 Hello everyone. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are joining us from. And today I'm totally delighted to introduce you to a dear friend of mine who is also a member of Thinkers 50. You know what that means. This is so amazing. The man himself, Bill Fisher, he's an innovation professor. He teaches at MIT and IMD Lausanne here, where he stopped for several years. He's also taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and had an interesting stint at Shanghai, published extensively. I am going to sort of really talk to him all about his career today, which is interesting to me for multiple reasons. One is, you know, somebody who's sort of started off as an engineer. Am I right on that, Bill? Is that correct? Yes. And how did this shift happen? Because, you know, that's a great example of switching the ecosystem. You started off studying engineering, then decided to go into really a different ecosystem altogether, which was management. What happened? How was this? First of all, it's great to be with you. Obviously, it's always great to be with you. So thank you for inviting me. It wasn't a voluntary switch. I had finished a master's degree in engineering and was employed in Pittsburgh in the steel industry of all things. And when there was a steel industry enjoying it immensely, I was a development engineer and then I got called into the Army. It was during the Vietnam War. I was called into the Army. I spent two years in the Army Corps of Engineers, but I was always in the Washington D.C. area, so I had actually never left the domestic U.S. During that period of time, I was spent a great deal of time in highly bureaucratic organizations. You know, I sort of lived the pathos of being in those organizations. I felt it firsthand and decided that the one thing I didn't want to do was to spend the rest of my life in a large organization that was hierarchical, bureaucratic. And so I became interested in going back to school and trying to learn more about it. I wound up in a doctoral program in business administration, but I really was torn. I was trying to make a transition between engineering and what it meant in an organizational context. This is the social side of innovation. So I did my dissertation. I found an advisor who was an economist interested in the economics of innovation. I became fascinated about that. It gave me a view of how organizations affect innovation performance. And after that, I was really in an academic track rather than going back to engineering. I discovered that I had the right because of the veteran's privileges to go back to my original organization, but I found that I was two years behind my cohort group. I would probably never be able to catch up. And frankly, I didn't want to catch up. And so I decided I would remain in an academic position. The one thing that was quite interesting is during that period, I also was involved in some aerospace engineering, which really changed the focus of what I was doing. So I came out of the army experience with a broader view of engineering that I might have had had I not gone into it. And that served me well going into career 2.0. So I think if I had stayed in engineering, I liked it. It was fun. I was learning things. I would have been career 1.0. But being forced out of that position through no fault of my own, I wound up at least a career 2.0 position because I was straddling two engineering backgrounds. And that I'll be forever grateful for. A really good example of the fact that when we say a career is a journey through life, actually what you see happening is the things that are really happening in our lives, which is like in your case, you get drafted into the army. And that actually expands your view of your original skill, which is about engineering. But what it does is it puts you two steps behind two years behind the cohort that you started off with and which triggers another opportunity to start really thinking about what do I want to do next? And so you move into management and how did this fascination with the innovation come about? Why did you choose that? Well, let me just go back quickly before even that. I was of a generation that was born in New York, Brooklyn in the post-Second World War era. And so I lived in a apartment house in Brooklyn where everybody came from somewhere else. It was the quintessential immigrant experience. My parents were born in the US there, my grandparents were not, but everybody in our apartment house came from somewhere else and they had come to the US, come to New York to build a better life. It was a very exciting experience growing up because all of these people largely were technical. They were not university graduates. They were people who were practical. My parents never went to high school. The people around us probably shared similar modest educational experiences, but they loved what they did and they were good at it. And they also came from such diverse backgrounds that, you know, you were being placed into a learning experience that was continuous. You had to catch up quickly no matter what conversation you were in because the people that you were talking to were referring to, you know, reference points that were literally foreign, right? You know, my father was a technical wizard. He could build anything. And he would take me, and he worked in the Defense Department, he was a Defense Department Civilian, so he worked in the Navy Yacht and he would take me to the Navy Yacht every weekend. I guess it was, he gave my mother the weekend off and would take me. But I was on these big ships and I was flying in planes as a small, annoying passenger probably. But you know, I was exposed to a world of practical technology very, very early. I went to a technical high school. I went to a high school in New York called Brooklyn Tech which changed my life. It was one of three special schools at the time in New York and it was highly technical. It was the idea was to prepare you for an engineering background. I went to a technical university. I went to Clarkson College in upstate New York, Clarkson College of Technology. So right from the beginning I was being exposed to a lot of different views of innovation without actually knowing it. It was part of the environment around me, the ethos that I experienced growing up. And I think that really put me into a wonderful position to appreciate not only the hardware, but to appreciate the social context in which it was taking place. And the people who were doing it, not only the engineers, but the people who made it work. When you talk about innovation, our first thought today is to think about technology. So in some sense innovation equal to technology. Is that correct? No. When I say innovation, the audience hears technology, but it's really much more complicated than that. I mean there's a social side to innovation that's expressed in business model innovation, for example, or trying to understand the customer journey so that you can be closer to the customer and gain insights into what they want. But there's also people. People are the ones coming up with ideas. People in conversations are the ones moving ideas. People are the ones in the organization that build the teams that develop those ideas. People adopt the ideas or they don't. So I mean there's a whole social context around innovation. And so when I talk about innovation, I'm talking less about the hardware than I am about the software. I'm not talking about really software, but I'm talking about the people, the social side. Yes, very definitely. Absolutely. Which is interesting because I do some teaching at MIT. I'm on the exec ed faculty there. People come to a school like that because they're fascinated by devices and by thresholds to achieve greater human potential. But I'm really interested in the humans. I'm really interested in how we're going to make this work. What's going to be the social value of this and how are we going to move on to the next stage of whatever the development is. Yet when you think about your own career and if you think about it and all the different things that you've done, taught in multiple schools, what is tempted to say that yours was a career one dot all kind of a model, except for the fact that you also did move into the army, came back and changed that. But there was a bigger shift that I see in your career, which is the China connection. How did that happen? Talk to me about that decision making moment. What did you think about when you took up the opportunity to go and live in China? I'll know who you there. It all depends on how you head it up. So did you take that decision? Let's start with that. Okay. So I was assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. What is now the King and Flagler Business School. And I was teaching in the operations group. My technical background, that was the most appropriate place for me to be. And so what I was teaching was really production management, a lot of highly technical quantitative types of, but I'd always been interested in China, specifically as a phenomenon of our time, as a great civilization in the 70s going through some very striking upheavals. I was fascinated by what was happening. And one night out of the blue, we were late for a party. I was eager to go. The phone rang. My wife said to me, it's for you. It's somebody who wants to talk to you about China. And I said, you know, that was the furthest thing from my mind. And I had no China experience, right? Zero. But our kids, we had three little children at the time. They were rambunctious going, you know, wild. The Babel sitter was threatening to leave. And so it didn't look like we were going to leave for the party anywhere near. And so I got on the phone, the person introduced himself. And he said that the United States government was working with the Chinese government to create a learning center for Chinese managers and Chinese policymakers. The expectations were would be seeing a market economy or quasi market economy in the not too distant future. And would I be interested in being a part of that? And if I would be a part of it, they would need us for the next seven months, at least in China. So this is the decision making process. I turned to my wife. I said, how would you like to move to China? And she said, yes. I mean, it was literally as quick as that. And three weeks later, we were in Beijing, children at all. It was a very different Beijing then. And we ultimately wound up in Thalien, which was a city of four million people on the coast, beautiful place. But it was, you know, 1980. China was a fairly primitive economy at that point in time. The aspirations were to become a developed economy by the year 2000. But if you stood in the streets of any Chinese city at that point in time, the odds of them making it to being a developed economy by 2000, very low. Yet they didn't. How long have I been in China? Well, I've worked in China in one way or another every year between 1980 and 2019. Sometimes it was for a month or so or sometimes a couple of weeks. But other times it was for three or four or five months. And in the late 90s, I was the president of the China Europe International Business School, CEIBS. So that was for two years, still a little more than two years. It was a, first of all, it was a privilege to watch this extraordinary story of economic growth take place. So it also became a place that we had strong emotional attached good friends and wonderful experiences there. But it changed my life because all of a sudden it really did become career 2.0, right? On the one hand, I had a position, a tenured faculty position in North Carolina at the beginning and then later at IMD that involved teaching at first operations, but then really innovation. I really wanted to always teach innovation. But in the 70s in the United States, innovation was a luxury that usually one or two people taught at only the most wealthy schools. And so I was teaching operations, of course. But a little bit over the years, a little bit of innovation, one course a year perhaps, mostly in executive programs. And then all of a sudden I was also spending time in China. I was an associate professor. I wanted to be a full professor. And so what I realized, if I went to China for six months or seven months of the year and didn't do research and didn't publish, I would not be promoted. But I knew things about innovation in the West that I then began to interpret into a Chinese context. So I began to publish basically same topics, but using China as the focal point. Just take a couple of minutes and deconstruct your career journey so far, what I heard you say, that you started off when the opportunity came and as really is fascinating that you have three children crying, the baby sitter is threatening to leave and you get a call saying that you want to go to China. And at that point of time, your wife says, yes, I'm in Mexico. And then you take that blood, sort of put yourself out of a familiar ecosystem into another. And that in turn triggers opportunities. So one of my big takeaways as I wrote this book career three dot always, you know, being able to navigate different ecosystems, you know, you are continuously putting yourself from something which you are familiar with your comfortable with and you go out of your comfort zone, you know, we always say that the systems which are very structured and defined and rigid don't really offer opportunities for innovation. What's that your experience to I think that the situation in in the decade of the 80s was that China was fascinating and remote. And only a few people were going there on any regular basis. And I was going there all the time. I began to be invited to meetings about China, despite the fact that everybody in the room was a China expert but me, but I was there more often than they were. Alan Whiting, who was in a well known American historian invited me to come to the University of Michigan to give a talk about what I was doing in China. And I bought his book about Chinese involvement, the Korean War, because I wanted to know more about what he thought he inscribed the book to me. I would get all of these books autographed because I was an awe of these experts. And Alan wrote the newest China quote unquote expert in the room has been there more than the rest of the faculty added up right cumulatively. Wow. And so I had street creds. My credibility was being in China, but I needed to spend time with the China academic community to be able to interpret what I was seeing in a way that was teachable, right, in a way that was understandable. And so every room I was in, I was always the least informed person, whether if I was in the China room, I was there because I was, you know, an operations professor. If I was in the operations room, what was because I was doing the China stuff. So it was a fascinating period. I was always in the wrong place, but for the right reasons. Is that does that make sense? I mean, it does. And you actually talk about two skills that you have used to one I would say is the ability to teach yourself things. The second piece is being able to teach it subsequently you are doing that so online during the pandemic for sure, but even otherwise, you've also got a very strong online presence on Twitter. I see you on Forbes, you've published a column for years, which I've been a fan of and that you've got some amazing books, which you so the ability to document stuff also seems to be a very integral part of your journey. Talk to me how you bring that. You know, I think from the day I entered academic life, I realized that getting your ideas out, publishing them was the currency of the realm. That was the way you got your job, kept your job, advanced in your job. You know, I always wanted to be active in that way. I always wanted to have a voice in the conversation. What I discovered was that my voice often was a disparate voice. It was coming out of a different position. And that was because I was fortunate enough to be able to span these two worlds, the world of my conventional academic business school world and something more exotic, China. I think it always required me to think about what am I bringing to this conversation. I was always confident what I knew, even though what I knew was different than the people around me, but I wouldn't have been in the room had they not been interested in what I was doing. But it also gave me extraordinary access to people who were real experts in my chosen academic field or in China. I was able to span those communities on the basis of coming from somewhere else. Is that the reason why the popular wisdom is that innovation always happens at the fringes? You've written so much about innovation. What is your tea? Absolutely. Over and over and over again, chat GPT is probably the most current illustration of that, but innovation always starts on the edges of an accepted community. And it's largely I think because the people who are the incumbent market leaders, if you will, in the community, whether it's academic or commercial, they're focused on deepening the foundation of their expertise or expanding what they know best, which is usually making a product that's highly accepted in the marketplace. But change comes when the consumer of those ideas or products is looking for something different. And people who are defending a market leading position are unable to easily make that transition because it's not what they do. What they do tends to be similar to what they've done in the past, whereas what people on the edge are doing is quite different. I often talk to organizations and ask them, do they benchmark? And of course, they all benchmark. But benchmarking is looking usually at your peers doing the same thing you're doing at about the same time in very much the same way. And that almost guarantees you're looking in the wrong place. So I do think being on the edge, it's not a guaranteed advantage. Okay? So part of the dilemma of somebody on the edge is that gotta make being on the edge meaningful, relevant to the consumers of the product that's being produced, whether it's ideas or not. I think the large majority of students that I've seen that have gone on to really spectacularly successful careers have been on the edge, not in the middle. And what they've been able to do is figure out very early how to sell that position. So when they go into a job interview, nobody's looking for what they have to offer. Most job interviews were looking for what we already have. And so these people have the challenge of being able to articulate not only that they can do the job that's being sought after, but they bring something additional to that conversation. They're in a difficult position almost right from day one, but they're also in a position to change the nature of the conversation in the future. When you switched ecosystems, how do you take the experiences that you have on a cumulative basis? How do you leverage that to keep going higher and higher in terms of your own field? So in some sense, you build your own expertise. That is a very depth and breadth kind of thing. It changes as you age and as the communities around you become more sophisticated. So you know, at first I was a novelty, right? China background was a novelty in many of these conversations. You know, I always remember at some point in the 80s, a neighbor of mine, lived in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, very academic community. A neighbor of mine said, he said, I live in fear that I'm going to be the last person on the block to go to China, right? Everybody was going. And as everybody went, I needed to think about, am I in a position to be a China expert? I think the answer very clearly was no, I'm not. I was always interested in China. I wanted to maintain the opportunity to do work in China. So what I looked for were things that were similar between the two communities that were interesting. And the dilemma of large, mature bureaucratic organizations plagues both economies equally. So I began to focus on Chinese organizations that were trying to deep bureaucratize, trying to become more nimble. And there's quite a few, you know, and the one that I was closest to hire, I chose because when I was in Shanghai, one of the people on our staff at CEIBS identified hire as an organization that was doing really interesting things. This is 1997, doing really interesting things and arranged for me to go up and talk to them about what CEIBS was doing, which we thought we were doing interesting things. And that led to a personal friendship between myself and Mr. John Ray Metton, who was the, you know, essentially CEO and chairman of the CEO. Right. And so, and they were in the beginning of what turns out to be a 40 year and still continuing battle against bureaucracy. And that has been a source of continuing interest in the business communities that I talked to in the U.S. and in Europe. I've often said that everybody in my rooms at IMD, well, I taught at IMD for 30 years, everybody there came from a large bureaucratic organization and was frustrated by that. And so if I could talk to them about an organization that was succeeding in reducing bureaucracy. And by the way, it's not coming out of Silicon Valley. If you think about executive education, so much of executive education is taking people who are in mature market leading and incumbent market leading organizations and showing them videos of Silicon Valley and kids running around and, you know, with long hair and flip-flops. I could show them people making washing machines, real people making real things in organizations that looked very much like theirs, but we're doing things very differently. That has been a godsend for teaching executive education. Not only are they trying to do it, but they've succeeded to a larger extent. You've been in education for so many decades. And this is also a time when people say that education is going to undergo dramatic changes. What are you most optimistic about? And what are you worried about? So I do think there's big changes in the often, right? I think we'll see changes in our audience. And I think we'll see changes in the timing of education and the way content is delivered. It always goes back to content delivery. And I think what we'll see, there'll be more continuous, not continuing, but continuous education where there'll be the ability of people to learn in the moment as they confront challenges. And I don't know exactly the form that that will take, but IMD and MIT do a program on driving strategic innovation that we do twice a year, once at MIT, once at IMD. And we've done for now in our 21st year. It's the longest lived program in either school. I just received a WhatsApp message this morning from someone who was in a program earlier this year saying, I'm running into this challenge trying to take what we talked about in class and put it into action. And almost always the challenge is not so much with the content as it is with the organization that's receiving it, the structure, the formality, the bureaucracy, the hierarchy. He said, can we talk this week? Now we're going to talk by Zoom or by phone or by something like that. But I think given the advances with the technology, that conversation will become more frequent and it will become more continuous in the moment. And I don't know what that means, but I think at the moment we're still very episodic. We do things according to schedule. But I think what we have to do is to supply a reinforcement of what we're teaching in normal programs in the field on demand. And that's going to change the nature of the faculty and it's going to change the way the faculty spends their time. But it's also going to change the nature of how we design content. I think we'll always have classroom learning. I think we'll always have remote learning. And I think for good reason because I think it's an efficient way to deliver content, but it's abstract until it gets applied. I think what we'll be looking for is something that will shorten that response time between challenge, frustration, and getting involvement. And faculty involvement will lead to greater learning on and practicality on the faculty's part as well. So we'll have faculty who are up to date because they're spending time assisting people who are in the moment trying to deal with the application of these. Right now, there's a lot of educational technology, but most of it is apps on a smartphone and it's push. Like today we're going to push out a bunch of messages to remind people to think about this. That doesn't lead to continuous learning. Continuous learning is going to happen when the audience pulls. And so we're going to have less predictable, more spontaneous sorts of conversations about what's happening there. John Hegel, who for years was the co-director of the Deloitte's Center of the Edge, talks about scalable learning, you know, replacing scalable efficiencies as the key to organizational success. And I think that's true. I think that we have not seriously built organizations as learning platforms. And I think that scalable learning is one of the things that's required, but that's going to be learning on demand rather than learning on release. What do practitioners miss when they come in to teach? Yeah, it is easy to say that the business professors who are consulting with organizations also get to see to try out their ideas in the real world and they bring that into the classroom. What should the practitioners do to be better? So usually you invite somebody in the classroom because of a specific experience that they've had and you've learned of and they come in and they talk about it with great specificity. But that specificity is not innately useful to everybody in the room, or not as powerful as it could be. I think what they miss is the ability to generalize. So one of the great things about being a business school professor is that you hear lots of experiences. And out of those lots of experiences, you can begin to generalize so that everybody in the room sees the importance of what you're talking about and can think about how to apply it. There's a research component that is associated with the PhD that allows you to be a better critical thinker and more familiar with the body of existing knowledge in a field so that you can generalize with confidence that what you're talking about is really supportable over a broader range of experiences than just one or two. But I do think that there's more people who are lecturers, there's more people who are clinical professors. There's more of a willingness today, I believe, to bring in people with really valuable external experience and enrich the portfolio of learning opportunities that the student gets. And that goes back to content. What I think what we need to do is more of that because there's so many people out there who have real experiences to share. But I think we always need to put it into a format that is generalizable. And that's where I think the professional academic is better able to do. As I say that, what I keep thinking is that there's only 24 hours in a day and the criteria for career advancement for this journey and an academic journey is all about publication in A-journals, esoteric journals and the like. And it's very difficult for the same people to be able to do that sort of research and play an important role in the contextualization of the lessons to be learned. So somehow I think we need to rethink either the review process for faculty advancement or the criteria for membership or we need to be doing it in teams rather than individual. Those are big changes. You've spoken about work, workers, and workplace. I think what you see in education is changes in all three. So the way you're working determines that there are skills and the way that you are looking at the skills determines the marketplace where the skill is being bought and so on. So the work determines the worker and the work and worker together come into the marketplace. Right. Actually, what I think is going to happen is that the needs of the workplace are going to force changes. In the workers, we're already seeing that with more practical representation of the classroom. It's interesting. You talked about my previous book, Primas and Unicorns, where I wrote about this and which one do you like better, this one or the career three or dole? Like the career three, the 3.0 has really, I've been talking about it all weekend and I think my family is ready to buy it as well. But you know, it's likely because it speaks to all of us in terms of our own experiences and aspirations, but it also takes a familiar topic and addresses it in a very, what I think is a profoundly different way and offers choices. So I could be happy in a 1.0 career, but I need to do things differently in different ways and probably wind up in different workplaces as a result. Will you see that there is going to be a greater need for people to be multi-disciplinary from the point of view of innovation? If I were to take that as an expert in the field, what would you say? Yeah, without a doubt. I'm sure the question that I have is, so I think as we develop technologies and live in a world characterized by the Internet of Things and ubiquitous connectivity and things of this nature, that I think the consumer, the customer, the user, be they, be it B2C or B2C or whatever, they're going to rise to the occasion and demand more, demand more from the provider of the connectivity, if you will. But those organizations and those individuals don't have that capacity. At higher, once they went into smart kitchens, people wanted to know, what can I do with the things in my refrigerator? What meals could I cook? What wines could I pair? Is this really organic? Higher, they build refrigerators. They don't know. They've never written a recipe in their life. So they were, I don't use the word forced because I think they did it fast. I think they saw the merits in accessing knowledge and expertise domains that were not familiar. And that means building a different organization. So I think that what you have is a combination of i's and t's, but I think you will have people in career 1.0 building better heat pumps and better refrigerators for a long time. But you're also going to need on the surface of part of that organization, people in 3.0 who are t's who have a wide curiosity in the world around them, and will provoke the i's to work differently or work on different things, maybe in the same linear fashion, but work on different things. Yeah, you talk about the i, which is essentially somebody who is a specialist, like the letter i in the English language, the person has deep into one. Yeah, and hence you talked about career one. But you are also talking about, you know, the t letter t actually has that kind of a on top, you have the context, various context, various ecosystem, like in your case, you've worked in different geographies, that's a different ecosystem, you worked in military, you worked in management, you work as a consultant, these are different ecosystems. So that's your career 3.0 in some sense. And what you're saying is the ability to actually take the benefit of somebody who is able to bring the outside in, you know, who can stay on the fringes of the organization, bring the outside in and translate it into the core, be any of the organization, which is the old time of the people who built that, that's the bridge that needs to be built for organizations to stay effectively innovative. Yes, yes, absolutely. You use the term that I think is the biggest change in innovation since I've been involved right outside in. Well, when I started my career, everything was inside out. Here's what we want to do. Here's what the funnel looks like. Here's how our inventions are going to, our innovations are going to raise our return on investment. You know, all of that stuff was inside out and it raised the likelihood that we were going to get it wrong when we hit the marketplace. But what outside in, a philosophy of outside in, or our minds of outside in says that everything starts outside. The customer journey is outside. Everything is outside. We need to build organizations that are close enough to the customer and higher, they say zero distance so that we are intimate. We know what maybe even before the customer, what they want. If we're going to do that, the mix between activities that are I shaped and people who are T shaped is going to change. It may not change everywhere. And we may have places on the surface area of organization where we have more T people. And we may have deep places of engineering excellence and centers of excellence where there are I people. And that's fine because we need that mix. But I think the mix will change and we will build organizations that will put I's and T's closer together. Ideas change the world, but conversations move ideas. So you've got to get those conversations to move faster and quicker. And one way to do it is reduce physical space so that you change the workplace so that you have the same workers, but now they're closer together. So the conversations are faster. So I think all of those things call out for changes in the way in which we organize hierarchical bureaucratic organizations don't do this. You know, they don't do it. They slow ideas down and they abstract them from what the customer or user wants to what senior management's interpretation. We want something that's much more intimate and immediate. And that goes for education too. What does that everyday routine of a curious person look like? What do you read? How do you read it? How do you make time? You seem to be a person who does an incredibly diverse set of things, you know, and yet you manage to do it all. I mean, you're sort of traveling constantly, you're a different answer, really seriously, retarded environments, and you're publishing, and you're talking to people, how do you manage to do all this? Yes, I laughed while you said curiosity because my assistant at IMD said that I was fatally disorganized. I think that's the way she put it. I think there's a trade-off. So I am interested in a wide range of things, but I also know where I think I do. I think I know where my base is. Interruptions add the potential to change everything. So I am tolerant of a lot of interruptions in my life, and I'm about to start a sub-stack on interruptions about how this works. But I think I'm willing to put myself in positions where I'm likely to be distracted, hopefully not terminally, you know, not dysfunctionally distracted, but where new ideas pop up. But I'm always trying to relate those new ideas, those interruptions to my core story. Well, I think I once told you that, you know, I thought there were three or four things when I started my career that I had great, great faith in. One was S-curbs and how they work. Another was the funnel. We knew how ideas were moved to commercialization. It turns out that three of those four things turned out to be really irrelevant. So when I started using S-curbs as an engineer, it was all about functional performance. Will this device work better than that device? In the late 70s, early 80s, Clay Christensen told us that, hey, you know, those curves are also showing industry disruptions. This is an industry phenomenon, not necessarily just a technology phenomenon. The technologies were changing, but so were the technologists. I now think that those S-curbs are customer experience or user experience curves. But that story still develops some degree of evolution. It's still as surprises and ruptures in the trajectory of change. And you still have to figure out if I want to remain relevant as an individual or as an organization, how do I make that jump between one curve and another? The basic foundation is still there, but boy, the story has changed a lot. When I looked at organization size, effect, innovation output, and I spent a big part of my dissertation looking at that, 40 years ago, you would say, well, you want to be somewhere in the middle. You don't want to be too small because you don't have robust conversations. And you don't want to be too large where you have no control over what's going on, where the organization is anarchic. But today, you and I and Ross are talking, and we're sort of a small organization ourselves, and we, how would you measure the size of that? Is it three individuals? You know, the whole question of organizational size is less far less relevant than it used to be, but we still have to connect with different expertise domains, unfamiliar expertise domains more today than ever. So what I'm always trying to do is interpret and reinterpret what I'm seeing back to what I think is my core outlook on innovation, which tends to be very social. So much of this innovation depends on being social on introverts, then add to a disadvantage in this whole process, because, you know, they kind of tend to look within, then they are sort of expressing themselves, they express themselves more often in writing than in conversations. Does it reduce their ability to be innovative? No. Andy Boyn and I wrote a book called Virtuoso Teams, and we looked at organ teams that had changed their industry. And most of these were historical examples, because everybody that we interviewed in contemporary firms didn't want to talk about this because they thought it was too much of individuals rather than teams, and they wanted to foster an organizational culture of harmony. But what we found was that these teams were irreverent, that they didn't follow the predicted rules. They were often very young. They had conversations that were impolite to the point where we adopted the slogan, polite teams get polite results, right? And we were looking for organizations that got impolite results that disrupted an industry. And what we found was that the role of the leader was critically important, much, much more important than at the time the innovation literature was acknowledging. And that part of the leader was to make sure that every idea got captured, whether you were an introvert or an extrovert, you had to tone down the extroverts, and you had to somehow get the message from the introverts. One of the guys we looked at was a fellow named Sid Caesar. Sid Caesar was a genius comedian back in the days when comedy was live on television. So it was a whole different dynamic. He had a writer's team that he put together that had Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Carl Reiner, Neil Simon, the playwright, geniuses, right? But Neil Simon was highly introverted. So Sid Caesar said to Carl Reiner, you sit next to him. This meeting may be chaotic, but I want you to make sure that the voice of Neil Simon is heard, whether he says it or you say it, that's your job for this meeting. One of the things that we got great respect for was how these leaders choreograph meetings so that their team benefited from more ideas rather than fewer. In very primitive ways, no idea went unchallenged, no idea belonged to anyone. Mel Brooks said once that he would go home and watch the show on TV, the jokes would come out and he would be hysterical laughing and his wife would say, is that your joke, Mel? Is that your joke? And he would say honestly, by the time they got done, I didn't know whose joke it was, right? And for me, that's a wonderful illustration of how ideas, you know, you put them into a pot with a lot of different expertise and it comes out better. More minds are better than fewer. More different minds are better than more of the same. What is your view of your career as you look ahead? So it's really interesting. As I look ahead, I used to think I knew everything. I mean, I think I'm exaggerating, but you know, I was quite confident what I knew. Now I think I don't know very much, but I know I have a greater appreciation for how things change. And so I think that what I have to do is not be a know-it-all, but a learn-it-all. I think I need to learn more than ever before. I'm no longer full-time at, I'm a Meredith at IMD. I do a fair amount of teaching at MIT, but I don't have the normal day-to-day faculty life. I find this really interesting and not at all easy. I mean, you know, I can't go down the hall and talk to my buddies and bang ideas against them because they're not there, right? I feel like I'm on every Twitter substitute as well as Twitter that there is. I'm all with the same hashtag. I have a better appreciation for LinkedIn than I ever did as a community of people, not only seeking jobs but also sharing ideas. I'm trying to stay in touch with you, with other people. It's more difficult to do, but it's also, I think, many ways more rewarding because I don't have the other time structure that I have. I'm still interested in what I've been doing for a long time. I'm reluctant to give it up because I find that the organization of human talent is so fascinating. I think that it's our only hope going into the future where, you know, we need to do better than we've been doing in the past and I think that organizations and the way we organize talent is going to be the part of the secret to that. Well, thank you so very much. I mean, I'm so humbled by the fact that, you know, even someone with a Tinker 50 Hall of Fame next to his name still considers himself to be learning and looking at the future ahead as a place where, you know, you're still open to learning new ideas. That's something that truly describes what the future of careers is going to be like. It's going to belong to people who are curious, not just in terms of accomplishing stuff and then just, that's the end of it, but each accomplishment actually triggers greater curiosity in the future. You are a living example of that. Thank you so very, very much. And, you know, if people wanted to get in touch with you, I'd put a link to your LinkedIn profile and your Twitter handle, but I'm sure that as people reach out to you, they'll be the beneficiaries of your ideas. Thank you so much for coming and talking to me. Thank you.