Ep. 208 - Fernando Garibay, Record Producer, DJ, & Entrepreneur on Awakening Creativity in Business

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation.  I'm your host, Brian Ardinger founder of Insideoutside.io, a provider of research events and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat for the latest thinking, tools, tactics, and trends in collaborative innovation. Let's get started.

Interview Transcript

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest today. We are recording one of our IO Live sessions with legendary Fernando Garibay. Fernando is a record producer, songwriter, DJ, entrepreneur. He was the official music director for Lady Gaga's Born This Way ball and producer for her Born This Way Album. He's worked with some amazing artists from U2 to Brittany Spears, and now he's working with some amazing corporate giants as the founder of the Garibay Center.  Fernando, welcome to the show. 

Fernando Garibay: Thank you, Brian. Thank you for having me on your show. I'm a huge fan. You're one of the best interviewers I've come across, so I'm excited to be here. 

Brian Ardinger: Thanks. Thanks very much. And you and I met about a year ago when I had a chance to come out to your studio and see your process of how you create a hit. And so I wanted to have you on the show for a couple different reasons. One, to start things off, the world has changed dramatically in the last two months. And we're entering what I'm calling the Great Reset. The old models are not working. Old ways of thinking. Status quo are being disrupted. 

And I wanted to have you on the show to talk about the creative process. And how the business world needs to awaken its creative side and how you're doing that at the Garibay Center. How did you move from producing some of the biggest hits in the world and work with some of the best artists on the planet, to pivoting and working in this corporate innovation environment? 

Fernando Garibay: So, it's really interesting. It's what the Garibay Center is all about, and why I founded this arena, what I call a New Paradigm. And just to clarify a couple points, one point is I still leverage and create content for the purpose of not only expanding and supporting and showing proof of concept that our model does work, but also to stay active in a creative community and stay creative myself.

Second point, what gives me relevancy in this climate and culture of innovation and why I started working with the corporate sector is because I realized none of what we do, as individuals, as human beings is sole dependent. It's not one person, it is community growth. And as I realized, working 20 years in the music industry at the highest tier, I realized that if we become an Island and we only create content with the purpose of expanding brands, so to speak, creating music and books and creating music and not really focusing on diversifying our creative portfolio, we're limited. 

And what I realized is besides access, right, on all sides, musicians are always creating at the highest level every day. They're in the trenches being creative. Where is another value set that we can use that creativity and apply it to outside businesses, besides entertainment industry. You see, man, it's a projection of myself because I am completely polymathic in my approach. It's all subjects. It's all sectors of business. It's all entertainment. It's all combined because creativity is creativity. Creativity is you find a new path to work every day because you are creative and looking for different novel ways of getting to work. Theoretically. Right. So that's just a very simple anecdotal version of quick creativity is. 

Having hit records, having the success, it got really empty and vapid for a while because essentially, I was defining my success by the hit records I have, and that's a very common problem. So, what I decided to do is shift the creativity and what I do every day. And all this happened in my career is I've evolved to look at this and adopt this orthogonal perspective. It's all things are related in a theory of emergence and chaos. Everything is related, right? So how can we utilize our skill sets of being creative and apply it to the corporate sector? How can we apply our creative attributes as musicians, as actors, as artists, as entertainers to use those lenses and solve problems?

Now, that sounds like a really high, abstract and tangible goal. But the reality is it's possible when you have Elon Musk tapping into the creativity of the Philharmonic New York conductor for his design idea, so to speak. Then you start to see that there are people who are hungry for different lenses. And so, my goal was to educate the entertainment and arts and music industry. Find mentees who are interested in being entrepreneurial minded. So they can not only create music, but learn the Harvard Business MBA course, learn a Wharton MBA course, learn the Oxford Neuroscience Course, which I distill in a way that musicians and artists can understand and apply these frameworks to expanding who they are as individuals, but also expanding their output.

Think of the Garibay Center as it brings relevancy to these artists as thought leaders. And it comes from this crucible of thought. Well, if you look at the greatest thinkers of all time from Einstein to Galileo, you start to see a correlation with musicianship. So there were musicians, Einstein was a violin player, and you start to see this correlation...you can make this connection that individuals who are creative, have creative expressions such as an instrument, et cetera, have this ability to look at things differently. All I'm doing is giving them the vocabulary to be able to do this effectively and to have this discourse now and sharing creative ideas. Now, not just making music or photography, et cetera, but also applying those skill sets to design, to helping corporate leaders, to think through their problems in a different way.

Aligning academic professors and the academic community to also apply this creativity in a different orthogonal way, so that we bring value to each other. So, think of the Garibay Center as a best in class, academic, corporate, and entertainment industry, working together to solve real problems. 

Brian Ardinger: Let's get tactical and talk a little bit about how that actually works. One of the things I liked about you and the session I went through, was how you brought the business side into the creative process. So, can you talk about how do you go about creating a hit.  You know you're working with an artist. What do you do? How do you use metrics and analytics on that to craft that and talk us through that process?

Fernando Garibay: Okay. In order to do that I have to kind of define a few terms, right? So, what is a hit? And so, we define a hit as when you successfully connect your content to a mass, participating groups. Identifying a target audience and then connecting with them on a genuine, authentic level. You've done that. You have a hit. If you want to go into music, entertainment industry, you look at such metric as billboard or charts, et cetera. They show you... Spotify streaming numbers...they show you who you've connected with successfully with the help of a machine, such as a label and publishing the marketing departments, et cetera, a machine to expand you...