Storytelling and Innovation

"If you want to invent an innovative future, first, you have to start where you are."

Ever wonder what a crow named Bernice has to do with innovation? Bob Allen returns to share more from his fascinating journey from executive leadership with Disney to his latest venture, Zenovation. Our conversation highlights how blending personal passions can lead to groundbreaking ideas. Read the blog for more highlights from this episode.

Connect with Bob Allen

Bob's Website https://zennovationnetwork.com/

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Episode Transcript

(00:03):
Welcome to the Jodi Mayberry Show. I'm so delighted
to bring back a former guest, Bob Allen.
Bob had a wonderful career at Disney and Ideas Orlando
and has some new things going on I wanna tell you about. If
you heard the past episode though, he was with his brother,
and he is now shaken free of his brother, to talk on

(00:26):
his own. Hi, Bob. Hey, Jody. Yeah.
So, Bob, you are older than Rick. Am I right? Oh, point that out.
Sure. Let's start there. Well, the no. I mean, the only reason I mentioned
is because, you know, the younger sibling always follows the older sibling
around to get attention. Well, so the real truth is there are 3 of
us. So I'm the oldest. Rick's the middle, and then our brother Buck is

(00:48):
the the the baby. But, yeah, I'm the senior.
Yeah. Well, I guess that is an awkward place to start it off.
So to quickly change the subject, I wanna
mention how sometimes when I record a podcast
episode with someone, some of the best stuff happens before the
recorder is on, and I wish I would've had it recorded. Bob was having a

(01:10):
conversation with a crow that was right outside his patio.
True enough. Yeah. I I do talk to animals. You know, I live
on a lake in Florida. And during the the height of COVID, my
wife and I worked together, but we were isolating from each other.
So she sort of took the office inside in the screen porch. We started referring
to as my dog run because this is sort of where where I started to

(01:33):
live and work. And I just got to know everybody in the neighborhood, and most
of them are birds. So it's, you know, I've got red winged blackbirds and cardinals
and doves and grackles and sandhill cranes and, and these 2
crows, Randall and Bernice, who come every day, and they're they're peanut
fiends. So they come and bark at me until I give them peanuts. I'm gonna
give you some park ranger humor, Bob. What do you call

(01:54):
2 crows sitting together? I know the answer. You want me to tell
you? Oh, well, see, I thought I was gonna be An attempted murder. That's right.
Attempted murder. Yes. A group of crows is called a murder, so
it's a park ranger joke. A murder of crows. Yeah.
When the last park I was a park ranger at, we
had a massive, unreasonably large

(02:17):
raven named Carl with a k. And I
used to tell park visitors that the first documented
photo and description of Carl was in 1916,
which, of course, was, loose interpretation
of Carl's real history, but the park visitors liked it.
Well, wouldn't be surprised. Alright, Bob.

(02:40):
There's I think we've got some good stuff to talk about, and I
I wanna go backwards. You had a great history at
Disney. A lot of people know the work you did at Ideas.
We'll get to those. Sure. But instead of following up
with what you're doing now, let's just start there because
I think it is Zinnovation is such a

(03:02):
unique capture of what I've learned about
Bob Allen. All the great stories with your personal
passion wrapped into 1. So let's start there, and then we can work
backwards. Great. Yeah. And it is an exercise in
passion. You know, it's everybody gets these. You get these chapters in your
life. And, you know, I'm lucky I've had a whole bunch of them. But

(03:24):
Zenovation and the whole idea of this innovation network was, you know, you get
to a point in your life where you go, okay, sort of in the Q4
here, you know, but and maybe it's generational. But I know
for me personally, I'm just not a person who thinks about sort of the classic
notion of retiring. I can't imagine anything more dreadful.
So it's you get to the point where you say, k. What do we do

(03:46):
next? So you go with your passion, I think, is the answer. And so I
I'm trying to blend a few things that I like. You know?
One is, of course, I've had a I've been really lucky. I've had a whole
career doing creative and innovative things, you know, for the Walt Disney
Company and others. I love that. I'm a storyteller. I love
that. I like to teach. I'm pretty good at that. I was sort of

(04:08):
my career was guided by people who are good teachers. But I've also
been a about a 40 year practitioner in a Zen
tradition. And, you know, we could go for hours and hours on
that. But, you know, Zen isn't what most people think it is. It's really
it's sort of the art of showing up in your life and knowing you're there.
It's it's that fundamental. But the idea was, okay,

(04:30):
what if we blend some of the things that we've
learned from, you know, 40 years of practice in
Zen. We call it practice with, you know, let's just
call it 50 years of experience in innovation and creativity.
And what could you do with that? And so the idea was there
are 3 or 4 things that I sort of consider myself reasonably

(04:53):
qualified to speak about. So we put together some talks, and one of them is
the one I'm doing with Rick of Mouse and Man, which is really very Disney
centric. Just a couple of other ones in there. And then
really fun was this notion of this innovation network, which is the other thing you
love to do is, hey. Who do I wanna work with? You know? And so
besides my brother, I have some some colleagues, and some of

(05:13):
them are former Disney folks, and some of them are people I've known.
1 of them I've known for 52 years. We went to high school together. So
I said, what hey. What can we do together? So there's a few
workshops we're putting together to do that. And so the idea of Zenovation is
doing some speaking to begin to teach some of these things and then doing some
deep dive work in some one or even multiple day workshops to

(05:35):
really start to help other people learn how to enhance their own innovative
performance. I like hearing about this. Just I will
say I have not much understanding of
Zinn. But the way you've combined that, something
you love so much with something you're so good at.
I like it because I've personally tried to step

(05:58):
more into combining my experience as a park ranger into what I
do now, which is in a way in I mean, Zinn and
park ranger are not close, but the idea Oh, they're very close. I
can't think of another field. In fact, that's that's a better, more
fruitful ground for practicing present moment than being a
park ranger. Oh, that's interest now we could talk for an hour or 2

(06:20):
about that probably. I only bring it up to say I
really like the combination of the the 2. Bringing 2
things together, making them 1. And I have found
that I've not asked Bob if he has read this book. But
of all I get the chance to talk to a lot of Disney executives and
one book has come up more than any other, and that's the Medici Effect.

(06:42):
Have you read that, Bob? No. I haven't. Oh, well, now
this is interesting. So the I'm gonna spoil the book,
but the whole concept behind it is is really good things
happen when 2 unrelated ideas smash into each
other. And I feel like that's what you're doing. Love it.
Well, if I had a philosophy of I was gonna say business,

(07:04):
probably life. You know, it is a version
of, you know, don't worry too much and expect possibilities.
You know, Larry Ellison was once asked. He's the founding CEO of Oracle. He said,
hey. Well, you know, you're a tremendously successful company. And, you know, how
do you do strategic planning? He said, we run into each other at the drinking
fountain. You know? So I'm I'm a big believer in I'm a

(07:26):
big believer in that kind of serendipity. But I'll put in a plug for mindfulness.
In order for that to happen, you actually have to be present or it'll go
right by you. And the real truth is, you know, more now than
ever, we spend a lot of time not being in our life.
And classically, you know, I'll give you a little a little bit of Zen talk.
By the way, the word Zen, just for the record, is a Japaneseization

(07:51):
of the word chan, which comes from Chinese. And really, it just sort of
means or points to the word meditation. It's about stopping and contemplating.
That's there's no magic or mysticism to it. That's what it means.
But the idea is if we live in our
minds too much, what happens a lot is our habits
take over, and we start worrying about the future,

(08:13):
and we start having regrets or concerns about the past. And as
soon as we're there, we're not here. So the idea of mindfulness practice
is just to learn to come back. My Zen teacher was a monk named Thich
Nhat Hanh, who died 2 years ago actually this week. And, you
know, Thay was famous for teaching in the West, and then his thing was
always, you need to come home, and your home is here and now.

(08:35):
So how did what does that have to do with innovation? Well,
in sort of my key keynote, if you will, is a talk called
Zinnovating. And the idea is, look, if you want
to invent an innovative future, first, you have to start
where you are. So you got to show up first.
From here, you can take a lot of really cool mindful actions

(08:57):
to create, in fact, whole cultures of innovation, and that'll take care of the future.
But you can only do it from here. You can't go there and do it
and then come back. So that's how the two things blend. This
is really interesting to me because I
realize I get caught in that trap way too often about
thinking about next week, next month, what's coming and

(09:18):
worrying about that and then thinking, oh, my goodness. We that thing I did last
week, my goodness. What? That's going to be a thorn for a little while.
And it reminds me of 2 people, which I'll mention,
and neither of them practice Zen, but yet talk in
the way you do sometimes. That is Lee Cockrell, who I
know you know Lee, and he will often say there's only

(09:41):
3 days that matter yesterday, today and tomorrow. And
and then Jeff Noll will often greet people by saying happy
present moment because most people reach out about your your birthday. Happy
birthday. Happy New Year. And Jeff will reach out randomly and say happy
present moment. And I always appreciate that. You know, it's
funny. We would go on retreats. We Ty would do leave retreats. We had a

(10:03):
1,000 people, you know, all all mostly all beginners. You know, we're all beginners just
learning to do this. And one of the fun things would they would have a
ceremony, and, you know, it was a big announcement. Hey.
It turns out today is today's day. And then everybody would stand
up and start talking about how they were going to celebrate today's day.
And, you know, it it does sound a little silly after a certain

(10:25):
point when you talk about it. Practicing it is different. You know, and I always
talk told people that about mindfulness practice is people will
say, no. You know, reasonably, hey. You know, that sounds cool. Are there some books
I can read? I said, yeah. There are. I said, but reading a
book about mindfulness practice is like reading a book about
skiing. It's not the same as putting the boards on your feet and pointing them

(10:46):
down the hill. You know, we call it practice for a reason. So you can
read about it, but I don't I encourage people don't get lost in the reading
because a lot of times the words begin to get in the way, particularly
Buddhist readings because it gets pretty convoluted. So just take
sit quietly somewhere, preferably somewhere pleasant, and see if
you can take 3 in breaths and 3 out breaths and know that you're breathing.

(11:08):
Takes less than 5 minutes. You know? Just do that for a while because that's
how you come home. You know? And you can begin to expand that out. And,
you know, nice thing about mindfulness practice, you can be mindful no matter what you're
doing. It's the difference between talking to
Jody while I'm thinking about my presentation at the Science
Center on Wednesday or talking to Jody and knowing I'm talking to

(11:29):
Jody. They're completely different experiences. This to
me, it just makes, something said by the
great philosopher, Kermit the Frog, even more meaningful. He said, wherever you
go, there you are. Maybe he knew what was going on. Yeah.
The Buddha said the same thing. Well, I heard it from
Kermit the Frog. So I believe Kermit.

(11:51):
What are the great Bodhisattvas, Kermit the frog? Well, I found a
good good