https://www.linkedin.com/in/fred-leichter-5525a2

This interesting interview is with Fred Leichter. Fred was the SVP of design thinking and innovation at Fidelity Investments. Now Fred is the founding director of The Claremont Colleges’ Rick and Susan Sontag Center for Collaborative Creativity. This means Fred will be in charge of working with Claremont’s five undergraduate colleges and their students to encourage, nurture and implement creativity programs among the students. It sounds like such an interesting center and mission.

We talked about Fred’s time at Fidelity and how he thinks about creativity and innovation, and then we dived into his new role at Claremont and what that will look like.

Here are some other things we talked about:

-How do you think about innovation? What’s your process to test an idea, and then bring it to market?
-What’s the goal of the Rick and Susan Sontag Center for Collaborative Creativity?
-At Claremont, what are your priorities, focus areas the first 12 months?
-Do you have a process to make yourself more creative?

Transcript

David Kruse: Hey everyone. Welcome to another episode of Flyover Labs. This is Dave Kruse from Madison, Wisconsin and today we are fortunate enough to have Fred Leichter. And Fred is a Senior Vice President of Design Thinking and Innovation at Fidelity Investments, but only for a few more days. Then Fred is off to be Founding Director of The Claremont Colleges’ of Rick and Susan Sontag Center for Collaborative Creativity. This means Fred will be in charge of working with Claremont’s five undergraduate colleges and their students to encourage, nurture and implement creativity programs among the students as well as innovation. So it sounds like quite an interesting center and a mission. So we’ll talk about Fred’s time at Fidelity and how he thinks about creativity and innovation and then dive into his new role at Claremont and what that will look like. So Fred, thanks for joining us today.

Fred Leichter: Yes, thanks for having me on Dave. My two titles are a mouthful, you did great, so. I’m happy to be on the program and I hope that what I have shared is interesting for your listeners.

David Kruse: Definitely. Well, I think it will be. So first let’s talk a little bit about your background and how you ended up as Head of Innovation at Fidelity?

Fred Leichter: Yes, so I have been at Fidelity based in Boston for the last 25 years. I started here and I tell my kids this and they don’t quite believe it, but I started here in 1990 and we didn’t have email firm wide. I think I had an AOL address, but we didn’t have firm wide email and so, I came into a time when obviously things were able to change pretty radically. I was fortunate enough to be part of the team that was focused on electronic business in 1995 after having been working on some operational project. And in ‘95, ’96 we had – Fidelity had had a key fee based application that allowed our customers to trade electronically using their personal computers and our software we sent out on a floppy disk. But in 1995 this thing called the world wide web gained some attention and I started a little team to create a design for our website, Fidelity’s first website called Fidelity.com, actually it was called fidin.com but we then purchased the URL Fidelity.com. So we – and you know the time 1% of Fidelity interactions were electronics, we had a TC based program. And there was some healthy skepticism about whether the web was gonna work, whether or not people would ever really look at the trade online or look at their finances online. But we don’t know how that turned out, but what was pretty amazing is between ’96 when we launched the first integrated version of our website in 2006, we went from 1% of our transactions being electronic to 96%, in fact 92% of our interactions with customs were electronic. So that little website and I saw the original prototype that I sketched out using some manila folders. That little website turned into an essential transformation of our business. So I was lucky to be part of that. So that was the first big part of my carrier. Fidelity was building and we went from three people on our design team to 150 and designed Fidelity.com. The take on that benefits, which is where people who have their retirement savings through their employer, that and Fidelity manages their money and then several other platforms they use institutionally, a platform called Streetscape and then went on to design mobile applications for peoples phones and tablets. So it’s fortunate to be at the right place at the right time where that big change was happening, and managed that team from the inception at ’96 up through 2010. So 14 years, which in internet years is several lifetimes. And then that was – then I had – along the way I have learnt about the Stanford d.school and gotten to know George Kembel, who along with David Kelley the IDEO Founder was starting the d.school at Stanford. And we visited them in 2005 and George asked us, asked me if Fidelity would be interested in sponsoring a class at the Stanford d.school and I didn’t take much convincing, because we had into these three circles, which now people know well his variability, viability and feasibility, but it caught my eye and we sponsored a class and which meant that we provided a cast-on product for Stanford students at the d.school to work on, which was around getting young people to save money, getting people who are college and grad students or college graduates and graduate school students to save money. That’s when I first learnt about design thinking and watched it produce some results beyond in terms of understanding the emotion that goes into something as cut and dry as financing. As successful as we had been with our websites, as I mentioned regarding the 96% of transactions, we still were, we were finding we were having a little bit more of a superficial interaction with our customers that we wanted, in other words many people were coming in and logging in and looking at their balance and logging out and that was a kind of a regular routine which we are not trying to make people impact there payers but we have been trying to get people to be more planful and consider their finances on a longer basis. So in that first class what we learnt is a bunch of interesting proposals that came from students, but the one insight that really stuck with my team came from one of the student groups who had been interviewing people my age basically and what they had noticed is that everybody my age – I’m in my 50s now, everybody my age vividly remembered going to the bank with their parents and they remember opening their first bank account and they remember their pass book, saving book. And in fact they remember it so well that they can still tell you to this day where it is and what draw they have it stuck in and it’s actually a little dry little piece of paper book but it has emotions built into it and people, they can remember the sound of the teller typing in their balance, they can remember the smell of the bank and then the feel of the paper. So that for us is a huge insight that came out of design thinking and we used that on a bunch of projects to learn to make things more emotionally. So long answer to your question, but that is what led me into design thinking in a way to try to help deepen the relationships with our customers and when it was finally time for me to hand over the reins of managing the user experience, design team, the day to day operation on the website, I chose to move into a group in Fidelity called Fidelity Labs where we focus on, and build out a design thinking practice to get us to be more focused on – we are a very human federal organization, but more focused on – even more focused on our customers and finding ways to talk to them more often and have more of a bias towards action and our culture of proto typing, which are some of the mindsets that come out of design thinking.

David Kruse: And can you give a brief overview on design thinking for the audience, because I think it’s interesting.

Fred Leichter: Yes, so design thinking is – it didn’t just come from Stanford and the d.school but David Kelley did popularize that term and what he used it to me is that designers have a process that they follow. Design usually start with trying to get a deeper understanding of their users and understanding what they need in the interview them and they observe them and they watch them. And then they think through their point of view and then they try to create a lot of ideas of ways to meet that user need and they create prototypes and then they test them and then they launch them and it’s an iterative cycle. And what David said is, that’s the way designers think, we need to get those people and technologists to think that way. We need to get everybody to be design thinkers and so that’s where the term design thinking came from. It was basically used a message, of not of all designers, but of good designers, but to use them more broadly and to bring them into business practice. So it’s – but in a way design thinking is a misnomer. A lot of people used to call it design doing, because it’s really about being active rather than thinking and the crux of it is this idea that you should have a bias towards action and a culture of prototyping; those are two of the mindsets of design thinking. The other thing that is key to design thinking is that this all sits on top of being a human center, but the idea is that, you are head causing maybe radical collaboration between people of different disciplines. So at the d.school, and this is one of the things that impressed us soo much in that very first class that we sponsored. At the d.school at Stanford, first of all the d.school is not a degree granting program, at Stanford University, but they do seek to get students from all over the University programs and put them together in to groups to work on problems together. So you will typically have a medical student, a law student, a business school student, an engineering student, an arts and sciences student, maybe a journalism student, all working together on a problem and what you see really visibility has set these different disciplines and different approaches to problems magnify what you can see and what you can do. The engineer will have one approach and the philosopher will have another approach and the doctor will have yet another. But if you put those together, you are more likely to get a radical break through or a crazy innovative ideas. Engineers will come up with same kinds of solutions that engineers usually do, etc but if you put different people together then you are more likely to get a radical breakthrough and create innovative ideas.

David Kruse: Interesting. And so how does that look at Fidelity with – do you have a diverse group and I’m curious if you have an example of kind of design thinking of a project you worked on and how, kind of the processes and how it..?

Fred Leichter: Yes, definitely. So at Fidelity what we found is historically, and this is the same in most large companies. And historically although we are – there is strong after care around doing the right things for the customer, it’s always been here, but historically people still work in silos and so what we started to do is bring together the marketing person, the product person, the designer, the technologist, the legal and compliance person. Usually legal and compliance doesn’t get to something till the very end and they tell you why it can’t work. If you bring them in at the beginning, then they are part of that creative process. You bring those different disciplines together and right from the beginning of a project and then you also have them talk to customers as a group. You don’t just say that you hire a research firm to do customer research. Research firms do great work, but we try to bring the customer into Fidelity and bring the teams out to talk to customers often in their homes or in their officers, to get a deeper understanding and appreciation for what they are really up against and what’s in front of them. So I’ll give you a couple of examples of projects that we have used this method for and these are projects that come out of – are starting in the Fidelity last group, that what we call small community incubators. So we’ve done a project and recently launched a service around end of life and the state planning, and so that’s not a core Fidelity business and it is not a topic people want to talk about really and it’s kind of a hard subject to approach, but it’s a reality. It’s the 100% probability we are all going to die someday and so yes, families don’t have that conversation and a shocking number of people don’t have wills and they don’t have beneficiaries designated for their children and they don’t have trust accounts built to protect their family’s assets when they go between generations where they could. And so it’s in everybody’s best interest to just sort of think for a minute and it’s also a problem where everybody is convinced, myself included, I’m not going to die tomorrow and that’s true for a while, eventually not true and people feel pressed and that’s a very emotional things. So if anything you are sort of perfect to approach that people, it was logical you would just do it or if you had a deadline like you do at paying cash, you would just do it. So we put together a service and really thought through how that will work and we started with an initial function that we could make it online, that lawyers weren’t necessarily necessary for everybody. But we actually learnt, actually there is a comfort then in trying to get it and some people do want lawyers, but they are still obviously what people started and get them to the lawyer that we can overcome and that we can put together a service that would be valued by our customs, without necessarily being focused on the ROI. But with the assumption that if we provided valuable service for our customers, they would keep more of their money with Fidelity and if more money would stay with Fidelity inter generationally and at the time when they did pass away. So that’s one project where we used this method, which was a success. There is a another project that we are just in the midst of, other end of the age spectrum and that’s also a sort of big silo issue around student loans and again Fidelity is not a bank. We don’t offer student loans, we don’t refinance student loans, but we have learned as people around the country are learning, just what a big crippling problem student loan debt is for people. But we were surprised you know to discover it’s not just for people with families and the parents with kids of that large student loans. And I’ve made different decisions and often poor decisions on what they do with their money. People who have student loans in their families are less likely to invest in their retirement savings programs. Even to the account that they would get a free or the match that their employer provides to them. So we’ve been digging in on that project and we are just getting ready to launch some pilot and discovering that still, but are going public with some of the programs around that. So, you know two examples of the kinds of things that we work on.

David Kruse: Interesting. So with the student loans example, how do you come up with that idea, and then how do you test it and then actually roll it out. Do you have a process in place or is it a lot of iterations or…

Fred Leichter: Yes, I mean there is a couple of processes. Design thinking is one, another is a method called lien start-up, which sort of [inaudible] sort of book that popularized it. But then it’s to basically try to learn. Before you launch a service in detail and put all the bells and whistles in place to try to figure out whether it’s the so called minimum viable product, that you can create, that will teach you about what those people will really do. So the way we stated this loan project is basically we looked around towards services that were available to people. That were nothing we had yet created and we put out a notice on our Fidelity intranet site and asked employees to volunteer, to try out some tools to help them analyze and potentially refinance their student loans, just so that we would watch that process and learn more about it and more than – do more than just interview the lot and see what would happen, with great care to be confidential about peoples personal information and not to ask some questions they weren’t comfortable answering. But basically what we learnt is, many more people than we suspected volunteered. Number two, people ask if they could forward the invitation to other people in their families, which we didn’t expect, and then we watched it, we did and we watched that it’s a much more emotionally and painful process that we had even imagined and also learned that while the services in the companies we have talked to talks about high satisfaction rates for their customers, we learned that was really only the case for their customers who had successfully refinanced. The people who had been rejected for refinancing, for whatever reason, for credit risks or credit scores or whatever were clearly devastated and that was, and they realized we have to do a way better job in handing people regardless of whether they were going to be successful in refinancing or not.

David Kruse: Interesting.

Fred Leichter: And so that, so to answer your question. We were able to start a project without writing any software. But we went further in just intervening people. We tried to figure out a way to find out what best situation was and what the experience was for people.

David Kruse: That’s smart. You guys are quite entrepreneurial over there, I like it. You got a good story. Okay so I want to move on to your next role, but I have one last question, and I know you are leaving Fidelity, but I am curious if there is certain technologies for the financial industries that your actually excited for. It doesn’t have to be technology, because it could just be a process or what’s kind of coming down the pipeline in your mind in the future in the financial industry?

Fred Leichter: Yes, I mean Fidelity Labs is a group I could back up and give you perspective. Fidelity Labs essentially there is two things very proudly speaking one is we’ve investigated in new technologies and try to see whether they are applicable and the front end to that has been things like the iPhone. And where we did a quick pilot of the iPhone app, you know Fidelity had a electronic trace some BlackBerry devices, but that hadn’t had much uptake, but then the iPhone obviously had a lot. And so another example is Google Glass, we wrote a pictorial type for Google Glass, but Google Glass did not take the off or has not taken off yet and so that was a failure. But we were so ready in place to act. My group on the other hand, the thinking team focuses more on that areas on that need, like a student loans, like end of life planning, like inter generational finance where we think they are bit trends like longevity, people are living longer. So my team starts rather than form technologies, starts with trying to find very big areas of unmet need, but often there is an intersection and we try to understand that. So and it a lot – one of the technology trends that we are watching and experimenting in and just to understand at this point is our crypto current and trying to understand what that might do to financial services if trades could be sold easily using blocking technology or what would that mean and how might revolutionize the industries. That kind of an example of the technology we think we are studying, because we think it has – may change things drastically, maybe like the internet. And then again the security issues and the privacy concerns make prep with, but we think that’s the kind of thing that we should be looking at. We also think artificial intelligence is a technology who’s time is coming rapidly and that there will be applicability of artificial intelligence and financial services is or something into management.

David Kruse: And, with, well both of those course are interesting topics. We could just spend a whole podcast talking about each on. But just one more question to follow up on the – the AI aspect or Artificial Inelegance I mean are you thinking how could – how are you thinking how AI could affect the financial services in the industry.

Fred Leichter: Yes, I mean, some of the obvious ways and they want the cuts, they want some startups that they are perusing this. Some of the ways maybe around personally construction and asset allocation and management, and smart asset allocation, but I don’t necessarily think that’s all that artificial inelegant and people know to do that. There are algorithms that are out there. The artificial inelegant made deal more with the nuant with for somebody’s personal situation and then you know a very specific needs to people based on their age of their children and where they live in the county and the real-estate home etc. So that’s an area where we think Artificial Intelligence has promised. But however, and this is the kind of learning’s we’d had at the end of like planning project leaders doing loans. People don’t just act on logic and don’t just act on algorithm and logic. There is a certain amount of emotionally security that people want to have and they want to and there is usually a – there’s usually a person behind that.

David Kruse: Interesting, that’s a good point, right. AI is not going to take over everything, because there is always emotion. Well, it’s a lot of choices, a lot of things you make through emotion behind that.

Fred Leichter: Yes and as you suggested, we could spend an entire podcast on that one. But it’s certainly an interesting topic.

David Kruse: Definitely, well maybe for another time. So let’s talk about your next role at the Claremont Colleges’ and I was curious what’s the – I see this is kind of a model for other schools. A lot of other schools have gotten more into entrepreneurship and stuff, but there is something to more of this creativity, innovation which is little different and so I’m curious what’s the goal with Rick and Susan Sontag at Claremont…

Fred Leichter: Yes so for – well, my exposure for this kind of thinking started as I mentioned earlier with the Standard d.school and in addition to sponsoring a class early, I was fortunate enough to be a Fidelity sponsor fellow after d.school and have a year in residence at the d.school in Stanford and work on a Fidelity project while I was there. So take classes, teach classes and work on a Fidelity project and that’s actually with some of the work around understanding. I was working with 100 students and needed people in the so called sandwich generation about aging parents and the kids in college at the same time. It’s another long interesting topic. But what I saw at Stanford when I was there on the ground, how much power is in this notion of interdisciplinary learning. How much power there is in the idea that you could bring somebody from the medical school or business school, the law school and engineering school together to work on a project, and how powerful, the massive and getting people to act on creating things quickly and being human centers. So that’s what the students at the Rick and Susan’s contact center. Its known as the Hive. A oncologist thought – he was trying to do at the under graduate level. So this is not familiar with the Claremont Colleges, especially a consortium of five really great, but very different under graduate colleges. Harvey Mudd, it’s an engineering school; Claremont McKenna that has a really strong program with the government and political science; Pitzer College that has really great arts and education programs; Scripts, college which is one of the top woman only colleges in the country and then Pomona, that is a really well ranked sort of a classic Nuborgh’s college. All five colleges are immediately adjacent to each other in Claremont California. So together they are known as the Claremont Colleges, but there is not such a thing. They all have independent curriculum, which they are on purpose. They all have their own campuses. They are immediately adjacent, but their own campuses and their own culture and their own personality, which are all outstanding. Students from any of the Claremont can cross register and take classes with the other, any of the other four colleges or five colleges in total, just the two graduate schools there. But there hasn’t been a program that actively integrated students together across all five colleges at once. So the idea of The Hive, the contact center is that we will be creating a program for collaborative, creativity to complement the great education that students are getting at the five colleges, but to get them to work on interesting, challenging, ambiguous problems. Ambiguous problems are the kind of problems that don’t have one answer, they have many answers and are just difficult to understand. But to get them to work together, where we have a student from each of the five colleges, potentially all working together as a team to identify a problem and find different ways to solve it. So that’s what got me excited about it. There was an opportunity to do something similar to what happened to Stanford and try to bring additional value to what a already great Nubourgh’s educations do, but to do it in a really unique way where you can leverage the skills and the disciplines that students have from different areas.

David Kruse: Interesting. Yes, you seem like you will be an ideal person to help lead that. What are the examples, and like bigger problems that the center is going to want to work on?

Fred Leichter: Yes, I mean, yes thanks for saying that. I mean I think I’m a good person to lead it in part because I don’t come from an academic background, I come from obviously as we have been describing from a business background. Fidelity is somewhere I used – where I spent time in the academic study and teaching and have been a sponsor. So the kinds of problems that people may work on or students may work on may be the type that I described at Fidelity, but they may also be other problems that come from the public sector, the social sector. Students this year – primarily it was piloted for this year. So it’s been in action for a year. I’m coming in to sort of bring it to the next level and get things more formalized. They were – for instance they were working on understanding the need of woman in their 60s who have newly diagnosed or new cancer diagnoses. So what are the emotional needs? What are the family needs? What are the cares? A very specific, a very, very sort of profound problem without an obvious answer. They may be working on issues of affordable transportation or affordable housing in the community. They also may work on things where we bring together different programs, that as a class this year taught where that was co-taught between a material of scientists, a materials science engineer and an arts professor to get students to create, work together to create art projects, while developing and understanding of the composition of the materials that they were designing around. This is another project, another class that’s been proposed for next year where we are going to have students study native American studies and geology and ceramics, in which they will in teams go up into the hills of Southern California and find clay deposits similar to those that native Americans have found in the past. Understand the geology that’s led to this clay deposits and then create ceramic work, which they will display in The Hive. So those are really nice, juicy, inter disciplinary problems where this learning that can happen by being collaborative and hands on and people will hopefully – I’m convinced that they will see things differently and forge relationships across disciplines.

David Kruse: Yes, what a wonderful experience for those young minds. I mean we all wish we weren’t looking back we were part of projects like that?

Fred Leichter: Yes, don’t you want to sign up for that class.

David Kruse: I know, exactly.

Fred Leichter: Get a shovel and start looking for clay.

David Kruse: Exactly, I might be coming on. I might be coming on. So we are almost out of time. I have a couple more questions, but I mean it sounds – like I said, it sounds like it could be a model for other schools and, but what is…

Fred Leichter: Yes, I think it will be and we are also working with other colleges that are in the – that are similar little arts colleges in other universities and trying to understand what are the programs. Are they similar programs that they have underway in which we are trying to transform a part of the education of the students.

David Kruse: Because I think like so many colleges have the entrepreneurship stuff and which is great, but my perspective of what you are doing is almost more relevant to entrepreneurship and just working with larger companies. But you are just working on teams and solving difficult issues and there is no right answer and yes, it’s interesting.

Fred Leichter: Yes, it’s different. You know an entrepreneurship – noting against an entrepreneurship program, but this was definitely not an entrepreneurship program. We are not – it clearly it doesn’t mean that students won’t come out with great ideas and start small companies. But this is much more about a problem finding and a problem solving discipline and the benefit of working across disciplines that is not just about starting a company. It could be about joining a large company or working in healthcare or becoming a teacher and so I’m convinced that these skills are going to help people in all kinds of disciplines, not just starting companies.

David Kruse: Yes, yes, I agree. And so the first year in 12 months that you are going to be there, what are your priorities? How are you going to measure, and maybe not going to measure. Maybe it’s just engagement you are going to measure, but what are your priorities and also do you have certain goals that you want to try to reach? It sounds like goals will be hard to set, but just curious.

Fred Leichter: No, that’s right. I think you hit on the big one which is engagement, but its engagement in three places; students’ number one, so now students engaged and wanted to take classes, sign up for projects or do workshops, then we won’t be succeeding with them. We want that engagement to be well distributed between a psychologist. Similarly we want facility engagement, we want us to create combinations to get facility from different schools in different disciplines to collaborate on classes such as the ones I was mentioning. And then the third engagement is with the outside world, and that’s part of what I have to bring to the table, is creating interesting dialog with people and business run in the public sector or in the military and there is all kinds of interesting places that we can create interactions for people and then be radical about the way those work together.

David Kruse: Interesting. Okay then.

Fred Leichter: So you are right. They are not financial metrics that we might have. It’s an entrepreneurial kind of venture and that we are getting this spilling off the ground. But what we are trying to do is get people to meet the opportunities to work together and to see light bulbs go off in their eyes and in terms of the way they are approach problems.

David Kruse: Interesting. All right, well I can see why are you talking this role. Sounds fun, well.

Fred Leichter: Yes. Thank you.

David Kruse: All right, so one more questions and then we should, unfortunately we have to wrap it up and this is more on a personal level. I was just curious you are around lots of creativity and Mike and creative people and do you have a process or how do you get yourself like in a creative mindset or innovative mindset and maybe, yes, do you have a process or do you have a method or its just kind of comes to you or how do you…

Fred Leichter: No I mean, yes that’s a great question. It’s part of how I look at helping working with groups. I mean there are a couple of different things that I do or that I do with the teams that I have here, that I will do with student teams and this term you use called stock which comes from stoking the fire and so you want to warm yourself up. But it’s not just warm yourself up, it depends on the activity. So sometimes we try to warm people up to be creative by doing energy activities, we are doing things are coming out of the world of impulse. So like adopting the two most important words in proposition which are yes and so I get people thinking yes and we can do something else and have some fun with it. So as a group that’s an activity, set of activates that we do to try to get people generative to generative as groups. And as an individual, and as other individuals I also, the flip side of that is to give people the space to be more reflective and more aware and sometimes that means being quite or just going outside and sitting and looking and seeing how many things you can notice and I would do that a lot. Personally what I would do is like pick up a lot of pictures, a lot of photographs and try to just notice. I notice things through the camera lens. Sometimes that I don’t see till later, but I wonder about why I just didn’t notice; we need people to meditate and reflect is a great balance that many people have the energy in groups. So we do all kind of things that I would do personally and then also try to teach people to do.

David Kruse: Interesting. Yes, that’s great advice, I love the yes end, I have a friend you does it often. Yes, I mean you’re exactly right. I never thought about that, but often when you come up with ideas. It’s easier to shoot ideas down right away, right, but…

Fred Leichter: Well, we do a little exercise here sometimes with the groups where you know you throw out an example like, lets plan a birthday party and ask people to get-together in groups of three or four and plan a birthday party and you say well, simple instructions are when you come up with an idea, make sure your realistic and everybody just say, two words in-between every idea, yes, but, yes, but, I know but, even better know, but and people had that conversation and the rooms kind of dead, and then you ask them how that felt and they said well, it feels a lot of like many of the meetings I go to. Somebody is always an expert and shoots down my ideas. And then you say, okay pause. So it’s, trying the same thing again. But instead of saying, no but, I want you to use two different words, yes, and, everything else is the same thing, same idea, plan for a birthday party. And just getting people to use those words, it’s amazing how it changes the tone the volume and the number of ideas that get generated and then peoples beliefs that they come up with really good interesting ideas and it’s just going to be a fun birthday party or a fun activity or whatever it is that they are planning. So it’s a great thing for you and your listeners to try sometime. Just have a conversation – try it out, have a conversation where you work on something and you say no, but and have the same conversation where you say yes, and you would be amazed that how different the two feel.

David Kruse: Well, that’s brilliant. I think when you are out there at Claremont I think you should start a blog.

Fred Leichter: Yes, the only problem in my life is time, so I will.

David Kruse: I was just…

Fred Leichter: Either that or I’ll just or I may well just get on your podcast more regular.

David Kruse: Yes, there we go. That would be awesome. That’s a great example of a birthday party. It’s a good way to end the podcast. So I appreciate that and I appreciate your time and the rest of your thoughts and giving us more knowledge about how you think about creativity innovation. It’s quite interesting.

Fred Leichter: Yes. Thanks. I enjoyed it, and great questions and thanks for asking me to do this.

David Kruse: No problem, and thanks everyone for listening to another episode of Flyover Labs. I hope you enjoyed it as I did and we’ll see you next time. Thanks everyone. Thanks Fred.

Fred Leichter: Thanks.