Ken Zakalik is the Director of Innovation at ALSAC, where his team helped ALSAC earn the honor of the number one company for innovators to work at by Fast Company. Ken describes himself as a career corporate-entrepreneur, and he has helped companies from large fortune 100 organizations to small 10-person startups to create and launch industry-disrupting innovative products, usher in new effective ways of working, and help to drive transformation.

In this episode, Ken and Steven discuss the mission of ALSAC and St Jude Children’s Research Hospital and how their innovation program has helped them adapt during the Covid-19 pandemic. We also talk about his own roots in pursuing a career in making new and different things, and how he’s been able to launch innovation programs throughout that journey. Ken shares some practical tips on getting buy-in from your organization as well as what it takes to scale new and different ideas that you don’t want to miss.

The 334 Cast is dedicated to bringing you the latest in business agility, innovation, and the future of work. In this episode, Michael Graber from Southern Growth Studios joins us for a conversation about innovation.

We talk about the role of culture in driving innovation and how business agility and innovation work together. Michael shares with us how he sees companies using innovation to adapt during an incredibly disruptive time and the growing trend of conscientious capitalism. We then talk about the innovation boot camps that Southern Growth Studios holds and a new product called Sprout.

To learn more about Southern Growth Studio, visit them at https://southerngrowthstudio.com/

Our first guest on the 334Cast is Jamie Smith. Jamie is the CIO at the University of Phoenix and a leader in the digital transformation space. His focus on creating an organizational culture that encourages agility and adaptability has helped him drive change at organizations like ServiceMaster, American Home Shield, and Nissan Motors.

In this episode, Jamie and I discuss the roots of Lean Manufacturing in Agile Software Development and Business Agility. We also discuss the role of Portfolio Steering in strategic agility and how the concept is applied at The University of Phoenix. Jamie shares with us how the world of education is reacting to the challenges in the current climate and how higher education is changing to react. We then go on to discuss strategies for successful agile transformations and the impact of culture on those initiatives. Jamie talks about the Scaled Agile Framework as a “gateway drug” to agility and how they’ve moved past those concepts in developing product teams at the University of Phoenix. We discuss the need to treat Product Management as a discipline and how his team is helping to develop those skills in the organization. We close by talking about where Jamie finds inspiration and what he’s reading in his quest for the “unified theory of business agility.”