DEO Profile: Steve Gundrum
Professional Inventor at Mattson
Steve smiles comfortably and settles into a chair. He has an air of contentment that hides a thirst for discovery and a passion for invention. As Creative Director (and formerly its CEO) of Mattson, one of the country’s foremost food research and development labs, he spends his days mixing chemistry and culinary arts.
We talked with Gundrum one afternoon over iced lattes at a local Starbucks. Surrounded by the products and experience of his passion, he described a career that’s one part scientist and one part artist — the perfect recipe for a DEO.
As a child, what did you think you’d be when you grew up?
I always wanted to invent. In grade school my neighbor and I made make-believe rocket ships and talked about flying around and picking up our friends.
In sixth grade I designed my idea of a maglev train. It was conceptual, but I figured out all the engineering details. My teacher said it was stupid — that it could never work — but I knew he was wrong because we’d been playing with magnets in class and I understood their properties.
This got me interested in drafting tools. I saved up my money and bought everything I could find: a drafting table, T-bars, mechanical pencils, an architect’s ruler. I thought they were so beautiful. I loved looking at them and holding them. I only bought “good stuff ” and I used them to draw everything. I drew houses, trains, rocket ships, anything. Everything I drew had to be precise and to scale, with multiple perspectives. I loved starting with a white canvas and creating something.
Do you recall any early childhood experience that shaped your career?
I was about twelve or thirteen and in the Milwaukee airport when I saw a travel poster for Northwest Orient Airlines. The poster turned the U.S. map upside down and flipped it so Florida pointed up and to the left. Then they had overlaid the title “Fly Northwest to Florida” (Steve draws the poster from memory). I remember being struck by the sheer cleverness and creativity of this concept. It was a profound moment that turned on my interest in being creative — that this was an option as a career.
When I was around fifteen or sixteen, I saw another ad, this time for Volkswagen, where they claimed that a VW cost less per pound than hamburger, using a simple visual comparison. I thought this was genius on two counts: someone could conceptualize this as true because VWs are light and someone could do the math. There were some creative analytics going on there that intrigued me.
How do you define creativity?
I’ve always just marveled at creativity, regardless of the category or the subject matter. You can just kind of spot it when something’s really new and not derivative. That poster behind us is beautiful and I appreciate it, but it’s not particularly creative.
When you spot the purest form of creativity, it’s something to behold. The band Phish is a good example. It’s amazing the creativity of everything they do — even the purpose of the band. It’s the same with Them Crooked Vultures. They’re not just good bands. They have a level of creativity that’s really pure and masterful. You can hear them for thirty seconds and get it.
Did you make a course correction early in your career?
Yes, in my sophomore year in college. I was an engineering major. I went to the program’s Christmas party in the gym and found myself surrounded by a thousand of the geekiest men on the planet. They were mourning the death of the slide rule and expressing outrage over the advent of the electronic calculator. There were no girls. No drinking. And this was their idea of a party. I knew right then I could not work with these people the rest of my life. I immediately transferred to marketing and I’ve never regretted it.
When did you first realize you could lead?
Very early. I was just comfortable with it. Now I lead like a producer or conductor. I’m confident pulling people together and directing them in different ways, but way before I had authority, I still could lead. I could sense that people around me wanted guidance and I was willing to offer it. Even people who were technically my superiors at work would be willing to let me lead them.
Over time my leadership style has adapted to whatever situation I’m in. Right now I need to micromanage more than I like because I have team members who need specific direction, but I don’t like to do this.
Team sports are a good analogy, I think. How you play versus lead or coach is situational and depends on your team members. If you have really talented team members, you can focus more on being a player who leads and not so much a coach. If you have developing team members, you have to be more of a coach and mentor them. You have to spend less time playing and more time coaching. If you have weak players, you’re just a coach — you have no time to be a player.
What do you love about your job?
Inventing — it’s still what I love to do. For me, it’s like going on a really awesome vacation with no reservations. You go to a really cool exotic place and you just start exploring.
Or maybe it’s like fly fishing, which I also love. It takes all these years to learn the art and the science. There’s all this cool equipment and technology and apps, but then there’s also this combination of experience, motivation, and intuition or gut feeling. You bring these together and creating becomes a hunt. You’re trying to catch this elusive “trout” — the big idea — in the river. You have to be patient and crafty. The little ones are easy to catch but not the big ones. They’re big because they’ve never been caught. No one’s figured them out yet.
Doing this is pure joy for me. It’s so much fun. I never tire of looking at anything that stimulates my thinking, like observing behaviors or talking to others.
Do you think innovation depends more on process or people?
I think innovation is much more dependent on individual efforts and people. It’s largely process independent. Not 100 percent — I don’t know what the ratio is — but you have to have the right inventors. It’s inventors, not the process of inventing. You have to be motivated to spend hours looking for insights and visuals — it takes a passion or drive that can’t be captured in a process.
What’s your “superpower” at work?
Patience. I know no one thinks of that as a super-power, but in my business, it is. As corny as it sounds, you can lead people (clients or employees) to water but you can’t make them drink, even if they’re dying of thirst. It takes true patience to wait until they’re ready to change and then get a wide group of people to adopt that change.
What’s helped you develop as a creative leader?
I’m a fine collaborator, but I’m a solitary thinker. The worst words I can hear in a group of people are, “Now we’re going to break into teams of three.” But I know it’s important and I lead by example. When someone has a good idea,
I explain why I think it was good. When they’re off track, I help get them back on track in a way that doesn’t bruise their ego. I don’t want to do anything that will stifle creativity.
That’s how people helped me. I seemed to always be surrounded by accidental support. People didn’t know they were helping me, but they were. They encouraged me with balanced feedback and fair assessments. No one ever said, “You’re a superstar” or “You’re amazing.” They would just calmly recognize when I did good work and let me know.
How important is corporate culture?
It’s very important. What we sell is so intangible. People hire us and they hope their investment will result in a successful product. No one will invest in people or groups who aren’t obviously and genuinely motivated and excited by what they do.
It’s the same in reverse. We have relationships with people, not companies. That’s what matters to us. When you find those right people and you connect with them, you get business relation- ships that are productive, creative, and successful.
But you can’t mandate culture. I lead by example and I do my damnedest to firewall individuals and activities that damage the culture. What damages the culture? Bad attitudes, people who feel entitled, people who believe they have skills in excess of their demonstrated abilities, people who are unapproachable because they have a quick temper or they’re manipulative. These are bad traits in any culture, but they’re really bad in a creative culture.
I also coach people never to fake it. If you don’t know, just say, “I don’t know, but I will find the answer for you.” Occasionally I see people trying to fake it and it’s so obvious and doesn’t instill confidence. I have no trouble saying I don’t know. I think it shows strength and people appreciate it.
Is your office design important to your creativity?
It’s critical. Some big companies have labs with nice cabinets and everything is neat and tidy. We have no doors on anything. We took all the doors off our cabinets because we want to be able to see everything. Creativity is about iteration: you don’t go from A to B. There’s a lot of hard work iterating. We make that as easy as possible in our space. Nothing is behind a door. Imagine if your computer screen locked up every time you stopped typing — that’s what a cabinet door is to us.
Our labs are very open. We work shoulder to shoulder. In the lab areas, shout mail is more important than email. Someone will yell out, “Does anyone have…?” I think it’s under-appreciated how important proximity is to the creativity process. You don’t want to be disruptive, but work environments and their own equilibrium over time.
How do you lead in a time of change?
The food industry evolves a little more slowly than other industries. The costs of change are very high. Change can happen fast at the entrepreneurial level or small restaurant level, where they can be more flexible and responsive. But everything on the menu here at Starbucks went through months of painful presentation and debate. The cost of building inventory is much more significant than with apps. If manufacturing is involved, it’s very capital intensive. There’s also little control over the retail environment. You have to hope it will sell. As a result, the industry is more risk averse and cautious.
But certain things like flavors can change really fast and I have to keep up with that. I read 93 blogs every day. I have an aggregator that creates a newspaper for me from all the blogs. The news is highly tailored to my professional needs. I also eat out a lot. Sometimes I try the same thing at different restaurants just to see how the style is developing. I’ve had Mexican moles in at least fifty different restaurants.
When it comes to the future, how do you know you’re looking at the right things?
It’s a result of experience, intuition, and your industry IQ (expertise). You can’t have just one — you need all of them. You also have to be a risk taker. You have to be able to put a stake in the ground on an idea and have the confidence to defend it, even if others don’t get it at first.
Have you made mistakes or had missed opportunities?
Sure, I make mistakes, but more than making mistakes I have certain weaknesses. I mean I don’t land short of the runway — ever. But I’m overly sensitive to people’s individual needs to the point that it gets in the way of progress at times. It probably goes hand in hand with patience, but this is not a virtue.
For example, because I understand how disruptive it is to let someone go, I may delay too long. But I feel such a sense of responsibility and I know this will disrupt their life, their self-esteem, their economic well-being. I could have a more profitable, smoother-running company if I was tougher on people issues, but I think of this as a speed bump. It’s not going to do that much damage.
The upside of this is that because of my style and my slowness to take offense, employees come to me with bad news. They’re not afraid I’ll overreact. This lets me put out fires before they become roaring blazes. People with tempers have reputations. I want working relationships, not a reputation.
As for missed opportunities, my ideas get shot down all the time and always have. I’ve learned to accept it. Luckily, I’ve never been blocked from expressing my creative vision. Even if some of my ideas are crap, I’m still allowed to keep trying.
When you’re gone from the scene, what three things do you want to be known for?
I could collaborate really well with people to create the very best possible outcome given the resources and constraints we were given. I was fun to work with, to the point that I made people happy. And that people would say of me, “Damn, he could come up with good ideas really fast.” In my business, creative and fast are both important. Fast is probably slightly more important, because for my clients there’s a competitive advantage to being first.
