-: Welcome to Leaders on Imagination,
where we ask business leaders
about the role of imagination in business.
Very pleased today to be joined by Bob Goodson,
who is a former language scholar
turned Silicon Valley Entrepreneur.
He helped build Yelp and he is currently
the president and co-founder of NetBase Quid
which is a visual and semantic analytics company.
So welcome Bob.
-: Hello Martin, good to see you.
-: What is imagination, Bob, to you?
-: I always think about the word origin, original,
because it used to mean for the longest time
that which has a very clear origin.
And only recently has it come to mean
that which does not have a clear origin.
I think it points to the nature of creativity
and imagination about involving
the recombination of existing things.
-: And what role does imagination play in business?
'Cause we don't often read about it in business textbooks.
-: I think it has a huge role to play today
in helping organizations adapt to the world around them
and the changes happening around them.
And it requires imagination
to see what's happening and act on it.
-: Is there any reason why it's especially important today?
-: Well, in the past year,
businesses have seen more change
in the way people live and the way businesses need to engage
with their customers than any year in history.
And so it's become a specially important
given that fast moving environment that we're operating in.
-: CEOs tell me the imagination is really hard.
It's especially hard in large companies
and in successful companies.
Would you agree and why is it so hard?
-: Yes, it's always difficult,
but I think it's especially difficult,
the larger the organization becomes.
And I think that's because the larger you become,
the more time and effort is spent
on inward facing activities and thinking,
and the less time an organization has
to be interfacing with its boundaries
and that which exists outside of the organization.
-: I know you take special efforts
to keep imagination alive in NetBase Quid.
What are some of your tricks and techniques?
-: Yes, we do.
We embrace an innovative culture
and one of the techniques we use to perpetuate this
is there's competitions through which we saw solutions
to important customer problems
from every employee in the company.
Innovation is not limited to one department
or other at NetBase Quid.
-: So paint a picture of imagination,
something concrete that Quid has done, NetBase Quid,
that you consider to be an act of imagination.
-: I think the most recent thing in the last few years
is that we have re-imagined
what continuous intelligence can be
for the front office functions of an enterprise.
Continuous intelligence has brought automation
and intelligent ways to make decisions
to back office functions and operational matters.
And we've envisaged what this could mean
for front office functions like marketing and strategy.
Things that most people wouldn't imagine could be automated
or this kind of technology could be brought to.
We've imagined that, and we've built a solution for that,
and we're the first to do it.
-: Imagination is triggered by surprise,
and you and I have just had the pleasure
of writing an article together for Harvard Business Review
on the role of spotting and harnessing
anomalies in strategy.
Could you tell us about some of the key ideas
in the article?
-: Yeah, so I think what we
were bringing to the fore
is the fact that detecting trends early enough
to still be a competitive advantage
and still be early enough to act on it is really important.
And it's equal part art and science.
There's a role for creativity and imagination,
a necessary role to even be asking the right questions.
And there's also a role for the latest technology
to be able to mine all the relevant sources of information
to tell you when you should be looking at something
and when something interesting is happening.
-: I remember we had a discussion
about the difference between just a regular anomaly,
just a blip, and a poignant anomaly,
and anomaly that points to possibility.
How do you know if your anomaly points to possibility?
-: Right, there's just so much noise to manage.
And so we have a framework for thinking
about how to identify when something is just a blip
and when something is gonna persist.
And one factor is momentum,
what's the trend behind this?
There's mathematical models that we use
to understand if it's going to persist.
There's the robustness of the observation,
do you witness something happening from multiple angles?
It's no longer enough to see a trend
in one source of information.
You can look at it in multiple ways.
And then the third factor is the impact
that it's going to have in the world,
and in particular to your business.
-: Well, thanks so much for spending time with us, Bob,
sharing your ideas on imagination.
-: Pleasure, thanks Martin.