This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and Bloomberg Quick Takes Tim Stinovic on Bloomberg Radio. Well, over the last seventeen months is we've endured the pandemic. We've seen some businesses absolutely thrive, while others not so much. Our next guest argues that those that have thrived were in fact prepared for an unexpected event like a pandemic, or maybe it wasn't even a pandemic that they were prepared for, but something else unexpected and they were able to pivot
and take advantage of the change. Joining us now is Jonathan Brill, former global futurist at Hewlett Packard. He's also the author of Rogue Waves future Proof Your Business to Survive and Profit from Radical Change. He joins us on the phone from Boston. Jonathan, the book is out today. Congratulations. I really appreciate you joining us on Bloomberg Business Week Radio. First of all, what is a rogue wave? Kim? Thanks for having me. So you've probably heard of black swan event.
These are completely unpredictable things that come out of aware and often CEOs used this as an excuse, But the reality is that most radical disruptions are more knowable than you might imagine. What I call roade waves. They're unmanageable, hundred foot waves of change. They are caused by the
collision of individually manageable constructions. I mean, when you think about something like COVID, the fall of couple the floods in Germany or China over the last couple of months, they're important, but what really amplified them was waves of social, economic, and technological change. And that's actually what the disruption is. Right. We opened up after after the last round of COVID, We just turned the advertising and we're now seeing a
bit of a resurgence as a result of that. It's all of the things around the pandemic that are causing the impact, not just the pandemic itself. And the same is true of opportunities. Over the last couple of years, we've seen this explosion of m R and A vaccines, for instance. The fall of cobble is going to create opportunities, maybe not for the United States, but for China, for which is searching for rarer resources which are common in Afghanistan.
And the flooding in Asia, and the miscalculation of the likelihood of these hundred year thousand year floods is going to create great rebuilding opportunities for some construction companies. And so for the lesson here is that a lot of times, when you have volatility, when you have disruption, it's a threat for some people, but it's an opportunity for the ones that are prepared. So the question isn't how do I respond to how do I understand and predict every
road wave? It's how do I respond when these things hit my business? When they when they hit my finances, my operations, they change my external environment, or maybe they impact my strategy. But a lot of times, Jonathan Company, as a leader, if you don't know what at rogue wave will be, there's only so much you can do to prepare for it. Right. Let's take COVID for example. Let's say you're Jeff Bezos who was running Amazon until
last month. He didn't know that he had to get so much ppe to provide to frontline workers, or know that there would be a very rapid expansion and growth of of Amazon Grocery Deliver your Whole Foods grocery delivery for example. Um Or did he write well what he knew, I've spent some time with leaders at Amazon. What they knew was they had a really good systems model of their organization and they knew exactly how hard they could push or pull the levers. And so the issue wasn't
that they were ready for a pandemic. They didn't pull out their COVID playbook. They were really ready for everything. Most companies really look internally at the things they can control, whether it's their finances or their offer rations. But the reality is most of the things that cause sustained impact on business value are external and strategic. So the question is how would you respond when any of the major UH risk levels are are hit or when they're hit
in different combinations. And one of the things that the Amazon is particularly good at and that I'm an advocate of, is gaming out what are those possibilities, pressure testing your organization, asking what would happen to something unimaginable hit us. Because at the end of the day, Amazon had a really good here, and it was because they weren't ready. It wasn't because they were ready for COVID. It was because
they were ready for anything. Yeah, And that's the key here is being ready for the unexpected, and certainly I do wonder to what extent companies, after learning from the last seventeen months, are going to have strategies in place that will help them prepare for whatever that next black swan or rogue wave or unexpected event will be. Hey, Jonathan Brill, stick with us, because we're gonna come back to you in just a few minutes. We're gonna do
some news. Jonathan Brill is former global futurist at Hewlett Packard, also the author of Rogue Waves future Proof Your Business to Survive and Profit from Radical Change. The book is out now. It came out today. Jonathan Brill joining us live from Boston. We're gonna have much more with him in just a few minutes. I want to get right back to Jonathan Brill, former global futurist at Hewlett Packard, also the author of Rogue Waves future Proof Your Business
to Survive and Profit From Radical Change. He joins us on the phone from Boston. Rogue Waves is out today, and Jonathan joins us once again. Now, Jonathan, I want to talk about this the framework that you developed in this book, the Resilient Growth Strategy UM you call it
the A. B. C's of Resilient Growth. Take us through it. Yeah, So when we think about companies that are consistently profitable through radical changes, like COVID, what we see is that they have consistent characteristics way called the ABC's of resilient growth awareness. If your people don't know why they need to change, obviously they're not getting do that. So you need to focus on improving awareness of the operating environment
through the organization. You need to focus on behavior. It doesn't really matter if your people know that as tsunami is coming, if they don't have the skills to respond. And so the question really is do your managers at all levels have the ability to make sense of increased resilience to and exploit radical change? And then to see in the A b C's is about creating a culture.
Do you have the processes and incentives to encourage employees to make decisions that balance both in your term performance and long term growth that they if they don't. If you don't, obviously they won't. And so when you wrap that up, you get a recipe for a more resilient organization. We were talking earlier about a company like Amazon, and uh, you know this is true for them, but it's also
true for a farmer that they work with in Ohio. Well, that's what I wanted to talk about, because not everybody is in charge of making decisions at a company like Amazon, or in charge of a team even and has to repair a team for a rogue wave. What are some lessons that that people can take away from this? Who are managers, who are employees who are looking to become managers?
What are their takeaways? Yeah? Absolutely, I think that first of all, you're you're right, not everybody can be in charge of everything, but you can have provide clarity, clarity around what it called risk bands. So this is a simple thing. When you ask somebody to do something, tell them how much risk you want them to take, but
also tell them how little that you'll accept. If you don't give that a bump at the bottom, you know, inevitably people will take the least risky path forward as opposed to perhaps the best path forward, or that the one that you and accept. What about when it comes to people who are looking just for their own leadership lessons here and how to lead through turbulent times? That's
a great question. So one of the things we talked about in the book, and there are hundreds of ideas like this is a communication method for leading under uncertainty when you're not the boss, how do you talk to people in a way that you'll be hurt? First you you, it's what I call the lead method, And first you say, here's the logic of what I'm suggesting. The second is about empathy, saying, hey, you know, I understand you may have a different perspective, you might have different goals. I
understand where you're coming from. Let me just double check on that. The third is authority, Right, even if I'm not the boss, why do I have some experience in this situation? And why might I be the person to listen to? The fourth, the d M lead is about the deadline. Right, how long do we have to make
a decision. We can decide who's going to do what for however long, but at the end of the day, by Tuesday, we actually need to close out on this because if not, there will be an issue moving forward.
So if you just take those four pieces of information, logic, empathy, authority, and deadline, you inoculate against most of the things, most of the political issues this more senior managers might use against you or that might cause you to not be heard some more junior employee when you're looking at when you see kind of that iceberg on the horizon. Well, speaking of the iceberg on the horizon, I think a
lot of people are thinking about, Okay, well, the pandemic. Yes, that is something that we need to be prepared for, the next pandemic perhaps or the continued evolution of this current pandemic. Um, how do we get what are the other types of shocks that companies need to be prepared for? What are those what are those unknowns? That's a great question, and I think one of the in the book, we talk about ten major disruptions that are happening over the
next decade. When it was at HP, we spent several million dollars researching the range of possible issues. Every year. Was one of those pandemic from down One of them was was actually a pandemic. It's some of the sec risk violins. So we've announced uh some some businesses that are coming out of that research in our micro fluid ex business UH and and we've been really looking at work from home technologies and how we could uh shift the nature of the business. Uh. Not necessarily for COVID,
but as if something like this happens relatively quickly. The result of that is if you take a look at Xerox over the last year, and their EPs versus hps H piece has been relatively stable versus Zerox is being down I think last year something like six nine by gap.
So the result is, you know, if you take a look at those two companies that should be pure companies have radically different results because one of them took a resilient growth strategy, thought really hard about road waves, and one of them, I believe at least optimized for the near term. What was the moment over the last eighteen months when you realize you needed to write a book about this. Ah, that's a great question. I'm passionate about
what's possible. Uh, kind of breakthrough questions. And I had a moment, uh, you know last year. Uh, I guess eighteen months ago about this time where I realized I knew these things, they had had unique knowledge, and we had to we had to get ahead of the future as a society, as as companies and leaders. Do you think that the way we think about collaboration changes the way that that managers are are planning for these events?
And I asked because everybody is talking about to what extent we're going to be returning to work in the quote unquote new normal physically, and I just wonder how that that change is planning for these types of whether or not you have a distributed workforce around the country versus everybody in one building in a city. So I think what you're asking and let's just let's just take a slightly different metaphor. Is the difference between like in
the military, the infantry and the special forces. You know, you manage them differently. You tend to give orders a little bit differently. And what we're moving from is that lockstep where where the infantry always has communication from the top, to a world in which we need to be coordinated both uh, you know, we need to be both coordinated and autonomous. And that looks a lot more like special forces.
I used to have special Forces operator who was my head of strategy, and he gave me some really good advice once, mainly because I was terrible at giving orders and you know, that's what the army is good at. And he said, Okay, here's the deal. You keep coming, uh, you keep coming to me, giving me half information and running for three weeks right right, Like, what I want you to do is really simple. Tell me what's the context,
what situation? What do we not know? Uh? And then uh, you know what what do I need to do if you don't come back? The context is always so important. Jonathan Bill, former global futurist at Hewlett Packard, also the author of road Waves Future Proof of Your Business To Survive and Profit from Radical Change. The book is out today. That's going to do it for Bloomberg Business Week. Join us tomorrow, same time, same place, don't miss Sound On with Joe Matthew today at five pm Wall Street Time
on Bloomberg Radio. Up next, Joe is going to speak to Massachusetts Representative Seth Molton, a veteran of the Afghanistan war, on the Taliban takeover. That Sound on today at five on Bloomberg Radio