 the economy always goes up and down and what you need as an organization is to have a share view point so that when you need to tighten the bell, people need to shut things down. There will be one thing you would keep. No organization would cut everything. Even when time is tough, across silos, there's always one thing you would keep and that share viewpoint is so critical because otherwise things will not add up. Things will not add up. Now, so let's use one case studies of one industry. We're gonna do a quick deep dive. Now, I picked this industry because I think it would resonate to a lot of you. I need to pick an industry not something like pharmaceutical, although we do a lot of analysis of pharmaceutical industry as well. And later on, I'm happy to share some of the resources that you could looking at farmer, looking at banking and elsewhere. But these industry tended to be a little specialized. So for those who are in the world of pharmaceutical, you could looking at this link, I just post and going through farmer. And there are other industry that I'll post later. But I need to create a discussion with you. So I decided to pick fashion. Let's talk about fashion. Because everyone wear clothes, whether you have a high end taste or very mass market doesn't matter. We're going to looking at the mass market fashion brand and understand why do some company can win big when time is good and suffer less when time is bad. And how do they build up capabilities over time? So let's take a listen and take a quick look into the world of fashion. Welcome to Transformation Talk. I'm Tairo Asan, the Director of Brightline at the Project Management Institute, PMI. And this is our first Transformation Talk of the year. We are planning to host the Transformation Talks on a monthly cadence from February to November 24. We are starting this year with a special Transformation Talk, Becoming Future Ready. And for this Transformation Talk, we are privileged to welcome forward you. And as you know, we are living in an increasingly complex and unpredictable age. Being Future Ready becomes a source of competitive advantage and resilience. It really enables corporate leaders to adapt to new realities, develop robust capabilities with a sharper focus, and find new sources of growth with an elevated sense of purpose. With award today, we will explore the future readiness indicator, a framework that engages organizations on how well they are prepared for future challenges and opportunities. We'll take a close look at how leaders prepare themselves and enable the organization to win more in good times and lose less in bad times. I was reading it and I almost add, and win also in bad times, but let's say lose less. Before setting this stage, I was planning to just go high level, but I was looking at the accomplishment that forward had. And I said, I need to take some time to share with you, because it is worth noting here. I mean, really, really stellar. Howard is the Lego Professor at Management of Innovation at IMD. So IMD, for those who don't know, it is in Lausanne in Switzerland. And Howard leads the Center for Future Readiness, which was founded in 2020 with support from the Lego brand group. I mean, at least as a kid, who doesn't know play logos and so on. I have some blocks to guide companies through strategic transformation. He's recognized for his global expertise. And in 2023, this is where I met Howard for the first time. He was honored with the prestigious Brighton Fingers 50 Strategy Award, recognizing his substantial contribution to management strategy and future readiness. His inclusion into the fingers 50 list places among the top global management thinkers. And I'll read a few and go through a few elements because I think that I was mentioning in 2015, poet and quaint name Howard among the world top business professors under 40. And in 2018, he appeared on the fingers 50 rather least, notably in 2023, his work with a Lego group was recognized with the European Foundation for Management Development Gold Award for organizational development and a Brandon Hall Group Gold Award for advancing learning strategies and competencies development. Today, Howard co-directed the strategy for future readiness program and has delivered tailored program and training to global companies. I mean, you can name them ABB, Bosch, the Lego group, Novo no disk, electric products, Heineken and Merse and many others. His ongoing work has been published in journals such as have a business review and MIT Sloan Management Review. And his case studies have won several awards from the European Foundation for Management Development and the case centers. He regularly appears on media outlet, including Blomberg CNBC and the BBC. His book, Leap, how to thrive in a world where everything can be copied, published in 2018 has earned him multiple award, including an axiom business book award gold medal and strategy plus business book award. Let me end by saying that Howard joined AMD in 2011 after completing his doctoral degree at Harvard Business School. Welcome, Howard. Thank you. Thank you for being so generous in previewing. Whenever my guests or colleagues give such a wonderful preview, I get very nervous because now the expectation is really high. So the topic really today is about future ready. A lot of the time when people ask me, oh, what does a future ready organization means? Well, in our research, we're kind of looking at things and it comes down to really one concept. Any future ready organization, they perform and transform at the same time is not even sequential. They do it at the same time all the time. Why is that important? Well, because like we earlier heard, the economic uncertainty is always around us. There are technological disruption. There are new, you know, disruptor coming into an industry. These days, we are talking about geopolitics. And then it's also domestic polarization on politics as well. So there are so much uncertainty around the world that, you know, unless an organization can perform and optimize their performance every day, they also need to transform their business model, build up new capability so that their long-term prospects would also be strong. Now, before we talk about the future, I thought what would be useful is to take a look of history because a lot of the time is almost like you need to look forward before you need to look backward before you could foresee the future. So here is a number of companies, turns out, that actually started their business during an economic crisis. You're looking at Fortune magazine, FedEx, UPS, Disney, they all started off during an economic crisis. Then you have HP, Chowswap, Costco, LinkedIn, you know, from all oil companies like Rockefeller, Standard Oil, right? They started during the infamous Black Friday to, data is the new oil, whether it's LinkedIn or Microsoft, they started off an economic recession. Now, the reason I point this out is this is a little bit curious, because in a way that if you think about a big company or any new businesses, you would want to start a piece of innovation or you would like to kick start a startup during the economic upturn. What you want is to ride out the sort of tailwind of an economic upsurge. Then, you know, banks would be more willing to give you loan, for instance, or, you know, if you're asking for corporate funding, a CEO and CFO would have more money to spend. But what we see on that little list is that really iconic company, they started off during a crisis. So why is that, right? And then probably some of you in your mind is thinking, wait, wait, wait, Howard, you are just cherry peg companies, right? Maybe at the population level, it looks different. Here's the thing. In fact, when we look back to history, half of the Fortune 500 company was started off during a bear market or recession. Now, let me invite you right off the bat to get ourselves warmed up a little bit. Open your chat box and type in your thoughts. Why do you think that economic upturn and downturn, whether the economic is going very well, a bull market, or whether the economy is actually going down, going into a bear market over the long run, it actually does not matter. At the population level, what you see here is all these iconic Fortune 500 company actually started off during a recession. So let's warm up ourselves and type in your thoughts around. Why do you think that economy overall actually doesn't matter whether a company is successful over the long run or not? So we hear a little bit of a comment coming in. So Lorraine said, is resilience, and in many ways it is the hallmark, right? Organization that actually can withstand over the long run, they have to build that resilience. And we're going to see how do organization build that resilience over the long run? Kimo is pointed out crisis and disruption is often a catalyst for change. I think that's absolutely right. For organization that have staying power, they never let a crisis go unused, the famous saying, and they either focus more around the cooperation of the firm, getting themselves lean and resilient when the time comes back than they search. And I think some of you mentioned also, you know, out of the box thinking happening in that time. And I want to piggyback on that too. It's not just out of the box thinking like Christian just mentioned really good there, but it's also innovation that is scalable over the long run. The fundamental business model is strong. Now this is really important because it turns out organization that have a staying power and become Fortune 500 company, they have to make sure their core business fundamentally economically, socially is actually sound. Otherwise at some point, they're going to go bust. Give you a prime example. Remember, we work by Adam Newman. Yes, we work when the economy is going well. They scale everywhere and they were riding on the money by SoftBank because the investor were flushing in money. However, we were fundamental business model. In fact, it's not sound looking back or they have in terms of technologies and app and also Wi-Fi and they were buying this long term lease and parcel them out to short term lease to entrepreneur. That business model turns out is not actually viable and they never arrived break even point. The moment that the economy turns out, then they were the one who go busted. He lesson learned. What does it mean? Well, an organization to have staying power, their fundamental economic model must be sustainable. Then timing does not matter. Timing really doesn't matter. Whether we are going during the economic crisis or not is okay. Now, why do I mention this? Because what we see is organization that have this staying power, they really have to perform and transform all the time to adjust the change in time. Now, easy to be said and done. Why? Because on the perform side, essentially, we are asking organization to maintain that strong competitor advantage every single day. And it's not just about cost cutting. Even performing, you need to ask yourself, what else could we do better to stay on top of rival? Maybe something you need to give up? Maybe we constantly ask ourselves, where are the non-user? Why do customer come to us? Even on the perform side, it requires a lot of thinking and creativity. At the same time, you have to think about transform all the time. You need to think about, oh, what are the new market we need to target? We need to expand the industry boundary. Maybe it's the new ecosystem we need to tapping into. If you're looking at all these iconic companies, whether it's Disney or the way to Microsoft, they do both at the same time. Microsoft 25 years ago to today is a complete different animal. And that is the understanding, why do we need to do both at the same time all the time? Some of you may mention, oh, it is almost feels like organization and by dexterity. And it is largely true. And what we want to unpack now is this big question. Why this is so straightforward? But so few company needs to do. Give you a quick preview. Essentially, what we saw is organization can do both at the same time. They don't think about at the business unit level. They think about capability level, meaning you could think about deploying generative AI into one business unit, whether this is perform or transform. Smarter company essentially think about new capability is serving both. This is why you build a multiply effect, a flywheel effect. We're going to see momentarily a concrete example. How do you think about building the next important capabilities so that those new capability would boost your near-term performance on the perform side, as well as boost and open up new arena for transform? This way of thinking is actually quite critical because the economy always goes up and down. And what do you need as an organization is to have a share view point so that when you need to tighten the bell, people need to shut things down. There will be one thing you would keep. No organization would cut everything. Even when time is tough, across silos, there's always one thing you would keep. And that share view point is so critical. Because otherwise, things will not add up. Things will not add up. Now, so let's use one case studies of one industry. We're going to do a quick deep dive. Now, I picked this industry because I think it would resonate to a lot of you. I need to pick an industry not something like pharmaceutical, although we do a lot of analysis of pharmaceutical industry as well. And later on, I'm happy to share some of the resources that you could looking at farmer, looking at banking and elsewhere. But these industry tended to be a little specialized. So for those who are in the world of pharmaceutical, you could looking at this link, I just post and going through farmer. And there are other industry that I'll post later. But I need to create a discussion with you. So I decided to pick fashion. Let's talk about fashion. Because everyone wear clothes, whether you have a high end taste or very mass market, doesn't matter. We're going to looking at the mass market fashion brand and understand why do some company can win big when time is good and suffer less when time is bad. And how do they build up capabilities over time? So let's take a listen and take a quick look into the world of fashion. Now, remember, during the pandemic, let's go down back to a little bit of a memory lane very quickly. You know, two, three years ago, when the pandemic was still all in full rage, there is all these fashion brand go out of business. Seriously. Remember J crew made famous by Michelle Obama, far bankruptcy. You have Brooks brother made man suit iconic brand far bankruptcy in the U.S. from J.C. Panney to Ant Taylor, Neiman's Marcus, they all far bankruptcy. Then you have organization that, you know, struggle. They do not go bust, but they struggle companies such as Cyra and Xanax. And then you have organization that wins really big such as Nike and Lulu Laman. Now, for one moment, you may think, Oh, but Nike and Lulu Laman are selling active wear sneakers and sport gear. This is the pandemic theme. But hold on one second. Under armor is also in a world of active wear. Under armor did not do well at all. Puma. Remember Puma? They're almost irrelevant. And then you have companies such as Reebok just sitting on the sideline. So here's the interesting thing, right? Pandemic, you could see as a natural experiment, a very unfortunate experiment that shocked the industry. Under armor kind of okay, Puma actually struggle. Then H&M, Cyra kind of all right. Then you have Nike, Lulu Laman just go off the roof. So momentarily, I'm going to ask you about what makes Nike to be ahead of others. Then you might remember after the pandemic, we're entering 2022 and 2023, right? Then interest rate went up, bad time. And then you have a consumer spending beginning to decline. And so all the fashion brand, including Nike, by the way, they all struggle. So I'm going to show your picture and I look at a crazy out there. So I do look crazy here because I remember I was traveling in New York and the CNBC called me up and asked, Hey, the Nike burning announcement just came out and we're looking at the share price. Why is Nike suffer less? And Lulu Laman also suffer less than Adidas. Now this is it, right? During good time, Nike and Lulu Laman just captured the market more than others. When time is bad, when time is bad, they suffer less. That is the outcome of becoming future ready that no matter what kind of economic environment they are, you're in that you just win more. Now some of you already inputting your chat box, your thought already. Thank you so much, Charles and MC. I invite everyone to pour in your thought. How do we explain why Nike and Lulu Laman seems to be winning more when time is good and suffer less when time is bad? They're all in the same industry. You compare Under Armour, Adidas, Puma, Reebok, Lulu, Nike. Now Lulu, some of you may not know, but let's focus on Nike. And how come Nike is winning more and suffer less? What is going on? Let's pour in our collective wisdom. This is quite important because once we are getting into that understanding that we could unpack what kind of behavior manager needs to embrace to be like the Nike in your own world. So Charles mentioned Nike.com. Now Nike.com is really interesting because for a lot of fashion brands when they do e-commerce, they do it on Amazon or in China Alibaba. What Nike have done is they thought they need to build up their own Nike.com. Long before the pandemic, they already scaled it up, 2020 year by year, a bit, a bit, a bit. If you think about why they need to scale up Nike.com, my God, it's the direct access to consumer data. If you think about Nike.com versus you know, Amazon, right? If you're a brand, if I'm selling through Amazon, I don't get the access to information of the buyer, the shopper, let alone the margin. The brand projection is also hard. Some of you already mentioned the trust of brand, right? How do you trust a brand? Well, every touch point, whether it is your physical store or all the way to online, you felt the brand is really talking to you. Rather on Amazon or any third party channel, your brand get reduced to a price tag and a small picture. That is not the way to build a brand. And so what you see is exactly like what Maria, Maria have mentioned, the online access to consumer, that they build up these online.com. And over time, they build more and more in terms of direct to consumer relationship. So this is actually more than just Nike.com. This is the consumer relationship at the same time, meaning things like their Nike flagship store. Some of you may have seen the Nike flagship store or you have walked into Nike flagship store. It feels very interesting. I mean, they divided their assortments of different sports, is music. It feels like a museum. Why? Because on the top floor of this Nike flagship store, which I went to once, the one in New York City, they have the original collection of Air Max worn by Michael Jordan. You have all this interesting design that you would love to see. But you cannot go unless you download the Nike Plus app and give away all the information. I remember I was a tourist, right? Coming to back Apple, I want to see Michael Jordan's sneakers. Would I at that moment give away all my information and just to walking into the top floor of the expert? Of course I would. And so what you see is Nike, not just thinking about the digital online sales channel, but it's really around this direct consumer relationship. Some of you already said, it's also the Nike Plus app that they view all these understanding. As a result, the brand building, they could really generate that brand loyalty. Why? When a brand to take a stand politically, you need to understand your core audience mentality. So Nike actually knows their core audience love, love the fact that Nike would take a stand on social injustice and things like that. Incomparent contrast. When a company do not have these capability to do social listening, when you don't have the data point to do proper social listening, you essentially shooting in the dark. It's really shooting in the dark. And some of you in the United States, you know the controversy about light or about wiser that in one of the commercial really have instigate anger for one big part of the core audience because they've gone too much of a liberal stand on one issue. And as a result, their sales has plunged for a long time. So it's when a brand and I think a brand needs to be purposeful, but it's also when you communicate, you need to understand what is my core audience? What is their mentality? Where they're from? So you fine tune the message to find resonance to your audience. And if we don't do that, if we don't do that, it's very hard to get it right. And it all comes down to data like Nike Plus, Nike Training, Run Club, all these are part of the same packages. Now I want to highlight one thing. Doing this is really hard. Dennis has just point out Nike Plus, Nike Training and Nike Run Club, right? It's really, really hard. Why? Let's take a look what happened. So let's see how they put in here. This is to me, it's sort of an epiphany or, you know, the exemplar of performance transfer. Because on your left hand side, essentially is the B2B business. What is B2B? Well, they sell sneakers to Walmart Target, Foot Lockers, DSW. So these are third party retailer. This is their bread and butter. Historically, this is Nike business. Then on the right hand side are the new business. These are direct to consumer relationship. Things such as, well, you know, Nike.com, we mentioned the Nike Plus app if there are revenue generating or their flagship store. They're really interesting flagship store. These are direct to consumer sales relationship. And over time, what you see this is exactly perform, making sure our core business is still growing. Meanwhile, the transform side, the new business continue to grow. Now underneath, of course, is the direct to consumer relationship, the social listening skill. All these are essentially common multiplier. Because the moment you can listen better to your end consumer preferences, then your R&D, making the next generation of sneakers, would be better. So your sneakers selling to foot lockers and all of that becomes more attractive. It's the multiplier effect underneath big time. And if you're looking at Nike, you could also personalize your shoes. They would ship your personalized sneakers within a week. And you could customize from the color, the shoelace, the material, everything, which means that the back end supply chain, some of you are from the supply chain angle. This back end supply chain must be world class, because they don't own all these factory across Asia. But they need to know which factory can take up this order, because the component is on site. So that they could automatically route those information to logistic supply, like DGL or FedEx, and then ship onshore to your household right away within one week, if not just days, which means their supply chain is also world class. Now, when your supply chain digitization become world class, it of course help your direct-to-consumer relationship. But you also would know what infantry is sitting across all your customer, your retailers as well. And you could move infantry based on predictive analytics. So one style getting hot in Brooklyn, you know the next thing is going to radiate to Chicago. So you move the infantry across different warehouses more proactively to capture the growing opportunity. That capability on supply chain and that capability on social listening is supporting both performance and transform. This is the logic we need to think about. Now, what is really hard is you need to have tough conversation. Let me describe, because in the end, CEO can only do so much. It's all about the people underneath who carry the day-to-day work. Now imagine, here is a debate between two head of the operation. Let's roll back in time. Imagine we are 2012 that Mary is in charge of the B2B business. So Mary is in charge to the B2B business and one of her most important account is Target. Then you have Susan, who is in charge on direct sales to consumer. So her job is to make sure people are coming to Nike.com and going to the flagship store and so on. Now at that year, if R&D come up with an exclusive item, imagine I have this exclusive item of pair of new shoes that Michael Jordan's endorsing, doing focus group people loves it. How do you move people to go to the direct consumer channel and grow more? Well, you put this exclusive item only on sales onto their store. But here's the conflict, right? If you put something really hot and exclusive to this particular channel, there would be and it happened. The most important client is going to make a complaint. What is Target or Footlock or DSW? Some guy is going to make a complaint and would threaten. If you don't give me that hot product here now, I'm going to drop Nike and stock up Adidas. So what do you do? Well, you need the two silo come together to have a discussion, not about fighting their own interests. That's not enough. But they would come together to find the right tactical balancing so that the right tactics would get them to the long-term goal. In this specific example, maybe just give one of discount something similar to pacify one angry customer and keep it quiet. The angry customer is all right. Meanwhile, you persist on putting that exclusive item onto your own channel. This is why I think having that share viewpoint is super important because without the share viewpoint, the immediate implication is the following. People are not going to make tactical move. Things could add up. In the end, future ready company are making tactical move every day. They need to react. It's not just a big vision. But whatever they adjust, they would make sure whether I'm marketing, whether I'm digital officer, whether I'm manufacturing, things would add up over the long run. Talking about things adding to the long run, here is one key thing that I would ask you to think about and will pull up a poll for you to vote. So there is a researcher called Don Sao from MIT and I'm actually in Kendall Square close to MIT. He went out to do a research survey and he wanted to understand, do most company have a share viewpoint? This is kind of interesting. The way he did it is very simple. He go ask this Fortune 500 company, simply asking their C-suite. Imagine in your C-suite, just like your company, you have a chief financial officer, chief marketing officer and head of R&D and many others. So he basically asked this question, hey, in your company, he interviewed first the chief digital officer, hey, in your company, what is your top 10 priority? Give me the list in your company, not your own function in your company. Then he go ask the chief marketing officer, in your company, what is your top 10 priority? Then he went over the head of R&D, same company, C-suite, hey, head of R&D, what is the top 10 priority of your company? Then he tried to triangulate to see how much overlap. So very obvious, right? For a good company, you want a lot of overlap, articulation, meaning the CMO top priority would be exactly, you know, the CMO thinking about what's important to the firm would be exactly how the supply chain guy think about important for the firm. And so as the head of R&D. For bad company, obviously, that each of these C-suite members would have a very different viewpoint. What they think is important for the company is completely different. So I'm asking Claude, maybe to pull up the survey on what do you think for this particular research, average company, how much overlap would be shared across a C-suite among average company? So please take your vote. So the question is very simple, right? This researcher is doing a naughty experimentation. He went out and asked among these company, the C-suite is there, asking the chief marketing officer, the manufacturing guy, then the CFO for instance, hey, CMO, tell me what is the top priority of this company? That he went out, CFO, tell me what is the top priority of this company that he's simply trying to triangulate. Among these different articulation one on one, how much is overlapping? If a company have a share view point, then it should be over 80 to 100% overlap, right? Everyone knows what is key importance of my firm. If a company is being pulled to a different direction, then there would be no overlap. So pick your guess and I'll review this piece of research. All right, so let's see. So most people think it's around 20 to 40% or 40 to 60%, right? I think, oh my gosh, I think your understanding is exactly correct. What happened is Don South from MIT, he came back and discovered, my God, most company do not have a share view point. Most companies are really working at the side level, even at the very top. Only a few companies would have a share view point. Now, if the environment is stable, if you do not need to make critical trade-off, if you do not need to prioritize, then it's okay. But if the economic environment is tough, you need to have difficult conversation to make tough trade-off, so that things would add up, getting stuck in the middle is not enough, would be very dangerous. And I think in the end, that is one trade that distinguish organizations that are future ready versus those that are not, simply because of the question that whether organization is able to make tactical trade-off across ILO every day and yet things would add up as a result. And like MC mentioned, a lot of the time, the C-suite would only focus on the expertise. I am in charge of marketing, all I care is about running the most effective ad. I don't care my impact on manufacturing. That is someone else's job. And so that would be a dysfunctional team, that these leaders coming into a conference call essentially is working almost like United Nation, lobbying on behalf of their own functional interest, rather than thinking about the broader term and collectively make the optimal choices. And I think this is actually behavior not just about the C-suite. If you think about your own world, there must be cross-functional collaboration needs to happen from time to time. When we enter that conversation, say imagine you are the corporate legal team and you are entering a conversation with the business side is your direct report or yourself able to cross that chasm to take that perspective from others so that you could have a good debate. Meanwhile, you're able to make the optimal choice in the long run. Now, Maria also mentioned one thing, which is interesting. You know, some company getting stuck because there's no outsider perspective. Talking about perspective, right? This is super important. Let's take a look of the laundry list of failure at Nike. My goodness. You're looking at this picture, my God, remember on the left hand side? That's like the iPod mini, right? Is the Nike Plus app, the first version, which is a sensor. You put inside your running shoes and it will synchronize your running performance onto the iPod Nano. That's before iPhone. Nike launched that. And then what happened? Well, Steve Jobs decided to kill iPod because he wants to put the music playing device inside the iPhone. And so the whole iPod business is gone. And so as the Nike Plus sensor, but then the company did not fire away all this manager. They keep them because this is the capability we want to build. Meanwhile, these capability around consumer electronics, building software, they saw wearable beginning to take off. Remember Fitbit? It's a big time. So Nike moved these manager onto building wearable. They launched Nike FuelBand, which took off big time. And then Tim Cook in charge, Tim Cook long eye watch. Fitbit nowhere. The whole wearable business basically plateaued and declined. So what do Nike do? Well, collect those learning and then move big time into today's Nike Plus app. What do you see is when an organization actually focus on capability building, then the day-to-day trade off is slightly different. On one side, one could think about, oh, every time we're building an app, it needs to be monetized. The other way of thinking about it is every time we build an app or consumer electronics, we are gathering consumer data and which will inform us to run a better marketing campaign, which helps us to launch a better product and will measure the impact from that angle. Not just financial bottom line as an individual business, but we're going to measure the positive impact of this new capability onto the existing businesses. And so of course, just like Tammy said, the biggest challenge here is to have that diverse perspective working together. I'll show you one last chart that will take some time for Q&A. What Nike have master is to essentially, and many other companies as well, it's not just fashion, you need to embrace conflict, diverse your thoughts in order to generate and maximize a good strategic outlook. Let me illustrate. So most people would think, you know, conflict shouldn't be too high and shouldn't be too low. There's a bell curve. Wrong. What you want is to have a one particular type of conflict. They call it cognitive conflict. Essentially, people who don't think alike would have a debate. So you have your functional team, say manufacturing, right? You have people really know the company, how things getting manufactured. But then you also have people, the digital native, different generation, so that you have different perspective, different way of looking at things. So you would debate is okay to have that type of debate and conflict, but you need to have high trust, meaning when the debate happened, it doesn't get personal. You still trust one another for the better good. And I think this is ultimately what allows a company to have things add up. When you're looking at this chart and it becomes quite clear, this is why at Nike, they could have all kinds of debate and discussion while scaling up both sides of the equation. So I'm going to pause here so that we could take some Q and A and moderate it along the way. But two things that we emerge out of this discussion, right? What is stamina of a business or why would some company can always stay on top of the game? Well, they perform and transform. How to do this? You need to scale up the next capability, the new capability to serve both sides. When it comes down to capability building in the behavior angle, you need two things, share viewpoint, cognitive conflict with deep trust. Then you can perform and transform at the same time. And I love MC rounding up, which means that becoming future ready is a human challenge, not a corporate challenge. I know, I know. Every time I talk about strategy, when I peel the onion for so long, in the end, in the end, it always come back to human challenges. And so I'm just going to pose a couple of resources for those who are excited to unpack a little bit more across different industry than you could take a quick look around. And there are a fashion that I just posed and there are technology I'm posting here earlier. I have putting in also other industry, pharmaceutical as well. There are six industry we cover, including banking and so on. But let's move into the Q and A part and have a interaction. Thank you. Thank you so much, Howard, for this delighting sharing of great, great insight. Let us directly go in and take questions directly from the audience. Our first question was coming from Lucy, and Lucy was asking if you could speak to the role and impact that organizational agility plays in the future ready concept? Yeah, super important. And I love this question. So when it comes down to scaling up capability, as we said, it's really critical to become future ready. Now, when you scale capability, there are two phases. Again, two phase. Phase one, you need extreme agility. Complete. Why? Because when you start learning how to build direct to consumer relationship or your car company, right, you need to do over the day update, autonomous driving or electric vehicle. At first, you need to do a lot of experiment because you don't have enough understanding there. You need to fail fast, move quick, gather learning big time. So in phase one, you need that. Then at some point, you need to scale to scale. You need irreversible commitment, meaning either I build a new factory with advanced robotics. I don't. Once I break ground, which cost me a hundred million, that's it. So you need to be able to also make irreversible decision based on evidence from the first phase. So agility is extremely important for the first phase so that you can get as much learning as possible. Evidence. Lesson learned. And then you go into phase two to commit full steam ahead. So I think the two is going hand in hand. Company getting into trouble when they don't see there's actually two side. Excellent. Thank you. Let's move to the next one. And that one is coming from Javier or Javier. What about the board? Because we're talking about the sea level. So he's asking, oh, she's asking what about the board? What is their role to make the company more future ready? So this is interesting. So in our world or in our work, we actually measure also the board governance. Because if you think about becoming future ready is a balanced scorecard. In what sense? Well, you need to perform today and versus tomorrow. So I don't have the time to really go deep. But the way we rank companies the following, we're looking at the financial fundamental, which is the new term performance. We're looking at investor expectation. But what we see is for organizations that are also good in the leading indicator into the future, like early innovation and business diversity, you need to have a good board governance structure. Things like would the CEO also be the chairman? That's not good. Would your board actually have external outsider as well, which is good independent director? And whether the management team is also diverse? Is this company only have one type of expertise and everyone things are like talk alike? Or this company at the board level or at the management team level actually have diversity as well. So it is a balanced scorecard in our methodology. I'm momentarily putting the link around our methods so people interested can take a quick look. Excellent. We have another from one of our regular here, Kevin. And Kevin is asking what are the critical system or tactics and organizations to focus on to help improve the alignment of the priorities? Very, very good. So we're going to be showing that I mean, I mean, not a great alignment. I was looking at the 80% but just 4%. It is very human. So first is, do people trust one another? Right? So to build trust, sometimes you actually need, I'm not those type of people, but you need clinical psychologist to moderate a real conversation among the C-suite. But that's not just a C-suite. You could think about in your own team, in your immediate surrounding, you could also get independent psychologist to have a moderator discussion. It's like couple therapy, right? But we think couple therapy only apply to private. Well, at work, you actually need that. So to build that trust is absolutely critical. And the other thing is create a tendency with one another, meaning the KPI needs to be shared. So no longer is just that I deliver my own result would be good. I actually have a share goal with someone across the side. That helps. Excellent. Excellent. And then for the next one, I would not like to combine two questions, one by Ram and one by Marisa. They kind of align. Ram is asking, how one could identify the unmet need of customers. And then going to Marisa, who is asking, could you speak to increasing capability when scaling for services provided by people, rather than products or unmet customer need? Oh my God. Yeah. Very, very big. So there are two, two way of thinking about that, right? So the traditional way, which is still relevant, don't dismiss that. You know, the ethnographic observation, Clayton Christensen, my advisor talked about job to be done, super critical. So to uncover unmet need, what you just need to observe is one element. But increasingly, what we see is that social listening skill is also important at the big data level. So this is where the direct consumer relationship becomes very, very important. So, and it's not, it's not just fashion company are focusing on, particularly around this idea of social listening. If you think about consumer package goods, whether it is Procton Gamble or Unilever, they also do a lot of those. And you need one more thing. You need to make those data transparent so that everyone across the world can get access to those information so that they could apply to their individual country. And this is what we see in this particular link that, you know, company PNG of the world, they really shine and Coca Cola do really shine, is that they leverage direct consumer relationship and roll up all this data into a central hub. And that really helps along the way. Excellent. Next one is I see like the three questions that are related. One from Vogue. I'm scared. Okay. One from, I think it was Jonathan and to some extent also Tammy. So let me try to bring them together as one. Vogue is asking, when we analyze research, and let's say tracker, we mainly focus on the last cooperation and the mature organization. So what are two main advice that you can give to the startups to be a future ready, but that is connected to the question that John was asking. When you say when you are big, like Nike, and you can recover easily from a small fall, you can do more trial and errors. What do you do to a small business and you owe and you owe your current income? So basically a startup or small business so it's connected. And then the last one was the scaling. Let's assume that they were small or maybe they got large and then they were to scale it. So yeah, I mean, I mean, one very interesting industry I just posted is Automotive because the top leading company these days, they're relatively young, but they scale really quick. And I'm not just talking about Tesla, but all these like EV makers, right? Going back to your question, then if you are a startup or upstart of a EV maker, right, you need to be very, very careful of the nature of the decision. There are decisions that are irreversible. So whether you need to launch these app or that app or the coloring and so as a startup, you need to go super fast, way faster than the world of Nike because you're still in the stage of finding the market, market product fit. But then at some point, even for a startup, you would encounter a decision if I fumble, then the company's gone. Now in that world, Netflix CEO have this interesting concept, re-tasting the founder of Netflix. He called it farming the descents. So you actually find people who hate your idea. You actually find people who think that you're crazy and then have them to argue with you. And then I give you one more trick, you swap role. So imagine, I have this great idea. I think my startup should do A and then here is another expert really well regard things that I'm completely crazy. I should do B. Then you argue, debate, take a pause and then you swap role. I'm going to adopt the perspective of solution B. My friend is going to adopt my position as solution A and we argue from the other person opposing B. Why do you do that? You get immersed to a complete different logic. You back it out. This is how you farm descents and make sure you challenge all the underlying assumption. So this is very tactical thing, but I've seen really successful company really do that. Be very careful what is reversible and what is irreversible. If it's irreversible, you go for farming the descents. Thank you so much. Let us take the next one, which is from Ram from individual leader point of view. What is future ready means? Yes, so this is great. So what I see is future ready leader are always superstar. So why they are superstar? Because the contribution to the company is unique and valuable, meaning in the immediate surrounding no one can do that job. So usually comes out to this is someone who really knows the company well and yet at the same time have a deep understanding of something of the external world. That's future ready leader. And how do you do that psychologically? Curiosity. That's it. There are manager and even junior intern that just so curious, they're always thinking about, oh my God, I've seen this happening outside world, how can I adopt here? And they do small things. And ultimately, their work will shine in the organization. And this is why they move up the corporate ladder. Or if the project doesn't work, their market valuation, their market value so high, they could easily jump ship in the age of there's no lifetime employment. So if you ask me, what is the attribute, what is a future ready leader, they can solve the company problem by rooting inside one organization. And meanwhile, they are so good in one key skill outside. And the psychological matrix that drive that behavior is not salary, is curiosity. It's an intrinsic motivation. Thank you. Let's take the last question that is coming from Daniel. And Daniel asking, what are apparent warning signs that indicate that transformation is needed before a company start to show a decrease in customer engagement? So the early warning signs or let's say, how do you know before it is already before you? How do you know? Now, so don't worry too much about foresight, because what I've seen organization is never be about being the first one, but it's the first one who get it right. So you take what is metaverse or whatnot, blockchain, the final winner is always not the first mover, but the first one who get it right. So I think what is really super important here is, you know, you observe what is going on, you try experiment, but never try to rush, trying to rush, meaning you are just prematurely scaled. But once you have the real evidence, once you merge with your organizational strength, then you could come up with something that is good from a consumer or user experience. And I think Vision Pro, for instance, by Apple is one of these examples. Thank you. Thank you so much. Again, I mean, we can go on with many questions. Time is short, and we are almost at the end of it. And as I was saying before, Howard could direct the strategy for future readiness program, and he has delivered several Taylor training to global companies. So I shared with you the link where you can learn more on the program and learn more on the great work that he's doing organization to be ready for the future. Now, moving on to you, Howard, I want to give you the floor for closing remarks. Well, thank you so much, everyone. I just love this interaction, and it has been wonderful. So I just posted my LinkedIn and, you know, my personal website account. And again, that is my course. Hopefully, we'll see some of you. But it's my great pleasure. I hope we could stay in touch. Thank you. Thank you so much. And then, of course, as we say, we're planning to have it on a monthly cadence. So we look forward to have you with us for the future one. Thank you so much. And have a great one. Take care. Thank you.