 Hello everyone, thank you for joining us and welcome to today's conversation with Rita McGrath and Ricardo Vargas. I would now like to introduce Ricardo Vargas, Executive Director of Brightline Initiative. Hello everyone, good morning, good afternoon, good evening. So I'm very happy to be here to open this webinar and it's for me a great honor to have Rita McGrath here with us. On the top of being a global recognized expert on strategy, innovation and growth. She had worked with several 4,500 clients including Triam, LinkedIn, Thinkers 50 and State Farm. She is also a great friend of Brightline. She was one of the first supporters of our mission. And I will never forget when she donated her time to participate in our course era course with the model and the course. Just last week reached about 15,000 students and I'm very happy that you, Rita, helped us to build this. And today is a very special also because of the topic because around a year ago, Rita released the book Seen Around Corners. And I just told her that this book is on my nightstand because right now what everybody wants to know it's exactly how we can identify inflection points on this so volatile word. So Rita, thank you very much for being with us. Okay. And supporting us so both of you now. Thank you very much. Thank you Ricardo. So do I, do I switch to my presentation now? Yes, yes. Awesome. Well, hello everyone. It's an absolute pleasure to be here. And so what I'm going to do is present a few, a few ideas and on on leading change and seeing around corners. And then we leave lots of time for questions and answers. So I think that's really the most important part the interactive part, when we really get into what's what's on everybody's mind. So the book Seen Around Corners is just celebrating its anniversary. I'm really pleased it's out. And the book is really about strategic inflection points. And I define a strategic inflection point as an event that typically an external event that changes something about your business by an order of 10. So if you think about any business, you know, by the time you're working in an industry, as the strategist like to say, by the time you got something worked out in terms of your business model, your customers, how you get paid what you do. You know, there are all kinds of realities that inform that business and those realities are a function of what is possible. By the time that business was founded. And so what starts to emerge is a whole set of recipes almost for success. So recipes for, you know, how you drive more engagement, how you create more customers, how you do things. And those recipes then translate into key performance indicators and how you get rewarded and everything goes on. And what I think happens sometimes is that these can become a critical blind spot. And so when the strategic inflection point moves through, it's very easy to miss it. I mean, if you take just as an example, take YouTube, right. You know, it's been around what 12 years. So if I told you when YouTube was first commercialized, this thing is going to destabilize large media and up and the way advertising gets done and completely change the way we communicate with each other. It's going to be a way, you know, kids in a garage with nothing but a smartphone can make money. You would have kind of looked at me and said, YouTube, YouTube is cat videos like, like, let's be real. Facebook, you know, teenagers sending ill-advised pictures to one another beer bomb and so forth. And, and I think that's right. And then one of the things I learned about strategic inflection points is that while they feel and certainly, as Ricardo was just saying this this inflection point we're living in right now feels as though it came out of nowhere. But in reality, if you go back and look, very often you can see the origins of strategic inflection points long before they're actually a pause. And I think that's the opportunity, right, which is, you know, if we can begin to see them early and begin to take action early, we can be in a situation where our business reaches new heights. We can wait or resist or avoid trying to see them. We're in a situation where the business goes into decline. And so that's really the backdrop to this particular segment, which is about leading change. And I thought it would be interesting to share with you the topic of, well, now that our world was changed all around us, how do we change our business, how do we bring those changes into being that are so essential for whatever comes to whatever the next step act is. And so I think leading change is interesting. In researching the book I searched in a search engine for the phrase change management and you find over 25 million references. It's a really fascinating, difficult topic. And what we often find is, you know, that people aren't, they say they're committed to it they say they want it they say they want to thrive with it but very often, it's more like this right lip service to change today, they don't really want to want to change. And so what I'd like to introduce you to is a pretty simple equation. It's called the transformation equation it was actually originated by some work by a professor named the Michael beer at Harvard. So I want to give him all credit for it. But I think it's a really useful kind of shorthand tool for thinking about how we create lasting change. What he basically said is the possibility for successful transformation is a result of a multiplicative effect of three practices working together. There's a do we have dissatisfaction constructive dissatisfaction with the current state, which basically answers the question, Why do we need to change like what's what's not great about what we're doing right now so you have to have dissatisfaction with the current times a vision for what the future state could be times a process that removes obstacles that block access to that future state. Now you know what's interesting is almost everybody I work with has a preference for one or the other right so some people are real process people like oh it's the process we don't have a process right that doesn't work. Some people are real vision people a father vision that's what it is that's what we need to be developing. Some people are real dissatisfaction people don't have dissatisfaction things going to happen. And what's fascinating to me is that all of those are right, because they multiply. So what you want to be concerned about is, where is the lowest level manifesting itself in your organization. So a couple of examples, one of my wonderful clients at Columbia Business School where I work is a big accounting firm, and the CEO of this big accounting firm here's from all of his contemporaries other CEOs. You know you people need to be more global, we're, you know, you're charging us different prices in different parts of the world you have different practices in different parts of the world. We have a mess we're not really happy about it. And then the CEO goes and talks to his sets of partners, let's just say a big partner meeting now business structured regionally. So the way that you got to be successful in this company in this organization was that you ran your region. And, and so each of the partners runs their region by the time they reach partner oh my goodness they've got three car garbages their kids are going to school life is good. And so this CEO comes and I can practically lip sync the speech about how important it is to be truly global and have a global mindset, and they'll look at him and global right got it. And then they go back to their offices and do what absolutely nothing because they don't feel it the CEO feels it but they don't feel the constructive dissatisfaction the need for change. So if you don't have dissatisfaction you've kind of got bottom of the inbox nobody's going to do anything. Let's take vision. Right. So at Columbia one of the things I'm very fortunate to have had before the pandemic was, we shared our offices where we work with people from the Goddard Space Institute so these are people that work at NASA like absolutely cool. And you need to run into the hallways like oh my god you work for NASA how cool is that. And you know what's it like and they're like, well, you know, not too sure about the Mars mission and the telescope, you know, the thing just doesn't fly and we have to rely on the private sector to make some of our moves. Lots of dissatisfaction. I've had no problem there. And these guys could process their way to, you know, New York to California they could flow chart that, but they're not completely clear what their vision is what you know what is it we're here to do. And then so it's kind of discouraging right. The first case of all I would submit is where you've got dissatisfaction so you get change going. You've got a vision so you know how good things could be. But you don't have the structures in place that are going to make the future reality possible. And if you think about big social changes. What that tends to do is it creates a vacuum creates isolation. Things like the Arab Spring, think about in your organization right you have a fast start, and then things kind of fizzle. So my main point here is that each of these dissatisfaction. A vision for the future, and a process that's in place to try to eliminate obstacles are critically important and you really need to be thinking about each of those as you're thinking about lasting change. And I think a lot of leaders miss miss something they miss one or the other. So that's a real difficulty. So just to summarize, you know where you've got TVP, you've got the potential for successful lasting change. You're not missing. None of the dissatisfaction in the bottom of the inbox. And if you're missing a vision, it can be anxious, frustrating people, you know, people want to move but they don't know what they want to do. And finally the most dangerous of all is this fast start and then trouble where you're not really getting the outcomes. So I'll give an example, and just I'll take the American Revolution, those of you that have seen the movie Halton right so dissatisfaction. So back around the time Columbia University was founded 1754. The King of England sent around a survey and he asked the colonists in America, how things were going. And they said, you know, actually things are pretty good we've got a bit of land which we never had before. And so what the British government proceeded to do is pile on more and more and more taxes onto the American colonists who eventually objective and then there's turned out to be a few dissatisfaction leaders who basically said, you know taxation without representation that's serenade. Right. And now what you'll often find with dissatisfaction leaders is they will create a small group of true believers around them. Right. And they'll be representing the cause. Then we had, you know, the necessity to reach beyond that small group to a larger group to kind of get them to rally behind a common vision, a vision that could embrace everybody. And in this case the visionary leader in the American Revolution, I mean, among many others, but what one of them was a guy named Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the Declaration of Independence, right. We hold these truths to be self evident that all men it was just men at the time that all men are created equal, and that they owe their endowed by their creator with the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We all men are created equal. Very compelling vision, right. That was awesome. You know, Jefferson's idea about how to create a revolution was to write this incredibly elegant letter to the King of England. And of course the King of England would then say, Oh, well, of course I see your point of view. Go off and have your, have your country that'll be great. Into that situation that came a real process for you. And this was George Washington and George Washington, you know, over the years we've kind of built him up to be this almost godlike figure but he's an incredibly pragmatic guy. And he's like, Hey, so you want a revolution. Well, we'll need to raise taxes to pay for it. We'll need to take people off of their farms men off of their farms and recruit them into the army and there's going to be blood and there's going to be a lot of loss of life but we can get this done. Now, what I think is kind of interesting about this example is the sequence. Without the dissatisfaction, there would have been no hunger for the vision without the dissatisfaction and division, there would have been no receptivity. I mean imagine if George Washington did emerge to the blue and said, Yeah, we can do this. And there'd been no, you know, none of the pre preceding steps in place that would have been a disaster. So I think what you really need to think about is you've got these this sort of almost a sequence to these things you have to have dissatisfaction, then a vision, then the process in place. And that kind of a very topical idea at the moment is, you know, the modern American women's movement, if you think about it, so we had World War two. We had, you know, people all came home from war that the sort of nuclear American family and the baby boomer flavor of it, all formed, and then a bunch of women said, Hang on, you know, this isn't right. Look, we don't have rights like we can't open a bank account. We can't. We can't hold jobs at the time. There were newspaper ads which had jobs for women and jobs for men and two separate sections. And this sort of bubbled up in crystallization of dissatisfaction. And so what did these women do. As you see the picture here, they burned their bras. Now I personally have never understood how a relatively, to me, innocent article of women's clothing came to represent such oppression, but that's what they did. They burned their bras. Now my next door neighbor, you know, kind of middle of the road modest guy looks at this and he's horrified, absolutely horrified. And this is one of the really interesting things about making change work, which is, you can't just look at the people that are dissatisfied. You have to have some message that's broader and that's where the vision is so important. So in the modern American women's movement, there was a woman named Betty Friedan. She wrote a book called The Feminine Misty. In that book, she argued, what we want is equal pay for equal work, equal pay for equal work. Now go back to the whole kind of foundation of this country. And Jefferson was saying all men are created equal, that equal pay for equal work thing, hugely resonant with many, many Americans. My next door neighbor kind of hears that he goes, Oh, well, you know, I can kind of see my way to understanding why that's important. Yeah, third kind of leader and there were many, but this is one of us. I'll pull up in the modern American women's movement was a woman you probably never heard of unless you're from Hawaii. Her name was Patsy Mink. And she was Japanese emigrated to her parents emigrated to America she was born in Hawaii. Her father during World War two was in church in prisoner of war camp in the Japanese many of the Japanese much to the disgrace of the American government were in church. And she was very bright, very, very bright and she had a lifelong ambition of becoming a doctor. She went through her college career did very, very well and applied to medical school and was rejected by every medical school she applied to. And so she went back to the people who had rejected her, when, you know, at the same time they've been accepting men who were much less accomplished whose test scores were lower didn't have that level of achievement she did. And she was, you know, just sort of why did this happen. And so one of the admissions directors finally took her seriously and said, All right, I'll speak to you about this. You're your own woman. Yes, I'm aware of that. What does that got to do with anything. I said, Well, you know, we're going to give you a place and we're going to have all this expensive education invested in you. And you're going to get trained and you're going to work maybe for a couple of years but then you're going to drop out to have babies and at that point, like what's, you know, you're just taking a place and it's not going to be fruitful, it's not going to be useful. The time this was legal. By the way, this is going on still all over the world in Japan. There was recently a scandal where women were being rejected from medical school because because they were women basically. And so anyway, Patsy gave up her lifelong dream of becoming a doctor and became a lawyer instead and relentlessly over a long career that involved several terms in Congress and you know much effort on her part, eventually really fought to get these unfair laws, things that, you know, laws that said you could be discriminated against to in applications to medical school, you could be discriminated against in terms of credit, you know, and on and on. But her signature achievement was something called the Patsy Team Equal Opportunity in Education Act. It was formerly known as Title IX. And what it basically said was for any university or any government funded institution, they shall not exclude people on the basis of sex. And this had a revolutionary effect on things like women's participation in sports, colleges attitudes towards admitting women, you know, it's just it was absolutely revolutionary. And so she was a process leader but this is the thing about process leaders I bet very few who have ever heard of her. And yet she devoted her life to changing these structures that kept gender relations where they were. So, so D, the NP. One last idea is about resistance and we won't have time today to get into what happens with real resistance but what I'd like to talk about is something that we often mistake as resistance, which is the reaction of people who are being asked to change. And what we very often mistake as resistance is the emotional reaction of being forced to change in some meaningful way I mean, look at this little guy who moved my bowl, you know, and any change, even if it's a positive change. There, there's always this moment where you have an emotional reaction, and it very often follows a common pattern. And we know about this pattern from Elizabeth Kubler Ross, who said, you know, anytime we have to change and in her case she was studying people who received the news that they had a fatal illness, but you know that research has since been extended to many, many different spheres. We tend to have a very predictable set of coping strategies. And then the change first happens, right? Impact, then there's shock. There's the denial, like this can be depression, you know, an often anger, anger bargaining and then finally, acceptance and reconstruction. So Ricardo you were talking earlier about, you know, there you are at doubles. It's January, it's 2020. There's also the thing with this virus thing, you know, it's in China, it's not going to be that big a deal. And then eventually we go through these motions, right, or it's like, well this can't be and then it's, you know, my entire year gets canceled and well, oh, and for many people that was very kind of depressing. There's a lot of anger, a lot of like, like, this isn't right, this can't be. And then finally for a lot of us now we're sort of reconfiguring our lives, we're trying to figure out what things are looking like right now. Now the reason that I raise this is because I think it's counterproductive to treat these emotional reactions as though they are resistance, because they're not. They're not true resistance and as I said we don't really have time to get into that today. But, but, but I think it's very important to understand that there's this emotional roller coaster that people look who, as they're being confronted with change. So some things to think about. If they're in denial, they haven't acknowledged that there's a problem, you know, that's where you need to use mutually acceptable data. You need to say, well, you know, could you agree if the vast majority of people had a high risk of becoming ill that it wouldn't be a good idea to have large gatherings and know, okay, baby, I could agree to that. If they're depressed if they're sad, right, that's where you want to say hey, focus on the future. Let's think about the vision. Once this is passed us, things will be different but it could be their aspects of it that could be really great. If they're mad, they're angry. Very often, by the way, if they're angry, it's for legitimate reasons. Something got messed up or something didn't get done right or whatever. That's where you need to empathize, listen, provide support. By the time they get into bargaining, again, that's where you're looking for your process. And then by the time they're accepting the change, now you can kind of move forward. And then we construct. How are we going to live our lives now that this major inflection point has come across and we are passing through it. So let me wrap up and then we'll have plenty of time for questions, I think, Ray Carter. So we're definitely living through one of the most passive inflection points ever. And I think, you know, that's going to be very painful for a lot of people. It's also, to me, a great unfreezing. It's an opportunity to revisit and rethink many things that we hadn't really been open to before. So just as an example, at Columbia, Executive Education, which is where I work, we've had to rethink all of our programming. And so we're now experimenting with different form factors that we could never do if it was a requirement that we be face to face. I'm taking my Women in Leadership Program, which is a great program, but it was a three day intensive. Everybody comes to your kind of program and we're now stretching it out over four weeks. Two days in the week or four weeks. I actually think the learning, in many cases, is richer. We can reach a whole different group of attendees who could never come to our course before. So, you know, yes, it's horrible in many ways, but it's also freeing up some creativity to cope with kind of new things. One of the things I talk about a lot is the new strategy playbook where we're not looking at competitive advantages that last for long periods of time, but we're looking at competitive advantages that are short, right? And one of the big elements of the new strategy playbook is that, you know, change. We have to accept change as normal. And we can't just say that it doesn't exist. Dissatisfaction, absolutely critical, but constructive dissatisfaction. We don't want people just whining and, you know, being mired at it. We want them to say, well, this isn't great now. What could we do to create a better future? Vision absolutely matters, I think more than ever. People need to be able to look and say, there's something we're striving for. There's something that's better. We also don't want to ignore the process steps. You know, what are the what are the step by step things that need to happen to get us where we are to where we want to be. And then finally, resistance can often be misinterpreting. And so don't blame people for having the emotional reaction to change that they might need to have. So for anybody that wants to learn more. Thank you. And this is my email address. You can easily reach me. I'm on Twitter, I'm on LinkedIn, I'm on Instagram, I'm on YouTube, you know, all kinds of things. I run a monthly newsletter, monthly ish, where you can subscribe to it's free. And in since the pandemic what I've been trying to do is really write the newsletter about topics that I think could be helpful for people that want to see around corners as they were. And then the other thing I've been doing since the pandemic has kind of come upon us is Friday fireside chats. And I have wonderful interesting very diverse guests from all over the place and so they're all also free you can just sign up for them. If you go to my website, you will see the schedule is that industry, you know, we make up what an industry is God does not come down and say here's your industry right. We make that up. And so I think it can often be a source of incredible blind spots. So what I would recommend alternatively is really think about who your customer is you know what what is the customer. And the specific way I look at it is what is the customer job to be done. So, I'll take an example if you think about teenagers and clothing right. I mean what's the job that clothing does for teenagers. Well, of course, the obvious you know keeps you warm in the winter or not too hot in the summer or whatever. But if you think about teenagers specifically. It's an incredibly important communicative job to do. So, what tribe of my part of what tribe of my not part of what is my uniform for going to work. And starting in about 2003. What you started to have was cameras built into cell phones and now teenagers are sending pictures of themselves to each other right and think about it like I'm in a red jacket on Monday and I'm sending a picture of something cool that I'm doing. And I'm in the same red jacket on Wednesday sending a picture of something cool I'm doing. And I'm wearing the same thing on. Well how lame is that. So I would actually argue to you that the whole concept of fast fashion, which is pretty much an ecological disaster. It came about from this combination of the job teenagers need to do, which is communicate, connect, communicate, share with each other. Plus, what what the job is of clothing and they kind of intermingled. And so if you think about who's lost out in this it's all clothing, you know the traditional clothing stores where you have for seasons and you imported stuff from Asia at the end of the season you sold what you could and then whatever you couldn't sell you discounted. And you know that's not what teenagers want teenagers want a constant supply of fresh ideas so who won. Well, back historically it was H&M for Zara right the fast fashion providers. So we need to start with who's the customer what is it that they really need to get accomplished in their lives what are their jobs to be done, and then work backward into what does that imply for your business model. Great. Thank you so much for your response. Our next question is, after planning the strategy companies still seem to struggle to follow the strategies execution and its results. Do you believe that tools with BSC for DX okay are and others can help during that execution. They can, they can I mean this is one of the things see the bright line was created to do right which was take strategy and follow through to it. So those tools can work if they're followed rigorously now a couple of things about measurements like see like odx 40x all those things. The trouble is any metric, any measurement over time erodes in its ability to predict the outcome. And the reason is people learn how to gain the tool. So, you know, whatever you're measuring people will start to conform their performance to that metric. And so what starts to happen is it loses its variance so there was some fascinating work done of baseball baseball teams by a very noted team. And what he did was he took baseball batting averages and mapped a curve sort of a constant curve from 1926. And then he mapped the same curve, multiple decades later. And what he found was the average was about the same the average batting score was about the same, but that the variance had collapsed. And what he learned was that, you know, think about it, the good batters learn how to do better and better, but the good pictures learn how to do better and better, you know, against the batters and so the variance on the upside begins to collapse. Meanwhile, the teams learn what a good batter really looks like what that really means and so the bad batters get weaned out of the population. And that is the same average but the variance collapsed. Now, the reason I mentioned that is your ability to use a metric to predict the outcome. Over time, almost inevitably loses its power. So yes, those kinds of metrics can be incredibly powerful. But you have to remember that human beings are genius creatures and nothing here I have a game the system so that's kind of the first Uber observation I would make. The second one I would make is and I'll take the balance scorecard just in particular because I haven't been very familiar with it. It is very possible for balance scorecard measures that look incredibly clean and streamlined at the top of the house on the top of the organization to look like a strand of spaghetti against the wall by the time it gets down to the level of the organization in which you actually wanted to motivate action. And so part of the challenge of implementing any system like that is how do you keep it simple enough that it really motivates action on the part of participants. Great. Thank you so much for your response. Our next question is, first of all, they want to say great examples that you provided throughout the presentation. Both the feminist and American independent movement had three separate leaders building the DV and P. Is that always the case or can one leader not build the DV and P for a successful transformation. You know, as with all things human. It very often is the case that you've got separate leaders doing those things, but there's no reason one leader couldn't do it and in fact one of the things that if any of you are interested I have a one page survey that I use that sort of measures in the polls of DV and P in your own organization. I find it tends to be a different skill set. Now that again there's nothing deterministic about this. It's possible for the same leader to do all three. But you know the person that's creating dissatisfaction and think of Malcolm X or somebody like that, you know where you're just marshaling this tribe of people who are motivated by a sense of this isn't wrong. You need to change this dissatisfaction leaders and those very often are a small tribe of true believers, the visionary leaders tend to be the ones that are able to reach across to bring more people into the camp into the field. And the process leaders are often the unsung heroes you know they're often working behind the scenes very doggedly and very quietly doing, you know, doing the hard work of making this a reality so it is three different skill sets it can be the same person it often isn't. And I think it's just important to know that each of those functions needs to happen and you know they happen in a sequence right so dissatisfaction first. And then if you need that vision or the dissatisfaction just gets you grumbling it doesn't get you a move to action. And then the process leader kind of sits down and says well how does this all work how do we create the structures which are going to allow this change that we envision to be a future possibility. Oh one practical thing that occurs to me as we're talking about DMP is you can use this structure to construct what I call an elevator speech. Which is, you know, imagine somebody that is important or potentially important to your change effort, and you run into them in a, you know, casual moment with with with not much time. So you can use DDP to actually construct what what is often called an elevator speech, which is a short. I mean I'm talking really short 20 seconds 30 seconds. So this is the layout of what you're doing and how they can help. So in my case, you know, we're completely rethinking Columbia executive so let's say we're to run into an important stakeholder, a key client or a dean or whatever. And they said so how are things going has this affecting you and I would say dissatisfaction. Oh, well, you know we've had to completely rethink our curriculum vision, but we actually are thinking we're going to be able to open this up to more and more customer and you never serve before we think this is going to be really a great opportunity to rethink the business, and then process. Oh, you know, would you be willing to come to a meeting of the standing faculty to talk about how we might do things differently right. So deep the structures your elevator speeches so that you're not just sitting there with your mouth full of teeth when you have these important opportunities to interact with people. Thank you so much for your response. Our next question is, you mentioned a new strategy playbook. Could you please expand on that. Thank you. Oh sure. So this is from my book on the end of competitive advantage, which came out a few years ago. And in it, what I argue is that strategies thirst for sustainable competitive advantage is today, a bit misplaced. But the traditional recipe for strategy like when I started in the field back in the day. The traditional recipe was you found an attractive position in an attractive industry, you throw up entry barriers like crazy. And then you sort of maintained that advantage for as long as you possibly could it. There are places in our economy where that is still possible, but in more and more parts of our economy. And so in that book what I argue is that strategy really needs a new playbook. And one of the first elements of that is getting rid of this idea that industry is going to predict everything because it doesn't and we've learned that over many painful years. So briefly the new strategy playbook consists of six elements that are quite different from the traditional strategy recipe. So the first element is something I call continuous reconfiguration. Today, you may have heard of that as pivots, right. So that we are, or agile, right that that set of ideas that we're going from a notion stability is the normal thing, and change is the weird thing to sort of continuous comfort with with multiple small changes that add up to eventually a big result. So if I were to take an example, a company like fact set, which is a company that was established in the US in the 70s, when computerization first entered financial services. And the two founders said, Whoa, you know, once we can get this data, like into the hands of investors that has enormous value and their original business model was they literally had pages of printouts that were set by bicycle messengers in the 70s and 80s. So today that company is completely unrecognizable. I mean they have databases, they have artificial intelligence they have machine learning they have all this stuff. But if you look at their history, you don't see wrenching reorganization you don't see fire the left hand side of the building what you see is continual small changes that led them to their current success. So continuous reconfiguration is the first principle. The second principle is something I call healthy disengagement, which means if you think about it, a strategy has a life cycle. There's going to be point parts of your company that are going into erosion in other words they're not going to be growth engines they're not going to take to the future. And what you want is to extract resources from those elements that you can invest them in new areas, and I call that disengagement. So you need to do that in a healthy way. And what happens so often today is, you know, and it's very human I understand it, but but people will cling on to those businesses and they will preserve them long after it's clear to everybody that this thing is just never going to make it. But I think we need to do is be much more proactive and healthier about it and just say well, you know, it's not the people that failed it's the business that didn't work out and I think that that makes perfect sense. So, here's an example of that. Back in 2015. Dyson, the vacuum cleaner guy was looking at the market for electric vehicles and said, whoa, this is a market that perfectly fits our strategy and aspirate aspirations. It is potentially huge. The only competitors Tesla, we're going to be able to get great big margins it's going to be perfect. So, let's move forward to 2019. Guess what everybody in their brother is going into electron electric vehicles which doesn't bother Tesla they're used to competition, but they were pricing them kind of to compete with internal combustion engine vehicles. And at that point, you know, he just looked at the business and he said, you know, this is just James Dyson it's not going to work. I'm going to disengage. I should have said to his engineers. I'm proud of you you did great work. We did everything that we hoped to do this business, but external forces have convened in such a way that it's not productive business for us anymore. You've got construct continuous change, healthy disengagement. Third element is really, really hard. And this is resource allocation across the enterprise. And I know very few organizations today they get this right, which is we need to be able to put our best resources into where our best opportunities are. And instead what's happening today is very often resources can get trapped and held hostage in individual divisions or individual businesses. You know they're under the control of powerful people. And so it's all scanner. So we may have the resources to go do something new and innovative, but we can't extract them from the businesses that have them tied to their life. And so what what I recommend is something I call resource allocation deftness, which is the ability to look across the whole corporation and see what's, what's going on. And I'm actually building some tools to help people do that so if any of you are interested in this reach out to me, it's baby stages yet but but we're very excited about the potential of these tools to go do new things. And the second element is innovation, but innovation as a, as a proficiency, not as this sort of, we've had this for the last five years or so where, oh my God, innovations of the senior guys or this is innovation we need more innovation around here you you know, go come to work at midnight in black t-shirts or whatever. And you know, it's just so crazy I mean innovation is a set of practices that can be learned it's a continuous ongoing set of things, and not what I call innovation theater and we've had an absolute rate of incubators, accelerators, change contests, saccabins, you know, you name it, without any follow through. And so if you really want to make innovation proficiency, there's those practices you need to learn you need to learn, you know, how do I source good ideas how do I then incubate them. And finally how do I accelerate them to be part of the parent corporation. Then we have leadership. And I think this pandemic has taught us that, you know, good leadership is absolutely essential. And it's what I describe as discovery driven. So we need to have the ability to get those hard to hear facts and data, the ability to build trust, the ability to build psychological safety, so that you get the information that you need. And finally, we have careers and talent, and increasingly what I see us living in is a world of what I call the tour of duty career, where you know people will sign on, they'll spend four or five years, maybe, you know, and then, then they'll move on. But that doesn't mean they're lost to you, right? It means you're now part of their network. So I'm seeing a lot of companies forming these very active alumni networks. And unlike the past, it's entirely conceivable to leave an organization, go do something else, come back, leave, come back, you know, when your needs are really there. So I think we're looking at people's careers in a really different way than these two. So I'll just summarize. So you have healthy reconfiguration, so being agile, death to resource allocation across the organization, healthy disengagement, innovation is a proficiency discovery driven leadership, and finally this notion of tour of duty careers as really different from the way I think strategy has been thought of historically. Great. Thank you so much for your response. The next one is a bit of a comment before the question and the comment is that he loves the way you present how people resist change. It is very human. But convincing them might be time consuming, if ever detected. How do you find and manage that to actually change? Well, I think what you need to do is think of it like any other thing you want to launch, right? You don't start with the hardest to convince. You start by creating a nucleus of allies in product launch, we would call that the early adopters, the people that see the vision that understand that want to get on board. And then you broaden to the sort of early mass market and then you broaden to whatever. So, you know, I think a big mistake is to try to do it all by yourself. I think what you want to do is recruit as many allies and true believers as you can, and then use the collectivity of their energy to convert those that are resistant. Great. Thank you so much. The next question is, what are the KPIs we should be keeping an eye on apart from financial legging indicators during a transformation, of course. Great question because this is where I think a lot of companies, well, both profit and not for profit get themselves hung up. So one of the things I talk about a lot is leading indicators, which are, you know, information about what might be possible in the future. And a specific example of a company that has embraced this is Microsoft. And what Microsoft has done is they said, you know, a lot of our measurements of success are basically lagging indicators. So they call them performance indicators. So things that are, you know, profits and revenue and stuff like that. They're great data, but they're all about something that's already happened. Instead, what we want to do is get our executives focused on the future. And so if you work at Microsoft, it's very likely that your metrics are going to be about things like usage. And before you can get usage, you have to have customer love. And I remember I ordered something not more than a month ago from them, from their Microsoft store. Part of the follow on survey that sent me after it was done was did you love the experience of working with us, which was a little ham hand that I thought but at the same time it showed that they're refocusing people on on the future. And so if you're a senior executive at Microsoft today, half of your metrics come from these performance metrics, the traditional ones, and half of them come from these power metrics, which are the future oriented ones. And, you know, if half of your compensation comes from caring about the future, you're going to be a lot more inclined to care about it than if all you bring your work done is the past. One last observation there is, I remember, maybe half a year ago or so, some analysts was congratulating Jeff Bezos of Amazon, as of having having had a great quarter. And Bezos leached into him, he just said, you know, that is the stupidest comment I've ever heard because the quarter we just had at Amazon is a function of decisions we made four years ago. It's just a stupid observation. And I think that's the mindset that that leaders have when they really want to be driving their organizations into the future. Great. Thank you so much for your response. Our next question is, how do you deal with errors or missteps during the change that reinforces the negative view of the change? And how do you recover from that? Oh, you have to be prepared for it to happen. You absolutely do. And it will happen because it's unknown. You know, it's unsure and human beings are imperfect creatures and you can't foresee every bizarre thing that's going to happen. One of my favorite stories of this is back in my PhD days. So, going back a while now, I was working with the distribution arm of General Electric. And these are the guys that had the unglamorous jobs, you know, they distributed light bulbs and gears and sprockets and stuff. And went through this big change effort. And the guy who was in charge of this particular division was a big advocate for change. Change was great and better. And everybody got all wrapped up in the change effort and kind of forgot about the customer. So everybody was all involved in the change and meetings. And this is that, well, customer dissatisfaction rose. Customer services numbers plummeted. Everybody was like really pissed off at the way GE was treating them. And he sort of stopped mid-track and he said, you know, I made a mistake. And he had something like 130 branches. And so he said, I'm just leaving headquarters. I am 40 days and 40 nights. I'm going to be on the road. I'm going to go to every single branch. And I'm going to re-emphasize how important it is to put the customer first and the change has to come later. And symbolically, just amazing. He literally went on the road 40 days and 40 nights, sort of a biblical reference. And tried to explain that, yes, the change is important, but it wasn't the most important thing was customers. And so I think you have to be prepared that things are going to go wrong. And I think being honest and transparent, I mean, most people are prepared to be open if you're prepared to be, you know, accepting of the fact that you made a mistake. And this didn't go the way we thought. So one of the big things Amy Ed Benson has taught the world, which is such a gift to all of us, is the concept of psychological safety. That you need to be able to express when things aren't going right. You need to be able to express when things didn't happen the way that they could have. And the more you can create an organization where that exists, then the more rapidly information will flow and the better, the better your decision making processes and so forth will be. Thank you so much. Our next question is, what is the role of time or speed for success in transformations? Well, as a general rule, the faster, the better, right? The more quickly you can get it to happen, the better. Not always. I mean, sometimes, especially if you're in a really asset intensive situation or, you know, if you're in a situation where you're involved in safety or something that could go terribly wrong and cause a lot of harm, you want to be very deliberate. But as a general rule, you'd like the pace to be faster, because one of the best ways, of course, the people that don't want the change to fight you is they'll resist, you know, they'll drag their feet, they'll, you know, yeah, I'll get to that next quarter, yeah, yeah. So you really want to try to get, you know, more speed, more agility there. Great. Thank you so much for your response. Here is the next question or comment. Your observations would suggest we need more public dissatisfaction and understanding of the current situations, danger to our future lives. Okay. Perfect. Thank you. Alright, we're getting towards the end of our time together. Did you want to say any final words before we wrap things up here today? Oh, I'll just comment that I think what Brightline's trying to do, which is connect the dots between strategy and execution is just such important work and I think perhaps today more important than ever. Great. Thank you so much. I hope everyone enjoyed the conversation today. We have a full day of programming with amazing speakers lined up as a part of our strategy at work event on October the 22nd, and you can now register to reserve your seat and get a special early bird pricing. Thank you so much everyone. Have a great rest of your day. Thank you. Thank you. Great to see you again. Great to see you. Bye. Bye-bye.