Ask dumb questions, embrace mistakes — and other lessons on innovation | Dave Raggio
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You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hume. Instead of being entrepreneurs, you can be an intrapreneur, working toward innovations and solutions within the company you already work for. In his 2024 talk, Intuit Vice President Dave Raggio takes us through lessons from working on a Skunk Works team inside his larger business.

and how the rest of us can do it too. It's coming up after the break. Support for this show comes from Capital One. Banking with Capital One helps you keep more money in your wallet with no fees or minimums on checking accounts and no overdraft fees.

Just ask the Capital One Bank guy. It's pretty much all he talks about, in a good way. He'd also tell you that this podcast is his favorite podcast, too. Aw, really? Thanks, Capital One Bank guy. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com slash bank. Capital One N.A., member FDIC.

Hi, I'm Bilal Velsadu, host of TED's newest podcast, The TED AI Show, where I talk with the world's leading experts, artists, journalists, to help you live and thrive in a world where AI is changing everything. I'm stoked to be working with IBM, our official sponsor for this episode. In a recent report published by the IBM Institute of Business Value, among those surveyed, one in three companies pause an AI use case after the pilot phase.

And we've all been there, right? You get hyped about the possibilities of AI, spin up a bunch of these pilot projects, and then crickets. Those pilots are trapped in silos. Your resources are exhausted and scaling feels daunting. What if instead of hundreds of pilots, you had a holistic strategy that's built to scale? That's what IBM can help with. They

They have 65,000 consultants with generative AI expertise who can help you design, integrate, and optimize AI solutions. Learn more at ibm.com slash consulting. Because using AI is cool, but scaling AI across your business, that's the next level.

Support for the show comes from Remarkable, and I'm really excited to talk to you about my Remarkable Paper Pro. It's the latest and greatest paper tablet. It's a digital notebook, but it's designed to let you write by hand onto the notebook.

It'll help you take better notes because it has a paper-like feel. And then there's digital tools that you wouldn't find in a paper notebook. Like you can copy and paste and you can move and skill and you can turn your handwriting into type text. So I love being at like...

A TED conference, for example, and taking notes in my Remarkable, which is just one tablet that I can take around everywhere through all the sessions of TED. Remarkable has created a tablet that truly captures the feel of writing on paper, but then pairs it with these really useful digital tools and no distractions. Remarkable is a really thoughtful gift for the thinker, note taker, or knowledge worker you know. Or maybe that sounds like you. In which case, it's time to treat yourself.

Beat the holiday rush and get your paper tablet at remarkable.com today. And now our TED Talk of the day. Two years ago, I became an accidental intrapreneur, meaning an entrepreneur, but within a larger company. Didn't mean to. When I started at Intuit in 2020,

My job was to do marketing and advertising for QuickBooks. But it was in that position that I saw an opportunity, an opportunity for Intuit to help connect our small business customers with complementary products and services that would help them grow and thrive while also being good for our business. Now, I sat on the idea for a while, really wanting to focus on the work that was right in front of me, but I couldn't shake it.

So I eventually pulled together a proposal, brought it to our leadership team, and much to my surprise, they said, go pursue it. And it was at that moment I started making every mistake possible and trying to bring it to life. But through those mistakes, I've learned what it means to be a successful entrepreneur, and I'm going to share those mistakes today in the hopes that if there's anyone that has an idea and wants to build something from within, that this can be helpful.

So the first lesson I learned was to socialize your vision early and often. I had romanticized the idea of a skunkworks-like startup within Intuit. I built a lean team. We worked in the shadows. Everything was on a need-to-know basis. The more people that got involved, the more process, the more bureaucracy, the more opinions. It was just going to slow us down. And it worked.

but not very long. The problem was, as we started to grow and become a legitimate business, I needed the support from a lot more teams. And I didn't have it. Some of the most uncomfortable conversations I had with my coworkers was going to someone that I knew was stretched thin, had no idea what I was working on, and telling them that they needed to carve out additional time to help support it. I was not very popular in those moments.

In my attempt to move fast, I made us move slow, because with every new team that we approached, we were starting from scratch and had to paint that picture over and over again. This is also when I learned the value of a well-placed happy hour or coffee break. So I realized it was really important for me to establish a human connection and not a transactional one. So I'd ask my colleagues to go out and grab a beer or coffee, and we would talk.

And in those conversations, I would learn about their workload, their resource constraints, about what energizes them and their teams. It was also an opportunity for me to share my vision, why I was excited, and what I thought I could do for our customers and our business. And now, back to the episode.

The second lesson that I learned, very similar to the first but on the flip side, is this idea of listening early and often. I'd been in marketing for almost 20 years at that point. I'd worked on Super Bowl ads, global brand campaigns. I thought I knew everything that there was to know about marketing and advertising. And because of that, I had a crystal clear picture in my head of how I wanted every piece to work in this new initiative.

When someone would say that something was impossible or had a difference of opinion, I immediately labeled them as blockers. They were either not understanding what we were doing, they were scared or simply just didn't want to do the hard thing. The truth was, I was grossly overconfident in my understanding of everything. I knew very little about corporate accounting principles. I knew enough to be dangerous about things like privacy law.

And those "blockers" were actually deeply invested in the success and were trying to prevent me from making the mistakes that would get the project killed. And to be clear, I was making a lot of mistakes. It's only because of them that the project not only lived on but thrived. Listening became so important to the project that we implemented something that we called "dumb question sessions."

These were a safe place, judgment-free zones, where myself and others could ask questions that maybe we were nervous to ask in other forums. Maybe because we should have known the answer to those. Maybe because it's obvious to the rest of the organization, but just because of the role that we sit in, we were never exposed to it. Regardless, the purpose of it was to have a shared understanding of all parts of our business. I remember one specific example where there was an acronym that had been used for weeks, and I didn't know what it was.

I didn't ask early on. So much time had gone by that I felt like I was trapped. I didn't want to ask at that point. I thought I was going to have to live with this lie for the rest of my life. But it was because of the dumb question session and the judgment-free zone that I was able to ask and fill in all the gaps. And actually, one note on that last example: I'm pretty sure there was a little bit of judgment, but I think I deserved it. So the last lesson that I learned, and the one that I feel is most important and possibly counterintuitive, is that the stakes can be quite high.

your personal risk tolerance doesn't matter. If you go out and start your own business and it fails, it is not a good thing. It can add stress to your family, obviously financial implications. Intuit was founded on trying to make sure that that doesn't happen. But if it does, it's relatively contained. If I were to do something that compromises our customers' trust in our products and our brand or create a poor product experience for our QuickBooks product,

The implications can be far-reaching. It can impact a lot of small businesses. You can't shoot from the hip. That's not to say that you need to work out of a sense of fear either. You just have to be super thoughtful about how every decision you make, how every action you take could impact the broader organization.

To wrap up, again, if you are someone that has an interesting idea that you feel like you want to build from within, I encourage you: work with the system. There is a lot of horsepower built up in these large organizations. Lean on the experts, learn from them. Will you go a little bit slower at times? Yes. Will you make compromises that you didn't want to make? Absolutely. Will the product be better for it? 100 percent. And that's what you want, and that's what it takes to be successful.

Thank you. Something about the way we're working just isn't working. When you're caught up in complex pay requirements or distracted by scheduling staff in multiple time zones, or thinking about the complexity of working in Monterey while based in Montreal, you're not doing the work you're meant to do. But with Dayforce, you get HR, pay, time, talent, and analytics all in one global people platform. So you can do the work you're meant to do. Visit dayforce.com slash do the work to learn more.

Support for this podcast comes from Odoo. Imagine relying on a dozen different software programs to run your business, none of which are connected, and each one more expensive and more complicated than the last. It can be pretty stressful. Now imagine Odoo. Odoo has all the programs you'll ever need, and they're all connected on one platform.

Doesn't Odoo sound amazing? Let Odoo harmonize your business with simple, efficient software that can handle everything for a fraction of the price. Sign up today at Odoo.com. That's O-D-O-O dot com. That was Dave Raggio speaking at TED Next. This talk was made in partnership with Intuit. If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at TED.com slash curation guidelines.

And that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This episode was produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Autumn Thompson, and Alejandra Salazar. It was mixed by Christopher Fazi-Bogan. Additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Balarezo. I'm Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening. PR.