There's so many ideas inside this book. And it's great pleasure to have you back again. Welcome Gary Hamel. Yeah. Thanks to be back Aidan. And I have to say right across this entire series, I'll repeat myself. I'll trigger Gary to repeat himself but I want you to treat it like. A research project to get a real handle of this content. But. I wanted to start on a couple of ideas today and as Mark Twain said, history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes and there's templates here for your company today.
So I thought one thing we'd start with Gary was foresight, this is always a challenge getting it right, but the themes, I think is what people miss. It's the themes you're looking for.
And one of the things you wrote, I thought set this up nicely is a sense of possibility is just as important as a sense of foreboding and inducing a company to escape its past however unappealing a company's present situation it is unlikely to abandon the past for the future unless it has created for itself an alluring vista of the future opportunities an opportunity horizon that presents a compelling alternative to simply reliving yesterday's successes to give up the bird
in hand, a company must see a dozen birds in the bush beautifully said over to Yeah. Well, I think the idea there is just to one degree or another, we are all prisoners of the past and in particular large organizations were built basically to be replication machines to do the same things over and over again. And it is a little scary to reallocate resources, reallocate time pursue something that is less certain than simply repeating what you're already doing.
It's true in our own lives, and it's true in organizations as well. And so, yes, it's very, very important to have this point of view about who are we becoming? Where are we going? What, what, what does the future hold for us? And I think a lot of organizations lack that. We might have talked about data, recent research that indicates most companies do not have a future oriented strategy. They don't have a point of view about how they're trying to change themselves and the world around them.
And I think often there's a sense that in a world that's so volatile and where change is happening so quickly, it's impossible to have that point of view, right? That, the future is essentially unknowable. And that is definitely true to a degree. But as you were suggesting, the broad themes are often visible a long way off.
And there's certain things, if you look at the trajectory of technology, if you look at demographic factors, some geopolitical factors customer needs and behaviors, these often have patterns that you can see if you're willing to look closely enough. And so I think often the reason companies miss the future is they simply didn't take the time to look. Let me give a couple of recent or at least maybe one recent example.
You look at some things that have been visible, very visible over the last, let's say 10 to 20 years. We could all see them. There was no mystery about it. Every, the data was all there. So I'll give three things. One was the increasing CO2 emissions, right? Everybody knows that's a problem. We're trying to clean up the atmosphere, the air, and yet that's not a new problem. You can go back 20 years and you can look at all of this data. So that's number one.
Number two, what you've seen over the last 20 years is declining costs of battery power. So lithium ion batteries, other battery technologies, the cost per kilowatt has been coming down very, very steadily now for many, many years. A third thing you could see was the growing power of GPUs, general processing units, computers, the kind of thing that NVIDIA makes. And so that's actually been going at an exponential pace.
So you say, okay, well, cause those are three things, seemingly unrelated CO2 emissions. battery efficiency, GPU. Well, you put them together and you have the possibility of EVs. And the possibility of, of, of self driving EVs or semi autonomous EVs. So why was it in, in, in 2012, when Elon Musk introduces the, the Tesla Model S, the first real commercial, EV, what what were, what were the CEOs of all the competitors doing? Right? At Ford, BMW, Mercedes, General Motors, and Toyota.
They were all paid very well. But it would seem often that you have to pay extra to get foresight from executives, right? That doesn't come with a compensation package. Because none of them were taking this very seriously. So, again, it's not so much about whether you can know the future. It's about whether you deeply immerse yourself, whether you marinate yourself in what's changing.
And I think it's a very important exercise for leaders and indeed at all levels of an organization to constantly ask themselves, what are the, emerging trends that are accelerating and have yet gone unnoticed or mostly unnoticed by our competitors. So that's not a hard question to ask. And often though, you can't see the future from your vantage point. If you're.
If you're sitting, mostly, if you spend most of your time with executives, with other leaders, with consultants, who've all been in the same industry, who are all looking at the same things you may well miss these nascent trends that are gathering pace. So, that's, that's just a, an investment of time.
I think also, and stop me if we talked about this before, but I think when things are changing and particularly when they're changing in ways that, that , may undermine current success, the human capacity for denial is really very substantial. And, and I've learned that what you see in bedrooms is kind of the same thing in boardrooms and sense of if a relationship goes wrong. Right? I I can only speak about this from a guy's perspective. I've occasionally told my wife how she's feeling.
That usually doesn't go so well. So I, never, well. I'll, I'll stick with what I my perspective. But if you're in a relationship that's not going so well, at least as a guy, your first instinct is just to dismiss the problem. And you go like, well all relationships have rocky patches and whatever this will probably self correct at some point. I'm not going to worry about it. And then it doesn't. And so you have long periods of silence and there's a certain kind of tension between two people.
And so at some point you go from dismissal to rationalization and you say, well, yeah, this is happening. It's maybe a bit unusual, but let me find a reason that is exculpatory where I don't have to deal with the issue. So like my wife has issues she has father issues or old boyfriend issues or something, but you know, hopefully she figures that out, but it's like, not, not, not on me. So things continue to deteriorate and now you just have to take a long drive to cool down sometimes.
and the kids occasionally run for cover. So now you go from rationalization to mitigation. So now I actually have to do something here. Clearly I can't let this go on. So you maybe find a quiet moment and you go to your spouse, your partner, and you say have you thought about maybe Prozac or something, right? And this doesn't go down so well.
And so hopefully at some point you move from rationalization to confrontation where you are not confronting her, You're confronting your own part in this, and you're saying, you know what, I'm not very easy to live with, I don't listen very well, I'm not very emotionally attuned. So that, that pattern of dismissal rationalization, mitigation and finally confrontation.
Again, you see that in companies, and we talked about last time, I think the experience of Ford around quality a couple of decades ago. But that, that, that denial could last a generation. And it's very interesting. Somebody went back and did a lot of research on military history. And one of their questions was, why did it take so long for new technologies or new ideas to, to gain traction or propagate in armies and navies?
And the basic argument was a generation of generals had to die off before something new could be done. Well, you hope that's not true in our organizations, but for that to happen, I think leaders need to spend a significant part of their time. I would say probably 20 to 30 percent of the time. Really digging deeply into what's changing, being exposed to it, getting a first person experience and understanding of it.
And without that, you are very likely to be surprised by the future in an uncomfortable way. But, the thing for sure is and that's why I don't like all this talk over the last few years about disruptive technology, because it makes it seem like a negative. For sure, the future has as much promise as peril. Right? Equal measure of promise and peril. balance for any particular organization though depends on whether you're paying attention, right? And whether you're looking forward.
So, I think a lot of organizations fail, and then they're surprised, and say, Well, how would we know? Well, actually you probably could have known. wondered about something , when you were saying about that denial. With your experience working all over the world, you mentioned you worked in Nokia. You mentioned how they started off very innovative. They started off embracing outward trends, and then as soon as they got successful, they stopped, but something triggered me, which was.
In Ireland, , we don't speak up about problems that easily. So we have a culture of alcohol, for example, and that would be the place where you either drown your sorrows or don't speak about them, but I was thinking about how.
For example a common scene in an irish restaurant would be the waiter comes over at the end of the meal and i still have a half eaten or quarter eaten steak how was your meal sir and i was fine it's great and then it's taken when i was like i'm never coming back to this place again instead of actually speaking up and, seeking out accountability. And I wondered what was your, your view of that from a cultural perspective, especially when you worked in Asia.
So, so, so extensively Yeah, I do think there's often, In many organizations, and yes, I think it is probably more true in some Asian countries than perhaps maybe in some Western countries, but I think there is this reluctance to actually say challenging things and to say uncomfortable things, even when they're grounded in reality. Right?
I mean, there is this kind of, collective silence about things that are uncomfortable to, to speak about, some years ago I was asked to Work with a very large Korean company around innovation. And the first time I was there and I was talking to four or 500 people, young people, mostly, they marched them into the auditorium and kind of military formation. And I said, I can already tell you guys, this is a problem, right?
I mean, you, you can't have that kind of a culture and orientation and maximize your innovation. But I think and I see this even at the highest levels Aidan, I remember, and I'm going to go back now again, quite a ways, but I remember the European consumer electronics industry, the American consumer electronics companies now that really aren't in this business anymore. And some of them don't exist, but Phillips obviously still exists as a company. Thompson RCA and so on.
And it was clear that Japanese companies were a threat, but they just really didn't want to talk about it. They didn't want to dig in into it. And one thing I heard, and I've heard this through the years a CEO will say, Well, if I really am honest about all of this, I may discomfort the organization, right? I'm going to make them anxious. Well, they already know. And what they're anxious about is that you don't seem to know, right?
And that you're not taking this seriously enough because they already can see this. And so I see it again and again, that it's often people lower in the organization. Who can see the new threats, see the new opportunities, but feel very disempowered to raise that and to ask that one of the things I think that as a CEO, you really do have to search out the malcontents, right? You have to find the people in the organization who do think you have it all wrong, who do think you're missing things.
And it's uncomfortable to go searching for those people and have those conversations. There was a chap, and I'm going to forget his name. And again, this is a few decades ago, but there was a chap at the big American telecommunications company, AT& T, and folks can look this up. You can find it, I'm sure, online.
But if you remember back before the Internet, the way telecommunication networks worked was all of the software, all of the intelligence sat in these big central switches, and all of the devices we had at the end were completely dumb, right? A phone had no intelligence in it at all. And so the assumption was if you want to add a new feature, like call waiting or something, you reprogram this big central switch. So it's a very centralized view of technology.
And of course the goal of AT& T and they advertise this and talked about it was building a smart network, right? Having all this beautiful code sitting running this, their big network. Well, one of their internal technologists wrote a paper called The Stupid Network, and he said in the future, all the intelligence is going to be at the periphery. Right? It's going to be out in our smartphones and our PCs and our servers and so on. And the network is just mostly going to be pipes, right?
High bandwidth pipes. Well, you can imagine in an organization that prides itself on building and running like a smart network, when somebody comes and says, the future is a dumb or a stupid network, that's a fairly provocative thing to say. And I think ultimately this chap left AT& T over that issue. People just didn't want to hear, right? So I think as a leader you only have so many hours of the day.
There's only so much you can understand and know about emerging challenges and so on and opportunities. So you have to listen to the people in your organization that, that are mostly in tune with this and also the ones that are likely to be the most critical about like, we're missing this, or we haven't paid attention to this. So again, not a natural trait. But you have to go searching for the renegades, the malcontents, and, and spend time and understand.
You're talking to the audience of this show, Gary, by the way. So you'll be prodding at some open wounds in some cases , for many of us, but there was something that I just wanted to flag with you as well. Is that, I know that you've written this content.
In the time it was written and that through your work you've updated a lot of that i'd love to share those older examples that you share because i think that's the gold to share, where are these companies played out and i loved what you wrote here about ibm you said.
Many times what are described as today's implementation failures are really yesterday's foresight failures in disguise, IBM's fat overheads were manageable when computers carried the gross margins of illicit drugs, IBM's overheads threatened to sink the company when computers became commodities with the margins.
Can vegetables and ibm are in the early nineteen nineties might well have argued it's not a vision we need it's a lower cost structure and faster development times, this we would answer of course you need to reduce costs why didn't you begin working on the cost problem a decade ago, why did you so dramatically underestimate the downward pressure that open systems, Clone makers and the convergence of computing and consumer electronics would exert, On margins many
of the emirs operational failures in the nineteen nineties would be traced back to four site failures in the nineteen eighties, that is gold because that same thing happens and people forget.
You know i was telling you one of the biggest challenges and one of the drivers of doing the show is that i know people struggle to read extensively cause, i book like this you don't read your research and you study i'd love you to share your observations on that exact theme and how it repeats time and time again Yeah, I think, I probably have almost an endless list of examples, Aidan, of organizations that have, that have done this exact thing.
And that's why at some point you realize that this is a pathology, right? You can't blame an individual executive or executive team. I think that would be unfair. You have to look deeper and say, how are organizations structured in a way that, that it makes them blind to the future, innovation phobic. And we'll get into this a lot when we talk about maybe some of my more recent work. But again, I see this pattern again with enormous consequences.
You go back and I'll try not to repeat this story at some future point, but it's super important one. You look at what happened to Intel, which was by far the world's most profitable, most capable semiconductor company. And I spent quite a bit of time in and around Intel, maybe a decade or more ago. I met some of their research fellows and I it was a super, super amazing organization.
But at a very critical juncture, probably around 2006, 5, 6, Steve Jobs comes to the then CEO of Paul Otellini at Intel, and he says, we're going to make this new device. It's called an iPhone. And we need a new kind of chip for it. That's very powerful because this is basically a PC in your pocket, but it has to have very low power consumption because it's going to run on batteries. So it's going to need probably some new architecture, some new designs, some new work and so on.
And Odalini says, no it looks like, so he is like, and I, I don't know what was in his mind, but I do know how he defended that decision years later. And he said at the time, it was impossible to know that this would be the success it was.
Okay. I'm very suspicious of that because I saw one of the very first iPhones, one of the very first phones that came out, and I'd taken it to the UK with me on a trip and it wasn't yet available in the UK and I showed it to some journalists that were interviewing me there and these guys started giggling like they were six years old, right? Because you could scroll and all this, it was now we just take it for granted, but it's an amazing thing.
And of course, even by then, by 2005 6, the mobile phone is already the most ubiquitous device in the world. We're making more than a billion of them a year. So if you say, I'm going to take the most widely sold available electronic device, I'm going to make it, like, almost infinitely better. Why do you think that's not going to be a success, right?
So I think what was more likely, and I'm sure the case, at that time, you go back in time market for PCs is still going up, servers are still going up, Intel has a huge demand, and the idea of devoting a lot of engineering resources to a new architecture and innovating in ways that weren't important to Intel. They hadn't worried much about power efficiency. You just plug this thing into the mains power and off it went. So I'm sure that was much more the challenge.
But I also have very little doubt that if Paolo Ottelini had asked of young people under 30 at Intel. Hey, should we do this? They would have said, damn, right. Like we, like, we want to be in front of this. So it's very, very hard to see the future from the 40th floor . But you know, if you talk to young people if, if you're out on the fringe, If, if you're looking for the chance to be surprised, you will see it. But I think, again, you just see, that kind of myopia, pretty much everywhere.
And, and ultimately shareholders and employees pay the cost for that. i love how, you bring us back you're writing it was cutting edge at the time. Bearing in mind that it was actually even earlier than when the book came out cause even then it's it takes long enough to get a book today but it was even longer back then and one of the things you talked about beyond ibm was things like the quality deficits. Which was a major issue for us auto manufacturers and.
As they saw an erosion and share in the seventies and eighties, and you said that it was more than just poor execution. Detroit didn't suddenly get sloppy and Japanese car manufacturers didn't start out with a quality advantage. Japanese auto companies realized decades ago, so this is really early, that the new formidable competitive weapons would be needed to beat. the us car companies in their home market.
And what i find so interesting is the same pattern again this these templates that you see is the us companies knew about it, they looked at it they studied it and they still didn't act and the question i always get is like how do you create that hunger in paradise that will create that action without scaring people.
Well, I think one of the things as I said, you, you, you have to spend a lot of time thinking about what's changing, what are the implications, and working through the second or third or fourth order consequences if this changes that, then what? Well, and then, and then what that might trigger, so it's just a matter of, of taking the time and taking the discipline to do that.
The other thing, very important question to ask is, are there things that, are the things that have not done been done yet, but are possible that haven't been done simply because it's not the way our industry works or operates or whatever, but, but again, I think having that, that, that creative curiosity to think about like, Well, why couldn't we do that? What would happen if we did that?
And we can maybe talk about how do you do, how do you get that kind of imagination working at scale in an organization? But let me give you another example. This is again, many years ago, but something you could see happening. And, so I was talking to senior executives at a very large food and beverage company. I won't tell you which one, but one of the big global leaders. And if you look at these companies and I'll the companies Procter and Gamble, Unilever, Nestle and so on.
If you look at these companies they're, it's a huge portfolio of brands, right? They all have individual brands for washing powder and for, peanut butter or whatever it is. But, and so I was talking to these senior leaders. I said you guys are fragmenting your brand spending over dozens of brands. And of course these all started out as young companies that they bought, had bought years earlier. And so that you understand where, how they got there.
But I said, and I, I use an example from another industry. I said, you look at a company like Sony that uses its brand over all kinds of products. And, I said, somebody is going to figure out how to capture the economies of scope by having the same brand over multiple categories of products. They thought I was stupid. They thought like, this is like, Gary, you're just like, that's never going to happen. Nobody's going to do it.
So because they hadn't done it, they couldn't entertain the possibility that somebody might else might do it. Even when it was completely economically logical, right? You might, you might almost say inevitable. That somebody would do it. Well, so what happened? Ultimately, you got grocers like Tesco or a Costco that created huge private label brands. So Costco, I don't know what percentage, but a significant percentage of what they sell it goes under their Kirkland brand.
And then I can tell you, it is on everything from golf balls to peanut butter and everything else you can imagine. And, and, and so that has become the Kirkland brand has become the largest. kind of consumer products brand in North America. There's nothing else, there's no other single brand that even comes close to their revenue. And yet somebody was telling me a couple of decades ago, this cannot happen.
So I think you've got to be very careful when you say something's impossible, something won't happen. You have to be very careful to explain why that is economically impossible, not why it hasn't happened yet, or it'd make me uncomfortable, or I don't think so. But why is this literally why would this be defying gravity? I had a very similar conversation in about the same timeframe with the leaders of one of the biggest, brewing companies in the world making beer.
And I and at that time, probably craft beers were like one or 2%. And I said, you know what, we have a generation that wants unique experiences. They don't want to be like everybody else. And, and this is just going to grow and grow and grow. No, no, no, Gary. It will never be more than three or 4%. I said, we'll see. I said, you, you, you, you think that there's a mass market only because there are mass economies in distribution and manufacturing.
But if somebody figures out how to do this at low cost and create new brands, I said, there is no such thing. The mass market does not exist. That is a fiction. It has never existed, right? We all would like different things that are unique to us. It was only that way because you guys weren't clever enough to figure out how to do it, right? And so there is this tendency simply to believe that because it hasn't happened, it's impossible.
But before you kind of go down that route, you really got to ask, really, is it really impossible? Or is it just something we haven't seen before? It might kind of make us uncomfortable because so many innovations, when you look at me like, Like, why didn't, like, why didn't that happen before? Right? And it's not that it's impossible. It's just nobody's thought about it before, but, but it's still easy to miss those things and, and even to dismiss those things, just because they're unfamiliar.
By the way, I have to give you one more little story in that regard. This is a more recent one. I was having I, I believe that over time and it's going to take some time because education is a slow moving industry. But for sure, we're going to see a move to more and more virtual education, right? The economics of a typical bricks and mortar university or business school are just like terrible.
You have me standing in front of 70 students inside this hugely expensive structure sitting in the most expensive part of London and the only people can afford to come there are pretty wealthy people. You go like, this just, it doesn't work. And so,, I, one night I was up at 2 a. m. and I was participating in it because I was in California. I was on a call with my. Colleagues at the London Business School, the management committee, , the senior people, , the past dean of the school was there.
He's a lov very lovely , and smart person. But I made this kind of plea about, guys, we have to think about how e learning is gonna change fundamentally this business and how we credential people and so on. And, , the dean at the other end of this call he was very skeptical. He says, Gary, I don't think so. People want this in person experience. They want whatever. I said, yeah. People also want Louis Vuitton handbags, but most of them can't afford them, right?
So, like, are we in the business of creating Louis Vuitton handbags? Or are we going to, create something for everybody? But anyway, he says, no, it's not the same thing having this, , virtual experience and whatever. So anyway, we ended the call. One of his colleagues calls me the next day and says the first thing he said after we got off the call was how great that was, and it was like you were really here. I said, that was precisely my point, right?
, but when you have a huge capital campaign, you're raising hundreds of millions of pounds, you have these beautiful facilities, like having a conversation about how it might change is just super hard. Walk towards the pain, walk towards the pain, right? When the future looks hard and it looks difficult walk towards the unfamiliar, right? I mean, that just has to be a mantra as a leader that you like keep inside of you.
I'm in life that's where growth comes from it's from the difficulty all the wisdom that came from the east is all about this stuff i just want to find incredible and yes we get stuck in the cycle we get stuck with the biases and the ego and the lack of humility and all that comes with that so that's why i love surfacing the stuff so thank you again for revisiting the start of this work that you've done chapter seven, which is called strategy is leverage just absolute gold i was telling
you i was running a workshop yesterday with a group of executives and this chapter, Was it was just so helpful and serendipitous that i read it beforehand and one of the things you talk about in that again let's cast yourself back to the nineties, you said how is it that japanese firms can be more efficient with less resources and spend less on r and d. Back then gm spent four times that of honda you told us that's something
that we still see today that believe that their resources are actually a competitive advantage but actually sometimes they can wait them down, Yeah, I think, that is the conceit of size that somehow, because we have more R and D dollars, we have more engineers, we have a bigger marketing budget that somehow, and I mean, it can be an advantage for sure.
It can be an advantage, but as you say, it can, it can equally be a weight you, you look at what is, what has happened over the last decade or less in, in, in terms of, the drug discovery industry. The largest if you take the 10 largest pharma companies in the world they spend about 120 to 130 billion a year on R and D like we spend, right.
The consumer spend, because they make all that money back and more, they have pretty good margins, but that that's how much has gone into it goes into drug discovery. However, if you look at the drugs that have actually been approved year by year, On average right now, about somewhere between two thirds and three quarters of all new drugs that are being approved by, by licensing authorities have come from pharmaceutical companies that have less than half a billion dollars in sales, right?
These companies, , each of these companies is spending three, four, five, six million dollars, billion dollars on R& D, and they're losing the companies whose total sales are a fraction of the incumbent's R& D budget. So, and, and the past the past head of R& D at Merck he said the best thing we could do in my organization, he's running this huge global R& D group, says the best thing we can do is just scrape off the top five layers. Started with myself. Well, unlikely to happen.
But yeah, I think, a lot of companies work on operational efficiency, right? They're trying to scrape out one or two or three or four or five percent of costs. But you got to step back often and say, is there just a different model of doing this, right? Is there just a fundamentally better way? Because what and often we think of innovation as like a new product or new service, but you're going to have a huge amount of innovation on the cost side.
Right, right now, what we need in health care, we have a lot of demand creating innovation, right, better technologies, better procedures, better tests that often are very expensive, but we need an equal amount of cost innovation that's saying, like, how do we dramatically reduce the cost of health care?
One of, one of my favorite stories is is an Indian physician now gone Govindappa Venkataswamy and, and he wanted to cure unnecessary blindness in India, which often comes from cataracts and a bright sun and lack of eye protection and so on. So to do this he didn't benchmark ophthalmic surgery in the West. He went and looked at McDonald's and said, how did they learn to make a burger for a couple of pounds, quid, dollars. And so he said, how do we industrialize this service?
So we build a model where you have many patients laying on kind of parallel beds. You have machines that can move from patient to patient. You have surgeons who are doing a hundred or so surgeries every day. He made it a production line and they radically reduced the cost of doing this. Well, that's innovation on the cost side, right? And so now they can do a cataract surgery for about 35, which is a fraction of the.
1, 800, 2, 000 B in the U. S. So yeah, I mean, you've got to think on that side and be, not just asking how do we take another few percentage, but is there a way of fundamentally changing the cost structure? And if there is, and you're not exploiting it, somebody else will. such a brilliant case study because one of the things that comes up for me a lot in workshops is but our product is the product. How can we reinvent or innovate around that? And that's your point.
You can reinvent every different aspect, you break it out and you look at every different aspect of it, including how you produce it. And there's a great line here. In my notes, I wrote down above it, harvesting and not sowing. And you wrote a company needs to reduce the book for a given bang rather than increase the bang for a given book.
Therefore denominator driven corporate restructuring programs are more about cutting resources leveraging resources i thought that was just a such a relevant line in the age of a companies are employing a i know to lean out their operations optimize the operations but they're not reinvesting again to create that value that you talked about, Yeah, I think almost always when new technologies come along, we use them first of all, just to incrementally improve what we're already doing and we don't
really work to see the revolutionary potential in that technology. And I suppose to some extent that's understandable. But that is why these new technologies are available to everybody. And they're not that mysterious and you can everybody could use them. So you, you end up asking like, well, why is it normally these young upstarts that use these technologies most creatively, right?
Whether it's in FinTech and digital banking whether it is in healthcare and biotech, whether it's in publishing and it's Amazon with Kindle and so on and not why does that happen? And I, I think that again, we become prisoners of the familiar. We cannot step outside that existing business model. And one discipline, I think Ada, that's super important.
You have to be able to abstract away from the physical thing or the service that you're providing as whatever it is, And ask, what is the need this is fulfilling? And then say, are there other ways of doing this? So you end up just assuming there's one way to fulfill this need when there may be multiple, but, you you forget you, are enamored and focused on what we're doing and the product and its manifestations rather than what is this , really deep problem we're trying to solve for people?
And might there be another way of of doing it? And in healthcare that is , particularly urgent. Because it's just becoming unaffordable for countries and citizens around the world. And there just simply is not enough genuine cost innovation going on there, but again, there's this tendency and I understand why to , let me just optimize what I have. It's easier to do. I understand it. It takes less creativity.
The returns may be more, more certain in the short run, but then you end up with a company filled with denominator managers who know everything about how to cut head count and how to reduce costs and know nothing about how to grow the top line. It's very interesting that, roughly half of the thousand largest companies in the world are unable to grow even as fast as GDP.
Like what the hell guys, but you have managers who, , and by the way, it's astounding to me that you can become the CEO of a large incumbent company without ever having to build, build a new business with inside that company. Like we need builders at the top, right? Not maintenance engineers, and yet normally we get the maintenance engineers who like ran it really well, didn't screw it up.
Like, And it's no disrespect to them fair play to forget in the job but, at a board level we need to change strategy as well they're needed.
But not in that role at this time in the world i really want to the hammer home gary this point this term i learned from you which is resource leverage, and you talked about achieving resource leverage i'd love you to describe what that is in your words for me as well as the audience but also, then you want you go on to say resource leverage can be achieved in five fundamental ways we don't need to go through all five these five are by more effectively concentrating
resources on key strategic goals so focus by more efficiently accumulating resources, by complimenting resources of one type with those of another to create higher order value by conserving resources wherever possible and by, rapidly recovering resources by minimizing the time between expenditure payback i love this section and it again so relevant, i'm just doesn't this stuff doesn't decay, Thinking truly creatively about how you do more with less you,
you see this in, in guerrilla warfare and unconventional warfare. I've had the chance over the years to talk to generals and different armies and so on. And you go back to the Vietnam war the U. S. dropped more ordnance just in Cambodia that it did in Germany in all of the Second World War with not a good outcome for the U. S. or anybody else. But so the thought there was, hey, we have the biggest air force, we can drop more bombs, let's go do it.
And, of course, what the Vietnamese were doing, being resource starved, was they were building tunnels as their supply chain. They would build tunnels. their bridges just underneath the waterline. So they could not be seen from aerial reconnaissance, but they were still effective. Like how do you come up with that idea of building bridges, like just two inches under the waterline, right? I mean, you have to be resource starved to do that.
And another example equally horrible was looking at, at 9 11, right? How does a small band of radicals attack the largest company country in the world and, and get through its defense systems and so on. Well by, by taking something, a completely radical idea of turning a civilian jetliner into a massive bomb, right? So, again, a very, very good discipline in any organization to ask, like, how would we tackle this problem?
If we had 10 percent of the resources that we have how would we have a real impact if we were resource poor, because if you don't go through that discipline every problem is just like, can we outspend the competition? So I think CK and I, we wrote another paper that kind of took some of those ideas further called strategy and stretch and leverage, but it really was how to use partnerships. How do you, get. How do you get more focus?
All the things you talked about, but typically we don't think creatively about any of those things. It's just do another round of headcount reduction or let's cut expenditures here. So you have to bring the same level of creativity to the resource side as you do to the demand side. I mentioned this one gary as well which is also in that chapter which is the speed to market and how.
Establish companies can be so slow to market and for whatever reason that the size of them the amount of, buy in or alignment they need to get the mental resistance that i get from inside the company and you call this rapid recovery, can you say a rapid recovery process access resource multiplier an example you give is the, Japanese companies and how intent they were an accelerating product development times and in the nineties you tell us it was estimated
that detroit's big three required an average of eight years to develop an entirely new model line, i mean while back then the japanese was four and a half years with an individual model variant, it was developed so much quicker and therefore they were able to recoup.
Return on investment was so much quicker as well that's something that you've seen and again this resource overly resourced can actually way down a company, Yeah, I think, we were writing, CK Prahalad and I were writing about this kind of thing, I think fairly early. We wrote a paper called expeditionary marketing. No, it was called corporate imagination, expeditionary marketing.
And, and we talked about the need to put something very quick and very early in front of customers, even if it wasn't the ideal the ideal product to get feedback because when you're developing , any new product or service, The goal is to maximize this ratio of learning over investment, right? I want to learn faster while spending less. I need to know where's the real heart of demand. Is this a function that they really need in the product? And so on.
I know there's ways of doing this through prototyping and, and, but, but you actually have to put things in front of customers in their hands. Let them touch them and use them. Now , that's easier, obviously in the digital world where you can do A B testing and you can put something out there and see what happens. But yeah, the Japanese were very good at this in the auto industry.
Now the auto industry has gotten better, but part of the problem was, and it's still a problem for some companies, they were organized into functional silos. And so trying to get sales and marketing and manufacturing and to all work together, it just, you, you, the speed was limited by all the internal silos and so on.
Yeah. What the Japanese would do, and Honda was probably the best at this, is putting all the engineers, marketing people responsible for a particular model in the same room and working together and saying, guys, let's resolve these trade offs like right now, collectively, rather than having a lot of a pissing contest and a lot of back and forth and whatever. So yeah, but it was, it's a combination of what I guess today we would call agile of getting multiple teams working together.
And also what would later be called like minimum viable product, but getting something that you could actually get out there in consumer's hands and test, and then iterating very quickly. The, the, the speed at which you improve anything is governed by the pace of iteration. So if you only have the chance to get better at something every three or four years, because that's your launch cycle.
and, companies like Spotify have gotten very good at this they got famous for and Amazon does the same thing Amazon has you can decouple the actual design of your website, of elements of your website into relatively small teams, they call those microservices at Amazon. As long as they're sharing the same underlying APIs that interconnect, so the stuff still all works together. But you're not tying all these different pieces at the same rate of progress.
So, and then you get a release train where you know that just every few months you're going to do something significant. So these are ideas, we certainly didn't fully work them out, but we could see enough that we knew the principles behind them. Right? We needed, you needed lean teams, you needed people you needed to shorten the iterations in your release cycles, and doing so not only allows you to recoup resources faster, but it allows you to improve faster, right?
Because you have another chance to make a design change, to make this thing better. And So just the speed of iteration has become a huge competitive advantage in all kinds of industries. I'm glad we saw it, i'll share something in a little while as well where you actually predicted the mobile phone i don't remember that but you did in this book as well which was i'm sure you wrote this.
In nineteen ninety one because it was published in ninety three so it was early man so i'll come back to that in a moment but i wanted to share a table that you have in the book and again i just think it's so and so relevant today it's the aspects of resource leverage so i'm sharing on the screen for those people who are watching us on youtube and spotify video so you'll see it but we'll have a little bit of. Empathy for those people who are only listening to us, Gary.
Maybe you'll pick out some of these things that you feel are most relevant today or most show up for you Well, I certainly think that first about building consensus around goals is super important. What I often find at the top of organizations is really, deep divides, almost like holy wars over what new technology or what new markets should we be focusing on.
And, and so you don't really get fully committed to any of those things or, or worse, you, you kind of, You you have one division who's really passionate about this. Another division who's uninvolved and doesn't care. And so if you run into a problem it's like, well, it's that division's problems. They're the ones who want to do it. That's their thing, but it's not a collective commitment to, to making sure we win in this space.
Right. So, I, I think about companies like IBM and Oracle and others who were very slow to get into cloud. How is it that Amazon and Amazon web services became a leader in cloud computing? I'm guessing probably all the things we've talked about, it was something new as uncomfortable as changing the business model and so on, but I'm sure there were huge debates in all those companies, is it serious or not? And if that debate doesn't get resolved, you just open the door for somebody else.
So I think. You know that now at the same time you're trying to get consensus You've got to keep an open mind and you've got to be out on the fringe and exploring and testing new things that may Not be part of that vision, but by golly, you know The top dozen people a company need to be a hundred percent united on where we think our big opportunities are And if that doesn't exist, you are absolutely gonna fragment your resources.
You're gonna be slow and so on the learning thing about using the brain of every employee. We'll come back to that for sure. This is one of my deep and enduring passions, but the fact that Toyota and the Japanese competitors were teaching. employees how to do statistical process control and Pareto analysis and identify quality problems, giving them the power to stop a billion dollar production line.
I, I don't know at the time we wrote this book exactly where Toyota was on this, but I know they, they get more than a million suggestions a year from their employees for improvement. And most of those are not mere suggestions. There's experiments, those employees have run and tried something and now are reporting on what we learned. So again, the pace at which you can improve is largely governed by how much of the intellectual capacity of your organization are you using?
And so that I think is The borrowing thing, again, I think is can be very important. You look at, Microsoft's success with the PC. Again, now we're 30 years earlier from cloud computing, but why was, why did Microsoft end up controlling Windows, right? And they leveraged IBM's resources. They went to IBM. They said there's this new thing called the PC. We'd like you, we'd like to make the operating system.
IBM said, fine thinking, thinking that, well, at some point we'll push Microsoft out and we'll control the operating system. Now today, of course, IBM is out of the PC business. But at that time, they Microsoft figured out how to leverage the global scale and the global reach of IBM, which was the largest IT company in the world. So that gave them huge leverage in the same way a lot of Japanese companies early on and today Chinese companies.
Started making OEM products for others and learned thereby and increased their own competence and then one day came into these markets with their own brands. So, again, looking at how do you do more with less? How do you leverage the resources of partners? I would encourage people, yeah, to go back and look at this and then for each one and say, how does it apply in our industry? How does it apply in our organization?
most of these strategies, I will tell you, I know that they're more difficult, but let me say they're a little bit more sophisticated than just doing another round of downsizing.
Because you mentioned IBM, one of the things you talk about is to protect those individuals, like the guy that wrote the paper or like you that spoke up on the call on that call, that WebEx call The company tries to protect them and send them off to a corporate post or innovation lab etc skunk works whatever you want to call that separate them away from the core business and, you mentioned ibm did this to create the computer but then there's
the problem of trying to reverse it back into the company again and it being rejected like a bad organ transplant, i love you to share your observations on that cause you recognize the back then Yeah. And I have to, to be fair to IBM, they learned quite a lot from that experience for sure.
But yeah one of the things that, a lot of consultants and academics have said, is that the only way in a large bureaucratic organization to innovate is by creating a specialized unit that is protected from the rules and the budget cuts and so on. And I have a certain sympathy for that because you certainly, if you're doing something new, it does have to have some dedicated resources. You can't starve it. And what, what you could often see happening.
in these large companies is, well let me, let me tell the story this way. What was interesting to me is when I go to a company and go to the senior team and say, how did you guys possibly miss this? They say, well we were working on this, right? We had a young team four levels down that, yeah, like we were actually ahead of this. I go like, well what the hell happened? Well, there was some kind of a budget cut or reprioritization and that thing got killed.
Well, the problem is that no alarm bells went off when that thing got killed. It was like four levels down. It was sitting in one division and, and so if you don't have that shared point of view at the center about why this is so important, it's very easy for that thing to be to be killed and that would happen. So it wasn't always that , the existing businesses weren't innovative and trying to do new things. They were.
But unless you understand why those are so strategically important and one of the dilemmas in large companies is they tend to define commitment by resources. So I often ask leaders like, how would you know if your company was really serious about opportunity X or problem Y? And the answer is, we'd have a lot of people on it, right? We'd be spending a lot of, like, well, that's a really bad answer.
Because the way you want to measure commitment is not spending because it's very easy to overspend on these new things and spend too much too quickly and get the spending in front of your learning. The way you have to think about this is strategically, why is this important to us? And then how do we minimize the amount of money it's going to take us to make a success out of this? So yeah, big companies fail big because they can usually not because they have to.
So if you lack that point of view at the center about why is this thing going to be really important, it is very easy for it to get sacrificed at some point. And nobody knows. Then 10 years later, you go didn't we have a project on that? Like what, yeah, what the hell happened to that?
Because there was no strategic focus on it, So recognizing that problem and recognizing how even great ideas could be killed in the cradle and nobody would notice, this was the idea like, , let's set up these incubators or these accelerators, whatever you call them, and we'll make sure they're protected and so on. And Google has one and Walmart had one and pretty much, and we've studied lots of them and almost none of them have made a big impact.
Because, first of all, you have to have, you have to ultimately grow something , very big. If 90 percent of your business comes from one set of products or , one stream, the chances of creating something equally big and important is pretty low. Just it's probably not going to happen. Apple, luckily it happened. They created the iPhone, which is far exceeded the Mac. So the question often is not how do we do the , new thing? It's how do we pick up the pace of evolution in our core?
What we're already doing? How do we just get faster? How do we get better? And in any case, the idea was, okay, let's put this off. Let's protect it. Let's ring fence it. And so, You end up often with the worst of both worlds, Aidan. You end up with something that still has enough corporate scrutiny and interference. And by the way, the people running that thing really aren't entrepreneurs. They don't have a big financial upside. They're not working like nights and weekends and whatever.
So you don't really have something that has the freedom and the energy of a startup. the other hand, it's disconnected from the core. So what should be an advantage of leveraging all the resources, the technology, the customer information, so on, it struggles to do that. So I think the better solution is.
If you're doing something new, give it a home wherever in the organization it needs to leverage those resources, leverage those customer relationships, put it somewhere that where it has a natural home in the organization, and then make sure that this thing has visibility, that every month at the very top, how is this going, what kind of progress are we making, how are we learning, so that nobody can kill that thing several levels down, without somebody noticing but The incubators
and accelerators is almost admitting failure and saying we really don't know how to innovate within the core. So let's just let's just like put this somewhere else. And many of those have been closed down. You can probably find some examples where something great came out of them, but, it was a bad strategy, but I need is innovation everywhere from every day in every part of the organization, both in ways that, that push forward existing businesses and ways to create new businesses.
, and I can't create a separate dedicated unit to do that. That is just , not a working strategy in my experience. i'm welcome back to that and you're brilliant experience with Haier of being inside the company and being an advisor will build as well and how to do it. There was something that i couldn't leave which was kodak and kodak.
At the time was still successful so when you this is the ninety so you talked about kodak and the term opportunity horizon, I'll quote a little piece here just to remind you again you wrote this over thirty years ago, eastman kodak extended its opportunity horizon when it removed its traditional blinkers.
and searched for markets that fell between or more accurately across its traditional competencies areas of chemical imaging, electronic imaging like copiers and so forth and one of the white space opportunities that emerged from this exercise was what insiders refer to as, an electronic shoebox realizing that many family photographs sit in a shoebox gathering dust in the attic Kodak's chemical and electronic engineers dreamed of medium, that would
allow consumers and customers to easily and safely store their photographs, view them on a standard television and reorder and edit them at will. The result was a process available through photo developers for turning chemical images, On photographic film into electronic images that can be viewed via at the time, a video CD player connected to a television.
What Kodak called a photo cd the ultimate success of this product is less important than the lessons it's managers learned about how a synthesis of skills residing in seemingly disparate businesses, could be combined to create new competitive space so many lessons we can go there but whatever that sparks for you i love you to share Clearly Kodak is a cautionary tale even though they were one of the first to experiment with digital photography, that particular product, I'm I don't remember
whether it succeeded or not, but I think that the lesson there is, yes, looking at an organization as a technology. In the first instance as a portfolio of capabilities and not a portfolio of products, because the new opportunities are usually in the white spaces between the existing product categories. One company is very, very good at doing this. Maybe the best in the world.
Having said that they've often, they've also had a bit of a struggle, I think recently, and primarily because they got caught up in kind of their own. Cost focused, restructuring, downsizing, rationalization. And it is , but the company that's historically been very, very good at doing this is 3M. So 3M make adhesives and abrasives and materials and so on, , and for years it was rated as one of the most innovative companies in the world.
I think Tom Peters and in search of excellence praise it as one of the most innovative companies. But they never saw the company as a portfolio of products. That was constantly changing, constantly innovating, new categories being created. But they would tell you, and I don't know what the number is now, I think the last time I looked they have like 40, 41 core technologies. And what's very important is, those technologies are not owned by the businesses.
What often happens is you get a vertically oriented product focused business that thinks it owns the contributing skills and technologies. And these go into this product and go , no, those should be available for anybody across the organization to leverage in new ways. And so 3M is very good at doing this because around all of these core technologies They have regular meetings. And when they meet with customers, they don't start by asking what do you want to buy in our product portfolio?
They start by asking what are the problems you have? And then they have engineers saying , man, can we use any of these 40 different technologies to help them solve their problem? And out of that comes huge amount of innovation. So, that's a very critical lesson. If a lot of myopia comes from looking at your organization in terms of what it does, rather than what it knows it's capable of. so if you look at a business school and say, well, a business school is about delivering degrees.
Yeah, but you have all this great, faculty capability. Like, why do you look at it that way? Why isn't it about just raising the level of management competence globally? But no, no, we run programs. So, you have to have a deeper self concept. If you want to be able to, see the white spaces that exist there. of the things that's linked to that is. i'm probably jumping ahead in the books here but i just can't resist really
is that it's a quote by your colleague Zhang Rumin.With Haier and he said that when he saw what the internet did to exponential change that he realized that you have to change the structure of the organization so it could no longer be in that hierarchical structure and i wonder what your thoughts on that was one of the things. suggest is just that it turns from a triangle into like a more like a murmuration.
So it's like, you'd see that beautiful murmurations with sparrows that it's based on the projects that are required at the time. And I was telling this, I was telling, I was running this workshop and I mentioned this. And the, the vast difficulty of even approaching that from an organization that, that one of the leads, there's like I really, really, that idea really resonated with me, but I can see the immense challenges that would lie ahead there.
Well first of all, I think that's we'll come back to this theme. But one of the most, some of the most influential pieces I read that really influenced my work were pieces that were written by technologists and about the web. One of them, and I'm going to forget the author, we can look it up. But one of them was called, I think it was called small pieces. loosely joined. And I'm embarrassed right now. I can't remember the author. So maybe, maybe we can put it.
Put it up on the screen there, but basically talking about how you built this amazing the internet itself, which is built on a very small number of principles. And but it created this opportunity where anybody could connect something to the internet. Grew up, I'm old enough. I remember when you had to get the net the telcos permission. To connect a new phone to your whatever. Now you can put anything.
So there was clearly an architecture there that was far more flexible, still coherent, still works, still reliable, but far more flexible. There was another book written by Kevin Kelly, who at that time was the founder and editor of Wired Magazine called Out of Control. And basically looking at how you get, , your example of memoration is a good one but how do you get complex behaviors and patterns. Without central control, right?
So out of control and those really struck me because we've typically assumed that the only way you get coherence focus control in a system is with top down, micromanagement and top down policy. And it was clear that in the case of the internet all these devices work when you plug them in. Right. And through APIs you could build an app That took address information from here and took , a payment module from here and something else and stitches that together.
It's what companies like Shopify and so on have done. And it was hugely powerful. Spawns a huge amount. And it was based on an architectural idea that was just Absolutely counterposed to, what we see in management. And so in, in the future of management, I, I talk about that and I talked, and that was the book that I think captured Zhang Ruomin's attention or drew him to me, I should say, but I think you saw the same thing. Now, here's, I think, a deeper lesson here.
You have to be able to think in metaphors. So if you look at the internet, you say, , what does that have to do with the organization? It's all built on technical standards and so on. But you look at it as, no, it's a way of organizing human activity. And we're also running an organization. We're trying to, what do you learn from that, right? So I think this is one of the gifts of Jai Gurmin and of every innovator.
They can look at something that on the surface seems very dissimilar, but then they look deeper and they say, is there some architectural similarities? Is there something here that we can map on? What is a metaphor? So, the metaphor is, maybe we need to think of the organization as a network. Right? Not as a hierarchy. So that now that's becoming less and less a radical idea, although very few companies have taken that thing anywhere close to being serious yet.
I mean, to really seriously think about that. And as your client or your friend said, yeah, it's going to be difficult. That's why it's taken, higher 15 years to really bring this idea to fruition. By the way, it didn't take them 15 years for the thing to start to have a payoff. It didn't take 15 years of big losses, but you just had to work at it and work at it and work at it.
So I think that Yeah, the assumptions that we have about our organizations are hugely out of date and often technology can point us towards like an alternative way of thinking about this thing, but only if you're willing to like constantly think here's something that's super, super different from anything I've thought about, but how might it apply? I don't know if we, I think I mentioned this before, but I've read a lot of books about evolution and about how.
And of course, there's a great debate now, not among creationists and evolutionists, but between evolutionists on how we got the level of complexity we have so fast, because mutation by itself does not seem to be enough to have gotten us here. So there's a lot of interesting dialogue going on, but it seems that in nature, there's a lot of pre adaptation. I think I mentioned this last time. And so you're experimenting and building things. that may not be immediately useful, but are useful later.
So I think you even look at nature and you go okay, where's the metaphor that I can use here? What do I take out of that? That would be helpful to me. , so that's a huge part of the creative process of looking at things that are very dissimilar and saying, Is there some metaphorical level connection that helps me think in new ways about something very familiar and very traditional? Because I will tell you and, you cannot, Innovation always requires you to go to unusual places. Always.
And if you're not out there on the fringe, if you're not reading books of philosophy, if you're not learning from other domains, You're gonna be stuck. I loved when you said that you mentioned pre adaptation. And to your very point, I was reading about epigenetics and interviewed this guy, Brian Diaz, and he did this research on rats that passed down fear from generation to generation. So you can make them fear the smell of cherry blossom and pass it on from generation to generation.
And I stumbled upon. The story of how the monarch butterfly not my grades from canada down to mexico. Add it comes to lake superior and does this crazy turn researchers like what are these guys doing that the journey across lake superior alone is exhausting why are they taking this unnecessary turn and it turns out that there used to be a mountain there. years and years of a, of evolution and erosion.
In this case, the mountains no longer there, but the generations learned this junk , this junk adaptation that. So it works both ways as well. And I thought about how relevant that is to organizations having rituals and mindsets that they carry on that are no longer relevant. Yeah, yeah. No, I think it's, it's, it's very important in your organization to be able to distinguish habits from principles. Or habits from values.
Because we get a set of habits that, as you say, get handed down and become reflexive that may or may not be creating any value anymore, but there's just the way. And if you don't occasionally step back and look at everything I am doing and say like, okay, is this just like a habit? Or is there like some fundamental logic, but yeah, I, in fact, I think we use this example in one of our books. And I, it's probably apocryphal. I don't know if it's even true or not.
I hope it's true, but of some monkeys in a cage and there's some bananas at the top of a metal pole and the monkeys scramble up and at some point you get an electric shock before you get to the bananas and you scurry back down and new monkey comes into the enclosure and starts to go up the pole and the other monkeys pull it back. Cause they like, no, and by the way, there's some value to that. You shouldn't have to discover every terrible consequence for yourself.
That's why parents help you like say, no, probably don't don't touch the stove. That's not going to work. But again, unless occasionally as, as literally as a discipline exercise, you step back and go if we look at all of what we believe, like how much of this is hand me down, how much of this is habit? How much of this is precedent? Versus is this really something that is still serving us well?
And if you're not, if you're not having that exercise internally and discovering those things that have become habits and therefore make it difficult to see new things or make it difficult to change, somebody outside your company will discover those things and we'll challenge you on those in the same way. SpaceX has been challenging NASA, they'll say , no, we can think about this in a different way.
Beautiful beautiful and speaking of things still serving their purpose that story is in competing the future but the monkeys in the banana and it is a true story i looked at the research dates back to the fifties there was that was a study done actually with monkeys. What's speaking of the relevance this book still highly relevant i hope people.
Start to get copies you can get copies of it is a beautiful hard copy here as well you can still find it out there and it's also available on kindle it's on scribed as well you can find it there but i just wanted to say how relevant it is so. You might not remember this, but you predicted the smartphone. You said that it's entirely possible that in 10 or 15 years, remember you wrote this in the, in 1990 or so the personal computer, as we know it will be a relic having a PC at home is a hassle.
Anyone who's had a hard drive crash who's ever gotten a message that the computer doesn't have enough memory for a particular task who struggled with the bus and teen, installation processes for a new piece of software the days of the disc of course or an expansion card or who's worried about what would happen if a thief made off with a whole kid and caboodle in the middle of the night.
knows that there are certain draws back drawbacks to cds before the cloud as well by the way what if there was an information utility. of carrying an electronic organizer or cellular phone one would carry what you called an info port a small device replete with a screen telephone link and data input device, stylus keyboard or microphone the info port would connect our happy user to his or her, Own small corner of the T Network or British Telecom or Bell Atlantic.
In that little corner would reside all the users files quite safe from the neighborhood cat burglar, electrical surges and other dangers. Anytime a new piece of application software was needed, it could be easily accessed. is foresight Yes. I guess the app store too, is in there somewhere. But again it's not hard to do this if, if you can step back and you say, okay, let, let me not think about this specific new technology, but we're like, what is it going to allow us to do?
How might that supplant what's already here? It's not as hard as people think. I gave a presentation and I want to say this is probably about the same timeframe because When the book came out, I got invited to speak at IBM. And I, I got quite close to IBM for a while. And I, I remember giving a presentation there called information as a utility. And the analogy I said, , it was again, it was like having the PC or whatever.
I said, none of us have electrical generators sitting by, by our houses and except for maybe emergency, we just been on the network. So like, why I said one day, all this information is going to reside in a network somewhere. And we're not going to be like. And so that was years before cloud computer. But it wasn't, you could just like, and again, that was a metaphor. That was an analogy. Here's the electrical network, right? Here's whatever.
And, so again, learning how to think by analogy, looking outside of your own industry, thinking about not products and services, but the deep needs and functionality. It's not hard to put these pictures together. It's, it really isn't, but it's, maybe in one of our, one of our dialogues here, we'll talk about how do you get better at it? How do you teach people how to do it? Because, it's a skill that can be learned.
and i think one of the main ingredients as you identified is time you have to assign the time and if you look at your diary if you're a leader of an organization.
Is very few people assigning enough time to the future and thinking about it and again as i say gary's books we're gonna cover them over the next few weeks and i'm very grateful for that i'm getting a unique and very privileged opportunity to do this with you as well gary for people who want to find you reach out to you where's the best Find you me at garyHamel. com. LinkedIn, an ex, you can find me there, Prof. Hamel.
And and if you get a question or something that you want to know more about, you're welcome to email me. I'm Gary Hamel, just the name at managementlab. org. My i'm gary travels extensively for keynotes all over the world as well as well as consultancy so, reach out to him for those services well that is still provides brilliantly, gary Hamel author of competing for the future on this instance and many more thank you for joining us.