Gary Hamel - Leading The Revolution Part 4

We're still on this book because it's so good leading the Revolution, and we're joined by the author of this book, Gary Hamel. Welcome back. Nice to be here Aidan. It's great to have you back, man. I absolutely love this chapter. I was teeing up the last day at the end of the last episode, but I went deeper into it. I went down many, many rabbit holes. It's two brilliant chapters.

One is corporate rebels, and this is the understanding of the difficulty that you have when you're navigating the corporate maze, the corporate political landscape as well, that we'll get into in a moment. I'm gonna tee you up with this following quote from the book. It's just, I sent it Gary to so many people who work in change and they were like, oh my God, that's me. So here we go.

You understand the revolutionary imperative. You feel it in your bones. You're vibrating with excitement that the thought of doing something new, building something radical, and you can't shut up about it.

But your industrial era boss with a black belt in corporate gamesmanship, is immune to your ramblings. Every time you start to pitch your idea, you get the look. You know the one the one that says, who hired this idiot? Anyway, so what do you do? Asks Gary. Beat your head against the wall. Throw yourself in front of the chairman's limo. Bide your time until the morons recognize your genius and promote you. Take early mental retirement, which many people do enroll in a seminary. Steady on.

There's another option, a path too seldom trod that is rocky and steep, but leads to opportunity. It is a path unfamiliar to corporate types, but well known to thousands of otherwise powerless individuals who succeeded in knocking history out of its grooves. Absolutely. Beautiful quote, Gary, let's tell our audience what you were thinking when you were starting this chapter.

First of all, I've lived for so long in Silicon Valley and I see all these wonderful entrepreneurs , and half of them, probably more than half of them, used to work in some big company, and they had an idea and it was powerful and or at least deserved to be explored. And they couldn't get an audience, they couldn't get anybody to pay attention. So they leave.

Prob probably if probably half of all business plans get written , on the employers paying the cost of you taken your time to write this thing and then you go in and you build it somewhere else. So that seemed to me like a colossal waste. Somebody shouldn't have to like, take the risk shift careers and so on to get an idea to have traction.

And yet inside most organizations, yeah, it is super, super difficult, particularly if you're young, particularly if you're at a lower level to, to get a hearing. So part of me writing this is like how do you punch above your weight? How do you take an idea and get people to take it seriously when you have very little political power and very little formal influence.

It's such an important book, Gary, and to know that you're not alone because those corporate change makers who experience this, it can feel like they're failing. They're the one who's not. I. Very good at it. And in, in many cases it's true. Let's be honest. And today, in this chapter, in this episode, we're gonna share some of the things you can do, but you quote Russo in the book here, and there's another lovely quote.

You said, law is a very good thing for men with property and a very bad thing for men without property. The worshipful observance of precedent is a very good thing for those who sit atop. Organizations because precedent protects their prerogatives. It rewards the skills they've perfected and the knowledge they've AC acquired in running the old thing. But precedents and a narrow distribution of strategy making power is a very bad thing for anyone who wants to create a new future.

I'm gonna keep going on here because this next bit teases up for a brilliant diagram shared by Gary that we're gonna share on the screen, Gary, and we'll have a bit of empathy for those people who are just listening to us.

But to tee you up here in a highly successful company, the operating model business model, mental model, and political model are all perfectly aligned. Each one sits squarely atop the one below. Human resource professionals call this. Alignment and alignment is fine if the world is not changing, but perfect alignment destroys any chance of innovation because it. Brooks, no descent. And allows no alternatives. Alignment is the enemy of business concept innovation.

Get your head around that one because it's something that we don't talk enough about. And Gary, who penned those words, is gonna share exactly what he was talking about. Yeah, lemme try to do that. So first of all, yeah, alignment. Is this like dangerous sort? I think it's almost the holy grail of a lot of HR people, other people. In fact, I did a cartoon, Aidan 'cause I'm cartoonist in my spare time that has like a whole group of lemmings running off a cliff together.

And like the CO is standing back away saying, well, Elise, they're all going in the same direction, right? So yeah. I didn't know, I, I didn't know they were your own cartoons. The cartoons you share in all your books. Brilliant. so, so, so, so in any case yes, for sure you ought alignment and consistency on, on, in, many ways. But perfect alignment is stasis, and stasis is death.

So this little concept I have literally, if you imagine like fortunes of baked beans or cans of tuna or something, and they're all perfectly stacked. and at the bottom you have the operating model. What's the supply chain what assets, capabilities we have? How do we go , to market and so on. Above that, you have the business model. What are our choices about what customers we serve, what's our value proposition?

So on, and, then a top that you have a mental model, and then at the very top you have the political model. Who gets to decide who says we're going left or right, or whatever. And what you find in an organization typically is all of those things are very aligned. So you have a group of people, the top , who grew up probably running that operating model who grew up inside that business model, whose mental models accord with all that.

This is the this is my belief about who the customers, how we reach 'em, and so on. And and then finally, those are the people who have the power to say yes or no to anything. So when that is all perfect life, there's just no room for anybody to do something radically new, you're just gonna get, you're get closed off. That's not our business. That's not the way this industry works. And people, the top who are discomforted when you come up with a truly, truly new idea.

So you have to find a way of kind of misaligning those things if you like, if you want to create any space , for new innovation to happen.

Otherwise, as you try to work an idea up the pyramid, every single time, you're gonna have somebody , who, who says no. And if you're down at the bottom of the pyramid, there are a lot of people above you who have the power to say no. And I think we, we might have talked about this before in most organizations there are no disincentives to say no. You could just kill an idea. Nobody comes back to it three years later and says, Hey, boy, that was a big miss. What the hell happened there?

Who is the idiot? Who kind of shut that down? That will never happen. So, , if you have perfect alignment, the people at the top they have the power, they have a particular set of mental models, , and they're very familiar with the business model. They build it, they ran it, their skills align with that. You it is you gotta disrupt that, shake that loose. If you want any hope of doing something new.

I'm gonna jump ahead because in that chapter that we teed up there and where Gary shares that diagram, there's three case studies of brilliant change makers. There's a guy who built a PlayStation, there's a team within IBM who basically educated the entire corporation about the internet. And then really importantly, there was a guy from France, DuPont La Rock, who essentially created a sustainable business model for Shell. And again. Couldn't, didn't stay there.

Which tells you a lot about what happened there. But did create the business. We're gonna skip them. We're gonna leave them to you to read the business 'cause they're very much in depth. Gary, maybe you wanna say a word on those because you did a hell of a lot of work interviewing each of those change makers. Yeah, well certainly it's, it's kind of hard to find people who've done that, right? So these are kind of, not quite unicorns, but they're fairly , rare beasts.

But that was what , I was looking for. Let me, let me put a little academic research behind this as well. There. There's a Stanford faculty member who I've lost touch with now, but Bob Bergman who wrote some really lovely stuff about how companies do strategic pivots. And he had done a case study on Intel, and some long time ago, Intel made a pivot from RAM devices me, memberships into microprocessors.

And of course, in, in hindsight, this looks like some brilliant strategic move probably led from the top. It wasn't at all, right? It's somebody four levels down who has an idea, who's super persistent, who builds the case, builds a coalition, , and you start to and finally the company says like, maybe we should try this. And I think that's true in most of these cases, right? I I wish it were otherwise, I think, and we'll we, maybe we'll talk about this.

There are ways , of building strategy at scale in organizations where you ensure that all these voices on the fringe are heard and you can aggregate them together and you can see the future faster. But you know, in the absence of that you need people who are willing to fight their corner, who do not have a natural constituency, who are not at the top of the pyramid. And again, when you look back through history, that is how strategy happens more, or strategy change happens more often than not.

So I was looking for people who had been kind of catalyst in doing that and understand like, well, what does it take to do that? How do you have this kind of influence in a very large organization? To literally get them to think about new opportunities. And for IBM it was at that time the internet was coming. A lot of the incumbents were behind that. IBM actually got got in front of it. And of course, PlayStation, we all know that story. And that was not a business that Sodium was interested in.

That was not classic consumer electronic business. So, yeah. And by the way, if you're a leader and you understand that this is how strategies change, typically, right? They don't change at the top because the top is too vested in the status quo. They change when you have some malcontent, some revolutionary somebody at the fridges.

If you understand that you're gonna try to find these people and you're gonna try to make life easier for them, and you're gonna listen to them and you're gonna be particularly concerned if their voices are getting shut off and you don't even know it because it's happening three your four levels down and you never hear them. So that was kind of the the purpose of going out and finding these people and saying, what does it take?

To change the direction of a very large company when nobody asks you to do it. And one thing you talk about in the book, and we are we're gonna cover in the future when we talk to Joe Bauer about the idea of resource allocation is there's. Oftentimes the CEO wants that information, but it's the middle layer. It's those people who have a serious vested interest in the status quo who won't let those ideas bubble to the top and often kill the person.

Try to frustrate them or ostracize them, or get them to leave outta frustration many, many times. And there's a, quote here again, a brilliant paragraph that will speak to so many people and tee us up for Gary's eight moves that you can make. This is, what can you do when you're this person? Every day companies get blindsided by the future.

Every day, dozens of organizations find themselves suddenly on the defensive, struggling to adapt a decrepit business model to someone else's business concept innovation. Yet the future never arrives as a surprise to everyone in an organization, someone somewhere. Mainly the listener to this show was paying attention for these heretics and novelty addicts.

Tomorrow's opportunities are every bit as real and an inevitable and inevitable as today's sunrise, but too often the Sears feel isolated and impotent. They don't know where to begin in building a grassroots movement, even though the principles of activism aren't classified, and there's no secret handshake. Over the decade, social containers of all types have constructed a highly practical theory of activism.

How sad that the principles of activism are virtually unknown to citizens of the corporate realm. And then you go on to say, well, let's tell you how to build an insurrection from those people.

Gary studied from all the literature that he's read, and it starts with one of eight steps, which is to build a point of view. And this POV, this point of view needs to have four main ingredients. It needs to be credible, coherent, compelling, and probably most importantly commercial. Yeah, well it's it's one thing and I fall prey to this as well. It's one thing to kind of have this general sense that there's a new opportunity over there. We need to pay attention to it.

Maybe it's something that's gonna come from AI or it's something coming from a fundamental shift in social values or whatever. But it's one thing to kind of have that as a nagging feeling or even talk about it then to really do the hard work of saying , what might the business model look like? I think in the, in the early maybe even the preface of that book Aidan, I laid out a fairly detailed view of what a totally digital business school might look like now. Will it ever come to pass?

I don't know. I. You have to have something that has detail to it that really reflects , the needs of customers in it. So don't just talk about , a vague kind of idea yet you really have to put the work into fleshing it out, making it real, thinking through the implications, understanding how you might get there.

And if you're not willing to put that time in and that effort in to really elaborate it and think it through write it out, put it in a presentation, maybe talk to some experts that agree with you, get their points of view. If you're not willing to do that, you're not gonna have any influence in the organization.

So a, a lot of people kind of complain or whine or say, gee, we should do something, but are not willing to put in the hard work of, of, of, of building something that can stand scrutiny, something you can share, something other people can look at. Maybe it's a simulation maybe it's CAD drawings, whatever it is. But you gotta reify that idea. So other people in the organization , can understand what you're talking about. There's one piece which I find so important.

So firstly, having a point of view in the first place. It's one of the reasons, Gary, when I started this show. I used to interview a lot of entrepreneurs, startup founders or scale up business leaders. And I found that they didn't have a point of view. Oftentimes it was quoting Gary Hamel or some other person they'd read, or some HBO article they just happened to stumble upon, but they didn't have one.

And actually what happened was I started to get kind of bored because it was like the same old stuff every week. And I, and it's why I interview authors on this show, is because they have worked hard to have a point of view. They've absorbed information, that they've synthesized it, they've written it, they've put their own slant on it.

And that's what's valuable I find, and I always tell change makers, these catalysts that you talk about here, that writing is a great way to actually establish that, that they need to start writing. Which leads us to 0.2, which is to write a manifesto. What do you want to see in the future? I think that's particularly important to do from the perspective , of customers. Whatever, I've been involved in any innovation. We try to build some persona. We try to imagine who this person is.

Why would they care about this? How are they not being served now? How is the solution gonna be better for them? And I think writing a manifesto from that perspective that feels very human and, where you're really being driven by a deep need or deep frustrations. That's like a super critical, that's what people respond to. They respond to, Hey, how are you going to solve this really deep, important problem? So again it takes time, it takes effort.

But as you say, Aidan, in writing that out you are forced to deal with the gaps in your own logic. You're forced to think about, I was just assuming this would happen, but maybe it won't. So I think that the sheer fact of writing it out go back to that business concept template I have in the book. Think through every one of those, every one of those kind of building blocks, what would this look like? And you don't have to there's certainly gonna still be some gaps and so on.

But if you haven't put in the hard work of doing that, don't expect anybody to take you seriously. There's a couple of key points you make in this manifesto. One is that something that we don't often do and particularly 'cause of the frustration, which is to stay constructive. Don't criticize. Don't rehearse past failures, and don't look for culprits. We often do that because we're trying to, we're so angry. We're like, wake up your dinosaurs.

And then the second is to provide broad recommendations, but don't argue for a single do or do die course of action. Remember, you're launching a campaign. Maybe you'll take us through those two because they're two of several that I picked out from that point of the manifesto that are so important. Well, obviously all of us, we respond better to things that are positive and future looking than we do to criticism and so on.

And so I think again, one of the tricks and all of these people that I profiled there did this. They were able to describe those things. Even those sometimes they were disruptive and required deep change. They were able to describe them in ways where people could say, yeah, we could do that. That makes sense for us. We should be in front of that.

So I think you have to be relentlessly optimistic , and paint a picture of why this is better for your organization, why it's better for everybody there. But to write it. And I've, I've seen people fail because of that, to write it as kind of a, a screed and we're so stupid, we better that just doesn't work. So trying to find a way that this is described as, as a, as a win for the organization is something that moves everybody forward.

I think that's, that's, and, and often leaders are looking to see, like, do I have a place in that future? Are, are my skills gonna be still relevant? So you have to take that into account and try to try to create something that, that is positive, where people can see a path for themselves in that future. In the end, obviously if you're gonna experiment, you have to find something very specific, a place where you start.

But I think early on, I. You don't want to overs specify because if you overs specify an opportunity, here's exactly how we're gonna do it. What channels, here's what we're gonna invest, here's the new people we need to hire. If you get very very specific, it's easy for somebody to pick that apart. And to be honest, early on, you want a lot of other people thinking about how we might do this. So you need to make, the case needs to be very compelling.

People need to believe this is some inevitable is somewhat inevitable. You have to describe the changes that are enabling all of this. And you can do a broad picture of that business model. But I think you, you don't wanna get too specific because something's gonna say, well that's clearly impossible or not gonna be able to do that. Or, so you want to invite and particularly as you build out a coalition you want, wanna invite other people to help you make this better.

And by the way, that's also part of building as I as we talk about building a coalition of support because. You wanna give other people the chance to put their thumbprints on this, right? And to feel like it's theirs. And if you come with something that's overly specified and your argument is, Hey, this is the only way to do it, I've thought it through. Let's, like you're disempowering the very people you would want to support. So leave it a little bit open early on.

Get a lot of opinions from everybody you can. And how would you make this better? What am I missing? Is there some fatal flaw in this design that you see? But the more people you have that look at it and help you build it, the more credible it's going to be across your organization. I have to say mea culpa, I was working in an organization and I built a product and I did exactly the wrong thing. I was trying to get credit for it. My ego took over. But it, one of the problems was the culture.

The culture didn't see that where the work was coming from and it's, you felt that you had to take every bit of credit that was going. So it, it speaks to Hawaii, and we'll talk about this later on in books like. Humano why culture is such an important aspect when it comes to innovation. But one last thing on the manifesto, Gary, you say sometimes you need a stick and this concept of creating a burning platform is sometimes criticized, but sometimes you need it.

And I love how you set this one up, like a reluctant Pharaoh unwilling to free the Israelites from bondage. The only way they're going to change their minds as if you convince them that things are bad and getting worse. Every company sits on a burning platform. If you don't know where yours is burning, go find out. Maybe it's an online competitor that's about to rip your margins to shreds. Again, this informs your manifesto.

Yeah, I think again, in general, I wanna stay positive and I wanna lead with the opportunity right. But you know, you're going to find a certain number of people who are very comfortable with the status quo and who might rightly tell you, Hey, we're better off investing the next dollar, pound, whatever in the existing business than taking a chance on something new. And so you kind of overinvest slowly in a dying business.

And so you do have to, you have to build that case of why this is urgent, why this is inevitable, why the existing model sooner or later is gonna run out. I, I Don't know if I mentioned this little anecdote to you but this is maybe a place where I'd failed in this sort of work, but some years ago now, maybe 15 years ago, I was working with one of the biggest media companies in the world, and they had a very disparate portfolio. And they were trying to, like, what's the logic of this?

They own magazines and movie production and television production and and whatever. And. I thought a lot about like, where's digital media going? What's the one big idea that is going to change the media landscape? And so again, this is, I wanna say maybe this is, I dunno, maybe it's 20 years ago, I don't know. But in any case, the big idea for me was the consumer's gonna be in control.

And our goal is to empower consumers to make, for the media, to be accessible, for them, to make choices for them to have. and I shared this with the board, which included a lot of very prominent media people, super rich people. And they said, Gary, we can't do that because our whole business model is based on telling people what they can watch, when they can watch what time programming it out.

So we lead them from one program to the next releasing something in the cinemas, making as much money as we can there, then putting it into premium pay for view, and then putting it somewhere else. And so the idea was so uncomfortable to them. That they just couldn't do it.

And clearly the, probably the failure I made there was I really didn't marshal enough data and maybe that still would've made a difference, but I didn't really spend enough time marshaling the data on why this was gonna happen, whether you like it or not. I dunno if I told you about this story. This is another story that maybe I told you. By the way, let's tell them again. Let's tell them, because I don't remember. well, you might, but, but again, many rabbit holes. I don't remember.

you know, I, long time ago I got asked to speak at well, I guess I can tell you. Yeah. I got, I got asked to speak at a big event at Microsoft, and this is back in the days of, of Bill Gates and Steve Balmer before Satin at Ellis time there. And I. And it was a very intimidating event because they had a hundred CEOs from all over the world. So I'm sitting in this room and there is the chairman of SO and Ford and Citibank and whatever the hell.

And part of my presentation I talked about what happens when the PC is no longer the center of the digital universe. 'cause it was clear the network was gonna be the center and the PC was just gonna be one more device along smartphones and other digitally enabled things. So at the end of this little talk, some senior Microsoft person, a little bit upset at me for sure, and I thought the talk went well.

But they came up to me, 'cause I talked about the post pc, post personal computer future and they said Gary, we don't believe in the post PC future. That's not how we see it. I said, oh. I said, how do you see? He said, it is gonna be the PC plus future. In other words, it's the PC is still the center and it's plus whatever comes. And I was a little taken aback. I didn't know how to respond. So I thought for one moment I said the future, strangely indifferent to our preferences.

The world may work out that way, but maybe not. So like, be be acknowledge what your preferences are. Like why, like, are you feeling that because you've done all the research, you have all the data, you've looked at the things, or is that just makes you feel warm and fuzzy? And so I think you do have to bring data to bear. You have to look at the inevitability of these things. Again, let me take an example.

I got very curious looking at the success of Tesla and we'll see they're gonna flatten out they're not gonna destroy the whole auto industry. And some of the net zero stuff we're gonna have to pull back on just for probably practical reasons. But nevertheless, I, I got thinking, okay, so you launched the model s in 2012, the first like mainstream ev. What were the leaders at Toyota and Ford and GM and Volkswagen and BMW Mercedes, what were these guys thinking about?

And they clearly weren't taking this seriously. And if you go back you can find all these kind of scathing, dismissive concepts. This is a toy, it's never gonna work. Nobody's built a new auto company in a hundred years. Like what a waste. But there were three things that you could see that were happening that anybody who's paying attention knew were going to be significant.

One, you had the increasing CO2 emissions, which sooner or later we're gonna have to take that seriously in one way or the other. And that had been going on for a long time. That wasn't the new thing. Number two, you had the rapidly declining cost per kilowatt hour of battery performance. So they were getting more and more efficient and therefore affordable. And then finally you had the growing power of GPUs that are necessary for autonomous driving.

You could see all these trends for a long time. And when you start to put them together, you go like, okay, this is, it's not a question of whether this is gonna happen. It's inevitable. It is gonna happen. So I think a lot of what you're trying to do when you're trying to help a company get out in front of something is you're trying to bring , the, the distant future into the present.

You're trying to help them understand the difference between, well, it might happen and what is very likely an inevitability. It will happen. We don't know exactly when, we don't know exactly how, but it's probably better for us that we're shaping that than it's shaping us. So I think that is also part of building that case, is looking at the things that kind of just make this inevitable. I'll give you one last example. Again, it's a long ago story, but I think very relevant.

I was sitting with a group of senior leaders from one of the biggest consumer products companies in the world that makes food things, home cleaning products and so on. You can decide who it is, but there's only a couple of 'em, right? So I'm sitting with them and, and they, these companies, they all grew by buying brands, right? So you see all these brands, you have no idea who's behind it, who's the parent company? All you see is this soap brand, this detergent brand this, whatever it is.

So I said at them, I said like, somebody's gonna figure out, 'cause you guys have no brand economies, right? Every one of these brands is a little thing. You're advertising it. Maybe some of 'em are bigger, maybe it's even a billion dollars. But it's just, you're fragmenting huge marketing investments across like th 30, 40, 50 brands. I said, somebody's gonna figure out how to build a, an arch brand, right? A Keystone brand above all of this. This is Gary. Like, no way people love these brands.

They grew up with them. It's the brand that's important. And I said, you know what? Be careful when you are challenging economics. So the economics of advertising and putting that together and advertising one brand and whatever, merchandising those economics are like, they're there, right? Somebody's gonna figure out how to do this. Well, it's interesting today the largest consumer brand in the United States by far is a brand called Kirkland. And it's the house brand of Costco.

And it's bigger than any brand from pick these way, way, way, way bigger. And of course if you go to the UK, you'll find the Tesco store brands and the Sainsbury store brands and whatever. So like I knew this was inevitable sim simply because the economics. We're so powerful, like and so you have to find those future inevitabilities and make them real for people. So it's not like, well yeah, maybe we could do this, maybe. No, no, it's gonna happen. Like where do you wanna be in this story?

But let's not pretend it's not gonna happen. . So you have to leave the opportunity, but you need also to be able to talk about the imperative that if we wanna control our destiny, this is not gonna be optional. those stories, one of the reasons I'm so eager to share the books and in a way, I mean you probably at the start when I got in touch were probably gone. Oh, well those books are better outta date. They're actually not.

If you generify them and you take them as templates, they're not outta date. They're the exact same stories. The company's names change. Some stuff went a different way because of some business model or something took off that you just couldn't predict. But one of the things you mentioned, Tesla there, for example, the template of Tesla for me is exactly with the likes of Toyota. So Toyota disrupted Ford and gm. Ford and GGM dismissed them. They got better.

And also Toyota started building electric vehicles way before everybody else. So even though they were this disruptor, they fell into the trap themselves with Tesla. And I thought about what you told me before about working with Nokia that Nokia the way Toyota and all these other companies dismissed Tesla, Nokia, dismissed the iPhone, Blackberry Rim at the time, dismissed the iPhone.

And you worked with the people in Nokia who dismissed it even though they were the ones who created this industry. And it's that pattern that I think is so important to highlight and we see over and over and over and again, and I can understand that it must be EAs, it must be very, very difficult to see the label when you're inside the jar. So when it's you who's in the spotlight, you running the company, it's impossible to see the pattern.

Yeah, I, I think it's a good point there Aidan, about thinking about the patterns. We did a little exercise some time ago. I, I should resurrect it 'cause I, I thought it was a very powerful idea. We have this little idea around, I, I think we called it the strategy genome project. And, and here was the thought behind it or the analogy. So all proteins and all of human life are built out of 20 amino acids put together in different combinations.

So I started to think about as you look about, as you look at strategies, many strategies across industries and so on, do you see the same strategies over and over again, but in different industries and kind of describe differently? And of course the answer is you do you find strategies of disintermediation, you find strategies of doing roll-ups in a fragmented.

Industry you find strategies where you have radical customer empowerment strategies that are based on peer-to-peer and so on strategies where you're creating markets where markets never existed. And so that's why I think it's, and we actually kind of did this kind of fun thing. I think we did identify what we thought were the most powerful 20 powerful strategic ideas.

And then you could look at these ideas , as columns, and then look at a set of industries like, where's this, like Artie, and where are people not seeing it? So that's also a super strong argument for why you have to be learning outside of your industry, right? Because that, that it might not have happened where you are yet. The other thing that makes this a little difficult is most, most kind of so-called disruptive strategies. You know, they don't, I. They don't destroy a company right away.

Right? It can still take decades. And so the real risk isn't that somebody comes along and overnight blows up your business. The real risk is just this long slow slide into irrelevance where, where the danger is never apparent enough, real enough until it's too late. I was watching the new and this will date our little broadcast here, but I was watching the New Press Secretary in the Trump administration here in the United States.

A young woman sitting in the White House briefing room, and they're now bringing in a lot of the new media players, right? The folks that have huge audiences online on YouTube and so on. And they're giving them a seat at this, what was a very exclusive table for the biggest newspapers, the biggest broadcasters, and now those guys simply aren't the show anymore, right? Donald Trump reached a whole lot more voters being on the Joe Rogan show, right? Than than he did on any formal network.

Well. You could see this coming forever. Literally, and I won't tell you where we saw it, but we saw it a long time ago. Wrote about it so you could see this coming. Once, once you have these new platforms where people find that the voices that they wanna listen to you'll be able to build audiences that are bigger than the audiences and conventional media where you're telling people, here are a few choices. And it's just , like, it's, it's it's logic.

And, and so those guys had 20 years to figure this thing out, cable news and so on. Linear television. so that's that's the real risk is that the slope into irrelevance is shallow enough that you are never moved to action. And that's why again, it is so important to fold the future back in the present and say, what part of these sins some trends will peter out. Some are irrelevant. What do we see that is likely to be inevitable? Because it fits with economic reality.

It fits with what consumers really want. It addresses frustrations. It addresses gaps in our own thinking. So you have to build that picture and it has to be as real to you and as compelling to you as clear to you as present reality. And if you don't do that, you'll always dismiss what's coming next. So that's if you wanna have that kind of influence and you're young in an organization. Yes. Build out your case. But also, not everything is inevitable.

Some things it's just a great idea and Nespresso was probably not inevitable, right? But clearly if you look at the value proposition, it's pretty compelling. So build out , the value proposition, also if you really believe this is an inevitable future, you gotta marshal the data, build a a persuasive argument. And the platform may not be burning yet, but it may be smoldering, and you have to point to that. I always think of a Gary as, as life.

We all one day bend down to tie our shoelaces and it hurts a bit more than it used to, or we can't reach those keys We dropped on the floor and, and eventually it, it just sneaks up on you. I remember. Recently I was stretching in the gym and , the fitness instructor who works in that gym said to me, oh, I, I don't usually see you stretching. And I said, yeah, , you end up stretching when it hurts enough. So, but, but it had been hurting.

It'd been getting tighter and tighter for quite some time. And I think that's the same thing with a business. And we know this. That's why one of the real drivers in me doing this show is we know this the books behind me there, mental biases, how the brain embraces the status quo. Doesn't want you , try things. We know this and yet we still find it so, so difficult. So having you on the show is so valuable.

So I'm gonna, I can get back to , the eight steps we're, we're on step two and I, there's one last piece of step two, which is to anticipate the resistance.

Gary says, expect to hear dozens of reasons for not doing something when timid, backward looking souls go scrambling for an escape hatch, , your job is to bolt it shut. So an example, Gary, and maybe this all spark some ideas for you, some examples that you've seen even as the consultant they're paying to come into the company. An escape hatch you say, is, for example, it's not happening as fast as you say, and the bolt that you slam shut is, oh yes it is. And here's the data to prove it.

So you go through examples after examples of this where people will throw out a blocker and here's the pre-prepared reason why you shut down that blocker. that is work that many innovators don't like to do 'cause it's quite left-brained work. It's boring. It's to sit through almost script scenario planning. What will they do to shut my idea down? And then I have to go and get that data to actually prove that I'm right or I'm on the right track.

, I think , the thought there is also, whatever that idea is, pressure, test it with a lot of your peers first. Make sure that you've heard all the objections and you've built your counter arguments where you can before you run this up, the corporate hierarchy, right? Because share it with people who can't, who don't have the power to kill it, but maybe critics right? And may point out some flaw that you didn't see.

So I think, yeah the more kind of critical eyes you have looking at something and again, leaders can kill an idea really, really quickly and often inadvertently simply by saying, as you said, it's not happening that fast. I don't believe it. It's not gonna affect us. This is gonna run outta steam. I heard, I, I don't know if we've talked in our conversation so far about the pattern of denial.

I don't remember if we have, but I think denial follows this very similar pattern, whether it's in human relationships or whether it's in the boardroom. Bedrooms and boardrooms. It's the same in this sense. Is that, so I, I'll use the analogy of a relationship that's not working very well. And let me try to talk about this from the perspective of the guy in this relationship, because that's the only perspective I know.

But if you have, let's say your girlfriend, your wife, whatever, and it's not working so well the first response is always simply to deny it like, well, or, or to kind of dismiss it. Lemme say it that way to dismiss it.

And you make it seem as if it's just this little thing. Well, yeah, all couples fight. There's rocky patches. You just have to expect that. And probably this thing will sort itself out. So you're, when it was a little uncomfortable, the first reaction is just make it go away. Just like, pretend it doesn't exist. Nah, nah, nah, I can't hear it.

So, so that will go for a while, but in this relationship, things start to get worse and there's like long periods of silence and you're kind of just a perpetual level of anger there, and your gut is turning.

So you'll go from dismissal to rationalization. And now you have to you have to have a story because clearly this is not usual. So if you're a guy, your story's gonna be something like my wife has issues and like it's daddy issues, or old boyfriend or something, but like, maybe go talk to a co. But it's like you're, it's, it's you're, you're letting yourself off the hook in that case. It's just, you gotta have a story. So that will go on for a while.

Then you move from rationalization to mitigation. Now you have to do something. And Typically whatever that mitigating step is, it's gonna be something that you put on somebody else. So the mitigating step is, dear, have you ever thought about Prozac? Right? Like, maybe that will like, get your mood back in equilibrium or something like that. And that probably that suggestion probably doesn't get the, the response you were hoping for.

So the fourth step is actually confrontation, not confronting her, but confronting your own beliefs. Like do I not listen very well? Like, how am I not showing up as a good husband or whatever?

And what, what you see often in industry, Aidan, is that that can take 20 years to sort itself out. And I don't know if I told you this little story. This was, I, this was a dinner. I had one evening in London with a bunch of senior people at Ford and they told me that they had just finished their 20th annual benchmarking study of Toyota. And I dunno when this was, this is a long time ago. But I asked them like, okay, what did you guys learn in your 20 that you did learn in 19 18 17 60?

Like, what's taken you so long? So that was not a very polite question. It kind of hung there in the cigar smoke for a while. And then their treasurer gave a very thoughtful, honest answer. He said, for the first five years we looked at Toyota, we didn't believe the data. Young people would come back and they said how good they were, how few defects per vehicle, how few labor hours per vehicle. We just said, it's impossible. You're miscounting.

There's clearly something that you know you need to go look at. So we kept, we kept getting the data and finally it's inescapable. So for the next five years. So that was the dismissal stage. I just can't be true next five years. We said, well, it was the rationalization stage. It's just because they're Japanese, right? They believe in NE Wasi and wa, whatever the hell that is. Right?

They don't have they have government support, they have lower cost of capital, they have docile unions, like never is it gonna work outside of Japan, but like, fine. Okay, yeah, great. He said, then they started building plants in north of England, in southern United States, and they got the same results there they got in Japan. So we moved from kind of rationalization to mitigation, but the mitigation was, you know let's go steady.

Everything they're doing we'll hire the consultants, we'll have these quality circles we'll put in robots. And he said, we never got the same results. No, what, whatever we did.

And he said, only in the last few years did we come to this honest confrontation where we said the real advantage is they have a completely different view of their frontline employees and what they're capable of. And the pace of improvement comes from them turning on all of the intellectual capabilities and problem solving capabilities of people on the front lines. And, and we have toxic relationships with those people and we don't know how to use their intellect.

So the, the last thing we'll challenge is typically our own deeply embedded beliefs. And, and so what you're trying to do in all of these cases is shorten the denial cycle, right? Like, let's just like, but. Yeah. But it is human nature, and so you kind of have to, you have to think through what are the excuses gonna be? What, what people are gonna say, well, it's not really happening really well, what data do we have? Or they're gonna say, there's nothing we can do about it. Really.

Like, why, why do you believe that? Or it'll never happen here. So I think, it's, it's all about kind of building something that's airtight and anticipating the objections. We interrupt this broadcast for Aidan to ring his wife quickly. I was wrong. I was wrong, Gary. Well, I love that man. That's a an absolutely brilliant example and one that we can all relate to in any aspect.

There's a, something that was referred to on the show before as the three asshole rule, which is if you meet three assholes in one day, maybe you're the asshole. Well, I think for me, the lesson there is, I. If you wanna dismiss something or you're arguing with something, or you don't wanna believe something, ask yourself, how does it serve your own interests to dismiss this? And be very careful of dismissing things, you know? Now, if you have the facts behind you and so on, that's fine.

You can just say, well, that's, that's like, not, not true, but if you're presented with new facts or new interpretation, be really, really wary of that first reaction to kind of shut it down or dismiss it. If, if, if that reaction is something that makes you feel more comfortable or makes you feel better about yourself, right? That's just like a personal discipline you have to have.

Like, oh yeah, okay, well this is pretty uncomfortable, but let me see if I can get over that and hear the real truth here.

Absolutely, man, , it's such important the personal renewal that goes with organizational renewal, which is, , I'm sure you've seen it or maybe even. Prescribed it when you were working with organizations that the leadership team need coaching when the organization's going through change. Yeah, they need coaching and they need a systematic effort to unpack a lot of those legacy beliefs and assumptions.

I think we, we have talked about this for sure, but it's why I believe the first and most critical step in innovation is always deconstructing what you already believe and asking how much of that is still relevant, how much of that is just legacy? How much of that is self comforting illusions?

But if you don't do that as a very explicit exercise, then you're likely to hang on to things that simply make you comfortable and use your political power to shut down conversations that make you feel uncomfortable. Super, super dangerous for the organization, for shareholders, it happens again and again and again. Just on that one, one thing that I, I'm always conscious of is.

Many people who lead organizations are not leaders of people, they're political geniuses, and in some cases psychopaths , and certainly in narcissists. And therefore, they don't really care about who they damage in getting to those roles. And it's one thing that that actually happens in organizations and many, many entrepreneurs have that profile and then when the organization goes to, needs to jump to the next level, they don't have that personal willingness to actually let go of the past.

And in some types, in, in some cases, actually sabotage their own businesses. Maybe you've seen that sometimes.

Well, I think, yeah, I think that is a vulnerability, particularly in entrepreneurial companies because the founder is so closely associated with one kind of idea and, and, and then the organization becomes dependent. That person's kind of vision and perspicuity and when they run inevitably you can maybe find exceptions here and there, some extraordinary entrepreneur and there, there are some that have had multiple acts.

But, but in almost always at some point the founder runs out of vision, right? And, and if the organization has not developed its own muscles to kind of see the future, to create strategy and so on, you co become highly dependent on that person. They, they like being seen as the great Sierra and the strategist and so on, and will very easily shut down new ideas.

So if, if you are in, in an organization, entrepreneur you need to build from the, the, the strategic thinking capacity of the whole organization and not let them end up depending just on you, however, kind of ego boosting that is. We better keep moving Gary, 'cause we're only on 0.3 of eight. The next one is something, many of us, again have to, to that very point that Gary made, look in the mirror and see if you're actually the challenge here because. You can't do it all yourself.

No man or woman's an island. And Gary says you can't change the direction of your company all by yourself. This is a lesson that even corporate chairman eventually lead. And I'd love you to share this story, Gary, because it's one that is in the rear view mirror, but is so, so relevant. And it was where founder and chairman of Silicon Graphics, Inc. Jim Clark, fought a long running battle, an often bitter battle with S-G-I-C-E-O.

Ed McCracken Clark was eager that SGI go down, down market, which is something we've talked about regularly on the show. Moved down market to produce a cheaper product and produce workstations at the upper end of the PC price range. So. Big, machines go down, it's gonna be cheaper. We're gonna have to ship more of them to keep the same profits.

And McCracken was low to sacrifice fat margins, to serve out of scope customers, as he called them exactly to what you were talking about, clung to the past. The status quo was convenient and eventually Clark quit. Yeah, I think, if I'm not sure what Clark could have done different in that situation, but clearly wherever you are, even if you're the CEO or the chairman, you need to marshal a lot of support.

I think coalition building is an underappreciated art and doesn't often get taught when we, when we think about how to change things and I , I tend to be quite relatively conservative in my views, and yet in writing that book I was reading Hannah Arendt and Paul Alinsky. These are like the most radical. Almost Marxist kind of activist. But I realized there's something in that, there's something about how you change large embedded systems and you can't do it alone.

You have to reach out and find other people. And so building that kind of groundswell is hugely important. Now, today, we can do that very quickly by using technology tools. If you have, if you're inviting hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of people into the, into the strategy conversation, and you have hundreds of them saying, here's something we should do, well that's gonna be pretty hard to ignore. But but you know, again, most companies don't approach strategy in that way.

So you're kind of left to do that coalition building on your own. And you make another point in there that has made before, but , it's worth making again that I think. High margin companies are particularly vulnerable to missing the future. Because often what happens over time is technologies become kind of democratized, right? They spread. And if you're you see this right now in this debate and it has yet to work itself out.

We don't have all the facts, but you look at deep seeq, which apparently was done for a fraction. This new AI tool from China done it. A fraction of the cost of open AI and open ai started out as being open, but then say, no, there's a lot more money to be made if we close this thing up and so on. So when you have a high margin business almost anything new that you can imagine will be dilutive to what you're already doing. And so like, everybody's like, well, why would we do that?

That's gonna make us less profitable. So I have to remind people that profits is like volume times margin. So if it brings in millions more customers, yeah, maybe there's less margin, but maybe the whole opportunity is bigger. And you saw that with Intel in recent years. You saw it much earlier with with Xerox. I think you may be seeing it now in the AI space. But yeah, that's just a common mistake in high margin companies, right?

They just do not, and so like, that's fine there's a certain number of companies in the world that can make Louis Vuitton handbags and Hermès Birkin bags and so on. But that's a very, very small part of any market. And maybe it's better to be Costco than it's to be to be herm maze. I don't know. But, be wary. Be wary if your argument is that will dilute our margins because that's often a very bad defense.

There's another reason you say to build a coalition, which is most new opportunities don't fit neatly into any of the organizational boxes. And what you mean here is actually the silos or the departments inside the organization. So as a result, you have to create a magnet for people who harbored the same revolutionary tendencies you do, whether their current organizational home is wherever that is, and a movement is not a box on the organizational chart. I love what you say here.

It's an ink blot bled all over the formal org chart. It's a splat, not a department. I thought that was a very astute point that's often missed. Yeah, I think, you know what if particularly you're a young person and you're trying to build a consensus, you have to find the supporters wherever they are. Right? And they're not and so there's a campaign where you talk to everybody you can think of like, does this make sense to you? Do you know anybody else who might be interested in this?

And I think the story I told about IBM, I'm gonna forget the chap's name, who kind of led that. But that was he started holding conferences and he would invite here's the internet, here's where we think it's gonna go. If you're interested, like, come show up, we're gonna talk about this, think this through. What are the implications for our company? And so he didn't have any formal mandate to do that. Nobody, like he was not the czar of the internet, right?

He was not the company's chief strategist or futures. But he just said, guys, I think this is gonna be important and we have to pay attention to it. And so you are just creating opportunities for people who care about this to get together and push the thinking forward. So again, not conventional thinking for most people. Let me go up through the channels, let me work through the typical structure that's a failure mode.

If you have an idea as, as you said, if you have an idea that doesn't have a natural home, and by the way, even if the idea does have potentially a natural home, but is kind of uncomfortable, you still better be working across the boundaries to build a coalition that again, , I might have said this in , another case, but one of the ways I think about change, particularly when it's hard, is how do I build a coalition for the future that is more powerful and has more influence

than the coalition for the status quo? And that just takes a lot of, talking to people, is this interesting to you? How would you help me make my idea better? And creating opportunities for those people to come together and share and learn and build on each other's enthusiasm. So not a skill is taught anywhere inside of business schools, but , pretty fundamental , if you ever want to have real influence in an organization, rather than spend your career kissing somebody else's backside.

Absolutely. You know what you were talking about, the media company. I worked in one that was where the, I started this show and I was doing what that guy in IBM was doing. I was going around giving these brown bag lunches, trying to create a movement. And in one of, in, in my first performance review before I started that I got like, really high performance review and then she found out I was doing this and she asked me to stop.

And then I was absolutely slated in my l performance review and my role was made redundant. So lemme So I learned, and let's, let's talk about you for a moment. It's an interesting case study. Why did she say stop? well, in what you were doing or what, what was the. was power. So I was working in the digital department and I was educating all the other departments on what digital was. How to run social media campaigns.

What social media was to try and democratize it to get everybody doing it rather than keep it in the department. And her whole thing was territory and have more and more people, more and more power. The time I knew it was really a trouble was hilarious. She asked me to do a strategy, what I would do if I was in charge and I do a strategy and I had like these vertical pillars for the different departments across the organization. And it had one for the digital department.

And then the next slide was there was no digital department and that was a different color and that color was diffused Exactly. Everything's digital. The digital was, a horizontal line across everybody. And she went, she was like, delete that slide. Yeah. And, and by the way, let's be clear being an internal kind of rebel or activist is always going to be dangerous.

You have to believe an idea strongly enough that you're, you're willing to take that risk and be ready to go somewhere else if you don't succeed. And this would not be any kind of critique on what you did, but because sometimes, sometimes that is the inevitable result, right? You just meet somebody whose power is threatened and they have enough power to kind of shut the thing down.

What I would say is in this approach, you do have to be kind of relentlessly optimistic, and you ha, you try, you have to try to paint a picture. Where every everybody's role gets better.

And again, that's not always possible, but even there you might try to think about, well, instead of this woman kind of running the digital services of the digital department, like maybe her role becomes kind of building the digital capability of the whole organization and what she needs to be is see her role , as building capability, as training people, as diffusing this rather than hang on. Now, would she, would she buy that? I don't know.

But, but the secret there for me, and again, not always possible, is helping to paint a picture where the people might be kind of against you. You can paint a picture where , this gives them a chance to have more influence to maybe in a different way, but rather than boxing them out or making them irrelevant. So, again, not always possible, but that's my instinct is how do I position this in a way where I'm giving you and , I have this conversation often now with CEOs who.

I believe that they need to become more and more architects of, of organizational capability rather than strategy strategists and chief decision maker and chief. And what you're trying to help them see is, guys, the biggest impact you can have on the organization is not like being the arbiter on decisions or doing a big deal. The biggest impact you can have is helping to build new institutional capabilities. More agility, more innovation, right? More customer centricity.

And so in a way they're giving up a certain kind of power, that kind of strategic authority, but another way you're helping them see a, a way where they can have far more influence across the entire organization. So that's an important thing for if you wanna be that kind of change maker, try to find the people might be against you. See if you can't reframe that in a way that this gives them greater influence in a different way, but greater influence than they might otherwise have.

And you have to be. Willing to share the glory and share the success if you're in it for yourself, people quickly figure that out. Then it just becomes a battle of hey, yeah, Aidan has this ego and he's trying to do this, and , I'm not suggesting that was the case, but I see that a lot of times where, you know, you wanna hold onto it, you want it to be yours, and therefore, like you build a bunch of enemies and they're powerful enough to kill the thing. Absolutely.

But you know, the reason I was sharing it was actually it was the two, gents and IBM were Dave Grossman and John Patrick. And then the other case studies you share in Sony, Ken Kutaragi, Mm-hmm. and then George Dupont Roques, which was the Shell guy. But what I found was really interesting about them was they were doing this, but then rather than shut them down, somebody higher up actually lifted them up and actually gave them air cover. And it's so important that that happens.

And I, and I do think it's a roll of the dice, sometimes you'll get, you won't get that air cover or you're not loud enough or you don't get to the right people. And this is actually links as nicely to 0.4 that you talk about is, which is you gotta pick your moments and you gotta pick. that you're aiming for, because otherwise that's what probably happened to me. I didn't pick an allowed enough place to, to pitch my wares and get it out there.

Well, certainly as you are building a coalition you're looking for people, particularly senior people. And that's why always go in tentative. Don't go in like, Hey, I figured this thing all out. You guys are idiots. This thing is gonna happen. But kind of always go in whatever your idea is. And we talked about developing it and fleshing it out. I think you need to do that.

But particularly when you're talking to, to, to more senior people, kind of start out humbly start out with like, we got, we have this hypothesis. This is something we think is happening. And start to sniff out who you think is, is willing to kind of support you or not. Where does this resonate or not? , and if you get a very, very quick pushback and you can see this person's not interested in learning, they don't wanna know, just go on. Right. Find somebody else.

Don't waste your time trying to get somebody to change their religious beliefs here. But again, talk to a lot of people. Be humble. Find the senior people who might be willing to back you up, give you some air cover put you in front of a more senior group. And and don't be deterred or discouraged when 80% of the people you talk to are either not interested or disagree, just find the ones who might give you some some amplification.

I think that's such an important point that's rarely said is some people just don't care. They're just there for their paycheck. They don't care. They don't want this hassle. This is way, way beyond their paycheck or they believe it is, Aidan there's a trick here or a gift, but it's, I don't think it's that hard. Is exactly as you're saying, is trying to find the people impact is more important to them than career. Where the company's future is more important to them than career.

And you can f you can find those people , they're going to be the people who are also willing to say, Hey, this is a problem. We're not doing very well here. Right. They don't feel, they don't feel an immediate need to defend every decision that's been made. They're not reflexively defensive about things. So you can suss that out pretty quickly. And those are the people who are likely are, are gonna be your allies. I think you've covered step five, which is to co-opt and neutralize.

This is from Saul Alinsky's work where you're trying to disarm and co-opt rather than demean and confront. I think. I think we've covered that, Gary, unless you feel otherwise. So. So we'll jump then to step six. So we're nearly there, which is a brilliant one to find it. Translator. So you've been at a while and despite your best efforts, you're having trouble getting heard, you talk, but not sure they've comprehended. Don't be surprised.

The very things that make you a revolutionary make it difficult to build a base of common understanding with the disciples of orthodoxy. I think this is again, a key one that sometimes the change maker as well is like listening to talking gibberish. I often think of the Cassandra curse, that she knows the future, but nobody understands her. Or it's like blurt out so much information.

It's like trying to drink water from a hose pipe and not having their story perfect, not having rehearsed their story. So therefore, you may need somebody higher up to actually translate and go, look, this is where it re relates to our strategy. Well, and again, everybody has their own particular knothole they're looking through in an organization, and you may be right on all the specifics, and the idea may be very compelling. I. But you know, you don't understand what are the other trade offs.

You don't understand perhaps the pressures that senior leaders are under. So yeah, finding somebody who whether, whether you, whether you, it's it's financial perspective you need on this, whether it's a broader strategic perspective, whether it's a re regulatory kind of perspective that you need. Finding people who can kind of put this in whatever language and terms makes sense to the very top group of the company is important, right?

That's, that's gonna be your mentor, your sponsor, and so on. So that's a little bit my, my last point, like looking for senior people who are not reflexively defensive who have been kind of outspoken in the past saying, Hey, we missed this, we shouldn't have. And then saying, guys, how do I make this how do I put this in the terms, make it palatable. So it fits with the all overall narrative in the company.

Often the company will have a set of strategic pillars or strategic priorities, and that can be, that's both a good thing, but it can also be dangerous because then you rule out everything that doesn't fit like our strategy. But it is important to be able to kind of translate that in. I, I, I think about my own, in my own institution, the London Business School. So part of our, our mantra at the London Business School is global impact. Right.

We are very, very keen on not just being a bunch of scholars talking to other scholars, but having real impact on the way organizations operate. So anything I might propose, I better figure out, like, how does this multipli our impact? Right. And be able to measure that and describe that in that way. So yeah, finding it, finding people who understand the broader strategic context, who can help you position your argument in that. Again, I think like, like, like super important.

And yeah, you just may not be able to do that from your perspective. I. yeah, and sometimes the configuration doesn't work in your favor and you have to just move on. That's life. But step seven is a key one. Again, because you kind of. I alluded to this earlier on, is that you, you can't boil the ocean. You gotta win small, win early and win often. And people can argue with position papers, but they can't argue with success.

All your organizational efforts are worth nothing if you can't demonstrate that your ideas actually work. Therefore, start small unless you harbor kamikaze instinct. We might talk about this later, I don't know, but certainly one company that figured out, one leader that figured out this is a guy, Scott Cook.

He was a kind of refugee from Procter and Gamble, a founded Intuit, the finance personal accounting software company, which has done spectacularly over the last now it's probably 30 years old now, but even over the last decade they way outperformed the indices and. When he worked at p and g, he had gotten really frustrated , by how long it took to make a decision.

And by the way, and how often decisions are made just on the basis of PowerPoints or political power, or your persuasive abilities, but not on any like reality. And so at some point he could see into it kind of adopting those bad tendencies and meeting after meeting, going through reviews and so on. And he finally said, listen, I only wanna make decisions based on data. And that means if you have an idea, go try something, right? And again, much has been written about this.

We don't need to rehearse this, but there, but even even quite bold and difficult ideas, there's often ways of starting to test your assumptions at super low cost, right? Building mockups or talking to experts. And so rather than take a completely theoretical case, see what try to identify the most contentious. Assumption you have or the one that is most likely to be. And see if you can go find confirming data, see if you can test that in some way, right?

And so at Intuit, this ended up they developed a whole methodology for very, now of course it's a technology company. You can do a lot of this testing very cheaply online. But they ended up with this methodology of go find customers. And by the way, hire is the same kind of thing, right? If you have an idea for a product. You don't run it up the flagpole internally. You put it out in social media and you say, guys, does this make any sense to you? Like, what would you change here? And so on.

And so you're always going into meetings arm, not just with an idea, but with an idea plus con confirming data. And I think that's like super, super important. So often take your time to do that before you put yourself in a position where you're gonna have a yes or no answer. Right? And two things are tend to be very persuasive to leaders. One is when you have a group of people coming and saying, Hey, we need to do this, right?

The reality is if you just look at the data, most ideas are dumb, right? Most ideas are like so if I'm a leader, it's not completely illogical that I would just reflect and say, nah, we're not gonna do that, right? Because there are way more dumb ideas out there than are smart ideas. So that's not like, okay, fine. So I have a lot more confidence if a dozen people come to me and say, Hey, we've been spending a bunch of weekends on this. We've been thinking this thing through.

I go like, alright, this is not one guy's brain fart. This is now whatever. And then that confidence is doubled if they say, and by the way, here's how we've been testing our core hypotheses. Here's what we've learned. So you do those two things and your odds of success are way, way higher. And it also says to you, if you are the change maker, don't have a brain fart. Don't give, don't give the idea too early. Like I. Incubate it. Get your point of view.

Go through all these steps, the previous seven steps, and then hopefully you'll get to step eight, which is isolate, infiltrate, , integrate. And what Gary tells us here is experiments that stay. Experiments are failures. The object is to turn early experiments into radical new wealth, creating business models with the power to change the direction of your company. And for this to happen, you must eventually push your brood of BA baby projects outta the nest.

In the early stages of your activist campaign, you may want to isolate your projects from the rest of the ISO organization. But to grow new opportunities, need to escape bureaucratic controls and orthodox thinking. They need their own place. A place where new ideas, new values, and new teams can grow unmolested. This is the logic behind corporate incubators, internal venture divisions, and skunk words.

But sadly, most projects never escape the incubator, which is often little more than an orphanage for unloved ideas, malnourished and secluded. Few projects ever find foster parents. That idea. Where, it away from the company, the sucking sound of the core. Essentially the work that was proposed by Clayton Christensen may have value in the early days, but then, like you say here, and colleagues like Michael Tushman, Charles O'Reilly is like, you have to bring it back into the company.

And actually, in some cases it, it deserves to be born there in the first place. Yeah, and I think part of this goal of at some point, finding senior sponsors and doing your best to integrate it with the broader strategic themes, the mission of the company.

Another, another very helpful thing is sometimes to go back into the company's history and look at analogies and examples that say, guys, this may seem very kind of new and radical, but if you look at what we did 20 years ago, we did something like this. So you, you really need to find a mentor who's not running the idea lab, but a mentor who's, who has real positional authority, who has p and l authority, perhaps somebody who controls some critical resources that you're going to need.

But, but yeah, you need foster parents, as I say, not the thing to be isolated in some kind of orphanage. And so, again, and I think companies that understand this and institutionalize this have an advantage. I if I, if I'm a CEO, the first question I would have of every EVP vp, whatever, is, Hey, tell me about the new ideas you're mentoring within your, your division.

Tell me about the things that are kind of unconventional, maybe a little uncomfortable, but might have promise where you're spending 20 or 30% of your time supporting those people, helping them, making sure they get resources because that's what I need. I need a lot of really great mentors. Not people that we've dumped in some corner somewhere and said Good luck. But you have to find those mentors yourself if that hasn't been institutionalized in that way.

And but if you don't and you don't do that fairly early, yeah, you'll, you'll never escape. Probably you'll, you'll, you'll be seen as an irrelevance, as tangential, as easy to ignore, easy to kill. Gary, the last point you make, we've got through all eight. The last point you make is you give some of the characteristics or values of the change maker, these corporate rebels. I think our audience know about that.

But there was one important thing, and this speaks to the leaders who may have listened to this show as well. Those people who.

Lead troops is the importance of courage. And I loved how you put this. And it's so funny. I was watching yesterday, I was watching the Nuremberg Trials, the old black and white version of that movie. I think I can't remember who the great actor is in it anyway, but it's, it's magnificent. And when you watch it, you can see how history doesn't repeat but it rhymes. 'cause you see about how people can rally around a leader who maybe wasn't the greatest leader that they needed.

And you wrote that after Stalin's death. So the idea here is having courage and how difficult it can be to have courage when there's so many people going against you. After Stalin's death khrushchev addressed the supreme Soviet and denounced his predecessors, horrific crimes against the Soviet people. Many in the audience were stunned. the scale of Stalin's evil was mind boggling. Finally, from the back of the hall, a voice rang out, comrade Khrushchev. You were there. You were with Stalin.

Why did you not stop him? Momentarily flustered, Khrushchev's eyes raked the assembly. Who said that? He demanded, who said that? He roared again. around the imp pertinent questioner, sank lower in their seats. While no voice is raised, no hand went up. And after a terrible silence, Khrushchev said, you know why the questioner that day was no more willing to stand up to Khrushchev than Khrushchev was willing to stand up to Stalin. The point was made.

Luckily, there is no gulag in most companies, but activism still takes magnificent courage. well said. Yeah, there's no, there's no getting away from that. You do have to believe the, and , not every idea takes this kind of courage, but the idea has to be, , if it's really important, the idea will be more important to you than your career. And and that's a hard thing to say if you're a young person and you've struggled hard to get a great job and you really do not want to disrupt things.

So I I say that recognizing that's a big ask. But I think it's important. I see even relatively senior people, Aidan, and it, it kind of drives me crazy, but I understand it. I see relatively senior people let, let, let's say like maybe a vice president level. You have a younger team that comes in totally enthused, wants to do something, they have a bunch of data, whatever.

And that senior person, their whole thinking is not, is this a good idea or not, but is how is this going to play with the top group? Is it gonna make them uncomfortable? Does it fit with their strategic vision, whatever.

And what's interesting is often the top people are so anxious for new ideas, but this person in the middle is so afraid of challenging the status quo or some embedded belief that they are, they will shut these people down, even though the leader might say, that's exactly what I want. Right? And so yeah. So it takes, even those people often just lack the curse. Say, yeah, that's a good idea.

Let me, lemme go pitch this and see I've had my version of that and I don't want to overstate this because it will sound maybe I, I don't wanna sound arrogant , or also as if I'm some kind of a masochist, but I. We'll get to the more recent stuff I'm writing that really challenges the whole idea of the organizational hierarchies exist. Now that's not a popular thing. I have another cartoon where some guy's standing in front of the room.

He is, he's talking to the executive committee and he has a big chart on, on the wall with the inverted pyramid. And the CEO sitting in the back says, Hey, Sam, I get it, but I don't like it. Right. So for me, building institutions that are truly effective and truly resilient is far more important than kind of protecting the ego of people at the top. Having said that, if you make them all enemies, nothing is gonna happen. Right.

And it's easier to have courage maybe at my stage of life than it is if you're 28 years old and in your first job and so on. But, so I wanna temper that advice, but just say, yeah, don't blow up your career if you don't have to. But in the end, if it's truly a powerful idea we talked about Eric Yuan, who left WebEx and Cisco to found a zoom. If it's a truly great idea, it is gonna be a great idea wherever you are.

One of the reasons Gary, I do this show is for that very point, is that life is short and , it does take courage and it's difficult. I've shared with people on the show before, I left jobs before because I was being forced into, as you said, early mental retirement and as a great guest I had on the show, I spent many episodes with him just like I did with you. Dee Hock, the founder of Visa, said, he said, most people retire on the job Yeah.

put their brain into their drawer and they start to slowly rot. And I hate that idea. . It's almost inevitable, Aidan, if you are not in the thrall of a problem or a challenge that is bigger than you, and that doesn't kind of inspire you every day is like, what else can I do here? How do I move the needle forward? One of the things I believe as human beings, yes, we're partly defined by our accomplishments, but we're also defined by the audacity of the causes to which we devote our lives.

And, whether that's somebody working at Tesla who thinks they're making a contribution to cleaning up the planet I remember having this conversation with some of my colleagues in the business school and saying, guys, what do you, what's our goal? What do we do here? And they'll talk about, we grant degrees and we educate young people, and so on.

I said, no no. We are working to improve the quality of management around the world because this is one of society's most critical social technologies. And, and if you start to think about it that way, suddenly seems very mundane. Well, I'm just teaching a course and we're gonna we're taking engineers and training them so they can like triple their salary or whatever it is then suddenly you have a much that forces you to think more broadly. That, that it pulls you away from the status quo.

So I, I really believe deeply that, that life is too short to work on inconsequential problems. And that doesn't and what's consequential for you may be different than what is for me. But what it says is, if you are not in the thrall of some purpose that's bigger than you, you are never gonna have the courage to do these things. You'll not live your best life. You'll not have the impact you want to have.

And so yeah, I'd rather make a small difference to a big problem than work on something that's peripheral or trivial. Beautiful, beautiful way to wrap up this episode. Absolutely love this book, Gary, and I'm glad we, did a deep dive and thank you for your contribution to inspire courage in so many of our audiences. Well, for those people who are still listening to us at this stage, 'cause I see the stats tend to fade as the show goes on, so only the diehard make it to the end.

So to them, we dedicate this episode to you and to our. Guest, Gary Hamel, author of Leading the Revolution. Thank you for joining us. My pleasure, Aid