 a panel discussions on why we should mind the gap and how we can connect ideas to results. And to moderate this panel, I'm happy to invite the stage, Deepa Prahalad, CEO of ANUVA and Outer. And joining Deepa on the stage, I want to invite Professor Rita McGrath from Columbia Business School, Professor Richard Daveney from the Tuk School of Business and Montaza Mulyahau, General Manager of Strategic Initiatives at Saudi Telecom Company. Hello everybody, it's a pleasure to be here today to discuss this very important topic of bridging the gap and minding the gap between strategy and implementation. Roger is always a hard act to follow. I think he gave us lots to think about in the way we view these issues. You know, it just seems based on the data that despite our best intentions and a lot of rituals around strategy creation and our understanding of its importance, many great strategies seem to still go the way of our New Year's resolutions. Don't really deliver the results we expect and the data from PMI seems to back up this point that up to half of projects don't get implemented on time, about 40% don't achieve the results they want. And there is a huge amount at stake for companies and for society in improving that scenario. And I'm really excited that we have such a fantastic panel here with us to discuss what we can do about it. What are the things that have worked? We have two very well-renowned Thinker's 50 Thought Leaders. We have Professor McGrath whose pathbreaking work in HBR Discovery Driven Innovation has influenced many different companies to think about strategy differently and she is also a professor at Columbia University and consistently ranked as one of the top 10 management thinkers by Thinker's 50. I also have my old professor from the Tuck School of Business, Professor Devaney who has explored many different ideas in his best-selling book, Hyper Competition. His latest is talking about the impact of pan-industrial society, what that looks like, what it actually is. He is a well-renowned expert and won the Strategy Award from Thinker's 50 last year as well. And I also think it's an important compliment that we have somebody who is very well-versed in the world of strategy practice. I have Montazar Mulaho who is head of strategy at Saudi Telecom Corporation, a very diversified company that serves the Middle East and Africa in telecom. So welcome all of you, wonderful to have you. And let me just start out by very briefly saying that we know that growth and prosperity really depends on having the right strategies and implementing them the right way. And I'm gonna ask you for a very quick answer, your high-level thoughts and then really delve into your specialties in a follow-up of if you could tell us in two to three minutes, what do you think are the real barriers to implementation in a lot of corporations? Rita, I'll start with you and maybe work back this way. Sure. So I think the first thing I see happening in a lot of companies is they pretend that there's certainty where there isn't. And we have this enormous desire to be right. And I mean, the amount of human breath that gets wasted on trying to prove that we're right about situations in which there are no data, the right answer doesn't exist yet, is just ridiculous. And it kind of echoes Roger's point about organization as machine. If the data don't exist, stop arguing about who's right and instead focus your energy on figuring out what the right answer is. So briefly that would be my take. Okay. My perspective is that we're on the verge of a significant change akin to what we saw from 1890 to 2000, excuse me, to 1920, let's say. And that additive and digital manufacturing is going to reform how we have to implement strategy, how organizations are structured and that we're too often stuck in old paradigms that make it impossible for us to think about the future. And we need to break that before we get anywhere. I want to start, I would like to hear from you. Yes, thank you. Well, I think the challenge is that we tend to face any kind of an issue of either design or execution by having two duffel bags. So analogy was important and I'm using that to express what do I mean, how you can tackle that. So one has processes in them, the other one has numbers. So whenever we're faced with a challenge, we used to either throw processes at them and think that they would be resolved or assign KPIs, which in my opinion don't work. So it's extremely important to think of how would we have another third duffel bag in order either to mix both or look at this rather than mechanically that from a people perspective. Thank you. And I really want to drill down because all of you really have approached this very critical issue from different angles. I think Rita, you've done a lot of work on looking at how the perspective with which we approach implementation can dramatically alter its results. And so I'd like to start by just asking you, what is the starting point and the importance of the starting point? What is the difference between really viewing strategy from an industry-focused perspective as opposed to an arena-focused perspective? Oh, thank you for raising that. So one of the dominant paradigms in strategy forever has been industry, like when I started in the field, all the cool kids were doing industry analysis and positioning in order of entry and that kind of thing. And what I think that has done is created enormous blind spots in how we think about strategy. So what I'm arguing is that we need to start thinking instead about, I call them arenas, which is a pot of resources that you're contesting. Various players who are part of that arena borrowing Clayton Christensen's term, jobs to be done, each of those participants to an arena are trying to achieve. And then the translation of your organization's capabilities into attributes that those players can perceive. And the thing is they only perceive the attributes, right? They don't perceive what it is your organization's doing to create those attributes. So let me give an example that might make it more concrete. So if you think about the market for teenage clothing, you think about what is the job that clothing does for teenagers? Well, among other things, it communicates status and what tribe they belong to and who they are and so forth. And yet if you think about other ways that those jobs can be done, right? Don't telephones and social media and pictures and selfies communicate those very same attributes. They do. They're actually competitors for clothing. And if you think about it even further, if I'm a teenager and I'm taking pictures of myself and I'm in a blue shirt on Monday and I'm in the same blue shirt on Wednesday and I'm in the same blue shirt on Friday, well, how lame is that, right? I mean, who wants to be looking the same all the time? So what you could begin to see is the substitution of traditional notions of quality and clothing. So the quality that my mom might look for in clothing, which is it's durable, it lasts, it does all these things. That's not what teenagers want. What they want is to look different all the time and hence we have the phenomena of fast fashion or disposable fashion. And the winners have been companies like Zara and Forever 21 here in the States, H&M, Ross Stores, TJ Maxx, who are the losers? The traditional high quality clothing people. And I think if you look at it through the lens of an arena, you would draw completely different conclusions than if you said, oh, well, we're all in the apparel industry together. It's a different market. Thank you. I think Montessar is a practitioner. You have a unique take because you've really spent 20 years on the front lines of implementing strategy in a very diversified business that has both a complex consumer and a business side in terms of services. And I encourage all of you to go look at the Saudi Telecom website. A lot of companies track their performance and their service quality, but they actually post their results online, which is unusual. So I really wanna hear from you of what are the people challenges? I know you've spoken about de-engineering the process of implementation. Maybe you could walk us through what that looks like and what that means. Thank you. So three years ago, the company was claiming that strategy execution is not doing well. So we are not achieving what we designed. And from my experience, there is never lack of design of strategy in any organization. Everybody wants to design strategy in an organization. But once you want to implement them or execute them, challenges arise. And so SDC went through everything, PMO, EPMO, transformation offices, project execution in the corporate. So at the end of the day, when two or three years ago, we were like thinking, so what are we doing wrong? And again, I think we were trying to tackle the strategy execution challenge by adding more processes. So the best consultants in the world were hired, right? To spend millions of dollars in trying to resolve this issue by adding processes. And what we found after applying some of these processes that we are neglecting the people side or the emotional capital of the organization. So SDC, like all of the telecoms in the world are facing a decline in their legacy services. So there is an emotional capital of fear in the organization. So people are fearful of losing their market share. So SDC today is 60% market share of Saudi Arabia telecom, business. And how would we maintain? So people are fearful. And the process does not address that at all. So just a small example. And it's not the big things. So you don't expect to hire shrinks across the organization to do that. It's actually paying attention to the details. And for example, we do a bi-weekly meeting with the business owners of the initiatives. And these bi-weekly meetings were just to follow up on the progress and to collect more data about how we are doing in terms of the targets. And it wasn't going well. We couldn't collect feedback. We couldn't get data on time. And it wasn't of quality for us to use and project. So there was a process. There were KPIs. But then we noticed that the way we conduct the meetings, we did not think of how would people perceive that. So what we usually do is go. We ask the business owner to come to our meeting room. Usually they come either one or two individuals and we're nine. So can you imagine nine people from the corporate sitting with a business owner from the business unit and starting hammering him or her with questions? So why is this green? Why is this red? Why aren't you providing data? So we were actually putting more on an emotional capital that is already there, of fear. So what we thought is, okay, so let's experiment. Let's instead of us asking them to come to our quarters, let's go and visit them. And not any more nine people, it should be two or three. And instead of us asking them questions about their progress, let them present their progress. And the result was phenomenal. So it wasn't a change of process. It wasn't changing the KPIs. It's actually just tackling and be aware of the emotional capital of the organization and dealing with that. You know, I think that's a very important point. The people element often gets neglected in some of these documents. And Professor Devaney, you actually have done a lot of different types of work. I mean, when I was a student with Hyper Competition, you talked about strategic capitalism and how this is really important for countries. And now you're one of the leading experts on this new set of tools. Technology has kind of a mixed perception as it is, but you're really saying that this new set of tools and digital and additive manufacturing is going to open a whole new world with tremendous implications for how organizations transform and implement strategy Can you help us understand what some of these changes look like? Sure. I think there's a couple of fundamental principles that are going to change. The first is an agreement with Rita. And what she calls arenas, I call pan-industrial marketplaces in my latest book. There'll be a kind of super convergence of things happening. And this is because additive manufacturing and digital manufacturing is going to allow companies to expand the scope of the firms and still get operational synergies by information sharing and their industrial platform and the knowledge of how to do additive manufacturing. So that's kind of the first principle and you have to really understand that. So an example of this is agricultural equipment. Companies are making harvesters and in it, it contains all kinds of different devices now. And those devices include things that measure the humidity in the air, the sunshine, the degree of aridness in the soil itself, chemical properties that require a fertilizer or other kinds of things, the bug count. And you can just imagine all the things that could be measured that would then be able to be used to get a better understanding of how to improve the farming and get the yields up. So we call this machine still a harvester when in fact it's more like a moon rover or a Mars rover. And so the functionality of it has changed so much that the industry definition now is constraining what we think of that machine to be. So that I think is gonna be a big mind shift for a lot of people. The second principle that I see here is that additive manufacturing is gonna fundamentally and digital manufacturing with industrial platforms is gonna fundamentally change the way we implement. So there's a lot of software out there today which allows us to run supply chains and do all sorts of things like that. And those things, and so a lot of implementation is gonna be around reprogramming the machines or around the machines learning how to do things better. And that's going to take over more and more of the human element of the organization. So implementation based on trying to retrain people and things like that may simply be way out of a paradigm of the past. I know what I'm saying is very controversial because what I'm talking about is the death of human-centric organizations. We are so biased about ourselves, we think we're the primary value adders all the way through the system. Whereas the machines are gonna start taking over more and more of that value adder. The third principle of implementation, let's say new product development is also gonna change significantly towards the machines. You think that humans can do the innovation to design new products. But there are now programs attached to 3D printing and larger additive manufacturing systems which eliminate a lot of what a design engineer would do. And so let me give you a couple of examples and then I'll turn it back to Deepa. There's a whole new set of software packages called generative design. And in generative design, the engineer puts in the original picture and CAD file of the product that they want or the part. The computer system then takes the principles of additive manufacturing and starts to use all kinds of new forms and structures that humans aren't used to doing. So things that used to have multiple pillars in it, now have these curving spiral supports in them and all kinds of structures that humans would not come up with. And they're often based on biological structures that evolved over many, many years. So it redesigns the parts. There's another software program which then looks at all the parts in the product that you're making and decides how can you 3D print combined parts. So you can reduce 300 parts down to 12 and eliminate assembly. So you don't have to retrain the workers because they'll get rid of them. Sorry to be so hard. So it looks like that's a lot of changes under foot and not always encouraging I guess on the human side because that's a hotly debated topic right now. And that's something that I want to really explicitly discuss and get all of your perspectives on. Because I think the idea of change is very exciting on the front end and people come on from these off sites really charged up and ready to go. And what sometimes we fail to fully appreciate is the amount of change that that requires on people across the organization not just on the front lines but really in terms of what the leadership capabilities need to look like, how we need to train and model and inspire behavior. And despite the rise of technology what you'd also hear at the same breadth from many corporate CEOs is how intense the war for talent has really become. And I think we have spent some time talking about what the deficiencies in the process are but I really wanna ask maybe I'll start with you Rita is really what do the winning companies that do? I'm assuming everyone makes some mistakes and has had some beliefs that turned out to not really pan out as planned but what do winning companies do and how do we actually prepare people to change direction and do so with confidence or at least be able to flag problems at the right time? Well I think our, and this relates to something Roger said earlier, I think our model of what leaders do is evolving pretty quickly. And it was funny I went back and researched this as part of my new book which is about strategic inflection points and how organizations can benefit from them. And the great thing about an inflection point is if you pick it up early it can take you to new heights and if you don't, well the opposite. And one of the things I would observe is that instead of sort of telling people what to do what leaders are increasingly learning is how to get the organization to generate options. So you can think of that as the result of project outcomes but generating lots and lots of options that then gets chosen by leadership in sort of a much more organic process. So rather than this idea of all the information aggregates up to the top so the only person that's got all the information is the leader and they make the decision that all goes down again. We're seeing a much more iterative kind of almost organic. So what I think leaders are doing today is they're setting a broad direction so we kind of have a sense of what the boundaries are what the constraints are. And then letting the organization experiment in order to find out what the correct path is through those boundaries. I'm seeing a lot more of that. What about the role of actual consumers as a source of expertise? I think especially in a tech world and I'm increasing a lot of product development. Winning companies seem to be able to inspire not just inside their four walls but also outside in society among others. So what is required to engender that type of reaction? What do winning companies do right? You're asking me? Yeah. As a follow up too. Sure, I think what we're seeing a lot more is people really digging deeply into how consumers are behaving. Not just sort of what do they say, what do they ask. So as an example, we're looking much more at behavioral rather than demographic or psychographic segmentation as an example. So where are those people coming from? What do they want? And more importantly, how are they behaving so that we can make some much more intelligent trade off choices as we're thinking about how we serve those consumers. And much as I really have to ask you the same question as well because Telecom of course has been really a leader around the world in bringing lots of new customers into the world. And I think that is another paradigm that has actually shifted as a result of that industry. I think we always used to think that we had to answer everyone's needs but that phone has become an aspiration around the world and it's actually enabled people to now go back and offer services that were out of reach in many countries, whether it's finance, healthcare, education, insurance. And it's taken it backwards, right? We've flipped the script in this industry and I think yours is also an interesting point because you have to get front end, very great customer service and customer loyalty. On the back end Telecom is almost a quasi law enforcement and security type of industry. And how do you really balance the two and get people aligned across many different tasks? Well, that's a huge question. But just first of all to address the issue of how would you, what's the winning ingredients? I think those organizations that don't distinct between strategy execution and value delivery. If these are the same thing, you cannot distinguish between them. So, and some of the corporates and some of the organizations distinct between them. And I think that's a really risky thing to do. For the Telecom in particular, there are a lot of exciting things that are happening. So big data and leveraging those big data, trying to work with other parallels within the value chain of Telecom in order to generate value and also contribute to the society as well. And also respect privacy and respect all of the, well the output of the Telecom to the society and to the culture in general. So it's extremely important again to stress the fact that these are not mechanics. These are people who are working together in order to achieve value. So you wanna call that strategy execution, value creation, it is the same thing. And as far as the role of leadership, I always read about flat organizations and empowering people, but ultimately, isn't there still some responsibility of leaders for results, for the conduct within their organizations? If you really see what's happening even with our leaders in Facebook and when there are these huge lapses, ultimately it's not everyone who jointly comes to testify before Congress. I mean, there is some expectation of responsibility. So how do leaders try to think about their role or what do they need to do to even monitor what's going on in such complex organizations? Any one of you are welcome to join in. I think it goes along with your topic. So maybe you should take it. Okay. I feel I'm speaking a lot, but anyhow. That's okay, wanna hear? I think the values, the principles of any organization is extremely important and that needs to be consistent across the organization, whether it's based on how do we design the strategy to be, I mean, based on those value principles and then going through execution and value creation based on those values and making sure that they are aligned. So again, privacy is an extremely important thing that is now emerging. There are a lot of calls, especially for telecoms, to respect privacy and to handle privacy with a lot of dedication. So I think it's very important for the organization to be aware of the responsibility that the consumers are giving to the organization and they need to apply their value, their value set to either design or executing that strategy going forward. Thanks, and then Professor, just one second. So one of the things my research has shown is that we make this false dichotomy, I think, between change and stability and you have either one or the other, right? And what my research suggests is that organizations that really thrive, and this gets back to leadership, have some things they keep very stable. And the things that I've found they keep stable are leadership, general direction, often strategy, surprisingly, culture, values, networks, those things kind of endure over time and provide that kind of center for the organization so people don't freak out. What things do they keep dynamic? Roles, movement of people through the organization, investment patterns. So you see lots of experimentation at the edges, lots of awareness outside. So there's this dynamic between what you choose to keep stable and what you choose to keep dynamic. And I think that's one of the biggest choices leaders make. Okay, that's very interesting. And Professor Devaney, I think in some of your earlier comments, you're almost suggesting that for people who are really struggling with the people issues and firms that are struggling, maybe we should let some of that go and focus on making machines smarter to compensate for all our lapses. And what's interesting is that people accept that guidance in some contexts and they're very resistant to it in others. So I'm just curious to understand what you think the people issues are going forward in really embracing some of these new technologies. We're seeing some pushback already and I would love your thoughts on how that might look. Yeah, well, first of all, let me say in the bigger picture, what do we do with a world of abundance with a consumer base that doesn't have any money or jobs? I don't have an answer to that because that gets the political philosophy. Do we wanna go to redistribution of the wealth, tax the big companies and then distribute them, all sorts of things that might suggest that Karl Marx was right, that capitalism in the end will bury itself. It'll become so efficient that it's not useful to people anymore. But as I see it, I have not worked with one CEO who wished that they went more slowly and trained and retrained their people more. They always come back after the fact and say, I wish I'd just gotten rid of them and brought in new blood that agreed with the direction we're going in. And because by the time we got it done to try to change people's minds, it was too late. So my belief is that the management of the future is gonna be managing turnover and moving in new people to replace the old people in the organization so that you don't face that kind of cement in the organization. Because you can talk until you're blue in the face and people don't change. They don't really care about your opinions. And they have their own and their individuals and they have rights to think the way they want. But at the end of the day, they don't have the right to think what they want in the middle of the transformation. And so overcoming that is a big issue. So I know I'm pretty harsh about this, but... You think? No. But this process, I don't understand why people react negatively to that because this process has been what's been going on for since the beginning of the first industrial revolution. We've automated people out of jobs for centuries. And we've laid off people for centuries when we didn't need them. And we've replaced them for centuries. The only difference is now that it's gonna be more of a faster kind of rate in turnover. I wonder about that though, because I think fundamentally the way we ask the question really changes the answer we get. And I think if we look at a new technology and say how many people can I replace, that's one question. I look at places like India and other emerging markets where they're saying there's a long road before we can really think about reforming education. How do we use technology to make people employable? How do we compensate for five years of missed school because you had to, you know, family hardship? But now how do we bring people together and train them? And I've seen entrepreneurs basically take people from villages and give them a very highly immersive tech heavy environment and get people trained in digital skills and basic English and saying we don't want you to just be able to find a job. We want you to be able to ultimately become job creators using maybe the skills of your native place. We send you back with this newfound confidence in soft skills and digital training. So is there really only one choice that executives have to make? Or is that the easy default we tend to gravitate to? Yeah, I understand what you're saying. And as a solution for India that works, I think. But these are folks who haven't been imprinted with a paradigm yet. And this is the first time they're getting a new one. So you've got to imprint them with the future paradigm, not the past paradigm. And unfortunately, the people who've been in the organization for a lot of times say, are suck. And they just can't think about it. And engineers in particular are the worst at trying to, have you ever argued with an engineer? You're sitting next to one so people like that. Is it fair? What's that? I said you're sitting right next to one so be nice. Right next to it. But I've been more critical. Yeah, it's kind of interesting when I meet people from engineering backgrounds that are steeped in conventional manufacturing, they don't believe in additive manufacturing. They don't wanna adopt it because a lot of it entails throwing away their design principles that they had for years and their manufacturing principles which have been repeated so much that they start to think of it as science rather than as just fluid methodology that changes over time. Well, I'm eager to hear from you, Rita as well. You've talked about the fate of companies like Kodak and many others who have gone through this process and what the impact on people in the community has really been. And I'm just curious to get your thoughts on what are the alternatives? How should people handle this when change is inevitable? Because we do see that even in this country there is a pushback among for wages, higher wages for workers. We had things for labor rights in many factories in the early 80s and 90s. So I'm just curious to see where does, you talk about inflection points, where is the inflection point where people say, no, we need to restore some balance and think about the people who work for us. Well, so I think the interesting thing in mentioning that example is Kodak was a fabulous employer. I mean, absolutely fabulous. I worked for an optometrist when I was in high school and every March people would come in with money from the Kodak bonus, every March reliably, year in, year out. Because Kodak always gave a bonus, it never went away. And I think one of the things we overlook in the, as hyper competition becomes more and more the reality of what we're dealing with is that that does create pressure on organizations to be able to offer that kind of stability, those kind of good jobs, and the need to be responsive in the marketplace. So an interesting contrast, which I've drawn on, and I think I was just in Japan and was on a panel with a gentleman who at Fujifilm in Japan basically turned Fuji towards digital and saved it when it could have easily gone the way of Kodak. So a couple of points I would make. The first is someone always sees it. It could be somewhere deep down in your engineering organization, it could be in your scientific organization, but someone in your organization is paying attention to what's happening long before it's obvious to everybody. And one of my questions would be who's paying attention? Who's listening to that person who says, there's something really weird going on out there or there's a trajectory that we should be following. So I think that's point number one. Point number two is as a large organization, we often overlook the fact that there are unique and powerful capabilities that organizations have built. And that's what gives you an advantage over startups. I mean, one of the trendy things is when you talk about innovation, people always say, oh, let's start a skunk works, go off and pretend you're Steve Jobs or something. And the problem with that is that it leaves behind what is unique and powerful about what the organization as it is does. So to me, one of the critical things that make the difference between those that suffer from an inflection point and those that actually take off is being able to sense what those capabilities are and really leverage them. So an example might be helpful here. So one of my clients is a company called UPM. It stands for Universal Paper Mills. They make really glamorous stuff like two by fours and paper. They actually make the paper the economist is printed on. And their CEO took a look at this operation some years ago and he said, you know, paper, two by fours, probably not growth industries. What is it that we are uniquely good at in the world? And the answer he came back with was enzyme technology. So it turns out that to take tree bark and stuff like that and turn it into paper, you have to be really good at the little bugs that do this. And he split the company in two. He said one part of the company is gonna be the mature businesses and we're gonna run them for cash. And the other part of the company is gonna be what he called the biofior businesses. And we're gonna center around enzyme technology and they're gonna go figure out what enzyme technology means for our future. And it took them a little while, but today they are among the world's leading producers of biodiesel plants. And so it's finding that core that is relevant today and is going to be relevant in the future in some way that you can't quite identify yet. But I think separates out the innovators that make it through these inflection points and those that don't. Before I turn it over to questions Montezard, I'd also like to ask you because you are in a very high tech business, you're bringing blockchain and a lot of interesting technologies on the business backend. And yet your mission statement is still customer first. That's your strategy. And you're also explicitly talking about bringing services throughout your territory and preserving the cultural and religious values of the region. And so you seem to have a lot of emphasis on people. And so this idea of how do you balance the pursuit of technology with the needs of people? I would love to hear your thoughts on that. Okay, so there are a lot of hype these days in telecom about blockchain, digitalization, and also agility. And so we need to look at those. So what methodology or which technology we need to adopt in order to create value to our customers? Of course, today STC is working, well, in Saudi Arabia and in the region, in other countries in the region, but also we have some equity participation in other regions of the world. So we need to take that in consideration knowing that every context has different dynamics. So it's extremely important to link between what tool we need to adopt to what value this will create to our customers. Makes a lot of sense. And I would love to open it up for questions to Aliyah. I have just one to step in. We have one question. We have hundreds of people watching through the live stream. So I have one question for the panel that I just received. To get approval for initiating a strategy, we raise the perceived value before implementing. We make assumptions of how the future will look like. And when it comes to the reality, this may be different. How to manage expectations of people in such an uncertain future? Yeah, I'm opening all of you. Please feel free to respond. Well, what I'm watching at the cutting edge and even the bleeding edges, firms are not as much anticipating as they are experimenting. And then using machine learning to sort out what factors help you pick more successful products or help you to improve the existing products more. And so it's much more kind of an exploration than it is a planned process. And I don't think there's anything new about that. I mean, Henry Minnsburg, one of the people I consider them as a founder of the whole strategy field. He's written about emergent technologies. And his friend and my mentor, James Brian Quinn, talked about emergent strategies as well. And so I think that's just happening at a faster rate and it's being automated. And because you can't really know what the future says, but you can make certain guesses so that you can monitor the right things to help you get that feedback to continuously adjust strategy and the kind of planning model that you suggest where there's no feedback from reality and performance back into what you're doing. I think that's a deadly way to go, especially when everything changes so fast. And I've talked a lot about discovery-driven strategies, discovery-driven growth. And the idea there is that you can plan, but only as far as the limit of your existing knowledge and assumptions takes you. So I see it very much as a discipline around taking assumptions, converting them to knowledge in a systematic way. And the beautiful thing about that is unlike some that fear that this is just a blank check and a license to do whatever you want, it's not. It's saying, here's what I need to learn. Here's what I think it's worth to our organization. Let's take that next step, let's learn that. And then given where we stand now, what's the next step? So it's much more disciplined and logical in a step-by-step kind of way as you're making your discoveries going forward than this kind of unplanned free-for-all that I think we sometimes think planning under uncertainty is. And just to compliment that, there is always a false assumption in big corporates that a strategy is engraved in stone, right? So you are not allowed to touch the design, okay? And I do believe that successful companies need to have that feedback mechanism. So it's an open system where you have an input and output and feedback. So you will always either refresh or even look again at your strategy's principles from a concrete feedback of execution. So again, a strategy is done in order to help you maneuver through where your challenges are posing and would take you somewhere. So if you think that this is not working or underachieving, then you need to look again at your strategy and you need to have that capability in your people to have that open discussion. Are there other questions from the audience? Thank you. My name is Fleming, I'm from Decide Act. My question goes in or maybe also a bit of comment because we circle a lot around the people issue which agrees very important here, but isn't the question that the way we manage strategy is basically old-fashioned, the way we monitor it is manual. It's not measurable and we should maybe instead look at it in a way where we make strategy just as transparent, measurable and concrete as our finances. And yeah, I know people will laugh. I believe this is possible, I'm working with it. It constrains the implementation a lot if you're capable of building a strategy by design meaning that you have to have a recordious look at it in terms of who would run a company without being controlled of your finances. So we have to establish a strong governance where you actually can monitor it and by building it that way you can engage your people in what Roger mentioned as making the decisions what's gonna happen and also what you're mentioning right now. So I believe that what is needed is digitization of strategy, implementation or support for it and a follow-up where we have it very tangible. And then of course involve things like blockchain not the currency way but actually we can register how things are connected and when decisions are made and ensure complete governance. What are your thoughts about this? So may I just say something? So I think nothing happens overnight, right? So there are organizations that are facing challenges of having an effective system reaching their objective that they want to reach and once they do that then they might look back on that process and set of capabilities and try to make it efficient. So then they would think of, okay, so what tool I need to deploy in order to reduce cost, increase turnover, et cetera. But I do believe that some companies jump in the later stage without having an effective way of handling it first. So I think it needs to be a learning curve for an organization to go through that. Any of the other panelists? I'm gonna jump in. I think one of the things that gets in the most way of an integrated approach to strategy is that we break things up in silos and as a consequence you don't have that line of sight through to all the different moving parts that have to go into making a strategy actually happen. So I'll give you a little example from my own life that happened to me just two weeks ago. A client wanted me to sign a bunch of books to send off to their clients. So I get this box of books, I sign them, I tape it all up, I have the FedEx number, I have the address, everything's set. FedEx guy turns up at my doorstep and I hand him the box and he looks at it with horror. It's absolute horror and I'm thinking, what could possibly be wrong? And he says, you don't have a label. And I said, well, okay, go to get one from the truck, I'll fill it out, whatever. He says, I don't carry labels on my truck. Literally, we are two human beings with a box in between us and my understanding is FedEx's entire mission in life is to get boxes from A to B and for want of a shipping label, this cannot happen. He literally left the premises without the box. And I'm just using that as an illustration of talk about strategy implementation not happening, right? I mean, this is a company whose sole mission in life is to get boxes from A to B and they can't make it happen. And it's not anybody's fault, but they have designed their whole system around the need for this label that integrates all the different silos and absent that it's not gonna happen. So I think a lot of us have that kind of thing going on everywhere in our organizations, we just don't see it. And so that's one of the big reasons I think why we have these gaps as you alluded to. Yeah, we... You tell me. We have time for one minute and one last question, okay? So please, can someone just bring the mic quickly? Yes, thank you. Thank you. I would like to challenge a question, put a question and a challenge to Professor Devaney. I think you're absolutely right when you talk about the harsh realities of what's coming with machine replacement, augmentation, artificial intelligence, but I also think there's extraordinary possibility coming. I've just returned from some time in Egypt and when I looked around, I thought this leapfrogging of capability could make a difference in so many places of the world. So I want to challenge you to switch the hat and talk about the possibility coming with this. Sure. That's another topic that I talk about in the book. It's hard to tell whether the, from additive and digital manufacturing, whether we're going to lose jobs or gain them. The first thing to keep in mind is, is that in the US, very few people actually work in a factory. There's a lot of people working for manufacturing companies, but they're doing marketing and distribution and product design and all kinds of functions beyond actually making it. So we're not going to lose as much as let's say an Asian country where they have a large workforce and great assembly lines and their core capability is conventional manufacturing methods. They're going to have more dislocation. That's first of all. And then secondly, I think the other part to keep in mind is the opportunity structure. Nobody yet knows what those opportunities are going to be. But one of the examples that I like to use was something that I speculated about back in 2015 in an HBR article. And I talked about that we now have the capability with additive manufacturing to make artificial coral reefs. Things we couldn't do with conventional manufacturing because it's such intricate structure that's involved and it's very biological, not very mechanical in its nature of the structure. And that I thought that eventually fish companies would make their own, create hatcheries and then harvest and be able to create a large amount of opportunity for people who don't necessarily have a lot of skill because they'd have offshore factories that harvested the fish and froze the separatism and then would freeze them and package them so that they could be used. And the other part of that I thought was it's not just gonna create jobs in fisheries, it's also got the benefit of helping lots of people who right now don't have food. And secondly, lots of new products can come out of that. Everything from new kinds of frozen dinners because there'll be a glut on the marketplace of fish to all sorts of other kinds of fish related things. And everybody said, oh, what a nut I am. Devaney, you've lost your mind, you must be really stupid. And then about a month ago, I read that Jacques Cousteau's grandson is experimenting with the creation of barrier, of, excuse me, of artificial coral reefs for exactly that purpose. And what he wants to achieve is to be able to make coral reefs in colder water because the existing coral reefs that took centuries to build by Mother Nature are being killed with global climate change. I'm so sorry that I have to cut in because I think we're out of time but I think we've had a very stimulating discussion and really highlighted the point that while there is a lot of choices still left to be made by humans even in the advent of new technologies, new questions about our perspective, our processes, how to best deploy the new tools that we have. And it will, I'm sure, give us plenty to think about in terms of both the strategy creation and taking it forward in the implementation process. So thank you very much to all the panelists. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you for your time. Thank you.