Innovation, XBox and Your Financial Plan (SB1645)

Feeling stuck in your financial plan—or maybe just in life in general? Whether it’s your money, career, or day-to-day habits, a little innovation can go a long way. Today, we’re breaking down how to rethink and restructure your approach to financial planning and work-life balance using lessons from Microsoft (yes, the Xbox folks). Dean Carignan and JoAnn Garbin insights on how to build a system for innovation—because the best financial plans (and lives) aren’t built by accident.

Meanwhile, a woman was scammed out of her savings, and a major financial company had to pay a fine—even though they didn’t actually rip her off. What happened? And what does it mean for how we protect our own money? We’ll break it all down.

Elsewhere in the episode, we discuss why trusted contact forms are crucial for safeguarding elderly relatives’ finances, how OG wants you to rethink your daily money habits, and why the Xbox case study holds lessons for designing a better financial plan. Plus, Doug has thoughts on podcast innovation, trivia, and—because it wouldn’t be a proper basement gathering without it—a hot take or two.

What’s Inside Today’s Episode:

A Woman Gets Scammed, But Who Pays the Price? A big financial firm faces a fine—without actually doing anything wrong.
The Xbox Case Study: What Microsoft’s innovation strategy can teach you about structuring your financial future.
Financial Planning Innovations: Why thinking like an engineer (or a game developer) might help you build a better plan.
Rethinking Your Everyday Financial Habits: OG’s take on how small changes lead to big results.
Trusted Contact Forms & Safeguarding Elderly Relatives: A simple but powerful tool to prevent financial disasters.
Charitable Giving Strategies: How to give smarter, not just more.
Doug’s Trivia Time: A deep dive into financial (and podcast) innovation—because why not?
Building a Network in Retirement: Why relationships matter just as much as money when designing your post-work life.

Key Takeaways from the Episode:

You can’t just wing it with your finances. Microsoft doesn’t build Xbox consoles on a whim—your financial future needs the same level of structured innovation.
Don’t assume big financial firms will protect you. A major company had to pay up even though they weren’t the scammers—learn how to protect yourself before something happens.
Small financial tweaks can make a massive difference. Just like product innovations, incremental changes in your money habits can lead to big wins over time.
Retirement isn’t just about the money. You need a network, a purpose, and a strategy—or you’ll find yourself wealthier but bored out of your mind.

Tune in now to learn how to bring structured innovation into your finances, career, and life!

FULL SHOW NOTES: https://stackingbenjamins.com/the-importance-of-innovation-1645

Deeper dives with curated links, topics, and discussions are in our newsletter, The 201, available at https://www.stackingbenjamins.com/201

Enjoy!

Monday Mentor: Dean Carignan and JoAnn Garbin

Dean Carignan and JoAnn Garbin join us in the basement to talk all things innovation – in your work, life, and finances. They dig into how to leverage innovation to reach your goals in their newly released book, The Insider’s Guide to Innovation at Microsoft.

Our Headline

Morgan Stanley loses $843,000 investor claim stemming from ‘gold bar’ scam (InvestmentNews)

Doug’s Trivia

What well-known index fund lover actually detested one way people buy them, the exchange traded fund?

Have a question for the show?

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Other Mentions

Join Us Wednesday!

Tune in on Wednesday when we’re covering what do YOU need to know so you’re prepared if your job goes bye-bye.

Written by: Kevin Bailey

Miss our last show? Listen here: How Does a Money Nerd Think About “Romance”? (SB1644)

Episode transcript

[00:00:00] Joe: You guys about ready to start yet? I’ve been sitting around so soon. Yeah. Waiting for you. 32 minutes ago. We were supposed to start this recording and yet I sit here waiting patiently. It’s absolutely horrible.

[00:00:14] OG: This is, this isn’t me. This is all Doug. You’re baiting us. It is Doug. Joe is such an expert.

[00:00:18] Master Bader. Yeah. He knows how to like, just really get us all involved.

[00:00:25] Doug: I mean, he might as well. Everybody up wear that like. Dickensian Lamplight costume where he is like going down the street, lighting all the gas lights. Any of those words

[00:00:36] are

[00:00:36] Joe: Well,

[00:00:36] Doug: I I

[00:00:37] Joe: did use a sentence that we know,

[00:00:39] Doug: I know.

[00:00:39] Joe: What are you talking about, Mr.

[00:00:41] 1800?

[00:00:42] Doug: Are you Dickensian? Too many syllables for you.

[00:00:45] Joe: Dickensian.

[00:00:47] OG: Could I have it in a spelling please? I have country of origin.

[00:00:51] Joe: Don’t be so Dickensian, Doug. Yeah, we got a show to do.

[00:00:55] Doug: You’re such a Dickensian.

[00:00:58] Joe: All right. Uh, we gotta salute the troops because we do that every week. Number one, because they talk about.

[00:01:03] People that deserve to be saluted on behalf of the men and women at Navy Federal Credit Union and the men and women making podcasts in mom’s basement with a rusty voice today. Hear that? Oh, you kinda like it, don’t you? I, I kind of do. Yeah, it’s kind of neat. Turn over a new leaf.

[00:01:21] Doug: Finally, hitting puberty.

[00:01:22] Trust me, having an awesome voice. It changes your world, man. When you used to have a great voice all the time. 24 7. You’re like, dang. Oh

[00:01:29] Joe: boy. And on behalf of the men and women at Navy Federal Credit Union, here’s to the people keeping us safe. Thank you so much. Let’s go stack some Benjamins together. Now

[00:01:39] Doug: here’s a right proper Dick Kenzie and salute to all troops.

[00:01:43] And now we’re British again. Good day, mate.

[00:01:48] OG: So confused.

[00:01:52] bit: He’s the type of guy you get halfway home from the theme park before you’re like, oh, where’s Doug? Oh no, we have to go back. My wallet’s in his fanny pack. So, oh, do not feel bad for Doug. He’s terrible. Every time he tells a story somewhere, a child loses a balloon.

[00:02:13] Doug: Live from Joe’s mom’s basement and the Stacking Benjamin Show.

[00:02:27] I’m Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Duggan, how innovative is your financial plan today with case studies for Microsoft to help you innovate on the job and with your planning. We welcome innovation scientists. Dean Nan and Joanne Carbin. Plus in our headline, one Big Wall Street firm just lost another judgment. But this one’s different.

[00:02:50] What’s gonna change with your money? Maybe a lot we’ll share and there’s absolutely no way that I’d let you leave without gifting you a piece of my incredible trivia. And now two guys who love compound interest and long walks in the park together, it’s Joe and o ju ju g

[00:03:16] Joe: in the most Dickensian way possible. Which one of you has the parasol over your shoulder? Uh, probably og. Hey everybody, welcome to you. Get Sunscreen the Stack Benjamin Show. Yeah, gotta protect that, that skin,

[00:03:30] OG: right? Wear sunscreen every day. Gotta wear sunscreen every day. How do you get this glow?

[00:03:34] Otherwise,

[00:03:35] Joe: man, speaking of glow, we gotta a great show today because. We are talking about innovation and og, while you may not want innovation in your financial plan, certainly figuring out ways to innovate at work to beyond the projects that matter at work help you bring in more money.

[00:03:50] OG: Take innovation in my financial plan.

[00:03:52] Why not?

[00:03:52] Joe: Well, we’re gonna talk about that we, whether, you know, your financial plan is the old fashioned way, but innovating in your life. I think so Your plan is more robust is something that is really a great analogy. And by the way, they’re going to talk through case studies, Dean and Joanne at Microsoft.

[00:04:11] And the good, the bad, the ugly of things that happen. And I’m gonna wanna walk through those a little bit because nothing I like better than a good case study to dive into our own personal situation. How are, how are you this morning, og?

[00:04:22] OG: I’m coffee up halfway anyway. Got a new coffee make Well you are

[00:04:25] Joe: trying to return a tablet.

[00:04:27] OG: Well, I mean that’s a whole different, you know, it’s an ongoing project.

[00:04:30] Joe: Let’s

[00:04:30] Doug: get into it ’cause it makes you so

[00:04:31] Joe: happy to talk about Well it is annoying though when you’re trying to. Do the right thing and be a happy customer and the company prove to everyone that they’re really not interested in helping you do the right thing and return the product.

[00:04:49] OG: It seems to me that a lot of tech products have a lot of margin built in, and I could be completely mistaken there, but I was looking at the stock price of Apple recently and I surmised that they might have profit built into their, their model. And this isn’t an Apple product, it’s a different product altogether, and I don’t wanna shame them publicly because I think it’s a good company, but it’s, isn’t it a lot easier just to, you know, at the, every once in a while where there’s a problem with a customer, just solve that really quickly.

[00:05:17] Like be known as the people that solve problems as opposed to be known as the company that makes you jump through 10,000 hoops. To return your $500 product that they probably made $300 on, you know? Yeah. Except that it’s like

[00:05:30] Doug: you’re, look, the $300 you’re thinking of is just on the cost of that unit. But you gotta factor in all of the r and d and product development it took to get that into your hands.

[00:05:39] And they gotta make that all be, it’s like pharmaceutical r and d and the cost of drugs. You gotta pay all of that stuff back somehow. You gotta make that money back. I

[00:05:47] OG: mean, it’s kind of like pharmaceutical drugs. I bet. I bet. It’s very similar. It’s pretty much the same, you know, I’m sure they spent $10 billion curing cancer and are selling it to me for $500 a piece, but there’s

[00:05:57] Doug: like four stages of testing the government’s involved.

[00:06:00] OG: Yeah, same, same, but different. Rare earth materials. Same. Same, but different. Nevertheless, there’s a solution for this, and the solution is you just skip the middleman, charge this crap on your Amex card, and when it doesn’t work, you just call Amex and then they make it go away. You know, so there’s a lot of downsides to using credit cards and like the extra fee and all that sort of stuff.

[00:06:22] Sometimes you gotta pay, but every so often your ability to just call Amex and go, this crap that I bought doesn’t work and they don’t freaking wanna return it correctly, and I’m tired of playing their games. And the fine people at American Express go, no problem, sir. Credit received and it’s done. The problem goes away.

[00:06:40] And yeah, I had to pay a little extra for that, but. What’s my time worth? What’s all the, you know, you

[00:06:45] Doug: said skip the middleman. It reminded me of a great meme. I just saw where it said my favorite part of going to the farmer’s market is the part where they take out the middleman and the vegetables cost twice as much.

[00:06:58] I’m still happy helping a farmer and I feel good paying twice as much. No,

[00:07:01] OG: absolutely.

[00:07:02] Doug: At the farmer’s parking. Yes, it’s organic

[00:07:03] OG: bro.

[00:07:04] Doug: It was still funny. I mean I, it is funny. I like the notion of helping out the small farmers too, but it’s true. And it’s funny ’cause it’s true.

[00:07:11] Joe: It is funny how even in our open today we talked a lot about innovation and process and really you can’t, you know, think about innovation in your life.

[00:07:21] And I think Joanne has made this point in their work before. You can’t just trust serendipity when it comes to innovation. You gotta be thinking ahead of time about how do I get that done? How do I create a process? How do I create a system? ’cause all of financial planning is a system. And if we can get more of that done well, then it’s gonna be a great day.

[00:07:40] Let’s, uh, talk about today’s Monday. Mentors, man, I love our Monday mentor segment, Dean Kein and Joanne Garbin. Dean Kein worked for a little company, uh, called McKinsey and Company. Never heard of them. He was in their advanced technology practice, but he’s been with Microsoft at 20 years guiding new businesses, like when we’re gonna talk about the Xbox in multiple AI efforts through their very first growth phases.

[00:08:08] Most recently, he’s been leading AI innovations within Microsoft Research in the office of the chief scientist, Joan Garbin was the director of innovation and Microsoft’s cloud business. Guided her team in developing billion dollar opportunities, including the regenerative data center of the future. And in 2024, she founded Regenerative Labs, a collaboration committed to creating cross sector transformation.

[00:08:34] Something else that’s interesting for anybody that’s a student, Joanne’s degrees from Villanova, mechanical engineering and philosophy. And I think if you wanna be involved in innovation, coupling a classic liberal arts curriculum with something like mechanical engineering, that’s a, that’s a cool place to be.

[00:08:56] Doug: That is pretty good. Cross section. Yeah, I like that. Ganja or that, uh, Venn diagram.

[00:09:00] Joe: Yeah.

[00:09:00] Doug: Cool

[00:09:01] Joe: place to be. Uh, and great forward. I don’t know if she’s forward thinking or just like both of those things, but those two go really well together.

[00:09:08] Doug: But, but let me guess, Joe, you saw. Kegan’s resume and saw the word Xbox and you’re like, I’m having him on.

[00:09:15] I don’t even care what he talks about. I want him on truly, truly that. This is just

[00:09:20] Joe: a ruse to talk about the Xbox. Yeah. On the podcast, Dean and Joanne, coming up next. So first though, we’ve got some sponsors to make sure this is free. You don’t have to pay for any of our Monday mentors or any of the Stacky Benjamin Show.

[00:09:35] We’re gonna say a big thank you to them here for a moment. And then Dean Kernan and Joanne Garbin talking innovation with us on Mentor Monday.

[00:09:52] Joanne indeed. Welcome to Mom’s Basement. Thanks for joining me.

[00:09:56] Dean: Great

[00:09:56] Joe: to be

[00:09:57] Dean: here.

[00:09:57] Joe: So fun. Joanne, I think I’ll start with you because I was watching a video where you were kind of talking about the thing I thought when I first heard about your project with Dean, which is on one hand we’ve got innovation, which seems so like, you know, I’m in the shower and I have an idea, and that creates innovation and it comes at me in these weird places, in these weird times.

[00:10:20] And then you talk about structure and talk about organization. These two things, Joanne, don’t seem to go hand in hand at all. Structure and innovation.

[00:10:30] JoAnn: Yeah. They seem like opposite sides of a coin, like they never shall they meet if your innovation isn’t structured and reliable. I. You’re not gonna build confidence with the people that fund the innovation, and then you can have the best idea in the world, but you’re not bringing it to life.

[00:10:48] I. Whether or not you believe it can be structured, it has to be.

[00:10:53] Mm-hmm.

[00:10:54] JoAnn: Because you need to be able to get better at it over time. You need to be able to teach people how to bring it into what they do and bring them into what you do. So all of that demands that it becomes structured and it just so happens that when you study.

[00:11:11] Decades of innovation in super successful places like Microsoft or from my world, the entrepreneurial world. It is structured. Nobody’s betting their mortgage payment on serendipity. Right, right, right.

[00:11:27] Joe: I hope, I have an idea in the shower tomorrow,

[00:11:28] JoAnn: right? Like, oh man, mortgage is due. I better get an idea.

[00:11:33] It’s like, no, you can’t do that.

[00:11:35] Joe: Well, well, and Dean, the other way that we think about innovation too is there’s this person who’s the innovator. You know, let’s take another company, not Microsoft Apple, right. Steve Jobs. Mm-hmm. The, the mystique and the mystery of Steve Jobs, and then everybody at Apple apparently make Steve Jobs innovation happen.

[00:11:52] But really in this project you’re talking about. Everybody’s an innovator. Are innovators born or can you create innovators? Somebody that thinks they’re not an innovator, turn them into one.

[00:12:03] Dean: Yeah. One of the things we observed is that many companies try to sort of carve out innovation and put it in a dedicated group or a centralized area and say That’s where we’re gonna get our innovations.

[00:12:14] And then the rest of like their skunkworks team or whatever. Exactly. Or an innovation hub or various ways that people try to do this and. What we’ve found through external and internal observation is that is really hard because you may come up with really good ideas, but the adoption by the rest of the company is problematic because the ideas were probably developed in isolation.

[00:12:38] They may not have buy-in and support, they may not actually solve an important customer problem, which you would be more likely to solve if you brought up the ideas and innovation within the company, uh, within the, the actual divisions that are gonna build and launch the product. A important pattern is what we call innovating with everyone and making innovation everyone’s job so that when you do have that breakthrough idea.

[00:13:04] You have the buy-in of the operations team that’s gonna have to stand it up, the marketing team that’s gonna have to sell it. The sales team that will actually be out on the front lines, bringing it to the customer. When you bring all these teams together earlier, you’re gonna get more diverse and unique ideas.

[00:13:21] ’cause you have diversity of thought, but you’re also laying the groundwork to bring that idea out into the world. And so those are some of the things that we discovered in the research and tried to articulate in the patterns.

[00:13:34] Joe: And I thought too, Joanne, you were talking about, you know, in the entrepreneurship world, I mean Dean’s talking about a big operation like Microsoft, but this even works for a team, let’s say four or five people, I would imagine.

[00:13:45] JoAnn: Absolutely. Dean, hit it on the head. You’re going to have better ideas. The more perspectives you bring to complete the full business and customer experience view of whatever you’re trying to solve. You don’t have to put it out in the world and find the holes by people being unhappy with you. There’s no time for that in, in the world now.

[00:14:10] People expect it to be good when you deliver it. So the way to build better things and services is to have those perspectives included from the start. So if you’re a two person startup, call all your friends that have jobs in different domains and buy ’em pizza and beer. Right? Right.

[00:14:32] Dean: And if, if I could, and pizza and beer solves a, a lot of problems, but to build so many problems, and Joanne’s comment is, uh, Jenna’s this wonderful analogy that I, that explains why this is hard.

[00:14:43] Right? And she says, companies, especially big companies, are kind of designed to be like a river. They go efficiently from point A to point B. And boy, you don’t wanna be in the path of that and trying to stop it. Innovation is more like the ocean. It’s got currents and movements and swells, but it’s not really linear.

[00:15:02] You don’t know where it’s gonna end up. And somehow you have to bring these two things together in a single group or organization, and you have to have the organization capable of doing both. And we have a huge training investment at Microsoft to teach what’s called ambidextrous leadership. So at one point you’re doing the operational side of all the, you know, defined, structured things that your group has to do to run a day-to-day business.

[00:15:32] But you’re creating these processes that are more divergent and open-ended in that same context where you can innovate and discover new things. And it’s really hard. And we have, you know, multi-year investments to train people to do that, especially managers. But we think it’s just the way innovation will have to get done in big organizations.

[00:15:54] Joe: What a great skill for people to have and what a great way to keep people excited about coming to work every day. If I know that innovation can be right next to me, or heck even me, that I’m super excited. I learned best, by the way, through case studies and what really I was attracted to about your project initially before I dug in, was just the idea that I was gonna get these fantastic case studies.

[00:16:15] So if you don’t mind, let’s take one of them from the book. Which is the Xbox. I got Xbox sitting right over here. Good. I don’t get to play it as much as I want to, but I’m a big fan of Xbox. And you introduce this this way, you say the early days of the Xbox, and by the way Joanne, you said something earlier which kind of is wild about the Xbox.

[00:16:35] ’cause you’re like, if you can’t present it to the higher ups in a way that they’re going to like it, you’re not even gonna get funding for the thing. So let’s talk about something that maybe shouldn’t have gotten funding, because Microsoft said, bill Gates as a software company, there’s this team, it feels like we’re a mom’s basement.

[00:16:51] It feels like you’re in a basement in Redmond making this thing. Right? You write that this is uh, duct tape and chewing gum. Sometimes the product works, sometimes the prototype doesn’t work. The team’s about to go meet with Bill Gates and Steve Balmer about this. And what are some of the things that they say to these software people that they wanna create?

[00:17:13] Dean: Yeah, maybe I’ll jump in on that if you Yeah, the, and I’m so glad that resonated with you because the reason we started the whole book with that anecdote is that a lot of innovative histories get told in retrospect, and they get condensed down to a very clean story. Some very smart person thought of some really smart idea and it changed the world, and the reality is just infinitely more messy and convoluted and iterative.

[00:17:43] And so what we wanted to start the book with was a depiction of how much courage it really took. Robbie Bach and other leaders of the first generation Xbox. To go into that office with Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer and say, we’re gonna do it this way, and if we do it any other way, it’s gonna fail and it’s too important to fail.

[00:18:05] Framing that challenge and the courage and the risk was an important way to start the book. There’s another great anecdote from the Xbox case we like to talk about, but could we,

[00:18:16] Joe: before we get there, Dean? Yeah. Let’s talk about exactly what they were gonna say. Because this is what I, yeah. Hey, this is a software company.

[00:18:22] We wanna make hardware, by the way, we’re not gonna outsource it. We’re gonna make it, it isn’t our quote core skill, right? This is gonna be something new. They’re absolutely certain that Bill Gates is gonna say, okay, so where’s the logo go? Yeah. We need street cred, so we’re not gonna put the Microsoft logo on the product.

[00:18:39] Are you kidding me? And then, by the way, oh yeah. Uh, we make money. Uh, how on this thing, well, we’re gonna sell it in a way. Well, we’re not gonna make any money on this deal. Yeah. So, so we’re gonna make money later. It’s like you, you know, what’s that joke? We lose money on every deal, but we make it up in volume.

[00:18:55] Right? Right. So Right. You, you gotta explain to these people all these things of the antithesis of what Microsoft is at the time, Joanne,

[00:19:03] JoAnn: they hit on two core ingredients of what will give your innovation a lot of success or better chance of success. ’cause anything could fail for any number of reasons.

[00:19:16] But on the one hand, those early. Team members were gamers. They knew what the experience needed to be. They knew what they hated about the current platforms. They knew what they hated about the current game development platforms. They knew who the players were both playing the games and creating the games.

[00:19:38] That was Intel that when you’re not that deeply connected to your product, you gotta go out and get those people involved. But the other side of it was Bill and Steve, and the rest of leadership may have been like, where’s the logo? Where’s the this? Where’s the that? But more important was Sony Sony’s presence in the living room and their growing presence in technology in the living room was a threat and.

[00:20:10] I had a sales leader once tell me, they’re like, people buy things for one of two reasons, fear or greed, or you could say a nicer loss, avoidance, or opportunity capture. Right. The Xbox team just stayed true to what they knew as gamers would rule the market. They had the luck of the fact that at that time Microsoft was afraid Sony would displace them in the house.

[00:20:37] Joe: It still was a testament to Gates embalmers that they still said yes to the project, but this is totally something that isn’t, uh, Microsoft’s wheelhouse.

[00:20:46] Dean: Yeah. There were two things I I wanted to say is, is one is, um, the other thing that’s beautiful about the Xbox case study is it defines the difference between incremental innovation and transformative innovation.

[00:20:58] And really the easy thing would’ve been to walk into that room and say, I. It’s gonna be Microsoft branded. We’re gonna run Windows on it, which was not the proposal and not the outcome. And it would kind of be a high-end gaming pc. Uh, that would’ve been an incremental improvement. And the team really stuck to the vision that only by building a fundamentally different device with fundamentally different software stack, can we transform this category.

[00:21:28] And it speaks volumes about Bill and Steve. Um, and they’re famous for these sessions where you bring in your idea. They grill you for hours and ask every conceivable question, but when you’ve answered it and they see your conviction, they write the check and off you go. And I think there’s two characteristics of Microsoft leadership that come through there.

[00:21:51] One is, is the willingness to ask the hard questions, but then make the commitment. The second is to not take success for granted. We see that throughout, you know, the company’s history, that it has consistently appreciated the. The position it’s in and the vulnerability of that position. And there’s periods in the history where it will become a little overconfident and not responsive to threats, but it learns from those experiences and it comes back stronger.

[00:22:25] And yeah, that was kind of the point I was gonna make about Xbox, being able to constantly do this and, and shift and reinvent itself.

[00:22:34] Joe: You have a piece much later in the book where you really dive into this, and I wanna do more of this later, but while we’re on this topic, you write much later to build like a who, what, why statement around the idea, right?

[00:22:46] So, uh, I’m thinking Joanne, the who, what, why here is the who is Sony? They’re coming for us, and either we go on the offensive or we get our lunch eaten by them.

[00:22:59] JoAnn: That could be, yeah, from the business strategy perspective, from you, honestly, you write a lot of those and then you synthesize it down to be something directional for what you’re gonna solve.

[00:23:11] But more times than not, you’re trying to identify who’s going to value what you’re doing, what is it that you wanna create, and then why are they gonna value that thing? Because too often we start with the how we’re going to do all of this, and you shouldn’t be talking about how for quite a while in innovation, how comes later in a support role.

[00:23:38] It’s the who, the what and the why that you really need to start with. And to your point, one case would be for Bill. He’s the who, the what is kick Sony’s butt. Why? Because we wanna kick Sony’s butt. Right? So

[00:23:55] Joe: because it’s the marketplace and we wanna, we wanna win that. Yeah. It’s interesting that we put that right there.

[00:24:00] And I kind of did that a little bit on purpose because. You talk next about the Xbox really hits it stride with the 360 man. I remember those days. I remember buying this add-on, which people may or may not know, called the connect. This fun toy attachment gets rid of the controller. My wife’s 80-year-old uncle is in our living room bowling without a bowling ball with my twins.

[00:24:24] They were just having, we were having a great time with that thing. I remember when Netflix came and now I can just stream Netflix right from my Xbox. Like this was, this was an amazing thing. How did they get the 360? So right from beginning to these add-ons, Dean?

[00:24:40] Dean: Yeah. There’s two pivots they made kind of coming out of the earlier generation.

[00:24:45] One of them was to get rid of something. They called the, the s, the business unit managers. And early on they had grown big enough that their business was divided. Well,

[00:24:56] Joe: you’re, you’re literally gonna throw the bums out.

[00:24:58] Dean: Yeah,

[00:24:59] Joe: you’re literally

[00:25:00] Dean: gonna throw the bums out. I

[00:25:01] JoAnn: love that they threw the bums out.

[00:25:03] Dean: And what they found was as soon as people had p and l control for a certain aspect of the business, whether that was games or hardware or peripherals, they started optimizing for their silo as opposed to for the holistic user experience. And so that was, and we, and we see this over and over in in our research, that when you want to innovate, you need to innovate not just the product, but how you build the product.

[00:25:28] You need to think about your organizational structure, your reward system. So they fundamentally pivoted to a single p and l dedicated to serving the customers. And they saw this change in behavior that followed with it. The other thing they did that I think was really smart was any new idea or new direction had to have a rationale that had three components.

[00:25:51] B, X and T. It had to have a B business rationale X for experience. It had to benefit the user and it had to have a technology component. So we know that it’s feasible when you do that. You prevent yourself from getting really excited about what’s possible as opposed to what’s needed and valued by the customer and what can be delivered, you know, profitably.

[00:26:18] And so this BXT framework was this beautiful and intuitive way to approach every big innovation decision and make sure you had a really sound rationale for going after it. Yeah,

[00:26:29] Joe: so Xbox really starts just smoking, starts really owning a big piece of the market. Every few years the system upgrade, the next change comes if the BXT triangle is in place, then they bring out the Xbox One, which anybody that’s an Xbox fan knows, was not well received.

[00:26:52] How did Microsoft then get it so wrong with the Xbox One, when things were rolling so well with the Xbox 360? Yeah,

[00:26:59] JoAnn: it’s one of my favorite lines is the B got ahead of X.

[00:27:04] Mm-hmm.

[00:27:04] JoAnn: We saw a business opportunity that made so much sense. Um, Phil shared, he’s like, it makes total sense in a PowerPoint, in a board meeting, it wasn’t a bad decision.

[00:27:16] Joe: Phil is, uh, Phil Spencer, the guy that runs Xbox now, right? Yes. That guy. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

[00:27:22] JoAnn: But in hindsight, after the reaction, the. Community pushback, the core gaming community, it was clear. It’s like, oh, you gotta lead with x it, you ne you cannot let business and technology come ahead of your user experience.

[00:27:39] You’ve gotta serve your customer and figure out the way to deliver that in a, a business in a technological way.

[00:27:47] Dean: I love what Phil told us about what happened next because you know, many organizations, finger pointing could have gone on, someone’s head has to roll.

[00:27:56] Joe: I remember from the outside looking indeed, and there was a ton of finger pointing going on from the outside.

[00:28:00] It was this person, it was this person, it was this leader. And

[00:28:02] Dean: you know, the thing that hurt as much as the kind of failure of the launch itself was just the reaction of the community. Because it really is an organization in Xbox that cares deeply about gamers and the gaming community. And to walk into the office the day after launch was a horrible experience.

[00:28:21] It was the mood and the tenor. And so when Phil Spencer then kind of took over, and he uses this term, I think we included in the book, he told us my job was to rehire the team. It wasn’t what to point fingers or, or fire anyone or lay blame. It was to convince them that we were a hundred percent dedicated to making things right.

[00:28:43] By our customers and by making this the same great place to work that it was before we went off this cliff. And he spent a huge amount of time communicating and essentially rehiring the team. And then a lot, one of our very first interviews made the point that Xbox came back stronger. From that, it came back with a renewed sense of mission and customer focus, and they change.

[00:29:13] Again. It’s not just, you don’t just think you’re gonna change, you change systems and structures and process. They completely rebuilt their engineering process to be more of a, a monthly release to the, the console hardware so they could be agile. They pulled in customer signals so they could actually be responsive to what the gamers were saying.

[00:29:33] And they really made that pivot in a meaningful way. And it’s, it’s a great example of. Failure is part of innovating. What’s important is how you learn from and respond to the failure. And that’s kind of how we tried to show that case as a big miss, but ultimately a good job learning and coming back.

[00:29:54] Joe: I thought that was such a great point because Joanne, if you’re gonna have innovation, people have to be, to Dean’s point, not afraid of innovating.

[00:30:05] And I know a lot of people at a lot of big companies go to their job every day and my, my number one goal is not to lose my job. Right?

[00:30:11] JoAnn: That sentiment of me creating safety and you know, the psychological safety is the buzzword for it, but that actual perceived, my job is not in jeopardy. That wasn’t something that the leadership after Xbox One let everybody assume they came out and said it.

[00:30:31] Mm-hmm.

[00:30:32] JoAnn: They’re like, we will undermine our innovative capabilities if we. Roll heads for this. This is part of the process. We want you to tell us when product isn’t ready or when we haven’t hit the mark or you are not happy with what the end product is. So we don’t wanna ship it. And I, another great moment from that interview was Phil pulled a demo device off the shelf behind him and he is like, team worked on this new version for a year, but it didn’t hit the performance and the price mark they wanted.

[00:31:08] So we took the learnings from it and we never shipped it.

[00:31:11] Dean: But he is got it displayed on his shelf Right behind you. Yeah. In his office.

[00:31:16] JoAnn: That’s putting that culture into practice, right. And just reinforcing it for everybody that. Make good decisions. Tell us how you got to where you got to and great.

[00:31:30] That’s what we’re paying you for.

[00:31:33] Joe: That is definitely top down leadership. What we believe, uh, second you talk about is, is reliability. I think you’re gonna get innovation more reliably if people feel like I can take a chance and not only is it, uh, going to not make me lose my job, maybe it’ll be in Phil Spencer’s office on a, in a place it might be a trophy that, Hey, look, I swung and missed.

[00:31:55] But how else do you get reliability into this process? What’s kind of the machine that you use with either employees or yourself to create that innovation, Joanne, that you were talking about? You know, not in the shower on a random Tuesday, but we’re cranking it out on a daily, weekly basis for years and years.

[00:32:15] JoAnn: It is exactly what you said, a process. Mm-hmm.

[00:32:18] Joe: It’s.

[00:32:19] JoAnn: Having structure, knowing where you’re at in the process, having tools to support that process, and then building the habits that go into that to use the tools. And one of the foundational elements of it is this very simple thing called diverge, converge, synthesize.

[00:32:39] Mm-hmm.

[00:32:39] JoAnn: Just the idea that you, you brought up the who, what, why statement.

[00:32:44] Yeah,

[00:32:44] JoAnn: I have an idea. Okay, great. But don’t go forward from that. Step back from it. Diverge from it. Ask your who, your what, your your why, learn and then converge. And you’ll probably start. In a very different place than that idea from the shower.

[00:33:04] So it’s, it’s those little building blocks and you put ’em into this continuous adaptive cycle and you teach it to everybody and everybody gets better at it. And as everybody gets better at it, it becomes this unconscious competence. And now you got an innovative company. Instead of an innovative product,

[00:33:23] Dean: if I could just build, yeah, because I, I think this diverge, converge, synthesized paradigm is so important, you know, and, and the idea of the diverge phase is I’m not landing on an answer.

[00:33:34] I’m exploring and understanding. I’m talking, I’m gathering information. It’s a very uncomfortable process in a lot of corporations because there’s so much folk. You’re in the river, right? You’re just going, you’re getting things from point A to point B. And so the most innovative groups we found specifically find time and place and permission to think divergently, whether that’s, you know, a one week hackathon where you go and try new ideas, or the company used to have something called a think week where you were encouraged to write papers on new ideas, but creating the space for that.

[00:34:10] Telling people it’s okay. That actually is part of your job. You’re not shirking your real responsibilities. You’re actually engaging in another aspect of your job. And if you don’t create that space, you’ll get incremental ideas and some new and slightly better ways to do things, but you won’t get the breakthrough ideas if you don’t create that space and permission for divergence,

[00:34:35] Joe: who was the gentleman Dean that you guys quote in this work who talks about terror?

[00:34:40] You kind of want to do things that frighten you, and frankly, I think he’s the same guy that came up with the idea of like backward compatibility for the Xbox, where now you can play the old games, which by the way, huge loss of revenue on the front end. Then for Microsoft, who could repackage those games to put on the new system instead saying You’re gonna have access to all your old stuff, you can upgrade and it’s gonna be fine.

[00:35:03] Dean: Yeah, that’s Kareem Trry. He, he ran a emerging tech for Xbox for many years. Literally, those are his words. And he would say that in a very fun and joking way to his colleagues. But he said, just so you know, uh, every six months ago, I’m gonna come up with something that’s gonna terrify you. And we’re gonna, because it’s so revolutionary and it’s so new and it’s so unexpected, but then we’re gonna work together to land it in a predictable and repeatable and responsible way.

[00:35:32] And I think that is so critical because absent that and absent a few scary figures, that the tendency to get back into the process and the day to day is, is very high.

[00:35:45] Joe: You have this, I guess I’ll call it a flow chart, which starts with discover. Next is design. Third is develop during, develop joy. And you talk about speed and you emphasize speed and how important speed is in any organization, how important it’s for innovation.

[00:36:01] You don’t love the phrase though, fail fast. Everybody in the industry, it’s become this buzz phrase, fail fast. You don’t like fail fast. How come?

[00:36:09] JoAnn: Failure is just one way to learn. And so disconnecting, failing fast from first learning, you’re just missing the point. Like there’s so many different ways to learn that don’t involve failure, and they’re cheaper and faster ways than failing.

[00:36:27] Plus, you don’t erode customer confidence and trust and brand reputation. So yeah, don’t jump to failure. Learn fast it

[00:36:36] Joe: sounds like is what you’re saying. Yeah.

[00:36:38] JoAnn: Learn fast. Experiment. Yes. Learn fast.

[00:36:42] Joe: Dean, one practice that you like to do, you write is write out all the assumptions you’re making about the world as you’re innovating.

[00:36:50] Can we talk about this? ’cause I, and it’s funny, when I was reading you writing this, when I, and I was imagining you writing this, I felt like you were writing directly to me. ’cause it’s always the stuff that I assume that that is where

[00:37:02] Dean: I get stuck. Thank you. I’m so glad that resonated. And, um, it’s an element of a broader practice called double loop learning and you know, the ideas in most learning cycles, we start out with some assumptions about the world, but we may not make them explicit.

[00:37:18] And then we define a course of action based on those assumptions. And the course of action either fails or, or doesn’t fail. So we’ll often then try another course of action. In double loop learning, there’s an extra step where you go revisit the assumptions about the world and you say, well, maybe we learned that some of these are invalid or they need to be modified, or that the world doesn’t quite work the way that, uh, that we think it does.

[00:37:44] Or customers don’t have quite the same demand profile as we thought going in. And so you reassess the assumptions before you start that next round of experimentation. And it’s particularly important in innovation because there are so many unknowns. And if you’re not constantly revisiting your assumptions, you can just make decisions that compound on a, a set of beliefs that may not be true, and that you might be systematically disproving but never revising.

[00:38:15] And so that discipline. Any major effort, write down our assumptions and then every time we have a learning moment, go back and update the assumptions.

[00:38:25] Joe: I love that Dean. ’cause it’s this, uh, growth mentality thing that your CEO talks about all the time and you know how much he loves Carol Dweck and I do too.

[00:38:32] And just this growth mentality of where am I wrong? Where am I wrong? Tell me, you know, where, where am I not getting this?

[00:38:38] Dean: And, and acknowledging that it’s okay to have been wrong. And in fact, that’s why we experiment and, and we learn. I, you know, the way Satya has framed it so many times is that he wanted to transform Microsoft from a company of know-it-alls to a company of learn it alls.

[00:38:54] And I experienced both eras by the way, and learn it all is is both more productive and more pleasant to work in. For sure.

[00:39:03] Joe: Being a guy that, back when I was a financial planner and knowing the culture then. Versus what I see from my son now. You could, it’s a night and day different workplace at Microsoft than it was then

[00:39:14] Dean: completely.

[00:39:15] And, and so much more comes out of it and, and people en enjoy the process more.

[00:39:21] Joe: Joanne, I wanna end on this ’cause I also found this very poignant, which is you write that there are some activities you need to truly ask yourself, should we be doing this at all? How do you institutionalize that process of going, yes, this is a project we should be spending time, resources, money on, versus, no, we shouldn’t be.

[00:39:42] JoAnn: Yeah, I, this is fundamental to launching a business or run in one. Why this, why now? Why us, right? Do we have the knowledge, the resources, the network to do this? There’s a couple of different things we talk about. One of them though is at the very beginning of whatever you’re undertaking. Create your guiding principles and turn it into a decision matrix so that you have this pseudo quantitative, qualitative framework that once you get into the ideation and you’re falling in love with the cool thing on the board, you got something that you set up way at the beginning, before you fell in love with anything to check back against and go, oh no, that’s still taking that off the shelf and going, mm-hmm didn’t, it didn’t meet our price and our performance spec.

[00:40:38] That was a decision matrix. Put in action, take the learnings, put it back into that double loop. What did we learn? What are our assumptions? Try again. Right? Innovation is very loopy. Um, and you gotta, you just gotta keep moving through the loops. You’ll fail a lot less if you do it that way.

[00:40:56] Dean: And maybe Joanna, if I just add, is uh, ’cause it made me think there, there’s a certain humility that’s needed in innovation, right?

[00:41:03] And this willingness to acknowledge, you know, the things we don’t know. The fact that we may not be the right people to deliver this, even though we’re excited about it and we see the opportunity and the why now question is so profound because we came across many innovations in our research that were good innovations just ahead of their time.

[00:41:23] Hmm. Yeah. And so the willingness to pass on an opportunity. Because either the market’s not ready for it or the supporting technologies aren’t there, or the point in time within your company isn’t right, is really critical. And it’s only when you have answers to all three of those questions that you wanna move.

[00:41:44] Joe: Well, thank you for walking me through one of the case studies in the book, the Xbox. ’cause I’ve, you know, been a big fan forever. Wish I could be playing Xbox more, although I have, uh, Indiana Jones and I have seen a little time lately. It’s been pretty fun. And by the way, uh, some of the other case studies, the one on Bing, uh, for me is also phenomenal.

[00:42:04] Uh, the book is the Insider’s Guide to Innovation at Microsoft. And I’m assuming guys, it’s available everywhere.

[00:42:11] JoAnn: Everywhere and all proceeds are supporting steam education nonprofits. So you’re not only learning for yourself, but you’re helping anybody else in the in the queue that wants to learn. Oh, that’s awesome.

[00:42:23] How to do this.

[00:42:24] Joe: That’s absolutely fantastic. And we’ll have links stackers on our show notes at Stacking Benjamins dot com. Dean Joanne, thank you for being our mentors today. I appreciate it so much. A

[00:42:34] JoAnn: pleasure. Thank you. This was really fun. Thank you.

[00:42:41] Doug: Hey there, stackers. I’m Joe’s Mom’s Neighbor Duck, and I just love those case studies, didn’t you? But I could totally relate. Heck, I’ve been innovating in the Art of podcast announcing since you were, you were only Yay high. That’s right. I mean, way back in 2014, I was saying phrases like hay stackers and I’ll be back right after.

[00:43:01] Mean heck, by this time my I’ll be back is probably more famous than Arnold’s. I’ll be back. Check out how expertly I read this trivia question.

[00:43:14] Alright, here we go. When it comes to innovation and investments, few products are as revered as the index fund. What well-known index fund lover actually very much disliked one way to buy index funds. The extra. Oh, oops. How about that? You caught a rare mess up by the world’s greatest announcer guy. If you’d like, I can, uh, I can autograph this section of the show for you so you can brag to your friends about how you caught the one time old Doug messed up.

[00:43:49] So, uh, let’s do that again. 3, 2, 1. Steve, what? Well-known index fund Louver. Oh my God. I’ll be twice. I mean, that never, that never happens, right? Okay, Steve, let’s, uh, I know we don’t usually have to do this, but we’re gonna do it one more time. Like the pros do what well-known index fund lover actually detested one way people buy them the index.

[00:44:19] My god, Joe, that I

[00:44:22] OG: thought you were an expert at this. That was actually

[00:44:23] Doug: a real screw up. This sentence is, is like bass backwards and I, I’m having a hard time with the structure of the sentence.

[00:44:29] OG: It’s called reading left to right Group two words together to make sentences.

[00:44:33] Doug: Yeah. All right. You do it. 3, 2, 1.

[00:44:39] What Well-known index fund lover actually detested one way people buy them. The exchange traded fund. See, there you go. You’re welcome. I’ll be back right after I go smile in the mirror for a while. You it, it helps me enunciate.

[00:45:00] Hey there, stackers. I’m broadcasting legend and guy who doesn’t like to brag. Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug. Ah, the index fund. Like a good lover back in the nineties. It’s there for you. Trusted friend, compassionate companion. Old index fund. Oh, come on dude. Just kidding. All right. Okay. Okay, okay. Okay. Speaking of legend, one legendary investor said he wasn’t a fan of the exchange traded fund, commenting that he preferred that people were better off getting one price at the end of the day and leaving their money alone.

[00:45:35] That man, it’s the legendary Vanguard ear, Jack Bogle. See kids, that’s how you do it. Then you finish with a flourish like this. And now two legends in their own meat. God, I mean, I did it again. Ah, it’s a crazy day. Lemme take another run at that Steve. And now two leaky son of a mother. Anyway, back to these S holes.

[00:46:07] Joe: Wow. Chose violence, oji.

[00:46:10] OG: I’m so confused what happened.

[00:46:11] Joe: I have no idea. I was so

[00:46:12] OG: disjointed and unprofessional. I don’t even know.

[00:46:15] Joe: Disjointed

[00:46:15] Doug: and unprofessional. Five stars. You try it, it’s a workout some days, man. Speaking of, of,

[00:46:23] Joe: uh, workout. How about working through some of these lessons about innovation, og because I said earlier, you may not want your financial plan to be innovative, but you really questioned that.

[00:46:35] You’re like, no, your financial plan could be innovative. What innovation should we be looking for in our financial plan?

[00:46:40] OG: I don’t know that there’s anything in particular, but the tried and true stuff of save money, don’t spend too much and don’t go into debt and all that sort of stuff is super important.

[00:46:48] But I think there’s opportunity at the margin for thinking a little bit clearer around taxes and tax management and asset allocation. You know, like adding a little bit of extra flavor in asset allocation has a pretty profound impact to, you know, risk and return and outcomes. You know, if you have international, that’s great, but if you add a little bit of emerging market that adds a little bit of flavor, so to speak to your portfolio and, and helps change the risk return profile a little bit, there’s benefits to taking that extra step or doing some research and trying to find different ways to save even just a little bit on taxes.

[00:47:29] It adds up over a long period of time.

[00:47:31] Joe: You know, and I was glad that Joanne did bring this up. Like I was hoping the fact that, you know, you can’t just try to sit around and hope for innovation to happen. A lot of this stuff, oh gee, I think you can, you can schedule, you know, one of the great things for you and I about going to Strategic Coach is that once a quarter on the calendar, you are headed to Chicago.

[00:47:53] And you’ve got two days scheduled in your calendar, which truly are for not just innovation, but I think innovation is a product of next level thinking. You know, not just being in the day, I gotta go run to the bank, right? That’s a financial thing. I gotta go run to the bank and do whatever the bank thing is, but actually going, how do I do my banking and why do I do it that way?

[00:48:19] When you start asking those questions and then you calendar those discussions, like I’m thinking when you’re talking tax strategy, why wouldn’t I sometime in November have on my calendar, this is my day to begin looking at tax lost harvesting, number one. Number two, also to examine if there’s any year end tax planning options available for me that I can, that I can do.

[00:48:42] Like putting that in your calendar so it just automatically comes around every year. I don’t have to think about it. There’s some innovation right there.

[00:48:49] OG: I mean, I, I would submit to you that tax loss harvesting happens throughout the year and, and charitable giving good point can happen at any time, but just reframing it, I think is the important piece.

[00:48:58] Whether it’s a scheduling thing or, you know, what we’ve been really harping on in the last two years and people are tired of us talking about it, I think is if you do any amount of donation to charity and you have a brokerage account, you have to do it through donor-advised fund. You should never, ever, ever write a check to a charity if you also have a brokerage account, because why wouldn’t you just swap out those investments with your new cash and give the charity your appreciated shares of whatever you just had, even if it’s an insignificant amount in the grand scheme of things, like a thousand dollars, you can set up a donor-advised fund for a thousand bucks and you capture all of the tax benefits of doing that transaction, plus some opportunities to like simplify your tax planning of, I don’t have to keep track of contributions anymore.

[00:49:48] I don’t have to keep track of all those little receipts that all those places give me. And, and it’s just reframing how you think about donating money. So instead of saying every week at church, I’m gonna write a check, you send a check every month from your donor-advised fund and that can be automated.

[00:50:03] Oh, a hundred percent. It is. But what’s really funny is, is that, uh, you know, and having these discussions with people who do regular charitable gifts, they say like, well, I don’t know. What do you, what do you think they’re gonna think about that? If you don’t, if you’re not the, maybe, you know, I just use church as an example.

[00:50:18] What do people think if I don’t put my envelope in? Yeah, that’s what we do. We put the envelope in like, it’s okay. Who cares what they think? You’re still doing it. Talk to the, talk to the treasurer. You know, I think you’re focused on the wrong

[00:50:30] Joe: stuff. If you’re looking

[00:50:31] OG: around the church going, absolutely, Hey, look at this slope.

[00:50:34] Look at me. Maya looks really thick. I don’t know if anybody notices this or not, but I, whoa, it’s so heavy. You better have two people carry it. You bring one of those publishers clearinghouse checks. But people say that that’s what’s going on in their brains of like, what do I do when the school has a fundraiser?

[00:50:50] And I don’t, I don’t reach in my pocket and pull out 20 bucks, or I don’t put 50 bucks in it. It’s like, you can still do that. Just do it. First of all, sending a check that says. OG charitable fund to a charitable organization. There’s a flex is a way cooler baller status than an envelope of fifties. I gotta be honest, you know, just like, whoa.

[00:51:11] OGs got a charitable fund. Schwab let you name it whatever you want. You can, you can, as long as it’s not Doug. No. You can’t use swear words. I already tried. Um, yeah. But, um, anyways, it’s just reframing how you think about some of this stuff that can simplify. It seems like a, a hassle to set up, but it’s like anything, when you set up a system, you put a lot of energy upfront into creating that system and you know, kind of testing it and fine tuning it.

[00:51:35] And then once you’re good with it, it runs automatically. And that investment of time and energy will save you so much time and energy on the backend. And, you know, tax loss harvesting, for example, if you’re doing it on an annual basis, that’s great. You can look every year, you can look every quarter, you can look every six months.

[00:51:53] The fact of doing it is the time effort, right? Like the schedule and sitting down and looking through your brokerage account and going like, okay, this went down this year. I can sell this. What fund should I buy to replace it with? But I really want the fund I had, so I have to remember to come back in 30 days and swap that back.

[00:52:11] You know what I mean? Like there’s a step, but you save so much in taxes by doing that. Why? Why wouldn’t you do that? Or Roth conversions or automatic increases in your 401k. There’s all these things that you can do that will make little changes, small changes every single day or every year. You won’t even notice ’em.

[00:52:30] But big impacts. Long run,

[00:52:31] Doug: great points, OG and and sparked a couple of thoughts. Thank you.

[00:52:36] OG: Appreciate

[00:52:36] Doug: that you were looking for that affirmation from me. I mean, anything you

[00:52:40] OG: can do to bolster my ego usually

[00:52:42] Doug: helps, helps you get through the day. ’cause I mean, I know you’re fragile. Frale, frale, it’s Italian.

[00:52:47] A couple of thoughts, uh, one of which has already been made, but innovation, a, a lot of people hear that word and they think, I mean, I’m not gonna come up with a different way that nobody’s ever thought of before to do this thing. That’s not necessarily, in fact, in most cases, that’s not what innovation is.

[00:53:02] You’re not coming up with new science, new chemical compounds put together. They’re gonna, you know, manufacture some completely new thing that has never existed in the world. It just needs to be new and different for you. And whether that’s your process about how you go with things, as you guys talked about, let’s schedule, you know, some time to look at.

[00:53:22] The example you used, tax loss, harvesting and opportunities for that. Or, um, maybe new components of some of your investment vehicles to, to change up end goals, uh, or end results I should say. But a, a another thing that Joe, you kind of touched on a little bit, which is make a deliberate effort to.

[00:53:41] Innovate. Not only schedule that time, but we know what a lot of large, large companies do. I, I help facilitate innovation sessions for people like Coca-Cola and Anthem Healthcare. They’re not Anthem anymore, but you know, some of the larger Capgemini, these huge companies, they actually will build innovation labs.

[00:53:58] They call them labs and their specific office spaces set up that have completely different decor, some different technological tools and different furniture walls that are erasable. So people can just write on the walls wherever they want, but it puts it, none of that. You could do all of the things you do in these innovation labs you could do in your own regular office, but going to a new place, getting, sometimes you have to get on a plane to go to a new place, go into a different office, have different people act as facilitators to challenge the way you’re thinking can lead to things that you would not otherwise do.

[00:54:33] Yeah. Could you do it all sitting at your desk or on your sofa or in your kitchen? Of course, but making the effort to schedule time to go someplace else can really change your frame of reference.

[00:54:44] Joe: I think that’s the magic of Strategic Coach. Frankly. I think it’s as much about getting on that plane and being in a different.

[00:54:52] Area that does that, but hey, just for a lot of us, to your point, Doug, just putting it on your calendar and not trusting the fact that I’m gonna all of a sudden have this aha that makes my financial plan better is an important step.

[00:55:05] Doug: Yeah. And I mean, what I’m advocating for is convincing your partner that you do need to go to Aruba to do that.

[00:55:12] Yeah. I mean, I think it there makes a lot of sense to go to a Caribbean island to that. Don’t there’s anything wrong,

[00:55:16] Joe: og. I don’t think there’s actually, you know, Doug’s kidding, but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. If we’re gonna have this, you know, financial meeting, let’s do it someplace fun.

[00:55:24] If we can afford it. I mean, if I’m going to Aruba and I’m maxing out the credit cards to get there, that’s horrible. But I think that’s, that’s also

[00:55:30] OG: a lesson you can learn. Don’t do this.

[00:55:32] Joe: That’s right. We’re gonna teach ourselves a very important lesson. I’m gonna try it. Get in first class.

[00:55:37] OG: Boy, that was a rough lesson to learn.

[00:55:39] We should learn that again.

[00:55:40] Joe: We gotta learn that again in, let’s say two weeks, seven

[00:55:42] OG: years on, I pay off my credit card bills. Yeah, well there’s a reason why Steve Jobs would only take meetings while walking. You know, that sort of thing. I mean, just having your. Brain’s ability to think broader will have a, um, a pretty profound impact.

[00:55:57] I mean, there’s a reason why you have great ideas while sitting in the shower. Yes, there’s science behind it. And so if you are in the same environment to your points, both of yours, you know, the likelihood of coming up with a new thing is pretty rare. But if you’re, you know, do a thing cycle or go outside or go play basketball or do something that you can do, but your brain can do other stuff, you know, you can’t do this likely while driving, right?

[00:56:25] ’cause your brain, you need the processing power to drive. But if you go for a walk, your brain doesn’t need a lot of energy to walk

[00:56:32] Joe: Two more places where this has been applied. Number one. Doug, I love what you said earlier about. It doesn’t have to be completely new on Earth like nobody’s thought of it before.

[00:56:43] New to you is really what you’re looking for. And 99% of the time, that’s exactly it. We began this year with a guy named Alex, her, for people that missed it, about how to make more money in 2025, specifically a hundred million dollars. But who’s counting? That’s episode 1625 and 1626 that we met with Alex.

[00:57:01] But what did Alex say? He said. Somebody’s already doing this thing. Somebody’s more innovative than you are. You’re paying, what do you call it, an ignorance tax. You’re paying an ignorance tax by not knowing, and so by setting time aside and just going, what do these smart people know that I don’t know is a big key to winning.

[00:57:19] You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. You don’t have to do anything eye popping, popularly different. There’s things people are doing with their system and their process to make this all easier that you may not be doing. The second one is just a couple weeks ago, Benjamin Brandt, when he was on OG, talking about when your pre-retirement.

[00:57:39] Treating your vacations, treating your life like you’re a lab rat, like I am. I’m checking to see what it is that lights me up now so that when I get to retirement, it’s not this, you know, this starting line of, oh, guess what, I’m gonna go try a bunch of stuff. And oh, by the way, I just figured out, I hate all that.

[00:57:57] I truly don’t wanna do any of this stuff. I remember these clients that I had when I was a planner that, uh, that both retired from General Motors on the same day. They bought an RV that in today’s dollars would cost over 350 ish thousand dollars. I, I think in today’s big giant

[00:58:14] OG: class A one.

[00:58:15] Joe: It was gonna be the, the best thing ever.

[00:58:17] And they were gonna spend their entire retirement tooling around the United States in their rv. And a year and a half later, they’re in my office and Gail is telling me that if they don’t sell the rv, she’s gonna choke George out. She, she, she can’t stand being in an RV with her. She loves her husband.

[00:58:36] Just RV life is not for them. But they didn’t know.

[00:58:39] Yeah,

[00:58:39] Joe: because they waited. And so I love what Benjamin said about innovation as well, about innovating. I think during your everyday existence to figure out the future is a pretty exciting, pretty exciting place to be. We’re gonna dive more into innovation in our newsletter, the 2 0 1, uh, that, uh, Kevin Bailey does a phenomenal job of curating for us every week that comes out.

[00:59:03] Stack your Benjamins dot com slash 2 0 1, and Kevin looks for the best links all over the internet so that you can dive even deeper into innovation and your financial plan. But for now, let’s do a headline.

[00:59:17] headlines: Hello Darlings. And now it’s time for your favorite part of the show. Our Stacking Benjamins headlines.

[00:59:24] Joe: Headlines today is not gonna take that long, og, which is good because I really wanted to spend more time talking about Dean and Joanne’s time here. Uh, this comes to us from investment news though, and it’s written by Bruce Kelly Morgan Stanley loses an $843,000 investor claim stemming from a gold bar scam.

[00:59:41] Did you see this? Nope. This is, uh, interesting because often on this show over the past 15 years, you and I have talked a lot about lawsuits that are happening. This one’s, this one’s pretty interesting. An elderly Morgan Stanley client in Florida who fell prey to a so-called quote Gold bar scam, won $843,000 in damages two weeks ago from Morgan Stanley after she claimed it failed to follow industry rules designed to protect senior investors.

[01:00:13] What’s amazing about this OG Morgan Stanley did nothing wrong. Mor Morgan Stanley did not scam her. Morgan Stanley’s people did not scam her. Nobody inside Morgan Stanley was acting at all as a nefarious player. What happened was this woman, Marjorie Kessler was being scammed. Finally, after a lot of a lot, lot, lot of back and forth, they actually got access into her Morgan Stanley account and they called Morgan Stanley pretending to be affiliated with her, and the person gave them information that allowed them to take $1.6 million and all of a sudden at her house one day, gold bullion bars worth more than $1.6 million show up.

[01:01:06] The scammers then were showing up in a truck so they could transfer the gold bullion to her quote escrow account.

[01:01:12] OG: So she got a box of gold and then somebody else showed up afterwards, she got 1.6 and said, Hey, we’ll take that off your hands.

[01:01:18] Joe: $1.6 million worth of gold shows up at her house, and then the scammers take it away in a truck to put in her quote escrow account.

[01:01:29] OG: I mean, I wouldn’t say Morgan Stanley didn’t do anything wrong here. Sounds like they didn’t do a good job of verifying who the account was.

[01:01:36] Doug: Well, but if those scammers had done, uh, it sounds like Joe was saying that there were a lot of conver pre-conversations back and forth before that happened. So my guess is those scammers were doing what’s called social engineering, and they were getting little bits of information out of this victim that allowed them to portray themselves as the victim to the firm.

[01:01:56] And there’s not much they can do. If, if that person’s giving them all the answers Yeah. That they’re asking, there’s not a lot more they can do.

[01:02:03] Joe: This is what the statement of the claim was in writing during repeated phone calls during a two week period, the scammers convinced Ms. Kessler that in order to protect her savings, she had to rush to convert her money into cash and gold bars to be delivered to couriers and cryptocurrency.

[01:02:20] Clearly safer. I mean, I’m sorry that that part was me, which would be deposited in a US Treasury account under her new social security number. According to the statement of the claim, despite glaring red. What?

[01:02:33] OG: Yeah, you do need to get the new one.

[01:02:35] Joe: Yeah, you gotta get the, you haven’t seen the thing about the new social security numbers.

[01:02:40] Mine’s seven. Despite glaring red flags and obvious warning signs of financial exploitation, Ms. Kessler’s financial advisor authorized and facilitated Ms. Kessler’s sudden withdrawal of 2.09 million in funds from a line of credit and the liquidation of assets from a life insurance trust during a nine day period in July and August of 2023.

[01:03:02] The claim alleges,

[01:03:04] Hmm.

[01:03:05] OG: Yeah, I mean a lot of companies now have, uh, and you might start seeing this in your brokerage account or you know, your IRA at an option to fill out a thing called a trusted contact. And basically the trusted contact is nothing more than an additional person that somebody can call.

[01:03:21] So from Morgan Stanley or from Fidelity or wherever your money is, they can call and just go, everything okay with mom? Like, have you checked in on her? It sounds like there’s some weird stuff going on. We just want one more, one more set of eyeballs on this. Oh gee. The

[01:03:37] Joe: very next paragraph. The financial advisor authorized the withdrawals despite the fact that Kessler specifically asked him to keep the withdrawals secret and not to disclose them to her son, who had been directly involved in every major decision in his mother’s investment accounts during the prior six years, according to the complaint.

[01:03:56] OG: Yeah. I mean, we’re rocking a hard place there, right? If your client says, you know, whatever, but see, here’s the thing, but have a responsibility to the client, right? You have a responsibility to, to do what they say and it’s their money. However, I think that I would much rather risk pissing off mom and making sure that it’s a transaction that’s legit than run the risk of something crazy happening.

[01:04:25] And obviously this was the case. I mean. It’s out of the norm for, you know, whatever the age this woman is. I don’t imagine she’s young, so, you know, clearly outta she’s in her early A 76. Yeah. So, you know, if this woman was frequently moving half a million dollars at a time in different places and whatever, that also, by the way, would raise some ire suspicion.

[01:04:47] Sure. But, but if it was like, you know, a, a business owner who’s lar, you know, doing large transactions and they’re like, Hey, by the way, I need to do this, you know, $2 million thing. It’s, you know, that’s a pattern, right? You say, okay, I, I’ve seen that before. But the 76-year-old who has her $3,000 a month, RMD sent to her checking account every single month, like clockwork calls you up and says.

[01:05:10] I need to take all 2 million and I need to convert it into gold bars that have it sent to my house and

[01:05:15] Joe: crypto.

[01:05:16] OG: Yeah. I just hang the phone up, prank call, click. But that’s what that trusted contact form is for. It sounds like you said Morgan Stanley didn’t do anything wrong here. I don’t think they did anything wrong, but they certainly didn’t do anything.

[01:05:27] Right. It sounds like

[01:05:27] Joe: I totally agree with that.

[01:05:28] OG: Like, listen bro, the money’s already gone. Right. She’s moving it for whatever reason. What? What’s gonna happen. You tell the son and she gets extra pissed off and takes more money. Like whatever, like you’re already Yeah, the eight, losing 800,

[01:05:41] Joe: the $843,000 award, by the way was 100% because they fell short in following the industry’s trusted contact standard that you’re talking about.

[01:05:51] Yeah.

[01:05:51] Joe: So I think the lesson here is for all of us, make sure we’ve got that on our account.

[01:05:56] OG: Yeah. I think a lot of young people don’t for. You know, probably safer not, I mean, if you’re, if you’re involved in your money all the time and that sort of thing, probably fine.

[01:06:04] Joe: Doug’s like, if you would like me to be your trusted contact,

[01:06:07] OG: I feel like anything else, you, you gotta kinda read the room a little bit.

[01:06:10] And if you’re at the stage where, you know, you’re talking to mom or dad a little bit about money and, and you’re starting to get into their checkbook and make sure that the bills are paid and you know, that sort of thing, it’s probably also the time that you have that conversation with their, you know, financial planner and say, Hey, by the way, is it okay if I’m involved in some of the, can you cc me on the emails?

[01:06:34] You know, mom, can you make sure that when you have a meeting, like let’s, you know, send me the summary. You know what I mean? Like, be in, start getting involved in that without inserting yourself too much. And, and maybe if this broker makes a phone call to the son and says, Hey, I’m not supposed to tell you this, but mom’s taking 2 million out of her account, putting it in gold bars and Bitcoin.

[01:06:53] He might have headed it off at the pass and. Then what happens is mom’s like, wow, thanks for saving me.

[01:06:59] Joe: Yeah. You and the lawyer say exactly the same thing. The lawyer for Ms. Kessler said, if Morgan Stanley had called my client’s son, nothing would’ve happened.

[01:07:09] OG: Yeah. Especially if she had the trusted contact form on there.

[01:07:12] It’s one thing to try to figure that out. It’s another thing to, like you said, mom, the son has been involved in every conversation for six years, and now all of a sudden mom’s like, don’t tell him I’m taking all the money out, buying Bitcoin. Like, no, you’re not. Just say, no, my mom taught me no. A complete sentence, like, no click.

[01:07:32] Joe: They actually said this was a weird award amount, but the lawyer for Ms. Kessler said that he thought the reasoning was simple. They gave Morgan Stanley a pass for the first one out, OG like, okay, one time we’ll give you the pass. But the second time when they came back for more. That’s when, yeah, that’s when we needed to penalize the firm.

[01:07:55] OG: Okay. Don’t convert all your money to gold and if you do, just keep it yourself. You don’t need anybody else. Just get your own arm to guards. You have gold for God’s sake. You can just pay ’em in. Little shavings.

[01:08:08] Doug: Get your pocket knife one, those like potato peelers and just

[01:08:12] OG: right off and be like, here you go young man.

[01:08:14] Watch the gold. He’s a potato peeler.

[01:08:18] Doug: Your can your cheese grater.

[01:08:20] Joe: Take your cheese grater with you to the, yeah, have

[01:08:21] OG: a little cheese grater. You’re like, you at the gold bar and you’re just against the,

[01:08:27] Joe: is that enough to buy a pair of Levi’s? Oh, you need a little more. We have a link to that on our show notes at stacky Benjamins dot com.

[01:08:34] Hey, time for our last part of this show. We call it the back porch, and we shine a light on some things that our stackers are doing. What’s, uh, what’s going on the back porch today?

[01:08:45] Doug: Uh, Joe, as always, lots of great discussions happening in our basement. One that I wanna point out happened a couple of weeks ago, actually, and

[01:08:53] Joe: the basement, by the way, just to clarify, for anybody who’s new here, that’s our Facebook group.

[01:08:58] Stacky Benjamins dot com slash basement will get you into the discussion. But anyway.

[01:09:03] Doug: I mean, I think they were actually physically in our basement for this one, but maybe they also posted on Facebook. I don’t know. But James showed up in the basement and, uh, asked a question, which a bunch of people happened to comment on in the Facebook group too.

[01:09:16] So it was kind of weird how all that happened, but, but James said I really enjoyed the recent episode on Early Retirement. One of the notes that was made a few times was that if you wanna move to a new location, it’s tough to build a network and feel connected. I would love to hear the show. Or people in this community share any insight on how to build that network in a new location during that stage of life.

[01:09:36] Tia, he signed it with, I don’t re tia. I don’t know what the heck that is. All caps, TYIA. Thank you in advance. I mean, I, I suppose it could, I also, maybe he has a secret language, we don’t know, but there were lots of great comments on this. We had, uh, you know, Jennifer and Eric and, and Jane all chimed in and, and gave some thoughts on, on how to do that and how to make those connections, which is just such a great use of our community in our basement.

[01:10:04] Joe: Well, I think the important thing here and, and for people that missed Benjamin Brandt the second time that we’ve discussed, uh, that episode just a couple weeks ago, that was episode 1639, Benjamin talked, speaking of innovation about melding. The current into your future. And so being scientific about maybe where you go on vacation.

[01:10:27] And the problem here for people that missed it is that often people will retire and will go to a community where we know nobody. We have no support network. And studies show so many people die of loneliness. And so you go to a place because you think that you deserve it. You deserve to be in this beautiful beach location, but you’ve never lived there for a moment.

[01:10:47] Or you go where your kids are, you know, maybe you’ve got grandkids. You go where your kids are. Your kids have a busy life, they can’t be around you all the time. And so you get discouraged because. The kids don’t wanna see as often as you had thought in your head, and you have no, no support network. So Jennifer says, I’ve lived in the same place for 25 years, but maybe try to join a group or club related to something you’re interested in or take a class.

[01:11:13] You know, that is cool, Doug. You can look at communities online and join their online community to try to get the feel of the place at a time. I think that’s a bonus of being a bonus of being online. Jennifer also says to volunteer when you get to a place, west Moss, uh, said that the average happy retiree volunteers with three different groups, and they formally belong to one, like either like a Lions Club, a Rotary, uh, maybe a religious group, but they’re deeply involved in volunteering for at least one, and they volunteer for at least three.

[01:11:48] Eric agrees that this is a topic not talked about enough on podcast. I, I swear to God, Eric, you and I are on the same page because it frankly, lately is all that I. I think about Jane Chimes in saying the easiest way outside of work interest, go and take part in meetups. I love what Xander says. Didn’t think about it too.

[01:12:08] Even if we’re in the middle of it right now, there are people who make friends easier, but I feel the other half of people move for a job or tax purposes. Don’t take this into consideration. That is a problem, og when people are being, um, what do they call it? Location arbitrage.

[01:12:23] Yeah.

[01:12:23] Joe: Ooh, I’m gonna go with a place with lower cost of living.

[01:12:26] Not think of do I even like anybody? Is there, am I gonna like this community?

[01:12:30] OG: Am I gonna like anybody here in the middle of

[01:12:32] Doug: nowhere? It’s

[01:12:32] Joe: probably

[01:12:32] Doug: all

[01:12:32] Joe: jerks. Living in

[01:12:33] Doug: Savannah, Georgia,

[01:12:36] Joe: losers sucks in, in Texarkana. So great discussion. James. You guys are hitting the road this week, right? Thank God. Looking forward

[01:12:47] Doug: to it.

[01:12:47] We’re actually literally on the road, right? Now? No, I’m on the road right now. Tomorrow, not me. I have a multi-stage trip. It’s gonna take me to get Well,

[01:12:57] OG: that’s because, that’s because you’re like, what would be better driving 20 minutes there and getting on an airplane or driving seven hours to get on an airplane and you’re like, you know what?

[01:13:05] I like driving. I’m gonna drive down the snowiest part of Michigan for seven hours and prayed everything that’s holy. There’s no lake effect. That’s way better than jumping on a plane ride in my backyard. Yeah, but I’m saving $200, so, no, it’s,

[01:13:18] Doug: it’s only partly that og, but the other thing was to get on the flight.

[01:13:22] To get to Reno at the time. You also wanted need to get to Reno. The flight leaves O’Hare at like 7 0 4 or something in the mornings. You’re

[01:13:32] Joe: driving from northern Michigan to O’Hare? Yes.

[01:13:34] Doug: Because that’s almost, that’s like Joe quality travel plans right there, bro. Kind is. But there’s gotta be honest, there’s no Greyhound buses involved in mine.

[01:13:42] Joe: No. Tough talks. Don’t knock it

[01:13:43] Doug: until you’ve Right.

[01:13:47] OG: That you know of. I’ll

[01:13:47] Doug: have a mule. There will be a mule in a cart though.

[01:13:50] OG: Yeah. God forbid you actually fly to Chicago the day before and stay in a hotel right next to the airport. I’m stay in a

[01:13:56] Doug: hotel the night before, but I’m driving to that hotel. I’m not.

[01:13:58] I’m not flying. Alright. Tell us how people get more of this Goodness. Of my travel story. The, the meetup. Oh, the meetup. Oh, okay. ’cause I mean, I can keep talking about this. Yeah, we’ve

[01:14:08] OG: got a couple people registered. I don’t know what the website is. Joe, what’s the website? Stacking Benjamins dot com slash slash meetup meetup.

[01:14:14] Who knew? You know. Yeah. Isn’t that wild? Wow. Way. Smart idea.

[01:14:20] Joe: Who thought of that url? Innovation. Innovation for the wind? Innovation? Yeah. During the podcast. Yes.

[01:14:25] OG: Wednesday, uh, this week, uh, six o’clock Local time. Uh, we’ll be there from six to eight, and then, uh, that’s February

[01:14:31] Doug: 19th for people listening late because I don’t want them showing up like in April.

[01:14:36] OG: Well, I mean, you can show up in April. I

[01:14:38] Doug: might

[01:14:38] Joe: hear some

[01:14:38] Doug: Rando

[01:14:39] Joe: day

[01:14:39] Doug: in July because you said it was this Wednesday. Mc pee’s tap house. February 19th, six o’clock. OGs credit. I mean, uh, come have drinks with us.

[01:14:48] OG: All right, all that is true. 8 0 2. I’m out.

[01:14:54] Joe: Don’t, don’t get there at 8 0 1. ’cause you will miss, we

[01:14:56] OG: will pass at the door.

[01:14:57] Like I’ll be holding the door and you’ll be like, Hey, aren’t you? I’ll go. No, probably not. Wrong guy. Wrong guy. Nothing

[01:15:03] Joe: to see

[01:15:03] OG: here, folks. Nothing to see here

[01:15:05] Joe: on BET note. What are the big lessons we should have got outta today’s show, Doug? Well,

[01:15:09] Doug: Joe, here’s what’s stacked up on our to-do list for today.

[01:15:13] First, take some advice from Dean and Joanne. Think about your life innovatively. I. How can you systematize the stuff that doesn’t matter and create the most innovative life for yourself? Second, calling your advisor for money. Be ready for a bunch of questions, but the big lesson while I am a legend. I’m not too big for my britches, as Joe’s mom likes to say, and she would know that lady’s got some huge Brit.

[01:15:43] Ow, God damn. She hit me with her slipper from across the room. How’d you do that? I was gonna say huge personality, ma promise. Ow. Gosh, she got me. Again. Thanks to Joanne Garbin and Dean Kernan for joining us today. You’ll find their book Full of case studies called Innovation at Microsoft, wherever books are Sold beginning tomorrow.

[01:16:07] We’ll also include links in our show notes at Stacking Benjamins dot com. This show is the property of SB LLC, copyright 2025, and is created by Joe Saul-Sehy. Joe gets some help from a few of our neighborhood friends. You’ll find out about our awesome team at Stacking Benjamins dot com, along with the show notes and how you can find us on YouTube and all the usual social media spots.

[01:16:33] Come say hello. Oh yeah, and before I go, not only should you not take advice from these nerds, don’t take advice from people you don’t know. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any financial decisions, speak with a real financial advisor. I’m Joe’s Mom’s neighbor, Duggan. We’ll see you next time back here at the Stacking Benjamin Show.

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