 Hi there. Good evening, good morning, good afternoon, wherever you are. Thank you very much for joining us. And welcome to season two of Remus and Bureaucons, which as you know is a conversation between some of the most fascinated people that I know of. And today we have one such person and that person is Greg Satell. Many of you may be familiar with his work if you've been reading his post on innovation. After all, he's one of the top writers on innovation and Greg is the one to have the show. And of course I must say that I've always enjoyed what you write and so many other places on innovation. So what is this obsession that you have about innovation for you? What brought you into this space? Necessity. I spent most of my adult life running media companies in Eastern Europe. And I was always, I always felt this urgent need to innovate. But I wasn't quite sure how to go about it. So I started looking for how do successful innovators innovate. And what I found was that everybody seemed to do it a different way. You'd find someone who was super successful like you'd go and you'd look at Steve Jobs and you'd see, oh, he really, you know, he really loves this idea of design thinking, you know, and then you see that ideal had built this amazing design practice on design thinking and Stanford had built a school around this idea. And you say, wow, that's really interesting. And you look at it and says, well, well, you should focus on the end user. And that's, and then you get to understand their needs and then you rapidly prototype and iterate towards a radically better solution is that sounds great. That must be what you do. And then you go and you read Clayton Christensen and the innovators dilemma and disruptive innovation. And he says that that's how you go out of business, because you pay too much attention to your customers when the basis of competition changes. So he says, Oh, well, that doesn't sound good. I mean, how can both those things be right. And, and then you have open innovation and lean startup and, and it's, you know, and it's just all very confusing. So I kind of set out to, to figure that out and to straighten things out. And that's, that's what led to my first book mapping innovation. And, and, you know, I have seen that a lot of times when people have a bright idea, the problem is not with the bright idea, the problem is that, you know, you inevitably encounter a lot of resistance, because, you know, there is a certain way of by definition, innovation means that there is a status quo, you disrupt the status quo, change it in some way. And that's inconvenient to all the incumbents in my book, I talk about the fact that incumbents are the first ones who kind of resist change. What does one do about this? It's funny. There's a famous book by Thomas Coon, where he coined the term paradigm shift called the, the structure scientific revolutions. And he quoted, I think it was Max Planck saying that a new idea doesn't take hold because anybody's convinced of it. But basically the old guard dies out and the new generation comes up and, and don't need to be convinced. You know, I think that that the, I think you put your finger on a really, really profound problem and something that we work actively with organizations on, because the traditional approach to change management is this sort of, you know, it's almost, it works off this assumption that when people understand change, they'll embrace it. So, so what you really need to do is communicate it more effectively and then everybody will embrace it and you'll all hold hands and sing together and be happy. When actually that almost never happens if if an idea is important, and it has potential to impact people, there's going to be some people who are going to hate it, and they're going to work to undermine it in ways that are dishonest and underhanded and deceptive. So I think the first step is to treat that as a primary design constraint, knowing, you know, knowing that that that there are going to be people who are going to work to undermine it. You know, you need to anticipate that so so that's the first thing is accept that as a reality. You can't say it's, you know, well it's really unfair or, well maybe if we explained it to them in a different way or maybe we if we talk to them. And it doesn't work if somebody really hates an idea they hate an idea there and the chances of them going along with it or you know adopting it or is is so low and you're going to waste so much energy trying to convince them of something they don't want to be convinced of that you're just going to get bogged down and spin your wheels and you're much better off identifying people who are already enthusiastic about the change and empowering them to be successful so that they can bring in others who bring in others still that's how you gain momentum, not by trying to convince people, but by empowering people to succeed with that idea. And if you can't do that then maybe you need to rethink whether it's a good idea in the first place. So, you know, Greg, we've got a couple of people who joined us and you know, thank you very much for joining. We've got actually a question from a partner who's sort of really saying that why is it that, you know, the VCs and everybody else are tech obsessed? Is everything supposed to be only from tech? You know, that's the question that she's asked. So, there's a question from Aparna. So thanks Aparna. I'm going to let Greg respond to that and I'll of course I have a point of view and my answer is that I think all industries today are tech industries one way or the other and you know, so that's one of the reasons why when people are saying this morning I was talking to somebody from Israel and the tech, you know, who was part of the tech startup scene and they were saying that there is, I've heard of fidd tech, educational tech, health tech, everything. By the first time today I heard of diamond tech, you know, that is sort of investing in that which I found really fascinating. So what's your view, Greg? Yeah, first of all, I think that you need to define tech. I think all too often when we say technology these days we mean digital technology, which is a fairly mature technology. And increasingly when we talk about tech technology, we're talking about biotech, you're talking about space tech, you're talking about material science, advanced manufacturing technologies. So I think in that way, the portfolio has sort of increased and spread out clean tech is another hot area. But when you say VC, you're talking about high risk money, you're talking about high risk investors. So they're really looking to make maybe one investment in 10 to be super, super successful because they expect most of their investments to fail. And that's why the ones that succeed really need to be home runs. And it's really hard to hit those types of home runs with more conventional technology. With software and consumer gadgets in particular, there can exist something called increasing returns to capital, which is almost like economic like perpetual motion machine. There was a back in the 90s, they started noticing that that some of these internet companies could sort of defy gravity in in that they just seem to be able to make so much money so quickly, and investors were throwing money at them so fast that they had to come up with a new economic theory. And basically they came up with this idea of increasing returns where if you have a combination of high upfront costs, very, very low or negligible marginal costs, and the potential for network effects and basically winner takes all markets, you can have this situation of increasing returns. And that's what sort of drove Silicon Valley valuations for a long time. Unfortunately, more recently, some investors have been applying those where they don't belong, which is why we get things like we work and. But there is, I will say that that we that we Silicon Valley does seem to be in a very, very difficult period. You know, it seems like the, we have an excess of capital globally, and it seems to have found a home in in Silicon Valley and I'm not sure that that's helpful. Sometimes Silicon Valley, and increasingly there's data suggesting that Silicon Valley is becoming some sort of doomsday machine. When you when you look at something like we work, which didn't have any special business model but because they were able to get so much money. They were basically able to undercut the entire market and drove lots of people with with reasonable business models out of business. And then of course they collapsed and the whole thing caused a lot of economic damage so you have to be careful about that. So Greg, I'm going to, you know, take your this statement and sort of take the previous statement and merge it together and sort of I have a question then. Does it mean that you know the successful organizations, you know, whether it's a startup which grows or, you know, even a large organization. Have they fundamentally when people talk about product market fit, are they also saying this is the path of police resistance which is that, you know, there is going to be no one who will oppose that idea. You know, you've written a lot about how organizations deal with, you know, resistance to change. So which means I have a brilliant product, but the only way it will succeed is if I can find a product where there will be no resistance to adoption. Is that what it is? I think it's more about, so there's a story about this that I like quite a bit. We have a, we have a program of commercialization grants in America that has not been very successful. So, so every, every, and I forget the name of this, these, these grants, it'll come to me in a second, but every government department that that give scientific grants, so like the NSF, the National Science Foundation, the NIH, DARPA, the agricultural department, these all give grants to scientists, and this was a system we developed in World War Two and then, and then was sort of laid out for the private sector in a wonderful document called Science, the emerging, emerging from frontier. And we, so we've, in addition to these scientific grants, they, they're paired with commercialization grants where these scientists can get small grants to take their discoveries and make businesses out of them. And, and they weren't particularly successful for a long, long time, until a guy named Steve Blank came along with this program called iCOR, where he basically offered to these, along with the National Science Foundation, his entrepreneurial course that he, he, at the time he was giving it Cal Berkeley and Stanford to these scientists, and he would ask them. And at the beginning, he would ask them all the same thing, which was how many customers have you talked to, and all of them who, who, who worked on their presentations for weeks. They all told him, oh, I haven't talked to customers, I've been developing this science. And he said, you don't know what the hell you're talking about. Get out of the building and start talking to customers. And every single one of them over years, and I talked to a bunch of them, they all had the wrong application. They all had made some breakthrough, but had the wrong application for a million reasons that they would have never known that. But once they talked to customers, and these were like 15 minute interviews, they found very quickly that they had the wrong application, which sort of sent them sprinting to go find the right application. So I don't think it's path of resistance. I think it's just understanding that you have to build, to build for the world, you have to understand it. There's a very famous essay by Martin Heidegger called Building Dwelling Thinking that speaks to this. But I think we get so focused on what we're doing, we don't understand enough about who we're doing it for. And I think that's sort of the key to product market fit. So then my question would be that when people have a product or an idea for a product, they kind of roughly know what they made a prototype. What is the question they should be asking the potential user to establish product market fit? How do you do that? What would you think of asking? They're on fire use case. What is that? I think if you go back to the Kotler marketing books, they'll tell you that you should always look for the largest addressable market. And that's typically how people do business plans for new products. They say, okay, well, the market is a billion dollars. If we can get 10% of that, we have a hundred million dollar business. And we think our margins can be 40%. So you should pay us, you should give us a valuation of $400 million. That's what we're talking about. But in actuality, if you really have something new and different, a large addressable market is pretty much the worst thing. Last thing you should be looking for, right? Because a large addressable market tends almost by definition is one that's well served, right? I mean, that's why it's a large addressable market. What you really need is to find a hair on fire use case. Somebody who has a problem that they need solved so badly, they almost literally have their hair on fire. So either that they've already have budget to solve this problem, but can't find a place to sell it to spend that budget. Or they've kind of scotch taped together some solution that doesn't really work. My favorite sort of comparison is to look at electric cars. There was a guy named Shai Agassi in Israel who created this company called Better World. And he was going to build an electric car for the masses. And he got a lot of people really, really interested in it. He raised over a billion dollars and he flopped, right? So many things had to go right to make a car for the masses. And once he fell behind and anybody who's ever run a business knows, once you get behind your business plan, you're in big trouble. And then you look at what Elon Musk did. He built a very, very expensive car for Silicon Valley, rich people in Silicon Valley. They weren't depending on these to drive their kids to soccer practice or to make it to work. These were cars that they got to speed around in on the weekends. One of the advantages of an electric car is that it accelerates much faster and it's sort of eco-cool. So it wasn't a very practical car, but he was able to sell it and he was able to get customers. And those customers were enthusiastic enough that they helped him sort of iron out the kinks. So those are the customers you're looking for. To get a business, you first need to get a customer and find somebody who actually has this problem that you can solve. And if you have a very new, very different solution, you need to find somebody who needs this problem solved really, really badly. Because if they have a huge desire to solve that problem, they're going to overlook the inevitable glitches that come up. And they're going to work with you to help improve it because that's what they need. And then you can build the business from there. And that's what I always look for is, and I've looked at this and studied this for many, many years. And it's a consistent pattern. When you have something new and different, don't go to compete in a large addressable market. Find that smaller market that really needs it so, so badly or wants it so, so badly that they're going to be willing to overlook that. You're a small company and there's glitches in your product and it doesn't work as well as you'd want it to. And then you can move up from there. So, you know, last week I was talking to Saul Kaplan and he said something similar you kind of built. Yeah, I know I just thought that because my question to him was, you call your company business innovation factory and yet you say that, you know, the moment you scale up something innovation stops. And then these are of course had a similar thing that you first, you know, don't worry about how many billions of people are going to use it. Can you make a small market, get to use it? And so, you know, if you have that, then you build from there. I mean, that was the essence of what he said. Yeah, I don't always agree with Saul on that kind of stuff. I mean, we tend to romanticize startups, but most of them fail. And, you know, if you look at big company innovation, you know, what, like if you look in technology, right? I mean, when's the last startup that has really done something super interesting in digital technology? But if you look at what's going on with, you know, who's done all the big innovations over the last 10 years in digital technology? Who's been driving artificial intelligence, quantum and then the post digital technologies like quantum and Noramorfic and I mean, big companies can afford to innovate slow. And they can, you know, if you look at IBM, for instance, which isn't the best run company, but they're still in business after over 100 years. Because every time their business collapses, which seems to be once every 20 years or so, they pull something out of their research division. Well, we've been working on this for 25 years. And something like quantum computing, they've been working on it for since at least 1993. So that's almost 30 years. And, you know, and that's why they're still in business and still relevant when almost all of their competitors are long gone. So is that what you and is that what you call slow innovation that it's brewing over a span of time and then you bring it out to the market when there's a market ready for it? Is that slow innovation? What is your definition? I think it's about because Google does something similar. I think you need to have a portfolio, right? And one of the things I noticed about companies that can innovate consistently over time is that they're always looking for new problems to solve. They have different ways of solving problems. And, you know, if you look at, let's say Apple, Amazon, IBM, Google, they all work in completely different ways. They all innovate in completely different ways. You know, Apple, for instance, Tim Cook once said, Oh, well, you know, one thing you can never do is like have an innovation division, you know, or vice president of innovation. Once you do that, you might as well shut the doors. Well, Google does exactly that, right? And actually, Amazon does too. They have an innovation unit. So, you know, what works for Apple, you know, might not work for for Amazon or Google. So I think you need to be very careful about that about saying this is the one way, you know, this is the one true path to innovation. Where what's really important is, are you constantly looking for new problems to solve? And that's quite difficult to do over time, you know, over decades. But if you look at Steve Jobs, his real talent, like he quite famously, he never invested in market research. But he always was looking for products that sucked. You know, he why did he why did he make the iPod? Well, because he thought music players sucked. That was the problem. And he wanted a thousand songs in his pocket. So that was, you know, that was a technical specification. You know, and then of course, phones suck. So which is why he built the iPhone. So if you can go and find a real problem or to use Steve Jobs term, if you can find something that sucks, well, then that's an area right for innovation. So every pain point is, you know, an opportunity for innovation in some sense, which is why they say it. And that's one of the things we find in our transformation work. And I'd be interested to hear your experiences as a chief learning officer at that we pro for so many years. One of the things we often find with when people come to us with a transformation initiative. It's funny because we see this. We see this this pattern continuously that somebody in the C sweep comes up with a an idea for a change initiative. And then they they find some high potential employee like a bright eyed boy or girl to to run this transformation initiative. And they're really enthusiastic and they're told they have the full backing of this board. They have a budget and they're supposed to charge boldly forward because we really need this to happen. And then after about six months, they start figuring out that they've been quietly undermined. The whole initiative has gone nowhere. And the the the executive sponsorship starts to dissipate. Maybe then maybe that they weren't such a bright boy or bright girl and what they thought was going to be their ticket, you know, to sending their career, you know, into the stratosphere. Now it looks like it's going to send it off the rails. And that's usually when they come to us, which we wish they had come would come earlier when they're not in such trouble, but we are. It is quite rewarding we're able to help them but but very, very often part of the problem is they've defined the solution but they haven't defined the problem. So they haven't defined the pain point. So if it's a digital, if it's a digital transformation, for instance, or an agile transformation or whatever it is. Or if it's a diversity initiative that they've defined the solution they've mandated the solution, but they haven't really identified what the problem is, and they haven't really identified who really needs that problem solved. So they're trying to wheel it out to the entire enterprise, where what they really need to do is make that problem make that solution work in one place, one place first, you know, make it. So you need to find somebody who really wants to solve this problem. And then you can empower them we, we, we, we have a concept we call co-optability, where instead of mandating that people change. Giving them resources that they can take ownership of to do things that they want to do. So find somebody who's excited about this technology, find somebody who believes that diversity and inclusion leads to better performance and better innovation. And empower them to succeed. And then build up from there. And then later on, you can start mandating. Once you've proven that this works and has some success. But don't go trying to sell an, you know, an unsuccessful and an idea that doesn't have a track record to people who are skeptical of it. Because you're just asking too much. Go with an idea to people who are excited about it, who want to make it work and show that you can make it work with them first, before you start pushing people into it. So Greg, you know, that's really fantastic, because what I want to do is, you know, respond to some of the questions that have come up here. And, you know, just for the purpose of resetting the room, you know, I'm talking to Greg Satel, who's a very, very favorite columnist and author of mine. And I love all the stuff that he's done. And, and I'm going to sort of talk to him about, you know, what is it that people get wrong about transformation? And why is there so much of resistance to change, even though we know that it's a good idea and it should probably be done. And every society, I mean, every now and then you can pick up ideas which are, you know, in that particular sphere. And if you read, you know, which, which brings me to this whole question, I've read a lot of your stuff on your website, which is called Digital Tonto, T-O-N-T-O. I'm going to put that for people to sort of look at. What is the meaning of Digital Tonto? What is that? So that's an old story. There's an old joke about, I spent most of my career, I spent roughly half my adult life in the, in post-communist markets in Eastern Europe. And he was always an outsider and always a foreigner. And there's this famous joke about the Lone Ranger in Tonto, which are two characters in sort of American mythology. And Lone Ranger was a cowboy and Tonto was an Indian, obviously not an Indian Indian, but a Native American. And Lone Ranger says, Tonto, Tonto, we're surrounded by Indians. What do we do? And Tonto says, what mean we white men? Whenever, whenever, and that's what it was like living in Eastern Europe all those years, whenever trouble came, whenever things were good, everybody'd say, oh, Greg, you're, you know, you're, you're, you're Polish or you're, you're Ukrainian now, you're like a Native. Until the, you know, until we had one of the inevitable crises that, that, that seemed to pop up in Eastern Europe. And then it was all what mean we white men. You, you are different. You're not. Then all of a sudden I wasn't, I wasn't, I wasn't one of them anymore. When trouble came, I was on my own. So does it mean that, you know, today, if you look at a lot of the business leaders, many of them are schooled in technology, should they have been schooled in psychology or social sciences instead? Yeah, I, you know, I'm biased because my degrees in, in philosophy, and I think it's, it's the most practical thing I could have studied. The reason, that's not the reason I studied it. I was actually a biology econ double major, but in college I was, I was really majoring in intercollegiate wrestling. And I was, had to train all the time. And I found that it was much easier just to write a paper than it was harder to fail. You hardly ever failed writing a paper, but you could easily fail taking a test. So that's why I switched to philosophy. But I found that, that the, the most important thing today is, is to, I think the most important skill is to think critically and, and, and to be able to communicate ideas. One of the interesting things about Amazon is they really invest a lot in writing as a skill. You cannot make a career at Amazon unless you learn how to write and communicate clearly and effectively. You can be the best engineer in the world. You're not going to, you're not going to make it an Amazon, you know, you could be the best marketer in the world, you're not going to make it an Amazon, unless you can communicate clearly, unless you can write good memos, you're just not going to make it. And I think there's a lot to that. I mean, they've been pretty successful. I mean, people make a lot about, oh, they've banned PowerPoint, they've, you know, they have these six page memos, and people try and copy them, but you can have all the six page memo and they have a reading period during their meetings and, I mean, you can copy all of that. But unless you have the writing culture and the communication culture that all that's meant to service, you're not going to be effective. So I think you make a very interesting point. I think I, I think undergrad, you should, you can always study, study what you want, right. I get a little bit frustrated when people say things like coding is the new literacy or something like that. Nobody needs to know how to code. If, if it's something you like, and something you're passionate about, you can definitely have a good career writing code or sitting in a biology lab or fixing cars and people make great money fixing cars and designing cars. I think in that case, you were, you really need to follow your passion in terms of what you want to study. But in, in terms of the skills that everybody needs to have, you need to be able to think critically and you need to be able to communicate ideas. And, and which is why you think that being just articulate that, you know, being very fluent in the language and, you know, because that was when I was growing up. So that was really one of the things that became important that, you know, you had to be able to communicate in a certain way, you know, your presentation slides must look a certain way and all of that. Now I think, and, and I, you know, to build on what you just talked about the Amazon culture that I would say I quite value that, that being able to put down things in writing in that six page document actually tells you that you're committing to what you have said, because you could have made a straight comment during the presentation, nobody's recording it. And so you can always say, but I said that, you know, it's not going to work, you know, and I remember saying that and most people would have forgotten. But when you put things down in writing, you're really committed to it. So I think that there is a value to that. But then when you say that, you know, this is the culture that you should have in order to build for, and they've been very comfortable adapting themselves. So when you put down things in writing, it's in some sense, you're getting rooted in an idea. At the same time, the company has been very fluid and adaptable. How do you reconcile these two polarities? I think everybody. Luke Gersener had this great comment where culture is what you reward and what you punish. And so I think it relates to values that Amazon values the customer and values collaboration. So part of a big, a big part of that, you know, if you look at the structure of those memos, there is a press release that you need to write. And then there's a series of FAQs. So you need to anticipate questions, anticipate problems people might have, and answer those questions. So it's very outwardly focused and the writing needs to be clear. People need to be able to understand this, what you're saying. It's one thing, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, he had this very influential essay about private language. And he said a private language doesn't exist. If you can't express something, you don't really know it. If you call something a beetle, and he used the analogy of the beetle in the box. If you say you have a beetle in the box, but nobody can see the beetle, they can't hear the beetle, they can't experience the beetle in any way. Right. And you don't know whether that beetle is an insect, or a German car, or a rock band, the beetle just becomes the name for the thing in the box, right. So, so, and I think we, especially, and when we discussed this before, in some professional situations, people get obsessed with jargon, and they're not able to express themselves without using jargon. And I really question whether even they really understand what they're talking about. If you really understand what you're talking about, you should be able to use it, you should be able to express it in a common language. And if you can't, you need to go back and question how well you know it. So I think that rather than the memo or the PowerPoint slides or however you want to do it, I found it a very useful exercise to always think about how I would express this to somebody else. And in that case, writing a blog I think is very therapeutic almost, because it forces you to be clear. And if you can't be clear, if you can't communicate clearly, you're probably not thinking clearly. So talk to me about your process of writing. I mean, how do you, you write a lot and, you know, you write for some of the top post magazines and journals and all of that. So clearly you're very good at it. And I want to learn from you about how do you go about, you know, you have an idea. And let's say your central thesis is that we aren't innovating anymore, or maybe we are continuing to innovate, whichever way you sort of have an idea. Talk to me about what happens once you have a broad idea. It's a fuzzy idea. You kind of think that, yeah, I want to write something about resistance to change. Maybe that's what you're going to write about. How do you then whittle it down to the final 500 words or whatever number that you are thinking of? What is that process? So I wouldn't call it having an idea. Usually I make a connection, like I'll be reading something or I'll be talking to someone like you and I'll make a connection between two things that weren't obvious to me before. And so the first step is I try and write an outline of three or four or five points and see if I can make something out of it. And if I can support it with three or four or five points, then I have something to work with. That's really the hardest part is getting the outlines. And then with the outlines, it goes pretty smoothly. Sometimes it goes faster, sometimes it goes slower, sometimes I have to go back and I realize that the way I was working on didn't quite make much sense. But I think it's just writing is rewriting and you're constantly trying to figure out how you can make it more clear. How can I make this more clear? Always clarity over creativity and then when in doubt, leave it out. I have all these little rules. If it sounds like writing, it's probably crap. And my favorite rule is dare to be crap, meaning I get down to write every day and sometimes it goes better, sometimes it goes worse. But you can always fix bad writing. What you can't fix is an empty page. So just get it down there, don't waste time, get it out and fix it later. Dare to be crap, that's my mantra for almost everything. So you first write it down and then you continuously refine it. I've got a few friends who compose music and it's similar to what you just said. So they all say that thinking of a tune is very easy. I mean, I can get a tune out in maybe 10 minutes. But to polish it and make it something into a best-selling tune or whatever, that sometimes could be that you're chiseling away. You're saying, okay, is that not really necessary? I would remove that. Then I say, oh, it's empty. Then I add it back. Then I say, no, maybe I change something else. So the term that one of the famous poets in India, Gulzar Sahib, he says that it's about nurturing the idea, nourishing the idea. He actually uses the term nourishing the idea and sort of till it begins to blossom and have an identity of itself. Yeah, and sometimes you have to put an idea down on paper to figure out that it doesn't make any sense. That's the easiest way. You get an idea and you think, and then you try and explain it to somebody else and it's much better to write it down. And then you can see whether it makes sense. And then sometimes you realize that I haven't quite thought this through. And sometimes I erase it and sometimes I leave it there and then see maybe if I can make one more connection. But you're always just kind of mucking about, I guess, and trying to see. One of my favorite sayings is all who wander aren't lost. Sometimes we're just wandering. And I think you need to wander a little bit to kind of find the path that you want to go on. And when you write a book, is that substantially a different process? Or it's similar that you have an idea that you kind of build on and you think of, how do you write? I mean, do you sort of have like the full thing in your head first? Or do you have the central idea? It's like a spine and then you build on it. Do you do the chapters first? Do you have a bunch of postage stuck on the wall and you're sort of working off? I've seen all kinds of models that writers. I'm very curious. I always ask that. I mean, for me, a book is a much bigger thing. So it requires a very, very different process. Let's do it over, you know, I can sit down and write a blog post or I've written HBR articles in the morning. Wow. You know, sometimes it can go quite quickly. And somebody told me once you have to let the muse know you're serious. So you sit down and you kind of work at it every day. And some days it's quite difficult and you don't get much done. And then sometimes it goes extraordinarily well, but you got to be there every day for that to happen. So my last book, let's start with my last book, which is the one I really always wanted to write Cascades. I spent 15 years on that book. Wow. Both books started with a problem I really wanted to solve. And, you know, to spend 15 years on a problem is, it's got to be a pretty interesting problem, right? But I was in the, I was running a major news organization in Kiev during the Orange Revolution. And I thought I thought it was just amazing how, well, first of all, there was this incredible feeling of confusion and nobody seemed to know what was going on or what would happen next. Not the, you know, not the journalists I'd see in the newsroom every day, not the other business leaders, not the political leaders. Nobody with any conventional form of power seemed to have any ability at all to shape events. So, and one thing I noticed was there was this incredible way in which people, thousands upon thousands of people who would ordinarily be doing very different things would stop what they were doing and then start doing the same thing all at once in nearly perfect unison. And I thought to myself, even then, well, I'd like to be able to do that, you know, I'd like to be able to bottle that force and put it to good use. You know, here I was running a big company with thousands upon thousands of potential customers. I wanted them to all unify on the one thing I was trying to sell them. And I, you know, and I have, and I'm sure you had the same experience as, you know, and as an HR executive and then as a chief learning officer where you have hundreds or in case of we pro hundreds of thousands of employees, bright ambitious people, all with their own ideas. But I wanted them to embrace the one I wanted to initiatives that I thought needed to be priorities. But I had no idea how to do that. But I was interested. I was how does that happen, right? How does this, how does all of a sudden, you know, Ukraine, which was a politically docile place. How did all of a sudden are 100,000, you know, hundreds of thousands of people in the streets, demanding a different society. How does it happen in very quick, you know, in a few months, like somebody flipped a switch somewhere, and the whole country seemed to have changed overnight. And then a couple of years later, I was in Silicon Valley and people were talking about social media was that was 2006. So it was all new that and we had a very big digital business. And so I said, I should really know about that. I should learn about it. So I started researching network theory and I found like an almost perfect mathematical explanation for almost everything that happened during the Orange Revolution. And I found that scientists had known for centuries about this mysterious force that I encountered on the streets of Kiev, and it was called a network cascade. And then because of some breakthroughs in network science in the late 90s, they found out exactly how these network test gates work. So that's what got me hooked. And then I started right researching and writing about movements. And I found out about one of these movements in Serbia, which there are these amazing group of kids and this one guy who was a key leader, then went on to train all these other movements, whether it was in Georgian Republic or Ukraine or Egypt or, and this guy named Sir Joppovovic, and now, and he became sort of this professional revolution. Well, I published something in Harvard Business Review, some years ago, and who tweets it but this guy Sir Joppopovic. So I, I reach out to him, I say, Hey, could I interviews. So he said, Yeah, sure. So we get on zoom. And I said, I got to tell you, I'm such a huge fan of yours. You know, it's like an honor to speak to you so we really because we've been reading your stuff for years. And so we hit it off, we became friends and I found out that Sir Jop had developed this repeatable model for overthrowing countries, or for running a social movement or whatever it is. And then I had this idea of what if you could adapt this framework for overthrowing countries and apply it to transforming organizations. And that's basically what the Cascades research was was trying looking to validate this idea that you could transform a organization, you could use these these sort of principles of social and political revolutions and apply it to an organization. And I found out that not only does it work. It seems to be the only thing that does work, because as you know, you know, three quarters of organizational transformations fail. And the ones that succeed. And what I found was, and the same thing with social and political revolutions, they all started off from very different places. You know, if you look at, let's say Gandhi, and Mandela and Martin Luther King, and Lech Wałęsa in Poland, these people had nothing to do with each other. I mean, very different personalities, very different philosophies, but they all ended up with the same principles that allowed them to succeed. And I found the same thing with organizational transformations. And I realized something else as well. When we look at organizational transformations, very often, almost always what we know about them happens when a business school professor or consultant. First of all, we only, we, we very rarely hear about failures, we, we, we generally hear only about successes. And then through these case studies where they go and they interview half a dozen people and then they try and tell people, you know, communicate what happened. But with social and political revolutions, you have, you have such amazing documentation. You know, something called something like the salt march, you have thousands upon thousands of contemporary accounts from every conceivable angle. And what we found is, when, when I went to, to go and, and interview people who were involved with major organizational transformations at places like IDM during the 90s, or more recently at Experian other, other places as well. When we asked them, did this happen? Did that happen? And they'd say, you know what it did. But we just thought that was something strange that only happened to us. So we found that the pattern, some of these patterns were so universal that even, even they didn't realize that it was part of the transformation. But it, it, it applied to them as well. So that was, that was really interesting. So that's, that's the subject of your book, Cascades, which I absolutely recommend. Guys, you must read it's a lovely book where he talks about, you know, what is a keystone change, et cetera, all of that. And very, very powerful writing, of course, like a lot of everything else that Greg writes, I'm a big fan of his writing. So, so you know, it's one of those things that I have no hesitation recommending. Okay, we are down to the last seven minutes of our conversation. And I'm going to switch gears and sort of move on to a couple of different things. And then towards the end, you can ask me two questions. I'm going to ask you a couple more. So do you want to start with your questions? Do you want me to start with my rapid fire questions? Which one would you rather? Yeah, I would, I've been wanting to ask you something for quite a long time. So when you're prioritizing learning for an organization, I mean, every organization needs to learn so much. How do you, on what basis do you make those decisions? I think, you know, you kind of look at three questions, which I think every chief learning officer would sort of need to address. One is to really understand which way the business is going to move in the next 12 to 18 months, because in technology, more than that is hard to predict. So you kind of have a view of that. But then you translate it into skills, which is where I think a number of people mess up, because, you know, if you, for example, you say your growth is going to come from mergers and acquisitions, they kind of translate and say, okay, the people who are doing it, what skills do they need? You know, what would finance need to do? What would HR need to do? So you kind of have a portfolio of that shift. Then you map it against what you already have, that you realize that you don't have anyone who's handled mergers and acquisitions, for example, then you have a gap to be met. Now, that's a build versus buy decision. When you go through that, then I think comes the real tough portion, which is to really understand what is the fastest way to get people to learn that. I mean, so, you know, you have a combination of educational experience and exposure. So education is what you can read up exposure is looking at alternative ways to do this and very often choosing what works best. And experiences when people try it out and say, okay, you know, I learned faster when I do this. That's really the way that in a nutshell, that's really what you what you are doing. So that's the thing. Yeah, so did that answer your question? Yeah, no, it's it's it's it's quite a good answer. And then how do you validate whether that learning has been effective? And, and could you tell me a actually quite like being able to ask the questions. It's easier than giving the answers. This is your last chance. Okay, so have you ever had a situation where you put together a learning program, and you realize that it wasn't quite working and people weren't acquiring the skills. And then we're able to sort of turn that situation around. Yes, you know, more often than not, I found that when you do something which is canned, you know, so this is a program and then, you know, so you decide the program without really understanding any of those questions that I talked about. And very often when you look at that's why I'm very deeply skeptical of people when they are sort of, you know, going in for these camp programs. You know, the cookie cutter thing you do it, because learning is so individual driven, you know, so the way that you enjoy. It's like writing your writing style is very different from mine and the way that you write is different the way that you learn is different. So until and unless you are able to tap into that you're inevitably going to make errors. So I think that's really the piece that I think goes wrong. So I've always tried to sort of work with the people who are designed, you know, who are going to be part of it. And so when you design it with the people, you are more likely to get a larger portion of it right. And then of course, you know, learning is a fairly complex process. So one of the major challenges in an organizational context is that there is always this thing that you did it and so what's the measure, you know, what is the ROI. And very often that kind of a question actually is good for things which are hard skills, you know, do you know how to do quadratic equations? No. Now once you've gone through the program, you can do that. That's easy to do. Has your leadership skill improved? Much harder. And it's something that gets done and you will see the results over a span of time, after a fair bit of time. And usually that's the place where learning and training are not really differentiated in organizations. But I have a question for you. We all know that, you know, upskilling is very important for organizations. You've written about overcoming resistance to change. Why do training programs get knocked off as soon as there's a problem? It's really like saying that since the Titanic is sinking, we are going to stop investing in swimming lessons. So why does that happen? Yeah, I think it comes down to values. And we have, and it's not just, it's not just training programs, right? But I mean, the famous case is Circuit City, where they had invested training. And that's what made them successful, that you would go there and you would have very knowledgeable people. Home Depot is another one where they actually brought in X contractors. And then somebody comes in, you know, quite clever and says, you know, these numbers would work a lot better if we're not investing in this. And there's going to be no immediate impact on our revenues, but we can cut costs very nicely. And I think that's just what happens when you have people not understanding the business. There's a great case study in Spain with Mercadona, which is a retailer there. And when the financial crisis came, they didn't fire anybody. They said, we need to cut costs. I think it was by 25%. I mean, that sounds high. I forget what the percentage was, but it was significant. And they said to their employees, you guys need to help us figure out how to cut costs. So the employees were highly motivated to figure out, oh, well, if we change the packaging like this, if we did that, if we did that, and they came up with, they sort of crowdsourced the cost cutting. And they were able to not only cut costs, but they cut these costs permanently, right? They could have thinned out the people in the stores and they could have made it work. But instead, they kept all the people in the stores. They had those people figure out how to cut costs. And not only did they cut costs, but they increased revenues because all of their competitors had cut their employees. They had laid people off. So people who went in their stores, they were understaffed. They couldn't get any help. And at Mercadona, they had fully staffed stores where people could get help. And they ended up increasing their market share. Again, I don't remember the percentage, but by an impressive amount. So I think you really need to understand how the business runs. And I think all too often, I know as a CEO myself, and I didn't run anything company, we had like 800 people in our company, so nothing the size of organizations that you were involved with. Anything close. But even in a company with 800 people, it's hard to stay connected. You know, you have what Barack Obama would call the fierce urgency of now. When you get in, I mean, I had to put out, in a place like Ukraine, I mean, where a crisis isn't an event, it's more like a way of life. I had serious fires to put out every single day, and a lot of people I had to keep happy. And it was an effort to, I would make sure I was in every department every single day. And it was tough. I mean, some days, you know, I was quite frustrated and bad mood, and I didn't feel like doing it. But to make that effort to stay connected to the business is very, very difficult. And I think that too many executives, they should teach that in business school, how easy it is to get detached. And how, and, you know, I will say this, and I think this is a great maybe thing to close on. I think when we're analyzing business, or any process, innovation or whatever, I think that it's so easy to imagine that people are stupid. You know, to say this company failed, they got disrupted, they were lazy, they were stupid, they had gotten fat. And when we find, if you look, you learn so much more, if instead of just dismissing people who got disrupted as stupid, silly people, you first assume that they're smart and hardworking and ambitious, and you ask what happened. You're much more likely to get the real story. B, you're going to learn a lot more. And C, you learn probably the greatest truth in business, and that is that everybody gets disrupted. Everybody's square peg business eventually meets its round the whole world. And when that happens all too often, we make the mistake of getting better and better at a bunch of things people care less and less about. So once, and it comes back to the conversation about transformation. Once you are able to internalize that maybe you're not so smart, and maybe others aren't so stupid, and maybe some people are going to hate your idea and want to kill it for whatever reason. That's when you can start to move forward and make things happen. Wow. I mean, terrific. Thank you, Greg. There was such a brilliant recap of everything that we talked about. I just want to, you know, say thank you to all the people who have joined us today. And, you know, it's great. Thanks a lot for being here. And, you know, Greg, what can I say? I just really so enjoyed the conversation. And I just, you know, wish you the very best. And me as well. This has been a lot of fun. So thank you so much for having the Abhijit. Thanks a lot. Stay connected and we'll see you guys soon. See you next week for yet another conversation with another fascinating guest. Thanks a lot. Goodbye.