Frank Mattes is the Founder and CEO of Lean Scaleup, a firm specializing in out-of-the-box innovation and corporate new-business development. He co-created the Lean Scaleup methodology, collaborating with over 100 experts from academia and industry. With a career spanning more than 25 years, Frank has advised numerous international corporations, including Fortune 10 companies. He has repeatably been named Global Thought Leader and influencer on Entrepreneurship and Lean Startup by Thinkers360.
Here’s a Glimpse of What You’ll Hear:
- [2:37] Frank Mattes discusses his childhood curiosity and reading the entire encyclopedia
- [5:31] How a professor’s advice led Frank to study in Los Angeles at USC
- [10:07] Lessons from Kodak and Fujifilm on adapting to industry disruption
- [15:30] The challenges of balancing current business models with future innovation
- [18:13] Why innovation requires making tough long-term decisions
- [24:50] How Amazon successfully disrupted itself with the launch of the Kindle
- [27:51] An overview of Amadeus’ shift from a technology company to a traveler-centric business
In this episode…
Businesses often face the challenge of balancing short-term success with long-term growth. With rapid technological advancements and shifting customer demands, how can organizations innovate while maintaining their current operations? Is it possible to prepare for the future without neglecting the present?
Frank Mattes, a seasoned expert in innovation and business strategy, offers practical insights into this dilemma. Drawing from his extensive career, Frank suggests that businesses must integrate immediate needs and future innovations by fostering a culture of out-of-the-box thinking. He emphasizes the importance of leadership in guiding teams through transformations, particularly in challenging industries. By listening to employee feedback and aligning short-term decisions with long-term visions, companies can avoid stagnation and adapt to change.
Tune in to this episode of the Smart Business Revolution Podcast as John Corcoran interviews Frank Mattes, Founder and CEO of Lean Scaleup, discussing how businesses can scale innovation while balancing current needs. Frank shares his expertise on adapting to disruption, the importance of innovation leadership, and lessons from companies like Kodak and Fujifilm. He also explains how Amazon and Amadeus successfully navigated the complexities of business transformation.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
- John Corcoran on LinkedIn
- Rise25
- Frank Mattes on LinkedIn
- Lean Scaleup
- Amadeus
- NOW and NEW: How Companies Can Use Their Capabilities For Scaling Innovation and Generating New Growth by Frank Mattes
Quotable Moments:
- “I bet the farm that the media will go digital, and we want to play a role here.”
- “Understanding to think broader is a managerial effort — and leadership’s job is to win now and create the future.”
- “When you explore new things, you touch the soul of the company — its true corporate identity.”
- “Innovation is about making tough decisions that play out over a 10, 15, or even 20-year timescale.”
- “You need activation energy to get that transformational process going, or the status quo will prevail.”
Action Steps:
- Balance short-term and long-term business goals: Companies must focus on immediate profitability while investing in future innovations to stay competitive. Ignoring either can lead to stagnation or missed opportunities in evolving markets.
- Encourage leadership involvement in transformation efforts: Leaders should actively engage with employees to gather feedback and remove obstacles to innovation. Strong leadership commitment ensures alignment between the company’s vision and execution.
- Leverage existing capabilities for new growth: Instead of starting from scratch, businesses should identify core strengths and find new applications for them. This approach, as seen with Fujifilm’s pivot beyond photography, enables sustainable expansion.
- Be willing to disrupt your business model: Companies that hesitate to evolve risk being overtaken by competitors or industry shifts. Embracing change, like Amazon did with the Kindle, helps businesses control their future.
- Create a culture of innovation and adaptability: Encouraging employees to think beyond their current roles fosters a mindset of continuous improvement. Organizations that adapt quickly to change are better positioned for long-term success.
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Episode Transcript
John Corcoran: 00:00
Today we’re talking about how to future-proof your business by focusing on the clients you’re serving now, but also what is to come at the same time for your business in the future. My guest today is Frank Mattes. I’ll tell you more about him in a second and tell you more about his book. So stay tuned.
Intro: 00:20
Welcome to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast, where we feature top entrepreneurs, business leaders, and thought leaders and ask them how they built key relationships to get where they are today. Now let’s get started with the show.
John Corcoran: 00:37
All right. Welcome, everyone. John Corcoran here. I’m the host of this show. And you know, every week we talk to smart CEOs, founders and entrepreneurs from all kinds of companies. And we’ve had Netflix and Grubhub, Redfin, Gusto, Kinkos, YPO, Activision Blizzard, lots of great episodes in the archives. Go, go check those out. And before we get into this interview, this episode brought to you by Rise25, our company where we help B2B businesses to get clients referrals and strategic Partnerships with podcasts and content marketing. Basically, we help businesses to give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships by helping companies to run their own podcasts and content marketing off of that, we are the easy button for companies to launch and run a podcast. We do strategy, accountability, full execution.
Frank, I know from the number of names of people that you got involved in this amazing book of yours here that you like. I know the importance of relationships. And so we’re going to, you know, talk about that in this interview. But it’s always been the number one thing in my life is relationships. And that’s why I love the ability to talk to someone like you, who we’ve never met before and have a conversation about this great book that you put out. But anyone who wants to learn more about what we do, go to Rise25.com or email us at. [email protected].
All right. Frank, I’m so excited to have you here today. First of all, you’re a Founder and CEO of Lean Scaleup, associate partner at Dual Innovation and previously served as Founder, CEO and Chief Innovation Evangelist at Innovation Support and You.
Your expertise really lies in out of the box innovation and corporate new business building. And you Co-created the Lean Scaleup framework with 100 different experts from academia and the corporate world, and they all contributed to this. And so this is really a tremendous feat that you put together. We’re going to get into the content of the book, but I love to start by getting to know people as a person. And we were talking about what you were like as a kid, and you read the encyclopedia from cover to cover. That’s insane.
Frank Mattes: 02:37
Yes, I did. I plead guilty, right? Because as a kid, I was so curious still, I guess right? So I learned to read very early, and so that huge book caught my attention. And I started to read and stopped when the book was over.
John Corcoran: 02:56
Wow. Yeah. I mean, I remember as a kid being jealous of other families that had encyclopedias. You know, my parents never bought one. Or maybe we bought one. That was like a used one. Wasn’t that good? You know.
Frank Mattes: 03:09
The shelf?
John Corcoran: 03:10
Yeah, exactly. I mean, it’s amazing that, you know, kids these days that have got access to information at their fingertips that, you know, we struggle to to get our hands on. You know, it wasn’t as easy to go. But so you so you’re, you know, had an insatiable thirst for knowledge. And you left home at 18. Well, first of all, you grew up in a divided Germany before the fall of the wall. What was that? Like?
Frank Mattes: 03:34
Yeah, in. Western Germany, in the very, very southern part of West Germany, where Germany meets Austria and Switzerland. Right. So it’s such a beautiful landscape and another beautiful landscape and even more landscape. And that’s probably the reason why I left at 18. Right.
John Corcoran: 03:50
Yeah. Oh, was it too boring for you even though it was beautiful?
Frank Mattes: 03:53
Kind of. Yeah. Kind of. I mean, not much going on.
John Corcoran: 03:57
Yeah. And what was it like for you growing up in a country that was divided like that?
Frank Mattes: 04:01
Oh, you didn’t really sense that. I mean, it’s a nice part of Germany and neatly tucked away, not so cosmopolitan, so I didn’t really notice.
John Corcoran: 04:13
That didn’t really affect your life?.
Frank Mattes: 04:16
No, no, no Different from Berlin, for instance, where you can feel that division right away.
John Corcoran: 04:21
Right, right. I went to Berlin in 1998, about five years or so, six years after the fall of the wall, and there were a ton of construction crews at the time. Lots of construction was happening, and I actually felt that the eastern side of the city was far more interesting because it was, you know, the western side was like London or Dublin or something like that. It was a European city. The eastern side was just something. It was kind of like a time capsule.
Frank Mattes: 04:48
Exactly. And it changed rapidly. Right. I guess at that time. Right. And comparing Berlin to London makes pretty much sense. since David Bowie lived for a couple of years there, as you may know. Right?
John Corcoran: 05:02
Yeah. So you join, you did military service. Anything in the work that you do now advising companies influenced by that?
Frank Mattes: 05:11
No, no.
Frank Mattes: 05:13
Not not at all. But I also studied and that may, may actually be an influence. I studied in Los Angeles as well. So I’m not. Just to talk about.
John Corcoran: 05:20
That. Yeah. You end up at USC, University of Southern California, which we were talking about earlier. George Lucas went there, lots of great thinkers. You talk a little bit about that influence.
Frank Mattes: 05:32
Yeah. I mean, see connecting the dots. I mean, it’s funny how life evolves, isn’t it? I mean, while I was still studying in Germany, we had a guest lecturer professor from I guess it was Harvard, if I recall it, or Boston University, one of them. And he was the only one who lectured at that time in English. And we made contact along the way. And he said, Frank, you need to think bigger, right? So why don’t you go to America for a couple of years? And I had this vision of California, right? California dreaming. So, Los Angeles seemed to be the right place for me.
John Corcoran: 06:08
You ended up in South Central in 1987, 1988. That wasn’t exactly the best part of California at that time.
Frank Mattes: 06:16
It was actually earlier. Right. So I was there 88 or so.
John Corcoran: 06:19
Right.
Frank Mattes: 06:20
So I might look younger than I am. But yeah.
John Corcoran: 06:23
Because I mean, that was when the 92 riots were not that much later. Yeah. And that was what happened right downtown. Now it’s beautiful actually. I mean a lot of that area. I’ve been there a lot. Yeah. Area around USC has been cleaned up and is a very nice part of town.
Frank Mattes: 06:39
Yeah, I was there a year ago. I mean, I could recognize a couple of things, but it has changed so much as well.
John Corcoran: 06:46
Yeah. So this professor then must have recognized in you and a natural curiosity towards innovation if he was encouraging you to come to the United States.
Frank Mattes: 06:58
I think it was more my, my, my, my thirst for, for learning more, for extending the skills, etc. I more or less stumbled into that innovation thing, right? So when I started my career at the beginning of the 90s, I was working for a boutique consulting agency that was involved in project management. Right? It turned out, however, John, that more than 50% of the work that we did was new product development. The term innovation by itself wasn’t even mainstream then.
And so, I mean, as I made my career in that company, I was with the Boston Consulting Group. Later on, I explored different facets of what makes up innovation, and it turned out that this out-of-the-box thing the new caught me say starting in the mid 2000 in the North years, right. And then ever since, in these 20 years. That has been my passion. And I discovered that’s also the background to the book, if we may later touch on that.
There’s a big problem to be solved, right? How can you integrate the short-term vision on the now and the long term vision on what comes next? New right. This is an unsolved problem. And these kinds of problems fascinate me. I’m a thinker. Connecting the dots I would. Describe it’s such.
John Corcoran: 08:24
A it’s such a tension for so many companies and and they’re, you know, you think of like, you know obviously like the, the mainstream companies that we know of, like the Teslas of the world or the Disney’s, you know, Disney went through a big struggle during Covid because their theme parks were shut down. They had to rapidly innovate, you know, launch their Disney+ platform. And it was a real change in their business model, you know, moving from like the cash cow that they had for many years, selling old movies and DVDs and VHS, you know, VCR, VHS before that to switching and, you know, being forced to innovate. Yeah.
Frank Mattes: 09:01
Yeah, definitely. And I mean, that’s a challenge. I mean, Tesla is a new company, let’s put it that way, like Amazon or the Netflix of the world. They do not have a history 100 plus years or in the case of Disney, close to 100 years. And when you explore these new things you touch about, you touch the soul of the company, right?
The corporate identity, not meaning the branding stuff and the corporate colors. Right. What makes up that company? And that’s the hard part in making that change. So if you take this seriously, like Disney did and successfully did in here, it’s a massive, massive transformation not only from a business perspective, but also from a kind of transformational psychological experience.
John Corcoran: 09:53
How do leaders within these companies rally a company to do something that is going to be a completely new direction and maybe even disruptive to their existing business model and their existing revenue sources.