Richard Ashworth

FRANKLIN, Tenn. — Today, companies need to adapt and be more agile than ever. That’s especially true for businesses across all levels of the chain drug store retail landscape, which extends from retail and pharmacy to public health services. Trey Holder, accelerate360’s chief business officer and president of distribution and logistics, recently had the opportunity to interview Richard Ashworth, president and chief executive officer of Tivity Health, to garner learnings from his career. Ashworth shared valuable insights on what it means to be an agile organization and some of the internal and external obstacles that must be overcome to implement a truly innovative culture.

The full interview (available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpSgSsUr5Hs) includes highlights from his career at Walgreens and recent initiatives he has implemented during his current tenure at Tivity Health. Here are some takeaways from the interview:

HOLDER: What attributes are necessary to implement an agile culture within an organization?

ASHWORTH: I think one is that you can’t be risk averse — you have to have an appetite for prudent risk taking. You can’t be silly with your money, your time or your people, but you have to take risks. I think that’s something that a lot of organizations that have been successful, like in Walgreens’ case, have been successful because they made a cultural shift.

Another is you have to be curious, and you have to be really curious about your customer … That curiosity pushes you to ask the right questions so that you can inform whatever it is that you’re innovating on to be right for them. A lot of times you think you know, but you actually haven’t asked the right questions.

I think the third attribute is a “bite-sized concept” of innovation. People sometimes feel like they need to lay out the whole thing for the customer to be completely done … and that is kind of old thinking when the market didn’t move as fast, when competition didn’t move as fast, when things weren’t as connected, and when things weren’t as global as now. Now that they are, speed is really kind of the game. Executing in bite-sized time frames is really important, and that’s sometimes culturally really challenging for people.

The last attribute is removing barriers. Barriers can be people, leadership, process, visibility and/or understanding. It could also be technology.

HOLDER: What lessons can be learned through failure? You hear the term fail fast … any truth to that?

ASHWORTH: You must be willing to fail, and you can’t get married to that failure. Plan to pivot, iterate and take the lesson to be learned so you can push the company forward in different ways.

HOLDER: What percentage of innovation fails?

ASHWORTH: The majority of them fail. I view failing as an investment. You got to work it until it works. If anybody could create an overnight success, well, then we’d all be doing that. It’s always challenging to figure out how to get right the new thing you’re trying to do. I find that companies just give up too fast. And so, for us, I’d say it’s 90/10 — innovations rarely pierce through and maintain stickiness with both customers and your business model. So I think companies must have that kind of mindset when it comes to “failing fast.”