Lee Jeyes is back from a cross-Canada tour and on the mic ready to share his insights and advice around pragmatic retail innovation informed by years of experience, most formerly as Walmart Canada's Head of Innovation. Get ready for a great conversation as we explore Where Retail Meets Innovation, and hear Lee's advice for retailers and brands of all sizes on how they can drive the innovation agenda in your enterprise.
Lee Jeyes is back from a cross-Canada tour and on the mic ready to share his insights and advice around pragmatic retail innovation informed by years of experience, most formerly as Walmart Canada's Head of Innovation. Get ready for a great conversation as we explore Where Retail Meets Innovation, and hear Lee's advice for retailers and brands of all sizes on how they can drive the innovation agenda in your enterprise.
About Lee
Lee's journey in the retail industry is both diverse and impactful. With extensive experience in operations, loss prevention, and ecommerce, he has also made significant strides in the realm of innovation. His most recent role as the Head of Innovation for Walmart Canada saw him building and launching their pioneering innovation incubator. Lee's expertise doesn't stop there; he has a proven track record in scaling near-term sustaining technology and has been at the forefront of developing long-term disruptive retail tech solutions. Passionate about championing disruption, Lee guides organizations through the intricacies of change. As the retail landscape evolves, Lee's mission remains clear: to lead, support, and inspire businesses to embrace transformation and elevate their innovative visions.
Transforming Tomorrow: Where Retail Meets Revolution. Now, as a keynote speaker for Spoken Artists, Lee continues his mission, helping organizations navigate the waters of innovation and inspiring change on a grand scale.
About Michael
Michael is the Founder & President of M.E. LeBlanc & Company Inc. and a Senior Advisor to Retail Council of Canada and the Bank of Canada as part of his advisory and consulting practice. He brings 25+ years of brand/retail/marketing & eCommerce leadership experience with Levi's, Black & Decker, Hudson's Bay, Today's Shopping Choice and Pandora Jewellery.
Michael has been on the front lines of retail industry change for his entire career. He has delivered keynotes, hosted fire-side discussions with C-level executives and participated worldwide in thought leadership panels. ReThink Retail has added Michael to their prestigious Top Global Retail Influencers list for 2023 for the third year in a row.
Michael is also the president of Maven Media, producing a network of leading trade podcasts, including Canada's top retail industry podcast_,_ The Voice of Retail. He produces and co-hosts Remarkable Retail with best-selling author Steve Dennis, now ranked one of the top retail podcasts in the world.
Based in San Francisco, Global eCommerce Leaders podcast explores global cross-border issues and opportunities for eCommerce brands and retailers.
Last but not least, Michael is the producer and host of the "Last Request Barbeque" channel on YouTube, where he cooks meals to die for - and collaborates with top brands as a food and product influencer across North America.
Michael LeBlanc 00:04
Welcome to The Voice of Retail podcast. My name is Michael LeBlanc, and I am your host. This podcast is produced in conjunction with Retail Council of Canada.
Lee Jeyes is back from an across Canada tour and on the mic ready to share his insights and advice around pragmatic retail innovation informed by years of experience, most formerly as Walmart Canada's Head of Innovation. Get ready for a great conversation as we explore Where Retail Meets Innovation, and hear Lee's advice for retailers and brands of all sizes on how they can drive the innovation agenda in your enterprise.
Lee, welcome to The Voice of Retail podcast. How are you doing this afternoon?
Lee Jeyes 00:41
Great, thanks. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.
Michael LeBlanc 00:43
Well, where am I finding you today, is it this morning this afternoon, where are you?
Lee Jeyes 00:48
It is this afternoon. I'm actually back in Toronto, I didn't come back from a three-month trip where I've traveled all across Canada, I've got to see it from East Coast to the West Coast, in an RV. So, it's been three months on the road. So, it's kind of strange to be back in the city after I've been, you know, in the bush for three months, but it's been an incredible trip and something on the bucket list, but yeah, back in Toronto now for the month of October.
Michael LeBlanc 01:10
Well, judging by your accent, I suspect you're not from Canada. In fact, I know you're not, but what prompted you to travel across the country and what did you think, it's not, you're not new to Canada, but what did you think about your journey?
Lee Jeyes 01:22
I'm not, it was-. It's actually my 10-year anniversary being in Canada next week. So, I've been here for almost a decade now, which is just crazy to think, but it's just always been a goal of mine. My retail career started relatively early on, and I got to the wonderful age of 30 and said, wow, like you spent most of your life focusing on your career and I didn't have the opportunity in my younger years to go traveling or to see the world. So yeah, I've always wanted to travel, never thought it was going to be in an RV, but I took the opportunity to take the time and see the country. It frankly was incredible. It was everything that I'd hoped for and more. There's something so special about driving through the Rockies.
Michael LeBlanc 02:03
Yeah.
Lee Jeyes 02:04
and you can just for hours, you know, it just it just it just keeps giving right every twist and turn gives you something new, which was just incredible, and I got to see everything that I wanted to see from bear to moose to mountains to waterfalls, and I also had the opportunity to bring some of my family along for the trip too. So, I have my sister and two nieces for a month and then I brought my mum along for a month which was just, just incredible to be able to have that experience with my mum, you don't get, you don't get the opportunity to spend a month with your mom at 30 years old.
Michael LeBlanc 02:33
Yeah, well what an adventure. I mean, I think many, many Canadians would benefit from that, I've had the ability to travel across Canada, but I actually too would love to do in an RV. All right, well listen, listen, we jumped right in the you and I don't think we've ever actually met in person because I think it was during the COVID era that we were connected through RCC, but let's start at the beginning. Who are you and you know, tell us a bit about your, your background. Well, you've kind of alluded to it a little bit been in Canada for, for 10 years. What, what's your personal and professional journey and what are you doing now?
Lee Jeyes 03:10
Yeah, so for anyone that doesn't know me, my first name is Lee, surname Jeyes. I've spent the last 16 and a half years in retail, specifically with Walmart. So, I spent just over nine years with Walmart Canada, and then the remaining seven years with ASDA in the UK when they were owned by Walmart. My story is slightly unique, but I don't think it's too uncommon in retail. But I started as a 15-year-old boy stacking shelves in my hometown in Northampton, England. Just, just there for a Christmas temporary job. Six-, six weeks of work and then, you know, didn't expect it to be anything other than that and then here we are, yeah, 16, almost 17 years later. So, in that time I spent, you know, time across operations, loss prevention, ecommerce, and then spent the last four, four and a half years in the innovation space. So, it's been an incredible journey and I love, I love retail.
Michael LeBlanc 04:04
And was it talking about how you came to Canada, I mean, Walmart big organization, you could have chosen to go in many, many places, or was it, was it an opportunity you couldn't pass up or did you, did you want to leave and go international to begin with and that kind of presented itself, talk about that a bit?
Lee Jeyes 04:23
Yeah, that's a unique story, too. I guess. There's really two things. I was the youngest ever store manager at 21, which is really cool.
Michael LeBlanc 04:31
21.
Lee Jeyes 04:32
But also, yeah, but also nerve wracking because a lot of the people I was managing or leading are a time where, you know, aunts and uncles or parents of my, my high school friends. So, I guess I learned pretty early that I wasn't the most important person, and my job was to serve them, but yeah, I had an opportunity to go on an international development program. Suppose-, supposed to be for 18 months actually, I was only supposed to be here for 18 months and then I went to a shareholder’s event which Walmart does every year in Arkansas I met the Canadian team and then came to Canada for a visit and then managed to make Canada the country that I chose to come and do an international assignment on. So yeah, that's how it started and almost 10 years later, I never went back. So, it's been it's been the best move of my life to be honest, I've loved Canada, it's been incredible.
Michael LeBlanc 05:20
That Walmart meeting, that, you know, annual meeting, that's legend and retail, right, big, big entertainers’ big facility. Fast moving, it's no ordinary meeting I, it's huge.
Lee Jeyes 05:31
It's huge, yes, huge. They bring the filling people I think there's somewhere close to 3000 associates from across the globe. It was interesting as I actually refused to go the first time, I'm typically extremely introverted and the thought of being in a large crowd and cheering and being at this big event scared the life out of me. So I said no and then the following year, my district manager at the time, had already signed me up and kind of forced me to go but yeah, it's a huge event, you get to you get to really see the size and scale of Walmart, you get to bring a lot of cultures together and then there's some really cool events, you get to see the history, you get to go to the first ever store and get into the, to the stores that are out there. And then there's some pretty famous acts that they're performing. So, when I was there, Hugh Jackman was the host and Elton John and Ed Sheeran were performing together in the evening, which was, which was pretty cool, because I love both of those artists. So-
Michael LeBlanc 06:23
Did they bring anybody whose, whose name our listeners might reco-, might recognize.
Lee Jeyes 06:28
Oh, no, no. It was a surreal moment, but it's an incredible conference.
Michael LeBlanc 06:34
So you, you joined Walmart Canada, and Walmart Canada has had-, you know, it's interesting, because we had a space here, as you would know, with, well, I guess stretching back to even Target but even more recently, where you had some US based companies exit the market and you know, I spent a lot of time in the US and they're like, what's going on and I said, You got to understand context. There's far more successful international US companies in Canada than there are failures. I mean, the failure is kind of, kind of small, and they're all, they're all idiosyncratic reasons. You know, as an international person thinking about Canada I mean, it does occur, and it is the case that Canada is a different unique market. Is it, from your observation sitting here, that the successful formula that Walmart undertook, I think it is to kind of get to know the market, take a, take a solid strategy and apply to the market but understand the unique dynamics of the market itself, yeah?
Lee Jeyes 07:30
Yeah, this is I think, what was interesting when I first moved Canada was, Target had just come to town actually, the store manager had spent some time with took me to a target and I could kind of feel the energy in the nerves in the business when I first moved over, and I didn't really have the background and the context like they'd had but I know that Walmart in itself had put a lot of plans in place to make sure that they're able to, to compete against that but yes, definitely that what can you what can you take from the US that the woodwork and translate here, but what's uniquely different that you still need to maintain Canadian context on so I guess the biggest surprise to me coming out of Europe at the time was, as I left Aldi and Lidl were just, just at the start of the disruption of UK market and there's one part of the story that I don't think too many people talk about, but there was actually a discount retailer in the UK, a few years before that, as your Walmart had acquired called Netto.
Lee Jeyes 08:28
You might see them elsewhere in Europe, and they were a hard, hard discounter, similar to an Aldi and Lidl, but as they made the strategic choice, choice at the time, to convert them to more like convenient type locations, Tesco Express, Sainsbury's local type company locations, but unfortunately, I think it was now in hindsight, the wrong strategy, because the locations one in the place where it was convenient, there were more like retail type parks that you would get in the UK. So, to be honest, I think people forget that part that at the time, had the opportunity to they acquired a discount retailer with a lot of locations, and I think if they had the time again, there would have maintained that discount heart discount model that has continued to disrupt the UK market.
Lee Jeyes 09:11
Oh, I'll share an interesting story at the time I was living at home with my, my parents still and my dad had my discount card for Walmart and I remember the day that he gave it back to me and my dad was extremely frugal, and there was a 10% discount and I said, what do you mean you given me the car but he said I don't need it anymore. I said I'll go to Aldi, and I said even with my 10% as an associate that was still cheaper. So that I think is, was a huge learning, not seeing, or at least not my early perceptions, but there was not as much of a hard, hard discounter, although we do have some great discount retailers in this country. Aldi and Lidl are just a different beast. They just, they were just obliterating the UK market.
Michael LeBlanc 09:52
I met the President of Action in I was in Barcelona in the spring and they're, they're Netherlands based take it, you know, they're just taking share in across Europe for I think they're now number France is number one, I guess you call them a hard discounter, but I mean, it gets to the core of our conversation we're gonna have is like you know innovation never stand still just because you're, you're strong today doesn't mean you're going to be strong tomorrow, right that kind of rust never sleeps. There's a Neil Young Canadian reference for you right there.
Michael LeBlanc 10:22
Hey, let's talk about, let's talk about your time innovating because your last gig at, at Walmart Canada was, was in charge of innovation, I'm kind of curious, like, on the one hand, and I've been in large organizations and smaller ones and the benefits of the large organization is you've got tremendous resources at your disposal, you have tremendous scale, even, you know, even making small tweaks can add up to big things. Now, on the other hand, you've got, you know, lots of, you know, sometimes necessary, sometimes unnecessary bureaucracy, innovations have to be fairly significant. There's a big queue and, you know, to touch a store, it's got to be fairly significant. How do you, how do you manage through all that and, and maybe you could share some, some examples, if you could, broadly of wins, and, and even fails where you tried to kind of be that leader of, of innovations, it’s a small world is, sorry, it's a small world. It's a small world blah-, it's a small, it's a small word, but it's a big role talk, talk about your experience?
Lee Jeyes 11:22
Yes, it's huge. I think it's a great, great question. I think one of the my favorite lines I used to share with peers or anybody coming into the organization was don't judge me by the idea, judge me by the ability to implement it inside of a such a complicated system. So, most people want to talk to me about self-checkouts or the actual technology or their innovation themselves. In fact, I'd often refuse to do that inside of the organization, when you get invited to go to different stakeholder meetings, or different division meetings that want to talk about all the core tech and most of my presentation would be that there isn't that much value in me talking about the exact technology or debating that with you.
Lee Jeyes 12:01
What I can do, though, is try and give you as many lessons of how do you take an idea and scale it inside of an organization that is so complex, that truly is the secret sauce that, that I think a lot of retailers and new, new leaders coming into the organization wrestle with. So, for me there was, there's, I guess there was, two things that mattered most to me. One was, I think it was a helper, and continues to be a help for me, I started in the frontlines of retail. So, I truly had the eyes and the ears of the frontline retail associates and the store managers, the district managers, I was one of them as such, but there's
Michael LeBlanc 12:39
You're always worried about those, those, those words of dread. I'm from the head office, I'm here to help.
Lee Jeyes 12:44
Yes, that's it and to be honest, you never want a groundswell coming from the frontlines of a product or on innovation, that doesn't work, it, that's the quickest way for a project to die and retail frontline employees, you know, not brought into it. So, it's the quickest way for projects to fail. So I think that making sure that I had a true pulse and sense on the associates and the leaders in the stores really helped me and it seems so obvious, but I think a lot of leaders underestimate that there was a period in my career where I was responsible as being the, I guess, the filter between all of the projects that would happen in the, in the home office and how they translate into the stores as part of the essential operations team and I would say, Michael, that the number one factor between a successful and not successful project was how involved were the people on the front lines of the stores.
Lee Jeyes 13:37
And make sure the work that you're doing, you know, drives a goal for them. I often usually call it the 'Win, Win, Win', which is a win for your boss, a win for the company and a win for, a win for your stakeholders and if you can get those three things, right, the project will move at a rapid pace and it becomes our projects, not Lee's project if that makes sense.
Lee Jeyes 13:37
Because a lot of people make a guess, a wrong assumption that when your project is approved by the C suite, or the CFO signs it off, you're good to go and the reality is the work starts the minute it hits the frontline of the stores, because those are the people that need to come to work tomorrow and your idea changes what they do. So having the frontline involved and brought into the programs and being good policy has been critical throughout my career. The second has been just bringing people together through cross functional collaboration, I think it's very easy to think that it's easy to reject bureaucracy, you see it as something that slows you down. It's frustrating. You know, you have seen your level approval, so why does everyone else's opinions matter, I actually used to see it as an accelerant, because, yes, it may slow you down in the start, but it will pay you so much more dividends later on if you bring people together early on in the process.
Michael LeBlanc 14:50
Well, let me let me pick up on that thought because, you know, reflecting what you're saying, you know, they sometimes the risk is and I've seen this happen with you know, Chief Customer Officer okay that, that individual owns customers, I don't have to worry about it or you know that one group or role or individual earns innovation. So, I don't have to really think about innovation somebody else is. Is that is, that a risk as well that I guess that's solved by what you're describing, right, make, make sure everybody's brought into the process?
Lee Jeyes 15:18
Yeah, it's definitely a risk. The three, I would say the, the biggest, first is incentive. The most organizations' incentive structures, even up to the C suites, are not typically built towards long term innovation. You know, it's about quarterly earnings. It's about annual bonuses, and it's about India return and value and if you think about the tenure of the C suite executive, most of them are not there, especially in markets like Canada that you might see a stepping stone markets for bigger markets, although it's, you know, becoming a bigger market now, you know, they're typically only there for 2, 3, 4 years. So, if you think about longer term innovation on the horizon, many of them aren't incentivized. Neither are the associates in the actual organization. For the short term. They're all incentivized for short term returns.
Lee Jeyes 16:07
So that's the challenge, I think second is making sure that you've really got a good sponsor, a good C-, CFO, because any, any early-stage innovation is expensive and good and bad ideas look the same at the start. And you really need a CFO to look at it from a portfolio perspective. Knowing that you know, not every single idea that you bring to the table can be evaluated on an NPV and IRR model and then the third point that you mentioned is structure. I truly think if you want to understand how well an organization is thinking about innovation, the structure of the C suite is a good tale, because a lot of the C suite roles although some of have evolved, frankly, it's still too siloed, in my opinion, and who really is responsible for that.
Lee Jeyes 16:53
And my last point is that, in the next stage of retail innovation, in my, my opinion, is truly systematic innovation. It's, for a long time, a lot of the innovation that's been driven and retail has been done in silos. So, it's done by operations, or merchandising, or supply chain and truthfully, a lot of the system that now exists inside of a retailer needs open heart surgery, and the system itself needs innovating and it's no one's job to do that. So I think the C suite roles is a good tell as to how much focus is on innovation and that one of the biggest challenges that's going to hold retailers back is not the Amazons of the world and Googles of the world, it's, it's how well are you able to disrupt your own business model and structure to enable innovation to be successful in the long run, that will be the biggest barrier that I think poses challenges for a lot of innovators?
Michael LeBlanc 17:47
Well, I guess that naturally lends into the My next question, which is this idea of Clayton Christensen's Innovator's Dilemma, which is really, in a roundabout way, part of what you're describing, right, that, that taking risks and, and innovating your way potentially out of one market into another. There's, there's some, you know, there's some drag on disruption, is, do you think about that model, is that something that you incorporate into your, your, your model about how you drive innovation?
Lee Jeyes 18:16
Yeah, I'm a huge believer in the model. In fact, a lot of my work was built on that model. If you think about the five years I've spent in innovation in retail, the first three years of that was on much more sustaining innovation. It's working on things like self-checkouts, electronic shelf labels, you know, in store robotics, which are still sustaining the business model, scanning go and then, when I finished my career, or Walmart as the head of innovation at Blue Labs, the incubator was focused on much more disruptive, three, five plus year how innovation, which was testing things with AI, computer vision, but also playing in things like retail inside of the metaverse.
Lee Jeyes 18:57
So, and I can tell you, both of those jobs were fundamentally different how I thought about unstructured innovation, from a sustaining standpoint versus disrupted was radically different, much different, whether it was the structure of the team, the capabilities that you need to be able to deliver those innovation, or even the financial framework that you need to have in place with the again, the CFO, because it just operates differently. It's very, very different. So frankly, I'd say the first part of my career, where I was delivering sustaining innovation enabled the second, second part of my career, because if I hadn't have built a portfolio of innovation that was scaling across the organization, driving value, Blue Lab would never have existed and frankly, that's how the conversation started. That conversation was, hey, you've kind of figured out how to do this innovation thing for us. Do you want to do more of it, what's next, then that was where we built Blue Labs, so I truly believe in it and I do believe you need both as an organization if you and it doesn't need to be equally weighted, but you do need to make sure that a percentage of the annual budgets are going to be set into a easy to access place for long term innovation that's not measured on the same thresholds that the Sustaining innovation would be.
Michael LeBlanc 20:13
I guess, the, the metaphor, or the close proximity of that is university type innovation, which is, you know, doesn't always have a purpose. It's just as innovation for innovation's sake, but out of that comes some pretty startling, some pretty startling disruptions. Let's talk about, you know, I just did a report for Retail Council, and my quarterly report and asked a bunch of retailers about retail tech and where they were thinking about it, and you mentioned a couple of them, you know, electronic shelf tags, I talked about RFID. We talked about AI, just self-checkout, just a, just a menu of different things. What do you think is, has got the potential to be the most, how do I say it, not just necessarily disruptor, but the most beneficial, systematic as you describe it, disruption, or is it each of these are distinct, but they all work together. What, how do you think about those, those, throw out some names like that and where's your head at?
Lee Jeyes 21:10
Yeah, this is, this is a topic that I think about a lot. I'm most excited about the blend of AI, computer vision and robotics together. I think that the ecosystem arguably would be disruptive in most retailers right now, because I actually don't believe that there's been a significant amount of change and retail in the 16 plus years, I've been part of it. If we're honest with ourselves, if you think about the retail experience, from a customer perspective, if you walked around the grocery store today, there really isn't too much change, right? You might see some self-checkouts, you might see some electronic shelf labels, probably see a few online grocery pickers and some parking spots, a lot of loyalty. The core operation of retail, at least from a customer perspective, hasn't changed too much and a lot of the innovation has been behind the scenes.
Lee Jeyes 22:00
I truly believe that this combination, and it is emerging, because when I left Walmart in January, I truly believe we're right on the edge of, of scaling a lot of this technology, but the blend of AI, computer vision and robotics working inside of a retailer, not in a siloed way, but in an end to end way, I truly believe is disruptive on what is some of the biggest challenges in retail like supply chain, labor allocation, merchandise assortment straight, like all of the things that, frankly, right now are still heavily weighted on human decision making and experience. If you can, if you can wrap that Oda loop of decide, act, observe and orient in a way that can test and simulate these, what are today's tests and retail. That's where the power is. And I, and it is coming because I've seen it coming and I'm, I'm a big believer that someone's going to disrupt it very soon.
Lee Jeyes 22:55
Because retail, the, the testing and retail, if you're just testing new MVP, or an idea, a lot of it is we decide centrally, and then we hope that it gets executed in the field and we hope that we get the outcome and if you put yourself in the shoes of a CEO of a large company, right now, a 12 year old in a developing nation likely has more information at their fingertips than a CEO does and all of the decisions that are frankly being made are often being made by experience and humans and that's not a bad thing. I just think a lot of these decisions or strategies could be simulated through technology and innovation. So, the blend of those three things coming together. Let me, let me make it a real thing. One of the cool things I got to work on that, I think was really disruptive. How do you reimagine the inventory management process inside of a retail store, because frankly, it's, it's archaic. And it's impossible for an associate to do well, you ask an associate to try and manage a store with 100,000 SKUs and 10 to $12 million in inventory and ask them to do it accurately.
Lee Jeyes 24:01
It's almost an impossible task and that's just one part of the system. So, we've got this really cool opportunity to work with I mean, you would see focal technologies. Walmart Canada, I think is one of the first retailers in the world to scale, scale computer vision technology at the shelf edge across its stores, most every store, I think by now has it and that opportunity to just take that information and data that we've never had for the first time in history of retail. If you think about this, Michael, if you're a merchant, and you work in the home office, you've never been able to tell if a products on the shelf unless you go to the store.
Michael LeBlanc 24:33
Yeah.
Lee Jeyes 24:34
You can hope you can pay for some reps to go in and check it, you know it's in the building maybe because you've got perpetual inventory, but you never know if it's actually on the shelf and then you don't know if customers are looking at it, if it's in front of a pole like whatever. There's so many different unique circumstances in retail that the power of AI computer vision of robotics coming together to make a lot of those decisions faster and to simulate them, I think is where I'm most excited.
Michael LeBlanc 24:58
So interesting, you know, I think about the different projects that I've seen and come across the table. I do worry sometimes, particularly in the Canadian context that I'm going to tie a bit of immigration policy into this, where we're bringing in temporary foreign workers and sometimes more manufacturing and basically, you're trying to fill the gap of innovation with a lot of relatively inexpensive talent, I feel like it, the risk is that it suppresses innovation and technology, do you, do you think about that as well?
Lee Jeyes 25:32
A lot. The Canadian ecosystem is a great ecosystem for innovation, you only need to think about the-, Toronto, for example, is a great hub, but there are significant barriers that prevent it. And we know that a lot of the great tip and technology that gets invented here goes down south. So, I do think it's a huge opportunity and I think it's going to be a key enabler for the Canadian economy is to keep driving innovation ecosystem in the cities, and it attracts a lot of, a lot of talent, but there's some significant barriers, significant barriers.
Michael LeBlanc 26:04
There's, I've also been thinking about building versus buying and, and, last week in the news, Amazon talked about putting out an orders at $4 million into an AI company. You mentioned AI. It's interesting, because you know that we do see this sometimes in many organizations, will they'll go out and buy innovation, basically, and then try to incorporate it into the enterprise. Are you a fan of that, is there a role for that in enterprise?
Lee Jeyes 26:31
Yeah, I think I think we've seen a lot of it and I think there's a big role for it, especially as change speeds up like, I don't if you listen to much of Ray Kurtzweil, but he talks about, by the end of this decade, he believes that one year of change is going to happen within 12 days and that's the pace of technological evolution. He's one of the world's leading, leading futurists and I think we see that actually, I think we see that with artificial intelligence when AI for or when that when it came out earlier this year as the hot topic and yeah, everybody was talking about it, where it started to where it is now is unbelievable. I mean, it started just like the early-stage internet with really gimmicky things like generating images, that, that was the same as the internet.
Lee Jeyes 27:14
I remember, a program and if you remember this, there was a website called A Million Dollar Homepage, which was just a picture of a million pictures on one page, or dogs.com and that guy was a billionaire, just by having pictures of dogs on the internet and I think we've seen the same with AI, the early stages, it was really novel things right, but I think the amount of plugins and the real business use applications that are have merged since is, is moving at a speed that I've never seen. So, I do believe there's an opportunity, especially as things get faster, but I still think it comes back to organizational structure, and culture, because I've seen too many examples of where you've been great talent in and it just doesn't work, we aren't able to adopt their mindset. We put too much bureaucracy around what they need to do. So, with the right teams and the right support structure. I think there's a place for it, but unfortunately, I've seen far too many failures where they just doesn't work out because of the structure of the mothership.
Michael LeBlanc 28:13
Yeah, it's an evocative idea, right, bring in that startup, that innovator, and we'll put that DNA in the organization and, you know, one plus one equals three. I mean, it sounds very good at the high level, but I know what you mean, exactly. So, listen, last question for you. Advice to the listeners and I'm going to frame this in a kind of a two start, one stop and, and of course, listeners, the vast majority of which will not have access to the resources you might have had at Walmart in terms of innovation, but let's talk about principle and practice. Give some advice for the listeners around two things they should start doing if they want to innovate at the speed of disruption, as my partner Steve Dennis says, and one thing they should stop trying to do, because it's just not and won't be successful.
Lee Jeyes 28:57
I think the first one is, I've actually believe most of the barriers to innovation are human barriers. So, I think the first one is, start and find the cheapest and fastest way to test your idea and get the idea out of your head. It's amazing how many great ideas are stuck in people's heads and the first stage of any idea is writing it down, putting it in front of people, meaning write it out or draw it out and see their, their response, because we're good at convincing ourselves every idea is a great idea, but I could. It's funny, I used to run workshops on this and just to try and convince people to take a pen or pad and try and draw out or write out their idea is fascinating to watch because it means that you need to put your idea to the world and the potential of rejection or people laughing or they all those things that you put in your head as potential outcomes or frankly rarely ever happened they're just barriers to people.
Lee Jeyes 29:49
So, the first thing is like write it down, draw it out, put it in front of a bunch of people and ideally, you're those people can't be your family and friends because they're also slightly biased to telling you it's a great idea and then the second would be about incentive. Like, I think you've got to find a way to incentivize your teams for long term innovation. If you're asking people to stand up to take risks, you know, to fail to come back with multiple iterations of something that's not working and to be wrong more than they are right, there's got to be an incentive for them. I laughed, I said this to my mom, at times I said, I, if I promoted people on the amount of times they failed at Walmart, the amount of promotions we would have done, at least in the Blue Labs team would have been exponential, because that was, that was their role it was to fail.
Lee Jeyes 30:33
So, I think, yeah, first write it down and draw it out to find an incentive to make sure that you can, you know, there's a long-term value and a benefit for the people that are willing to break the status quo. Those are the two stars that I would, would work on stop, I would say, stop judging the idea. That sounds crazy, but ideas are easy to come by everybody's got them start judging the evidence that the other people think that idea is good. So, I think we as humans, naturally, we think it's a good or bad idea and we'll close ideas down. I would never judge the idea on the surface, I would say, go and find the evidence and that could be an early MVP test, you put it in front of 15 people in the streets of Toronto, it could be anything, and you judge the evidence that other people believe it's a good idea, because if you judge it right on the surface, you'll potentially miss an opportunity to iterate into something great. And most great innovation never came straight out of a sticky note and implemented exactly how it was first formed. So those are the pieces of advice I'd give to the listeners.
Michael LeBlanc 31:34
Oh, fantastic. I mean, listen, it's been a great discussion and you're back from your Canadian Tour. If somebody wants to get in touch with you, learn more or keep up with what you're thinking. Are you a LinkedIn type person or where's a good place to connect in?
Lee Jeyes 31:48
LinkedIn, yeah, now my, now my traveling is out the way for a while to be much more active back on there again, but yeah, LinkedIn is typically the place that I'm most active.
Michael LeBlanc 31:56
Right, well, fantastic. Well, Lee, thanks so much for joining me on The Voice of Retail podcast. Fascinating discussion. Wish you much continued success and I think you're at the, at the point of the spear, so to speak in retail, it needs a lot of disruption, and there's a lot of disruption and needs a lot of innovation. So, thanks for filling us in and giving us some advice and like I said, continued success.
Lee Jeyes 32:18
Thanks for having me. It's been a pleasure.
Michael LeBlanc 32:21
Thanks for tuning into this episode of The Voice of Retail. If you haven't already, follow on your favorite podcast platform so new episodes will land automatically each week and be sure to check out my other retail industry media properties and the Remarkable Retail podcast with Steve Dennis, and the Global E-Commerce Leaders podcast.
I'm your host Michael LeBlanc, senior retail advisor, keynote speaker, Rethink Retail 2023 Global Top Retail Influencer. If you want more content or chat, follow me on LinkedIn.
Safe travels everyone.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
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