Welcome to the Jodi Mayberry Show. I'm so delighted to bring back a former guest, Bob Allen. Bob had a wonderful career at Disney and Ideas Orlando and has some new things going on I wanna tell you about. If you heard the past episode though, he was with his brother, and he is now shaken free of his brother, to talk on his own. Hi, Bob. Hey, Jody. Yeah. So, Bob, you are older than Rick. Am I right? Oh, point that out.
Sure. Let's start there. Well, the no. I mean, the only reason I mentioned is because, you know, the younger sibling always follows the older sibling around to get attention. Well, so the real truth is there are 3 of us. So I'm the oldest. Rick's the middle, and then our brother Buck is the the the baby. But, yeah, I'm the senior. Yeah. Well, I guess that is an awkward place to start it off.
So to quickly change the subject, I wanna mention how sometimes when I record a podcast episode with someone, some of the best stuff happens before the recorder is on, and I wish I would've had it recorded. Bob was having a conversation with a crow that was right outside his patio. True enough. Yeah. I I do talk to animals. You know, I live on a lake in Florida. And during the the height of COVID, my wife and I worked together, but we were isolating from each other.
So she sort of took the office inside in the screen porch. We started referring to as my dog run because this is sort of where where I started to live and work. And I just got to know everybody in the neighborhood, and most of them are birds. So it's, you know, I've got red winged blackbirds and cardinals and doves and grackles and sandhill cranes and, and these 2 crows, Randall and Bernice, who come every day, and they're they're peanut
fiends. So they come and bark at me until I give them peanuts. I'm gonna give you some park ranger humor, Bob. What do you call 2 crows sitting together? I know the answer. You want me to tell you? Oh, well, see, I thought I was gonna be An attempted murder. That's right. Attempted murder. Yes. A group of crows is called a murder, so it's a park ranger joke. A murder of crows. Yeah.
When the last park I was a park ranger at, we had a massive, unreasonably large raven named Carl with a k. And I used to tell park visitors that the first documented photo and description of Carl was in 1916, which, of course, was, loose interpretation of Carl's real history, but the park visitors liked it. Well, wouldn't be surprised. Alright, Bob. There's I think we've got some good stuff to talk about, and I I wanna go backwards. You had a great history at
Disney. A lot of people know the work you did at Ideas. We'll get to those. Sure. But instead of following up with what you're doing now, let's just start there because I think it is Zinnovation is such a unique capture of what I've learned about Bob Allen. All the great stories with your personal passion wrapped into 1. So let's start there, and then we can work backwards. Great. Yeah. And it is an exercise in passion. You know, it's everybody gets these. You get these chapters in your
life. And, you know, I'm lucky I've had a whole bunch of them. But Zenovation and the whole idea of this innovation network was, you know, you get to a point in your life where you go, okay, sort of in the Q4 here, you know, but and maybe it's generational. But I know for me personally, I'm just not a person who thinks about sort of the classic notion of retiring. I can't imagine anything more dreadful. So it's you get to the point where you say, k. What do we do
next? So you go with your passion, I think, is the answer. And so I I'm trying to blend a few things that I like. You know? One is, of course, I've had a I've been really lucky. I've had a whole career doing creative and innovative things, you know, for the Walt Disney Company and others. I love that. I'm a storyteller. I love that. I like to teach. I'm pretty good at that. I was sort of
my career was guided by people who are good teachers. But I've also been a about a 40 year practitioner in a Zen tradition. And, you know, we could go for hours and hours on that. But, you know, Zen isn't what most people think it is. It's really it's sort of the art of showing up in your life and knowing you're there. It's it's that fundamental. But the idea was, okay, what if we blend some of the things that we've learned from, you know, 40 years of practice in
Zen. We call it practice with, you know, let's just call it 50 years of experience in innovation and creativity. And what could you do with that? And so the idea was there are 3 or 4 things that I sort of consider myself reasonably qualified to speak about. So we put together some talks, and one of them is the one I'm doing with Rick of Mouse and Man, which is really very Disney
centric. Just a couple of other ones in there. And then really fun was this notion of this innovation network, which is the other thing you love to do is, hey. Who do I wanna work with? You know? And so besides my brother, I have some some colleagues, and some of them are former Disney folks, and some of them are people I've known. 1 of them I've known for 52 years. We went to high school together. So I said, what hey. What can we do together? So there's a few
workshops we're putting together to do that. And so the idea of Zenovation is doing some speaking to begin to teach some of these things and then doing some deep dive work in some one or even multiple day workshops to really start to help other people learn how to enhance their own innovative performance. I like hearing about this. Just I will say I have not much understanding of Zinn. But the way you've combined that, something you love so much with something you're so good at.
I like it because I've personally tried to step more into combining my experience as a park ranger into what I do now, which is in a way in I mean, Zinn and park ranger are not close, but the idea Oh, they're very close. I can't think of another field. In fact, that's that's a better, more fruitful ground for practicing present moment than being a park ranger. Oh, that's interest now we could talk for an hour or 2 about that probably. I only bring it up to say I
really like the combination of the the 2. Bringing 2 things together, making them 1. And I have found that I've not asked Bob if he has read this book. But of all I get the chance to talk to a lot of Disney executives and one book has come up more than any other, and that's the Medici Effect. Have you read that, Bob? No. I haven't. Oh, well, now
this is interesting. So the I'm gonna spoil the book, but the whole concept behind it is is really good things happen when 2 unrelated ideas smash into each other. And I feel like that's what you're doing. Love it. Well, if I had a philosophy of I was gonna say business, probably life. You know, it is a version of, you know, don't worry too much and expect possibilities. You know, Larry Ellison was once asked. He's the founding CEO of Oracle. He said,
hey. Well, you know, you're a tremendously successful company. And, you know, how do you do strategic planning? He said, we run into each other at the drinking fountain. You know? So I'm I'm a big believer in I'm a big believer in that kind of serendipity. But I'll put in a plug for mindfulness. In order for that to happen, you actually have to be present or it'll go right by you. And the real truth is, you know, more now than ever, we spend a lot of time not being in our life.
And classically, you know, I'll give you a little a little bit of Zen talk. By the way, the word Zen, just for the record, is a Japaneseization of the word chan, which comes from Chinese. And really, it just sort of means or points to the word meditation. It's about stopping and contemplating. That's there's no magic or mysticism to it. That's what it means. But the idea is if we live in our minds too much, what happens a lot is our habits take over, and we start worrying about the future,
and we start having regrets or concerns about the past. And as soon as we're there, we're not here. So the idea of mindfulness practice is just to learn to come back. My Zen teacher was a monk named Thich Nhat Hanh, who died 2 years ago actually this week. And, you know, Thay was famous for teaching in the West, and then his thing was always, you need to come home, and your home is here and now.
So how did what does that have to do with innovation? Well, in sort of my key keynote, if you will, is a talk called Zinnovating. And the idea is, look, if you want to invent an innovative future, first, you have to start where you are. So you got to show up first. From here, you can take a lot of really cool mindful actions to create, in fact, whole cultures of innovation, and that'll take care of the future. But you can only do it from here. You can't go there and do it
and then come back. So that's how the two things blend. This is really interesting to me because I realize I get caught in that trap way too often about thinking about next week, next month, what's coming and worrying about that and then thinking, oh, my goodness. We that thing I did last week, my goodness. What? That's going to be a thorn for a little while. And it reminds me of 2 people, which I'll mention, and neither of them practice Zen, but yet talk in
the way you do sometimes. That is Lee Cockrell, who I know you know Lee, and he will often say there's only 3 days that matter yesterday, today and tomorrow. And and then Jeff Noll will often greet people by saying happy present moment because most people reach out about your your birthday. Happy birthday. Happy New Year. And Jeff will reach out randomly and say happy present moment. And I always appreciate that. You know, it's
funny. We would go on retreats. We Ty would do leave retreats. We had a 1,000 people, you know, all all mostly all beginners. You know, we're all beginners just learning to do this. And one of the fun things would they would have a ceremony, and, you know, it was a big announcement. Hey. It turns out today is today's day. And then everybody would stand up and start talking about how they were going to celebrate today's day. And, you know, it it does sound a little silly after a certain
point when you talk about it. Practicing it is different. You know, and I always talk told people that about mindfulness practice is people will say, no. You know, reasonably, hey. You know, that sounds cool. Are there some books I can read? I said, yeah. There are. I said, but reading a book about mindfulness practice is like reading a book about skiing. It's not the same as putting the boards on your feet and pointing them
down the hill. You know, we call it practice for a reason. So you can read about it, but I don't I encourage people don't get lost in the reading because a lot of times the words begin to get in the way, particularly Buddhist readings because it gets pretty convoluted. So just take sit quietly somewhere, preferably somewhere pleasant, and see if you can take 3 in breaths and 3 out breaths and know that you're breathing. Takes less than 5 minutes. You know? Just do that for a while because that's
how you come home. You know? And you can begin to expand that out. And, you know, nice thing about mindfulness practice, you can be mindful no matter what you're doing. It's the difference between talking to Jody while I'm thinking about my presentation at the Science Center on Wednesday or talking to Jody and knowing I'm talking to Jody. They're completely different experiences. This to me, it just makes, something said by the
great philosopher, Kermit the Frog, even more meaningful. He said, wherever you go, there you are. Maybe he knew what was going on. Yeah. The Buddha said the same thing. Well, I heard it from Kermit the Frog. So I believe Kermit. What are the great Bodhisattvas, Kermit the frog? Well, I found a good good