Host: Now the Red Cross is how big?
Guest: The Red Cross has 35,000 paid staff. We have over a million registered volunteers. We operate in every state and territory of the United States. We're the American Red Cross so, therefore, while we do have folks from the American Red Cross on the ground in other countries, predominately we operate in the 56 states and territories of the United States.
Host: So you're a relatively large company NGO. And I think what you've probably found in your experiences is that large companies to innovate across a company or to create a culture of innovation is really difficult.
Guest: I do. I believe that it is tougher. The larger an organization gets I think the tougher it gets to kind of work through the bureaucracy. Clearly that was the case, at least in my opinion, in the Department of Homeland Security and somewhat in the federal government at large. Not that there aren't pockets of creativity and innovation in the federal government. I'm not implying that.
Host: But how do you unleash them?
Guest: I don't know. The tough part of this is that I think somehow you've got to build upon centers of excellence. What I have tried to do and the way that I believe you can influence and create a culture of innovation and quite frankly a culture of risk taking, appropriate risk taking, is to leverage what we've labeled a center of excellence. So you take people who are bright, talented, not afraid to fail, not afraid to take risk, who can think out of the box so to speak, I know that's a bit of a cliche phrase but it really does mean to think differently than the way things are normally done, and to give them really difficult problems. You give that to a couple of centers of excellence and the centers of excellence by the way might be uniform skill sets. For example, it might be you know a telecommunications slash network group of individuals armed with --
Host: So it's really a small team that's put together?
Guest: It's a small team. It's a tiger team. Okay.
Host: Focuses on a single problem?
Guest: Right.
Host: And then try to apply it more largely across the organization?
Guest: Exactly. Yeah. And what we're trying to do in the Reds Cross is to leverage kind of the center of excellence or tiger team approach, take a real problem, apply it in a smaller scale, put a pilot in place that's a real pilot not a throw away. Okay. So put a really pilot in place and see whether it works. If it works, then what we want to do is to begin to expand that out to more and more geography, more parts of the business to more business units. If it doesn't work, we don't give up, we kind of take a look and say, Well what happened here? How come we expected this to happen and it didn't happen? We make adjustments and we kind of go at it again. All the while keeping very very focused on the fact that in the American Red Cross we're not lavishly spending donor dollars on research and development type stuff. We're doing as much as we can with very small investments of financial means.
==== Transcribed by Automatic Sync Technologies ====
