How to spot inflection points in business before they happen

Introduction

Jeff Saviano

Better Innovation, it's Jeff. Incredibly, here we are, season five. Can I just say that I am so proud of our entire Better Innovation podcast team. From producer Tommy Alli, Head of Marketing and guest Chrissie Poirier. Brian Cooksey and our crack team at Hogarth Worldwide. They worked together to bring this show to you. In these early days of season five, let me begin with a heartfelt thank you to team Better Innovation and to you, our faithful listeners. You are in for a treat today. We have leading management thinker and strategist Rita McGrath with us in the studio. Rita is a bestselling author, speaker and long-time professor at Columbia Business School.

She is widely regarded as a premier expert on leading innovation and growth during times of uncertainty. She's received the number one achievement award for strategy from the prestigious Thinkers50 and Rita has been consistently named one of the world's top ten management thinkers. Rita received her Ph.D. from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and also has degrees with honors from Barnard College and the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs.

Rita is a prolific author, including the bestseller The End of Competitive Advantage. But we talked about her latest work, Seeing Around Corners - How to Spot Inflection Points in Business Before They Happen. We are witnessing a new golden age of innovation as organizations and entrepreneurs launch new enterprises that are emerging from this global pandemic. So, what's important, the art of trend and signal spotting, how to look around corners.

I think it's so critical to the success of any new endeavor. Here we go. An opportunity to learn from the great Rita McGrath. Rita, welcome to the show.

Rita McGrath

Oh, it's a pleasure to be here, Jeff. Thank you for having me.

Jeff

It is so nice, Rita. It's so nice for our Better Innovation listening audience to spend some time with you today. We really appreciate this. Thank you for coming on to the show. Well, this is the second half of our two-part podcast series. I was so humbled to be a guest on your Fireside chat. I guess that was just a couple of weeks ago. We've been calling this our Home and Away series. We had such a great discussion, but we also left some really good stuff to talk about today, I think.

And Rita you have such an interesting background. And I have to say in the truest sense of the phrase ‘Thought Leadership’ across many aspects of management and strategy, maybe a place for us to start would be tell the audience about the focus of your work, Rita.

Rita

Sure. So, I guess my current work really had its seeds in some work I did back when I was a bureaucrat. I got my Master's in Public Administration and went to work for the city of New York for about eight years, during which time I led a major what we would today call a digital transformation, although we didn't talk about it that way then. But it was basically taking paper stuff and turning it into digital stuff. And while going through that process, I got really interested in this process of large-scale organizational change. So, when an organization has to go from one way of being to another, and then I went and got my Ph.D. at the Wharton School, and my Ph.D. supervisor was a guy named Ian McMillan, a very opinionated, shall we say, and he ran the Entrepreneurship Center at Wharton and got a big grant to study, you know, innovation, broadly speaking. And so I went to him with this idea I had for my dissertation called The Science of Implementation. And he kind of looked at me and said he couldn't imagine anything more boring than writing about the science of implementation. And then, you know, great good fortune happened in the form of a research grant from a major New York bank. They gave us a three-year grant to study the corporate venturing process in their bank. And what it involved was case studies or really in-depth case studies of things they had tried that had worked in things they had tried that didn't. And this really kindled a passion for the connection between strategy and innovation. And right around that time, what we started to observe as well was an acceleration of a trend that was already well underway which was a shortening of the period of time in which you could hang on to a competitive advantage once you had built it. And my dissertation was about how established firms build new things, how they create new capabilities. And that's just been a passion of mine ever since. So that's really where it got started a little bit by accident.

Jeff

What do you think it is, Rita that has peaked your interest to help organizations, whether they've been started off within the public sector, whether it's the public sector or the private sector? What is it you think about actually engaging with organizations trying to improve how they operate?

Rita

Well, I find the human aspect of it to be just absolutely fascinating. And, you know, each of these stories of transformation is kind of like the Greek opera. I mean, it's a Greek tragedy. I mean, it's got heroes and villains and by standers and villagers and, you know, and every change you want to do has some just incredible backstory in caste to characters. So, I just find the people part absolutely fascinating. And then kind of as a companion to that, how we have managed our way through these major inflection points is quite astonishing when you think about it. I mean, when my dad was at the Kodak Corporation back in the 80s, you know, they wrote things on paper memos and there were people who stamped them like ‘received’ and then filed them in large filing cabinets. And this was not 1000 years ago. Right. And if you think about how dramatically the world has shifted since then, I think it's remarkable that we have all adapted so well to these really seismic changes.

Jeff

Just before the pandemic, we had the good fortune of having a delegation from one of the African nations come and visit us. And we were reviewing the latest technology to extract information from documents and digitize to your point Rita and I never forget one of the points they had raised about just from a tax perspective, their tax returns, you could take any large conference room, multiply that by 20, fill it floor to ceiling and that's full of all tax returns that they wanted to digitize. They didn't really see an easy way to do that. But obviously there's many, many different technologies and ways to help organizations like that. And so that's how you got started, that's so interesting and this interest in helping organizations. I'd love to talk today Rita about your latest book, Seeing Around Corners - How to Spot Inflection Points in Business Before They Happen published in 2019. What's the book about Rita and why did you decide to write this book?

Rita

The book is about strategic inflection points. A 30,000 foot level. So, it's how do you see them? You know, how do you pick up the signals that something is about to change? Once you've seen it, what do you do about it? You make up your mind what to do about it, and then how do you bring the organization with you? And what got me interested in the topic was, it was kind of a natural follow on to my previous book, which was called The End of Competitive Advantage about this, you know, shortening window of opportunity that advantages had. And one of the things I noticed was that one of the factors that leads into an advantage either being created or eroding are these technological and other inflection points. And that kind of came together and then I revisited Andrew Grove's wonderful nineties book, Only The Paranoid Survive. And he was talking about life kind of in the midst of an inflection point in how do we navigate through that. And, nobody really followed up in my mind with something that really took that to the next stage, you know, going beyond what Grove that so I got very interested in doing that and that was really where the book started, but it kind of sat around in bits and pieces for a long time. I knew I wanted to do something about strategic inflection points, but it hadn't really crystallized until a friend sent me this great article called What If You Changed the World and Nobody Noticed. What this article described was all these massive, massive, really important shifts that people just ignored for sometimes years. The article opens up with the story of the Wright Brothers and the invention of airplanes, basically. And like they went to the archives in the next day, New York Times, nothing, Next month, New York Times, nothing. Next year, New York Times, nothing. It took three years after the Wright Brothers historic flight before any media outlet took this seriously, and it took even longer for people to realize the implications. And so that that was really what crystallized the book, because what I realized was that these changes happen over a long periods of time. So, they feel when they're upon you as though, oh, my God, this came out of nowhere. But when you really go back and look, there were lots of early warnings, there were lots of weak signals. There was lots that you could have seen had you been looking for it. And I thought, okay, that's something a strategist can work with.

Jeff

And how do you find those markers in the world? And it is such an interesting way to put it with the pace that business moves today and the opportunities with new technologies and, you know, frankly, everybody's searching for an edge, right? We're all looking for an edge to beat the competition and to move at light speed. Your focus on inflection points and how to spot those market flares that are off on the horizon. I think it recognizes the importance of those capabilities that leaders need across a wide range of organizations. I love how you organize the contents of the book into three sections. How do you see an inflection point coming? Well. And what do you do about it? It's like vapor in the wind, unless you can really act on it. So how do you see the inflection point coming? What do you decide to do about it? And then the third area, how do you bring the organization along with you? Is it okay to use that framework maybe to guide our conversation today? I just think it's such a great way that explains how you can actually do something about it so you're affecting real change within an organization. So, let's begin with the how; how to spot those inflection points. My favorite section of the book, and I have to say, I didn't read your book. I listened to your book. I've been trying to listen to more audiobooks, and I only listened to it at the gym. So, every time I'm thinking of the principles that just comes into my mind that it was it was accompanying, my workouts for a couple of weeks. So, thank you for that. I felt like you were with me as I was on the machines. And so, beginning with how do you spot those inflection points, my favorite section relies on a metaphor about how snow melts from the edges. Can you explain what do you mean by that phrase and why is it relevant for spotting inflection points?

Rita

Well, the first observation I would make is that before you can see them, you have to be where they're happening. And Andrew Grove, again, to go back to you know, well, here is the famous for having said, if you wish to see where spring is making itself felt, you must travel to the periphery because that's where the snow is most exposed. And my translation of that is snow melts, but it melts from the edges. And what that means in a business context is, you know, you can't expect to sit at your desk at headquarters and have these weak signals just sort of neatly presented to you and tied up with a bow.

You have to actually go to where the changes are happening. And so in the first chapter of the book, I list eight or nine things you can do to actually get out to the periphery and the reason that's important is because those really weak signals, they don't show up in your numbers for years. Often, they don't show up in any of the reports you use to sort of monitor the current condition.

They show up in conversations where your sales people are going, ‘well, that was weird, that never happened before’. Or where someone on a loading dock says, Huh? Where's all this stuff coming in from Vietnam? Or, you know, where someone observes that, we would we have a problem we could solve for a customer, but corporate won't let us or you know, whatever.

It's all those kinds of interactions which give you a clue about where things might be starting to crack. And so the first part of the book is really advice for leaders on how you can personally get out there. And the first observation is you need to personally get up there because the organization, left to its own devices, will try to keep all bad news away from you.

You know, I mean, I have a friend who uses the metaphor of the CEO wrapped in bubble wrap, and I'm sure you've seen this yourself. It's financial reporting. And so by the time you do learn about it, the crisis is much worse than it need have been. And there are some bosses that make that even more the case.

And so you see these people who really make it pretty clear they don't want to hear bad news. They shoot the messenger. They don't listen. And, you know, Andy Groves’ company Intel was part of this conversation. He used to talk about finding helpful Cassandras, people who would bring you the truth even if they knew it would be uncomfortable.

Jeff

And a lot of companies don't have that philosophy. And sometimes it's hard. I find reading a lot of business books, you have to really struggle to find the principles. What I love about this book and loved about how early in the book that you throw out eight practices to help ensure that what you're seeing and what is going on along the edges, in essence, becomes your early warning system.

And I thought it may be fun to review a couple of them. Let's not go through all of them. We'll sort of tease the audience, let them go by the book to see the full list. But let's go through some of them, I think are quite interesting. The first one really caught my attention had alluded to this a minute ago, ensuring the direct connection between the people that are at the edges of your company and the people who are responsible for making the strategy.

This made me think of the stories of Henry Ford and walking the floor of the manufacturing and talking to workers and really getting to the heart of the people that are making product or selling services. So, talk about the importance of that direct connection.

Rita

Yeah. So, we as human beings have these myths in our head about what is the basis for our decision making.

And the myths are that we are rational creatures who proceed from the data in a PowerPoint to a logical conclusion and then we implement that logical conclusion. And that's actually very far from the truth. We make our decisions on the basis of personal exposure and on the basis often of stories, stories that we make up. And so the first piece, the personal exposure piece, is really critical to, you know, you have to see it yourself.

You can't get it third hand or fourth hand. Or somebody said, oh, yeah, you know, there's an issue with the plant in Mexico until you've seen that plant in Mexico and really experienced what's going on. You know, it's just hard for you to feel any connection to the story. And then the second part of it is there's no substitute for hearing from people themselves about, you know, what it's like to do business with your company.

I'll give an example of a tech company who I won't name for purposes of not embarrassing them, but I was literally talking to their head of operations. So, the person that does all this operation stuff for them and I'm doing a talk for them later in the year. And we were planning for this talk. And I said, well, I don't know if you want to hear this or not, but I just had this horrific customer service experience with your company.

And she said, Oh, I want you to send me everything you can about what happened because they don't know, you know, when they get that right. And I said to her, look, I'm not in the business of like pestering the CEOs of my client organizations with my personal problems. She said, No, you know, if you're having this problem, that means thousands of other people are too.

And I need to know about it. And this actually gets to something that I think people don't see, which is that in the area of customer service, for example, which is a huge area, if you're a leader, you need to understand what that experience is like. And most of them not you know, most of them think, oh, everything's fine.

And what the whole customer service industry, if you will, has done is they've created this metric called containment, and they created symmetrical containment because they want to sell you customer service automation systems. Right. And the containment metric means how well did your robots do at keeping you from actually talking to a real living human being? Now, the problem with that is as automation has gotten so much better, right?

I mean, today you can do things you never have conceived of being able to do 20 years ago. You can change your airplane tickets. You can book time at a luxurious hotel. You can order things, you know, that will magically appear in your doorstep. I mean, all this stuff. So, the automation has gotten good enough that by the time you want to talk to a real person, you're already in a state of complete frenzy and outrage.

And so what a lot of these companies do, and this is something I was talking about with this large tech company, I said, you know, the blind spot you created for yourself is customers hang up in frustration, vowed, never to do business with your company ever as long as you live and you think you've succeeded because you've contained that call, they never got through a human being.

And this is the kind of thing that leads to these strategic blind spots. So as a leader. Right. And she's a beautiful example, she had no idea of what was happening in that operation. And, you know, maybe it'll be a good learning moment. And I don't wish to embarrass anybody. This is not like anybody's fault. And just if you don't have somebody like me or like a person in the service in bringing those stories to you, how would you know. And organizations get so big and you create roles that are very nuanced and very specialized and you can see how that happens. You can see how senior leaders not purposely, but they get insulated from the customer and insulated from some of those problems that are happening on the ground. And I just think it's a great place to start our conversation today because you can't do this by desk research, right?

Jeff

You can't do it from just sitting at your browser and searching for inflection points and think that you're going to find what works for your company. This this one of the eight seems to be a bit of a close cousin to another one. Pursue direct contact with the environment. I love this phrase. We've had Steve Blanc on our show a few times now.

Get out of the building. Talk to customers. And I wonder if there's a connection to Steve Blank's work there just because he's so I think of how emphatic he is with that advice to all of us to get out of the building that the real answers for your customers and your problems don't lie on the inside, but they lie on the outside.

Rita

Oh, Steve. Steve and I are good friends and we have a mutual admiration society going on. I first ran across Steve actually his work when I was doing some work with a large industrial company, and they were launching this brilliant new big venture and they put this guy in charge of it who was a typical Hard-Charging regular guy, and he's looking at this venture and he saying this Alec, I don't have the answers, you know, to what this thing needs to be.

It was a whole new technology that they were trying to launch. And this company went after it in the typical way companies do. Which was give me your playbook, tell me your launch date. Tell me all this stuff. And this guy finally said to me some sometime later, he said, I realized then that I didn't know how to do this.

This was new. And so I had to get smarter about it. And one of the resources he pulled on was Steve's book, which is it's something to the six steps to the Board, Four Steps to See. That's what it's called. It's all about customer discovery, which is very close to my concept of discovery driven planning, where the idea is don't plan a big, uncertain thing.

And so you knew what was going on instead. Break it into pieces, determine what must be, what must be true, and then plan by check points which I think is a very similar discipline to what Steve talks about. But the reality is that you just don't know. I mean, you can have a really strong assumption, but unless you're in the marketplace, experimenting, you're not going to find out.

And one other observation I would make, and this is based on some work that Martin Reeves has done, he's a busy gee. And he recently published a book called The Imagination Machine. And one of the things he did in that book that I really like is he breaks down the process of imagination into manageable chunks. And he starts off with, well, what triggers us as human beings to use our imagination?

And interestingly, he finds that there's an actual neurological thing that has to happen for you to come up with a novel solution. And that's a surprise. Something has to be out of the ordinary or surprising before your brain kind of goes, wait a minute, what does that mean? And so, if you as a senior leader are insulated from those kinds of surprises exposed to them, you're missing a critical driver of what could be an imaginative response.

Jeff

It makes me think of the great work from Nancy Duarte, who has written so many great books about communication. One of my favorites called Resonance and she analyzed the great speeches of all time from the great communicators, whether it was Martin Luther King's. I had a dream speech or John F Kennedy and many others and looked at.

And, what she figured out is that what hooks people is the contrast that we're all hooked by contrast, whether it's in the delivery, the tone, inflection, or the type of information that you rely upon. But it's that and perhaps that's akin to the surprise here, that you need something to click, some contrast like that to serve as a spark in this context for imagination today. Did I get that about right in this context?

Rita

Yeah, absolutely. That what you're after as a leader is the thing that doesn't conform to your previous assumptions. The thing that you look at it, oh well. And that didn't come out the way I thought it would.

Jeff

These incongruities that existing business and to have the to have the intuition to be able to go deeper into it when you see it.

And so okay let's go through one more. I love this one as well. Use deliberate decision making processes for consequential and irreversible decisions, but then use small, agile, empowered teams to for perhaps reversible experimental decisions. So, this dichotomy between you've got something really big, consequential, irreversible, then it's different from decisions that may be more experimental. Explain that a bit more Rita.

Rita

Sure. So, what happens in companies over time is, you know, bad stuff happens. You're in the world of taxes, bad stuff always happens, right. And so, what happens over time is we put in rules to make sure bad stuff doesn't happen. And if you let that accumulate over many years, what ends up happening is you got this thicket of compliance and rules and heaviness process, which is appropriate.

As you said, when you got a high risk, very consequential bet the company kind of thing to think through. You really need to give that time and attention and do your risk management and all those other things. But if you're just running an experiment, if you're just doing something that is, you know, I wonder if this client will prefer blue or pink. It's reversible. It's not expensive. You could do it quickly. And what we do in companies is we impose that same heavy use of process on both kinds of decisions. And I think that's a mistake. I think what ends up happening is, you kind of disempower people. So, I have a friend who's got a great phrase for this. He calls it the creating the permissionless organization. So being so clear about your strategy, your intentions, what's in, what's out, what the guardrails are, what you're allowed to do, you know, independently of getting anybody's approval and that allows people to try things out without it being this huge monolithic idea. The other thing that I think is very relevant to this point is the best organizations put vehicles in place so that people really at the edges can get some resources to try things out without consequence of all that you failed that didn't work. And different companies do it different ways. And you've spoken about this before. You know, 3M has these grants that they can awards with a scientist really believes in something. They can get some money to work on it. Adobe has a program called Kickbox, which gives, pretty much anybody in the company that wants to try something out $1,000 to try it.

Now, most of the time it's not going to work but you know you've got in the case of Adobe you've got an actual mechanism to try this thing out. And they've now taken it to the Creative Commons license. So, if you go to KickBox.org, you can actually download the resources and request studies and see how other people have done it.

I think that the thing that they have in common is this theme of trying to make some resources available at the edges again so people can take independent initiative and try things out to test their hypotheses.

Jeff

We are a user of KickBox. We spend some time with that team and I just love that they released it open source and put it in the Creative Commons. And this goes back a few years, but we adopted it, we tweaked it a bit, made it our own to fit what we were doing. But I just find it's such an inspiring program and there's something above there actually is a box, there's a box that you get and it's and there's something about that too. And maybe it gets back to your point Rita about surprise or about contrast that like there's an event it's not that you just went to a presentation, but you actually got this physical box and with real stuff in it to help facilitate innovation and it made me think of among I think still the best advice that I received shifting my career into an innovation-focused role is don't debate as much as test. And there's such a tendency and we see this within our organization and many of our clients as well that that we love to debate things. We love to develop pros and cons lists or for us accountants and tax people to account with the left in a right what's plus and what's a minus a debit, for every debit there's a credit we love to kick that stuff around. But, how do you shift from that and create these small experiments and test to get information to make better decisions. Isn't that really what we're trying to all do anyway, is just make a better decision.

Rita

Yeah. So, there's a wonderful book by my colleague Michael Schrager, who's with the MIT. He used to be at the Media Lab, he's moved on to something else now. But he says an experiment is worth a thousand ideas and he has an actual formula for how you do an experiment and another good resource is Alberto Savoia’s wonderful book, The Right It. Where he talks about formulating an X-Y-Z hypothesis, the XYZ hypothesis is something like I assume X will happen to Y population to produce such an outcome.

So, let's say I'm running a subscription business. I just wrote a piece on this. If I assume that 20% of my free subscribers will convert to become pay subscribers within a six-month period, and now you can go test that. And, you know, if you run the experiment and it's 2%, not 20%, well the rest of the numbers in your plan have to change.

So, my argument here is stop arguing about who's right. You know, figure out a way to construct a hypothesis test which would give you some answers. And that's a much more productive use of time than I'm sure you spend hours and hours listening to people debate things like should the price be 49 or 72, you know, and the reality is you don't know until you get up there and try it.

Jeff

It happens almost on a weekly basis. But that mindset of how do you shift a conversation in a debate and those pros and cons to actually create an experiment. And it's maybe it's the scientist in all of us, right, to actually create that experiment. To prove or disprove is there's nothing better sometimes than disproving it. And, you know, ideas are a dime a dozen, but you can't focus on everything, so how do you design those tests? Okay, so those are a few. And again, for our audience, you have to go out by the book, Seeing Around Corners, you'll see the other of these eight practices that I found so relevant and really helpful in this work of looking for those inflection points. You also recognize, Rita, in the book that there are three kinds of indicators in any business; lagging indicators, current and then leading indicators.

Can you explain those three indicators and the difference across those?

Rita

So, lagging indicators are basically information about something that's already taken place. And most of the information we use in business, unfortunately, has this lagging quality to it because you know, it's financial reports. Well, the financial report is about sales you've already made or it's, you know, historical information about that, some tax you paid last year or whatever.

So that's lagging and it's not bad information. But keep forgetting is it's not predictive. You know, you can't change anything about a lagging indicator. Then you have current indicators which tell you where you are. So things like your net promoter score with your clients, your employee engagement scores, what's the current rate of churn among your customers or your people?

Those all kind of give you an idea about where things are right now. The leading indicators are the hardest to manage, and there's a couple of reasons. The first one is, by definition, leading indicators tell you about something that hasn't happened yet. And so, reasonable people can disagree about what the data mean. So that's the first one. Secondly, they often take the form of stories and hypotheses.

They're not data, they're not facts are not in a spreadsheet. So, there are the people who are super uncomfortable with that. So, you're telling me this story about something like, why would that be? And the third thing that happens with leading indicators is we tend to confuse our preferences with our predictions. And so, we want so badly for a situation to occur that we just won't even allow ourselves to think about, well, maybe it'll be B.

So, I'll give a concrete example one of the things I was working with the client was if you think about March of 20, 22 sorts set that's now six months away, where are we going to be with the virus and there's two choices, right? One is the Delta goes away and there's not another one. And people, you know, get vaccinated in larger numbers and we can stop community spread and out about that.

Then that would be, you know, okay, we're past the pandemic at that moment. The other situation that they have to think about is their thinking about their scenario planning is that we continue to be in this muddle for another year or more. And, you know, depending on what data you're looking at, what you would do that is you say, okay, these are my time zero events what data should I be looking at right now here?

You know, in the fall of 2021 to determine whether situation A or situation B is becoming more likely. And I think that's the kind of thinking that people really struggle with. So, if you think about it, it's very human not to want to invest today. To be resilient to something that may or may not ever happen in the future.

And yet what we know is these awful things happen regularly. They happen. And, so if you think about something like the Y2K problem, right, which was that in the year 2000, all the computers were going to think we'd reset time to 1900. And you remember the stories at the time, it was going to be dire. The airplanes were going to drop out of the sky and nuclear plants were going to become unstable, and we would all move to Montana and stockpile waiting.

So, when the big moment came, the year 2000 came, what happened? Nothing happened. We spent as a society, we spent $100 billion to make sure nothing would happen. And it's hard to get people to take action in that period where it's a leading indicator that you're trying to operate on.

Jeff

It is such an important part I think of the message and, and perhaps it just shows by human nature how easy it is to focus on lagging indicators.

Maybe it's the, the tax person and me or the types of issues that we're working with. But that information is so readily available, it's staring you in the face. Whether it's a company’s balance sheet or a profit and loss statement. And there's no shortage in this data-centric world that we live in with what those lagging indicators are.

But in reading this part and in talking this through with you, Rita, it seems as though that that it's almost like there's a gravitational pull, that pulls leaders back in time towards the lagging indicators or even the car in which perhaps are a bit more helpful than lagging indicators. But what is it about what makes leading indicators so difficult to discover because isn't that really why this gravitational pull pulls us back into lagging indicators?

Because, it's not so easy to discover these leading indicators is it?

Rita

Well, what I'm always struck by is how really easy ones get missed. And, so I think the short answer to your question is I think it has to do with incentives. I think it has to do with what we reward people for and what we reward most executives for is current quarter performance, you know, or at least compared to last year, how did you do. So, I think rewarding backwards is the first problem. The second problem, though, is that we don't think second order and let me give an example. I was working with a big company whose one of their lines of business is they create products for babies. And I did one of these early mornings workshops for them. And I said, look, one of the scenarios you guys want to think about, oh, the way that I do this is I have them construct two future scenarios.

And you got at least four possible futures to think about. And one of the futures I raised with them was what about a baby bust, you know, and they're running around worrying about things like environmental regulations on single use, plastics and what's, you know, what's going to happen with the multinational. And I was like, guys, you know, if a million potential customers, if you want to think of them that way, are simply not born between now and the next three years, don't you think that could affect your business?

Now, here's something that people just keep forgetting. Is one of the most reliable leading indicators you will ever find are demographics. You know, if you want to know how many 20 year olds there are likely to be in the next ten years, guess what? They're all alive and well. And today they're all ten years old. And yet we don't we don't even look at the easy ones.

Jeff

Hmm. It's also, I think and there's a great line in the book I'm going to ask you to state and to comment on that I think it's so helpful to think about when change does occur. And, and one of my favorite aspects is the, the Ernest Hemingway line. Do you want to explain what I mean by that.

Rita

It comes from the novel The Sun Also Rises, and one character asks another. So, how did you go bankrupt? And the response was, well, two ways - gradually and then suddenly that really was one of the inspirations.

Jeff

Gradually. And then suddenly. But isn't that really so relevant? And you mentioned Kodak earlier and that's something that an area that we've gone over on the podcast in the past is disruptions like that and what happens gradually. But then something happens and it speeds up. Explain that in the context of quote like that about how change occurs gradually and then suddenly and apply that to business change or disruption that when we look at these patterns of disruption and these patterns of change. Is that how you think they occur sometimes in business that they're on a gradual trend line but then something happens and there's an event, perhaps it's a bit of a cliff event and then something happens suddenly today. Did I get that right? Extending that great quote to business practice.

Rita

Yeah. So, let's take a concrete example. The case of the burgeoning group of companies that are called direct to consumer companies competing with traditional retailers. And what you find out is, is the initial ones, the first early ones that were digitally native, let's call it that was so maybe rent the runway would be an example of a company that started this category. And there are many, many others. But is your take of the established incumbent? Right. They're not paying attention to the fact that, you know, some woman in a warehouse near where you are in Cambridge has figured out a way for people to get access to designer clothing without actually having to buy designer clothing like that doesn't immediately flatter up on the on the radar as an alarming thing. And yet, if you look at from the time that company was founded all the way through, you had this just massive wave of companies selling everything from, you know, food, clothing to mattresses to shaving gear to, you know, you name it. And that that would be massively destabilizing, but not for a long time. Right. I mean, it took a long time before we began to have this direct consumer model that was actually economic and people started to understand, well, what are the metrics we need to look at there? Another one I would point to that was gradual and then sudden is the whole evolution of the software as a service business model. You know, when Salesforce I think, was the first company to really, you know, bet the farm on that, that was seen as very controversial and it was sort of seen as, oh, well, you know, for small companies maybe, but it's not going to affect, you know, the core business of a large customer relationship management company.

So, I think the early signs are often easy to gloss over. You know, you'll hear leaders say things like they don't know how to scale or in the case of energy, no, we work with real fuel. You know, like we don't work with renewables. We work with real fuel. And what happens over time is people figure it out.

So, another interesting aspect of this is there is this other phenomena where you see something or somebody sees something and then it gets massively overhyped way before the world is ready for it. Right. And, you know, the original .com revolution was a case, right? And, you know, everybody had to run around getting a Web page and getting a dot com address.

But we had this huge bubble. And then when it finally deflated, there were an awful lot of people saying, see, I told you this dot com thing was never going to be anything. But, what happened in the early shows, you know, and subsequently now was some of the survivors of that original crash began to figure it out, you know, so you had, you know, the e-commerce companies working out.

You know, here's how you establish a payment system and here's how you get people to trust that this is going to be safe and here's how you and and and and right. So that they eventually built a viable ecosystem which over time came to rival the one that had existed before.

Jeff

And many in our audience have probably seen the Gartner hype cycle and ends and how prolific that is and what a great explanation of and gave some wonderful examples that you could think of other technology examples like and we were looking at it just a short time ago about blockchain and there was this initial hype with blockchain and some crypto assets. You have to recognize that you're going to come off of that hill, that early initial hype and market interest that almost always you're going to come off of it. And then there's going to be some, for lack of a better word, steadying and progression of the particular product or service or solution. And it's that second climb that we get so interested in, that second climb, you can just envision the hype cycle in your mind.

You're over the first hurdle, you're over that first time. You come down the other side and you make your adjustments and that second climb of real, perhaps more sustainable growth and how important that is. This may be a good pivot to that. The second of the three parts of the framework about, well, then what do you do about those inflection points? And then I want to return Rita to something that you mentioned earlier. This concept of a Time Zero event and I just think that that as we look at all of the different actions and the way that you describe what a Time Zero event is, and how does that lead to taking real action to do something? Explain what we mean by Time Zero event.

Rita

Sure. So, a Time zero event is the moment when the inflection has arrived. And, you know, you can take pictures of it, you can describe it to people. You can talk about what an impact it has on your business and what I like to think about with Times Zero events is you don't want to wait till then to be making your preparations.

Right, because your degrees of strategic freedom at times zero are pretty limited. At the same time, you don't want to be making decisions so far back that it's just complete noisy because you know, and what so what happens is your ability to make sense of information gets stronger over time. So, what you want to be doing is pushing your decision making horizon you call it your trip wires back in time from time zero. So, go back to my example from like where are we going to be with COVID in March? Well, there's things you could see you know, you can look at things like vaccination rates. You can look at things like rates of outbreak. You can look at things like, you know, what our country is doing. You can look at things like you know, where where our new variants appearing where where those things and buy by sort of watching those indicators, leading indicators again, you can begin to make intelligent judgments about which scenario is likely to be unfolding and then make your decisions while you still get time to act. So the time zero concept is really that you have the fewest degrees of strategic freedom and now you really need to do something. So, to connect that to strategy, right?

So how do you decide what to do about it once this thing is underway and I see, you know, a variety of responses, some folks see it and either willfully or because they just can't bear to grapple with the implications, choose to, well, they're not ignoring it in their heads, but they're ignoring it in their actions. So, pick half of the energy industry today.

Companies are never be I mean, they know that by 2050 the business as it's existed is not going to be the way it is at all. And yet when you look at how the leadership at the various companies have responded, there are some that are just like, yeah, yeah, yeah I get that. But you know, today I got to do, so they get it in their heads but they're not doing anything differently.

Then you got the ones that are sort of frozen in the headlights. They're like, Oh my God, what do I do? And they don't invest in the old system and they don't invest in the new system. They're just kind of paralyzed. And then you get the ones that actually are saying, ‘Okay, what I need to do here is begin to roll out some innovations or practices or experiments which could help give me more information’.

So, what you want to do in the run up to a time zero event is, you know, what information would I like to have to know what the right decision would be in that scenario and then go look for it. Because a lot of times there's it's out there and you can actually give you a lot more confidence in making a decision.

Then, if you just use the usual channels.

Jeff

There's so much there and you had mentioned even a few minutes ago, I want to make sure the audience really heard what you said is that there's a difference between if I get the words right, Rita, difference between prediction and preference. Right, and not to make and I take that distinction or the recognition of that distinction is don't just assume that your preferences will become reality, but that that it's not even as much about prediction. I've heard you talk a bit about this as well, but it's about preparedness and talk a bit about that. That I think is such an important concept because I think many people perhaps coming into this discussion about looking around the corner and looking at those inflection points, that I think it may be natural to think, well, isn't it really about just making a prediction, looking at all those signals and sticking your thumb in the wind and predicting and then everything will take care of itself? But the preparedness is like the linchpin, isn't it, of preparing your organization to talk a bit about that? Did I get that right? First of all.

Rita

Yeah. So, the way to think about that, maybe an analogy would be useful is if you're, you know, in a car, right and you can only see six or twelve feet in front of you and you suddenly see an obstacle. You've got to make a huge wrenching turn of the wheel to avoid that situation. If, on the other hand, your line of sight is a mile or more, right? You can make the adjustments you need to make with fairly small turns of the wheel. So, part of what I think is in the new strategy playbook is I like to talk about it, is you want to be making lots of small cumulative changes so that as the world is shifting around you, you're kind of shifting in concert with it. And I don't mean huge wrenching things have become a huge opponent of large corporate programs that come fully funded with all the staff and all the stuff up front, because you're making assumptions about what's going on that are highly likely to have at least half of them be wrong. And so you put all this corporate weight behind something that is 50% off already.

And so, you know, you think you're going sort of 20 degrees east in terms that you really needed to be going 40 degrees east. Well, that's a huge difference by the time you take it out. So, I think the idea behind prediction, behind prevention is to build into your organization enough resilience to make those small changes. So, don't get everything so tuned and tightened any little bump along the way is going to send you flying and recognize that there is you can almost think about it like the way you manage your portfolio right there should be or your financial portfolio. There should be some things in there that have the potential to really be great. But if they don't work out, you know, you're not having to mortgage your house right.

There should also be things in there that you can count on in the event something bad happens. And so, I think it's getting that balance right that a lot of firms mess up. I think an example we're seeing right now is the whole way the global supply chain is, you know, struggling, that we have built ourselves such a tuned, too tight you know, efficient, optimized model that any little glitch anywhere, you know, 40 layers down all of a sudden, you know, Toyota shutting down its manufacturing plants. And that's to me a symptom of not being prepared. Not even doing the work of saying, you know, how vulnerable are we to this.

And I mean you guys run risk business, right? Somebody should be asking that question. You know, if all of our suppliers in Indonesia get knocked out, what does that mean for us? And I think a lot of people don't even want to ask the question.

Jeff

And of course, many of these organizations that we're talking about in many in our better innovation audience today, these are ocean liners of an organization and to turn that ocean liner on a dime is impossible and putting greater emphasis on preparedness. And then also, given the time that we're in as we record this today, the early days of September and how important that is as everybody's thing every board is discussing resilience and discussing readiness for the next crisis. It is all about resilience and preparedness and what if some organizations frankly just get wrong and not they weren't ready for the pandemic and governments weren't ready. Okay let's shift to the third component of the framework. It's so important. How do you bring the organization along with you? Let's start with the why; why is it important to focus on organization here? Why is this so critical?

Rita

Well, you know, first of all, you can't do much just by yourself with the reason you have an organization is that there are things that you can't accomplish as an individual contributor. So, it's important to have your people, your team, other people coming along with you. Secondly, it's because to build the infrastructure, to be able to cope with whatever comes after the inflection point, after the time zero. You need to have hearts and minds engaged in that. And again, it's this concept of the edges, right? And it has big implications for leadership. So, increasingly what we're seeing is leaders creating the conditions in which the organization generates options. And then one of the roles of the leadership team, these senior most decision makers, is to choose from among those options. It's not to tell people what the options should be. It's to say, we've done these experiments, we've discovered this, we've done these learnings, here are our choices. You know, we've got maybe five plausible paths we could take which of those after debate and discussion and much sort of muddling through do we want to set the organization on? And then and then you need to have everybody acting coherently around it. And if you don't have that, what ends up happening is you have the group thinks you're going to Japan and the other half thinks you're doing to Malaysia. And then there's a group to say we're not going anywhere. The whole thing just kind of stops.

Jeff

And that's and this is not easy. And oftentimes within that particular process, and seeing the inflection point and evaluating the actions could be meaningful change, could be difficult change. There will be friction. There will be competition for those opposing views.

Of course, there'll be organizational politics. And I'm so glad that we're talking about it because I love how you opened up the section. You can't do it alone. What's it worth? You know, as an individual contributor, you can only do so much. But isn't it really about the hearts and minds of the particular course of action that you want to pursue in your example?

Is it Malaysia? Is it Indonesia? Is it is that something else, you have to convince and it's so hard to tell anybody to do anything within organizations today. How do you get to the hearts and minds, whether it's through incentive mechanisms or otherwise, to pull them along with you, to give the organization a greater chance of success from following that particular course of action?

And so difficult, so hard to do in many instances. But unless you can crack this nut and get the organization with you, then you may not have much success is how I took this particular point.

Rita

Yeah. I think one of the things that leaders sometimes underestimate is just how important the story is, in the story of where we are to be happening, let's come along with me and together with stories, symbolic meaning and I think a lot of leaders forget that everything they do has the substance. So, I made this decision to do X versus Y because. Right, the logic. But it's also got the meaning that people make of your decisions. And if you think about the stories you read, right. Business press, a lot of times it's about something symbolic that was either a disconnect or that was, you know, that really was a support. If you think of the great leaders, we talked about great speeches earlier, you think of the great leaders in history. They used symbolism to relentlessly reinforce the journey. The point that this is where we need to go, this is what we need to be.

And they and they backed it up with actual action. So there is a great story I read the other day, which I had not known about Walt Disney, the demand, Walt Disney, and why there are no mosquitos in the Orlando theme park. And one of the things he had done was he had gone out and recruited experts at Mosquito Management.

And one of the big ‘ahas’ from talking to those experts was that the way to prevent mosquitoes from being able to breed is that you don't allow pools of water to puddle anywhere. And so, if you look at how Disney, Disneyworld, the one in Florida, if you look at how it's built, all the moves have these curves, there's you know what fountains everywhere are there's these little running things water's not allowed to stand around in pool.

And so in one of the most mosquito infested environments in the world, Disney was able to address that problem. You're not going to have the same propensity as you would if things were just left to chance. Now, why I think that's such an interesting simple story is, you know, he didn't go out and, you know, dick delegates, you know, go institute a massive task force.

You know, he sort of laid out what the end goal was and then what do we need to learn to figure out how to do this in a way that's not bad for the environment. That's not bad for our guests. It's reliable and went to look for these unusual sources. And I just thought that was such an interesting leadership moment in the sense of here's the goal, right?

Let's find out the best and worst is to get to that goal.

Jeff

It is such an interesting way to put it in. And perhaps it's an acknowledgment that there are real people on the other side of these decisions that we're all wired for story we're not wired for I think there's tremendous risk in and how we're all so focused on making data driven decisions.

And there's an important for artificial intelligence prediction models and analyzing data different ways and finding new data streams that may be predictive of certain outcomes, but we can't forget the point that you're raising, Rita, which is that we're wired for story and that’s what sticks. And so in this this opportunity for leaders to galvanize, I suppose, right there, galvanizing the organization and getting them behind you don't lose sight of this is a leadership moment and that there are humans on the other side of it and how do you appeal to them because you're talking about sometimes significant change that you're trying to promote in order to deal with the particular inflection point.

I think it's such an important point. You published this book in 2019. My guess is that perhaps you didn't know that there would be a global pandemic within a few months of this hitting the shelves.

Rita

So sure, I knew that writing was timed perfectly for that. No, I of course didn't know that and yet what was interesting in reflection and looking back and, you know, I had no particular reason to be exploring public health, but what's happened since is we have seen the mountains of evidence that not only suggested a global pandemic could happen, but that it was highly likely to originate in China or you know, in that part of the world, and that it was highly likely to involve some kind of mutation in animals that would find its way to humans. And, you know, there's a big debate about where the actual origin was. But there are stories being written in 2016 and 2017, very specifically and not just the emergence of the virus, but the characteristics of our being unprepared that would turn it into a global pandemic.

So, if you think about it, we've had other situations like this. We've had other viruses that did not take on this incredibly global infectiousness because we put in place systems to stop that. And with, with the rise of what unfortunately what happened was a lot of those systems had been dismantled. And so, the book, the book, I guess the book would be friendly to guess this kind of thing can happen, but also pay attention to your helpful Cassandras. There were people who were talking about this like standing on rooftops, screaming about it for a long time before it actually became reality.

Jeff

And well, I find it so interesting that that if you look around the time, just take whether it's, you know, 2018, 2019, that timeframe pre-pandemic. There were countless organizations and teams that can convene to analyze the risk the various risks that may impact organization of governments and societies. And there were clearly other risks that became more dominant for those teams to consider. The perhaps one of the most pressing risks was around cybersecurity and data protection and personal data rights and I mean that certainly rose to the top of many.

But you're right, something got missed here and the pace of change has accelerated incredibly over the past year and a half because of the pandemic. How has that impacted your thinking on inflection points?

Rita

I would say a couple of things that surprised me. So, the first thing that surprised me was just how fast we adapted. I mean, just how quickly organizations said, oh my God, this is coming. We need to take action now and, you know, work from home stuff that was oh, yeah, yeah. We'll get to it.

And, you know, maybe a few tech people can do it. All of a sudden it was like, no, we need laptops for all 40,000 of our call center people next week, I mean people just took actions and made decisions. And one of the things that I found fascinating is and I've had this conversation with so many people, they said, you know, the first few months of the pandemic we were like the highest performing organization we have ever been.

It was just astonishing. We made good decisions. We took everybody's perspective into account. We’ve shoved aside the politics. We cooperated with competitors. If you look at the pharma industry, from people who are arch rivals who would never reveal anything about what's going on in their labs, all coming together to try to get this problem solved. So, the first big surprise was how effectively that that crisis moment really shoved us into really operating in a much more effective interpersonal and organizational way.

So that was one big surprise. I think another big surprise was how much of the assumptions of the way the world should work were really being challenged. And several that come to mind are, you know, how essential workers jobs are, how awful many of those jobs are and how we just kind of sleepwalked our way into, I think the number something like 35.6 million jobs in the United States are terrible jobs.

And yet the pandemic reveals they're essential. They're absolutely critical. And yet we're not paying people well. We're not training them we're not giving them development paths and so forth. So, a lot of these sort of unspoken and under acknowledged assumptions were really now being revealed. And it gives people options. And so, one of the interesting ones I'm watching right now is this whole work from home.

And we are dealing with mountains of people's opinions Workers are better when they're in the office. They're more productive. It's much better for you to commute an hour and a half each way because maybe you'll have a serendipitous conversation with a colleague or I want to see everybody in the office because then we can all come together spontaneously for stuff.

And on the other side, they're saying, no, actually, I can do without the commute. I can work from home. But my point is, neither side knows right now what the right answer is. And the only way we're going to get to some kind of answer is by, you know, lots of different organizations are going to do a fair amount of experimentation and I think what we're learning is that part of what the pandemic has done is it's pushed us into this situation where, you know, we're having to acknowledge that we don't know that we just have a lot more assumptions we're making the knowledge that we have. And I think that's in a way, maybe a good thing. It's given us permission to change.

Jeff

And we don't know and I think it's a great example of the points that we were discussing earlier about don't debate it but experiment. And we're starting to see workers who are leaving organizations because they don't feel philosophically aligned to perhaps where leadership is and we've seen some big financial service companies say if you want salaries in the big cities, then, you know, get out of the vacation land and come back to the big city and others that are perhaps more open to alternative work arrangements. It will take some time. It will take some time for that to develop.

We can feel the passion Rita for your work. What is next for you? What's the next book that you're working on?

Rita

For me, what am I working on? Well, three, I guess three things that are a lot of fun. One is, of course, you know, you're always thinking about the next book once the previous one has been published. And the theme that I'm thinking of for it is, is literally time zero.

So, you know, you're in an inflection point. You've, you've hit it, maybe you prepared, maybe you didn't. But you know what? What's the thought process you should be following now? And I think that'll be an interesting one to think about. It hasn't it hasn't got that crystallizing clarity of gradually then suddenly yet. But I'm hoping you'll be able to.

So my process for books, it's kind of like you pick up lots and lots of pieces and eventually something happens to sort of put them together in a puzzle piece. And that's when the book crystallizes in my mind. So that's one that I'm working on. I'm also working on a capability building tools kind of concept, which is the result of years of frustration, which is I would get up and I would talk to people and I would tell them about innovation and how important it is, and they would agree and be enthusiastic and then they'd go back to their organization and it's like, what is it, is it a spreadsheet, is it a new kind of stuff and what is it? Right. You know, so I'm working on building some tools that will try to translate some of the theory into practice. So, for instance, I talk about planning by check points, right? Well, what does that actually mean and how is it different from planning the way we normally do? Well, in a normal plan, what you have is you say, okay, you know, quarter one, this is what's going to happen, quarter two, this is what's going to happen.

And, it's very linear almost. Whereas if you're planning by check points, what you do is you say, Okay, I'm going to plan like crazy till I get the first prototype. I'm going to be very, very detailed about what prototypes I'm going to make and what audiences I'm going to test it with. But then I'm actually going to stop and I'm going to say, what does what we've learned tell us about we're ready to go next. So, it's not a linear, assuming, you know, the answer kind of planned. It's a much more fluid kind of thing, but people don't know how to do that. So, one of the things I'm building is this, it's a software structure. It's not really a software offer, but it's a software structure that goes together with a set of, I’ll call them learning modules.

So, you get to prototypes. Let's just say and let's say half your team doesn't know anything about prototypes. Well, what are your choices? You can have them all, you know, go to class somewhere. You can try to teach them the results. You can have the ones that maybe know it's very inefficient process, right? So, my vision here is that, you know, you get to prototypes, you pop out over to the learning system, you have four or five or six lessons about prototypes that'll get you enough to get you started.

But, you've now got everybody been through the same experience, speaking the same language. They know the difference between prototype and experiment you do, for example. And then they can come back and do their work and so that's something that I'm very excited about. And I've been working on it for a while now. But maybe, maybe this time I'll hit on a formula that actually works.

Jeff

But such a need for that in the world and it's the world that I'm in and big organizations and innovation. I think there's, there's something to that about how do you define roles full time versus part time and when innovation is a 7% job for somebody, how can you really assume that something great will come out of it?

Made me think, too, of I was reading something the other day about the timeline for launching new products and something to the effect of if you're happy with your version one, if you're really happy with your version one product, you probably took too long to ship it, which has been sort of rummaging around my head lately about the need for speed, especially as we were coming out of the pandemic and looking at new growth opportunities, the need to harness how important a moment this is not to get too crazy about it, but we are this is a generational moment in time as we sit here in the fall of 2021 and what's happening in the world opportunity to harness energy within an organization, think of ideas and ship products really quickly to the point about about you double clicking on time zero and what that means for those of us who love the work that would be tremendous because I think it would give the innovators and those seeking growth something really tangible to latch on to.

Now what do I do about these inflection points and I think that's such an important part of your work.

We are getting close to the end of our discussion Rita, there's been so much written about applying these ideas to see around the corners in your own life when and extending these principles personally. And I'm just so curious, how can these skills and capabilities help of us both professionally and personally?

We talk about organizational readiness and organizations doing great things. But what about us as people and how can these principles help us individually?

Rita

So, I think many of the principles are the same, right? Which is you want to have options in your life. So, you don't just want to have one deep functional specialization that silos you in your thinking.

You want to build networks that allow you to be resilient. So, one of the things I ask people to think about is, let's say the organization you work for goes out of business tomorrow. Do you know ten numbers you can call that would help you figure out at least what the next step could be? Right.

And if you don't have that, then you haven't invested enough in your resilience and your network. And the last thing I would say about that, two more things, if you there was Korn Ferry, I think it was, and LinkedIn did a bit of research looking at who got to be in the C-suite and what their career trajectory had been like.

And what they discovered empirically was that the people that really got those big jobs were zigzag careers. So maybe they started off in marketing, but they spent a few years in operations. Maybe after that they took a role in sales. Maybe they jumped companies then and you know, did a sort of a subject matter expert thing. But I think what we are boards and people that pick C-suite, people are intuiting right is that we need people with broader apertures.

We need people who are curious, who have been exposed to enough that they recognize something when they see it. You know, I mean, people talk about intuition and there's a lot of work that's been done on intuition that shows that if you're in a situation which is similar to one, you've been in before, then you're probably your intuition is a good guide.

If you're in a situation which does not resemble anything you've been in before, then your intuition is likely to lead you astray. And one of the most interesting findings of this was, you know, the profession that is best in the world at determining whether somebody is lying to them. Customs inspectors. And I was blown away by this.

I was like customs inspectors. Well, customs inspectors think about it every single day. They're looking at people coming in with suitcases and saying, do you have, you know, built on in that suitcase? And people are saying yes or no. And they're like, well, let's just have a look. And so, most of human experience is not informed by feedback.

Like we make decisions and maybe it works out and maybe it doesn't. We don't really ever get to the causality of it. Whereas customs inspectors 8 hours a day, every day getting the opportunity to find out if they're intuitions right or repetition and yeah, you know, and so they get really good at it over time. I mean, there are people I’m told in the customs inspection world can look at a truck and tell you whether the truck is likely to have contraband on it.

I mean, that's amazing. Last thing I would say that of a personal inflection points is, I think it's a mistake to shy away from them and to try to pretend it's not going to touch me or it doesn't happen. And the analogy I’d introduce there is you remember the Apollo 13 mission which went so disastrously wrong and the people at Mission Control were very concerned because they didn't think the ship had enough energy to turn around and get the astronauts safely back to Earth.

And some bright spark came up with the idea. They said, well, wait a minute, what if we would have we accelerated the movement of the ship toward the moon and ricocheted around the moon and use the moon's energy to give it that boost back to earth and that's essentially what they did. And you know thankfully for all of us that that idea worked.

But I think the analogy of where are the places I could accelerate toward to get that boost of energy the next phase, I think, is something worth asking yourself,

Jeff

Isn’t that great? Seeing the movie where they just take everything that's in the capsule, they dumped it on the table and the scientists staring at it and creatively with no guidebook to think of how are they going to get out of this problem and how are they going to fix it.

And I think it's such great advice. And I look at that examples of those in the C-suite and our former chairman of EY Mark Weinberger always highlights the fact that, he left the firm and went in and out of government, I think four times over his career. Left our firm, went to government, came back, went and did that multiple times, multiple roles.

And for some, that's uncomfortable. It's uncomfortable changing so much. But I think it's such a great point to anchor on Rita as we come to a close today. We always end our Better Innovation episodes with three rapid fire questions, quick questions, quick answers, as if we have not been having enough fun. This is the even more fun part of the interview.

What do you think? Are you up for it? Okay, here we go. First question, what book do you have on your nightstand? The Conversation by Robert Livingston. Okay. Tell me more. What's it about?

Rita

It's about conversations about race. And he's going to be one of my Fireside chat guests. And his argument in the book is that this is a fixable situation and that it really begins with human to human conversation.

And he walks you really through a whole series of explorations. It's very well researched of you know, what caused the situation of race relations in the United States to be the way it is. How do you break those barriers down and do it in a way that isn't putting one side against the other or that isn't insulting to people?

It's very, very thoughtful. So, I've been reading that and enjoying it.

Jeff

I can't wait for your fireside chat now, having been on the other side of that. I can't wait. That'll be so much fun to see. Okay. Second question, Rita. Tell us about a historical figure who you admire.

Rita

Oh, lots of them. I would say maybe Queen Elizabeth, the first one of England.

And, you know, to have had the kind of impact she had with everything she was up against, you know, from murderous relatives to romantic betrayals and everything in between. I think she must have been a remarkable person. Wonderful.

Jeff

Excellent. Last question. What do you see as our greatest opportunity to build back stronger when we emerge from the pandemic?

Rita

Creating an environment and where everyone's gifts can come to the surface?

And in far too many places, we you know, here's the analogy I would use. You know, if you look at YouTube or Instagram or any of these sort of very individualistic outlets for creativity, it's unbelievable. The talent that's out there, the sheer human ingenuity that's just blossoming. And yet we take those self-same, creative, ingenious people. We pop them in a corporation and all of a sudden we expect them to be like badly performing robots.

And so to me, like, one of the hugest opportunities we have is really engaging in a new way of unleashing human potential which, you know, which is available to everybody.

Jeff

And I think we have organizations now that are more open to it. The point you raised a few minutes ago that we saw how successful they were in those early days of the pandemic, put the politics aside and just found the right person for the right job and how teams could come together.

I think a great point for us to end our conversation today. Rita, I've really enjoyed this part two of our Home and Away series. I hope maybe you'll come back someday to Better Innovation

Rita

absolutely. And I'm dying to visit your lab when it's safe to do that.

Jeff

Oh, we'd love to. We'd love to have you there.

We love having visitors, and we usually take a stroll through MIT in the media lab and our friends there. And the collaboration means so much to us, so, open invitation when those things are happening again in the world, would love to have you come in. Thank you so much for joining us today. It's a real pleasure. Thank you.