As a latchkey kid raised by the ‘me’ generation my friends and I, raised by wolves and bad TV, looked to heroes and role models like William Shatner and Sean Connery who never accepted defeat and always preserved who both exemplified the ethos Adidas now coins as ‘Impossible is Nothing’. Since learning this, every time I was told something couldn’t be done, I always tried to figure out a way around the problem that would end in a solution and not a dead end, never accepting no as an answer.
When running product at The North Face I was introduced to world class outdoor athletes like Conrad Anker and Renan Ozturk and I once had the great fortune to share a bouldering expedition with them both in Joshua Tree. As they competed with one another, they both looked at a giant rock and before they ever touched skin to stone, they each predicted how many moves they would make to top out: this is what they called “The Problem” and I realized then that problems to solve are not qualitative. There is no good of problems, there is no bad…. They simply exist to be solved, or not. This was also the first time in my career running product that I had an advanced concepts team and together we developed a suite of consumer electronics called IO GEAR: an ecosystem of heating, lighting and ventilation for tents, sleeping bags and apparel that, while it never made it to market, as an outdoor product person was my first foray into the digital: wearables, firmwear, and CX. This greatly informed my ability to work with Misfit to develop the world’s first swimming wearable device for Speedo which ended up being sold in every Apple store on the planet concurrent with both the Rio and Tokyo Olympics.
This set of experiences led me to understand, a dozen years ago, why people kept saying ‘data was the new gold’ and that everything would soon be digital, from product reaction to experience. While nothing in my training would have indicated I could drive success in the digital and wearables space that the ‘never say no’ ethos I learned from Captain Kirk and James Bond served me well indeed; where I longed to reside was being able to deliver the future state at global scale, that I was addicted to impact, and that as they said in the Three Body Problem: ‘the future is not as far as it used to be’. These events and experiences have punctuated my journey to shape me as the practitioner of Applied Innovation I am today.