 Hello everyone and welcome to today's conversation with Professor Henry Minnsburg and Ricardo Vargas. Professor Minnsburg is a Cleeg-Gorn Professor of Management Studies at McGill University in Montreal, an officer of the Order of Canada. He is the author of 20 books and two Harvard Business Review prize-winning articles and the recipient of 21 honorary degrees. Ricardo Vargas is the Executive Director of Brightline, a PMI initiative who has been responsible for more than 80 major transformation projects in several countries covering an investment portfolio of over 20 billion USD. And thank you for joining and now I will invite our panelists to speak. Hello everyone good morning good afternoon and good evening and today is an absolutely special day for me. The first time that I met in person Professor Minnsburg was last year at our conference strategy at work and you know you know when that time that dreams come true because professor his books were on my nightstand during all my master degrees so you know he was a true inspiration for me and I feel really honored that he accepted our invitation today to share some of the thoughts on his research and his work. Professor Minnsburg thank you very much for being with us today okay. Pleasure. Look I have a first question because when we read you have very strong opinions about what is happening today with coronavirus and I want to start by asking you what are the positive trends that you have seen during this corona times and what brings you hope? Okay let me just say Ricardo for starting that you bring me hope and Brightline brings me hope. You're such a delight to work with so much fun so and so it's a pleasure to be working together again. You know I think people are some people at least more people are opening up to the idea that something is wrong and I don't mean the pandemic itself I mean our governance our economies our way of doing things things have gotten completely out of control out of hand and the the encouraging sign for me is that this is waking people up people are recognizing it and realizing that we've got to do things differently and for my concern particularly our world is so out of balance you know there are three sectors in society public private and what I call plural and we need to balance those sectors to function effectively there things have been out of balance and in fact we'll get into I guess but the countries that are doing well in the pandemic are the ones that are balanced and the countries that are doing horribly I'm talking about developed countries three in particular in Brazil Britain and the UK and the US that are really badly out of balance. Yeah I know that that that's perfect and and this probably is related to the concept of community and community leaders and you have a lot of work on that how we have seen these communities emerge? Well you know if you go back community has always been a major factor you know economists keep telling us how how greedy we are and how selfish we are but we're as much communal as we are selfish you know I to an economist who says you know there's no such a thing as benevolence I say what kind of mother did you have? So you know we're two-sided and community has always been a key factor in our lives but and if you read the talk film on democracy in America when it began writing when it began a lot of what he wrote was in effect about community so it's a key factor but we've been driving the forces of community out. Community is you know in the pandemic it seems to me the countries that are doing well governments protect us businesses supply us communities engage us and the countries that are doing well on the gas are acting in a protective capacity the businesses are acting in a supply capacity with ventilators and gloves and all kinds of other things and communities are the heart and soul of where we function and this has become this kind of webinar has become a kind of community in effect you know we're you and I are talking but we're two people just looking at each other very closely and other people can see us right close. Yeah no that's perfect you said one thing we were talking a couple of days ago and and I was discussing with you about leadership and you said something for me that was I would say very powerful you said that you are not very big on leadership you said that we are too individualistic in a world obsessed with individualism so yeah what is your take on that because we're you know people are very much self-centric yeah but you know what's interesting is that a lot of of what's touted as leadership is not the self-centered part it's not about the people aren't cheering about executive bonuses and all that they're cheering about the leaders are going to save us just bring in the right leader and everything will be fine but that is still hugely individualistic we are looking for big daddy we're looking we're big mommy we're looking for the single person who will save us instead of recognizing the communal aspects of it I'm not saying leadership is unimportant in in with Bolsonaro and Brazil and Trump in the US and Johnson in the UK we're finding that leadership is hugely important as a factor for destroying their societies that certainly works you can destroy a society through leadership can you save a society or build a society through leadership sure that's what's happening in Denmark and Germany and New Zealand but those leaders are engaging leaders they build on community ship you can't separate leadership from community ship these are not ego trips in New Zealand or in Germany with Merkel and people like that these are not ego trips these are people who are really truly seriously dedicated to community I call it community ship to go along with leadership yeah that's fantastic and we are seeing a lot of changes this webinar is an example this is exploding so what should be part of this post COVID way of working so how do you see the way of working in the future you know we're putting together a little blog piece I don't know well what we'll do with it called zooming ahead question mark not so fast because you read about a lot of companies that are saying oh this is great and people are working at home and they don't have to commute and they're so effective and you know we don't have to watch over them the time and and and you know we can communicate you know you and I could be joined by people in Asia and South America in real time and it's wonderful and you know what it's true it's true but there are drawbacks and the companies that are saying throw it all away work at home you know you don't have to come to the office anymore are going to find out that like every other technology it's two-sided there's pros and there's cons and and some of the cons you can brainstorm here we can't we can't sit and and have a group going through a very complicated problem solving exercise we can communicate we can share we can do this with thousands of people that's the plus side but the whole set of negative sides associated with this technology like like any other technology and and you know the look at this intimacy you and I are having this conversation and we're as close as we can be but but to do that with 12 or 14 people would be much more difficult than to get 12 or 14 people into a room and walk around and add papers and and you know just have all kinds of other forms of communication that are not that are not available here this looks incredibly casual and incredibly informal but don't be fooled it's all programmed it's all scheduled we started at 10 o'clock eastern time at least eastern time we started 10 o'clock on the dot and we will end around 11 o'clock we don't bump into each other in the halls we don't have casual unexpected conversations we don't meet at the coffee machine and say hey i have an idea it's all scheduled it's all programmed so it's wonderful but be careful yeah no that's and and do you think these changes we are seeing today will be temporary or they will last forever well how do you see that i hope the answer is both i hope will as with any other technology i hope will use positive and recognize the negative so so look this kind of podcast i mean this is amazing i am sitting in my house in the country near montreal and and i had a commute of about 10 steps from the dining room where i had breakfast to this screen and it's amazingly convenient there's less travel it's more effective you can see me real close up if i'm in a hall you know i could be you could be a hundred or more meters away from me or 50 meters away from me and i'm looking at everybody as a big mass whereas here i'm focusing on you so so uh it's it's it's it's a terrific way of doing things i don't want to get in an airplane and fly to lisbon uh when we could be doing this i i want to fly to lisbon and eat your rice you must come here must come here yeah i love food and i promise that i will do a duck rice for him but this one we don't have technology yet for for me to do it here and you eat in in your place so you must come here to see uh but professor i have a famous it's a famous portuguese dish that i had in brazil ever let ricardo forget it once he told me knows how to make it which one the feijoada the no no not the feijoada the rice stuck oh the rice okay but look a professor i had it in brazil the first time yeah i have i have one one question what we are seeing today is not only this change on people working from home but several business we're massively disrupted i'm talking about retail so some business they just you know hit the wall with cove so what do you think and what would be your advice i would say to these companies that are facing their business model does not work properly in in this kind of environment you cannot make them online you cannot put people working at home i'm talking like restaurants like tourism and this kind of industry what would be your advice to these organizations that are facing these massive challenges on the way forward you know in this regard i think there's three kinds of businesses in a way there are the businesses that are able to take huge advantage of this uh and and i clearly amazon and zoom and those kind we have a little company called coaching ourselves dot com which is just suited perfectly to this so there there are businesses that really can take can benefit hugely there have been a businesses that get really badly screwed by this because they they find it very difficult to adapt the interesting businesses are the ones that look like they're getting screwed but they're clever enough to find another way through so i'm not in the restaurant business but you know if you get clever about takeout or whatever it is you know you could be expanding your business rather than contracting it so as usual you know it's about the entrepreneurs who are really clever uh and uh you know the ones that have easy to take advantage they just have to be clever in how they do things but the the entrepreneurs who are who are against the wall and come off the wall and say i'll figure out a way to make this even better um those are the ones you know a lot of management education is like that because you know it's always been in classroom and now all of a sudden we can get clever you know that that that that is perfect and but when we see this we see also a dramatic social impact right so we are seeing people suffering not only directly from from covid but those who lost their jobs you know with no security and there is a massive discussion today about the role of the government you know of up to what point the government should protect or not in different lines of of view so what do you what role do you see for social initiatives beyond business and governments to rebuild our society what would be the the main roles you see on that i before even before social initiatives for me were the single most important way to change society because you know businesses change societies in terms of the goods and they supply they also change societies by manipulating government some of them which is very happy but but but proper businesses change society by offering new goods and services governments change societies i think by listening to social initiatives so what we mean by social initiatives are many activities that just grow up almost spontaneously that become very effective ways of changing a society they could be big mass protest marches like the me too marches or black lives matter that are changing society and those are totally plural sector what i call plural or civil society or third sector whatever you want to call it i call it plural sector these have huge effect social movements social initiatives are all you know brazil what i always loved about brazil i did a podcast to brazil a few days ago and they have a famous expression in brazil that brazil is the country of the future and always will be kind of cute and i said no brazil was the country of the present and will be again before bosson arrow brazil was the most interesting country in the world i think for change for real important social change and a huge amount of it came out of the plural sector you know so you have a workers a landless workers movement that see farmland that's not being worked and they just go in and farm it in other countries they'd be in jail the favelas interestingly are a way of taking not that was meant to be but the way of taking people out of the market out of the market for housing which which causes the market not to go up the way it's done in cities like tirano and vancouver where foreigners come in bid the prices up and drive people out of their own cities because they can afford to live in their own cities the vellas do the opposite they take huge numbers of people out of the housing market by physically going somewhere else that's a social initiative the vellas have kinds of other issues but so so so brazil and lots of countries are full of amazing social initiatives just creative activities that change all kinds of things and you know whether it's people starting to bike more actively in contrast to commuting you could go on and on and on this is the way we're going to change and and and the the pandemic is is not introducing that but it might be accelerating it i certainly hope so yeah a lot of a lot of reading that i had recently was talking about COVID not as something just to change but to accelerate things that were already happening but making it shorter and making it happen faster you know all this online commerce and and several things and i want to to ask because your whole life was in in research and universities and recently the the economist published an article a powerful article about what is happening with higher education with this you know this COVID not having international students people not traveling so what is your view about the future of learning you know how do we create the future thinking in the world that with more restrictions so several universities are facing a lot of challenges on that what's your opinion on this yeah let me let me say something first about acceleration because acceleration happens both ways we've had an acceleration i don't know if you could say during the pandemic but certainly up to it we've had an acceleration of the worst possible forms of leading in country after country after country it's just shocking it's you're seeing it now in china with regard to hong kong not that there's anything new we've been seeing it in venezuela for a long time we've been seeing it in in in nicaragua for quite a number of years and and by the way ergolin and turkey and it's not a question of left or right some of them are on the left like venezuela some of them are on the right like hungry johnson in the uk absolutely irresponsible trump off the scale completely so we've been having an acceleration of horrible horrible governance but but to get back to higher education you know for years and years we've been running programs one is called the impm international master's program for managers another dot dot org another is called imhl dot org international masters for health leadership that have always been built on social learning we don't lecture them very much they sit at round tables about 30 40 50 people in the class they sit at round tables and they spend half their time learning from each other there there are people with significant experience we don't let people in that class typically less than about 40 35 40 years of age the average age about 45 something like that and they learn from each other this is social learning that's not so hard it's hard to carry lecture lecturing in onto the web um you can do it but it's kind of boring but you can carry social learning onto the web we've been doing that we're doing it in our programs we're doing it in coaching ourselves calm where people can can get together in groups small virtual groups we're talking three four five six people seven people get together in small virtual groups listen to some kind of general presentation and then share their experience and their knowledge and learn from each other um my daughter and I she's completing a phd in social work we're doing an article together on two views of the university one we call the the sort of top down ivory tower view and the other we call the reaching out the sort of the looking down ivory tower view and the reaching out kind of octopus view that the top down view or the looking down view is we're sort of on top at a distance looking at the world and trying to describe it through questionnaire and direct forms of data gathering which is what bad chief executives do they sit on the top and they pretend they're looking at things um and and and universities do that too lecturing is like that i'm lecturing everyone else is listening um whereas the reaching out model is to reach out to get on the ground on the instance and do your research by watching what's going on i started my career with my doctoral thesis by sitting in the office of chief executives and describing what they did in detail and that's what set my career going um so the reaching out model both research and teaching i think with these new technology it's in it's helping the reaching out model more than the looking down model that's fantastic i have two questions here that i want to to address with you that that came from the audience from alvaro and cabali about strategy so we need to take on how the business strategy practice will take shape and alvaro is asking what is the difference between strategy is strategic planning and strategic thinking and how are they related okay so so first of all let's take content from process so strategy is content strategy is what you do and and and and strategy making or strategy formation strategy formulation is the process so let's talk about the content first of all every dictionary and almost everybody i've ever met on strategy as from now into the future that's what it is in the dictionary strategy is from here to there what are you know and your questions are kind of some of your questions are you know what's the strategy going to be going into the future for universities or whatever that's the way we think of strategy and that's a planning process planning into the future um but you know i play a little game with people not a game but a little exercise with people and i say okay that's how you define how do you define strategy and plan mission vision etc and then i say okay now um if i said to you please describe the strategy that your company actually pursued over the last five years would you do that and of course they would do that and i'd say well wait a minute that violates the definition strategy is not what you've done is what you're going to do yet everybody uses the word the other way so i distinguish intended strategy the usual definition from realized strategy the actual strategy pursued okay and then and and then i say okay now comes the key question did this strategy that your company or organization pursue actually was it the same as you intended to pursue in other words did you realize your intentions and you know what very few people say yes very consistently uh um some say yeah more or less not very many a few more say or maybe sometimes the same say you know the strategy we pursued was completely different and most people say well it was a mixture and i'm saying oh good because that means that we've got two sides to the strategy coin we've got a deliberate strategy and we've got an emergent strategy deliberate strategy is what you intend that's formulation implementation an emergent strategy is formation as you make decisions and do things you form into a pattern that becomes a strategy you converge you go up market product after product after product you go to asia one country after the other maybe you didn't intend it maybe maybe you got into papanugini by mistake and that works so you went into uh so you went into the philippines and then you went into indonesia a pattern forms so to come to the second part of the question there's strategic thinking that's deliberate that's traditional there's strategic planning that's the same thing really but formalized and there's strategic learning which was not part of the question um and to me creative strategies are learned they're not planned they're not thought through initially they're learned um and and to take ikea that you know how did ikea get into this really clever strategy of selling furniture that's unassembled very clever strategy change the furniture business read their own website a worker tried to get a table in his car and it didn't fit so he took the legs off and then came the critical strategic moment and that was hey wait a minute if we have to take the legs off so do our customers that probably happened 50 times before but one person at that point said wait a minute and and the second part of that was the organization was robust enough that that little act somehow got to the people who could change the company okay so that little insight changed the company and the furniture business it's it was monumental for that business learning pure learning yeah no that that's perfect so what i can see is that the emerging the concept of emerging strategy is pretty much dominating the current business scenario we are facing because even today we we cannot make any predictions right we really don't know what will happen in the next in the next two months for example when i went home to the for the lockdown in march i truly i thought that i would stay two weeks you know and at the end we stayed almost a hundred days i'm just using this as an example so imagine how business was affected so if you cannot learn from that you you just don't move right yeah it's a it's a perfect stuff yeah they'll see and i live in montreal we have spent one night in montreal in the last five months we were lucky enough to see it coming and we moved up here and we took what we really needed including the book i'm working on thank goodness i did that and we have spent every single night for five months and all day for five months up here we went to town once we went for the day but we had to stay overnight because of something so we spent one night in montreal you can't plan if you can't predict and nobody can really predict you can't predict discontinuities nobody predicted the virus quite the way it happened they predicted there might be one but if you can't plan if you can't predict and so you know thomas watson supposedly said in 1948 there'll be a world market for five computers and he didn't predict it and yet and yet how did he do so well with it because he took advantage of it before anybody else he saw it early but he didn't see it at the beginning he didn't predict it so so real visionary geniuses maybe the people not who predict but who pick up the trends very early pick up the actual trends very early they're the ones yeah and that there are several questions now so i will move to tracy so she can take some questions from the audience so we can address them okay tracy back to you thank you rickardo our first question any advice on how to keep a large business aligned during times of great change well how do you keep large businesses aligned how do you keep large businesses aligned not during periods of great change it's it's um i guess what the what the question means is is is it more difficult to keep them aligned during this kind of change um you know it's an interesting question because it implies that you need to keep them aligned let's start with that maybe you don't need them aligned you know maybe times of great change are when you have to stop keeping them aligned and let a thousand flowers bloom to quote maltsate to let all kinds of people come up with new ways of doing things and seeing things because that could be the creative time so i'm not sure you want to keep them aligned but of course a business has its strategies and if your strategy is working and you have to be very careful that in times of great change you may think it's working and it's not so you may really need to change it um but otherwise i i come back to community ship as a as a um uh to take precedent over leadership the ship is for community ship and if you want to keep it aligned it's not about the big boss who's issuing orders it's about recognizing that people are living communities and and function effectively in communities and if they're working at home even more so because you can't control them quite as well as you can they're sitting in the office with you thank you professor minnsford just a reminder we're going into our question period right now so if you do have any questions you can still submit them through the questions portion of your control panel our next question about the 10 schools of thought model do you think that there is a better one to be followed or it depends on the organization the segment or the culture and should what should guide the former strategy in an organization okay so i have to explain what the 10 schools of thought are because not everybody knows uh with joe and pal and bruce allstrat we did a book called strategy safari uh in which we described 10 different schools of thought about strategy i don't have them all in my head um but the first three are the deliberate kind of schools the one we call the design school which was the traditional view from ken andrews and so on of SWAT models and all that strengths and weaknesses and opportunities and threats and opportunities and threats model um a planning school you know people like uh like um george steiner and so on igor anzoff and uh and a positioning school michael porter these are all deliberate so those are three all together there's a learning school there's a cultural school um there's a transformation school um i'm forgetting some of them but anyway so so these are all different perspectives from the literature on on how you create strategy um i as i said it depends what stage you're at if you're in times of great changes i just imply the learning school might be very much important if you've got a very clear solid successful strategy the way ikea has had in selling unassembled furniture um then the planning school is fine you're not going to change the strategy or come up planning doesn't come up with new strategies it comes up with extrapolating the strategies you've got perfectly fine for ikea you know somebody once told me i used to shop a lot of ikea certain amount and they were always out of stock they were always out of stock i couldn't believe it now finally i said to somebody not okay what's going on she they said the founder hates planning now he's a good entrepreneur he's planning he doesn't want that interference with his own entrepreneurship so so um so that's why they were out of stock um but once they were established they couldn't afford that they have to be in stock if they want to do well um because people know what they want you know the whole you know amazon has quite an interesting effective strategy and a lot of it is based on delivery and stock and it's it's all about logistics we know what the strategy is when they may be they may be diversifying into other strategies but the the retailing strategy is quite clear quite above board and it's a question of execution thank you professor minnsburg and just a reminder if anyone has any questions just type them into our questions box our next question professor minnsburg in 1990 you presented a presented a decision model based on the degree of complexity and the rate of change when both are high you recommended a radical decision model are we in this context today and how would you describe this radical model in your current context well it depends what you're doing you know um let's take myself as an example um we're comfortable and settled here we don't have any complex decision-making except me trying i've done a piece on on the coronavirus and a whole different way of perceiving it and dealing with it and it's so different that nobody wants to publish it so i'm trying to cope with that as a decision process um because i think it could have huge impact and i can't get it published um but but um uh otherwise um you know we're settled so depends who you are and what you're doing and so on but but um i described decision-making in terms of art craft science the the the science of decision-making i call doing first sorry i call thinking first you think in order to do and that's the way we're taught to make decisions you know analyze the problem uh you know diagnose it find alternatives evaluate the alternatives select one that's how we are taught to make decisions i call that thinking first um but there's two other ways to make decisions one is seeing first you you you decide when you see let me compare it with the most important decision most of us make which is finding a mate okay if you try thinking first to choose a mate you make a list of all the characteristics you're looking for you find all the possible options you evaluate each person if you're a male you have evaluated female against all these criteria you add it all up you choose the lucky woman and then you announce your choice by this time she's married with three kids that's not how we make that decision uh except maybe an indian family arranged marriages seeing first is how we make that decision my father met my mother in new york and that day called his mother and said i met the woman i'm going to marry so there wasn't a lot of analysis in that decision um seeing first we we interviewed someone for a job and in two seconds we know that's the person okay so a lot of effective decision and some ineffective decision making to is made by seeing first and then there's doing first doing first is what we have to do when we're in crisis when we don't know what to do doing first means do something try something you know in the case of a mate it's kind of find someone live with them see if you're compatible you know in the case of uh of business decisions um you don't know how to diversify so buy some company that's related it won't work out but you'll learn from doing that what might work out so that's totally a merchant strategy you try it you do it enough to do in order to think rather than think in order to do in times of crisis doing first is much better seeing first could be as well thinking first is good in times of stability thank you professor minceburg and just a reminder if you have any questions type them in the questions box we're going to try and get to as many as possible our next question agile agile suggest reacting what's next in business models that makes them ultimately constantly optimizing their business in whatever situation they are in well i'm not sure i understand that agile meaning agile the movement i guess you don't know what the person's asking but um say to get a read again this is a trick yeah agile suggest reacting so what's next in business models that makes them ultimately constantly optimizing their business in whatever their situation is and let's see if richard if you're there if you wanted us to clarify that yeah let me just step in professor as far as i understood is that we are talking about the agile movement so the agile movement says that we should be ready to react and adapt so i believe that the person is asking about what is next so what would be the you know the next emerging trend that you can see i would say after this or combine it with yes reaction so yeah so i've spoken to agile groups a number of times ready to react or flexible agile the word and the word means to be flexible right agile so so um what's next okay a very smart dane once said i never predict especially the future um and and he was a very clever guy because we can't we can't predict discontinuities and if i could predict what's coming next i would do it if i you know if i could predict that x y z is the is the great new way to solve business problems then i'd write an article about it and do it so uh the fact is that what's coming next will be a total surprise um or or more likely it'll be a repeat of something we've already done a million times with a new name that's probably more likely um but but normally uh something if something interesting comes along who could have predicted and nobody could predict these are idiosyncratic they come from individuals who have an idea like deming or peter drucker or frederick taylor in a hundred years ago or whoever i mean you can't you can't predict those things so you never know what's coming next and it's a bit like a question i sometimes get asked what's hot and and if if something's hot it's probably going to get cold quite quickly because it's probably being overdone and and done thoughtlessly the interesting thing about the latest technique is that the people who apply it cleverly with thought the way the japanese applied i think deming's ideas if i remember correctly um if they apply it cleverly they do really well with it if they applied mechanistically uh the way reengineering absolutely destroyed uh this idea what reengineering was an interesting idea but it came to mean in many cases nothing more than firing a lot of workers um thoughtless application the real reengineering which nobody could have predicted in a way real reengineering where you think through a process from beginning to end the way the way uh the way uh steve jobs did with the telephone i mean look what steve jobs did with the telephone the most amazing piece of technology in history i think because every other technology did one thing you know the printing press gave us books and cars gave us transportation television gave us image and radio gave us voice steve jobs gave us everything he thought it almost does the wash amazing piece of technology in our pockets thank you professor minnsburg and rickardo we do have more questions coming in our next question um dni or dei have become quite topical recently what is your view on the equity part of the equation what implications does this have for strategy going forward well i show my because you have to tell me what those are do you know rickardo i don't know those uh initials dni or dei and carlos if you're there can you just pop that into the questions box and you know what i'm going to move on and carlos if you can just respond and then we'll come back to that question there our next one oh is that diversity and inclusion what's that diversity and inclusion have become quite topical recently what is your view on the equity part of the equation what implications does this have for strategy going forward uh i'm going to have to infer what this means but if we're talking with diversity and inclusion like black lives matter and and things like that i guess to have more and more diversity and more and more inclusion i'm not sure i can let me make this answer this is a pitch from my own country i think canada and the us have diverged remarkably in the last 20 30 40 years and gone in completely different directions it's really interesting because we share a we look the same we drive the same cars we watch the same kind of television we really look like we're the same and we're very quite different in this regard the us was a melting pot and it became so much of a melting pot that it's hard not to be you know if you don't watch um the super bowl uh kind of what's wrong with you in the united states you know whereas the gray cup in canada sort of our equivalent if you don't watch the gray cup nobody cares that much a few friends care but the us became a melting pot and it kind of looks too much the same and it's hard to be diverse that's why we have these movements and the police coming down on blacks and so on canada has become a kind of a woven fabric with amazingly diverse people keep their roots you know they're whether they're come out of the indian from india community or portuguese or jewish or whatever there's so many different aboriginal and so on people keep their roots and yet blend beautifully like a like a colored fabric fabric and so so there's um uh i'm just diverse and includes so there there is a kind of diversity and yet there's an inclusion works very well so i think that's um and does that work for equity yeah i think in canada it works for equity um in the sense that we're quite you know where every society has its inequities um but i think we're doing quite well here thank you professor minnsberg our next question what happened to the strategic cycles did they actually shrink or did they or did just the emergency strategy become more significant than the planned strategy um i think you learn typically learn through emergent strategy in other words creating the strategy is the learning process like i described in ikea you try things try something new it works you keep trying you know how long it took ikea to come to develop that strategy once they got the initial idea 15 years i mean just think of those little things that you have to put in the wood to tighten the screw i haven't seen it described but there must have been months of work just in that little dumb thing that enables people to screw things into wood so so it took an awful long time so we we start by learning um but once we've learned it once ikea had its strategy then it became deliberate um and then the idea was to pursue it through planning not strategic planning strategic planning is an oxymoron this is unconcerned you don't plan strategy you learn strategy you plan the consequences of the strategy you learned ikea learned what its strategy is and then it planned the consequences of that by building stores and and products and so on and the change becomes new products and new things to offer and you're tweaking and you're adjusting the formula constantly and interestingly ikea's some of its uh intermediate diversification you know ikea started with tables and chairs and god knows what else then it went into kitchens you know we have a kitchen up here that's an ikea kitchen so you don't buy one part you buy like 50 or 100 parts and then you assemble it same philosophy then i was told i don't know whatever happened to this that ikea in rough was selling prefabricated houses well that's really interesting because it's the same strategy can't bring it home in your car but same strategy so they were constantly adapting what they did this is the danger i think of of porter's view of strategy porter's view of strategy is so analytical and so planning oriented that it precludes that kind of creative element and it's much more about adapting strategies you've got you don't get a creative news strategy by reading michael porter i don't think thank you professor minceberg our next question do you see companies retreating to domestic markets in line with their political trends in a few big countries or are they doubling down on multinational business models i'm not the one to answer that i guess an economist might do better to answer that because i haven't studied the question of studying it i would assume you're going to see both i doubt if amazon is is retreating i think amazon's probably doubling down or coupling down or a hundred fold down so zoom certainly isn't retreating to a local market so so i think it depends on what the company is is and what business they're in and so on and so forth in some businesses the vaccines are are going to turn out to be interesting because do you let the pharmaceutical companies get away with what they've been getting away with for so long in other words should vaccines be marked up by factors of hundreds you know that if they develop a vaccine leave out the development costs from and if they develop a vaccine that costs say five dollars should they get away with charging five hundred dollars for it so they'll skim off the market i don't think people will tolerate that for a minute um they're you know they're they're gonna have to recoup their development costs uh in the mass market which is what which is what you know steve jobs did with music and and and phone and movies you know we watch movies for five dollars you know what sometimes it's kind of like i don't feel like going on netflix to see if it's available free for five dollars i'll just watch it on apple i've already found it so so he came in with a very different strategy just come in cheap and capture the market um the pharmaceutical companies haven't been that smart or frankly that honest that they get away with that pricing is criminal it's manslaughter manslaughter that people are dying and i hope nobody will die for an overpriced vaccine yes priced it so they make proper profit no question but this obscene pricing absolutely unacceptable we'll find out what happens with the vaccines um but that might drive people domestically because each country is crying the canadian government just lined up with Pfizer god knows what they're paying them but lined up with Pfizer that if they come up with the vaccine so much of it comes to canada well you know what brazil did with the hiv aids medications is they said the hell with these controls the hell with the controls are demanding that our local pharmaceutical companies replicate those those combination drugs uh we're not going to let our people die while you're charging obscene amounts they were charging like in the in the in the if i remember correctly in the thousands for things that should have been things that should have been charged in the hundreds thank you professor minceberg our next question what is the difference between being strategic and having a strategy interesting question um to me being strategic means being clever um you know you're strategic you can be strategic about anything you know we we have an article called five piece for strategy plan position pattern etc and one of the definitions is ploy uh the word ploy is you as a strategy you have a ploy for for outracing you know getting past the neighbor's dog who's coming to try and bite you so you're strategic you'll hop over the fence and that's strategic to have a strategy means you know where you're going you know what you want to do or you know what where you have been going and you know uh kind of in which direction you've been headed and maybe want to keep going that doesn't that having a strategy doesn't necessarily mean you're strategic in the sense that you know i might have a strategy that's exactly the same as your strategy there's nothing creative about it so i'm not being strategic but i have a strategy you know my strategy is to drink wine for dinner well well i don't know that's pretty boring but anyway um i don't drink wine much for dinner but anyway um that's that's that's could be a strategy but it's not strategic uh professor i have one one we are coming to an end but i have i want my my last question to use that let's suppose you have now uh the ears of the executives globally okay and the and the government leaders what would be uh your advice to them during this time you know not only to build better companies but also to build a better society so what would be uh the key takeaway for all of us to take home from your experience uh in moving forward well you know for some of them i would say get the heck out of office which is just what happened in lebanon if you if the leaders of lebanon came to me a week ago and said what should we do i guess i'd have to get the hell out of there um same thing with with the boss bosson arrow same thing with venezuela same thing with nicaragua same thing with hungry same thing with poland same thing with britain same thing with the united states um there are so many people who are just so awful and should not be in those positions but for people who are decent um my advice comes back to community ship and and you know what was amazing merkel will go down in history as absolutely an amazing leader you know why there was no ego there she was thoughtful she thought things through she she did what she thought was right sometimes she was wrong everybody's wrong sometimes but but often she did what was right i don't mean i don't mean i mean correct proper i don't mean just just effective and and um and and and and that's because there was no ego there so what we need are people in high offices good luck but what we needed people with high offices who don't have big egos eight people who are modest that's why women some men too i don't think biden has a big ego but but but often women not all thatcher was a woman too but but some but but women often don't necessarily have those egos possibly the way the prime minister of new zeal has or or or or merkel in in germany um it's not about you it's about serving so what do i tell the poor people in lebanon who are looking for leadership and want to get rid of the politicians somebody with some kind of decency has to step for decency and and and guts has to step forward like a nelson mandela why do we get so few nelson delas you know why yeah professor uh you know it's it's so inspiring for me you know i was listening carefully every single word and it's it's amazing and thank you very much for your time to be with us and this kind of discussion is what we really want to make happen you know i think we need to have this discussions and this is the topic of the event we are doing in october 22nd strategy at work you were with us last year so this year we are talking again about that trying to build the state so for those who are listening and want to know more you can go to events dot bright line dot org and take a look of what we are planning this year uh professor thank you very much so i hope when this comes out we'll be together for our rice duck okay rickardo let me make a little pitch to um please go to minnsburg.org um and you can see rebalancing society and all the things we're doing there you can see my blog and join that declaration of our we did a declaration of our interdependence it's all on minnsburg.org on the home page yeah that that's great so look thank you very much take a look on events dot bright line dot org thank you professor one more time it's always wonderful to be with you and to all in the alternates thank you very much have a wonderful day take care thank you rickardo bye