The Great Build - Season 1, Episode 1

The Great Build is a podcast by Bhartiya Converge, bringing senior leaders together for candid, unscripted conversations about the ideas shaping how organizations think, build, and grow.

In the first episode of The Great Build, host Bill Jordan, Board Member of Bhartiya Converge and Former President of Designer Brands, sits down with Julie Averill, former CIO of Lululemon & REI, for a candid conversation about what it really takes to turn innovation into business growth.

This is not a conversation about innovation as a buzzword or a slide in a strategy deck. It is about innovation as the discipline that moves a business: the mindset a leadership team has to build deliberately, why the fastest-moving companies choose to build their capability rather than buy it, and how a GCC in India can become the engine behind that kind of growth.If you lead a team, or you are thinking about how to scale one, this conversation is worth your time.

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Join two powerful CXOs who have built and led billion-doll retail brands. Bill Jordan, board member of Bhartiya Converge, former president of Designer Brands and DW Designer Shoe Warehouse, in conversation with Julie Averil, author, former CIO of Lululemon and REI, as they discuss how the innovation mindset separates organizations that move fast from those that just talk about it.

Bill: Let's talk about India for a minute. Do they bring different perspectives to the business that helped you guys think about innovation differently?

Julie: So we opened in Bangalore not because of a cosplay but because of talent.

Bill: We don't think about the customer. We think about something else that we're trying to accomplish?

Julie: The key I think for any company is keeping the decision makers close to the customer. We were going to take risk and we were going to have fun. That was just a mindset.

Bill: When you have 1.4 four billion people the amount of transactions that they process I mean we  as retailers in the US we gear up for that but every day in India is black Friday.

Julie: Yeah that's so true I saw this through Lululemon as we scaled from 2 to 10 billion, it was infectious to come into cuz we don't say no to anything we can do anything.

Bill: A lot of times stopping stuff was just as important as building a new muscle.

Julie: The leader needs to create the environment for innovation so it's not a tops down mandate you thou shalt innovate. There are some foundational things that you need to prioritize. And if you don’t prioritize those foundational things, especially when you're growing like a rocket ship, that will punch you.

Bill: Welcome to the Great Build Podcast, where vision becomes reality. I'm your host, Bill Jordan, retired retail executive and board member of Bhartiya Converge. In this podcast, we sit down with leaders who are shaping how organizations think, build, and transform, where ambitious leaders share how they lead. In each episode, we will bring one conversation, one leader, one perspective, and one set of ideas that will change how you think about the challenges your organization is facing right now. In today’s inaugural episode, I'm joined by someone who has led some of the most consequential transformations in modern retail, Julie Averil. Julie has spent two decades leading technology innovations across major retailers during periods of rapid growth, including seven years as global CIO at Lululemon, helping it scale from 2 billion to over 10 billion globally. She's built teams across multiple countries and led through constant change. She's known forearming trust in high stakes moments, making hard calls when the path isn’t clear, and building organizations that hold up under pressure. She holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science and an MBA. Today she writes, speaks and advises on technology and the human work behind transformation. And she’s coming out with a book in June entitled Chief Impact Officer. Real transformation comes from human, not just artificial intelligence. Julie, welcome to the Great Bill podcast.

Julie: Thank you, Bill. That was quite the introduction.

Bill: So glad to have you. But let's jump right into the conversation. Today, I'd like to talk about what separates organizations that move fast from those who just talk about it. I mean, every company wants to innovate, but few organizations seems to move at the pace that they want to. I know I've experienced that in the past, and I'd like to start with your perspective on that gap between intention and execution.

Julie: Yeah. Well, let's talk about what it feels like first to be in one of those companies that moves really fast. So, I've been in startups. I've been in Lululemon early days. Uh, and I've been in large organizations that that don't move as fast. I think when you walk in, your shoulders go down a little bit, right? You're you know that you're going to learn something. You know that the rules are the rules. You're not there to play politics or figure out who really makes the decision. You're there to create and you got people around you that have the same mindset. And so when you’re really innovating, you're in a space where you're creative and your technical ideas are free flowing. So, um, take that, put that on hold. And then the opposite of that is when you're in an organization that doesn't make decisions clearly. Maybe there's a large chain of command. Maybe it's unclear. I’ve got a great idea, but how do I get this idea in front of the customer? The organizations that move fast there, there's something about just this culture and this DNA and also about how decisions are made. The key I think for any company regardless of size is keeping the decision makers close to the customer because when you innovate you want to be able to observe what that experience is. You want to be able to come up with ideas. You want to be able to iterate and you want to move really fast on it. In organizations where that that isn’t true, that's where they move slow.

Bill: So, do you think Julie that when you talk about being close to the customer, which I love. I mean, I think that's the right answer. When we're sitting in boardrooms or, you know, creating strategy decks, we don’t think about the customer. We think about something else that we're trying to accomplish.

Julie: Yeah. And that's necessary, right? We have, we need strategies. Companies run on strategies. But when you get down to like the I think we're talking about like the speed of a company. And so, what's the organizational behaviour? What's the culture? What's the DNA like? I'll tell you when I walked into Lululemon, uh, so I came from REI, which was a co-op, right? Much different much different agenda, different culture, and there was a hunger and a pace, a pace at which Lululemon moved. They thought that they could do anything. It was infectious to come into because all of a sudden it's like, why can't we do that? We don't say no to anything. We can do anything. So, I came in as the CIO and there was so many things happening and I'll tell you most of it were probably not the right thing because they weren't they weren't the things that were really moving the needle on the customer. So, I would try to stop them butif they were a good idea it would just pop up in another area. So, putting a governance on that which was where I came from like we have to govern was impossible. And so, I had to change my mindset like how do we enable this? How do we enable the right ideas so that they can become bigger instead of trying to govern?

Bill: So how is as a leader and a leadership team, how do you get all of your teammates to buy in? Not just your executive team, but everybody you know through the ranks because you can have great ideas and leadership team can have great ideas but reality is most of that gets executed at a different level in the organization. So tell me about how you you guys were able to accomplish that.

Julie: Yeah, that's such a good question and you're right. It is the leader's job. The leader needs to create the environment for innovation and I think that that relies on a few things. Number one, psychological safety. You can't force your way to innovation. You have to create the environment for it. So, it's not a tops down mandate. You know, thou shalt innovate. It's creating this safety where people know that it's okay to take risks. It's okay to be wrong. It's okay to learn from it and to move on to say I don't know psychological safety I believe is this it's infrastructure right it is what the it's what good teams run on. The leader job is to hire people who want to work in this sort of environment you know not people who command and control but people who really want to build together and create innovation and so that's people who have a minds set of the business especially in the age of AI today right everything's AI I disagree there's always been really amazing technology AI is really amazing technology but you need to make it work for the company.

Bill: I agree with that and I think you know when I lookback at my retail career, and this this will apply to not just retail but all industries most of the biggest and most important innovations that occurred are not technology based right it's not this technology that you roll out this new, you know, program or whatever that's going to change customer behaviour. You know, it's product, it's experience, it's these other things. And I think a lotof times that gets overlooked and put through a lens of technology is driving these things.

Julie: Yeah. I'll give you an example. So, in 2014, I was working at Nordstrom and we enabled well, we had to we had to do a really big back-end system where we replaced a core order management system. It literally was too heavy to be housed in the building anymore. Like that's how old it was. We were at we had to add disc space. It was just too heavy. So we had to upgrade to something more modern. Because we were aligned with the business, we realized that we had the opportunity to also enable um the stores to become fulfillment locations. Here it is this back-end system and we enabled store fulfillment. Um, we had no idea what it was going to do, but it ended up being transformational to the company because all the inventory in all hundred stores all of a sudden became available to anyone who was shopping online. So turn increased. Uh, we took returns in the store. So customers shopping online came into the store like it was transformational to the company. That was an example of where technology enables right. It's not about the technology. It's about what you're doing for the business, what you're doing for the customer. The customer got access to all the inventory across the entire company, not just what happened to be in the warehouse in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, uh, but but everywhere. So, and I saw this through Lululemon as we as we scaled from 2 to10 billion. Wasn't about I mean, did we go from oncrem to incloud? Yes, we did. Sure. But we did that. No, we didn't talk about it, right? We did that as we were delivering things for the company and helping the company grow.

Bill: Talk a little bit about how it felt to be on that rocket ship of growth, right? You know, going from two to 10 billion in seven years. I mean, that's roughly a billion dollars a year of topline growth. It's hard for me to fathom. If you think about when you were there in the early days from, you know, the time you left, like how much changed and how did it feel?

Julie: It felt like we were always winning every end of the quarter, right? We just would beat expectations. So, we expected to win. We expected to keep winning. There's momentum that comes with that. When you are leading the pack, you're not uh playing defense, you're playing offense. Like, there was more ideas than we could possibly create. I mean, as a technology organization, we were scaling from, I don't know, small to very large and so producing tons and tons of value for the business, but that still just barely put a dent in what the business had appetite to do. So, it's fun to be a part of that. You know, I feel like it was a once- in a-lifetime opportunity to be able to have all the experiences that come with taking a company from 2 to10. And you know, you do things as best you can at the moment. And then because the next year you're 2x what you just were, you're looking back like, oh, why' I do it that way? So, you learn to get better at things. You learn to you learn to do things the right way the first time. Um, but you don't always do that, right? You're still growing as fast as you possibly can.

Bill: Well, it sounds like culture is a big part of the innovative environment. So, you talked about that culture of winning and how it feels. And I had a couple of times in my retail career where all the stars were aligning, right? You know, you know, sales were going up, margins were going up. And it just felt great. And in those environments, you felt empowered to do more. You could take more risk. you could innovate, you wanted to win. It sounds like, you know, that was an important part of the culture.

Julie: Yeah, for sure. And I feel like that was my job. My primary job was to create culture that would enable innovation at speed. So, there was a lot of work done with the leaders, right? How we lead, how what are our values and how do we live into our values? And if we don't live into our values, then we have conversations. And as I opened the our tech hub in Bangalore, India, it was the same thing. We you know, I had worked with partners, Indian partners for two decades. You know, a lot of that is you handoff a body of work and you get it back. This was something different. This we wanted to create an extension a part of our global technology team rich with culture from the very beginning. So that this was a partnership. This was just part of our delivery model and so that required a lot of investment in in culture. Youknow I spent a lot of time in Bangalore getting to know those leaders letting them know this was a different kind of company. We were going to take risks and we were going to have fun and we were going to innovate. Yeah. I mean, truly an opportunity of a lifetime for me to be able to build that and really see what it’s like when you have an organization that is safe, that is creative, that has incredibly strong technologists that check their ego at the door, that want to participate in creating amazing things for a company that they really believe in.

Bill: Well, let's talk about India for a minute and you know when I think about how you must have leaned into that organization as part of your own organization but how or do you have examples of how using that that team and your team in India help you guys innovate faster or differently or do they bring different perspectives to the business that helped you guys think about innovation differently?

Julie: So we opened in Bangalore not because of a cosplay but because of talent. we just simply couldn't hire the talent that we needed across Seattle and Vancouver. It wasn't there, just wasn't access. And so we opened very, you know, from the beginning knowing that we wanted to create a place that drove innovation at scale. That's that was just a mindset, right? So um we took a couple of leaders who moved to India, really had the culture, grew the team, hired amazing leaders. I would go over there and they would show me what they were involved in and everything would just blow my mind, like so advanced. They understood the business so well. And that was because the business leaders in you know Vancouver, in Hong Kong and wherever they were would go to Bangalore and invest time with the team there so that they would understand the business. And so what that created was a team this is before Lululemon was even talking about having stores in India but we had a team that was as fully Lululemon as any other team on the planet.

Bill: Such an important piece. That's great because they felt like they were part they were a part of the culture and they felt like part of the team and that I'm sure is in large part to your leadership and making them feel like part of the team and not just placing them part of the team.

Julie: Yeah. Critical part of the team.

Bill: I think about all the innovation too in India generally you know you know the stat that I always uh share with my retail friends is every day is black Friday in India. Uh when you have 1.4  billion people the amount of transactions that they process I mean we as retailers in the US we gear up for that but every day in India is black Friday.

Julie: Yeah, that's so true.

Bill: So I'm going to take a quote from Hamilton here, the musical. You know you've been in the room where it happens right you know the room where these big decisions are getting made and what we're going to innovate in and what we're going to do and what do you think the conversation in those rooms that leadership teams aren't having and they should when it comes to in innovation. What are they missing as it relates to thinking about and therefore executing later on about innovation?

Julie: How decisions get made in the organization. You can't in my opinion set up a separate innovation team and put them off to the side and say okay you're the ones that innovate. I believe that innovation is a mindset and a culture that needs to be pervasive throughout the organization and everyone should be responsible for innovation and for that to happen you have to be able to make decisions quickly. That's a great idea. Let's get that into production. I think what the what the leadership team should be talking about is how quickly we move. So much more important every day that we advance into the age of AI where data is available on a real-time basis. You know, we have to figure out as large organizations how to make decisions more quickly. How to say what is it okay for us to be bad at? We can't be good at everything. So, what is it okay for us to be bad at so that we can put our energy into those things where we really need to be amazing.

Bill: I know one of the challenges I always saw with leadership teams I was part of is trying to prioritize uh what needs to get done and um which is a difficult thing because there are a lot of great ideas out there and every person you know who represents a different discipline has their own idea of what's going to really you know be the thing that puts us over the top your organization over the top you know how are you guys able tohelp prioritize the again I think you probably had lot of different ideas that were in the hopper. What was that, you know, mechanism or was just getting together on a constant basis? How did you guys prioritize?

Julie: It was always hard because like I said, the list of things that we wanted to do was 10x what we could do. And we were doing a lot. You can tie it to strategy. You can you can allocate money per department. There’s all sorts of different ways to do it. But when it comes right down toit, what you have to do is you have to look out more than just, you know, the next year because there are some foundational things that you need to prioritize. And if you don't prioritize those foundational things, especially when you're growing like a rocket ship, that will bite you. So for us, it was product data, right? We knew every year that our product data was distributed across the organization and we needed to have one reliable clean set of product data that everything else could be built on and it was expensive and it also[clears throat] required not just the technology but the business leaders and all the business process changes. And so every year we said we'll kick it down the year one year. So it becomes like okay let's stop everything else because now we really need to work on this initiative. Like balancing the important but not critical along with the things that are going to going to really move the business is the hardest part of the job especially when you have endless opportunities to do things that really are going to move the business.

Bill: Yeah. I remember a lot of those conversations and they were they were tough. They were loud and vocal, but great leadership teams find a way to have those conversations, right? And then agree and then move forward together. I mean, that's a that's a really big key.

Julie: Yeah. At the end of the day, that's what you have to come down to. Nobody's going to be happy, which probably means you arrived right.

Bill: You did the right thing if nobody's happy. I think you’re hitting on a key theme here, Julie, which is in order to innovate successfully and to move fast. A lot of it falls on leadership. You know, what you know, decisions, how quickly you make decisions, how you communicate those decisions, how you live those decisions every day, how you inspire your, you know, your associates or your employees to go out there and buy into and drive those decisions.

Julie: Right

Bill: So if you were advising a team now, leadership team that wanted to build an innovation first culture, what would you suggest that they do? What would you suggest they stop doing? Because I know in my career a lot of times stopping stuff was just as important as building a new muscle.

Julie: You got to look at the DNA of the company, right? AndI think companies get really comfortable with the way that they've done things and think that that's the way to keep winning. That's not the case anymore, right? You have to challenge how you've done things uh and reinvent them. There’s so much so much white space out there right now for new business models, new ways of doing things. And so it would probably start by saying, “All right, if we were going to build the business today, what would we do? What would it look like? Would we be organized the same way we are right now? Would we reach the customer the same way? Would we take our products to market the same way?" And just think about what could be if you were, you know, if you were a small company today with the tools and um innovation available, right? What would you do? That's your competition, right? So your competition is doing that right now. Start with that and then say, okay, how do we get there? We have to get there by having this culture where it's okay to take risks that we're going to we might disturb some things, you know. I think one thing to do is you could put a team together, give them, you know, fund them and then see what antibiotics the organization throws at them to slow them down. You really got to think about how the organization works, how they you know, how far up the chain does do decisions have to go, what happens when you get something wrong? Do we do we punish? Do we celebrate? Do we learn from it? That mindset. And then of course the culture to create this environment where you have those people that, you know, like you talked about early in your career, being part of those organizations that are just hungry and creative. How do you create that?

Bill: You know, legacy in your company, you know, whether it’s legacy debt or legacy thinking is hard to overcome. So, if you've had people, especially in larger corporation companies, and you've been around along time, and this is how we do things, that stuff changes all the time. And, you know, if I think about when I started my career, people didn't shop on the internet very much, right? And today, it's a it's a primary vehicle. And if we continue to think the way we did that, you know, hey, in my case, people walked into a shoe store to buy shoes, then you're going to fall behind really quickly.

Julie: Yeah. And I think it's really important as companies change. I've seen multiple companies do this, like, okay, something new is coming out. We're scared of it. We got to hire in new people who know that. So, I think this is something that that honestly happened at Nordstrom, right? Amazon came in. Nordstrom was always known for customer service. Amazon redefined customer service. And so Nordstrom hired a lot of people from Amazon to speed things up, to innovate. And the thing that we have to be careful about in that environment is making sure we still hold on to what is true and special about the company, right? And if you hire all external people, maybe they don’t understand like what is at the root of really what makes this company special. And that's what a leadership team needs to do, right? They need to know, all right, here is that core that we will never give up, that we will never change and keep that true. Otherwise, you're just trying to create a, you know, another version of a company that's going to be chasing where you used to be.

Bill: I think that's spot on. That's spot on. Are you open to going to a rapid fire round where I ask you a couple questions? You know, one-word answers. No overthinking. You ready?

Julie: One word is tough for me, but I'm going to try.

Bill: All right. One word to describe the future of work.

Julie: Fast.

Bill: The most overrated concept in business leadership today.

Julie: These are supposed to be fast, right? Efficiency.

Bill: One decision every CXO should make sooner rather than later.

Julie: How that's one word. Okay, Bill, now you‘re challenging me. Innovate.

Bill: Innovate. I love it. A book that changed how you lead.

Julie: Forged in crisis by Nancy Cohen.

Bill: Oh, I have to get that. What does the great build mean to you from a GCC's perspective?

Julie: Enablement. Growth, Empowerment.

Bill: One word that you would want the next generation of leaders to live by.

Julie: One word. Um, authenticity.

Bill: Very good. Very good. Well, Julie, this has been a great conversation and I know our listeners are going to take a lot from it. So, thank you for being so generous with your time and being our inaugural guest on the Great Build podcast.

Julie: Thank you so much. It was great. I appreciate it.

Bill: Thank you. And to our listeners, if this conversation sparked something for you, please share it with others who need to hear it, your friends and your colleagues. And keep a lookout for Julie's book, Chief Impact Officer, coming out in June 2026. So, thanks for listening. We'll see you on the next episode of The Great Build, the podcast where vision becomes reality.