Summary: Culture is critical for teams and organizations looking to be have significant innovation impact. Based on working across large, small, non-profit and government agencies, I've discovered what are a common set of four culture attributes in organizations that were highly innovative. We validate these and other attributes that make-up culture for an organization with this weeks guest.<br> Guest: Dr. Natalie Baumgartner<br> Dr. Natalie Baumgartner is a Co-Founder and the Chief Psychologist at RoundPegg. RoundPegg is The Culture and Engagement Platform for all companies. We strive to make it possible for people to fit and thrive where they work. With Culture Science at it’s core, the RoundPegg culture and engagement platform helps companies increase engagement, reduce churn, retain top talent, and break down silos using web-based social apps. Natalie has been the human form of RoundPegg for over a decade, consulting on corporate culture with investors, senior executives and boards of directors. She holds a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology and serves on the board of the Consulting Psychology Division of the American Psychological Association. She is a popular speaker on culture, engagement, mergers/acquisitions and change management – and a TEDx speaker on Culture Fit. Natalie is a culture evangelist and is passionate about the power that company culture has to revolutionize how we work.<br> You can connect at <a href="http://roundpegg.com/" target="_blank">Roundpegg</a><br> <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/nataliebaumgartner" target="_blank">LinkedIn Profile</a><br> <br> Killer Question<br> Can I create an on-demand version of the product?<br> Do you need to have a finished product in order to make a sale? Is there any way that not offering a finished product would actually give you an advantage, or even become a selling point? Suppose that your manufacturing costs appear to have gotten as low as they can without sacrificing quality. Even if your costs are acceptable to you, you still have to deal with the lag time between ordering a product and having it manufactured and shipped to you—typically six weeks from China. Perhaps this lag time causes you to lose sales, or to miss the window of opportunity for your product if you’re aiming to respond quickly to a short-lived fad. Is there any other option besides relying on this manufacturing and supply chain?<br> My children have long since outgrown toys, but if they were still young today, I’d probably be roped into visits to Build-A-Bear. Build-A-Bear, like the paint-your-own pottery craze that preceded it, doesn’t offer a finished product. In fact, the whole selling point is that you create your own customized product in-store. These types of businesses are offering a dual product: both the end result—be it a stuffed animal in a personalized costume or an “I Love Dad” coffee mug—and the chance to create something without taking responsibility for gathering materials or cleaning up the mess it generates. A stuffed toy may feel like a low-risk product, but children’s tastes, interests, and fads can be as fickle as an adult’s. Just ask any parent. Once you start adding the layers of design and complexity to a toy—clothes, accessories, prerecorded sounds—you risk creating something that misses the mark with your target audience. Build-A-Bear’s strategy is very clever in that it allows them to keep components, rather than finished products, as inventory. They never have to run the risk of being stuck with 10,000 astronaut bears the week after the latest Pirates of the Caribbean opens. Or conversely, having 10,000 pirate bears in anticipation of a hit only to find the franchise has run out of gas and the kids don’t care.<br> There are two points to take from this. The first is that these companies are reducing their risk of having a stockroom full of faddish, briefly popular products that they now can’t sell.
