Gary Hamel - Leading the Revolution Part 3 Be Your Own Seer

Welcome back to part three of 'Leading the Revolution' with the legendary Gary Hamel. In this episode of The Innovation Show, Gary and host Aiden dive deep into two key chapters from Gary's books, exploring the principle of learning to be your own seer and the critical distinction between imagination and prediction in innovation. They discuss the importance of psychological safety in fostering creativity within companies and why many organizations fail to imagine the future. Gary shares his insights on developing foresight, the role of contrarianism in innovation, and the necessity of building a foundation of unconventional, differentiated insights for genuine innovation. He also emphasizes the importance of stepping outside the insular corporate environment to seek out underappreciated trends, frustrations customers face, and the deeper, broader questions around societal changes. Packed with practical exercises and real-world examples, this episode offers valuable takeaways for individuals and companies alike aiming to break free from conventional thinking and lead the charge in their industries.

 

00:00 Introduction and Welcome

00:25 The Importance of Being Your Own Seer

02:23 Imagination and Foresight in Innovation

06:12 The Role of Discontinuities in Innovation

08:11 The Need for Organizational Foresight

09:42 Building a Foundation of New Insights

18:18 Challenges in Allocating Resources for Innovation

25:15 The Importance of Transcendent Themes

29:15 Understanding Deeper Changes in Society

31:24 Impact of Connectivity on Society

32:19 Customer Frustration and Business Opportunities

33:37 Reinventing Education and Knowledge Consumption

34:42 Identifying and Addressing Industry Dogmas

41:20 Empowering Employees for Innovation

46:41 Distinguishing Form from Function in Business

49:07 Encouraging Radical New Possibilities

55:43 Conclusion and Future Topics

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Welcome back to part three of Leading theRevolution with our guest, Gary Hamel.

(00:05):
You're very, very welcome back.
Thank you.
Thank you, Aiden.
Nice to continue the conversation.
It sure is.
There's two chapters I'dlove to get through today.
. I was telling Gary, I've been collectingquotes that I'm gonna share to our
audience as well from the books.
I could actually write a book of quotesfrom all the books we've covered so far.

(00:25):
But I'm gonna just tee us up herefor this idea of being your own seer.
And really the principle of thischapter is don't rely on other people.
You have to do it yourself becauseit has to be in your own context.
And I loved how you started off here.
You said, I. There are too manyindividuals who cannot yet escape
the dead hand of precedent.

(00:46):
Too many who are not fullyvested in the future.
Too many who cannot distinguish betweentheir heritage and their destiny is this.
You want to do something about it.
More and more innovation comes notfrom the triumph of big science, but
from the triumph of contrarianism.
It is the idiot NT who asks a freshquestion, who then answers it using parts

(01:12):
that already exist, who is also often theauthor of the new that's because industry
revolution is conceptual innovation.
It comes from the mind and soul ofa malcontent, a dreamer, a smart
ass, and not from some bespeckledboffin or besuited planner.
I absolutely love that, andit speaks to this idea of.

(01:36):
Psychological safety to speak up,creating the conditions where people
can come forward and talk about things.
And what you ultimately say here iscompanies fail to create the future.
Not because they fail to predict it,but because they fail to imagine it.
It is curiosity and creativity.
They lack, not prospect.

(01:57):
It is vitally important that youunderstand the distinction between the
future and the unimagined between knowingwhat's next and imagining what's possible.
Yeah, boy, it's been a longtime since I heard those words.
They, they're prettygood actually, you know.
I'll, I'll claim that.
You forgot, man.
You forgot there's so many.

(02:17):
Look behind me here.
There's so many you've writtenin the meantime that that's why.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I do think there, thereis a need for every individual and for
every company to develop foresight.
And as, as I say, foresight isnot primarily about prediction.
It is much more about imagination.

(02:38):
I got very interested in this questionwhen I was a young faculty member.
One of the questions that really intriguedme is, well, where do all these new
game changing innovations come from?
Like, once you see it, you golike, well, that's cool, that
makes a hundred percent sense.
But like, where where did it come from?
And when you go back, and I spenta lot of time talking to a lot
of entrepreneurs, you know, many,many years ago it was a different

(02:58):
kind of population we have today.
But what, what do you discover is theyweren't smarter than the rest of us.
They didn't have any, communication with the almighty.
But they had a different way ofseeing , and what became clear to
me is that, foresight is as much.
imagination as it is prediction.
And, but it's notimagination without context.
It's not like you, you have a fever dreamand it's all informed by experiences these

(03:22):
people had and the context they werein and frustrations they saw among users
and technologies they could see that werebecoming, that were being commercialized
and putting those things together.
And it was often bornoutta serendipity, right?
You just happened to be in aparticular face and go like,
wow, that doesn't make any sense.
Can I change that?
And so a lot of what I've triedto do is understand, okay, what

(03:42):
are those perceptual habits?
How do you develop them in yourselfso you're able to imagine what
could be and then how do youbuild an organization where.
You can never program innovation.
You know, in the same way you can,you know, program a piece of software,
but you can create the conditions.
So how do you build a lightning rod sothat, like maybe lightning strikes at

(04:04):
least more often than it would otherwise.
But the starting point is to reallyhave a theory and an understanding
of where do these ideas come fromand how do I develop this capacity
to see around corners, to see over thehorizon, to reimagine what could be.
And the exciting thing for me inmy career is I learned you can
teach that and you can build that.
I think often, particularly in, inSilicon Valley where I spent a lot of

(04:25):
my time, they like to tell themselvesthat this innovation is just like this
incredible, brilliant mind and they'renot many of them about, and you'll
probably never be able to do it, right.
Well, after you've trained a hundredthousand people to, think in this way.
And you've seen new businessesand billions of dollars
of market value going on.
No, no, no.
Guys, this is not that complicated.
Weirdly, almost nobody actuallydoes it seriously, but this is

(04:49):
not, this is not neuroscience.
It's much more straightforward.
I. Love what you said you sharedthroughout the book, other books you've
read, but also quotes that you lovedand one of your favorites you mentioned
at the time was Alan Kay, who wrotePerspective is Worth 80 IQ Points.
And you say, Alan knows that afresh way of seeing is often more

(05:11):
valuable than sheer brain power.
And then you go on to say, impressionism,cubism, surrealism, postmodernism.
Each revolution in art was basedon a reconception of reality.
It wasn't the canvas pigmentsor brushes that changed, but how
the artists perceived the world.
In the same sense, it's not the tools thatdistinguished industry revolutionaries

(05:32):
from rum incumbents not the informationtechnology They harness, not the
processes they use, not their faculties.
Instead, it is their ability to escapethe stranglehold of the familiar.
And here you go on to share ways we canschool ourselves in the art of seeing
past the familiar or to the truly novel.
Maybe you'll share some of these, so I'll,jog your memory as well because you give

(05:56):
loads here and this is probably work youwere doing with companies at the time you
went, look, let's just lay it out there.
So I highly recommend people get the book.
There's loads of stuff in there if you're.
Struggling with your imagination.
Gary gives a list of things you can do.
One of them you say is what you calldiscontinuities, and you said change.

(06:17):
Revolutionaries are looking for thingswhere the rate of change is changing.
For inflection points that foreshadowsignificant discontinuities.
Those who fail to notice these nascentdiscontinuities will be rudely awakened
by those who were paying attention.
And this is to your point thatyou've said throughout this
whole series, most companies knowthey see the change happening.

(06:41):
You worked with Nokia at both pointswhen they created the phone, when they
created the industry, and then theyfailed to take notice when there was an
inflection point or discontinuity again.
Yeah, I think you have a dilemmain many organizations where.
The people kind of control strategyand are supposed to set vision.

(07:02):
They have a very kind of narrowset of interactions, right?
Most of them internal for sure.
And they show up at Davos and they talkto their senior team and so on, but they
do not actually invest in getting out atthe fringes where change happens, right?
Change does not start in themainstream, whether it's fashion,
whether it's music, whether it'sarchitecture, whether it's technology.

(07:22):
It starts out in the fringes and ifyou're not out there learning from
that, and it takes an investment.
But I do think, you wanna askyourself whether it's politics,
whether it is technology, science,lifestyles, what is accelerating,
what's changing that most people arein my industry are still ignoring.
Because by the time, you have Accenture,McKinsey telling you how important

(07:43):
is things, you're probably too late.
I mean, you're still gonnahave to do it, right?
You're still gonna have to understandAI or whatever the, you know,
technology du jour, but most ofthe economic value probably already
been captured by somebody else.
So, you do have to be your own seer.
You cannot, you know, rely on somebodyelse to come and package this all up
and tell you what the implications are.
You have to make that investment.

(08:04):
And, most companies are very insular.
Most of the senior leadership timeis spent inside the four walls.
And , you're just gonna be surprisedif that's your your M.O.. I mean, one
of the things that, , when I wrote, thebook we're talking about now, Leading
The Revolution, that was around 2000.
I had moved to Silicon Valley , in1993 from London back , to the

(08:25):
us And you know, I just had aringside seat to what was going on.
And every day I'm rubbing shoulderswith people who are inventing
the future and working out on thebleeding edge of technology and so on.
It's not that I was any better atanybody else in particular in the future.
I was just immersed in it all the time.
And so, so I say like,well that's interesting.
Where might that lead?
I think the other really critical thingwhen you see something that's accelerating

(08:46):
or something catches your eye is toreally have the discipline to work through
the second or third order consequences.
Like, therefore, what happens?
And , you see thesmartphone, and photographs.
You go like, well, we're gonna haveinteresting privacy concerns outta that.
That's gonna be a whole industry,probably, or a whole set of issues that
are gonna, , come around that, or you seeearly Napster and you go like, wow, okay,

(09:06):
there's a way of immediate sharing now.
So how do I think about wherethat goes in my industry, peer
to peer, user generated content.
How, how might that be monetized?
How do I, you know, so it'snot simply noticing a trend.
But it's having the disciplineto work through the implications.
If then, if, then, if then,and like, okay, where does that
lead and how might I harness it?

(09:27):
It's obviously very important toput these trends together because
when you look at innovation,it's almost never one insight.
It's a combination of insights aboutusers, about technology, about industry
incumbents, about where they're blind.
And somebody goes like, okay,I can put this all together.
And so that's why one of the thingsthat I've long believed is that
you cannot really innovate and youcan't create an innovation strategy

(09:50):
unless you first of all, built afoundation of new insights, right?
you have to know things.
And I, say know, not in the sensethat it's just a hunch, but you have to
see things, know things are changing,know what's happening, and you have
to have a set of insights that you arenot gonna find in your competitors.
Right.
That you didn't get off of some chatGPT list of , what's changing in the
world, what's important, or whatever.

(10:12):
but that you've seen foryourself because, , you can't
build a differentiated strategyor a differentiated product or
business model unless you havedifferentiated insights to start with.
So yeah, and that's a piece,that often gets missed.
So, when I've worked with organizationsbefore, asking 'em like, well , what
are the new products and new businessesand so on, we start by saying, let's

(10:33):
build a deep population of new insightsof things that we know, we've seen,
that they're grounded in reality.
It's not a fantasy, but we also knowthat probably very few of our competitors
are paying attention to these.
Very few have thought deeply about 'em.
And, and I'll say the other thinghere, that's super important, Aidan,
those insights need to be sharedbecause, , you can have two or

(10:55):
three different people who will seethe same thing and draw completely
different conclusions out of it.
So when you start to share these insights,and so in the work we do, we'll create
hundreds of these sorts of insights.
They're all up online.
We put 'em where everybody across thecompany can see, okay, here's what we saw.
Here's actually like the data behind it.
Here's some of the implications.
We, and we let people commenton that and build that.

(11:16):
Oh yeah, I saw that too.
Or I saw something over here.
And so when you have multiple mindsall mulling on the same population
of insights, you get a huge explosionof ideas rather than hoping like
it's just one person who has somekind of brain fart , and sees it.
So you have to havedifferentiated insights.
They have to be shared across theorganization because people are gonna
see different things out of that.

(11:42):
I love that man.
I was telling you, I was quoting yourloads and I have this reinvention summit
starting in April, and I was sharing aquote because one of the things we're
trying to do with that is get peopleinto an environment where they'll rub
shoulders with, I. Different people andhave conversations and have enough time.
And , you say in this book yourecognize then, this was before the

(12:02):
onslaught of information we havenow, you said how ironic in a world
populated by knowledge workers,there is virtually no time to think.
You may be able to manage the present intiny splinters of time, but you certainly
can't innovate if your attention hasbeen smashed into minute sized shards.
I thought that was so prophetic, butalso that was the experience people

(12:26):
were having then and now it's way worse.
I think that one of the greatestpersonal advantages one can have in, in
your career is just the discipline toreflect and to take time and to think,
and what works against that is notjust like, only the inbox and all the
things that are coming at you every day.
What works against it is also thefact that all of our media now is so

(12:49):
addictive, is all built around 30second one minute clips and so on.
And , it's like going off acrack or alcohol or something
else to sit back and saying, no,no, no, I'm gonna clear my mind.
I wanna think through it.
So yeah, in a world of fragmentedattention, concentration
is a competitive advantage.
, but it, it takes, ittakes work to do that.

(13:11):
Absolutely, and, and you don'tget rewarded for it is the other
problem , you think about someonelike Zhang Rumin, who you work
with, the CEO and founder of Haier.
What I was struck by is he got allyour books translated into Mandarin
and loads of other thought leadersas well, and he actually read
them and then he sought you out.
And that intellectual humility isone of the reasons why higher such,

(13:36):
probably the one of the most valuablesand will become one of the most
valuable companies in the world.
I think that's a really importantpoint because we have this bias
for action instead of a bias forthinking, plus a bias for action.
Yeah, I think, I think that's true.
And
and, and, and also I think what,what distinguishes  Zhang Rumin

(13:57):
and not, not many other leaders Ican think of, they understood that
management is maybe humankind'smost important social technology.
Like how we bring people together, how wemotivate them, how we coordinate across
units, how we set goals, how we plan.
And so he wanted to deeply understandwhat was the state of the art was there.
But he also understood like, if I wannabuild an amazing company, the state
of the art is not good enough, right?

(14:18):
I gotta push the boundaries farther.
And I think so many leaders, theyjust take that all for granted.
And in other words, and we'll come tothis later, but, when you talk about
innovation, we tend to think products andservices, but by far the most important
innovation is in innovation and howwe lead, manage, control and so on.
And that gets almost no attentionat all in organizations.

(14:39):
But, but yeah, I think now, whatI wrote all those years ago is,
it's still relevant, I think.
So.
But of course now, you have things like YCombinator, all of these incubators where
they will help you probably understandthe future, see opportunities and so on.
But I think even there, they mostly, theytake people who already have an insight,

(15:00):
who already have had an epiphany, andnow how do we help you build a business?
And I think in an organization,the starting point has to be, Hey,
how do I build that foundation ofinteresting, unconventional insights
that will, that will be the buildingblocks for genuine innovation.
And it's just something that I think.
, I think it's gets dismissed.

(15:21):
I know a very few, in many organizationsyou'll have a unit, for example, a company
like Proctor and Gamble have people go outand live in customer's homes and try to
get, insights on people's lives and theirfrustrations with their products and how
they're cleaning their houses and so on.
But my questions, okay.
How broadly do those insights getshared across the company, right?
Is that like just some people inproduct development or everybody
across the company has a chance?

(15:41):
Number two is, okay, do you takethose insights and do you also have
literally in the same space wherepeople see the insights about where
tech, what tech technology is doingand new material science and so on.
And do you have insights at the sameplace about what your competitors
are doing and what their valueproposition is and how their position?
We cut all these insights up andthey're spread across different
parts of the organization.

(16:03):
So, the average individual justdoes not have the grist for the mill.
They just don't have, enough in frontof them because they're like, wow, okay.
That could really, there's a chance todo something very interesting there.
I was telling you, I was just speakingto Eric Von Hippel, and I mentioned
you in that episode, but I was tellinghim, I read this amazing study by
Robert Sapolsky and Robert Sapolskyin his book, why Zebras Don't Get

(16:26):
Ulcers, it's about stress, but hewas talking about the discovery of
Type A personalities and there was.
A guy called Meyer and anothercardiologist called Meyer and
another one called Rosenman, andthey discovered Type A personalities.
But what happened was an upholsterercame into their office, so they'd
noticed that their seats were gettingdestroyed and they just assumed this

(16:49):
was the rate of change , of theseseats that people were destroying them.
But the upholster comes in andgoes, man, what the hell are you
doing to your patients in here?
'cause they were all scratched andworn and they discovered that it was
their type A personalities who wereso eager to get in and out of the
clinics that they were scratching theseats 'cause they were so nervous.

(17:09):
And SSapolsky had this brilliantline I thought of when
I was reading this chapter.
He said that if you want to know ifthe elephant in the zoo is sick, don't
ask the vet, ask the cage cleaner.
And I was thinking about how it's thesame as asking a consultant versus
asking the people out in the field.

(17:29):
And it, it segues beautifully towhat you said, you, you have to
search out underappreciated trends.
You said there is no proprietydata about the future.
Whatever you can know aboutwhat's changing in the world.
So can anyone else.
So you've got to look whereothers are not looking.
But the good news is that people inan industry are blind in the same way.

(17:52):
They all paying attention tothe same things and not paying
attention to the same things.
And I thought that was reallyinteresting that almost having.
Some charges to go looking for thesetrends versus going to a conference once
and not doing anything about it or listento a TED Talk or reading The Economist

(18:15):
and how to bring that into the culture.
You know, the early work I did, and we'vedone this, you know, multiple times,
through the years, but, we'll in alarge company, we'll put teams together
with maybe 20 or 30 people on a team.
And first of all, we need thesepeople for maybe two or three months.
And it's interesting.

(18:36):
I was, I was working with one of thevery large automakers, which everybody
would know and they were in our kind ofstuck and they said, Hey Gary, we really
have to get in front of the future.
We have to like, innovate.
And I said, okay.
You have like about 250,000 employees.
I'm gonna need about 120 ofthem for four or five months.
You thought I'd ask themlike, I don't know what like.

(18:58):
But they said it's impossible Isaid, you guys have so much waste
and so much slack, and you're tellingme, and so that this is by one of the
places where the rubber meets the road.
Like, yeah, we need to have apoint of view about the future.
We need to get in front, butlike, we can't spare any cycles,
any intellectual time, anybody.
Well, alright then let's justgo back to turning the crank.
But in any case, often we'll take25, 30 people times four teams.

(19:22):
So a hundred or more a hundred people.
And we'll have one team spend amonth trying to understand what
are the nascent changes, what'saccelerating, what are the implications?
Who's driving it?
Has anybody exploited it?
We'll have another team spend a monthdigging into all of the competitors
and saying, where are they all blind?
Where are they all, have overlappingassumptions and business models and so on.
And what part of that might we beable to, we'll have another group.

(19:45):
Reconceiving their own organization andthinking about it not as a portfolio of
products and services, but what are thedeep skills and technologies that we have?
I mean, , I think right now aboutApple, I, apple probably has a
wider range of technologies thanalmost any company in the world.
And yet they, all of it is focused on thislittle thing called , the iPhone, right?
Or maybe a Mac.
And you're going like, guys, let's stepback and think about what you know and

(20:08):
where else can you exploit that, right?
But you have this, and you know what'svery interesting, Steve Jobs changed
Apple's name from Apple computerto Apple, because he said, I don't
think we're like, we're broader, butI think now they've gotten stuck.
It's essentially theiPhone company, right?
So this is a supercritical thing to do, is.
To challenge the prevailingconception of who we are as a company,

(20:31):
which is almost always defined inproduct terms and say, no, no, no.
Like what are the deepthings we know how to do?
What are the skills, whatare the competencies?
We'll have a team kind of diggingand drilling down through that,
and how much of those things arereally unique in world class.
And then we'll have another team thatis interacting with customers and
out of the field and understandingwhat are the frustrations, the
anxieties, the unspoken needs.

(20:52):
And each of those teams is gonnabring back hundreds of insights.
And then we share those.
And I'll go deep in the process if peopleare interested, but, but I, I do think
that is just a critically missed step.
And every time we've done it, there arewhole new businesses that get created
and a lot of market value gets created.
But we talked about taking the time as anindividual, but setting aside the time as

(21:16):
an organization to explore those fringesand to bring those insights together.
You know Haier is very good at this.
Now they use a lot oftechnology to do that.
All of those things are sharedinternally and externally.
'cause they want their potentialpartners to look at, Hey,
here's what we're learning.
Do you see an opportunity here?
We're missing.
They're not proprietary about that.

(21:37):
And then come help us build it.
But yeah, it's, the investment in,the foundations of innovation it just
doesn't happen in most organizations, orit's very sporadic or very fragmented.
Most innovation is actuallyinnovation theater.
It's not real to that point.
went, right back to Joe Bower, whowas Clay Christensen's thesis advisor.

(22:02):
I'm doing a series with him.
Gary, after, when we're,we're finished our,
good.
Say hello to him.
For me.
yeah.
He's, he is awesome.
influential in my own work,
Oh wow.
I.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Brilliant.
Brilliant.
Well, I'll, I'll let him know andmaybe we'll have you on that series
as well, because he is, he is aload of guests on that series.
It's kinda like this is yourlife, one of those episodes.

(22:23):
But the, resource allocationprocess that he talks about.
To your point, people won't, allocatethe human resource to that because it's
seen as putting a, a pause on the companyor we're not measured for that yet.
Or what, what will Wall Street thinkinstead of actually going, okay, well

(22:45):
let's have maybe lower managers will givethem, will give them a responsibility
now to run the company now that it'srunning and we'll focus on the future.
And, and how do, how do youbring that into companies?
How do you bring in that real stepchange to go, we're running this
thing differently from now on?
I.
Well, I think in my experience, there'sa couple things that has have to happen.

(23:06):
Number one, the company has to, bepretty dissatisfied with where they are.
You know, they have to understand like,Hey, we've missed some big opportunities.
We're not growing.
If the top line doesn't look verygood our margins under our pressure.
So you have to have, a businessof imperative to do this.
I think the other thing that itjust requires a lot of humility.
When we did some of this work for a bigsportswear company, , the CEO kind of

(23:31):
put out a blog, put out a video blog andsaid, Hey guys, we're not growing as fast.
We're all dissatisfied the report, weat the top cannot tell you what to do.
We don't know what to do.
We don't, , if we had the answer,we would've figured it out by now.
So you have to have also that kind of.
Humility to say, Hey, weneed to learn from everybody.
This is not a few people at the top.
We're gonna figure this thing out.

(23:52):
And then of course, as we were justtalking, you have to create some slack
in the organization for it to happen.
And in, in many cases, all threeof those things are missing, right?
Rather than being like superhonest about kind of mediocrity
and flatlining, it's like, ah, it'sthis problem, it's that problem.
There's a lot of excuse making.
There's a sense that if I ask the wholeorganization to help in this, in a very

(24:14):
open, transparent way, I lose control.
I cannot predict the answer.
I cannot see the end from the beginning.
And that, that makes me like super nervousbecause like, what if they come back
with ideas that like, we don't wanna do?
And then thirdly, yeah, just,
cutting through all the busyness andsay, Hey, we're gonna invest here.

(24:35):
Yeah, those conditions are often missingand so companies stumble and at
some point activist investors forceyou to do things you know, you didn't
wanna do anyway, and it's too late.
, and I think part of the problem,Aidan, is so many leaders really
see their role as running somethingrather than reimagining or

(24:56):
building or changing it, right?
If I'm a top leader and I'm spending 80to 90% of my time on basically running
the business and fighting outsidefires, regulators, other things as it
happens, like I'm not doing my job.
But that's the reality.
some of this stuff is quite simple.
Like if you're a reader of apaper, a newspaper, or website,

(25:20):
whatever it might be, or a journal,you say, find the big story.
And I thought this was really interesting.
Now, I was saying to you, I bet youloads of companies were reading your
book and going, I'm gonna do that.
I don't have any ideas, but I'mgonna do what Hamel says here.
'cause you said searchfor transcendent themes.
So these overarching themes, and yousaid one of the reasons many people fail

(25:42):
to fully appreciate what's changing isbecause they're down at ground level.
Lost in the thicket ofconfusing, conflicting data.
You have to make time to step back andask yourself, what's the big story that
cuts across all these little facts?
And the example you gave in thebook was to consider trends.
So several trends, but they're everywhere.

(26:02):
And one of them was, in mostdeveloped countries, people are
getting married later in life.
No longer do people expect tofind a mate while still at school.
They have more time at work,they're not getting out as much,
they're not drinking as much.
Hence, what about a dating site?
And so reminding people, this wasthe naughties, that this was 2000.

(26:23):
You wrote this book and therefore you sawa rise in match.com and all these kind of
companies that, or co companies like that.
But I just wanted to remind you of that.
And they go, what's the one at the momentthat you're seeing like, so some of
these big stories that you're seeing andyou're going, why is nobody doing this?
I have a list of those thingsthat I think are interesting.

(26:45):
One of them that I think is pretty currentis I. And we cannot, we kind, I think
we see it now, but I think most people,certainly business people and government
people still don't wanna face up to it.
It's just this incredible divide we havebetween the elite and everybody else.
And the fact that a huge number ofpeople in societies across Europe,

(27:05):
north America, elsewhere, justfeel completely disenfranchised.
, I started looking at this data somewhile ago, and people just don't, yeah,
a lot of this, I think Aiden is people,there's, we just have a pain avoidance.
You look at something that looksuncomfortable and you don't wanna think
about, what's really going on hereand what are we going to do about it?
You know?
But you look at data where a, asignificant majority, like two

(27:27):
thirds of kids in Great Britainthink they, that they would be better
off living in a socialist system.
Now they can't tell you wherea socialist system has worked,
but that gives you a sense.
Vast majority of people acrossthe developed world thinks that
government, media and business worksfor the few rather than the many.
Right now.
Now this has become unavoidable and yousee Trump and whatever, as as, but, but

(27:49):
you could have seen this a decade ago.
All of, if you're looking at the data,if you're looking at the frustrations
that people have, if you're looking atthe declining middle class, if you're
looking at where wealth is going insociety, where 90 some percent of
it is going to the top 1%, you knowthis is going to become an issue.
And it was very interesting durwhen, during the, and I tend to
be as apolitical as I can be, butyou know, in Trump's first victory,

(28:13):
people literally were shocked.
What the hell is going on?
How could this happen?
I'm going like, you people certainlyhave not been paying attention.
You're in your own fricking bubble, and you didn't really even need to
go to talk to people, all you needto do look, is all the surveys that
are being done and see this like deepwell of frustration that's there.
So I think that's, I think that'scertainly one thing that, you could've
seen a long way off and most didn't.

(28:34):
And most politicians are still surprised.
And many, and probably 90% of the peopleat Davos are still in denial about this.
Like, guys, if, , andon the back foot, right?
So, yeah, I think again, getting thebigger picture means having a lot
of different sources of data tryingevery day to read things and consume

(28:56):
things that are not in your usual diet.
So if you have like, here's thethree things I read every day.
No, you gotta diversify that.
You gotta look much farther a field.
But I'll also say spending some time,you know, understanding history,
understanding philosophy, understandingtheology also helps you like.
See what's the deeper thingsthat are often going on, right?

(29:17):
That, that are kind of fundamentalchanges in how, in, in self-perception
or how people see their role insociety or what they think the role
of government is, or businesses.
And, and that's very hard to see, ifyou're not getting data from multiple
sources and multiple perspectives ratherthan being inside of your little tribe.
And number two, if, if you don'thave the historical or the broader

(29:39):
context to make sense of that
I'm gonna bring it back tosomething you had talked about,
which was the orders of Impact.
And you said that the world is a systemand we really saw that during covid,
the whole idea of vuca, the complexity,something changes here and it will affect
something over here, water bed effect.
And you mentioned Paul Saffo and thisidea of orders of I impact, and you

(30:04):
mentioned a brilliant analogy in thebook that I'd love you to riff on.
You said the speed of the Internet'stakeoff surprised most people,
but that it should have happened.
It was no surprise because theinterstate highway system provided
an almost perfect historical analogy.
Bear with me as I tell you this quickly.
Automobile had existed for 50 years beforethe interstate highway system began

(30:28):
to connect communities across America.
Within a decade of theinterstate's, introduction,
suburbs started springing up.
City centers were withering.
Corporations were building officetowers, and what had been corn
fields and commuters were commuting.
It wasn't the car per se, but the abilityto connect communities that changed
the distribution of work and commerce.

(30:48):
Likewise, computers had existed for50 years before the internet took off.
Before the net computers had beenislands of computational power once
connected, that began to transformsociety in ways even more dramatic
than the interstate highway, but alsoin ways that are entirely consistent
with timeless aspects of human nature.

(31:09):
I thought that was brilliant because.
When you grasp that and you see thingsin the rear view mirror, you can start
looking outside the windscreen andgoing, well, where are things going now?
And I wondered, what wasyour version of that now
I mean, one of the things that, again,this is the value of sometimes, like
understanding the deeper things, anytechnology that connects people together,

(31:32):
whether that was , a path, 300 yearsago or, or whether it was smoke signals
from, from Native Americans, or whetherit is a telegraph or phone and so on.
Anything that connects people isgoing to have enormous impact.
And, and , , you take that connectivityand it's exploded in, in terms of mobile
data and communication density and so on.

(31:54):
Social media was in inevitable.
You could tell, I mean, you go back tothe earliest things where people were
starting to be on online forums andyou could rate each other's comments.
You know, this was happeningby the time I wrote that book.
It wasn't hard to see, , that's gonna belike an enormous business of peer-to-peer
in whatever way that, you know, turnsout you sharing content and so on.
So, if you ask me what are some of thethings I think are likely looking forward?

(32:19):
I think, I think many, many customerstoday are deeply, deeply frustrated
because I think companies, inmany ways have used technology to
degrade the customer experience.
It's harder to talk to a human being.
You're forced through, , appsthat are often very poorly
designed, not easy to use.

(32:40):
So I think, if I'm a business, I'm sayingthere's a deep in every industry, there's
a deep, deep well of customer frustrationthat we're not even paying attention to.
And because we're all focused on like,we can save a little bit here and there.
So that's one thing that's like, Ithink, , somebody could thinks about
because, one of the, one of theother really broad themes that I think
has been true for now 20 years atleast in terms of the newcomers, is

(33:03):
basically reinventing every industryfrom the customer backwards, right?
And thinking, okay, like, what's thecore function we're trying to do?
How do we deliver this in a muchmore seamless, interesting way?
Uber would be an example that Airbnbwould be an example of that, Kindle
, and Amazon would be an example.
Like, but there are many industrieswhere that still really hasn't happened.

(33:24):
So I think that's, you know, deep,deep well of frustration as technology
has been used often to push customersaway rather than to bring them closer.
So I think that's like kindof an enormous opportunity.
I think another thing I seehappening is just the way we build
knowledge and consume knowledgeis gonna change fundamentally.
Partly thanks to ChatGPT, butpartly because, universities have

(33:47):
fundamentally failed young people.
They're not teaching 'emwhat they need to do.
They're have become kind ofindoctrination centers and , nice
retreats to spend a few years.
And kids are desperate to knowwhat are the skills I need.
To make a difference.
How do I build my portfolioof interesting projects?
I think there's an enormousopportunity for entirely new
educational models to emerge.

(34:09):
It's not just gonna be, take an onlinecourse, but things that are much more
thoughtful than that, that are reallyfocused on building skills, that are
measurable, that are quantifiable, whereyou leave, not with kind of a degree, but
you leave with a set of, certificatesthat you've mastered these things.
And so that, if you just look at the,sorry, state of education, you look at
kids who are desperate to make an impact.

(34:30):
The fact that two thirds of kidswho come outta university don't
work in the field of their degree.
Like there has to be just likea freaking huge opportunity
in there somewhere, right?
So yeah, you look atany of these things and,
you, and that's the beauty once,once you teach yourself, I. To Walk

(34:52):
through the world saying, okay,what does everybody believe here?
This kind of nonsense.
Where's the deep wells offrustration that nobody's addressing,
that everybody's ignoring?
What are the technologies thatwe're using to do this, but could
actually be used to do this?
Like, the world is justfilled with opportunities.
There's a dozen different companiesI would've liked to start here.
I'll give one idea away for free.
Maybe somebody's done this by now.

(35:13):
You go to a restaurant and they giveyou this long wine menu and all the
prices are super inflated, but alsoyou have no idea what are the good
wines are, where are the bad wines?
So you can sit there with yourphone and maybe go to wine.com.
I just want to snap a photo with my phone.
Use character recognition.
Then I wanted to go to a database, findthe VINs, take the prices and tell me

(35:34):
what are the best, where, what's thebest ratio of quality of wine to price?
Like somebody could justdo that tomorrow, right?
It's not hard.
And That, that, let's let'sa 15-year-old idea at least.
So maybe somebody's donearound way, but yeah.
I think, and by the way, you just becomea lot more optimistic when you have, when
you've developed those kind of thinkingskills because like, there's just like

(35:55):
amazing cool things we can do everywhere.
There was one you mentioned inthe book with the hotel hangers.
Do you remember that one?
Oh, well, yeah.
I mean that's the other point is that,you know, these industry orthodoxies come
in all different sizes, which is why, youknow, I need people on the front lines
thinking about this, not just, yeah.
But that little example used there was,you know, obviously you can challenge

(36:17):
the big orthodoxy that, hospitalitymeans I own a physical building with
rooms that are all alike and whatever,versus Airbnb or something else.
But then you think about the customerexperience where, you go in even to
like a, a, maybe a four star hotel andthe hangers are all like secured in
the closet, like they're locked down.
And you go like, man, , sothey really don't trust me.

(36:37):
Do they like for, , they have mycredit card information, but they
don't trust me with a hanger that'sworth four pounds or $4 or something.
So, you know, put a side behindthe door, say hanger's $5 and
like do an inventory the same way.
Do a minibar and make it a profit center.
Right?
I mean, again, those thingsare just like everywhere.
But , we all start to getblind and we mistake, the edge

(37:02):
of the rut for the horizon.
But when you train people like,okay, what are we doing every day?
That just doesn't make sense.
That frustrates comp customers,it doesn't create economic value.
Those things will veryquickly come to the surface.
And, you know, the one I thoughtis like sometimes you as a customer,
like I'm one of those people whowill say it to the people I go, you
know what would be really useful?
And you can see their eyes glazeover and they're just going, when

(37:25):
will this guy be outta my face?
And you just go, why would I bother?
But if you had somewhere tocapture, that would be so good.
Well, it's, there's a wholebusiness there, Aidan, because
you're absolutely right.
You have people like you, like me, likeeverybody listening, who every day, you
know, you have a customer experience thatlike, Hey, there's a simple fix here.
You could do this like better.
And there's literally no place to go.

(37:47):
Your choices.
You talk to an employee in that momentwho has no way of sharing that, who
has, is completely disempowered, can'tchange it, it's just helpless feels bad
for you, but can't do crap about it.
Or you go to some onlinecomplaint thing or whatever that
disappears, whatever, of course.
Which is why people today whoare really pissed off, you put

(38:08):
it on social media and then maybesomebody's gonna like pay attention.
If you have a few thousandfollowers, you might get a response.
But you start to, I mean there wasa us, I dunno if they still do this.
There was a US consumerelectronics retailer called Best
Buy that had something called.
Voice of the customer throughthe employee VCE Best Buy.
And it was really simple, you knowon the terminals, the screens in

(38:31):
the store at the point of sale.
If a customer says something,there's just a little place you
could click and say, this is whatwe just were asked about this.
And , I talk about thisin one of my books.
They were mining tens of thousandsof these comments every year.
So just imagine somethingthat is that simple.
I know at one point British Airwayswhen they were serious about service,
I'm not sure they still are now, butthey had video kiosks and when you

(38:54):
came off the airplane and you wantedto say, you just like walked up,
pushed a button and said, Hey guys,here's something else you could do.
Right.
And I honestly, I think a lot ofcompanies, so so what do we have instead?
I. What we have instead is at theend of every damn interaction, they
want you to like rate somebody.
Like if you hang on, we'regonna survey, okay, fine.
You wanna know whether this person did agood job or not, but like you're really

(39:17):
not interested in whether I have anidea for how to make this thing better.
You always share great cartoons,illustrations , with your books and
on LinkedIn and stuff like that.
I think you share.
Air wood once where it was a suggestionbox and it was zoomed out and the
person was putting in a suggestion boxand underneath there was a shredder.
So it was like my idea.
That's where, that's how it feelssometimes is like, why bother then?

(39:40):
But there's a exercise yougive here, which is great.
You surface the dogmas, you called it.
And you say, so how do you cultivatecontrarian tendencies and surface
the dogmas in your companies?
One simple device is to ask yourselfand your colleagues, what are the 10
things you would never hear or customerssay about our company or our industry?
For example, no customer's evergonna say the airline treats its

(40:04):
customers with dignity and respect.
Few customers would ever say it'seasy to shop for a better rate or
on electricity or fewer, even stillwould say, banking is fun, or hotels
are have always got great food.
And once you've identified whatcustomers would not say, ask yourself
why they would not say those things.
I thought that was just such asimple exercise for people to do.

(40:28):
Yeah.
Well, again, I hope that in that book,I think there are a lot of like fairly
simple things because these do have tobecome habits, they have to be routines.
And without it, they'renot gonna have, any impact.
But it is, it is interesting to me how anindustry can get it wrong for so long.
You know, recently some of theairline industries have started

(40:49):
tying their loyalty programsto how much you actually spend.
Well, of course you should.
It's not how many miles you flythat makes you a valuable customer.
It's how profitable you are, right?
And so you go like, wow, took youguys a long time to like figure that.
And of course now all those super frequentflyers who weren't making the airline
any money are pissed off about that.
So fine.

(41:09):
You better figure out a way ofdealing with that, but yeah.
I mean, there is, I think in everybusiness, in every industry, there's
literally an infinite number ofways you can make that thing better.
And the only question is like,okay, do your employees feel
empowered to think in new ways?
Is there a place for themto go with their ideas?
Better yet, can they experimentwith that locally without having

(41:30):
to get like a lot of permission?
If an idea is good, howquickly gonna get it tested?
How does it then propagateacross the system?
How long does that take?
And you just start to, theseare very, very simple ideas.
How many ideas of what quality,how quickly are they tested?
how efficiently are they tested?
How quickly do they getshared across the system?
And those things togetherabsolutely drive the rate at

(41:51):
which any business can get better.
And yet, if you take every oneof those elements, our employees
actually listing every day, do theyhave a place to go with those ideas?
, do we actually then turnthose into experiments?
It's like, no, no, no, no.
You good?
So, yeah, sometimes it's beenfrustrating, Aiden, because
But man, I, I tell you, it's it'swhy I'm so happy to share the book

(42:16):
because n not, not much has changed.
And you know, that Mark Twain quote,history doesn't repeat what, it rhymes
that the names have changed of thecompanies, the industries, et cetera.
But the challenges just creep backin and it's almost like a cycle of.
The companies that listened at the startwere either entrepreneurial or they were

(42:36):
entrepreneurs who read your book, listenedto it, took action, but then they get
to the top of their S-curve and theystop doing it 'cause they're so busy.
And then the other guys come in and it's,it's, I really wanna stop that cycle and
I want to, those companies who were atthe top of the curve to realize and to
wake up and see, it's not, it's not thatyou're broken, you're human, biased,

(42:59):
you get blinded, you get in, stuck inthe exploit phase and stop exploring.
And there's, there's a formula tofix this if you really want to.
Yeah, and I think, yeah, the reallywant to is certainly part of it.
But you know what I had to recognize,and we've talked about, this took
me a long time, too long I. Isthere was a reason so often these

(43:20):
things were falling on deaf ears.
Right?
It wasn't that the CEOs didn't careabout this, it wasn't that they were
willingly blind or whatever, but all ofthese employees are caught in a system
where these things are just not rewarded.
I came across this wonderful, funnyblog, bitter and funny and so on by
some, young employee saying that theirwhole life now is spent navigating

(43:44):
between a bunch of bullshit tools likeZoom and Trula and notion and whatever.
None of them are connected together andwe spend all of our days like entering
data and filling these things out.
And, we're in a system that now a hundredpercent mistakes activity for achievement.
I. You know, and we're all just feedingthese various, like, you know, data,

(44:06):
data hungry systems that are mostlydesigned so people above us can tell,
like, and you know, we just fall intothese traps and organizations that.
everybody there goes like,this is stupid, right?
Like, or, or maybe not.
Maybe a lot of 'em are just donethinking and they're just in the system.
. So it's a system level problem thathas to be solved right there are
organizations where, as I say, activityis mistaken for accomplishment where

(44:33):
you look at most of your customers aspeople inside the organization, not
outside the organization where there'svery little upside for new ideas and
for taking the risk to pioneer them.
There's very little downside tokilling an idea because nobody's
ever gonna come back and say like,why the hell did you kill that?
That was like a promising idea.
There's no accountability there.

(44:54):
You know, most people haveno idea what a P&L is.
And so they're managing to bullshitKPIs and other things that are only
tangentially related to actuallyhaving a good business outcome.
You know, most frontline employees don'thave not been given business skills.
I mean.
So this is a system, right?
And that's why my book's changed and thefocus has changed, is like, alright guys,

(45:14):
we gotta step back and change the system.
Having said that,
if you make the investment in yourselfand you make the investment in seeing
into the future, and if you teachyourself how to be a contrarian and so
on, you will still have a way biggerimpact than you would otherwise.
I mean, you may not be able to changethe whole system, but, despite

(45:35):
everything I said, CEOs leadersare still hungry for new ideas.
They want people who will take therisk of doing something I talked about
in that book of, how do you becomean internal rebel and even, despite
those things all around you notletting those dissuade you or put you
off or wait for the system to change.
'cause that's, that's a prettyhopeless situation to be in too.

(45:57):
I think what we'll do, Gary, iswe'll keep that for the next day.
If you're cool with that,we'll do the corporate rebels.
Give a couple of those examples and theidea of to change the business model,
you need to change the mental model,but also the political model behind it.
We'll do a coverage of that.
So I have some diagrams, a couple oflast ones maybe to wrap this chapter.
I thought we'd get through more, but Ilove the fact that you've built on these

(46:20):
ideas and that also you're willing toshare some of the experiences you've had
in the field from working with clients.
I think that's the unique thing.
You're not only writing this, but you'rean academic, you're a practitioner,
you're a consultant, but you're outthere with really successful companies,
which really makes it interesting.
But one of the things that youtalked about in the early books.

(46:41):
Competence based competition forexample, was the idea that your
capabilities or competencies canactually be the competitive advantage.
But you say in this book, you candistinguish form from function.
And I think this is a really keyterm to share with our audiences.
Any company can't distinguish betweenform and function will get what inside.

(47:05):
An obsolete form factor.
And you say one way of distinguishingfunction from form is to
substitute a verb for a noun.
Rich je and butcher in his name there,but chief he at the time he was CEO
of Wells Fargo, provides an example.
Banking is essential, but banks are not.
Banks are things, bricks andmortar banking is a function.

(47:27):
And maybe you'd share an ideaon that because that's a really
great one for people to startthinking about their own business.
I think, I think Clay Christensen hada different way of talking about this.
I think he, he talkedabout jobs to be done.
Maybe it was a language he used.
I. But I do think, yeah, we, you end upcaught inside of a particular business
model, a particular way of deliveringa customer benefit, and you lose sight

(47:49):
of, well, what's the real benefit?
And are there other ways to do that?
You know, you look at now, you know,banks have basically become an app, right?
I mean as many things have, right?
So the function is still there.
Newspapers have become an app, right?
I mean, you still consume the news,but in a completely different way.
You know, music, same kind of thing.
And we were talking a few minutesago about education, right?

(48:10):
Well, like, I think.
It's, I wanna be careful about sayinguniversities are gonna disappear.
They're may, maybe the, the,almost the longest lived human
institutions we have, right?
Oxford, Cambridge, and theseplaces go back, having said that.
And so they'll still exist in some form,but I think if you look at how education
is delivered more generally, yeah, theuniversity is just, it's just a particular

(48:30):
form, a way of delivering knowledge humanexpertise, capability, even research.
And if you're wedded tothat, you lose, right?
Your commitment has to be not to aparticular business model or structure.
The commitment has to be, we're tryingto make a difference in people's lives.
We're trying to do something like amazing,and we're gonna find the best, most
efficient, most amazing tools to do that.

(48:53):
the moment you lose sight of that andyou become hostage to a particular,
form factor or delivery channel orwhatever, you've opened the door for
somebody else to take the future.
Brilliant man.
I've one last quote and I'dlove you to riff on this one.
This was.
Kinda like what you said about SteveJobs changing from Apple computer
to Apple, the power of language andthe power of labeling something,

(49:15):
and how we get stuck in that.
You said that in most companies thereis no distinction between a conversation
about radical new possibilities anda conversation about how to eke out
another percentage point of gross margin.
The same standards of analyticalrigor are applied to both, whether the
subject is the return on a new pieceof production machinery, or the chance

(49:36):
to create an entirely new market.
Strategy conversations at GE Capital atthe time were labeled Dreaming Sessions.
Questions about internal rateof return on EVA are disallowed.
No one mistakes them then forbudgeting meetings, I thought
that was a really important point.
Yeah, well, un unfortunately, GE CapitalI think imploded with a financial crisis.

(50:00):
So may again, the examples are sometimesbetter at the time than they are,
but that's, you know, you can't writea book without taking that risk.
Um, But
though, Gary?
I I mean, I think that's areally important point and, and
something that somebody could becritical and go, Hey, that didn't
work, but that, that's the point
No, no.
The point.
Yeah.
And, and, and the, and, and,and GE co much got caught.

(50:23):
GE Capital got caught much more on theoperational side and just this endless
quest to do deals and expand for thesake of expanding and getting bigger.
So they may have, they had those sessions.
I don't, I'd be surprised if anythingcame out of them having said that.
Absolutely.
Right.
And I think, you know, there's, oneof the things we're fighting behind
all of this, Aidan,, is not only kindof systems and structures, but we're
fighting kind of a managerialist mindset.

(50:45):
And if you look at the kinds of peoplewho move up in our organizations,
their analysts program managers,administrators, finance people, and so on.
And for them, pragmatism alwayshas the veto on any idea.
And so the quickest way you can kill,and, and particularly as we were saying

(51:06):
there, when you can't distinguishbetween a highly operational thing
where you, where you should expectto have a lot of data, you should
expect a high degree of certainty.
Your right to demand it.
If you walk into every conversation withthat mindset, like I am here to pull
your idea apart, to pressure, test it,define the weak point and so on, you'll
never do anything that's truly new.

(51:28):
Because the things that are newby definition cannot be evaluated
using those criteria, there's notenough evidence, there's not enough
data, there's not enough history,there's too much that's unknown.
And I've seen this happen again and again.
As I've watched young teams thatget excited, we help them to
get excited about some new idea.
They've done a lot of work andthought it through, and they come to
present and then you have some likegravelly voiced old timer say well

(51:50):
of course we have to be realistic.
And like, you destroy theidea, you destroy the spirit of
those kids and like whatever.
And you know, when, when you'rethinking about the future, being
realistic is a very different thing.
Being realistic means are weseeing the world in the right way?
Like we could be very clear, dowe have the right assumptions?
Are people really frustrated?

(52:11):
Is this technology really evolvingat the rate we think it is?
So it's not that you're fact freeand that you're just riffing it.
You can start, , you cansay what do we believe here?
Is it credible to believe it?
But you can ask how muchmoney is this gonna make?
I'm trying to think of the companyand I think it was W.L. Gore, they've
pioneered the long-term innovatormaterial science, but they had a

(52:33):
simple model called real win worth.
It's probably in one of my books.
And so if you have a new idea, I'll giveyou a really practical little case study.
gore, they make Goretex right, whichis an amazing performance fabric.
It's in all kinds of things, and theyget paid a lot of money for that.
Somebody at Gore said,could we put this in shoes?
'cause a lot of people are runningoutside in inclement weather and

(52:53):
it had never been done before.
And it actually, there are a lotof technical challenges in making
gore, that fabric flexible enough tostand up and not lose its properties
as you're flexing in a shoe.
They spent years doing this and itwasn't a big team, but nobody said stop
because the first question they'd askedthe gore is there a real opportunity?

(53:14):
You go like, okay, there are alot of people live in inclement
areas and they wanna exercise.
Okay, yeah, that's big.
Okay.
Like, keep going.
Right?
That's like, that wasn'tso hard to figure out.
Right?
But it wasn't that it was a fantasy.
Like here's the data, here's thenumber of people, here's how much
it rains in Ireland, wherever.
Yeah.
Let's, let's do this.
So that's the first question.
Is it real?
And you can go for a longtime just with that alone.

(53:36):
At some point somebody's gonna ask.
Can we win?
Which means, okay, it's real, butdo we have any right to play here?
Do we have any competencies, anycapabilities that you know, or is
this somehow in our wheelhouse?
But that's the secondary question.
And of course for Gore,the answer was yes.
And then finally somebody's gonna say,worth, okay, can we monetize this?

(53:59):
Is it is, is there enough valuehere that people will pay us?
We can cover our costs,we can make a margin.
Is it really important?
So often I think in companies,when new ideas come up, all three
of those questions get asked atthe same time, real win worth.
And the last one is the killer.
Because if you can't say like rightnow, like, yeah, it's gonna be worth X.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
We can, you know, and so that'swhy I think companies so often

(54:21):
miss the future because the, infact, it's, it's very interesting.
We've done this a lot in ourresearch, in our consulting.
Very interesting question to askin a, in organization companies.
What are the opportunities that wemissed where we could have played, where
we had enough capability, expertise wecould have played, but we're not there.
And then you wanna go backand do some real diagnosis
and say, did we never see it?

(54:42):
And often people did see it.
Alright.
Did we under resource it?
Yeah.
Did we kill it prematurely?
Yeah.
Did the team behind it get frustratedand leave or get reassigned?
Yeah.
So you cannot take that highly pragmatic,hardcore data driven mentality and apply

(55:05):
it to every question or every opportunity.
and yet that is the managerialistmindset and the inclination to do that.
And by the way, you get a little buzzof feeling superior and feeling good
when you pull somebody else's idea down.
That's often theunfortunate truth as well.
And like, you know, I toldyou it was like dumb idea.
The audience experience that all the time.

(55:27):
But those of you who areCEOs take heed of that.
And we all tend to do it.
We see things to our own perspective.
To Gary's point, you'llsee the same thing.
You'll see a totally different,let the organization see it.
Gary, it's always a great pleasure.
I thought we'd get twochapters done today.
I'm glad we didn't.
'cause I really want to go into thenext chapter, which is Corporate
Rebels there's some great heroes,corporate rebels in that chapter.

(55:50):
But more I want to talk about , the kindof structures of navigating political
hierarchies, because that's a hugechallenge when it comes to status and
to the point you just said there abouttrying to get around those people
who will condemn your idea early.
For people who want to findyou, Gary, where's the best
place for them to reach out?
Gary hamel.com.
Email Gary at gary hamel dot com.

(56:13):
Prof, Hamel on X and you'llfind me on LinkedIn as well.
Brilliant.
And don't forget all thosebooks are available that
adorn the shelves behind me.
There we were covering Leading theRevolution, author of Leading Revolution.
Gary Hamel, thank you for joining us.
Thank you very much.
Thank you, Aiden.