On the 23rd of December of last year, I was on a plane traveling from Madrid to Venice to meet with my family for the holidays and I had a thought flying around, a typical small thought that doesn’t bother but doesn’t fly away either.
I was looking for a simple answer to something complex.
Every time I meet my grandparents (91 and 76), they always ask me three questions:
On the second question I start to sweat, but only because I know the third question is coming.
Probably most people working on tech or innovation know about this feeling (including the Metaverse questions at dinner; previously Bitcoin).
How do I tell my grandparents what my job is about? Probably if I tell them “I help corporations solve big challenges through Radical Innovation” won’t be clear enough.
Also I think TheCUBE goes beyond that, our purpose is clear, our market positioning is radical and hands-on; however, there is something that we’ve been creating that probably I could call magical- hard to explain — but it has been developed with intention, and it’s the essence of our people and soul of our projects.
There are three types of problems that we face in our life, personal and professional:
Simple: Can be solved through best practice: I want to make a coffee with my coffee machine — I know the process and the ingredients I need to make it a success.
Complicated: Solved through experience: I don’t know the answer but I can get someone who knows it — If I want to make a cappuccino coffee with vanilla flavour, I call my friend who is a coffee expert or look for a tutorial on Youtube.
Complex: Hasn’t been solved before, the only way to find answers is through experimentation: I want to make a coffee by roasting soybeans.
At TheCUBE we live in complexity, but we embrace it as a natural part of ourselves. The median age of our team is 27 (not sure what the industry average is, but I believe it is quite unique), and we work on radical innovation projects, projects that no one has done before and there is no path to follow in order to get to the objectives.
I remember a quote a client told me one day, “I’m working with you because you are not an expert in my industry, probably you’ve never done something similar before, so I’m sure the solutions you are going to provide are going to be radically different.”
So, what do we do again?
Probably this will be the best description of my job and the essence of TheCUBE. Since day 0, we’ve been exploring and developing psychological safety; this means you won’t be punished for making mistakes, being encouraged to embrace them and see them as part of learning.
At the end, when innovating the important thing is the problem you are solving, not the methodology you used to solve that problem.
We look for ambitious people, people that are eager to make big things happen and love exploring the extra mile, in a natural way… the extra mile is not crowded at all, we don’t like crowded places (except for events, we love events full of creative and brilliant people).
Diverse, talented, energetic, nonconformist, ambitious with a mentality embracing change and pushing the status quo to design and execute projects that will transform industries.
We love helping our people, long lasting relationships and growing together.
In the end, I haven’t found an answer to what I do, but only because I do something new everyday.
PD: As I’m writing this blog, I’m looking at one of our team members carrying some olive trees into an Innovation Lab. We’ll give you the full story in another blog entry.
ANDRÉS HADDAD
CEO of TheCUBE
