Gary Hamel Part 1: Competing for the Future 1

I am so delighted to be able to bring you this time of work with a brilliant thinker innovation. His books are adorning the library here behind me and it is a great pleasure to welcome to the show gary Hamel, Aidan, thank you for having me. What a pleasure to take some time and look back and hopefully look forward to.

i'm delighted to get you it's so difficult to get your time i know you're traveling a lot you're still out there driving transformation driving new thinking you And I'm hoping to extend your tome of work to a new audience but I thought Gary, we'd start with a bit of context to your thinking, to your collaborations and indeed to your consulting work.

I suppose it began when I was at the University of Michigan as a young PhD student my PhD was in international business and this was the late 70s, if you can believe it, that long ago. And it was really the first time, Aidan, that American business was significantly challenged by foreign competition. So we saw the auto companies surrendering market share to Toyota, Honda, Nissan, and so on.

America's consumer electronic industry, brands that probably most people wouldn't even know anymore saw a lot of their market go to Japanese companies. And what really struck me about that phenomenon was two things. One was that there had been an enormous lack of foresight and perhaps humility on the part of U. S. executives. They just didn't think that their success was fragile. They couldn't imagine that somebody could challenge them in such a profound way.

And secondly, I saw the costs of that kind of myopia and arrogance , in my community. Living close to Detroit, you could see people who are losing their homes, the city being hollowed out, and what struck me very much was the human consequences of this lack of preparedness and this inability to change and inability to shift gears.

And so perhaps more than anything else, as a young kid who had not spent very much time in business, and probably looked at some of this as an interesting intellectual problem it hit me very early on that there were lives at stake here and livelihoods and communities and that leaders have an extraordinary responsibility To a very broad constituency, not just to shareholders. So that hopefully has informed my work ever since and given, I hope, a kind of real kind of human edge.

I would say another real signal development was. and there are many, but I, I don't want to bore people, but I'll give them perhaps one other one, was when I joined the faculty of the London Business School in 1983. So that was leaving University of Michigan, going to my first academic appointment. I've been on the faculty now there for more than 40 years. But for some reason, very early on, they asked me to teach executives. And this is quite a, an unusual thing for young faculty.

Usually you taught MBA students and maybe. 10 or 15 years into your career, they thought you'd be experienced enough to stand up in front of a group of executives. But for whatever reason some people there had some faith in me and they put me in front of, executives who are 20 years older than I was, very seasoned in the trenches managers and leaders. And that forced me to raise my game really quickly to get practical really quickly to make that bridge from kind of theory to practice.

But the other thing, Aiden, I spent a lot of time with those executives, not only in the sessions, but, afterwards over dinner in the bar, whatever it might be. And you start to develop a real empathy for what these individuals are up against. And the challenge , of aligning people in an organization, the challenges of re vectoring strategy the challenges of building a high performance culture.

So I got immersed in the world of business and in the practical concerns of leaders, I think much earlier in my career than was typical. And so I hope that's been another thing that has informed my work that hopefully is intellectually interesting with some rigor, but also I've tried to be super practical. How do you help these people and the institutions that they lead, recognizing that all of us depend on those institutions for our livelihoods, for products, for services. For our pensions.

And so again, not an academic challenge, helping these leaders get better at building institutions that could meet all of the demands that society put on them. I think what's really interesting about your story is beyond the education work, beyond the corporate work that you do and the management consultancy that

you do . You're also got scar tissue of industry work and i thought maybe we'll go that's where you started but even today you still do a lot of work in china you work with Haier you were, chief transformation officer there let's tell the audience a bit about that because it shows the breath of your work Well, I've, I don't know how many organizations I've had the chance to work with, but it is dozens. I mean, it would be kind of a roll call of Large companies around the world.

And in some of those cases, I've spent quite a bit of time in some less, but and , I will say along the way, we created billions of dollars of market value, but we also had spectacular failures where we tried to do things that didn't work. , , IBM, Whirlpool Procter Gamble, Unilever Shell Nestle, it's a long list. It's a long list. I have it somewhere. It's about a hundred different organizations. And again, , in those organizations, I've always tried to encourage.

Leaders to do truly new things. I'm not interested in working with an organization that's, doing something that's been done a dozen times before. So pretty much always in my work, I've tried to challenge organizations to do something that hasn't been done. Whether that's creating strategy through a truly open process where thousands of employees are engaged in that work. Whether it's with hire encouraging their leaders to think about how do you build a large organization?

That is mastered entrepreneurship at scale. Whether it is in some organizations training hundreds of thousands of people to think like business innovators, frontline blue collar employees. So I, get excited and I have fun when we're trying to break new ground and obviously sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't work, but it is surprisingly hard to find leaders who are willing to try something truly new. The first question they usually ask is who's already done it? What's the roadmap?

Can you guarantee this is going to work? And I always have to say, nobody's done this. You know, I was, I was thinking of, of, of, of an analogy, you know, the, the James Webb telescope is sending back these, like, unbelievable images now from space. I mean, just truly mind blowing images looking back, almost 13 billion years in cosmic history. And you think, okay, so the engineers, the scientists from 20 different countries that, that put that together, who are they benchmarking?

And the answer was nobody! There was nobody to benchmark there, right? So I think having the courage to lead is a very rare thing, but luckily I've been able to work with a lot of extraordinary leaders who've said, yeah, let's try something new.

That's a nice segway for the work that you do today and i'm gonna pick the book off the shelf today so, we're gonna talk about this your first book competing for the future with CK Prahalad and, It was your collaboration with CK and resulting consulting work that became the basis for your first HBR article. Do you really have a global strategy?

And I thought it was interesting linking it to what you said about this idea of Japanese competitors, for example, in the U S market, particularly the automotive industry.

You said you wondered how could competitors with such apparently meager resources managed to successfully giants and more than that corporate giants who actually, created the industries and you saw this time and time again in your work and i thought we'd use that as a way to talk about that article but also your collaboration with CK who was a great friend and collaborator

There were several things that were very intriguing to me as I watched that, that story unfold of new competitors, challenging incumbents as you say, who in some senses invented those industries. One was the fact that the challengers. Often had a comparative deficit of resources and what struck me there and it's something I've believed ever since that in the end what really matters is not resources.

But resourcefulness, that resources themselves, how many employees, how much market share, how much capital you're spending, those are very poor predictors of whether an organization will continue to thrive. And , the question then comes, , what is it, what are the roots of that resourcefulness? What drives a company to think differently and to imagine how to remake an industry? And behind that was a sense of ambition, a sense of aspiration.

That I often found missing in Western companies, I've argued that many leaders suffer from a kind of ADD, , not attention deficit disorder, but ambition deficit disorder. And of course, if you're sitting on 30 or 40 or 50 percent of market share, where do you go from there? Well, obviously you can invent new industries and so on, but you get very complacent and very comfortable. So, you know, and I think we drew this, we use this simple little illustration competing for the future.

If you imagine there's two organizations. That are pretty much identical in many ways. They have skilled people. They're competing in the same industry. But, but the primary difference between them is the ratio of ambition to resources. So one company, the incumbent, is quite happy if they simply grow as fast as the industry around them. They maybe expect organic growth of 2 or 3 percent per year, inflation adjusted. And that's good enough.

And then you have a newcomer who has maybe a 10 to 1 resource disadvantage. But they have really high aspirations. And so in one case, in the first case, you have a lot of slack. Now, people in these large organizations may feel resource constrained because the budget has been divided up into a thousand tiny little pieces. So you may feel like, but. the organization overall has plenty of, plenty of money. You know, they're investing billions of dollars a year in R& D and capital and so on.

And yet there's slack there. And in the other organization, there's stretch, right? Aspirations up high, resources down here. And one thing, you learn as you look at this story over and over again, across industries and time, is that innovation is born in the gap between resources and aspiration. And as companies succeed, as they get bigger, that gap gets smaller and smaller. You get rich, you get bigger , and ambition starts to fade.

And so I think a challenge for any leader in any organization is to continue to raise your sights, continue to dream big and have the courage to do that. So that was certainly an insight for me at the time that a lack of resources, a relative lack of resources was no constraint on your ability to succeed and win. If anything, it made you hungrier and it made you more creative. So that was a very kind of important lesson that came out of all of that, at least for me.

The other thing, looking at the other side of it was, I understood a little bit about the capacity of large organizations for denial, for pretending that, they're not in difficulty. And I'll give you an anecdote there. I probably shouldn't reveal the company. That'd be a little unfair. But one evening, I was sitting dinner in London with the senior leadership team of one of the big American car companies.

I'm trying to think about the time frame here Maybe this was now we might be getting close to 2000. I don't know 19 late 90s But anyway, they have been losing share to Toyota and Honda and so on forever and so over dinner Somebody mentions that they had just done their 20th annual benchmarking study of Toyota and I thought well, that's interesting So I asked the question. What did you learn in year 20? That you didn't learn in your 19, 18, 17, 16, like what the heck is taking so long?

And the company's treasurer came back with a very thoughtful answer He said for the first five years, we saw the japanese competitors making inroads in europe in the u. s we told ourselves that it wasn't even really happening. We couldn't we couldn't accept the fact much less that they were actually better than us in some ways And he said, we send young people over , to Japan to look at these companies and dig in and see what we can learn.

And they'd come back and they'd tell us how good they were. How few hours it took them to assemble a vehicle or the quality levels they were achieving. And we simply dismissed it. We said, you counted wrong. That can't be true. So he said, we went through five years of basically just dismissing the problem. He said, for the next five years as the evidence mounted, we said, okay, it's true, but we kind of just rationalized it by saying, The Japanese are different.

They have a different kind of culture. They have more, more amenable employees. They don't have unions in the same way. They have these strange concepts of Nemowashi and Wa and whatever. Like, it's true, but there's nothing we can do about it, right? So you, you go from dismissal to rationalization, right? Like we, here's why it's happening. Like, too bad we're not Japanese, but we're not. And they believed , that, that success could never be replicated outside of Japan.

So he said that was five years of kind of rationalization. He said, well, then they started coming and building plants in the north of England, in the United States, and they got the same results using European and American workers that they did with their Japanese workers. So he said, we went from rationalization to maybe mitigation. We said, okay, We have to do something here. So we send in the consultants and we've studied their work practices.

And so we put quality circles together and we, did statistical process control, but he said we never got the same results. And so there was five years of really thinking that the advantages around process , and robots and so on. He said only, so he's saying this now 20 some years ago, but he said only in the last few years have we admitted to ourselves They started with a completely different management philosophy.

And at the core of that was a trust in the ability of ordinary employees to do extraordinary things. Because the Japanese car makers were taking employees that had maybe 10 or 12 years of education. And they were teaching them statistical process control and Pareto analysis. They were giving them the ability to stop a production line if they saw a problem. Toyota's employees were generating a million improvement suggestions a year.

So they were using, they were harnessing the intellectual resources of their people in a way that simply couldn't happen or wasn't happening among the American and European car makers. And as I thought about that evening and reflected on it later, what hit me was, he said, the last thing we were willing to do is to challenge our own beliefs and our own premises. Well, what was really difficult to challenge there and what the Japanese had done very well.

Was moving authority and power from supervisors and plant managers down to frontline employees. And so, a lesson I took out of that is that an organization can live in denial for a generation. And the hardest thing, and we'll come back to this maybe in my later work, but one of the hardest things, Success depends on redistributing power because people who have power are quite happy to have it. They like more of it and they're not very eager to give it up.

So there were a lot of lessons packed into that early experience. And CK definitely was just, a huge part of every step of that journey. My, my first encounter with CK Prahlad was who for sure is one of the great management thinkers of, the second half of the 20th century. But he was a newly hired faculty member at the University of Michigan where I was a PhD student. And he was giving us a seminar to faculty. And I remember having like this knockdown argument with him.

And like, we were really going at it, like all gloves off and whatever, I can't even remember what it was about, but it was something I disagreed with. And he felt strongly about And people in the meetings said, These guys are going to be enemies forever. Like, they're just like hammering at each other. Which I don't normally do, I don't, I'm not sure what provokes me, , but in any case but we both enjoyed the encounter. And I think we both were smarter because of it.

And so we started, working together and writing together. And I think in a way, we both felt a little bit like outsiders. CK had grown up in India, of course, and made that immigrant's journey to America and gone to Harvard and extraordinary success. But I think, you know, always felt like, I don't want to say like an outsider because he was very well plugged into all kinds of power structures.

But he had that he had that sense of, you know, Being, being able to be outside the system and look in and see it for what it was and not be co opted by it and kind of a similar way I'd gone to a very small undergraduate institution and you know found myself now among these senior executives and a lot of elite company and kind of always have that sense of, all right, this is all very interesting, but like, I'm not part of this. I can look at it maybe objectively from the outside in.

So I think that was also where we bonded. But we were both very interested in global competition and the challenge of building more capable organizations in holding leaders to account , and being really cognizant of the human consequences of all of this. So. Yeah, was an amazing, amazing collaboration. I learned a lot from him, some very practical, deep lessons. I hope you learned a little bit from me. fantastic.

I love that story about the outside in, and it comes up in the writing as well, where you say, one of the big challenges is the lack of diversity in a leadership team, and while there's a lot of diversity washing still goes on at the moment. It's still not there. There's a diversity of thoughts.

And to your point about being that outsider, being able to maintain that outside view, a lot of people are onboarded and they come from the same colleges, come from the same backgrounds, and therefore you don't get this diversity of thought inside a team. This was one of the huge things that you talk about in competing for the future.

Yeah, I think, this has been part of my consulting work, if you ever want to put together a team of people to think about the future or to innovate, I've always believed that there are three kinds of individuals that need to be overrepresented in that, group, whatever that group is. Number one is young people. You know, who, who have not, drunk all the Kool Aid, who are still curious, who are still skeptical.

And you know, it's, it's kind of an irony to me that often the people who are responsible for creating strategy and direction are people who have most of their emotional equity invested in the past, and they feel they have to defend decisions that were made a decade or two ago. So I think you need the voice of the future in every critical conversation. I give you some kind of fun examples of how to do that if you like. So that was one group.

I think the second group that's important to have there is people who've worked in other industries who haven't spent 30 years in banking or the auto industry or transportation or whatever it is. And then thirdly is people who live and work a long ways from head office. Right? And so, don't challenge Catholic Orthodoxy from Rome, typically, right? It's going to start somewhere else. And same is true for organizations.

Ironically, though, in most conversations about strategy and direction, those three groups are significantly underrepresented, and it's just a mistake. And so that's why, Large organizations miss the future more often than not. It's why it's typically newcomers and incumbents with nothing and nothing invested in the status quo, nothing to unlearn that get to the future first. And so yeah, that, that was certainly a practical lesson for me.

And whenever we put together a group to do any kind of innovation or future focused work,, we want that mix of. And, it is ironic that we, we put so much energy and I have this experience once in, in working with a large global accounting company. And I was in a room where we probably had people from 40 different countries there, they represented all around the world. So, an enormous cultural, racial, and also we had gender diversity.

And yet everybody thinks alike because they'd all been put through the same corporate training. They all looked at the industry in the same way. They all read the same kind of, trade magazines and websites and so on. So it's ironic that you can have amazing cultural diversity, but have almost no diversity in thought. And, I worked hard to change that wherever I had the chance.

this book is written back in the nineties and was saying to gary before we came on air that's the value because you see that despite this foresight that you had along with ck and threat the rest your work still a lot of companies. Must have read it because it was this book in particular was business book of the year business week book of the year.

That the year that i came out as well so people release buying it whether they read it or not or take an action on it is another thing but i am always struck gary but how. Despite this information being out there, people don't take action on it.

And it just flabbergasts me the whole time there was, you mentioned there that you had a couple of examples and please do share, you know, I know the book is the framework , from which we'll talk about each time, but if you have any colorful examples to add to it, it really brings it to life as well.

Well, one of the things I might talk a little bit about is another very early experience, which informed a lot of my thinking and was actually a test bed for a lot of my thinking, was some work that I did with Nokia. And they're still there, but kind of a shadow of their former selves. But, I may not get the year exactly right in this. I want to say it was probably 93 or 94.

But I got a call, I, I had never heard of Nokia, and I got a call saying, we read I think it was an early HBR article, Strategic Intent. And they said, we read this and you talk about ambition and how, outsiders can take on industry incumbents and that's what we're going to do. We're a small Finnish company, we pioneered mobile telephony in the Nordic region, and we want to beat Motorola.

And at that time, Motorola was by far number one in mobile phones had a very, very rich history, some very smart leadership, and they said, we're going to become number one. And this is all over the phone. I'm on a call. I've never heard of these people, but I said, well, I give you a lot of credit for ambition. And they said, well, you come up to Esku Finland's second largest city. So I said, sure.

So in a very, very cold, bitterly cold January day, and they're a couple hundred kilometers from the Arctic Circle, I like find myself in this room of young, young executives. The average age was probably early to mid thirties about my age, I suppose. And, what just struck me was just the sheer ambition. And I said to them, well, if you want to beat Motorola, you can't beat them playing by Motorola's rules. They're very good at what they do. And so I said, we're going to have to innovate.

We have to have a strategy that is highly differentiated. And I've believed that again for a very, very long time, that the most important thing about any strategy is how it's different from every other strategy. And we can come back to that theme because even today, most companies don't have anything That looks like a real strategy, like not even close. But anyway, so I said, we got to develop a strategy that's highly differentiated. I said, well, how do we do that?

I said, well, we have to go places and ask questions and think in ways that nobody at Motorola would ever do. So this was, as far as I know, this is one of the first, maybe the first attempts at real open strategy. Cause I said to the leaders that I said, you guys are fairly young, but you still have a lot of biases and assumptions.

And you know, and, and you spend most of your time looking at your other competitors at that time, Motorola, Ericsson, or it was, so I said, if you want to think differently, there are four perspectives you need to take. And this shows up in my work again and again over the years. Number one, you have to think explicitly about industry orthodoxy. What are the assumptions that everybody else takes for granted that they're not even willing to challenge?

And again, I can give you dozens of examples from lots of different industries of where this trips companies up, like Adidas and Nike failing to see that. Yoga is a highly athletic activity, even if it doesn't have any referees and men in uniforms kicking a ball, right? And so they lose that whole market, which is now owned by Lululemon and others because they couldn't challenge belief.

So I said, first of all, we're going to think really explicitly about what things do your competitors believe? Who are your customers? How do you go to market? How do you price? And then for every one of those kinds of common assumptions, let's ask, is this a law of physics? That you, that can't be challenged, or is this just the dead hand of tradition or, or dogma and, and we can challenge it. So we had dozens of people looking at that issue.

We had dozens of people taking a second perspective, which was asking, what are the deep unarticulated needs of customers? The ones that they can't even talk about because they have their own assumptions and beliefs. And not only the existing customers, which at that time for mobile phones was mostly business people, but potential customers.

So we had these Finnish engineers the club district in Tokyo, or walking along Venice beach in California with super pale legs and shorts that were too short and brown sandals with black socks, you know, just, yeah. Irish? They sound like me on holidays. At that time, the most popular consumer product in the world, so this is also dazed me, but the principles are not, are timeless, was the Sony Walkman.

And so he said, you guys have to go learn about the Walkman generation, because if you want to beat Motorola, you have to, you have to engage an entirely new group of customers. So they spent a lot of time doing that. A third perspective that we asked them to take is, all right, what is changing in our world? What are the, what are the discontinuities? Technology, lifestyle, but what are the things that are changing the dynamics that you might leverage to change the rules of the game here?

And then the final question was trying to think about, well, what competencies could we build that are unique? So in any case, we had dozens of people doing this work and they generated hundreds, thousands of insights around all of these topics. And so then we got together and we said, okay, let's, let's take all of these insights. And ask ourselves, what potential strategies does this suggest? Where could we do something different?

So, they ginned up about 2, 000, I would call them baby strategies, little ideas of here's where and how we could change the rules of the game. And again, no, no small executive team could have possibly done this, right? And you're building a strategy that is both deeply rooted in reality. We're sending people out, you know, we weren't fantasizing or coming with things out of thin air. We were looking at what's changing in the world. What do you hear when you talk to customers and so on?

But a strategy that was deeply grounded, but also had to be groundbreaking. And so at the end of that process involving hundreds of people, there were three big ideas that came out. That proved to be true game changers. One idea was moving the phone beyond voice.

So we were already in, in late, in mid nineties, doing experiments with using the phone as a means of payment with vending machines, adding cameras to the phone, texting and so on, but we knew it was going to be way more than just a phone. The second theme that came out was making it a lifestyle device. And that meant you have to drive down pricing because to make it affordable to kids and others, you couldn't have it at 1, 000 for a mobile phone. It meant making it in multiple colors.

It meant letting users choose their own colors and so on. A whole raft of things came there, putting your marketing dollars against this next generation. And the third leg that came out was really focused on the telcos, but it was about providing solutions.

What Nokia wanted to do Was drive demand faster to build this new market and that meant going to the big telcos With a turnkey, here's the phone, here's the network hardware you use, here's the software you need to manage billing and pricing and so on. So those were the three kind of core themes. And again, there's a very important, I think, idea here that the quality of any strategy depends critically on how many strategic options you generate in the first place.

And strategy, what we call strategy or strategic planning is often highly linear, you know, you start with the status quo, you kind of think like plus or minus 5%, how do we change that? We started with a complete blank sheet of paper where the explicit goal was a strategy that was unlike any other strategy. And to do that, you have to bring a lot of new voices into the conversation, and you have to ask a lot of new questions.

So what was interesting at some point, and I don't remember exactly where it happened, but in one of these Meetings, and I'm sure it wasn't me, But somebody was looking at all of this, and now we've taken, you know, thousands of potential strategies. We looked at the big themes that came out of that, the kind of meta strategies. And somebody said, you know what we're really trying to do is make the mobile phone, the remote control for life. It's 1994. That is 13 years before the iPhone.

And somebody says, this needs, this is going to be the remote control for life. And it was, and over the next few years that part of Nokia, Nokia becomes like worth 60 billion, about half of the Finnish stock exchange, but again, everybody knows how this story ends, right? And so you have this group of young executives. I know them all. And, 10 years later, they're all multimillionaires. They're all hugely celebrated.

I go back and say, Hey, maybe we need to do this exercise again, because like strategies are not once and for all. Every strategy , , it gets old and it loses its economic power. Nah, Gary, we're good. I think we got this. It's working like amazingly well. And one of the orthodoxies that Nokia had that ultimately Apple exploited, was that their primary customers were the telcos, not ultimate consumers.

So they really didn't think about how to design a different OS how to open up that OS to outside developers, because the telcos wanted to control that screen and control the user experience, and Apple said, no, we're going to let customers control it. But, but again, this is something you have to do every few years. But certainly, out of that came a passionate belief in the power of open strategy.

the idea that there's no small group at the top that has the bandwidth, the curiosity, the data, however smart they are, I'm not denigrating them, but they just can't do this on their own. You need a lot more people to generate a lot more options to develop truly an interesting strategy. And in that sense, the most senior leaders are less the creators of strategy than kind of the editors, right? You look at all these ideas and you're like, Well, where do we see the themes and the threads?

Where is the internal consistency here? And so that was also an early experience that really changed the way I thought about strategy. But as you say you look at here we are, 30 years later, how many companies have ever used an open strategy approach? I think like very, very, very few. And, you know, I saw a survey just a couple of years ago, this is from PWC , and, cause your question Aiden was, you throw Some of these ideas out, Gary, not very many of them seem to stick.

They don't really get a lot of traction often and this PWC survey, 6, 000 executives, only 37 percent said their company had a well defined strategy. Only 27 percent said the strategy was innovative in any way, and only 13 percent said they had a roadmap for building new capabilities. Like, okay, what are you, what are we paying you guys to do for heaven's sakes?

i've worked in industry as well and you just get busy doing and you get less busy thinking, and often cause you're not rewarded for thinking you know you mentioned the empathy you developed for. The executives over in london and those boys like going to the pub that's for sure and having chats as well so it's a great time to understand what's going on inside. People's heads i understand that empathy but what i find so fascinating why i love going back into the archives of the work is that.

The heroes of the time of nokia were motorola motorola. executives were the most celebrated at the time then it's nokia's term they become and it's like this i've heard it called the CEO disease but it's like the success disease that that is, hardens your mindset that you become more fixed in your mindset as well and that piece.

Just flabbergast me that we know this is the case it's a pattern that happens happens time and time again and the people that are who are in the successful positions today.

Are the ones that are often close towards outside thinking understanding the movement of environment out there as well and i loved what you talked about in this book competing for the future where you talk about it like species extinction, or species differentiation that you need that diversification of a species not only for the diversity of thought, otherwise you're gonna go extinct as well because the landscape changes therefore.

Your needs change as well maybe you'll riff on that a bit gary Yeah, well, I've long believed that nothing fails like success and that in any success you find the seeds of future failure. You tend to end up with a operating model, a business model that gets more and more refined over time to do one very specific thing. So everything becomes more rigid, over time.

You find that more and more, as you were saying a moment ago, everybody is operating and not many people are experimenting and thinking.

So, when you talk to executives, they'll tell you uniformly that, It's better to put another dollar of investment into what we're already doing than into doing something new and in a sense That's true right in the short term The marginal returns are always going to be higher on doubling down on what you're already doing than trying to do something new But you know then you've eaten your seed corn as they say, right?

You're not you're not building a future You also have, the belief systems, the orthodoxies among leaders become trapped and you have all the sediment of this is the way we do things around here. And I can give you just dozens of examples there, but, often, when I go into a new company, I'm learning about a new industry. Often, a leader will say to me, an executive will say to me, Hey, Gary, this is how our industry works.

And I always say, well, until it doesn't, like, don't assume that this is how the industry works. And executives often spend very little time in environments where they have any chance to be surprised. And, I saw this happen over and over again, Aiden. You'd have a young team they'd be given an assignment, you know, go out and understand this new technology or this opportunity, and they'd get all worked up and they'd get excited about it.

And they'd come back and they'd present to the executive committee or the board or whatever. And the board would just punch holes in this thing. And there were often a lot of holes to punch. But, the dilemma, and this is another thing I certainly learned along the way is, If you're a leader, you are really good at pulling apart somebody else's argument, right? And saying like, is this really true? What did you look at?

And whatever, and making people less than confident about what they already know. And so I learned that there's no way to get a leadership group to truly understand the future, to truly understand what's changing. By having people present to them. You have to get them off their asses. They need a first person experience with the future themselves. So they at least have enough corroborating personal experience. They can say, yeah, I think you're right. I've seen some of that.

Yeah. I think it's, I think it's, that's what's happening. , I had the chance to work now six or seven years ago with Angela Aarons who had been the CEO of Burberry. I'd worked with her there. And then she became the head of retail for all of Apple. She's running their. some stores around the world. And I remember, and again, this is now eight or nine years ago, in one of our first conversations, he said, Gary, all of the next generation is going to communicate through video.

Like this is their media video. And I thought to myself, yeah, maybe that's true. I hadn't really seen that. , YouTube was in its infancy. Yeah, that could be true. Well Angela because her store is filled with young employees and a lot of young customers, she could see this. She was out there every day, looking at how they were communicating, the videos they were sharing and so on. And she could see this.

And as a leader, she was, she used video for all of her messaging with her community. Every week, she's like. Does a short video. Here's what we're working on. What do you think? And, it wasn't emails and so on. and just to get an example of if you are out there with the young people on the bleeding edge of change, you know, having that personal experience.

The future is not predictable for sure, but it's often way more predictable than we think. So, and I've argued the reason companies miss the future is not usually because it was unpredictable, but because it was unpalatable. And you just didn't want to have face to face up to it. I had this very interesting experience again, back in the early 90s, but it's very, the ramifications are still being felt.

I was talking to a group of young and technologists at at and t, the big American telecommunications company. And they showed me this simple little chart, Aiden. And it was started like in the mid eighties, a few years earlier, and then they had projected this out to about 2000 and 10. One of the lines was the increasing bandwidth that we'd all have in our homes. And they predicted that sometime, around 2005 to 10, we'd have gigabit bandwidth in our homes.

Like, it's a radical idea that you could have that much bandwidth in your home. So that was one line going up like this. They had another line coming down, which was the amount of bandwidth you needed to deliver full motion video, so you could stream something. And because compression algorithms were getting better, we were able to stream more with less bandwidth. Well, in their little chart, that line crossed in 2005.

So they're saying, and this is, they're saying this at least, yeah, at least a decade earlier than that. They're saying, we're going to be able to do this.

Well, I think Netflix starts streaming around 2007. Apple TV gets launched about the same time, but the traditional broadcast television industry just didn't see this. And I, I remembered this was just a few years ago, I late teens, 2016, 17. The head of, of media research for one of the biggest U. S. television companies stood in front of a group of advertisers. This is less than a decade ago. This is seven or eight years ago.

Is in front of, all the people who pay their salaries, all their advertisers, giving them the, the, the state of the union about the media industry. And he says this. He said, there's not enough interesting content on Netflix for us to worry about them. And YouTube is a sidebar. Now, by this point, the late teens, , seven, eight years ago, already young people are consuming 65 percent of their video content through streaming and not through linear broadcast television.

Like what the hell is this guy saying? And I think he probably knew the reality, but you literally could not admit to yourself that this You know, 50, 60, 70 year old business model was on its last legs. And now you look at all of the media companies going through downsizing, recombining, as we see the death of linear television, you could see this coming a long ways off. This was not a surprise.

But again, and that's why, for me, senior executives are often the choke point on an organization's ability to learn and an ability to change. Because, and this is something CK said that was absolutely true. I must credit him for this. He said, executives are often very unwilling to write off their own depreciating intellectual capital.

And so as long as a few people atop the company are responsible for setting strategy and direction, they can hold the organization's capacity to change hostage. to their own personal willingness to change. Like, that can't be , right? And yeah. And so you see this again and again, and again, you see it with Facebook and TikTok, right? I mean, the pattern repeats. And as you said there in your remarks, what this makes it super difficult to hold up any organization as an exemplar.

Because, you find an organization that is very smart about something. And clearly there's something to learn about them in that area. But there's a hundred other ways they can screw up,

. i'm when you're writing about them you're writing about them usually in a moment of success but you have no idea about the change in leadership, even though you know a lot about the future you don't know how it's gonna actually manifest in that particular of the organization as well i thought that's interesting i'm one of the things just a segway to you mentioned.

What ck i believe talked about a lot of you talk about in this book is that everybody talks about a learning curve but there's also the need for a forgetting curve that it's this on learning of everything you've learned. That is the huge challenge. It's this bias of all these things that you're successful for today that actually hold you hostage to the past.

Yeah, I was, working with the leadership team of one big technology company and in their head office they just had their 25th anniversary as a company. In the head office, they had, Paintings, 25 paintings representing different milestones and different parts of their success and their strategy over that first 25 years. And I said to them, guys, which painting are you going to take down every year? Like at least one of these things, you got to say, that's not going to work anymore.

And yeah, and believe me, I'm no different. You know, I, struggled to. Sometimes let go of things I've held closely , and cherished closely, but but you have to do it , and I think , as you get older you have to make a super conscious effort to be out there on the bleeding edge and to be talking to people and understanding that and reading about it and having a first person experience CK was absolutely right.

But again, it's just interesting, despite the fact that's just clearly true, that you have to be able to forget and unlearn. Very few organizations have any explicit strategy for doing this. One interesting little example that your listeners might find interesting, I was , just, you can start to do some of these things in very small, but practical ways. This is a big food and beverage company, and every year, they had their annual strategy meeting.

This is just a few years ago, where you, they take the top couple hundred executives in the world, and they'd all get together, what, here's our strategy for the next year, here's what we're gonna be doing, getting everybody aligned. Well, this time I thought it was quite brilliant. They had about a hundred people under 30 employees from across the world in their organization, watch this thing via live streaming, and then to tweet about it in real time.

And all these tweets came up on a big screen as executives were speaking. And they're like, that doesn't seem right to us. Like what evidence do you have for that? Like somebody else is already doing that. And most of them were positive, but. Just this ability to be humble and get real time feedback from people out on the front lines, , that's a simple little thing. That's not complicated.

You have the monkey will hear no evil people don't want to know about that because it's perceived as a threat i think i'll be killed if i don't ask about your view of the sad story of their demise of nokia because you've worked with them . The myth is they didn't see the iphone coming but they actually did and i would imagine Rita McGrath told me for example that she actually saw an ipad.

The sad story of their demise of nokia Prototype type of tablets and a prototype touch screen phone in nokia years before it ever grace the stage in california with steve jobs i'd love your view as well because you worked with them that's they knew this was coming but they had this endowment. To the past that kept them hostage. Well, I think, yeah, there are a couple of things that work. One was and by the way, you're right. They created a product.

It was created while we were working with them called the Nokia communicator and it flipped up. There was a screen, you had email, you had a keyboard, right? It was like an early clunky blackberry, I guess. Obviously didn't have a touch, touch interface on it, but they knew, they knew that this was going to become the personal device that you live your life. We'd, we'd known that for some time.

I think, and this takes us into another area, clearly there's a certain degree of arrogance and, and unwillingness to challenge some very deep beliefs. But one part of it was they had not built a deep competence in software. And so, it's not that they didn't have software people, they did, but they had not built this really deep fundamental capability in software. And, whether that was my failing, their failing, we didn't really see this.

But clearly, they should have been working really, really hard on that. And again, , when you start with a company filled with, , RF engineers, radio frequency engineers, and amazing manufacturing people, but you have to have a roadmap for building next generation competencies. You know, it's very, and they did not have that. And as I said, they're also hostage, their biggest customers were the telcos. Because if you remember, we bought most of our mobile phones through a telco.

And so they didn't sell many phones to, you know, consumers. And so when a telco says, hey, we really want to control everything on that screen. We want to monetize it. We want to charge you 2 a month for getting a news feed or getting something else or texting. The idea that you would open up that interface to third parties did not occur to them, should have occurred to them, did not occur to them or at least, never got acted upon. Let me give you a counter story.

Apple now, about 12 years ago, Apple started to understand that we needed, they needed to control their own digital future. So at that time, almost every Apple product was using semiconductors, microprocessors from other companies. from Samsung or Qualcomm or Intel or whatever. And they said, all right, we're a digital company. The ability to create true differentiation in all of our products depends on us having our own Silicon. And so they made what was like an incredibly courageous decision.

You have a company that is a software company and they're saying, we're going to master one of the most arcane black arts in the world, which is the design of highly complex systems on chips, right? And low power utilization. And so they bought a small company to get some initial talent, but then they've just been relentless for it for more than a decade in doing that. And now every Apple product has Apple Silicon in it.

And when you look at the benchmarks, even the current CEO of Intel will tell you Apple is designing better chips. And if that was a standalone business, they'd be number three or four in the world as a chip designer. So, it's not about just understanding what competencies you have now. You've got to really be thinking, what are the ones I have to build for the future? We tell ourselves we live in this world that, everything is changing at this high velocity, which is partly true.

But I can tell you it takes a long time to build world expertise in anything. And it's, it took Apple more than a decade and , Nokia never made that commitment. I have a quote that speaks to exactly that.

Cause you talk about the need for competency building throughout the book as well. And you said, and this is in the introduction to competing for the future. So again, early nineties, you wrote this. We saw companies making commitments to particular skill areas. These were global companies, not American companies, such as at the time, optical media, financial engineering, miniaturization.

Far in advance of the emergence of specific and product markets which is a key point senior executives you wrote seem to see competition as a race to build competencies, not simply to gain immediate market share what was the basis you asked yourself for such commitments how could one write a business case for a market that might not emerge for a decade or more, what was the logic behind the

emotional and intellectual commitment so much in evidence." i thought that was just a key paragraph because that is the pervasive problem investing as you said i come to you as a senior leadership team go look this is the future, show me the evidence you go i can't because this market might not emerge for ten years and you go okay shut up we're making progress, that is the challenge that still is that the challenge for so many listeners to this show gary who work, innovation who

are consultants or who are trying to drive change with inside organizations heads of transformation maybe you'll tell us a little bit about that and perhaps the antidote to that in your view. Well, I think it's very important to think about competence in terms of customer benefit. You're not really thinking about it as a specific product. You're thinking about what's the range of functionalities or benefits. But but you're thinking about a broad class of benefits that can be delivered.

Software is highly configurable. If you master software, you can create all kinds of functionality through software. AI is now the same, right? AI is going to be a general purpose technology that can be used in many different applications. So , you have to be willing to say, we cannot envision all the specific use cases, but we're pretty sure this is going to be transformational because it's going to allow us to do new things that seem to be impossible. So it's still a business case.

It's not completely an act of faith. You're looking at that technology. You're looking at, , you certainly have a range of potential use cases that you can imagine but you're not sure which are going to emerge in which order, but you have to start building the competence early. In many cases today, you don't get a second chance. Sometimes you do, right? There's often, we often in strategy, we have this debate about first mover versus second mover advantage.

And I, years ago, I said, I think that's the wrong way to think about it. I want to think about smart movers and dumb movers. So if the first mover is a smart mover, you may not have a second chance, right? If you're slow to do something new. If the first mover screws up and over commits to a specific thing, it doesn't turn out that way, then you may have a chance to come in. But you have to be thinking about this in terms of clusters of use cases, in terms of new functional benefits.

I mean, you look at the commitment that Tesla has made to AI and sensors and so on. They couldn't tell you exactly how fast. I mean, Elon Musk was always way more optimistic than he should have been probably, but they couldn't tell you exactly at which case this at which rate this becomes commercial, nor could they tell you all of the potential applications. Now they're moving into robots and other things. But you could see this is a transformational skill.

And if we want to have a piece of this, we got to start now. So it's still a business case, but it's a different sort of business case than somebody who says, tell me exactly the product. You know, what's going to be the revenue? What's going to be our margin? If those are the questions you start with, you're doomed to be a follower forever because there's an idea in biology called pre evolution.

You know, one of the things that's quite difficult to explain in biology sometimes is how quickly a new morphological trait, a new trait enters a population. And, and because mutation takes a long time, and so certainly one of the theories there is that there's pre adaptation. Things enter the genome that, that, that aren't immediately useful, but neither are they harmful, and they sit there.

And then once the environment changes, the organisms that have that particular trait have an advantage. It's similar in any large organization, you have to be building new skills in advance building the teams, making that investment often years before you can see exactly how you're going to deploy it.

And, a lot of leaders, a lot of CEOs, they don't operate on a timeframe. They don't have that frame of mind. They don't have that conviction because they themselves aren't close enough to these technologies to really understand their power. So they don't really have that conviction. So they'll maybe make an initial investment and when it doesn't pay off then they back away from it. I saw this again, let me take an old case study, there, there are plenty of recent examples.

I did some of my PhD research in a company called Matsushita, Matsushita. Japan. They own the brands Panasonic and JVC and JVC ended up being the winner along with Panasonic of the war to build the first video recorders. And, people from Matsushita, from Panasonic, JVC had come to Silicon Valley in 1959 and they saw the world's first videotape recorder. It was like as big as a refrigerator, made by a company called Ampex.

And you could look at that and go like, what possible implications does that have for just a consumer electronics company? This is a professional product used in television broadcasting. Like, what, like, what is this? Why would we ever think about this? Well, what they saw there was the underlying functionality. Time shift, right? That I can watch what I want whenever I want to watch it by recording it.

And so that sense, they went home and they said, we're going to make this a commercial product. It took them almost 20 years. You to figure out how you, you know, make much smaller tape and, you know, more magnetic material on the tape and so on and make something that's affordable. And Sony had their run at it as well. But it took them, you know, nearly 20 years to make a commercial product. But, but here's again, a very important lesson for leaders.

The measurement of commitment is not how much you invest. The measurement of commitment is how steadily you invest. So if you looked at, you know, JVC and Panasonic making those investments, in the early years they were trivia, you know, it's a few small teams of people. But they just, year after year after year, they worked on this. Now, their U. S. competitors and some of their European competitors, When this started to look like a real thing, they pour money into it.

So we need a product in 18 months. In 18 months, you didn't have a good product. You took it to the market anyway, and it failed. Then you closed down that team. A couple years later, leaders say, oh, this still looks like a big opportunity. We better get in. So some of these U. S. companies spent more money trying to get into that market. Then the Japanese competitors spent because they just didn't invest consistently.

And you see this now with investments in ai, or investments in digital technology. In, general. Most companies are playing catch up. One of the things you talked about in the book that provoked that particular book was the gap between theory and observation. And you wrote at the time of writing the book, companies were disbanding corporate strategy departments when consultancy firms were engaged more often to improve operating efficiency than to plot strategy.

And I thought about how history repeats again, or it echoes or rhymes as Mark Twain would say. Because companies are still rushing to downsize today rather than create markets or industries for tomorrow they're using AI as a way to become more operationally excellent which yes use it for that, but they're not taking the wins or the gains from that to invest in a new market for tomorrow so that's the echo that we're seeing in the markets again You know, one of the very interesting questions is.

Why is all this investment in technology not raising productivity? Because as far as we can see, it's not. This is a deep topic. I'll come back to that later. I can defend that and give some more data if you want. But one of the challenges is most of these technologies, the root from the technology to Impact goes through a large incumbent company. They see these technologies. How do we use them? And as you say, most of they use them incrementally.

So, you think of a large hotel chain like Marriott and I see digital technologies. Yeah, I can use that to do the dynamic pricing. I can use that to run my my customer loyalty program.

I can use that to have an online reservations thing, you know, blah, blah, blah, all these things, but they never will see the opportunity to do Airbnb because you're looking at all of these technologies through the lens of what I'm already doing and not what am I doing in terms of some deep competence thing of, if Marriot said like, I'm creating experiences for people or I'm creating a place for people to spend the night rather than I'm a hotel company, right?

If you can define who you are in terms of a deep need rather than a specific function or a specific form in which you meet that need, then maybe you'll see these opportunities, but most organizations don't. They look at the new technology through the lens of existing products and services, existing, operating practices, You know, where will this help us, get another few basis points to margin, but they don't have the capacity to see how it could be used in a truly transformational way.

Again, hundreds of examples of that, right? You could pick any industry, and I think I could probably give you an example, but that's why, even in a highly dynamic environment, I think strategy is more important than it's ever been, right? You have to have a point of view. It, it cannot be overly precise. Given the complexity in the world, but you have to have a broad point of view of where and how you're going to shape the world around you over the next three to five years.

And often, and this was something CK and I always would do when we were working with senior teams and still do, and it's an exercise any of your listeners can do within your own organization, however big or small it is. But you ask leaders the following question over the next few years, three to four years, how are we going to reinvent ourselves and the world around us. And then you ask each person, each part of that leadership team, to put their answer on a piece of paper. Write that out.

Or electronically, doesn't matter. But you could, you have to do it in no more than three or four sentences. Three or four from two statements, right? Here's who we are today. Here's what we think we want to be in a few years time. And so you can think of these as each one is a vector of transformation. Here's how we're gonna reinvent ourselves in the world around us. What's a very interesting exercise is you have everybody do that and then you do a little context analysis.

And you ask all right, do we have any consensus? And usually the answer is no. What you have is a whole bunch of different points of view about the future vying among the senior team and endless arguments that don't get resolved. And so there's not consistency in focus. Second question you ask is, is there anything about our point of view that would surprise competitors or customers? Usually the answer is no. We have the same things on our list that everybody else has on their list.

And then you ask, okay, are we, can you see what we're doing in the next 90 days that is connected to that point of view? Are we building new competencies? Are we putting new teams together? Are we running experiments? But have we, have we, have we folded that future back into the present? And again, I go in, I do this, and you ask these questions and the answer is no, we don't have consensus. No, it's not very differentiated. No, it's not really much impacting what we're doing right now.

And you go, guys, like, we got to change that because, you could not control your destiny if you have no point of view on what that destiny is. Yeah. You know, again, a little exercise that's useful for any group of leaders or individuals to do is, is kind of a little two by two and, and, and look at your, look at your diary, look at your calendar.

and and ask how much time you're spending on basically next 90 day problems versus anything that has a longer time frame on one axis and on the other axis, how much are, what amount of your time is going to internally focus things, budget meetings, staff issues, and so on, versus things that are really focused on customers, competitors, and the environment.

And I think what you find even among quite senior leaders is more than 90 percent of their time is in that lower left quadrant of, you know, fairly immediate inbox, fighting fires, and, and a huge amount of it is internally focused. Well, you know, you can't, you can't get to the future first if that's where your time is going. It's just, you know, it doesn't work. And so, you know, yeah.

So one of the questions I think, you know, we'll come back to is, like, why, why have some of these, you know, Corporate organizational failings. Why have they been so persistent? But you know, I often, I'd often say to the editors at HBR and at the Harvard Business Publishing, I say I'd love to be able to write things with no examples at all because the moment I write an example now I'm a hostage to some leader somewhere who is gonna screw it up.

Like there's a 90 percent probability that's gonna happen, right? For some reason. And,, so it's kind of a conundrum. I'd much rather write about the ideas. And be very, you know, suggest how you can implement them. I want to be very practical about, what you could do with them, but not try to say, here's a company that has it all figured out and like go down and do likewise.

When i read the back catalogs of work like that i take it that way and go, This was the knowledge that you had best to be able to see today but it's the theories that come out of it that i find so interesting last one for you gary

. If you're a leader for example and you're a chief executive you say imagine this scenario fully aware that if he or she doesn't make effective use of corporate resources somebody else will be given the chance and they launch a program to improve return on investment. Now or why rona or rose or cd and so forth has two components a numerator net income and a denominator investment, not assets or capital employment in a service industry and more appropriate denominator maybe headcount.

Management throughout, this hypothetical firm also know that raising net income is likely to be a harder slog than culling assets and had can't, this is something that's happening right now across many many organizations in the name of efficiency but again, like carving off bits of the iceberg and no investment in the future again.

So yes, you might be cutting headcount now to make the firm more efficient or more valuable from a wall street perspective, but there's no investment of that new revenue into the future. A challenge that is pervasive as ever.

Absolutely, an organization may have to shrink to survive, but you will never thrive that way. And I think, again, if you look at who gets to the top of most organizations , or maybe ask the question this way. If you see a few senior people vying for the CEO job, the top job, who do you think is going to have better odds, the CFO or the CHRO, head of human resources, right? Almost always it's the finance person.

And so, our organizations have been led, for many years, primarily by people who have a finance or accounting background. I'm, and that's an important skill, but to be really blunt, these people often have a left brain, the size of a watermelon, a right brain, the size of a pistachio. And and again, the easiest thing to do.

And again, I come back to this theme in many ways throughout all my writing, but , if I'm there and my compensation depends on, getting earnings up as fast as I can, popping the share price, cutting is just easier than building every single time. And if I am only expect to be in that job for three or four years, the consequences of cutting out muscle along with the fat It's probably not going to show up until I'm, I've taken all my money and left.

And so, you just see this over and over again and and now, it may not be just outsourcing and downsizing. Now it's share buybacks. We have other ways of you know, pretending that we're resilient when we really are. But again, the kind of people that get on those top jobs. I mean, it's interesting to me, Aiden, , I, one of the things I believe deeply is that you shouldn't, no one should ever become CEO unless they've had to build something new. Right? They've built a new product line.

They've built a new business inside of that company. You should never get to be a CEO when all you've had to do is run existing legacy businesses. And yet most people know the way to the top is either you're CFO and then you move to the top job or you run the biggest legacy business and don't screw it up. That's like, that's not a very high bar, right? You have a lot of legacy, a lot of brand technology, whatever. Don't screw it up. Right? Right.

I mean, asking somebody to keep the iPhone business going for the next five years is a very different challenge than asking somebody to come up with the next iPhone, right? But we really need to hire and reward people who have the capacity to build and have an entrepreneurial sense. And, , I read, people have wildly different views on Elon Musk. I don't want to be part of that debate. But I did read a book by a Wall Street Journal reporter on, the first 10 or 15 years of Musk building Tesla.

I would encourage every so called leader, executive in the world to read that book. Again, I don't care what you think about either must, but it gives you a sense of what is personally required to build something new. The unbelievable commitment, the passion, the persistence, the personal risk taking, the, the do or die attitude. And, it is as far from being a good administrator as you can find, right? Like these things, there's not even a bloody Venn diagram there, right? There's no overlap.

And so we need to find ways of cultivating that kind of set of capabilities in large institutions. And this is what I focus on in much of my more recent work. But yeah, it goes back to, what is your job? Is your job to, to simply grow earnings? Or is your job to build an organization that can thrive, that can grow that is creating new things for customers? And, the incentive systems often push executives to take the easy route out on that. And by the way, I should say one thing there.

Leaders will always often tell me that the real problem here is the investment community, right? They're short term, right? All they want to know is like what you're going to do for the next quarter. And so part of that is true. There's that's true even for companies like Tesla. We're like, how many models did you ship? Are you growing? And their share price gets impacted by that. But here's the interesting thing.

If you look at , any stock index, if you look at the Dow Jones or the DAX or the FTSE, whatever it may be, you will see some companies that have a price earnings ratio of 8 or 9 or 10, and you'll see others that are 30 or 40. You cannot tell me that all investors are short term. Right? If you invest in a company with, if you invest, if you were investing three or four years ago in NVIDIA or 20 years ago on Amazon, I can tell you, you are not short term. What did you see?

You saw a company that had a growth story, that had ambition, that was building new capabilities, where the CEOs weren't just like accountants and denominator managers. And you said, these guys are going to do something. So I think , every leadership team pretty much gets the investors they deserve. So if the investors go okay, these are a bunch of denominator managers and turnaround specialists and so on.

Yeah, we'll let them squeeze the lemon, but give the juice back to us in dividends and share buybacks. Cause you guys don't know how the hell to make lemonade. So just give us the juice. We'll redeploy it. And somebody else will make the lemonade. Yeah, you can't blame investors. It's a complicated issue, but on average you can't blame investors when they, aren't willing you to trust you to build something new when you've not often done it.

Brilliant, brilliant call to action as well. Gary, a nice, a nice way to finish. I pulled a little line from competing from the future just to. Give a call to action for this book as well i highly recommend reading it going back and reading it again still available it's on kindle as well now as well so.

Incompeting future say this book is not for dilettantes it is not for the merely intellectually curious it's a handbook for those who are not content to follow for those who believe that the best way to win is to rewrite the rules for those who are unafraid to challenge orthodoxy for those who are more inclined to build than cut for those who are more concerned with making a difference than making a career and for those who are absolutely committed. Staking out the future first.

That's the call to action that this book brings to you highly recommended and gary for people who want to reach out to you and your work in management lab where is the place to find you, can you have So the best place to find me is through social media. I'm on both X and, LinkedIn. On X, I'm just Prof Hamel. You can find me easily there. I'd encourage you to connect. I write regularly there and post. You can visit my personal website. That's just garyHamel. com. So lots of ways to reach out.

linkedin as well and i love the cartoons you share. The way you write as well. I pulled Gary so many quotes. I usually take quotes from books as I read them. I have so many from, from this, this book so far as well. And it's been an absolute pleasure. I look forward to recording the future episodes. Gary Hamel. Thank you for joining us. Thank you, Aiden.