 Professor Ram, it's really wonderful to have you here today and we really are grateful for the time that you're spending with us talking about challenges of transformation and as you well know lots and lots of organizations are undergoing transformation today in many many different ways and driving innovation in order to foster growth and in some of the work that you've done you're talking about ways that we need to speak differently about what transformation means and how to do that so can you tell us a little bit about some of the transformation challenges you've seen in organizations today? I think one of the problems we have when we start talking about transformation is that we still because I think this is how human minds work we kind of assume what the end result will be there is in management thinking and has always been historically a tremendous drive to control that we want to kind of have a we're prepared to kind of talk about risk-taking or prepare to think about talk about creativity but we still kind of nurture that little desire that I just hope it doesn't go off the rails and if I had a pound for every time a CEO said was just as long as it doesn't go off the rails I'd be a very wealthy man by now and I think that is our challenge how do we actually nurture that courage in organizations to kind of push just not just beyond the comfort zone but beyond the plan the transformation zone and kind of encourage true experimentation I mean we'll listen to Alexander Rosterwalder speaking earlier and he is he's done a lot to trying to kind of tie people up to a notion of innovation cultures where there is all the things we've been talking about for such a long time an acceptance of failure daring to take risks letting kind of experimentation drive us but still we have a long way to go. How would you speak to CEOs and organizations about how to build courage within the group of employees who are most likely to be disrupted by change? I think I kind of I always kind of talk to them about the fact that we we talk so much about learning particularly I can have academics with tendons to always learning and knowledge stuff like that but the late great Peter Drucker of course reminded us that one of the most important things is not learning but unlearning and we often have strategies for learning we have HR processes in which we get more and more competencies and so on but we have very little strategic processes to unlearn and to kind of tell people that listen you will become irrelevant here is how we can guide you through this irrelevancy back to a new kind of relevance and I think that the transition between different kind of competencies is grossly under managed in many organizations today because frankly let's face it who among us wants to go you know what I really want to become in two years is irrelevant I think that all that stuff I've done for years and years and I think that's going to be worthless we have such strong kind of boundaries inside that we absolutely do not want to engage in that discourse but we forget it and we're going to pretend that no no I'm I'm not protecting my own identity I'm striking a blow for the learning organizations and for our core competencies one of the things that I think is really fascinating kind of within the transformation framework is that I think project managers of the future and wherever they fit whatever you call them are people that are going to need to look at what the challenge is and be able to curate all of the different types of tools and approaches that are necessary in order to drive that to a successful resolution and it's not about one or the other it's actually about having a multiplicity of tools available to you that you can wrap around a problem rather than any one particular approach how important do you think that is in terms of the future of the workforce being able to do that I would take it a lot bigger I think that is incredibly critical even to not just transformations in workforces or the future of the workforce but literally the future of society itself that is we have to accept that the problems we're seeing right now in society be climate change be changes in demographics we're aging far too rapidly to be really truly for this to be sustainable be it social inequality be it global inequality we need the kind of mega projects we need the kind of truly kind of transformative projects that can address things that have remained unaddressed or kind of remained under addressed for decades but which will need actually very rapid results and there the transformative logics that we can learn be it from Silicon Valley be it from a clean tech company in in the kind of Southern Africa be it from some weird nowhere country like Finland that we can take all of this skills and start saying no we need project managers that truly just don't want just transform project management don't just want to transform a singular company but transform an entire area of society