Welcome, Dan McClure on this very first episode of what might be the SwordWorks podcast at some point.

Why don't you start about and tell us who you are and what you're doing for SwordWork?

Yeah.

So basically I'm a guy who couldn't get a job doing anything else besides innovating.

I started out my career with a degree in

engineering and lasted about four weeks as an engineer before I started going rogue and

doing innovation at the large utility company I was working at. And I was lucky that the entire

industry got deregulated right about that time and all of a sudden they needed an innovator. And I was lucky that the entire industry got deregulated right about that time,

and all of a sudden they needed an innovator.

And I've never really looked back since then.

So I've been doing innovation for 30 years.

Part of that time making elephants dance, you know, big organizations,

doing innovative things that they normally don't do.

I've had my own company, so I've done the whole Inc. 500 award thing.

And most recently, I joined ThoughtWorks about four years ago, because I think there's a

enormous opportunity right now to bring innovation, business innovation, design, and technology together.

And the ThoughtWorks folks represented like a great platform on which to build any kind of dreams and aspirations of technology.

When you say innovation, what do you mean by that?

So it's interesting that people have a hard time with this, but I think it's partly because

it's been co-opted by so many different types of folks.

So early on, innovation in the 1970s and 80s was all around factory innovation, Deming's models of how to optimize factory performance.

And that's really innovation about taking an operation and making it just a little bit better.

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