40 plus people in the book agree. And that's not to say there there's a ton of value to be had in what we'll call little eye innovation. Continuous improvement.
 
 Right? If you're not doing continuous improvement, you're gonna die out pretty quickly. But a mistake, a lot of strategies innovation strategies make is if we try to go too far, too fast, People won't buy in. People will get scared. We won't get funding.
 
 But it's actually the opposite. If you don't go far enough and big enough, you're not gonna get people excited enough. To even attempt to make the change because we don't wanna change. Like, change is scary and uncertain and risky. So you gotta make the vision bold enough that it just fundamentally hits you.
 
 Right? Right in the heart, you gotta excite people emotionally first. Give them that first. And then lay down stepping stones. You can't jump to the big horizon.
 
 That's, you know, almost impossible for anyone because people are involved. But you gotta give them that horizon and then move forward in those steps and those stretches because now you're feeling the progress and now you're getting that reward and you the horizon's coming closer. So it all feeds on itself. And if you think too small, people lose interest and move on.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Yeah. I love that. This idea of kind of, like, zooming out to the big, but then focusing people on the next step. So that you get both the motivation to do something big, but also you remove that that impossiveness, that that bridge that hasn't been built yet. So then let let's go a little bit now into the activities or the patterns.
 
 If you just, like, Give me a brief description of each one. Let's start with innovating every day. What do you mean by that?
 
 JoAnn Garbin: Innovation every day is about building the structures and habits to make it a reliable process. Which sounds oxymoronic. Like, innovation can't be reliable, and it's true the output of the process that whatever it is you're creating, you can't define that at the start. If you could, it's not innovation. Right?
 
 You're creating something that doesn't exist yet. But how you go about solving it can be reliable. And it has to be. Because if it doesn't, if it isn't reliable, you can't teach it to people, and you can't bring new people in, and you can't you can't synthesize it with the rest of your business. So the idea that innovation is this chaotic, unstructured, run amok, crazy scientist space is just not how it's done professionally.
 
 That's the myth that gets sold. People like me and the contributors to the book that make a living off of this, we don't bet our mortgage on chaos. Right? We show up every day, like, any creative professional, and we practice our craft. And we build better habits, and we bring other people into them.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: I love it. That's so inspiring. I was just in Nashville with my daughter this weekend, and we're listening to a musician who was a composer. She was describing the process. She writes a new song every day by 11AM, and then she submits it.
 
 And if you follow the process, it is a stage gate. There's the agent, then the agent to the artist, and the artist, you know, takes the first step, and then maybe it gets recorded, then maybe it gets released, then maybe it gets a single. But it is but is that habit of every day to help us visualize a bit? What are some of the practices that someone might think of adopting or an organization might think of introducing in this innovation every day.
 
 JoAnn Garbin: Yeah. At the so at the beginning of innovation, most people think innovation starts with an idea. I have an idea. Here's how we can make our business better, or here's the new widget we can build. That isn't what we do.
 
 We take an idea and we step back from it. That's the habit. No matter what the idea is, step back from it, and we do a process called diverge, converge, synthesize. And what that allows us to do is wherever that starting point we think we had was, we step back from it and we ask questions from as many angles as possible. We bring in different disciplines to look at the problem together or the opportunity.
 
 We go outside the walls of the company to understand it from the outside in. We bring it up to the executives to get their perspective on it. The old adage of see the elephant from all its sides. Right? That divergence, period, inevitably, leads you to a new starting point than that first idea.
 
 So here's how it gets super tangible. You write a who, what, why statement. I want a better mouse trap. Who's gonna value it? What is it?
 
 Why are they gonna value it? I'm not talking about how it's gonna be better or how I'm gonna solve the problem. It's who, what, why. And if you do that, then you can say, alright. Well, who else?
 
 What else? Why else? And now you can just start expanding around that original thought, and you can end up in very different unique places, and that's just the beginning of that process.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Gotcha. Yes. So I see how that is repeatable, learnable. The outcome of it can be is necessarily uncharted. Excellent. Alright. Let's go to the next one, if you don't mind, innovating over the years.
 
 JoAnn Garbin: Innovating over the years is something that all healthy systems do if they wanna continue to exist. So we use the model from nature, the adaptive cycle, the nature of field to saplings, to forest, to lightning strike, back down to field, to forest. Your business is going to go through that same cycle, whether you believe it or not. But, hopefully, at this point in modern life, we all know disruption happens. It is just count on it. So if you know whatever you're doing today is going to get disrupted, then you need to have a continuous cycle of innovation where there's something always new being incubated.
 
 There's something always new being developed and matured. There's something always in that just about to be disrupted category so that when the disruption comes, you're not starting at zero. You've got something right behind it, ready to go that's already maturing and out in the world, and now you're not regrouping. You're not a flat baron field waiting for the forest to come back.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Yes. And I can see having that thing that sapling makes you more comfortable letting the lightning strike and abandoning. Right? Because you're abandoning to something.
 
 JoAnn Garbin: Yes.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: That's nothing.
 
 JoAnn Garbin: It's portfolio management. Right? You wouldn't bet all your money in one place. And what is the business doing if it has all of its capital or OPEX going into one business model or one technology? That's a very undiversified portfolio.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Yeah. I think that people organizations many organizations grossly underestimate how many things you need in the portfolio. And when they feel well, tell yeah. Talk talking about that. I see you nodding your head.
 
 JoAnn Garbin: You have to have enough so that when the things in the portfolio fail, the things that work make up for the losses. Right? The VC world will tell you that, I don't think you need to be quite as bold as the VC world necessarily in every business. But the idea that you spread your investments, you do that divergent exploration, and maybe instead of landing on one starting point, there's three or four viable starting points and you move them all forward, and you see what happens, your scenario plan. Right?
 
 There's there's a lot of there's a lot of look back in business. How did we do last year, last quarter? In sustainability, in particular, what was our carbon footprint, what was our water consumption, all historical. Businesses led forward. So you have to be doing that forward projection.
 
 You have to be thinking in bets as Annie Duke would say, you have to be doing that scenario analysis, and then place your bets. On a portfolio of options.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Right. And after the fact, it looks like foresight. It looks like brilliant calculation. Right? But it was portfolio.
 
 Interesting. Let's talk about who innovates. You know, there are. Very popular models, which are kinda centralized processes. There's a division and innovation team.
 
 You talk about, you know, everyone innovating, which really speaks to me personally. So I was wondering if you could just unpack that for us.
 
 JoAnn Garbin: Yeah. Thank you. Innovating with everyone, I think it's our favorite chapter. It really is patterns wise because of that myth that innovation is the domain of a select few. Yeah.
 
 It's just not true. Julia Louthan, the head of the developer division, has this wonderful quote in the book. She says, innovation is about fundamentally changing the customer's life. If you can't change the customer's life, it's just a cool idea. And what that makes really clear is you have to get it into the hands of the customer.
 
 It has to get out of the lab, into the hands, change a customer's life. You have to service that customer. You have to find that customer. There are so many people involved in that. It's the entire value chain of a business.
 
 Involved with changing a customer's life. So that's step one is just recognizing that it doesn't matter how great your invention is. It doesn't become an innovation until it's creating value for your customers. But then beyond that, innovation benefits from having all of these different perspectives. Bringing design to the table has shown to have, like, a two to one return on invest men over companies that don't bring design to the table at the beginning of an innovation process.
 
 Like, if you treat it as an afterthought, you're missing the whole point. Same with marketing. We heard it about finance, and legal, and customer service, and technical services. It sounds overwhelming, but when, again, when you get into the habit of having everybody in the conversation, when you go wide, you get all of the voices. You get all the perspectives.
 
 It leads your convergence to a more holistic view of what you're going to create. And now you don't have to bring everybody through every step thereafter. You do the work, and then you bring it back to them, and they're your first customer. Right? Did we hit the mark for your perspective?
 
 And so innovating with everyone who is really talking about how to do that, how to meet people where they're at, get them excited about the opportunities, help them come along the journey of innovation no matter where they sit in the organization, and really tap into the full value of the people in your company, in your ecosystem, everybody, really.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Fascinating. Just to help us visualize that, can you give us an example?
 
 JoAnn Garbin: A beautiful one from the case studies is cognitive services. So cognitive services are what is powering generative AI for us all right now. Before this group existed, AI as a service, something you could embedding your software or, you know, log in to chat GPT and use a big AI model that's hosted somewhere else that didn't exist. Microsoft, at that time, it was, like, 2011, had a ton of Microsoft researchers studying AI. They had a ton of Azure engineers building the platform that is Azure and creating cloud services They had Bing, which was this search driven platform itself.
 
 And but we didn't have the motivation behind cognitive services was action actually missing the mobile revolution after missing the search revolution. So it was, like, leadership and some others looking around going, we've got Bing, we've got Azure, we've got Microsoft Research, We've got these pieces. What can we do with them? And they task this small group of what we call boundary crossers. These people that work really well connecting dots and negotiating
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: long term boundary crossers.
 
 JoAnn Garbin: Yeah. They're great. Fundamental role you need in innovation. And so what they did was they went out and they found experts in seven different lines of businesses from different domains and disciplines, and they brought them together. And together, they created AI as a service.
 
 So, clearly, it all existed within the walls of Microsoft. But until they started thinking about bringing everyone into the process, they just didn't see it, and they couldn't do it.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: And it's mhmm. Yeah. I mean, I wanna get to beyond technology, but you're just, like, opening up this thing that I've just been obsessed with lately is I think that so often, you know, the left hand can't find the right hand that you have these people that are working on that could be doing great together, people have a need, people have a solution inside the same company, and they just can't find each other. And Microsoft, I mean, the scale of it I mean, when I've when I was last at the Redmond campus, it was like, it's a city. There's just, like, Building 123499, A Hundred, And 2.
 
 It's like, So just tell to how do you what are some ways that a company can think of enabling these boundary crossers to find each other?
 
 JoAnn Garbin: Yeah. There's quite a few different ways. One that didn't make the main book, is the garage. We wrote a bonus chapter about it. The garage at Microsoft is our maker space, collaborative space, skilling space.
 
 We have 15 of them. They're physical spaces around the world. And they host the global hackathon. And that is another habitual way to get people out of their day jobs to interact with people they've never interacted with before to work on a project they've never worked on before, to practice the skills of innovation, to get closer to the customer. Because, like you said, it's like a city.
 
 But it's also like a giant shipper machine. Right? So I do this little piece of the part, and then somebody else does it, and I may be a lot of layers away. From the customer. And there's a practice we like in the book that came in through the v s code case study called zero distance to the user.
 
 How do you stand side by side with your user? And understand what they're doing, how they're doing it, what pain they have, what opportunity they're looking for, things like the hackathon give anybody in the company no matter where they're at in the chain of command and the layers, the ability to put their hands on the end product and work on something that's going to be into somebody else's hands at some point. So wherever we can create those opportunities for people to be with the customer and practice delivering value for them. There's a dozen different practices in the book that we talk about.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Yeah. And I think since so many of Microsoft products and now I would say, everyone's products are characterized not by a transaction, and then maybe the customer comes back to you, but you have this ongoing interaction with them. Right? I have so many questions. I wanna learn more about zero distance.
 
 I want to learn more about the Bing story. We don't have time to cover everything, but I think that we need to we to be complete, I think we need to talk about what you mean by innovating more than technology.
 
 JoAnn Garbin: This is something that goes against an instinct most people have when they hear the word innovation. A lot of us think innovation is technology. So that's the first obstacle we have to overcome. Innovation is value creation, and you can create value in a lot of different ways. And historically, if you like, literally, if you look back across the existence of humans, most of the value we've created has not been technology.
 
 It's been in business. And so if you're not exploring that business axis of how you create value, how you deliver it, how you service it, how you capture it, your people's systems, your marketing, your brand, you know, and you can either look at Gary Pessano has a great book called creative construction, David Kelly has the 10 types of innovation. You know, tech is two of the 10 types. There are eight other types.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Got it. Yes.
 
 JoAnn Garbin: So it's about getting beyond that mindset of innovation is technology. It's not. Innovation is value creation, and Uber didn't create any new tech. They just changed how we ride share.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Right. And I think Airbnb is the same thing. It they first of it, they changed the system and then built the tech to serve the system.
 
 Fascinating. I love the diversity of your career. You know, what we're talking right now mostly is about kind of organizations pulling innovation from its people are opening up the doors for innovation. But a lot of the stories like the Xbox story that you that you cover, for example, and your personal story, is often people are going against conventional wisdom. Wisdom.
 
 And sometimes it proves to be right. Just tells when have you gone against a pretty conventional wisdom?
 
 JoAnn Garbin: It seems to be my default mode, and I have people in my life that will say it started when I was, you know, five. I think it's an entrepreneurial mindset, and you can be an entrepreneur out in the world or inside a company. Like, my coauthor Dean is an entrepreneur. We call him an entrepreneur. But it's anybody that looks at a problem or an opportunity and says, I'm gonna try a different way.
 
 And so, you know, for me, it's been sustainability has I've done sustainability differently than most of my industry peers. I've long said sustainability is innovation. And for me, it's If what we're doing today is not sustainable, then the sustainable way to do it is inherently novel, which makes it a competitive advantage, which means it's innovation. You know, it's going to create value and set me apart from my peers. I've actually changed a little bit since we launched the book a couple weeks ago.
 
 In conversation, I get a lot of polite nods from people when I say sustainability is innovation, but it doesn't really click. And where I've come to over the last couple weeks is to say, don't just solve for sustainability, solve with sustainability. That's what we did with the regenerative data center of the future. We didn't say how do we make a sustainable data center? We said, how do we make a data center that we can deliver faster, cheaper?
 
 It'll run more efficiently. It'll be quieter. It'll be prettier. It'll help the economic you know, the economic situation in the location it is. It'll provide jobs.
 
 We solved those problems with sustainability. I love that.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: It's almost like when you don't have sustainability as part of the requirement. You have a lot of existing solutions to default onto, and it's easy to just do. Right? And so when you overlay this, now it robs you of those or a lot of them, and it forces you to create the do. I love that.
 
 I love that. Oh my gosh. There's so many things that I still wanna ask. There's so many great frameworks in the book and its really practical wish we could go all over them. There's one that I just need you to at least touch on for us BXT.
 
 What does BXT stand for?
 
 JoAnn Garbin: Business experience technology and the x's for experience. It comes out of the Xbox team so they look their x's Hi. Wait. The great thing about that one, in the chapter where we present it in the Xbox chapter, we show how you can succeed using BXT, which is lead with x. Always lead with the customer experience, and you'll succeed.
 
 But we also give you a really big failure. Xbox didn't lead with x. They let b and t get in the lead, and they had a really rough go of it. That was the Xbox one launch. So it's a great both sides of the coin story of you can have a framework.
 
 It was their framework, but they didn't use it. And they felt the price.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: That's great. That's great. Yeah. I would try to be able to read that story, the Xbox story. Because it's also relatable to just everyday people, and it's such epitomizes kind of what innovation can be when you have a company that's never made hardware, making hardware.
 
 A brand that probably doesn't work in the gaming world, but they create their own brand. So many things, so many reasons that shouldn't have come from Microsoft. So thanks for unpacking that for us. How can people get to all the stuff that we didn't get to? Certainly, certainly, by the book.
 
 How else can people connect with you, learn from you, and Dean, and continue to benefit from the work that you've done for us?
 
 JoAnn Garbin: Thank you. I appreciate you having us on and talking about the book. All the proceeds are going to steam education charities. So we're not only trying to help everyone that's listening, but also the next generation of innovators join us. Innovation@microsoft.com.
 
 It's all spelled out. We have a free insider community where we'll be distributing new chapters, new stories, tools to help you put these things into practice, online courses, so far, everything's free. That's one of the benefits of the Microsoft brands. And then we're on LinkedIn. That's our that's our primary platform.
 
 So follow me, follow Dean, follow the book on LinkedIn, and let us know what you think. It's a conversation. This the book started as a conversation between me and Dean, and we're just trying to bring as many people into the conversation as possible.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Kind of like evolving, ever interacting innovation, interacting with users. Yeah. Love it, Joanne. Thank you for the work that you've done, the work that you do, and Dean as well, and taking some time to unpack it for us here. Thank you, Joanne.
 
 JoAnn Garbin: Thank you.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Thank you to our guest, JoAnn Garbin. Thank you to our producers, Karina Reyes, and Zach Ness, our editor and the rest of the team. If you like what you heard, please follow, download, and subscribe. I'm your host, Kaihan Krippendorff. Thank you for listening.