# LBS Favourites

Data: 11-01-2025 21:36:19

## Lista de Vídeos

1. [The art of negotiation: Six must-have strategies | LBS](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKbcmlKb81c)
2. [Handling Complexity with Professor Richard Jolly | London Business School](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPL5g3F_wbA)
3. [Two tips for developing good management skills | London Business School](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLcgCEbsT08)
4. [Trailblazer Series: In Conversation With Indra Nooyi](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=An4b-TvIWAo)
5. [Building personal and organisational resilience with Richard Jolly | London Business School](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nbcaGyQrf4)
6. [The challenge of making it happen l London Business School](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bz-37FePEO8)

## Transcrições

### The art of negotiation: Six must-have strategies | LBS
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKbcmlKb81c

Idioma: en

so this morning I'm going to be sharing
some you know theory with you so to some
extent I'm glad I have you early where
the caffeine is still kicking in what
we're gonna be talking about this
morning Society of influence and
persuasion and when I say theory the
reason why I say theory is because
there's actually a rich this isn't a
rich area of research there's a lot of
science behind it and I want to share
with you just a little bit of that
science now you know here at lbs we
believe very strongly that there's no
point throwing theory at you if it's
also not simultaneously practical to you
so while I'm gonna be talking about
these ideas of influence and persuasion
and the science behind it simultaneously
I'm going to be giving you tons and tons
of examples right whether it's in the
business world whether it's in the rail
social world just try and make these
ideas come alive and the other thing
about my style of sort of like teaching
and being in front of a class is that I
really don't know what to do if I'm just
hearing myself talk endlessly so I do
hope and expect that you guys will
participate along with me and you know
bring in things that you think are
pertinent as we talk about these ideas
of influence and persuasion so on I
think big picture we all appreciate the
idea of needing to influence people
right so you know many of you guys may
be very senior in your organizations and
yes it may be the case that you can go
around just telling people to do
something but as you may well experience
telling somebody to do something might
result in them just kind of complying
with what it is that you want them to do
which is all fine and good but it
doesn't necessarily result in them being
committed to what it is that you're
thinking about wanting them to do and
the course of action that you're
pursuing um and as a result of that
these ideas around influence and
persuasion are really really key because
they move beyond getting somebody to
just simply comply with what it is that
you're requesting to actually being
truly committed to the course that
you're setting for them such that when
you're not in the room when you're away
at LBS attending a course or at a
meeting in a different organization
these individuals are still doing the
things that you want them to do and that
in some sense is a big reason
we have these ideas and want to think
about these ideas of influence and
frustration and as I said there's a very
very large area of research around this
and I want to share with you just six
basic principles around how it is that
we interact with people right so this
work is really being influenced by a guy
called Robert Cialdini he's a social
psychologist and he he came up with
these ideas these six principles and
thinks of them as a sort of like
interpersonal principles of influence
and that's kind of what I'm gonna be
doing this morning sharing these ideas
with you so if we start off just kind of
at the top and work our way down if we
think about the idea of reciprocity
reciprocity is this very very powerful
sense of that when I do somebody a favor
they feel a compunction to do a favor
back for me in return I'm sure that you
can think of many many instances in your
own lives when when you're trying to get
somebody to do something rather than
just making request after request after
request it may actually be easier to do
them a little favor first
and then all of a sudden they're
actually much more likely to do
something back for you in return right
so in negotiations we know this very
very well that if for instance we want
the other side to share information
about their priorities actually a really
really good way of trying to start that
process is to share a little bit of
information with them when we do that
that kick starts this process of
reciprocity and then hopefully and
usually people then feel a of a duty to
respond in kind and give you some
information back in return on I have
this thing here on anybody know what I'm
talking about what this is it's very
popular in the US so these are like
mailing labels so return address labels
and I don't know how many of you guys
have experienced this but sometimes
charities will send these out so the
gentleman is at the back is nodding so
tell me a little bit about this
in the US that yeah Ennis I mean this is
exactly they're trying to work on this
principle reciprocity okay um did you
ever donate out of curiosity yes okay um
so so you're more generous than I was I
was when I was in the u.s. I was always
a starving student so I would get these
in the mail and starving student as my
excuse I never I never donated but this
is the principle that they're working on
right so they're printing out these
return address little stickers and and
obviously this is incredibly cheap for
them to do you can only imagine that all
they need is a color printer they need
to have bought some stickers from from
Office Depot and then they're printing
them out on mass and then they send it
to you and now you'll receive this thing
and oh my goodness it's a personalized
gift how thoughtful of them and then
they kick in this idea of reciprocity
and now you feel a slight need to do
them a favor in return
ah there are many other examples of this
so you know this is a decide of like is
it really a free gift in the mail I
mentioned this idea of reciprocity
negotiations right giving some
information to get information but I'll
give you another example so this is a
study that was done some years back and
then we're trying to figure out how to
get people to respond to surveys so I
don't know how many of you guys I have
to do customer surveys or even in-house
service when you're trying to get your
employees to respond to you but this is
an interesting one so this company was
interested in trying to understand it's
not this company sorry these bunch of
researchers were interested in trying to
understand how to get people to respond
to surveys so what did they do
they had two groups of people and one
group of people they sent out this
survey and they said hey we'd like for
you to complete the survey is really
important for us you're all part of this
organization we want feedback from you
and if you complete the survey and send
it back to us we will send you a check
for $25 okay
I mean $25 is it's not a small amount of
money it's a decent amount of money
you know I could get a very nice lunch
or simple dinner for that okay I can I
can work with that and then in the other
condition what they did was they send
out the survey and they said hey we
really really like for people to
complete the survey here's a five-dollar
track it's yours to keep whether you
complete the survey or not but we really
like for you to complete the survey
people were much more likely to complete
and return the survey in this condition
now
Synnex in the room are probably going
hang on a second I've just sent out like
a lot of five-dollar tracks am i in a
lot of trouble now interestingly no
people in this condition tended to be
honest they tended not to cash the check
unless they actually completed the
survey so this idea of reciprocity was
one more effective and to more cost
efficient then this idea of hey you do
something for me then I do something
back for you in return right so this
idea of reciprocity is quite powerful
any ideas that you guys can think of
around reciprocity ideas or how you've
seen it play out in your lives or in
your organizational lives
if you get promoted sometimes in some
situations it may be that you've had
this credit of trust from your boss or
whatever yeah no I can see that right so
interestingly enough you've done the
work to get the promotion but even then
they're giving you this promotion and
now there's this sense that oh my
goodness I really really need to do good
by them for giving for putting their
trust in me okay thank you anything else
that you guys can think of any other
examples that you can think of I'll give
you a funny example but this also gets a
little bit at how as we start thinking
about how to use influence it's also I
think interesting to think about how it
is that we make sure that it's not being
used against us okay so this one's a
funny example that puts those two two
ideas together on I'm Singaporean
originally I know that my accent is now
completely muddled I lived in the US for
a long time I lived here for a long time
I don't know what I sound like now but
in sample one of the things that we
celebrate is Chinese New Year and during
Chinese New Year and this is a very
Singaporean custom it's not even an s
necessarily a chore broadly Chinese
custom but in Singapore when you
celebrate Chinese New Year you go visit
all your friends and family which is the
same across China but the unique thing
in Singapore is that when you do this
you bring two mandarin oranges to your
host home okay and it's two mandarin
oranges because the word for mandarin
oranges are in in Chinese sounds like
gold sounds like fortune so in a very
Chinese way they're playing on this
linguistic thing to say I'm bringing you
fortune okay so what happens is that you
go to your host home you bring to our
and just for with you you give them to
them and they now immediately feel the
need to do you a favor back in return so
what do they do
they go to their kitchen put those two
oranges down take two oranges and give
them back to you so
you started with two oranges now you
know five minutes later you you're back
with two oranges so then you repeat this
process as you visit the houses right so
you visit the next house hey you still
have two oranges so you give it to your
new host your new host gives you new
oranges back in return you still have
two oranges so you keep doing this
process of giving favors and then
reciprocating such that at the end of
the day you still have two oranges you
started in with two oranges and the end
of it might not be the same two oranges
but you still have two oranges and it
really is this a very ritualized version
of this reciprocity process okay but
it's also how it is that people are
trying to now out the effects right so
if people are trying to do your
favorites and curry favor with you
this is this is an instance of how it is
that you defuse these reciprocity
influence tactics can you guys think of
how else you might you know try and
diffuse these tactics if they're being
used against you Cole thank you so so so
so okay for those who are not in on the
on the details to tell me a little bit
about okay okay
that she's bringing Olimpico okay I
think it's called first I see okay
okay good good evolution of a tradition
okay other ideas of how you can see this
sort of like if somebody is trying to
use this influence tactic against you
how you would try and now also these
sorts of reciprocity influence tactics
mm-hmm so you could you could pay for
you could just decline to accept it but
my guess is that in an organizational
situation well in most situations that
could come across as kind of rude right
so yes you can try that okay but be
careful that you don't offend your your
your counterpart other things that you
could do absolutely right so there's
just a sense of tit for tat you know
down the line I remember it's my turn to
pay for lunch or dinner or whatever or
drinks yeah
somebody had a yes yeah yeah so exactly
right okay yes aye aye I don't dispute
this so in some sense as we go through
all these different types of influence
tactics that is the the advice that will
be consistent for many of them but I'm
gonna present to you some research that
basically says you know what sometimes
that doesn't work as well as we'd like
to think that it would and in that
regard it's therefore even better to
have other ways of tackling them my
guess is that for instance within an
organizational setting many many many of
you guys will have rules within your
organisation set that say I can accept
this gift but not this gift a certain
value of gifts or there's certain things
that I can't do these organizational
boundaries are there in some sense
because sometimes just uh saying I
understand what they're doing and I'm
not gonna fall prey to it is not
necessarily sufficient yeah so some
things that we can do as I said you
could try and reject the gift but it
could be it's not necessarily easy it
could be seen as impolite we could be
exactly this right accept the gift but
kind of be wary of what's going on and
again that can't work don't get me I'm
not trying to say that it won't work but
I'm just saying that it's not as easy as
it might sometimes be and uh that
whatever this happens to me I I
generally like to have a ready excuse
you know somebody want I go into a shop
and try and buy
I'm trying to buy something and they
offer me a coffee or whatever it might
be
thanks I just had breakfast I don't need
anything right now that doesn't
necessarily stop them from still trying
to really like foist and stuff on me but
at least if I have a ready excuse that
potentially helps me to overcome their
their influence tactics that's
reciprocity let me give you some other
ideas to think about um another tactic
that she'll Dini talks about is this
idea of commitment and consistency and
the idea of commitment and consistency
is that once we make a decision and we
head down a particular path of action we
feel the need to be consistent with that
course of action and this can happen
even if we get negative feedback about
our actions and is particularly
effective if the commitments are done
sort of like in a very active public way
right you can imagine right so if you
stand up and immediately start saying
things about you know I am going to you
know New Year's is coming and I'm going
to make a resolution to start going to
the gym if you make that sort of like
public commitment it becomes much more
effective in ensuring that you become
consistent with that course of action
down the road so I have another example
a bumper sticker right so not as common
here again but again this is potentially
a bit of a u.s. example but when I was
in the US I remember seeing bumper
stickers for every which cause that was
out there but beyond that for children's
schools right always like proud parent
of you know whatever whatever school why
do people do that why why are these you
know bumper stickers so prevalent and
then come election time also very very
prevalent why are they out there
okay and then what happens when that
brand comes knocking on your door for
for money or current you know or your
time commitments or something like that
you've defined this is exactly you're
exactly right right you're spot-on
you've defined yourself as that is part
of your brand so when that brand comes
saying I need your help
in terms of time whether it's for your
children's school or money for saving
the whales or whatever it might be
you're much much more likely to do that
right another example and this one is I
like this example because it really kind
of combines these different a couple of
these different influence tactics and
one of the things to think about if
you're trying to go around influencing
and persuading other people is that if
you can tap into multiple of these
principles
whatever you're doing becomes ever more
powerful because it fundamentally means
that it's leveraging off of different
psychological ideas simultaneously okay
so example how many of you guys have
been let's say on the plane and you're
reading some sort of magazine and you
see in the magazine this little tear off
thing that says you can get three weeks
or three issues or free of this magazine
and then after that you know you have to
stop paying how many of you guys have
seen that yeah how many of you guys have
signed up for that okay and tell me a
little bit about you did remember
counsel well done you so how or why did
you remember to cancel but that's this
to large extent is this idea of like
commitment and consistency but there's
also reciprocity going back to what we
just talked about right they're giving
you three free issues or whatever it
might be and then there is also the hope
that hey I'm reading this I'm reading
you know whether it's National
Geographic or The Economist or whatever
it might be and especially come on let's
say the Economist okay I'm reading it
now Wow
I'm feeling so smart for reading The
Economist okay and and you know what you
know what I want to be that smart person
who reads The Economist so when it comes
time to renew my subscription sorry to
actually stop pay
for my subscription I'm quite likely to
do it because I've coded myself as a
person who reads The Economist but
honestly speaking I don't know about you
guys but the Economist is like comes out
what once a week it takes me a month to
read each issue right so there's just
like giant backlog of economists sitting
on my desk and I'm still shelling out
money because I've coded myself as
somebody who reads The Economist other
examples that I have for you for the SIA
T of commitment and consistency so we
talked about bumper stickers petitions
are very similar in nature has anybody
heard of the foot in door technique I I
hear laughter so I'm hoping there with
our with our new guest who's just joined
us feel comfortable sharing a little bit
with no no no sorry I'm putting you on
the spot but you were laughing so do you
want to tell us a little bit about this
foot in door technique make sure you're
on the inside before they people know
actually what you're talking about
kind of yeah anybody else familiar with
this tack tactic you're selling brushes
yes yeah
housewife obviously they do that by
saying yeah so thank you that that's
pretty much this idea that it came about
when people used to go door-to-door
selling stuff whether it's brushless or
whatever it might be and the idea is
simply that hey if I can get my foot in
I can get the rest of myself through the
door okay because once you've committed
to letting me just you know get in a
little bit I can open that door further
there was a study done in and this is an
old study but it's a beautiful study
done in the 1960s to examine this wooden
door technique and I have to tell you
about it because it's really um it's
kind of amazing so this was done in
California and they were interested in
getting people to put a big ugly sign
saying drive carefully on on these
people's front gardens okay um and they
were kind of curious about how to get
people to comply with this request and
so in one condition they knocked on a
bunch of doors in a neighborhood and
said hi we're very interested in people
driving carefully in your neighborhood
would you be willing to put this big
sign which was very very ugly on your
front garden people looked at the sign
and so we're like
not so much okay 17% of the people here
said that they were willing to put this
big ugly sign on their front Gardens the
other condition they knocked on the door
and said hi we're very interested in
people driving carefully in your
neighborhood would you be willing to put
this little sticker sing drive carefully
on your window everybody said yes I mean
this is a neighborhood people had
children they wanted people to drive
carefully so absolutely everybody said
yes two weeks later knock knock knock
what do you be willing to put this big
ugly sign saying
drive carefully on your front lawn 76%
of the people said yes right verses 17
from the other condition so think about
a time when if you're trying to get
somebody to do something for you and
their initial response is no no no think
about whether you can make a smaller ask
initially because that may be the way to
try and get them to do the big off later
on this is this idea of commitment and
consistency how do we prevent from well
I'll give you one my idea the there's a
very very powerful area of literature
that talks about something called
escalation of commitment
okay escalation of commitment refers to
a phenomenon where if people make
investments are typically money but also
time or energy in a particular cause of
action and then they get negative
feedback people typically feel people
typically reinvest in this failing cause
of action because they feel the need to
be consistent with their initial choice
right so from an economic standpoint
this is considered irrational it's
considered throwing good money after bad
you're supposed to ignore some costs and
people are honoring some cost and this
escalation phenomenon has been used to
explain anything ranging from R&D
investments to commitment to personnel
right so you hire somebody there
not working out quite right well we
could ask them to exit or we could give
them more training well let's give them
more training and more training and more
training even though maybe we should be
thinking about exiting them gracefully
it's been used to explain the Vietnam
War it's been used to explain even
things like the amount of time that
basketball players have on court
so these analyses try to control for how
much how good these players were but
even then if these people these
basketball players were recruited with a
big lump sum of money they ended up
having more more playing time on the
court understanding all of this how do
we try and prevent some of these things
from happening how do we ensure that the
decisions that we're making are good
decisions and not bias by these initial
commitments that we make
agree so being very concrete and
objective in your data I will say that
research has found that the way that we
look at the data becomes bias to because
of this right so I hear you and I agree
with that the stop-loss is like this
bottom line this reservation prices
reminder that I need to stop which I
also agree with so this is very
difficult to prevent and you need to try
many things so these are good but may
not be sufficient all the things that we
can do very good idea right so what's
happening is that if I make the initial
choice to invest resources in the course
of action I'm the one who feels as
though I need to be consistent but if I
have a neutral third party make the
reinvestment decision so a colleague who
can help me with my thinking help me
analyze the data that can be very
helpful because this colleague is not
burdened by the same need to be commit
to be consistent with initial
commitments other things that you can
think about this is one of those where
we say ignore sunk cost right so this
gentleman was very very rational and say
well we need to kind of understand that
these things are happening to us and we
just need to say no and my dissertation
for many many many years ago was looking
at exactly this idea when it comes to
these sunk costs can we just say you
know what we just need to ignore them we
just need to understand that they're
there and ignore them the problem is
that we don't go around saying ooh let
me look out for sunk costs ooh let me
beware of sunk costs and then the next
thing you know the sunk costs hit you
and then you feel this this this need to
be consistent this is why these
principles are as potentially tricky as
they are yeah so some idea is there let
me give you more things to think about
so we talked about reciprocity we talked
about commitment and consistency there's
this idea of social proof which is this
notion that when the course of action is
Caesar
what was interesting as I'm coming you
know this is this is this is something
that happens in the collaboration and
actually you can I can see when she sits
something out loud I'm like yeah that's
gonna be as a public commitment he's
gonna kind of reinforce her so they're
there any tips for us so so without
asking for more specifics which I'm not
sure I can deal with um I would say that
you want to try and find an a graceful
exit right so so a graceful exit a
graceful way to back out from that
commitment but the other thing too is to
find an alternative so a lot of these
types of commitment and consistency
things it be in your head it becomes go
no-go it becomes invest not invest it
becomes let the person in don't let the
person in but if we can think of an
alternative path and also another
acceptable path then all of a sudden the
thinking becomes different and it's not
so binary it's not so oh my god I have
to do this to be consistent there's wait
hang on second maybe there's this
alternative thing that I can do instead
so without the gory details those are my
suggestions yes yes yes in a face-saving
manner yeah for you as well probably
yeah okay so so so proof social proof is
saying that when the course of action is
not completely clear we very often look
to other people around us as to what it
is to that we should do and we follow
them right we're much more likely to
follow people who are like us who are in
close proximity to us and this can
result in a lot of
interesting things so I I had the the
difficulty with doing these sessions is
that I have so many examples to share
with you and I'm like picking and
choosing amongst my kids but this one I
have to choose so laughs tracks do we
know what those are the canned laughter
right so and a lot of TV shows a lot of
these sitcoms says this canned laughter
in the background who here finds it
annoying yeah okay
but why do sitcoms wider the studio's do
this because it works and it's
particularly effective if the show is
ambiguously funny if somebody else is
laughing you find that funny too so it's
just something to keep in mind how do we
get somebody to do something well tell
them everybody else is doing it and we
see this happening a lot of times right
it's like this happens with trends it
happens with a lot when in marketing
where they try and say look everybody
likes this and when that happens since
the senses oh I must like it too within
a more business example and the source
of social proof ideas have a lot to do
with both actions and themselves so if
somebody's bidding right you're not very
sure whether this has value or not if
somebody's bidding okay you bid too but
then that as a result of that they have
it has implications for things like M&A
so my husband's a banker and what do
they try and do if you can get one
interested party to interest the party
you're done there will now be a whole
slew of people who are interested in
buying this company because these ideas
of social proof kick in please
I'm afraid somebody else you're trying
to get me social proof to say exactly
exactly
yes absolutely right and and then very
often too it goes beyond social proof
but we pair it with this idea of we pick
the people who whose quotes we use right
it may be a celebrity or somebody very
cool because we want to be like these
people so it's again pairing different
types of influence tactics together but
absolutely yeah the best thing to do is
just talk to each of them before their
meeting yeah
and present the new idea to each of them
yeah them to think that idea is great
yeah presented as new
yeah old meeting yeah there's more
chance that's going to be accepted yeah
and so so so thank you for this and but
it's it's not just I mean I know that it
may be particularly relevant in a in a
Japanese culture but it's true the world
over right if you're trying to sell an
idea trying to sell it first time in
front of a big group it's not
necessarily the easiest thing to do
whereas if we can get a bunch of people
off line to buy into your idea then to
hopefully publicly support one or two of
them to publicly support you in the big
room you're much more likely to get a
momentum of people who are who are
voting in your favor again bringing
things like brexit where it becomes
pertinent um how do we prevent some of
these things from affecting us
unfortunately the research doesn't
necessarily have great ideas here so we
just have to kind of say looking cut you
need to understand your motivations for
doing something don't just follow the
crowd right and I write I say this for
those of you guys who have kids I mean
this is really particularly pertinent
right so kids just kind of follow fads
and trends and and and you're trying to
give them to be individuals and to
understand what's going on this is
consistent with some of these ideas
this one's easy to understand but really
really powerful we like to say people
who we like to say
yes to people whom we like which means
that we want to be likeable in some
sense and what makes us likeable well if
there's a lot of research to show that
people who are physically attractive are
more likeable people who are similar to
us are more likeable so if somebody
comes from the same town same city same
country as you more likeable if somebody
has the same name as you research has
shown that even if you just tell them
same name all of us you don't know
anything else you're more likely to
trust them okay for I don't know why but
there you go we like that we like our
name so we like other people who have
the same names as us people who
compliment us people who are associated
with positive things I'll give you some
funny examples who are these guys Arnel
I'll be back who's the other guy
some what some other know Cruz
Bustamante okay now you might remember
that our our I'll be the terminator
became the Governor of California right
this happened during the this recall
elections and the other there were a lot
of people who ran for these recall
elections but the the other big
contender was this guy Cruz Bustamante
now Cruz Bustamante as it turns out was
extremely qualified for the position he
was the Lieutenant Governor he'd been a
public servant for many many years in
fact up until that time he was like of a
highest-ranking Latino in public office
okay but he didn't win the elections the
famous Hollywood star won the elections
right I mean and this goes towards this
idea of liking especially in especially
since the vote was happening in
California I mean this is a Hollywood
wall people know him people I mean like
him he represents all these cool things
he's married into the Kennedy family or
was at that time was okay and then
things happened on another example some
of you guys might be aware
this in the presidential elections in
the US the taller of the two candidates
tends to win the electoral vote it's a
little bit nastier with the with the
other vote but we like tall apparently
or tall symbolizes I don't know power or
authority or something and we tend to
vote in the person who is tall which is
really bizarre right I mean it's like
what if somebody is height and I feel
bad for myself have anything to do with
somebody's ability to be president not a
whole lot and yet the taller candidate
tends to win the US presidential
election now some of you guys then are
thinking of world leaders who may not be
as tall Sarkozy comes to mind or you
know when he was in power and I don't
know how much how much you know about
Sarkozy but one he first of all he was
quite short but he tried really really
hard to make himself tall okay so there
are pictures and you google it you'll
see it there are images of him standing
on on boxes in front of podiums right so
if there's like a lectern and a mic and
everything he's standing on a box yeah
there are press conferences of him in
like some sort of like company like
opening a new factory or something like
that and the the the the story goes they
called around the entire organization
looking for the shortest members of the
organization to be in the photo shoot
with him so that he wouldn't appear
quite so short right so there is the
sense that I want to seem tall and being
tall conveys good things that people
like bizarrely enough
so yeah I don't know whether he had
heels shoes but yes I mean here again
notoriously short right um I was just
about to say Kim jong-il Yi there are
pictures of him with with these like
lifts in his shoes but it's to try and
appear tall thoughts questions examples
so very good question right so at least
with regards to these data it's I mean
except for the last elections is always
with men between men so we don't know
and then the comment in the caveat that
I often give especially with these data
is who knows nowadays because it's
becoming more complex with gender coming
to play with race coming into play that
said a big picture there's generally a
big main effect where and this is very
unfortunate and a whole different story
men are generally perceived as more
competent so it is going to be like for
like but there's also us just a sense
that men are more competent than women
which I beg to differ on but several
story going to share with you two other
principles the second last one is
Authority we tend to say yes to people
who are in positions of authority or
seem like they're in positions of
authority
okay so studies have been done and is
really scary where somebody dresses up
like a doctor so they put on a lab coat
they put on Scrubs they have a set of
scope and then they'll go into a
hospital they'll find a nurse and start
giving random instructions to the nurse
on how to take care of patients and the
nurses very often say yes and follow
through with the instructions
obviously they stop the nurse before bad
things happen but the idea is this
person's seam is like an authoritative
figure and therefore people say yes to
what they're saying or what they're
asking for same things
opens with regards to a lot of these
when people start investigating what's
happened with airplane accidents on very
often it has to do with the dynamics
between the copilot and the pilot right
so you guys may remember some years
maybe five years ago there was the plane
that I was I think was a Korean Airlines
plane that landed in San Francisco and
thankfully people were generally not
hurt there were not that many fatalities
and the plane managed to land fairly
safely and what happened is that they
they found out that the Sun was in the
the pilots eyes but the copilot didn't
want to put down any sort of shades or
wear sunglasses because he thought that
that might be disrespectful to the pilot
and as a result of that these sort of
like crazy things happen now I put out
these examples and we especially for you
guys I think is useful to think about it
from two ways one is huh how can I get
people to do the things that I want them
to do okay but simultaneously I think
it's important to realize especially
with with with people who have a lot of
a seniority and manage other individuals
your own seniority your own authority
could be suppressing your employees
abilities to think creatively to voice
their opinions because they're just kind
of concerned hang on I better not speak
up against my superior against my boss
right so we want to think about it from
there two ways um example that I have to
mention when it comes to Authority
anybody heard of the Milgram experiments
okay this is a good one oh I actually do
have a little bit of a picture for you
okay so what happened in the 1950s and
1960s a guy by the name of Stanley
Milgram wanted to try and understand why
the atrocities of World War two happened
and one school of thought was look
they're just some people who are bad and
they're bad and that's what it is okay
they're bad apples and that's there's
nothing we can do about it there's
another school of thought that said hang
on a second there was something about
the city
situation that made really good people
do some really bad things and stanley
milgram was of that opinion so what did
he do he ran a study in New Haven Yale
and where he brought in a bunch of
people off of the street to be teachers
okay
and they were supposed to teach a
student who is this guy who's actually
working in collaboration with
experimenter and the this participant
was told look you're the teacher that
person's a student okay and every time
the student gets the answer wrong you
need to give them an electric shock okay
and the this student as you can see was
hooked up to a bunch of wires and then
the the teacher had control of a big box
that had a bunch of flipchart one that
had a bunch of levers on it from 15
volts going all the way to 450 volts
okay now they asked a few psychiatrist
beforehand so what percentage of the
people do you think would go all the way
and the psychiatrist said no no no no
very few very few okay people are good
it's only the nutty people the
psychotics the sociopaths who are gonna
do that so what's the percentage of
Psychopaths and sociopaths 1 to 2% of
the population
those are the only people who are going
to go all the way to 450 volts what
percentage of the people do you think
went all the way to 450 volts very close
to thirds 2/3 of the people went all the
way to 450 volts when the student who
was not very good at learning got the
questions wrong again and again this
person just kept on pressing these
levers from 15 volts up up up up up up
up up up they didn't stop when the
student was screaming in pain faking it
they didn't stop when the student
shouted that he had heart condition
they didn't stop when the student
fainted dead away right they just kept
on going why did they do that because
this guy who was the experimenter was
standing there in his white lab coat
with a clipboard there and he never held
a gun to the guy's head and said you
have to go nothing like that but just
prompts along the lines of the the the
the experiment requires you to continue
please continue right so they were lots
of there were verbal prompts but it was
never anything physical that said you
have to do this now
these um participants they were stressed
out beyond their minds they were
sweating profusely they were shaking
they were traumatized from doing it but
they still did it this is the power of
authority I will give you one thing to
think about though keeping in mind the
idea of commitment and consistency
imagine if the study had started off
here my guess is that you would have a
very different result you probably
wouldn't have had two-thirds of the
people giving him a 450 volts of shock
which by the way was also marked with
xxx so again combining different types
of principles can be very very powerful
I have just a few minutes left with you
so I want to give you this last idea to
think about and hopefully that's
enticing ideas which is that when
something is limited we want it more and
that limited can be limited in time
limited in number it's particularly
valuable if it's just limited and and
you'll if you think about it now almost
all these sort of like places online
where you can buy tickets do that right
and even Amazon does that when it's just
a few more they'll tell you three more
like by now right or for airline tickets
you know four more seats at this price
it's trying to tap into this principle
of scarcity getting you to say get the
sense of I need to get in on this action
now before that opportunity goes away
auction fever which I study a lot is the
perfect sort of combination of this
there's scarcity because in auctions is
typically one unique item there's time
pressure because you have to bid very
quickly on the item goes away and then
there's competition with other people
right so this competition increases the
sense of the scarcity of the item so all
of that makes it really seemed as though
this item is really really scarce in
general we really need to be where this
adrenaline rush especially in a sort of
like auction type setting take a break
think carefully confer with your
colleagues but fundamentally understand
your motivations for buying something or
doing something is it just because it's
very very rare and very scarce or is it
because you really wants it now I bring
this up example give you just a second
and to something I hadn't realized that
how perfect the timing for this is but
even I mean the Black Friday sales which
are on right now in the UK and then
they'll start in the u.s. properly
tomorrow it's all about this idea here
yeah please
so they're actually not the buyer
themselves yeah
and you give them obviously target price
restrictions around what they do today
also they might they might because at
the end of the day if they're watching
all of I mean first of all in theory
you're asking a professional to do it so
one might hope that they're there for a
little bit
yes yes that I have not no I have not to
see how an agent would do in this
situation but your example is
interesting because when I said
professional then I'm saying okay they
know something when auctions they know
how to do all this and in theory there
should be better off then you asked me
specifically then I'm gonna be obnoxious
to say well I know about scarcity I know
how to like guard again so in theory if
you train somebody then you're better
off so but you could train yourself you
can train an agent does that answer your
question
yes understood so that's a very good and
important distinction right you're
basically pointing out the fact that
there are different psychological
motivations for you as the buyer versus
an agent as a buyer and for both parties
there are things that will motivate them
to keep going but different types of
things that will keep them going so for
each of the parties you need to be
careful of of what the bottom line is
but you need to put in place different
safeguards to ensure that they're not
taken over by auction fever
if you ask someone to go to the auction
for you if you tell them up front that
you want that item
you know they will feel kind of
compelled and they will feel this
implicit liability towards you that if
they miss out on that item and someone
takes a problem it's an issue because
you employ them to get that for you so I
suppose if you don't tell them what the
outcomes you want is then probably you
can eliminate well I mean I think it
goes back to something that we've said
before right have very clear bottom
lines right so that will prevent you
from getting a bad deal but it may not
help you to get a good deal yeah I saw a
hand up yes please
that's a lovely example thank you yeah
yeah yeah it taps into all these
principles which is why it becomes very
powerful when you're using all of these
different principles simultaneously I'm
at time but can I please give you my
favorite example diamonds so pretty
yeah timeless classics Beauty fire love
brilliance women tend to like them what
do we know about diamonds scarce
are they really scarce tell me more
control
[Music]
married engagement rings we're not
something nineteen twenties thirties
when I think was to this young men get
married buy an engagement ring when is
one month I'll be honest at this law
revenue ticked up very nicely
they thought we're all something yet nor
six that's not some campaign it's
brilliant though okay
I mean it is genius so that's exactly it
okay so I mean look time is there are
tons of diamonds in this world they're
just loads and loads of diamond in the
world but De Beers holes control the
support of the supply of diamonds it
limits the supply it makes it to be a
perceived value combined with some
clever marketing and biggity bam-boom we
really really want them now I have to
say this because it's important we're
looking at the women in the room going
oh yeah we want these diamonds but you
guys have the things that you want to
okay I don't know whether it's the
iPhone or the watch or the stereo or the
gadget or the limited edition print or
whatever it is but you guys women and
men have things that they covet because
of scarcity yeah let me just end with
this final idea here when we think about
influence and persuasion I've talked a
lot about these ideas there are other
things that folk that fall into how it
is that we can influence and persuade
people the bottom line if you don't
remember anything else remember this you
guys have been trained to strategically
and think about the content of your
message yes the content of your message
is important but when you're trying to
influence and persuade somebody think
also about how you're creating that
relationship how you're framing the
information that you're conveying
because that has a huge impact on how it
is that you influence and persuade
people I'll stop I'm happy to take
questions or thoughts but I know that
I'm also over time
I think that works from company to
person perspective if you're doing and
if you're the one who's doing ago she
ate you and you're going to someone to
say yeah they might get caught on the
consistency but it's in there in danger
that they'll think actually already done
you a favor
right but the way that I'd actually
think about doing it is if you're trying
to get in with a company it's hey can I
have a meeting with you to have a chat
about something can I buy you a cup of
coffee right and then from that coffee
it's the biggest sale after that so it
doesn't yes they've given you their time
but you've bought them coffee right yes
yes
please
yeah I guess I what I'm just trying to
choose to summarize this idea that the
ideas of influence and persuasion are
all of this stuff is not necessarily
around what you're saying so think about
politicians okay and these like type
things that we're talking about are the
attractiveness things about it's not
that the their actual political
positions that they're conveying yeah
okay there's something there but people
are being persuaded by other things like
their attractiveness their height so
that's what I'm trying to convey to you
that that the message is important and
the message is particularly important if
people are motivated to listen to you
and have the cognitive resources to
listen to what you have to say but
especially if they don't have cognitive
and motivation resources there you want
to focus on how you're getting to them
buying them a coffee asking for a little
bit of time and then asking for more
time doing them a favor those kinds of
things and you can question about some
of the actions off to us well the trap
comes across as a big some small uncouth
people don't listen to them exactly
right so there's a message component but
there's also how you're delivering it
absolutely let me stop thank you guys
very much for your your time and I hope
you have an interesting rest of your day
[Applause]
you

---

### Handling Complexity with Professor Richard Jolly | London Business School
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPL5g3F_wbA

Idioma: en

yeah we kind of care about the same
stuff uh so uh I'm really looking
forward to uh sharing with you some
ideas and engaging in a in a dialogue
with you uh and um always struck me that
HR and L&D if we take these two uh two
two clusters um you kind of have a
really challenging
job uh because we all know that you know
the power of you know people and
learning to really create value in
organizations is something that if it's
done very well as hopefully we do here
at London Business School uh if it's
done well then it can be transformative
but um you kind of have a choice you
either work with an organization that
really buys into and invests in people
uh and learning uh in which case it's
kind of it's already running you know
sort of it's all running pretty smoothly
already or you work for an organization
that doesn't buy into it and you're
always struggling to get resources and
either way you you kind of got really
quite a difficult uh challenge so I hope
that what we are focusing on here uh
this morning morning it's something
that's relevant uh and something that's
uh helpful uh stimulating uh some
thinking for you and uh what you can do
in your roles uh and uh really what I
want to do is really build from Julian's
session uh because uh Julian coming from
the strategy side it's striking to me
just how many of the strategy professors
are focusing in on this issue of purpose
uh and which was traditionally an OB
subject uh and uh so um you know within
OB this is absolutely something where
there's a growing body of data to say
this is a very important topic so what I
want to do is uh start from the same
place uh as Julian started with but then
look at it from a different lens more of
an OB uh lens if I can do that uh so
where I want to start here uh is uh with
something called dunbar's number are you
familiar with d hands up if you're
familiar with dunbar's number um so uh
Robin Dunbar is a famous anthrop ologist
well famous if you're an anthropologist
that is uh and uh he did an analysis of
our brains uh looking at something
called neocortex uh ratio uh and this is
basically trying to figure out uh when
you analyze the the structure of our
brains how many active stable social
relationships uh can the average human
being uh cope with uh and he came up
with a rather precise
number 148 now academics you know doing
all this sort of rather precise stuff uh
however another group of anthropologists
did a completely different
analysis uh they were looking at all of
the hunter gatherer Societies in the
world today uh and apparently uh there
were 19 of them uh and what they found
uh they're looking at the average size
of their communities and what they found
is whether they were some of the Eskimo
tribes in the Arctic Circle all the way
down to the Aboriginal tribes in
Australia the average size of the
community was exactly the same uh and
typically had been that way for
thousands tens of thousands of years the
average size of the human
Community
148 now this may be a coincidence of
course but there's something here and I
think it's something important because
human beings have lived in communities
of around 15 people for as long as we've
been uh socialized animals uh and
whether it's an African or a European
Village it's stable yeah uh you know
everybody you know who baked your bread
who grew your vegetables who uh made
your shoes and um you have stable
structures there you don't have Career
Development uh you born into a role it
was the same role as your grandparents
be the same as your grandchildren it's
stable over many many hundreds and
thousands of years and by the way uh
LinkedIn Facebook the average number of
people uh that uh the people are
connected to is on both of those
150 however so this is social fabric the
problem is in the last 100 years
organizations have
exploded clearly following the birth of
the Industrial Revolution the rise of
these massive firms and Julian touched
on this I think at the beginning of his
and um now 150 people we know how to get
stuff to happen know when Henry Ford was
building the Model T he had over 300,000
people working in the same plant and
within six years of founding the
business he was turning out a quarter of
a million cars a
year how do you organize 300,000 people
well uh the answer was provided uh with
this uh book which I would argue and I
think Julian would agree is the most
important and influential Business book
uh of the 20th century uh it was
published in 1911 the Principles of
Scientific Management taylorism and what
Taylor said in this book he said in the
past the man has been first in the
future the system must be
first uh and so Scientific Management uh
by the way 1911 this is almost exactly
to the year that the Harvard Business
school was founded yeah and even today
we call it an
MBA uh I really don't think you find
probably haven't done for many decades a
single MBA student who says I'm doing
this degree because I want to be a
business
administrator but a 100 years ago that's
what we needed we needed people to do
scientific management with stopwatches
and you know controlling it all and so
this has been the Paradigm of the 20th
century control
processes uh and if you get onto an aane
uh you know I can pretty much guarantee
that that process is going to be fairly
standardized why because that's how we
get people flying all around the world
pretty cheaply uh and pretty pretty
safely so you know you will go in you'll
have to do a chck ticketing process
security process passport control uh and
then you get onto the airplane uh they
will give you a safety briefing it will
be fairly stand
I uh and this is how we live this is the
world we live in today uh and it's the
world going back to Henry Ford of mass
standardization any color so long as
it's black um
fantastic uh it means we have uh great
health care we get great travel great
communication all the incredible
economies of scale that come uh from
this world but there's a problem here uh
for me at least well I think it's
actually a bigger problem uh in fact it
was a problem even for Henry Ford uh I
don't know if you know but even during
his
lifetime the Ford Motor Company lost
Market
leadership any want to know don't the
story uh in fact they were perennial
underperformer for decades at least 70
years they were less uh successful than
General Motors uh and um you know they
produced some really bad cars for many
many years uh and and even though this
guy Henry Ford was a genius he could
conceive of this production line no one
had ever conceived of this before and
then you could can design it and uh and
control it uh and um the reason that
Ford I would argue uh
struggled uh is that Along Came the
rather magnificent Alfred
pelone and I would consider Sloan the
father of modern management and as some
of you will be aware we still have a an
MSE program here which is still called
the Sloan program and Sloan said the
following he said look there's a funny
thing here uh we pay for their hands
their physical
labor uh we could get their heads for
free 100 years later we have absolutely
failed to get people to bring their
heads in any sort of non-h hierarchical
way
uh and uh you know there examples of
this um you know the data shows that you
know 90% of good ideas don't come from
the Executive Suite y uh and yet we have
this hierarchical model where things
Cascade down the hierarchy uh it just
doesn't work uh you know in this modern
more complex World it just doesn't work
and then we have as your all familiar
with these Employee Engagement
studies uh now you know if people are
engaged if they really care about the
organization if they're going to go
beyond the minimum that's required just
to sort of get stuff to happen and yeah
yeah yeah I'll turn up when you say I'll
tighten the nuts and then I'll leave on
time pay me the
money even today a 100 years later the
vast majority of employees in your
organizations don't give a
damn how do we really get people at
every level in the hierarchy to really
care about the organization to go beyond
the bare minimum uh you know traditional
models of you know hierarchical control
whilst it's brought us incredible
efficiency it's fine we need uh all
these systems and processes um but we
also uh we need something else and
that's where I want to really sort of
start off on this uh and um the problem
is uh that uh even in the Industrial Age
Scientific Management uh didn't work
uh but now if you call it the PO
Industrial Age uh we're starting to see
massive
cracks uh so uh Bert one of the leading
sociologist said managers differ in
their ability to survive and thrive uh
without bureaucracy yeah Scientific
Management uh what is opportunity for
some managers is distress for many
others it's kind of nice to be in
control particularly when you're in the
Executive Suite you you climbed the
ladder year after year you've got a
depth of expertise you know more about
it uh than anyone else and now you've
arrived uh and you want to be in control
why cuz you know
more there is um uh well I was going to
say an Italian tire manufacturer but I
think there's only one uh that I've
worked with um uh for uh for many years
uh and the uh the managing director of
is a guy called Mr gory and this guy is
does anyone know pelli here I work this
guy is uh famous with imp pelli because
uh he knows more about TI manufacturer
than anyone in the company yeah he start
off when he was 16 and he is famous he
will go into the factory and he'll take
off his jacket and say no you need to
recalibrate this machine
brilliant uh and uh you know he is a
true expert he has that depth of
expertise the problem is that again
perelli is a perennial
underperformer because everything comes
from him
you know even today pelli strategy uh is
actually defined by Mr
gory uh and uh a few years ago uh the
management team said hey could we do
some of this sort of participative
management thing please uh and he said
yes sure so what he did is he wrote the
strategy and then had a 2-hour Q&A
session with his management
team uh so they could uh ask questions
about his strategy uh now this is not
what's happening and the companies I
would argue uh they're going to be the
dominant forces over the next
Generation uh and uh so uh what are they
going to have well for me one of the
most exciting
shifts uh is the move from human capital
which is what Mr gory's got yeah
knowledge and expertise towards Social
Capital yeah the ability to get things
done through other people uh and um so I
think we're seeing a seismic shift here
uh the biggest challenge here is uh you
know the challenge between the
generations because the people at the
top grew up in a world of control they
have this human capital and yet they're
being challenged you've got to get
better at relationships and in some of
the industries and professions that you
are part of a lot of the senior people
are better at human capital than Social
Capital now if I can pause here for a
minute um and talk about the
Millennials uh now uh for years years
I've had clients of mine you know HR L&D
people saying oh the Millennials and
line managers saying oh these
Millennials are a nightmare I go you
know well no they're not I mean the data
here shows that they are they want all
these sort of extra things of course
they do they've grown up in a bull
market life has been good for them you
know they've grown up slightly entitled
perhaps and they're young and youth and
all of that um and they've had choices
uh but then I have to say about uh 2
three years ago I started actually
bumping into them uh in uh a
professional context and um I got it
wrong I have to admit uh these guys are
fundamentally
different uh in their expectations uh in
what they want from their organizations
from their bosses uh and uh I would
argue uh that if you in your
organization aren't sort of uh really
understanding how business is
Shifting uh and doing something about it
uh I think there's going to be a massive
uh sort of shakeup here between the
companies that are able to adapt not
indulge them but adapt uh because um
they are a nightmare but they're also
for me you know one of the most exciting
things uh to happen for a long time and
I have to say I think that generation
are going to do a better job of running
organizations when they get there than
we are currently doing if I can be a
little bit provocative so it's a
nightmare but it's also a massive
opportunity uh and but the problem they
have to do is how do we influence up the
hierarchy because we've got these ideas
and they don't give a dam so this
tension between human capital and social
capital is for me what I see is the
biggest sort of fundamental shift in
organizations
today does that make sense yeah um so if
that's the case what it means is you've
got to deal with complexity why because
organizations are getting more complex
and it's not just the all the sort of
stuff the trends that we all know about
um it's the fact that the most complex
things you have to deal with a
people uh there used to be an old thing
of you know uh even in the NBA world the
hard skills and then the soft skills
yeah uh you know the quants and The
Poets and all of this uh and um uh you
know I think the fact that strategy
professors now talking about purpose
strategy used to be full of
microeconomists yeah figuring out uh you
know some uh some very statistical
things the fact that uh all of us
kind of focusing in on what I would call
not the sof stuff but the complex stuff
uh is uh extremely uh important uh and
um in fact uh there used to be something
called uh behavioral
psychology uh that since 2002 when Dan
canaman won the Nobel Prize for
economics the first and probably the
last psychologist to ever do it uh
they've now called it behavioral
economics that's our stuff that's fine
you know teach it's all important even
behavioral Finance
and um so what we see here is this
complex stuff the people's stuff uh is
really uh what organizations are having
to get good at and I think this applies
differently to the different sort of
generations if you like within
organizations so if we're going to
handle complexity uh well the problem is
uh you're dealing with complex
organizations in complex environments
and uh you know some biology there's
something called um and this is not
particularly memorable it's called
Ashby's principle of requisite variety
and what Ashby says is the complexity of
any organism needs to mirror uh the
complexity of its environment so if
you're in a simple environment like the
ocean then you can be a you know pretty
simple organism jellyfish amiba whatever
uh but that's not really the world we
live in and Russ akov uh who's sort of
big deal of my world uh died a couple
years ago he said the only problems that
have Simple Solutions the simple
problems uh and so you know if you're a
senior with your human capital your
depth of
expertise there's a risk that you think
oh this is a simple problem I've seen it
before uh and um I always struck that if
you're
senior and you think a simple problem uh
has landed on your desk you have a
problem uh because either it is a simple
problem with a simple solution in which
case why the hell is it written up the
hierarchy I'm going to push those down
or more likely you think it's simple and
it's
not uh so uh the the challenge here is
uh living in this vuka world who's
familiar with vuka yeah so this is uh uh
something uh that um I first came across
doing some work with an American company
uh at West Point the American Military
Academy about sort of five six years
ago and um uh since then I've actually
done some work with the British military
and exactly uh the same uh the same
phenomenon here and what they're saying
is look so the military for me for for
many many decades has been a very poor
metaphor for organizations rather Macho
rather male I think we can say rather
you know sort of you know kill the enemy
you know marketing Warfare I don't think
this is very helpful but actually today
I want to argue that the military
metaphor is perhaps one of the most
relevant uh metaphors we could use for
organizations
uh so um what does vuka stand for let's
just quickly go through this uh so
volatility uh just the speed of change
yeah remember these things things
fiveyear
plans uh you know it's just kind of you
know when we used to have these
strategic planning departments uh and
Henry mburg wrote this wonderful book
you know the rise and fall of strategic
planning um and uh so we just don't know
what's going to happen all of these
uncertainty these blacks one events just
so much speed uh and volatility uh and
uh very hard to predict what's going to
happen uh complexity there multiple
different forces affecting our business
now so I do a lot of work with
investment Banks and you know pretty
much every bank I I work with today uh
just you know there regulatory stuff the
internal sort of changes um uh that
they're having to deal with if you're on
Professional Service firms having to
deal with this sort of uh you know
offshoring
Outsourcing uh all this you know new uh
sort of you know regulation or
deregulation and it's just getting so
many different forces we have to pay
attention to and then finally uh
ambiguity uh because reality is
hazy uh and the military analogy they
use for here is the fog of
War throughout history there's never
really been a situation when the general
was sitting on top of the horse uh on
top of the hill uh looking down over the
battle field and saying okay let's get
the troops up a little bit here hold
them back on the right it's never been
that way uh and even today with our
wonderful technology this is not the
world uh that they have to fight in and
this phrase the fog of War comes from
the brilliant uh military theorist uh
Von Von kovitz who's still very much in
Vogue today and he used to write uh very
poetically in the days in the 19th
century when people wrote more po ically
he said the great
uncertainty of all data in war is a
peculiar difficulty because all action
must to a certain extent be planned in a
mere
Twilight which in addition not in
frequently like the effect effect of a
fog or moonshine gives to things
exaggerated dimensions and unnatural
appearance uh and in organizations today
you know if you're the the executive
team and you think you know what the
hell's going on and you think you're in
control you know you think you're Henry
Ford uh you're in serious
trouble uh and um I think one of the
biggest challenges that we Face given
all of this complexity around people
around changing environments is we're
losing I would argue something that for
me is a critical
faculty uh because it's harder to think
in complex environments and here we have
uh the the Fantastic uh Thomas Watson
senior who
founded IBM uh found it in 1912 ran it
until his death in 1952 and he famously
had the word think put above his
desk uh and even today those of you who
know IBM will know that you know think
is in their
DNA yeah uh if you ever bought an IBM
computer it was probably called a
ThinkPad and so so uh uh you know this
uh is you know kind of how they operate
you don't go in you didn't go into this
guy's office and say boss I've got a
problem what should I
do um but in 1952 this was pretty
challenging
today uh I would AR it's almost
impossible
because there is a disease spreading
through our
organizations uh the disease well let me
share with you some of the typical
symptoms of this
disease uh it's what I call hurry
sickness so some of these symptoms are
from your personal life some from your
professional life but uh the question to
you is do any of these feel rather
familiar number one if you're
microwaving something just for 30
seconds you have to do something else
whilst you're waiting for that microwave
uh to go pink number two you get a buzz
from just catching a lane or a train so
you rush into the train station leap
onto the train just as the doors are
closing yes that moment of personal
Triumph and as for the
airport you are a master of airport
management the fastest route to the
airport you know all the kind of how you
pack what you wear kind of which queue
you know that think oh I got person
could have got that um uh have you ever
seen that George Clooney movie up in the
air masterclass of airport management um
you uh do something else for do drive
maybe listen to the radio be on the
phone hopefully not eat your breakfast
put on your makeup but know something
else as we're in the car uh you we take
your desk whilst checking your email
sometimes on the phone at the same
time you do something else whilst you're
brushing your
teeth particularly if those you with an
electric toothbrush if I had somebody
Rec say Richard yeah my electric
toothbrush takes 2 minutes that's 4
minutes of valuable time a day he says
so I have a pile of reading in the
bathroom so I can optimize uh that
otherwise wasted time I thought that was
packing his day a little bit too tightly
um you get impatient waiting in line or
waiting in traffic uh you check your
mobile phone multiple times an hour I'm
sure none of you will be doing that
today but we do occasionally get
participants on courses here who are
rather obsessive uh studies recently
have said the average executive checks
their phone every seven or eight minutes
on average um you hate the time it takes
uh to boot up your computer in fact it's
probably quite a while since you last
turned it off you know sleep mode
hibernate mode whatever it's
called Uh you find yourself wanting to
interrupt other people frequently now
you may be polite enough to hold
yourself back suddenly they're thinking
come
on going on I got the point I got the
point um you do something else in
telephone
conferences uh now if you got 20 people
in a conference call typically you got
19 people one person speaking rather and
19 people uh doing their
email uh if they're in the office that
is if they're at home you probably don't
want to know what they're doing um but
there is an ultimate symptom to know if
you have this disease which
is when you get into an elevator you
have a favorite
button and there are two words on that
button which
say door
close now you don't just push that
button once do
you cuz that's not how microprocessors
work you got to keep pushing that
button cuz that's really going to make a
difference isn't
it so how many of you recognize some of
these symptoms in
yourself oh my goodness you are very
sick group of Executives uh in fact some
of you may be so sick you're sitting
thinking well what's the problem rich I
am achievement oriented I get a lot of
stuff
done uh well if you're that sick let me
share with you why for me this is a
dangerous
disease and it's this in fact there's a
specific point about this door close
button uh I worked for years with one of
the elevator
manufacturers uh one of the directors
told me he said Richard
uh yeah it's really frustrating uh
because uh people are pressing the
button so often uh that they're actually
wearing out we keep having to replace
them he said But the irony is what
people don't understand Richard is that
over half of the door Clos buttons in
the world are not connected to
[Music]
anything it's a light bulb that's all it
is push away why it makes us feel in
control
we like to feel in control in our
lives um but there's a more fundamental
challenge uh than that so next time you
press that button I am going to be there
whispering in your
ear what the more fundamental problem is
achievement orientation being busy
getting stuff done is
directly uh contradictory to a learning
orientation and that's what we all the
reason you're here is you give a damn
you care about helping people learn I
hope at otherwise you're in the wrong
place um we care about helping people
learn if you're pushing the door close
button you're not learning and they have
a phrase they use in Florida that for me
gets at the heart of the issue they say
when you're fighting off the alligators
it's hard to remember you would trying
to drain the
swamp this is magnificent uh and for me
if the Strategic objective is draining
the swamp and here we have a Florida
swamp the Everglades the problem is
there are alligators there and an
alligator attacks you you've got to kind
of defend
yourself the problem is particularly
facilitated by technology you can spend
your entire
career fighting alligators being busy
and achieve nothing of any real lasting
value to the organization
why because fighting alligators feels
good look at how many emails I sent to
it how many meetings and conference
calls it kind of you know achievement
orientation feels good you know if we go
back to our phone thing you know every
time you check your phone I don't know
if you know this they've done studies
neurological studies where they actually
find that you get pleasure yeah you
actually get dopamine produced in your
amydala you are chemically addicted to
alligators uh and uh let me share with
you some of the typical alligators I'll
do this briefly because you know there's
other stuff I want to cover but for me
this is just so important because the
reason you know learning is tough in
organization it's because of the damn
alligators uh so first uh sort of so two
challenges here first one is uh
meetings um now many of you will spend
quite a lot of your life uh in
meetings and I reckon I could come into
your meetings and using some standard
facilitation techniques I could Harve
the length of those
meetings uh and double their
effectiveness uh is anyone here going to
challenge me and say no Richard you
could video our meetings in my organiz
my meetings and use them as an example
of best practice here in London Business
School
anyone it's tough isn't it uh let me
share with you my favorite app
it's called the meeting
clock uh and again this is not not
genuinely recommending you use this but
it's a nice provocation so you put in
the number of people attending the
meeting then you put in the average
yearly salary number of hours you work a
week which gives you an hourly rate we
all have an hourly rate you know direct
course indirect course you know you
could figure it out um and then the
beginning of the meeting you press start
and it tells you how much the meeting is
costing the
organization
now that is a way of should we say
reframing what we're doing uh when we're
having a meeting uh in fact there's a
Danish company uh uh vux where the CEO
now uses this in his board meetings uh
and if you're giving a presentation and
you can see the Danish croner ticking up
uh you know bit of pressure because the
CEO is quite a direct kind D like to be
quite direct I think we can say uh and
um uh and you know give you some
feedback you have just cost us you know
30,000 dangerous Groner that was not a
good use of our resources in fact
there's a company in Silicon Valley
where everyone has you know swipe cards
with an electronic barcode on them and
so the meeting knows uh meeting room
knows who's in there and there's a
digital clock on the wall that tells you
literally the cost of that meeting to
the
organization what they found is the
average length of meetings just when
they're sharing the information no
consequences it's just information the
average length of meetings
halfed uh because you know sort of in
physics we have boils law gases expand
to fill the available uh sort of uh
volume in business we have Parkinson's
law work expands to fill the available
time uh SO meetings are a problem uh the
other problem is clearly email now uh
we're not going to go into email that's
not the core point of today uh but uh in
my studies I've done over 95% of
Executives say emails just got out of
control it is a nightmare in my
life uh started off you know pretty good
stuff yep connecting sharing uh now it's
just got out of control and while we may
like fighting alligators increasingly
this is more the reality about how most
Executives kind of struggling here
there's so much complexity so many
alligators and so this ability to really
stop and
think uh is becoming very
the philosopher Burton Russell said most
people would sooner die than think and
most
do for me one of the challenges both
from an L &d thing and hopefully what we
what people do when they come on the
courses here at the school is we don't
just go bang bang bang and all this sort
of content and today is Tuesday so it
must be economics and tomorrow is going
to be finance and then strategy I think
you know really learning has to
come from sort of slowing things down
and creating protect ing some space to
think uh and um uh somebody used a
metaphor for me recently where they said
you know Richard in organizations it
feels like you're uh water skiing yeah
you're hanging on for dear life you're
kind of bouncing over the waves kind of
you know just barely in control of
what's going on if you make a mistake
it's going to be really bad uh and
you're kind of terrified but it's sort
of exciting at the same time uh and um
that's what it feels like I think that's
the achievement orientation yes I stayed
up for you know 5 minutes without
actually getting an enema um so that's
tough uh but the challenge for a
learning point of view is to kind of
slow down and do scuba diving any hands
up if you ever been scuba
diving quite a few divers here uh I I I
I love scuba diving and one of the
reasons I love it is that it forces me
to slow down yeah CU you know if you're
breathing too fast you use up your air
in no time 20 30 minutes you have to
slow yourself down you have to Center
yourself and this all this mindfulness
uh sort of concept which again I think
is actually very helpful uh just to get
people to stop and think not just on
their training courses but as part of
our practices is one of the key
challenges of really coping with these
complex
organizations uh and having worked with
know many many organizations I've been
on the faculty here for 15 years and
have a little Consulting business on the
side
um I'm just very struck by if we look at
an organizational level here rather than
the individual level um there's
something that the best
organizations they have something very
consistently in common whatever industry
profession they happen to be in the best
organizations they kind of feel the same
and it took me a while to figure out for
me what the difference was and um the
word I ended up with was
confidence if you're in a complex world
it's really hard to be confident now
it's very easy to go to one of the two
extremes here uh for example uh sort of
overconfidence uh and uh we know what
overconfidence in organizations looks
like uh it's
arrogance a hubris a
grandiosity uh
intimidation uh and um I think there's a
little video here that perhaps
illustrates rather well what I mean by
[Music]
this again this is the USS Montana
requesting that you immediately divert
your course 15° to the north to avoid a
collision over please overt your course
15° to the South to avoid
Collision this is Captain Hancock you
will divert your course over negative
captain I'm not moving anything change
your course over sir this is the USS
Montana the second largest vessel in the
North Atlantic Fleet you will change
course 15° North or I will be forced to
take measures to ensure the safety of
this ship
over this is a lighthouse mate it's your
[Music]
call hello
captain
[Laughter]
in the words of Mark Twain it ain't what
you don't know that gets you into
trouble it's what you know for sure that
just ain't so so you may be the second
largest vessel in the North Atlantic
Fleet you may even be the
largest the problem
is there are rocks out there uh and
overconfident
organizations uh uh can sort of enjoy
their moment in the spotlight uh but uh
you know there's a sort of a
triangulation here between psychology
and economics about how so consistently
organizations rise to a dominant
position uh they get arrogant they get
complacent and then they die uh and by
the way uh there was some really good
data recently showing that um uh they
die typically just uh the uh when
they've had their most profitable
year uh not sure I would buy Apple stock
as a long-term investment right
now uh to use one analogy there and so
in Psychology we call it the Paradox of
success uh which is that uh you know if
we have a winning formula we just carry
on with it even if people prevent us
absolutely incontro controvertible
evidence uh that it's the wrong strategy
now we just don't change we keep on
pressing the same door close button uh
and um uh so uh that psychology ol econ
economists have something called the
leaders lose
principle because from an economic point
of view we just see uh increasingly
rapid Market leaders are losing their
dominant position sustaining that you
know really dominant position even if
you are the largest vessel well is
increasingly hard so that's
overconfidence now clearly there's a
spectrum here and in a minute I'm going
to ask you to reflect on where is your
organization and maybe your function
within this organization uh Etc but
clearly the other end of the spectrum is
underconfidence uh you may have come
across this as
well uh learned helplessness Martin
Seligman brilliant research uh looking
at how animals and human beings if we
don't feel control yeah remember that
control Scientific Management feels good
if we don't have that control we just
give
up why
bother um
feeling a victim of the circumstances oh
what can you do and oh this regulation
oh this red tape all of these horrible
things going on uh and uh it could very
easy to get into that victim
mentality uh the bystander effect
now uh there is a video I used to show a
video um of the bystander effect and
there's lots of different stories here
the original research was done based on
this case in New York about Kitty
geneves the anyone familiar with this
the R who was murdered and shouted and
38 people heard her but didn't help they
didn't call the police uh and then you
know this crazy guy came back um an hour
later and and you know killed her she
was lying covered in blood and nobody
came to help there was a huge outcry at
the time and there's many examples of
this uh the video I used to show about
this was based in China a little girl
called Lulu was hit by a white van and
on CCTV it was captured and he drove
over her looked out the window saw he
driven over her looked around and no one
was there the only way could get away uh
was driving over again and
disappearing uh so he did that and uh
then you know you see 17 people walk
past look at this girl four-year-old
girl in lying The Gutter and eventually
somebody then goes and oh I saw your
daughter in the gutter the mother comes
uh and you know I've got two daughters
who are five and seven I can't show this
anymore just I just makes me cry uh and
takes and she died
and in China there was a huge outcry
we've lost our community values because
in China there was this incredible sense
of 148 people we look after each other
what's gone wrong with
society and you know those of you who
involved in China you know these massive
sort of changes how do you actually
create the sense of people
caring we're not very good at it so this
is the bystander effect and um uh Jeff
fer from Stanford said it's easy and
often comfortable to feel powerless to
say I don't know what to do I don't have
the power to get it done yeah can what
can I do I told the
CEO uh and besides I can't really
stomach the struggle that may be
involved it is easy and now quite common
to say when confronted with with some
mistake in your organization it's not
really my
responsibility
such a response excuses us from trying
to do
things uh and Julian's provocation going
and being disruptive and I love this
Fosbury Flop you know it's such a great
analogy uh in not trying to overcome
opposition we'll make ourselves fewer
enemies and are less likely to embarrass
ourselves and particularly those who
working in you know Professional Service
firms um you know professionals the
thing in my experience they hate more
than anything else is looking stupid
um and so learning involves you know
practicing stuff you know if the first
time you pick up a violin you know it's
not going to sound very good those of
you with Children Learning musical
instruments at the moment uh you know I
share your pain uh it's sort of tough so
learning when you have this you know
this human capital this depth of
expertise uh is actually really very
challenging uh it is however a
prescription for both organizational and
personal failure uh so this bander
effect for me is critically important
and then there
is The Greatest Story Ever Told at
London Business School have you come
across downtown Kolkata versus the
forest in font hands if you're familiar
with this few of you uh no apologies for
showing it to you again so um for 11
years we had a professor here called
sumantra goal who was I would argue the
greatest Professor we've had uh in our
time in our time as a school he was just
one of those people who could just see
things more clearly than the rest of us
could see things just no further uh and
I had the privilege of working him with
him for uh 5 years he tragically died in
2005 uh well before his time sumantra
was famous because with pretty much
every group he ever taught he told them
the same story and it's a story that's
resonated with Executives over the years
and in it he Compares and contrasts two
very different environments downtown
Kolkata in Midsummer versus the forest
of fonton blur in Spring I think there's
a business school somewhere near font
blur I can't remember it name but it's
where he worked before he came here
here's sumantra uh sharing the story uh
very timely but uh given Davos at the
world economic
Forum individuals do not change
fundamentally in who they are without a
very serious personal crisis of some
kind but the conclusion again for for us
perhaps the the key conclusion is that
is a roong question to ask revitalizing
people has a lot less to do with
changing people and has a lot more to do
with changing the context that companies
that senior managers that people in this
room create around their
people now context some manager called
it the smell of the place it's it's a
hard thing to describe and then let me
try to describe it the best way I
experience it through my S of personal
experience if you wish I I teach at the
London Business School I live in London
have done so for the last year and a
half before that I lived in Fontan blue
in France for about 8 years but one look
at me and then one sound of my accent
and you know I do not come from either
of these two wonderful places in the
world I come from India from the eastern
part of India my hometown is the city of
Kolkata so every year I go to Kolkata in
the month of July that's the only time
when my children have a summer vacation
now Kolkata is a wonderful town in in
Winter Autumn and spring but but summer
well the temperature is 102
103 uh the humidity is about
99% and I feel very tired most of my
vacation I'm tired I'm
indoors I us to live in font low and
this I genuinely challenge you go to the
forest of Fountain blow in Spring go
with a firm desire to have a leure walk
and you can't the moment you enter the
forest there is something about the
crispness of the air there is something
about the smell of the trees in in in
Spring you'd want to jump you'd want to
jog you want to catch a branch run do
something and that I believe is the
essence of the problem most companies
particularly large companies have
created downtown Kolkata in summer
inside
themselves and and then they complain
they say you know you are lazy and you
don't take initiative and you don't take
cooperation you are not changing the
company the is is not about changing me
I have a lot of energy in in in spring
in font blue and I'm a bit tired uh in
summer in in in Kolkata and and that's
the issue to change ultimately beyond
all these abstractions of strategy of
organization of
processes at the end the issue is how do
we change the context how do we create
font and blue Forest inside
companies
brilliant that's it how do we create
this energized environment rather than
people just springing their hands yeah
yeah yeah yeah purpose yeah just just
give me the damn money yeah I've done my
hours tighten the bolts and nuts
whatever uh and here we have the forest
of font blur and
spring uh and uh is this what it feels
like working for you that energized conf
organization were people on Sunday night
just another bottle of wine numb the
pain Friday
yes is this
it and by the
way this isn't to do with how you know
it's tough in banking it's tough in
professional some sectors particular
where it's really tough right now but
actually that doesn't mean we can't
actually have the time of our lives uh
doing it again I'm not being naive here
but actually very often with hindsight
the times when we learned the most
actually even the times we had the most
fun was when it's really tough you know
Frederick n's wonderful
quotation what doesn't kill me makes me
stronger that's when we really learn is
when times are tough so um you know uh
Julian was referring to this quotation
earlier and I think uh the American
writer F scotford Gerald put it very
well he said the test of a First Rate
intelligence is really the ability to
hold two opposed ideas in the mind at
the same time and still retain the
ability to function and so there is this
point here about you know in a complex
world you know you know one of the ways
we simplify it is we become
overconfident or underc
confident uh and um so really the
provocation to you
is no well first of all where where is
your organization I'm give you some time
to discuss this in groups with the
people around you and I hope you'll I'm
sure you'll be open and honest with each
other uh so first thing is where's my
organization and maybe even my
function uh and you've all seen
different organizations at different
times in different spaces uh you know if
the challenge is to really
stay uh in that uh Central
ground uh the question is in your
experience what are the characteristics
of of confident
organizations uh now clearly one of the
points that we're making the for this
morning here is purpose yeah that's
really one of the most powerful ways you
can really get people there that's one
of the things here but I really want to
hear from you now about 10 minutes
discussion here uh you know what are
your experiences uh of overconfident
underconfidence so that's the group
therapy Point uh and uh when you've seen
this done well what what have been the
key drivers that have created that
confidence in the
organization okay is that clear enough
okay 10 minutes discussion and then
we'll just hear back from
you okay if I can ask you to uh wrap up
your
conversations uh so I'm curious what was
uh coming up uh uh for you in terms of
the
themes what is it there's no single
score for the whole organization yeah
yeah so is it that some parts of the
organization are consistently in
different places or different different
yeah yeah yeah yeah we the question how
can you try and create sort of a stable
confidence level in the
organization yeah I think actually trust
part yes say a bit
more well I think when you're leader you
trust the people working under you then
it's um easier for them to be creative
and do the work
yeah you haven't seen my slides you the
um
question of what do we want from our
leaders uh KZ and posna who two you know
proper academics in this field uh they
did a study when they asked me what do
you want from and you know proper uh
kind of uh research rather than sort of
you know some sort of U you know sort of
more sort of journalistic approach and
what they found is
honesty uh more than anything else
honesty uh now the next TI was
forward-looking and having a plan uh
then inspirational was only 65% and
competent only
65% and that's my problem with human
capital is your competence all this
stuff you've known uh is that's that's
not the point so leaders need to be
build trust there's two academics in the
1970s um they did a fantastic set of
studies where they went into a series of
primary
schools uh and they gave the children a
battery of different psychological iCal
test but they didn't tell the children
the
results uh all they did is they went to
the teachers and said now don't share
this with the children but just so
you're aware we put the children into
two
categories the first are the high
potential children and then we've got
the uh low potential children but don't
share this with the children uh the
researchers then went away and came back
three or four months later to see how
the children were getting
on and perhaps unsurprisingly in every
every single school the high potential
children were doing well and the low
potential children were doing less well
every single time there was uh you know
clear correlation uh the problem is uh
they lied to the
teachers the children had been randomly
assigned to one group or the other and
yet their measurable performance in
every single
class uh was showing a clear
Divergence and you know this is my you
know there's about confidence and trust
this is why for me this is just so
important because one way or the other
through your attitude your mindset you
create a self-fulfilling
prophecy and there are some uh bosses uh
who say I am skeptical you have to earn
my
trust uh and um they they're always
right the idiots grew up I told you
going you what the hell are you doing ah
and you know the problem is you give
those same
employees uh to a boss who actually can
build
trust uh and uh those same employees
will perform better it's just
simple one way or the other you create a
self-filling prophecy uh and um I think
particularly today and this sort of you
know so as exactly as you're saying it's
so hard to be confident so how leaders
can build
trust well that is I think a critical
challenge other other comments here it
looks having Rich discussions here so I
hope we can tap into those a bit
more well um culture played a part of it
I work for a US company and I would say
um my us counterparts version of
confidence what I
confidence yes uh Wonder there is that
sort of British thing there isn't it um
if you say um British because most
people struggle with feedback because we
don't like being criticized um uh and
it's usually not as simple as you know
you've done a bad job uh so pretty much
every country struggles with negative
feedback I think the British struggle
even more with positive uh feedback uh
and um you know the classic British
thing of oh it was nothing oh I can't
take credit and oh no really it can be
quite quite shocking and I've done
various EX over the years where you get
people to uh say positive stuff to each
other and so this reflected best self
some of you will be familiar with which
is very exciting uh as a way of actually
getting people to focus on the positive
and Barbara Frederickson wrote this
wonderful book positivity uh which um
shows you know from an academic point of
view if you focus on the positive uh you
do perform better the problem is the way
that gets expressed is is very context
dependent isn't it the way you do that
in the UK is going to look very
different for way they do in the US and
so these sort of cods retentions what
really does confidence look like it gets
expressed differently I think that's one
of the challenges across the borders I
think it's a great Point other other
Reflections there's also a gender
element in
it
yes want to say a bit more um don't
know I think there's also a lot of
studies that have shown that uh with a
relatively comparable behavior um a male
boss will be more likely to be
classified as competent um just you know
doing his job whereas a female leader
will tend to be classified as either
bossy or bitching or hormonal
or was was this study on anger I think
getting angry a boss getting a m boss
getting angry was like normal he was
pass passion woman was probably you know
yeah
she's
yes okay
sweetie I was Tak a professor rooll into
for a minute but so I'm sure I hope you
got
that the I think the gender point it's
you know these culture with gender Point
these These are these are really
important and I think it it goes um back
to fundamentals of personality we take
the big five uh personality traits all
familiar with five Factor Theory uh and
um all of them uh you know so uh oops uh
low high uh you know what we know is
people are normally distributed across e
to the big five uh and there's no gender
difference except for one of them the
one where there's the gender difference
is what we call
agreeableness um so if you're high and
agreable this you're caring nurturing
focus on the needs of others
if you're low you're selfish competitive
me me me uh you don't give a damn about
other people you probably can figure out
where the gender bias is 60% of women
will be high 60% of men will be low um
but so let's if that's just the the the
the the theory here let me um talk about
organizational environments here I would
argue that most large
organizations have rather a male uh
culture in this respect yeah sort of
hierarchical uh sort of uh you know
internal rivalries and competitiveness
and kind of you know all of that quite
individualistic stuff is that fair
enough it's I don't think that's too
controversial is it so let's say you
happen to be a female executive in that
environment and your personality sorry
it's not very well drawn but you know
it's not that extreme but you happen to
be more
agreeable uh now what I would argue is
um uh you have a you have a real problem
there you say Okay um so uh you know we
encourage uh people to
authentic authentic leadership one of
our you know themes we do go on a lot
about here so okay I need to be
authentic here so I'll be you know
caring and nurturing and what are my
male colleagues going to say about me if
I do
that yeah too self whatever you're sort
of too weak too fluffy too soft uh too
all sorts of things I might say so okay
well clearly that's authenticity thr
that one out of the window on this
Dimension here so I need to play the
boys at their own game uh and you take
up your rooll down here uh well what do
the male executive say about you
then yeah very yeah exactly um we don't
need to put out so I would argue here
that as a female executive wherever
along this Dimension wherever you take
up your role however authentic or
inauthentic you're screwed uh there's no
right place the men will criticize you
wherever you take up your role so being
confident as a woman uh I think as you
say there's a whole series of studies
even just asking for a pay rise now the
the typical male approach is I am
fantastic you should give me a pay rise
now I haven't done anything yet but I
should still get a pay rise give it to
me now and the typical female executive
uh is well my boss will see I've done a
good job and will want to reward me and
wait for that to sort of maybe happen uh
so you're right I think the issue of
confidence here uh really does have some
very important Dimensions here and um
but the one thing I would say is that uh
when you look at studies of creativity
and Innovation obviously overlapping
subjects and those who've done hrst will
will be familiar with this um what you
find is and Linda Gratton is sort World
Authority on this is that the most
creative teams tend to have 50/50 uh on
the
genders uh and it's when that works well
you get the creativity you know
fertility might even say uh and um uh so
it that is kind of critically important
and for me that goes back to the Social
Capital Point uh because a lot of these
senior people aren't very good at
dealing with people who are different to
them uh and that relates to any aspect
of diversity it relates to these
Millennials who are down there going hey
you know you know I'm not developing
what's the problem uh you know develop
me and by the way I don't want your job
look at you you're divorced and you out
of shape and uh kind of workaholic
that's not that's not what I aspire to
be so so um uh I think these are
challenges but but this is the challenge
how do you really
engage uh with people in this way and
you know one of the simple points is
just raising awareness and just the
conversation here because it's one of
the things that in my background I was
um I trained as a psychotherapist and
particularly in relation to family
therapy what screws families up is not
that there's a problem there be it's you
know somebody's having an affair or
alcoholic or someone's a kleptomaniac or
got an eating disorder what ever those
AR that's not what screws up families
what screws up families is when we can't
talk about it yeah when things become
taboo is the sort of the jargon that's
used there and that for me is probably
at the essence of what it means to build
confidence and to build social capital
you got to talk to each other uh and
human capital is not about talking to
all these little people because I'm
Henry Ford I've got a massive brain and
you I talk to you little people you're
just turning the nuts and bols um
we're still running
organizations in a kind of Scientific
Management tailor kind of way and it's
very tough and there's um uh a large
firm we work with here at the school um
uh that I work with now for gosh over 10
years and uh they um came to us and said
Richard uh can you help um our senior
Executives be more
agile uh as soon as I heard that I
thought we're screwed abely screwed here
that is the uh you know the sort of I
could see the sort of the Executioner
sharpening his knife kind of as we
engaged in that program uh and um you
know CU we sat there with them and say
hey you should be more agile and they
looked at us going you know uh kind of
you know uh worked all this time to get
to the top and I'm now here I want to be
in control I don't want to be agile uh
and um uh it was chuffing so my sort of
position here was actually that was
completely the wrong thing what we what
we should have done and kind of
hopefully what we're now doing is
actually not helping the people more
agile but helping them create the
context where other people can be more
agile that for me that's a really
critical way of reframing uh the the
role of senior Executives
yeah uh any other other comments but
thank you these are these are such great
uh great
points um I want to finish here with um
a uh a metaphor
um
because if you agree with me that you
know there's fundamental seismic shifts
here uh in what how we need to you know
engage our employees get things to
happen uh and it's not simply you know
control uh it is uh about really
creating this dialogue this conversation
uh then uh I think the final analogy to
perhaps wrap this up with
is uh whenever you try and make any
change whenever you try and do something
differently whenever you try to be a
role model for the things that you think
are important uh other people don't like
it so jud's provocation go out there and
be disruptive it's like yeah come on uh
you know got to be kidding me uh because
um you know
sociologists guy called Robert Jackal in
particular would argue that if you want
to be successful in your career uh don't
disrupt uh don't take any personal risk
keep your head down
don't get associated with any project
individually uh and uh keep you know
keep uh you know minimize risk and then
eventually you'll sort of rise to the
top uh and uh there's a lot of Truth in
that uh there's a lot of Truth uh in it
because um if you want to get
promoted uh you know what the data shows
is ignore everything that HR tells
you uh I'm sorry it's bad news but uh
everything it's tells you and simply
mimic the behaviors of the people above
you uh that's the rational thing to do
uh and uh I love uh this quotation here
from the psychologist Balman who said
children have never been very good at
listening to their elders but they have
never failed to imitate
them now as a parent this is terrifying
and uh and
true uh and in organizational terms it's
also true which is the way to get
promoted is to mimic the behaviors of
the people above you cuz they're going
to like you the mini me syndrome as we I
call it uh so um so that's kind of a
rational thing to do
but uh actually uh we need to uh reframe
this because there is some truth here
that everyone makes you feel uh that
you're in a china shop yeah and you say
well hey I came with an idea for how we
could you know use our HR principles to
help transform the organization they go
that's fine
but don't break
anything that's fine if you want to do
all your you know fluffy stuff that's
fine but you better not impact the
profitability better not upset any of
these people internally and externally
you better not do this sir so don't
screw
up that's always how they make you
feel uh it's just a truth about life so
we're always being made to feel that
we're in a china shop but it's just not
true uh organizations are not China
shops I would argue uh their
Gardens you have an incredible depth of
expertise you built up for many many
years you know uh what's uh you have a
point of view about what the
organization your organization should be
doing differently based on all the stuff
that you are passionate about that you
care about and you've learned over the
years uh and
um to the risk of well yeah I'd like to
do this but um well actually
organizations if if you push
through the things that you are
purposeful about things that you really
passionate believe in uh my prediction
is you won't kill the
organization uh it's very hard to kill
an organization if you if you've ever
done any gardening it's very hard to
kill a
garden if you have Ser you know
experienced capable people who so say
this is what I care about and really
push it
through uh that's what really uh happens
in great organizations
whatever level in the hierarchy they
make happen the things they believe are
right uh so um my encouragement to you
is take some
risks but it is it's very tough and uh
my final slide here is um quotation from
Mark Twain 20 years from now you'll be
more disappointed by the things that you
didn't do than by the ones you did do so
throw off those uh bow lines sail away
from the Safe
Harbor that would be my final comment to
you and and just just closing here um uh
the um uh we're just launching in a few
weeks actually a new program and I'm
sort of co- director of it on uh the uh
Professional Service FMS the next
generation of leadership there uh and um
the the purpose that I have for this and
my colleagues have uh uh sort of brought
into is um you know we have so much
expertise in professional service firms
here at the school and some of you uh
you know work uh for some of these firms
and um and we haven't really captured
this in an open program yet and our
ambition is to make the Harvard psf
course look really
old-fashioned there's so much change in
these environments uh and but this is
kind of a risk uh now you know we are
passionate about it and you know put
yourself out there and take that risk
well you know we might fail but uh I'm
certainly confident will succeed so I
just wanted to share with you a personal
example of that uh so um I hope
uh that this morning uh you know both
from a strategy point of view and uh
from this complexity point of view I
hope this is uh this is relevant uh to
things that you're involved in and the
one thing I would encourage you to do is
take more risk put your head above uh
that parit for the things that you
passionately care about that's what
happens in great organizations thank you
very
much
thank you Richard and while you're at uh
lunch we'll be putting a copy of
Richard's latest article uh which is the
parur tend to lower the value once again
Richard Jolly thank
[Applause]
you

---

### Two tips for developing good management skills | London Business School
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLcgCEbsT08

Idioma: en

yes I'm thanks
try in ten minutes to tell you all the
answers to these rather important
questions and ending questions that we
all we all grapple with I mean most of
the people in the room have have some
sort of management responsibility and I
don't necessarily mean that they have
lots of people reporting to them I mean
that they have some responsibility
collective responsibility for getting
work done in teams through collaboration
with others so this is an extract if you
like from my my book which is going to
come out in September I just want to
give you a couple of hopefully
thought-provoking ideas just just to
take back and to ruminate over I don't
have all the answers there are never any
simple answers to these important
questions but certainly a few a few
things that you might be able to take
away who are you happier spending time
with this is not my data this is data
collected by a famous economist the LLC
actually Aldrich Laird and he asks
people who they're happiest hanging out
with on a day to day basis and there's
the list you can see the list friends
parents spouses children etc the to cut
to the chase the bottom line is we like
our friends the most obviously we meet
them in certain friendly situations but
the bottom of the list is where you
should focus your attention the boss
comes last
we were prefer to be alone speaking to
nobody hanging around in some dark
corner of our office rather than
interfacing with our boss and there's
lots of reasons for that I won't go into
it there's good reasons as bad reasons
but the point is that if you actually
look across organizations as a whole and
of course lbs we've seen the numbers lbs
is actually a better managed
organization than the vast majority but
even in a place like lbs good management
and bad management's kind of mixed
together we've all had shall we say good
bosses we've all had bad bosses and my
kind of hypothesis is that we can do
something particularly about those of us
frankly who are not doing as good a job
as bosses as we might be able to do
because it's often said that when
someone leaves a company they're
actually leaving a boss not a company
they join a company and they leave a
boss when someone leaves
very often because they just simply
haven't gotten with the person who they
are reporting to what what does it make
good management what are the secrets of
good management what does a good manager
look like well I've been doing a lot of
research on this but fortunately I've
got our friends at Google to do some
hard numerical analysis of this they
they collect up data on essentially
personnel reports to try to figure out
across the tens of thousands of people
in the company what are the attributes
of their good managers the managers who
get good results I'll show you the list
this came out a couple of years ago be a
good coach empowering your team
expressed interest in team member
success don't be a the ogre
communities are out said what what they
mean without I don't know it doesn't
matter the point is here is their list
of the eight things that they are
looking for and you look at that list
you think huh you know that is that it I
mean you know I kind of knew all this
the article written in the New York
Times on this call this forehead
slapping Lee obvious if you see what I
mean this is not the product if you like
of a really clever insightful science
it's a statement of the obvious and here
is the kind of the the problem here is
the dilemma if you like which is that in
some ways we've already known for many
many years
what good management looks like if I'm
to boil it down to three or four things
it is about giving your employees a
sense of where they're going a sense of
direction a sense of the value of the
task they're doing giving them the space
to get on and do it themselves without
being micromanaged giving them the
support they need when they ask for it
and giving them praise and recognition
after they've done it you know that is
not rocket science so the interesting
question for me as I started writing
this book last summer is why don't we do
what we should you know here's our list
of the habits of Philae highly effective
people some of you probably come across
this but one of the best-selling
management books of all time by Stephen
Covey but for me it's actually very
similar to the genre of you know dieting
books and the dark other and the genre
of books about for example how to become
better at golf now these are booked with
long lists of things that we should do
but when you are addressing that golf
ball if you're a golfer or when you're
thinking about your next diet you know a
long list of the ten things you should
do is not actually very useful because
it's hard to keep them all in your mind
at the same time and we all have these
habits and routines and ways of working
ingrained behaviors that no list of
items is going to help us with so my
book is actually not about what a good
manager looks like because we know what
a good manager looks like my book is
about why don't we do what we think we
should and I've come to a hypothesis
that being a good manager is a somewhat
unnatural acts I tried to get an image
to go with this word but when I googled
unnatural acts I I decided those images
were not suitable for for Thursday
morning so I got the world in general
afraid what do I mean by an unnatural
act what I mean is that for most of us
the skills that we need to be a good
manager are not things that come
naturally to us and not things that we
would do habitually without conscious
effort and particularly they're not the
things that we got us promoted to our
position to manager in the first place
we have a lot of technical skills very
much most of us we suddenly find
ourselves as a manager and we're asked
to do something very very different so
two little tips if you like about ways
we can think differently about
management to make it not so much a
Nazarite because I don't think it ever
will be but at least it's much more
conscious of what we should be doing
differently and the first is simply what
you might call a fresh perspective on
the problem if you've ever studied the
field of marketing you'll know that
marketing is about seeing the world
through the eyes of your customer and
understanding the world from their point
of view well for me good management one
definition of good management is seeing
the world through the eyes of your
employee essentially figuring out a way
to enable your employees to do the best
possible job that they can now that
might sound kind of obvious but it turns
out there's a couple of little ways of
using this in in a smart way they say
that the queen thinks the world smells
of fresh paint if you see what I mean
whenever she goes on a visit it is also
always a sort of a long heralded visit
everyone knows she's coming so what do
they do they give that give the
walls and fresh coat of paint they put
on a show for her and the world she sees
bears no resemblance to the real world
that is going on around her because
everything she does it's like
Heisenberg's uncertainty principle for
the physicists in the room you know if
you try to measure something you
actually change the thing that you're
measuring so for me the starting point
for good management is is put yourself
in the Queen's shoes what would we do in
order to kind of get under the skin of
our organization you've probably seen
this show Undercover Boss right you've
been around for a few years now this
chap here Stephen Martin
it was the second ever undercover bot
and he's also an LDS alumnus anytime
doesn't talk to the school sometimes and
I do know the premise of the show is he
spends two weeks undercover working as a
labourer in his own organization now I'm
not actually suggesting that Andrew
starts working on the front desk
incognito I'm not sure not sure he'd get
away with it because we are only 500
people and everyone just about knows him
but you know for Stephen Martin working
in a big construction company that's
where he worked on the front line
actually he could do this without people
really knowing who he was and of course
as a result up two weeks he got insights
that he would never have gained walking
around the building site with his hard
hat on surrounded by a coterie of
advisers so that the basic principle
here is very simple which is you know
without going to the kind of the trouble
of being an undercover boss for two
weeks whatever position you are in an
organization whether you're chief
executive whether you just got till
three people reporting to you there are
ways of getting a little bit closer to
the way things really work and I'm not
going to go through this list these are
things that you will recognize in a lot
of executives end up spending a bit of
time on the frontline they might you
know if they're a smoker or if they're a
sports player they will often have shall
we say non hierarchical conversations
with the people that they are hanging
out in their social groups with ask
meetings is another well-known mechanism
of having conversation with the person
two levels below you or two levels above
lots of ideas that are kind of custom
through the hierarchy so that's my first
point try to see the world through the
eyes of your employee my second and
final point is actually for all of us
I've managed
getting a little bit more comfortable
with our own limitations and biases we
are all flawed if you like we are all
behaving in ways which are not
necessarily helpful to our job there's
lots of what's called behavioral
economics research out there which shows
that we as managers particularly manage
I mean we all got flaws but particularly
these are a problem for managers behave
in ways that are counterproductive
here's two pieces of evidence just bear
with me this is quite funny this is a
survey done of entrepreneurs and they
were asked what's the chance of your new
business ideas exceeding your opening a
restaurant yeah you're starting to sell
your service as a consultant what are
the chance of your business seeding and
what that chart says is that something
like 33 of the respondents said the
Charles of seeding are 100% we will
succeed 10 out of 10 and obviously it
goes down from there when they were
asked the exact same question about a
business like they're succeeding what is
the answer well actually on average most
people think that the chances of a
business just like what Levitt set up
will be about 5 out of 10 something like
that you see what I'm saying we are
particularly when we get into our shall
we say managerial ranks we are generally
overconfident we are generally also
control freaks we like to be in control
we like to be calling the shots this
little chart I won't go into it these
are all famous executives however the
last 12 months have tried to buy their
ailing companies back from the public
shareholders one because they think that
those idiots who've taken over control
those companies don't know what they're
doing and that despite the fact that all
three of those companies have real
problems in terms of the strategies and
the markets they're working in these
three executives are going to put their
own money behind them trying to anyway
to take those companies back and run
them themselves so you see the point
executives like to be in control they
like to call the shots they like to be
on Lee
or on the front pages of the newspapers
when you compare that to the real tasks
of management of actually getting work
done through others it turns out that
the best managers are the understated
people who are happy to give other
people
responsibilities who are happy to share
the limelight with others who are happy
to praise others for doing a good job
rather than taking all the praise
themselves that's why I call it an
unnatural act because essentially the
thing that comes naturally to most most
people the higher they rise in
organization is to be the guy on the
stage telling everybody he's got all the
answers or she's got all the answers and
in fact most good managers was really
good managers are almost the exact
reverse so there's no simple solutions
as I say a couple of quick thoughts and
then I'll finish can you give away some
power can you find a way of giving power
to others when whether you think Tony
Blair's government ever did anything
worthwhile for this country or not is
irrelevant the very first thing he did
when he became Prime Minister whatever
15 years ago was he ceded control of
monetary policy to the Bank of England
up until that point it had been owned as
it were by the government he said this
is something which the Bank of England
should own I'm going to give that power
away that this is quite a rare thing the
chap on the right some of you might have
met him if you've ever been to any of my
talks his name is Henry Stewart he runs
a little IT computer company computer
training company court called happy
limited they they run the happy training
courses his whole philosophy is of
making people happy and his basic
management principle is pre-approval of
all decisions if you want to propose
something says Lewin he starts by saying
this is pre-approved now write the
proposal now he can get away with that
because it's a 30-person organisation
I'm not sure that would quite work in
lbs some point the bigger you get the
more you've got to put in place some
sort of controls around things but
there's a basic principle of saying you
are in charge I'm only going to stand
essentially as a review of this that is
that is something worth thinking about
I'm going to finish with one final
thought if I may think back to when you
were last really engaged in a piece of
work most people when I ask them that
question they think of a specific
project a time-limited project a project
which had a beginning a middle and an
end
why are those projects the things that
we enjoy the most or because we have a
very clear sense of where we're going we
have a team were working with and we
know when we're finished if you think
about it most work can actually
into projects you know we've just
launched our big fundraising campaign if
you think about it a campaign is a is a
sort of a fabrication of a project
around an ongoing activity of raising
money what we're trying to do is the
school right now as you know is to try
to raise up to 100 million pounds is the
target but we've already got some sort
of staging post at 50 million we are
trying to package the fundraising around
the school's activities into discrete
packages so that at the end of each
package we can celebrate we can say
we've done a good job we can Pat each
other on the back and then we can kind
of start the process all over again and
at a micro level we can all do versions
of that package that projects the work
that we do into little projects to make
them more fun and engaging for all so
that was a very very quick short summary
of my book thank you very much hopefully
there was something in it for all of you

---

### Trailblazer Series: In Conversation With Indra Nooyi
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=An4b-TvIWAo

Idioma: en

good morning everyone and on behalf of
the women in business club thank you
very much for being with us today
after a tough year of fully remote
events and screen interactions we are
thrilled to open our brand new in-person
trailblazer series with a truly special
guest
we see so many women in the room today
and we know you're here because you're
eager to learn share and be inspired by
business women who are as passionate as
yourselves
the women in business club is run by
student volunteers from our school who
want you to succeed in that journey and
offer you opportunities to explore your
purpose
with this in mind we are sure that you
will remember today as a highlight of
your lbs journey
without further ado i am happy to
welcome dean francois who will introduce
our extraordinary speaker thank you so
much for being here today
it's so nice to see the full room and so
wonderful thank you so much all of you
for taking the time to join us
uh you said we're here to learn to share
and get connected and i want to thank
the women in business club for
organizing this brilliant event
i was telling them earlier
that it's my fifth year as a dean here
and
every year i've been stunned by the
quality of the event that our students
organized
thank you so much you are continuing on
this tradition
and if i could ask all of you now to
please join me in welcoming indra nui to
the stage
in dry you should know we did not
rehearse this
and there was there was no sign up here
saying applause now this was totally
spontaneous you are a superstar thank
you for for being here and i hope you
sensed the admiration and the love that
there is for you here
in the room um of course it starts with
your business success
and i was really interested to to find
out that you did hesitate about going
between general electrics and pepsico
and your background was much more
general electrics but you love the
culture at pepsico and that's why that's
why you did so
and then we know what happened there
and we so appreciate that there's
something really nice about the
simplicity about performance with the
purpose
and at the same time the complexity and
the breadth of all that it means
and it's nice to see that you actually
made it work
and so for that we thank you for being
here as a role model in london business
school for our community
we also appreciate of course that you
come here and you decided to connect
your visit to your book tour
and
we want to work with you in making sure
your book beats your expectations
has not just been an opportunity for you
to influence the world but for others to
connect with you
and together with you influence the
world and i hope that you will think of
all my colleagues and friends and
students as allies with you
in this movement
these are people who are exceptional and
outstanding
we know because we select them
and it's not so easy to come here
actually
they can tell you about that
but
what we do in selecting them of course
we look at their achievements
academic and beyond but we also look at
their ambition
and do they want with us to have a
profound impact on the way the world
does business and the way business
impacts the world
and so rest assured this is not the
school that trains you to make money no
matter what
it's about having a profound impact on
the way the world does business and on
the way business impacts the world so i
hope that in your visit you'll get a
true feel for that what's embarrassing
for me as as the dean is they do it so
well and in so many ways that i always
have to
struggle to figure out which stories to
pick
but there are plenty of those so i hope
that out of this visit
you'll get a sense of the connection
you'll understand how welcome you are
here
as a business role model
and as a beacon of light in our world
that maybe will aggregate our efforts
so that together we can make a
difference
and with that i just want to say again
thank you to all of you for for taking
the time
this is lbs at its best right
when our students and our staff and our
faculty and our alumni all come together
to together
learn share and get engaged so that we
can have a profound impact on the world
so thank you for for joining us and you
are in great hands
thank you for having me
thank you so much to dean francois just
checking the sound is good for everyone
at the back as well great
um so i hope you felt the
true excitement and buzz of you being
here indra today as you walked through
the aisle and i know this is such a
special event on so many
so many ways post pandemic but also just
for who you are and who you represent to
the student body particularly um to the
women and the women in business club
thank you for having me and thank you
dean for those lovely comments it's
great to be here
and we're going to spend 45 minutes just
going through some key questions from my
life in full really touching on some of
your real successes but also some of
your hurdles that you had in your
journey um and then i'll open to the
floor to the audience for some questions
as well so you get also your opportunity
to ask indra there's things that really
made you think about her career and her
journey
but i want to start at the very
beginning um so in madras in india and
you talk about your childhood really
fodderly um
but two things that really came across
to me in your childhood was your family
and your education you know the real
focus on education
and there was sort of three key figures
um growing up you thought at least from
the book was your mother your father and
particularly your paternal grandfather
tata and you described them as giving
you the foundation the confidence and
the wings to fly and i thought that was
an incredible way to sort of describe
the elders of your family
but from your childhood what do you
think was the most formative part and
how did that propel you in your career
so let me sort of abstract from my
childhood and yeah sort of paint the
picture
um i was born eight years after india
got independence eight years so long
long time ago and india was a new
country just coming into its own
women were still you know the homemakers
if you had women they were really
teachers
and little else
and usually the teachers were the
anglo-indian people who were left behind
in india so
the indian uh people the local people
local people the women the women were
all house makers so
uh it was a an interesting time and the
country itself was trying to figure out
what's the education system going to be
how do we
you know bring people to be teachers to
be professionals
so in retrospect i realized how profound
the time was at that time you were just
a kid you were a kid in a family you
just grew up
interestingly i grew up in a family
where the men said the women should be
allowed to do whatever they wanted they
should not be held back and that's very
important because
you don't give birth to a daughter and
say i just gave birth to a lifelong
unpaid laborer right that's what many
families do they say ah
we've got an unpaid labourer for life
some other family is going to get her
it's not even for my family because
she's going to get married off she's
going to be an unpaid laborer for life
there that's not why you give birth to a
daughter you give birth to a daughter to
say i gave birth to a lovely child why
not let her soar why not let her do
whatever she wants whatever she chooses
to do she wants to be
a homemaker that's fine but if she wants
to do something else let her do it
that's what it should be
when i was growing up that's how it was
okay
but then it was not all rosy because i
had a mom who also
didn't go to college brilliant lady and
decided that she
had to listen to the men she too wanted
to live life vicariously to the
daughters but she also had to comply
with society
so she was there with her sisters
talking about horoscopes and getting her
daughters married at day 18. so i knew
all the horoscopes that were being
looked at at the same time we are
soaring you know so this is living in
contrast and i would love to pick up on
that point actually because you have a
really interesting relationship with
your mother and you describe that a lot
in the book
and you used to describe your mother as
having one foot on the accelerator
propelling you to education propelling
you through your career and then one
thought on the break
kind of making sure that as a south
asian woman you were adhering to some of
the
traditional and cultural expectations of
you as a mother as a child rarer
so how did you deal with those sort of
competing
priorities on you and your identity we
were just grateful that she had a foot
on the accelerator and my father and
grandfather pressed it even harder
because
had she put her foot down and said it's
the break and nothing else we wouldn't
have been able to progress so the fact
that she had one foot in the accelerator
was good
so at that point remember we had no
reference set where other people were
allowed to soar and they were doing
great we were the flag bearers of
soaring women and so
we couldn't take refuge and saying look
those neighbors kids girls are doing
well or somebody else down the street
everybody was being matchmate at age 18
and they were doing all the housework
and in fact they weren't allowed to do
the adventurous things we were allowed
to do so we were just thrilled to do
have the opportunity i mean
what we had and this gets to the broader
lesson
we had a frame within which we had to
operate we were given infinite freedom
within the frame but if we violated the
rules of the frame then the frame got
tighter so as long as we lived within
those rules it was good
what were the big takeaways from my
growing up first families are very very
important very important they give you
foundation
and
when everything fails you've got family
so we should never underestimate the
importance of family whatever family
means you know in those days it was a
definition of a family today the
definition of a family may be different
but we have to recreate that belonging
and that sense of support in some shape
or form in our communities second
families are messy i don't know if a
single family that doesn't have
some complications so families are messy
families are fragile
yeah you don't know when your family is
going to be
you know perturbed by something covered
upset a lot of families in my case it is
my father's accident
um fortunately he
recovered and went back to work but had
he not our whole history would have
changed so families are fragile and in a
family the men and women have to be
educated and they have to have both the
power of the purse
if that doesn't happen families
disintegrate so i think we should focus
not just on my upbringing but more what
it means for
all of us going forward and the last one
is a tough one
the roof over the head made all the
difference
the fact that we had one house and even
though we don't live in it the fact that
that house existed
and we could always go back there gave
us the level of confidence that anything
failed anywhere we could go we could go
by that house
and it gave us that roof over our head i
don't know if you all have read the book
evicted uh there's a great book that was
written in the u.s i forgot the author's
name maybe sami you can look it up
it talks about the importance of roof of
the head and how
you know poor families in the u.s when
they don't have a roof and they're
constantly evicted from their homes it
impacts the fundamental confidence and
the lifestyle of people because they
don't know where to end up next
so even if it's a small home having a
roof over your head that you can call
home
is very very important as we rebuild
communities
and i think that kind of both those
points family and home
all rests on this idea of providing
people stability particularly women to
then give them the opportunity to go and
soar right so once they have that
stability then the ability to move
forward i want to pick up on quickly on
the point that
you're definitely a trailblazer you know
in multiple
respects and particularly for the women
in the room but also around the world
you're known as a trailblazer for
indians you know you went over to
america you really lived the american
dream and got to the very top
and being the first ceo immigrants as
well to run a 1450 company how did you
work with that identity as an indian in
your career and how were you always
authentic to it as you moved through
your career as well
when i went to the us in 1978
there were hardly any women in
corporate america i should say women
were graduating from business schools
even in my class at yale there were 25
percent of the class was women okay so
that was a good number then
very very good a little bit more than 50
now but there's a very good number
but you've seen the hbr article about
the mummy track you know many women
leaving the workforce if you haven't
read it you should it's an interesting
read in retrospect
and it was a very uh
well-written
article based on facts what percentage
of women from hbs
were sticking around and with how many
just dropped out of the workforce
so
i came into a workforce where i had
hardly any women peers
no women bosses yeah and there i am
looking completely different than
everybody else in the workforce
and i started my career in chicago so
all my clients were in midwestern towns
in wisconsin in michigan in
minnesota
and
i just got an email from one of my bcg
consultants who used to work with me and
he said oh the story of you and me in
waterloo iowa is not in the book the
story goes like this i was working for
a trust company as a client
and
this young kid had to set up meetings
for me in various midwestern towns to
talk about the trust business
and
we went to waterloo iowa to the waterloo
trust uh
bank it's a very good bank
after the meeting we went to a
restaurant and the entire restaurant put
their forks down because they'd never
seen somebody like me walk into
that restaurant wow so you can imagine
me i'm trying to be brave and say no
it's going to be just fine but
everybody's looking like who is she what
is she doing here okay and remember i
was also dressed kind of weird because
my clothes didn't fit quite well but
doesn't matter i held my head straight
with my all you guys don't carry these
things we had men's briefcases we
carried those days i walked in very
proud put it down
and i ordered something vegetarian to
eat talk about my indians i'm still a
vegetarian don't drink don't smoke so i
haven't yet become with the times but
it was tough it was tough to navigate
through all these
towns where i was so different i was a
vegetarian so most of the time i didn't
have enough to eat you know you live in
a time where vegetarianism is common in
my time there was no vegetarian food in
any town i was in neenah wisconsin
appleton wisconsin
when i asked for vegetarian they would
take out the steak and give me the
mashed potatoes in the piece
right in front of me they would
literally take out the steak and say
here's the vegetarian that used to be my
meal yeah okay so there were days i
would go home so hungry because i i
didn't know what to eat um
so i went through some interesting times
i'd walk around with for those of you
indian with a bottle of pickles just to
spice up that mashed potato i mean
that's that was my life and so uh
those were tough times you know uh it
was lonely i felt different
the one thing that it did for me though
i had the immigrant fear
and when i went anywhere i assumed i was
in a hole
i said they're looking at me like i'm
different because i'm different they're
also asking me asking themselves the
question what is she doing in this room
advising me what is she going to know
about american business and remember at
bcg we were not advising people on the
shop floor we were actually advising
c-suite executives
and i show up
with the team and they i assumed they
were thinking that
bcg must have made some sort of a
mistake to bring this woman in and so i
had to dig myself out of the hole first
and then demonstrate my capability so
i had to do better than anybody else i
thought
in order to earn my place at that table
and that's what
resulted in me doing well because
clients kept saying i'd like indra
and so i went from me feeling
terrible about myself
to clients saying oh indra has to take
three months off to have a child we'll
put the case on hold i can't tell you
how many clients put the cases on hold
and said
let's just hold the case let her come
back and then we will continue i really
unheard of yeah and particularly in you
know i think
corporates and the way they're treating
people now is very different but in your
time i imagine
clients holding projects corporates not
like unheard of absolutely bcg giving me
six months
paid leave when my father was dying
didn't even bat an eyelid they just
called and said take up to six months
now listen in three months my father was
gone i went back to work
when i was in a car accident bcg said
take as much time as you need all paid
so
i had the benefit of all of that support
but for me
i never forgot that i was an indian
immigrant yeah i never forgot that and
even today you know i hate to say it i
still have that immigrants
tummy rumble i don't know what it is
butterflies in your stomach are people
still looking at me differently not
today because i see all the
familiar faces
and the dean made me feel very
comfortable but i have to tell you
wherever i go i do have
and i think it's also really interesting
as a second generation immigrant having
seen our grandparents and parents go
through that you do see that fear and
that constant need to keep doing better
and i think even the next generation of
immigrants are adopting that and also
wanting that desire to succeed um but
it's the toughest is the conversations
with my daughters every time i tell them
you know think of you as an immigrant
they go why we're not immigrants we
might have been we're not so we have
this little chasm between us when we
have these conversations yeah i know i
think i have the same with my dad very
often too
um just switching gears slightly if we
could move to um
some of your key drivers and some of the
things that you really sacrificed i
think it was really apparent to us in
the book that you have this sort of
unrelenting sense of purpose which
really drove you in your career and even
with that purpose you brought it into
the way that you led pepsi as well
but on the flip side of the purpose you
also sacrificed a lot
and you sacrifice family life you
sacrifice for impersonal
you talk about exhaustion in the book
and also missing loved one events
and one thing i thought was particularly
interesting was that you describe the
role of being pepsi ceo as three
full-time jobs and then you describe the
role of being a mother a wife a daughter
a daughter-in-law
as also full-time jobs
whilst balancing all these things
where do you think that sense of purpose
came from for you and how do you think
it really drove you in your career now
this is a
sort of a statement for all of you
i had to do all that without technology
had we had technology then my life would
have been much easier i'll be honest
with you so don't get panicked about oh
my god we have to do all these jobs
life's much more easier for you so we're
going to talk about how it's going to be
easy easy for you easier not easy
the problem is that i didn't view these
as
big challenges i was actually energized
by the fact that i had to juggle all
these i never balanced all this because
they were never in a state of balance at
any point in time it was always juggling
five things and hoping the balls didn't
drop that's all you and if they dropped
hope the least important ball dropped
and then we pick it up but
accidents happen you know you miss
something yeah
i built a huge support structure around
me
uh my i married the right guy critical
lesson for all of you
whoever you are man or woman marry the
right person because if you have the
ground rules right up front equality in
the marriage both are going to help
support
family building um
nobody is going to bring their crown in
the garage from the garage both are
going to leave it in the garage
if you come in with that system your
spouse can be your biggest support which
is great
um
my multi-generational family all helped
which help it creates a set of issues
but if you can look beyond the issues
they can be a big help uh neighbors
uh people in the office
uh secretaries you know would say
let us provide the extended support
system for you
so and then i had bosses i mean i had
bosses who were incredible mentors i
don't even know how i lucked out this
way
but
i had a boss in pepsico a ceo who would
say okay you have one daughter in
boarding school one daughter in the
school close by there's a problem in the
boarding school raj is not home i can go
to the boarding school take care of the
problem you take the other daughter home
or vice versa what would you like to do
this is the ceo of the company saying
indra what would you like to do where
would you like me to go deploy me
so when you have bosses like that you
realize that
you can somehow manage through the
biggest problems
but the other thing is if come five
o'clock kids were allowed to come to the
office i just said hey my kids are gonna
be roaming around the office because
after five all bets are off remember we
didn't have hybrid working and all that
stuff so for us there was the workplace
and there was home
but come five o'clock my little one
would be running around the corridors
and i'd be off with my without my shoes
and she'd walk into executive offices
and say mr kendall he's the chairman
emeritus mr kendall do you have a minute
to chat
sure tara come on sit down and they'll
be chatting and i'll say where is tara
and then i look that she and don kendall
are having a pepsi and chatting
so she'd walk into the ceo's office and
she'd pick a candy from the box and you
know she was a young kid when she joined
when i joined pepsico the worst days was
when i was president i was doing so much
and you know she wanted permission to
come to the office and hang around so i
said come and do your homework in the
office
so they wandered around they knew all
the executives they chat with them they
they chat back in return but you have to
build that kind of ecosystem and you
should be allowed to do it because
people realize you're such a huge
contributor to the company
that they want you whatever you bring
along with you
and i brought myself to work and you
asked me the first question about
um
how did i keep my indian-ness my family
was front and center yeah
my job was front and center if you can
believe it they were all lined up yeah
and so
if my kids called i took the call
whatever i was doing whatever i was
doing
whatever i mean
and and it's incredible actually because
one of your first chapters is about
family and it's just such a consistent
theme and i i love that you felt
you know so valued that you could walk
and say my daughters are coming in and
that's and that's me and there's
actually a phrase in the book where you
talk about like that's that's the value
of injury like if you want me you take
these rules
but really picking up on the mentals of
your life um you had so many in the book
but just name a few norman wade gerard
schulmer roger enrico and stephen
raymond
and
what's really clear in the book is even
though they gave you a lot you know like
you said they were willing to drop your
daughter off to school and do so many
things to make it work for you they also
asked for a lot of sacrifice from you
throughout your career you know you
dropped a lot of things on the hat you
changed the way your career was coming
out and panning out for their needs as
well
but what was the sort of biggest thing
you took away from your mentors and that
sponsorship
i mean there were more than mentors
there were supporters they were my
promoters they gave me stretch
assignments but they
helped me get there and then they
showcased me in every possible way
they would put me in front of the board
when i was not
you know a board member and uh
you know would give great compliments uh
you know to me in front of the board to
show that they truly valued my work
um
and they would never make a decision of
anything of importance if i was not
involved in the decision making
and so even if the men went off to play
golf or fish or go hunting on the
weekends which i never did because i
don't do any of those and i had kids to
take care of
roger would never make a decision with
the boys
because his point was i don't want to
incur her wrath because if i made a
decision
she has to implement it and i don't want
to take the chance of her saying the
dumb decision so
we can talk about it but let's go
involve her before we make the decision
so he never ever made a decision if i
wasn't involved i'm talking about
almost everything except maybe people
calls which he got to make as a ceo and
so when you're part of that inner circle
and included as a valuable member by
leadership
um
you know you give it your all so it was
a two-way relationship he was a mentor
supporter and i was the ideal mentee
yeah so i grew and thrived under this
mentorship and support and they saw the
results of their mentorship so i think
for all of us who are looking for
mentors and supporters it's a two-way
relationship don't think it's a one-way
relationship if they give you advice and
you choose not to take it go back and
tell them why you didn't take it mentors
hate it when they give you advice and
you just do whatever you want so it's a
two-way relationship and that's what i
had with all my
supporters and i would love to pick up
on your relationship with roger actually
because as you spoke about he would take
some of the male senior executives
away for these weekends and um you say
in the book that you were excluded
because you were a woman and
specifically in the book you say for me
that was fine because i wanted more time
at home i was confident that roger
wouldn't pursue anything significant
without me being consulted and involved
kind of to your point that you just made
now but also you recognized during that
time your pay and your stock options
weren't in line with equivalent male um
executives
so how did those moments of you being
distinguished or identified differently
because of your gender impact your
relationships with those mentors
see this is the cultural problem that
comes into play because
where i came from all the money i was
getting already seemed like a lot of
money i'd never seen so much money in my
life
so yeah i saw everybody else getting
stock options but
i was just happy to be in the room
i was literally happy to be in the room
and in those days because there weren't
too many women and
there wasn't any conversation about pay
parity none of that conversation was
happening
you don't think about going and saying
hey where are my stock options i was
getting paid well so i just kept working
now
let me also give you the flip side steve
reinemann becomes ceo the first thing he
does is makes a massive adjustment to
everything i have
and i've never looked back because
everybody treated me well after that
but
you've got to understand the time
my cultural upbringing at that time
and i mean my cultural upbringing
and what i could and couldn't ask for at
that time
yeah today if
my daughters didn't get their stock
options i'd be egging them on to go ask
for it but the right way but the right
way
but then i didn't think i could and can
i just pick up on what you just said the
right way what would the right way be do
you think now in the current context of
business
you know having been a ceo i don't know
what the right way is from an employee
perspective but i'll give you a thought
um
if you are in sort of the middle
management okay
don't go directly to the boss and say i
need more money
because
if for some reason they can't give you
the money it sort of sours the
environment the best is go to hr first
and have the conversation about
why is it i am not getting paid
what yeah somebody else the same job is
getting paid and make sure that they
show you the facts
rather than just
uh base it on hearsay say let's look at
the numbers let's look at
everybody in the kind of job that i'm
doing or the level that i'm at what
they're getting paid yeah anonymize the
numbers but just share with me what it
looks like and what my ratio is versus
theirs because without the facts don't
go to your boss and say i think i'm
getting paid less
yeah so a supposed point there is make
it a very objective criteria rather than
the sort of more slightly subjective of
i'm being paid less and approaching that
direction and also i think um
whether we like it or not for some
reason women are still considered too
emotional or too pushy or too whatever
even today you don't want to get a badge
so you want to approach this very
objectively get the facts then sit down
with your boss and say hey these are the
facts yeah and can we talk about it
and if the person says i don't want to
talk about it then you know there's a
tone of the top problem that's a whole
different discussion but if you present
somebody with the facts i would say more
often than not they will talk to you
about it
great thank you
i'm going to move to your time as ceo um
and you spent 12 very formative years as
pepsi ceo and
during that time you did some really
significant changes firstly buying back
the north american bottle bottlers and
continuing to diversify
pepsi portfolio and really embracing new
methods such as design to really
increase the profitability of pepsi but
i think the crown jewel in your time was
really performance with purpose
and for those in the room who don't know
what performance the purpose is this was
indra's strategy which had sort of three
pillars to it first was continue to
nourish so diversify pepsi's portfolio
for healthier foods
secondly to reduce environmental impacts
and reduce water wastage and lastly
cherish
and particularly cherish the talent
pipeline at pepsi and i wondered how you
decided to come to the origination of
performance with purpose and why that
was sort of the defining strategy for
you
pepsico was always about performance so
financial performance was a given we had
to get it done
but as i looked at the future of
the food and beverage industry so we
looked at the mega trends
over the next 10 years 15 years what are
the big mega trends that are going to
impact pepsico
and as we looked at the 10 mega trends
realized that the move towards health
and wellness and increasing focus on the
environment climate change
the war for talent all of these were
going to be big issues that we're going
to make or break pepsico
so if those are the issues i know that
it's going to take a while for us to
change the company to address to future
proof it put it that way
so rather than say guys we're going to
have to future proof the company and
these are the things we're going to do
we started with articulating the mega
trends to everybody and saying these are
the trends that are going to impact
pepsico and our industry do you buy into
that
once people bought into the framework of
the mega trends and what the
big uh
things that could impact our industry
are they bought into the strategy so it
started with the direction then the
strategy and then the actions
so when we had to make investments
when people questioned our investment
levels you go wait a minute
do you agree on the to the mega trends
yeah
if there's a health and wellness trend
that's emerging
do you agree we should diversify the
portfolio yes
if you're going to diversify the
portfolio we're going to have to do it
through innovation or through
acquisition do you agree with that yeah
so why are you disagreeing with the
acquisition i'm making so rather than
pick on a step
link it back to a broader strategy
and if people have issues with the
broader strategy
then you talk to them about why we have
a difference of opinion example would be
people would say are you mother teresa
why do you have to change the portfolio
just make soda and chips and you'll be
fine
i'll look at them and say have you
changed your eating and drinking habits
oh absolutely i eat healthy now so let
me make sure i understand you've changed
your eating and drinking habits but you
don't think pepsico should change its
eat portfolio transform i'm not getting
away from the fun for you products i
just want to diversify it
well this is the part where i hope
business schools teach this
investors would say
if we want healthy products we will
invest in a healthy products company
we will be the diversifier
i said then what happens to pepsico you
become a cash cow
but you know growth is oxygen for
companies if you don't grow
your employees leave you because they
want to be part of growth companies you
keep the energy of a company in the
vitality of a company going because of
growth
so if you're managing a company to be a
cash cow how many people are going to
stick around
and i i really felt
that you started thinking about
performance for purpose and these sort
of broad mega trends and future proof in
the company way before your competitors
and way before a lot of businesses
around the world we're starting to see
these trends now let's look beyond
financial returns let's look at
ourselves as companies and what we're
doing for the world and you know andrew
you're really ahead of your time when
you're making some of these things well
it's not that i was sacrificing
financial returns i was just balancing
level and duration of returns people
looked at let's do a boom splat you know
deliver a lot of returns and then it's
okay if it collapses the next ceo can
pick up the pieces i was saying hey let
me reinvest some of this boom money and
create a lasting company which is
delivering consistent returns over a
long period of time i thought that's how
companies should be run
i didn't realize that boom splat was an
option clearly many companies think in
fact some people have written a book
about when you're a ceo the first thing
you should do is take a massive reset
just say the previous ceo did everything
wrong and just say you have to invest a
whole bunch of money that's the splat
part and then you'll get seven years to
write alpha
that's the boom part and then you retire
and the next ceo takes a reset that is
the worst way to run a company and that
must be in july you were pepsi's uh ca
for 12 years where the average ceo is
only five years but remember i did
either two six-year terms or three
four-year terms because the first six
years i had the financial crisis to
globalize the company and then deal with
the bottling crisis so that was my first
six years
the second and then put in all the new
capabilities for performance of purpose
design r d so big investment years we
were still delivering but investment
years the second years were getting the
return from those investments
so
i feel like i was reborn a couple of
times as you see here
um i want to quickly uh go to the point
that you did while she was usc you wrote
to all the parents
of your most senior executives
thanking
those parents for
you know the things that they've given
their children so that they can come and
you know work for you and do so well at
pepsi and that had a huge impact on your
senior executives and they wrote to you
thanking you for that
how important did you find humanizing
the role of the ceo and how did that
impact your leadership style
versus other so i'll tell you a story
today and then i'll go back to that
story
um
i get a lot of calls from male ceos
these days saying can you send me a
sample of the letter that you wrote
[Music]
okay
and then i get a call back saying
you won't believe the reaction i got
okay so that's today i mean last week i
was sending out draft letters
um
go back a little bit david rubenstein
wrote a book about summarizing a whole
bunch of interviews he did with leaders
how leaders lead and he put mine in the
first book because of this one
thing about writing to parents let me
ask you a show of hands
how many of your parents would like
getting a letter from your boss saying
you're doing a great job
okay you see we rest our case right
there all right here's the problem
once we turn 18 we don't get a report
card on the kids because by law you're
not allowed to send report cards to that
you're not required to okay if the child
shows you the report card it's okay so
you just
i speak of my parents they'll just pray
i hope she's doing okay hope they're
doing you know contributing to society
many of her parents are doing the same
thing okay yeah they're just appealing
to a divine being to make sure that
things are going well
and the only evidence that they're doing
well is that they haven't read anything
bad about it in social media right it's
by one minus x not the x itself all
right
to put it in simple terms um
so
in my case when i became ceo
most of the people in india didn't
congratulate me
they congratulated my mother in front of
me
you did a good job
you prayed enough you fasted enough
that's why
your daughter turned out right so you
must be the one to be congratulated
so i came back and i said
yeah you know they're probably right you
know
so what if i assumed is 100 right so let
me write to the parents of my direct
reports and say thank you to the parents
for the gift of their son or daughter so
i wrote a very personal letter to each
of the parents of my reports and i met
every one of them personally i went to
various cities in the world and met them
personally just my direct reports then
the next groups about 400 when i was
through with pepsico i wrote to the
parents every time i did a leadership
program or people got moved up i wrote
to the parents
and the first time their photograph
comes in the annual report i would blew
up that picture send it to the parents
with a lovely note so they could hang it
up on
it
and i love it at one point the senior
executives when they go home they kept
saying you know their parents asked them
oh how's indra
first question
first question not how are you it's like
how's my friend indra it's always my
friend i love that
so you know
look it worked out well
i did it because i felt
i had to say thank you i felt a debt of
gratitude to them i had an outstanding
team so i felt i had to express my debt
of gratitude i would say to all of you
today
the number of male male and underlying
male executives writing to
the parents of the people that work for
them is increasing
i'd say in the last year maybe 10 or 12
male executives have written and they
are just
blown away by the reaction they're
getting from there
and i think just i know my dad would
love that letter as well so i think it's
just it makes sense right that we think
of people beyond just being an employee
but
think of them as people who have come
and really worked hard and come from a
place
the head of hr for our middle east he
said that his dad who lives in a big
apartment building in delhi took the
letter and pulled the chair up at the
entrance to the apartment building and
every member of the apartment that came
and he gave them a copy of the letter
and said
i want you to know what my chairman
about pepsico chairman thinks of my son
and you know surprising i said were you
embarrassed brahman he goes no i felt
good
um i actually want to turn to one of the
stories um about when you received
president of pepsico and don't go to
that story
i think we have to enjoy
any time um i've also i i actually
recalled this story to my husband uh
about a year ago because i thought it
was such an interesting story but indra
um
is is appointed pepsi um president and
she is driving home it's 10 p.m
she rocks up at the door and um her
mother opens it and indra's so excited
to
tell her mum and her family and her kids
their sneeze and their mum says please
turn around and go get some milk
um
and then just kind of infuriated in this
moment and says well my husband's been
home for hours why didn't you ask my
husband to go get milk and she said you
may be the president or whatever of
pepsico
but when you come home you are a wife
and a mother and a daughter nobody can
take your place so you can leave that
crown in the garage
don't clap
this moment obviously and this story um
as you said has been retold to you many
times and that had a really big impact
um obviously in the way that you thought
about your time and just looking back at
that quote
you know how did that make you feel and
looking back on you know that your
achievements and all the things that
you've done as well as that sort of tug
and sense of guilt you have sometimes
felt as well
how do you look back on those years and
reflect back on that time well at that
point she should have let me celebrate
for a brief moment but you know she's an
indian mother i can't do much uh
yeah um but in retrospect i think it was
a very valuable lesson in humility it's
a lesson to say that
um you know at work you're fungible
somebody can take your place you can
lose your job tomorrow especially when
you're a senior executive or a ceo
as a ceo the board can fire you at
no notice 15 minutes notice they can
call you and say you're out and you just
pack your bags and leave so the job is
uh temporary for us
but at home that's all we have going
back to our first thing about family
many of us are the backbone of family
and i just go further now to say
she told me to leave the crown the
garage she said well your husband came
in at eight he was tired so i didn't
want to bother him okay
but
i think both
members of the
both parents husband and wife should
leave their crown in the garage it's not
that one person leaves it in the garage
and the other person walks in and says
look at my crown i think both should
leave the crown in the garage and when
you come home
assume the new rules
as my kids often remind me mom we don't
work for you
i know that i mean in my home
i don't get an inch of leeway if i say
can you get me something they'll say
please i go
i'm just telling you kids why should i
say please we don't work for you mom
so pritha please can you get me a glass
of water or milk you know so i'm
learning you know all these words at
home
only because
you know
normally parents talk to their kids in a
direct way but in my kids they just want
to make sure there's a clear
differentiation between
mom the ceo
and mom the mom yeah and
they teach me humility just as my mother
did and
i've loved reading about pizza and tara
and you know you really open up about
you know their experiences seeing you as
a mother but also uh pepsi ceo at one
point you actually said you know you
kind of thought that
they wish there was two of you you know
at all times and sort of drilling down
on
something that you're so passionate
about and i imagine this comes from you
know some of those some of those balls
that you were juggling
was you know the care crisis that is
coming upon the us but also a lot of the
aging populations
um
in in aging economies and you talk often
about how
we say we want to get minority groups up
the ladder we say we want to get women
up corporate ladders but we're not
giving them the care they need and like
you sort of said before you were really
lucky to have extended family and people
there helping you with your kids
but how would you like care to change
in order to support those people going
up the ladder so this brings us full
circle back to why i wrote this book it
was never intended to be a memoir i i
was just not that kind i actually was
going to write a bunch of policy papers
on care
and people said nobody will read them or
it won't be sticky
and the only way to make it memorable is
if you inform it with the arc of your
life so if you notice this is not a
tell-all memoir with yeah you know
salacious stories nothing this is just a
factual journey with lessons and then we
go into the care crisis twofold issue
one when i step down people said why
don't you replace yourself with a woman
remember eight and a half percent of
fortune 500 companies are run by women
they always ask women why don't you
replace yourself with the women the
other 92 percent of men they never asked
them why did you replace yourself with a
woman i've never understood that
but that's how it is
i said look i've produced a lot of women
who've gone on to run companies in
america but they leave at the senior
middle management level because the
pyramid narrows so much they don't want
to go through that last bit of
hell to become a ceo because it's a big
it's a slog
but then as i started dig deeper the
pipeline was broken we had a lot of
women who entered pepsico the first and
second levels they were in large numbers
more than 50 at times and then there was
a big drop off
so when people were
considering having families etc
they just dropped out of the workforce
okay and could you also touch upon the
point indra that you made in your book
when you were looking at the pipeline
and you did a review of 200 performance
reviews men and women
and you noticed something between the
difference
women dropped out so why did the women
drop out one when they had children they
didn't know how to juggle home and work
because there was not a care
infrastructure that existed for them the
second inside companies and pepsico is
better than most was better is better
than most
performance appraisals are
somewhat skewed against women
for example
i noticed that performance and presence
of women said this woman did
fantastic she delivered on all her goals
but
there's a problem with her potential
with the man it would be
he did pretty good on all his objectives
but
he's got huge potential so for some
reason
the woman's potential was a problem
for some reason
and so her potential was a problem her
performance was great
for the man the performance was a
problem but the potential was great i
never understood this and but phenomenon
so i knew that that was also wearing
women down
and we had to address a lot of these
issues because if you continue with this
and but phenomenon you strip women of
confidence which affects their
competence and it's a doom loop so we
knew we had to address that but we had
to systematically change things in
pepsico to keep women
but i found something much worse when i
was co-chairing reopen connecticut
during the pandemic because
a public epidemiologist and i were the
co-chairs for connecticut
we found that all the frontline workers
the nurses the teachers the caregivers
the people who worked in senior homes
people who worked in retail some
hospitality that was open
all the women had children or caregiving
responsibilities at home
but yet when they came into the senior
care center we asked them to stay for
two or three weeks before they went back
because of the quarantine issues they
couldn't go home every day
but we never talked about who's going to
take care of your kids who's going to
take care of the seniors in your home we
never had that conversation
all of a sudden we call these front line
workers essential workers
you notice we all call them we send the
word just the words changed and at seven
o'clock we all clap for them
but we never talked about what child
care system do we need to give those
people
all of that stuff so now fast forward
postcode
the white-collar workers can talk about
hybrid work can't talk about remote
working we have technology tools but
those front line workers have no choice
they have to show up at work every day
right we're now talking about stressed
out mothers especially in white collar
jobs who had to juggle all these
caregiving responsibilities but from
their home
but these frontline workers have to go
into schools and hospitals and care
centers and retail workers and hotels
and work but nobody's talking about the
support structure for them so if we
don't build a very good child care
system and a senior care system but the
child care system
for the frontline worker in particular
we're not going to have
the backbone of people who hold up the
economy
and
for very senior people in the c-suite
don't worry about child care they can
take care of it they can afford to pay
for it the entry level plus another two
levels if you don't worry about a care
system for those people and for the
front line workers we are asked we are
looking at a disastrous scenario
where either we will have
very few children being born and a birth
rate that puts the future of the
countries in jeopardy or
we would end up with incredible stress
on the
the mothers in particular but young
family builders but mothers too and then
you'll have a lot of them leaving the
workforce none of these options are good
and that's a really important lesson
actually for the people in this room
because i think we often think about the
fact that we probably will be going to
those white collar jobs and we're
stressed out about our own care
circumstances but actually
we need to think about the companies
hopefully we'll be running one day and
how frontline workers are really going
to be supported i'm going to wrap up
there on our formal questions um because
i know we want to give it at least five
or ten minutes for the audience to ask
questions but before i do can you and i
know how unoriginal this question is
but uh can you give a final piece of
advice to any business student that you
think after they leave lvs or what you
would want them to take with them
um as we were talking with the dean
whatever job you take up please ask
yourself the question how does it make a
positive impact on society
money at all costs used to be the mantra
it is should it should not be the mantra
going forward
it should be the work that i'm doing
is it going to negatively impact society
not today even if it's in two or three
years we were talking about examples
like cdos that were developed during the
financial crisis that brought the world
down the world's financial system down
everybody who designed it knew it was
going to bring the world down okay but a
bunch of smart mbas designed it
and then pulled out got out of it before
everybody else was left holding the bag
so think ahead as to the consequences of
what you're going to be doing second put
yourself put your hand up for the
toughest assignments
don't take the easy assignments nobody
will remember you
for doing the easy jobs but if you took
on a tough assignment and demonstrated
your
mettle people are going to say
this is somebody i want to keep an eye
on the third big piece of advice every
entity has politics understand the
politics but don't play in the politics
because the minute you play in the
politics you become a political person
as opposed to somebody who understands
the politics and navigates it
yeah
those are the three business lessons on
the personal side
i say this always think hard about time
we all have very little time
in our lives and think hard about where
you want to allocate that time i didn't
have too many luxuries
in terms of technology and flexibility
you all have it
think hard about where you're spending
the time
how much time
social media media and how much time
binge watching versus time that you
spent on human interactions so think
hard about all that it's your choice
thank you andrea welcome
and i'm now going to open questions to
the floor if you could just raise your
hand and then one of our volunteers will
come and give you a mic
valet feel free to choose whoever
thank you
great
um thank you so much for your talk that
was really really nice my name is
shivangi um my question for you is
around what you talked about a little
bit earlier so you said
juggling a lot of tasks and juggling all
the balls you it gave you energy and
that's how you kept it up
um my question is how you sustain that
energy because i feel like i've
had in in the work so far already i feel
like i've done that and i do feel a
little bit exhausted when you're trying
to
prove your
your name in that space and why exist so
how did you manage that energy and
sustain it
i don't know
i really
i genuinely don't know because when i
was writing this book
i was tired reading about myself
okay because i have no idea where i got
that energy even coming to london going
to through british airways and coming
here
i just thought about the trips i took
the hundreds of trips
many of them commercial flights before i
had the luxury of the private plane
but
hours of weight in airports you know
flying economy at times business class
now you fly first class and feel great
about it but
the way we slog through all that while
writing decks uh you know in the airport
every minute and calling kids at home i
have no idea where i got the energy
however i will tell you
at different points when i did feel
tired
what i'd say to myself is
i don't have a choice
the only thing i can give up is the job
but the job gives me such
satisfaction keeps me energized i'm not
going to give up the job the rest of it
i can't give up
because everybody counts on me so i
summon
all kinds of reserves
and the fact that i didn't sleep much
helped a lot that was nothing to do with
practice just a genetic problem so that
i got an extra three or four hours a day
which other people didn't get and you
know little tricks speed reading you
know i something from the time i was a
kid i got used to it that helped a lot
so you know it's very easy to go through
a deck in one third of the time that
somebody else did and retain it
those are all trainable skills
you just have to find those skills now
you know what with get abstract now you
don't even have to read books
everybody's digested everything for you
so you have a lot of shortcuts you can
take to your work use technology wisely
and
just power through life and then decide
what you're willing to give up that's
your choice
i am not a good role model for this
sorry
no thank you so much it's been an honor
thank you i think we'll take a question
from this side chief you could just hand
the mic
thanks
hi thank you so much um my question is
about i know that pepsi has a very
storied hr function a lot of great hr
leaders i worked with monique harina
this summer and i was wondering kind of
what you think is part of the core of
pepsi's culture and that function that
differentiates it and how it worked with
the rest of the business to be seen as a
leader and respected
yeah you know hr when you have a very
good hr function
there are two
points of view inside the company
division presidents will sometimes say
hr is trying to run the company
okay other times you say we have a very
good hr function thank god
hr has to be
strong but they should not try to run
the company defined as they shouldn't be
telling the division presidents exactly
who they should be hired or firing they
should provide frameworks they should
provide approaches they should be
providing
rules that we will not violate
in terms of people hiring management but
they shouldn't have such a heavy hand
that it looks like hr is controlling
the agenda let me give you an example of
what i mean
actually a recruit pointed this out to
us we were recruiting somebody for a
senior middle management position
and when that person came to interview
with me because it was an important
strategic hire
this person said to me you know i had
eight interviews six were with hr people
what the hell's going on in your company
i you know we never even thought about
it but we gave hr so much power
that basically they controlled most of
the recruiting uh interviews so we
changed that and said no more than two
hr people if somebody's going to or 20
of the interviews can be with hr people
so you've got to be very very careful
about the hr function
you must have an excellent hr function
but don't let them
have too much power because then it
creates a feeling that
something other than the line managers
are controlling
the business which is a bad image to
have
can we take one question here that had
on somebody here had a hand up very
early yeah
the right right one hi thanks my name is
anshuman uh and i probably agree with
you on the time aspect that you
mentioned uh because i believe all of us
have 24 hours you me the rest of my
batchmates and it's what you do with it
defines where you go
uh probably so the question i'm gonna
ask you is the two actually so i'll just
go for it uh first is you know juggling
all these various aspects of life how do
you manage that most important aspect of
time for yourself do you know look back
reflect and say
i need to improve this i need to work on
this
and the second aspect is what's this you
know what was your mantra to happiness
amongst managing all these challenges
through life my mantra for what
happiness happiness
okay and i'm going to say something like
oh so cliche but that's okay all right
i'm gonna tell you it's loud
the happiest moments for me was when i
was sitting on my bed with my two kids
hanging off of my
legs almost because they put their books
and do their homework and i'm watching
each of their homework to see if they're
doing it right
and i had tv on mute watching my yankees
play baseball that was mantra happiness
for me
because i had complete control over my
ecosystem
my kids were right there
i was supervising them they felt
connected to mom even though mom was
doing her pepsico work
doesn't matter but you know
she was also involved in us
[Music]
those were the happiest moments for me i
didn't need my time
um
maybe i'd have been a better person if
i'd had my time i don't know i never had
my time i've never had my time in my
whole life
and even if somebody told me you've got
10 days it's your time
i wouldn't know what to do i'll give you
a great example i told my team simi and
lisa i said
i'm taking two weeks off in december
to just disappear i need to take my time
okay
so my kids came up i'm very disappearing
too i said i'm disappearing i'm not
going to tell you where i'm going but
i'm disappearing
they said just tell us quietly okay so
which means tell us
so i'm planning this fabulous trip just
by myself
last week i said well it'll be even more
fabulous if my husband and kids came
along
but i think now it's gone it's over
because now they're gonna decide where
we're going
[Laughter]
what we're gonna do every day
every activity and on top of that mom
becomes a punching bag if anything
doesn't go right it's mom's problem and
so i'm saying to myself
what is happiness
if i go by myself every minute of the
day i'm going to be wondering what the
kids are doing my kids are all grown up
but i'm going to worry worrying about
what the kids are doing
what's raj up to okay that's all i'll
worry about all the time you might be a
bit bored as well without them no no
i'll take books okay one of my books and
read them but
i concluded
much to my dismay
that i'm better off having happiness
even with being the punching bag if
these people are around me because at
the end of the day
that is all that matters for me
i could lose all my money but these
three people
are there for me
so you have to decide what is that one
thing in your life that gives you
utter happiness even though it comes
with pain happiness always comes with
pain
what's the one thing and then you
balance your life that way thank you
you're welcome i think we have time for
one more question andrew if you'd like
to choose which other hand
the pressure i think one from the back
actually um because i don't think they
haven't had a chance yeah great
hi my name is karate thank you so much
before i ask my question i would really
like to tell that when i was growing up
you were my role model and that was true
for a lot of indian girls when when they
were growing up so it has truly been an
honor to to be here
my question is i wanted to know that if
you get a chance to restart your career
is there anything you would do
differently
in today's terms you mean today's world
yeah
um
what would i do differently
i don't know you know um
every failure i've had i learn from it
in fact i think i'm a stronger person
because of the failures and again
if you look at a failure as the world
has come to an end as opposed to
it's a learnable moment or a teachable
moment it's a much better outcome
you know i married the right guy
so that's okay the kids are okay i'm
trying to see my checklist
kids are okay
what would i have done differently
i don't know i mean look
um
i know the balance sheet of my life
right and as i look on balance of the
balance sheet
i'm comfortable with all the
assets i've built and i'm
aware of the liabilities i have
and how i've offset them with assets so
i have my own life's balance sheet
and
i'm comfortable with it all and if i'd
had today's technologies my kids
wouldn't say wish you had been around
more because i would have communicated
with them via facetime or
zoom
whenever and i wouldn't have traveled as
much because i would have zoomed more
with my people around the world
so
i might have had the reverse problem my
kids say can't you disappear for some
time
i threatened to decracify their rooms
and they go just disappear mom please
where would you like to travel so
i think the reverse problem might have
happened but
no i just
i am happy with
my life cool thank you
i think that's a sign of a really really
good life
um if i could just welcome marca to the
stage she's one of our co-presidents uh
to do the final thank you
so thank you everyone thank you everyone
for being here thank you indra for
making the time
we just wanted to take this small moment
to thank intro of behalf of women in
business club and on behalf of everyone
we know many of you especially women
have written their applications to lvs
based on indra so it is super exciting
to have you here
as we come to our close i on behalf of
women in business club wanted to extend
our gratitude to all of you for
attending such an amazing event
months ago it sounded almost impossible
to host this event
after one year and a half of ongoing
pandemic
it has been sensational to have you all
here at this vastly naphill hall
indra thank you so much
for coming to lbs today to share
remarkable bits of your life in full
especially thank you for being such an
inspiration to all of us who want to be
the change that women bring to the world
of business in the coming years
we have bought this token of
appreciation
for you to ensure as you continue on
your visitor please
and that's
as last reminder to everyone if you are
posting on any social media any social
network please tag indra women in
business club super appreciate that
and now we please welcome everyone to
leave the hall through the back doors
thank you
[Applause]
[Music]

---

### Building personal and organisational resilience with Richard Jolly | London Business School
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nbcaGyQrf4

Idioma: en

I have to say I'm really excited to be
with you here this afternoon because the
topic we're talking about is one that's
very close to my heart H and it seems to
me that right now in organizations uh
we're at a sort of critical time uh and
uh I hope that I can raise some
challenges for you uh to think about
yourself uh your organization uh and uh
what you can do to really try and help
both of these uh be more
resilient so where I want to start this
afternoon uh is with a
question uh thinking just generally
about your life what I want you to start
off with is what really matters to you
most in life so when you look back over
your life what are the things that uh
will really have been important to you
and so just turn to the person next to
you just for a couple of minutes uh and
just share what as you look back over
your life are going to be the things
that you would have considered to have
been most important so just a couple of
minutes
discussion before we talk about what was
coming up in your discussions what I
want to do is share with you uh some
findings from a remarkable lady called
bronnie we who spent a large part of her
life looking after people uh working as
a nurse in the hospice movement who in
their last few uh weeks and months of
life and when she retired she wrote a
book where she said look uh when people
uh really at the end of their life it's
remarkable just how consistent the
regrets are about how they live their
life and her book is called the top five
regrets of the dying let me briefly take
you through this number one I wish I'd
had the courage to live a life true to
myself not the life others expected of
me I wish I hadn't worked so
hard I wish I'd had the courage to
express my
feelings I wish I'd stayed in touch with
my
friends and finally and most importantly
of all for me I wish that I'd let myself
be
happier now we're going to take each of
these points in turn and really try and
look at some of the research to really
help uh illustrate uh the the themes I
want to cover this afternoon but before
we do that I want to go back to the
themes coming up in your discussion now
there's no uh challenge here in terms of
what was right or wrong but this is a
question I've asked to thousands of
Executives over the years and these are
the top five that come
up uh a partner a significant other
someone to share your life with if you
have a partner uh on average uh you'll
be happier and live longer than if you
don't
friends on average
friends uh again spending really quality
time frequently with your friends uh is
important uh uh you time for yourself
remember those things you used to have
called hobbies and
interests Health in terms of uh your
well-being uh in terms of your Fitness
and children so these are five and
there's many others that come up some
sort of spiritual life uh uh Community
involved
the question I want to really focus on
here is where does work fit into this
diagram and the answer is it doesn't it
doesn't fit at all uh and particularly
uh in our current uh working environment
uh work kind of
overlaps uh all of these uh and if we're
not careful uh particularly when times
are tough what happens is we find oursel
working a little bit longer longer hours
uh maybe working weekends maybe coming
home having some dinner and working uh
later uh uh maybe uh working early in
the mornings uh and uh but we're sort of
doing okay but the risk is uh that if
this pattern uh continues we get to this
stage and this for me is
dangerous uh because uh what was this
Bubble Up This one you remember what
that one was partner remember that
person uh there is a saying that
somebody else can look after your
children you don't want somebody else
looking after your
partner failure to invest in the one key
relationship that you still want to be
there when the children have left home
is a classic mistake and again what's
this one friends you remember those
people you used to kind of hang out with
let me give you my definition of a
friend a friend is somebody that when
you spend time with them you feel
energized again these Hobbies an
interest all those things used to spend
time on again Health we'll come back to
this one you can imagine and again
children so if we're not careful this
stage is one uh that can happen and
there's a a quotation that when I first
saw it um years ago now uh it really uh
sort of punched me in the face it's by
benj it's from Benjamin Franklin who
said some people die at 25 and aren't
buried until they're
75 now in my work with
organizations uh particularly working
with Senior Management uh it's something
that I find uh too frequently which is
working with senior Executives who've
achieved all the things they thought
would make them
happy they've got the money the status
the power the the material Goods uh
they've got the all of the uh sense of
achievement um that they thought would
make them happy and yet they're kind of
not that happy in fact the really scary
thing is when you've achieved all the
things you thought would make you happy
uh and yet you're less happy than at any
point in your career that's a tough
moment
now the um issue it raises is well
what's really the problem here uh is it
technology well we're going to talk
about this shortly and to some degree
the answer is yes technology doesn't
help uh in some respects uh is it lack
of boundaries around work uh lots of
work travel an interconnected uh Global
work environment
uh your boss maybe your boss or even the
organization are these the problem well
for me
overwhelmingly there is one fundamental
problem here I'm afraid it's bad news
it's kind of it's
you you're the real problem because you
set incredibly high standards for
yourself you're much more demanding
yourself than any sort of tyrannical
boss could ever be uh you never feel as
if you've done enough and certainly it's
probably many years since you ever said
right time to go home my work is
finished we never kind of finish our
work uh you're self-critical and if
you're not careful your identity can
become far too caught up uh in your uh
working life because of these changes in
the boundaries in fact I would argue
that there is a disease that's spreading
through our organizations and there may
even be some of you that have some of
the symptoms of this disease let me
share with you some of the typical
symptoms the disease is what I call
hurry sickness and here are some of the
typical symptoms number one if you're
microwaving something just for 30
seconds you have to do something else
whilst you're waiting for the microwave
to go
ping you get a buzz from just catching a
plane or a train you do something else
whil else you drive listen to the radio
be on the phone eat your breakfast put
on your makeup you doing something else
in the car you eat at your desk whilst
checking your emails uh some times on
the phone at the same time of
course you do something else whilst
brushing your teeth uh particularly
those of you with an electric toothbrush
of course uh in fact I remember a client
of mine recently told me that uh he said
Richard my electric toothbrush uh lasts
2 minutes that's 4 minutes a day a
valuable wasted time he says I have a
pile of reading in the bathroom so I can
maximize my efficiency I thought he was
packing his day a little bit tightly
here uh you get impatient waiting in
line or waiting in traffic uh you check
your mobile phone multiple times an hour
uh in fact Studies have shown uh
recently that the average executive
checks their phone every seven or eight
minutes uh sometimes even at events like
this you might be checking your
phone you hate the time it takes to boot
up your computer in fact you hate it so
much you never really turn that computer
off you have that sleep mode or
hibernate
mode you find yourself wanting to
interrupt other people frequently I mean
you may be polite enough that you don't
but you're sitting there thinking come
on you do something else in telephone
conferences but there is an ultimate
symptom to know if you have this disease
which is uh when you get into an
elevator you have a favorite
button and there are two words on that
button which
say close doors now you're not stupid
you know how technology
works you don't just push that button
[Laughter]
once that's not going to make a
difference you got to keep pushing the
damn thing cuz that's that's how it
works so let's just see a quick show of
hands how many of you can recognize some
of these symptoms in
yourself you are a very sick group of
Executives uh a fundamental problem is
that particularly in our technology
enabled uh
lives uh we're losing a fundamental
skill we're losing the ability to really
stop and think almost every executive uh
in the world today the first thing when
they do when they wake up in the morning
is check their
email the last thing they do when
they're lying in bed at night is check
their email and we're connected every
moment in between and they have a
wonderful phrase that comes from Florida
that for me gets at the heart of this
issue what they say is this when you're
fighting off the alligator it's hard to
remember you were trying to drain the
swamp if you're trying to drain the
water away so you can build stuff if
that's your strategic objective the
problem is there are alligators there
and if an alligator attacks you you kind
of need to defend yourself um but here's
the challenge we have become a
generation of alligator Fighters the
problem here is that um we spend all our
life actually if we're not careful doing
this sort of stuff that doesn't really
matter uh and you can't really blame
technology the problem is when you check
your email you trigger the whole miso
limpic reward system in your brain you
trigger dopamine you are chemically
addicted to your email there's nothing
rational about it whatsoever it triggers
exactly the same chemistry in your brain
as any form of addiction and yet we
think we're just doing the right things
it is now possible to spend your entire
career creating no value for your
organization and do the whole time doing
emails and sitting in
meetings uh so uh it's a bit of a
problem for me uh and the reason is we
just love fighting alligators it's this
chemical addiction uh and I got a couple
other photographs some students have
sent me over the years uh here's a guy
um who's created a workstation here on
the beach um
I think the one that scared me the most
when I saw it is this lady being
presented her newborn
baby uh still on her BlackBerry the
great sumantra goell put it very
powerfully when he said look there's two
things that are important here focus and
energy I don't worry about your ability
uh to have energy I do worry about your
ability to focus on the things that
really matter to you both at work and
more fundamentally outside of work
that's my real concern uh in the world
of business today because what it feels
like for most Executives today if I can
use a water sports analogy uh is a bit
like water skiing you're kind of holding
on for dear life uh the sort of water
spraying it's a bit bumpy kind of going
past you pretty fast if you let go just
for a second just one day without
checking emails it's going to get away
from you it's going to hurt so what
really is stressful what fundamentally
caus is stress because almost nothing is
inherently stressful and by the way uh
for the average executive uh the key
stressful moments in your life are not
in the workplace they're commuting uh
and actually life real relationships
because real relationships they're kind
of difficult but in the
workplace uh it's not how many hours you
work there's kind of no correlation
between hours you work and how stressed
you are much more fundamentally the
thing that causes stress is is how in
control you feel of the work you do
because if you have as Robert Caris put
it high demands and low control that is
inherently
stressful uh and so many Executives
today live in this life of constant
stress so the theme of today's session
is resilience so let me try and talk to
you about what resilience is and kind of
why it's difficult and I'm going to
stress you out uh but also then talk
about well what can you actually do to
build your own own and your
organization's resilience so resilience
the way I Define it how it's often
defined is the ability to recover from
stress and adjust fairly easily uh to
change so how do you do this well two
things I want to focus on skills and
most fundamentally its attitude that's
really at the heart of what we're going
to talk about uh in this session um and
the classic Model for thinking about
this goes back over a 100 years and has
still been validated in a whole bunch of
recent neurological studies and medical
studies as well and this is s yks and
dodson's study on originally on mice in
1908 and it's called the jks Dodson law
so your performance is influenced by how
much pressure you're
under now just uh in your own mind think
what does your graph look like what does
your curve look like here now the left
hand side is pretty straightforward this
is not controversial if you don't don't
have enough pressure enough stress on
you you just get bored frustrated
dissatisfied it's what's sometimes
called rust out so that's the first half
of it and there is a point in the middle
here when we're at our most effective at
a most creative at a most satisfied uh
uh that state of flow as it's sometimes
called but the question this leads to is
what happens on the right hand side of
your graph most Executives think it
looks a bit like this
some people even say yes I eat stress
for breakfast um well
unfortunately uh the problem here is
this is what it really looks
like uh and as we go over to the right
hand side here uh as we're feeling more
pressure we're getting more tired we're
working longer hours if we're not
careful we can get into some kind of
vicious circle here you start getting
ill uh just exhausted irrational
Behavior getting irritated by things
that never used to irritate you and
clearly this is what we call burnout
usually it's just one extra piece of
stress uh that makes a fundamental shift
in our ability to cope uh and in terms
of how we cope uh it affects uh all of
our sort of physiology here and
particularly one of our stress hormones
called cortisol and cortisol is a
hormone a healthy hormone and in
moderate levels it's anti-inflammatory
it's very very important hormone uh and
um uh the problem is when you have
prolonged high levels of stress you
produce too much cortisol and too much
cortisol is toxic uh so um not only does
it affect our immune system it also
affects our sleep early in the morning
uh your body starts producing cortisol
and high levels of cortisol in the
morning help you wake up refreshed ready
to go for the day but our body processes
throughout the day and then when it
comes time for bed we're tired ready to
go to sleep
and then we sleep well and all of the
body's repair processes kick in both
mentally as well as physically repairing
us uh ready to go so that we wake up the
next day refreshed and ready to go that
is the healthy pattern we
want the problem here is prolonged high
levels of stress our body produces too
much
cortisol uh and it can't process it
throughout the day so the graph looks a
bit more like this and then when it's
time for bed the problem is that our
brains are still going at 100 miles an
hour uh and we know we're exhausted we
almost shaking with exhaustion but we
just can't switch our brains off it's
that state that I call being tired and
wired uh sleep is one of the most um hot
topics uh in the world of business today
I was at Davos in January uh and uh two
themes really everywhere sleep you need
to get better sleep uh and mindfulness
was the other one if you're not sleeping
well it affects everything in fact
certain Studies have shown that people
who are chronically sleep-deprived
perform as well on a range of tasks as
people who are
drunk and yet for many Executives they
spend a large majority of their lives
going through this sort of sleepwalking
uh through their waking lives so what
does it take uh in order for us to sleep
well to get out of this TI and wide
State well there's a few pieces of
advice here number one whatever you
do never ever have a screen in your
bedroom if you've got a television just
rip it out never take your iPad never
take your damn phone into the bedroom uh
because uh it just stimulates you uh you
want it dark as dark as you can get it
doesn't have to be silent uh little bit
of background noise bit of white noise
is fine because otherwise if it's
completely silent even one small amount
of noise uh might wake you up uh and you
need to try and slow yourself down so of
all the things that you can do to help
you manage your cortisol
down to help you sleep better there are
two things that come out most
consistently number one uh exercise 30
minutes of moderate exercise uh reduce
your cortisol level significantly for 48
hours the other biggest thing is
mindfulness now it doesn't have to be
any Transcendental Meditation it doesn't
have to be some sort of spiritual thing
just simple breathing exercises just for
5 or 10 minutes even just sit down in a
comfortable chair close your eyes and
just count uh your breathing count in
for six count out for six if you do that
for 10 minutes uh that will have a
significant impact on a range of
different measures and the research
that's coming out now from the academic
world about the impact of mindfulness uh
is for me incredibly exciting uh over
medicating yourself with
alcohol uh more than a coup a glass of
wine is not good cuz whilst it does
knock you out uh you don't get high
quality sleep it's like an anesthetic
yeah in fact you probably will wake up
in the middle of the night uh go to the
bathroom uh obviously when you go there
you'll be checking your emails um but
the really scary thing is uh one
executive said to me recently said
Richard um what I found is when I'm
checking the emails in the bathroom
middle of the night I'm actually getting
replies
it's kind of a problem here um if we're
not getting enough high quality
sleep
then if our cortisol is uh too high and
we're not managing it effectively so
we're not really waking up refreshed
well what happens to us well here's the
stressful bit uh because what happens is
high levels of cortisol become toxic it
affects a wide range uh of measures uh
it affects do you feel sort of well or
do you feel ill some people you ask them
how are you go
yeah I'm okay other people kind of
they're feeling good I remember uh my
eldest daughter Anna when she was a
toddler uh she used to wake up in the
morning and call down the stairs mommy
daddy would come out and say hi Anna and
she would stand on the top of the stairs
with this huge smile and say it's
morning
[Music]
time and my heart would just melt every
time F because here was somebody was
just so excited about the day every day
is going to be a great day huge smile um
it's probably a while since most of us
woke up saying it's morning
time so how do we feel do we feel
mentally sharp what sort of mentally
dull the really scary stuff is uh your
immune system um so what happens when uh
it affects your immune system
well there is a range of different
symptoms here this is the stressful bit
uh cold
flu uh back ache a classic stress
related symptom very expensive for
organizations tight chest uh migraines
allergy outbreaks skin problems uh and
more chronic uh sort of longer lasting
effects uh hypertension ulcers accident
pronus um addictions of all forms uh
including electronic uh retail and
internet uh addictions
it can just fill our lives it's not
about being too busy we always have time
to do the things we want to do always
the key thing here I'm really trying to
say
is uh stop and think what really matters
to me and I want to go back uh to these
five points from bronny wear uh and
really use them to think about uh some
uh some things that you might be able to
do the first point here she said is I
wish i' had the courage to live a life
true to myself not the life uh others
expected of me now over the last 20
years uh I've you know coached a lot of
people uh in senior positions often
going through major transitions uh and
um I'm absolutely clear in my mind the
people who have great careers always do
the same
thing they just focus focus on stuff
they're passionate about great careers
they kind of emerge by doing things that
you're excited about because if you're
really having fun
doing something that energizes you then
people kind of want to hang out with you
you have high
Mojo uh when you walk into interviews
you just look as if you're having fun
people want you to have you around so
great careers about figuring out and
often is the life's work figuring out
what am I really good at well what are
my real
strengths uh what am I doing when I'm at
my best so that's the first one the
second one is I wish I hadn't worked so
hard so Harold Krishna has has a famous
quotation here nobody on their deathbed
has ever said I wish I spent more time
in the
office and certainly when it comes to
tombstones this is not a tombstone
you're ever likely to
see and this is true all of us had
moments where you I've got an office at
home and there are times I'm there
thinking I just got so much work to do
now and I can hear the kids and I have
to say I've got a lot better at saying
you know what I've got a do these emails
but they can wait till tomorrow because
these moments with family for me this is
it's not just uh sort of quality time
these are the memories my children will
have with their father or
not kind of
matters we should have the courage to
express my feelings now there's two
aspects of
this um the negative and the positive
let's start off with the negative
because part of what we need to do is
the courage to confront the difficult
conversations the difficult
conversations are crucially important
but much more importantly than those
it's the positive
ones because uh taking time to praise
other people to say thank
you uh it kind of matters and if you do
this
consistently it triggers uh a sort of
State called udonia what's called human
flourishing well-being uh your body is
just going to be healthier and it's just
in a business sense as well simple stuff
you can do uh great the great Jack Welsh
was famous presing a huge number of
handwritten cards saying thank you for
people uh now if you get a card from the
CEO of the company or some you know big
celebrity that's kind of that's a
memorable event for most people uh and
uh so getting to this habit of praising
people saying thank you is crucially
important next one I wish I'd stayed in
touch with my
friends
now friends is a particularly important
one here
because it's so easy with all of this
sort of work bubble pushing the other
ones spend less time with the people we
care about and my definition of friends
I mentioned earlier was these are the
people that when you spend time with
them you feel
energized you feel that kind of uh that
energy you come away from it with your
mojo there's been a number of studies
one done in Sweden one done in the US
longitudinal studies one of them over 16
years and controlling for all other
factors they found something remarkable
if uh you don't spend time with your
friends if you're more socially isolated
during the time of the study you had a
50% higher mortality
rate now it's kind of scary this but if
you're not going to spend time with your
friends well you're kind of screwing up
and there may come a time later in life
when you really do regret
it and finally and the most important
one here for me I wish I'd let myself be
happier now what this isn't saying is I
wish I'd been
happier what this is saying I was I wish
I'd let myself be happier for me the
most powerful thing here about happiness
is not trying to control
everything uh because you can't control
everything the one thing you can control
more than anything else is not what
happens to you it's how you respond uh
to what happens to you that is the
ultimate thing uh you can control so the
advice here about how to manage stress
how to be happier well that the um
there's a quotation here in fact it's a
prayer uh that for me gets at the heart
of the issue and I offer this to you in
no religious sense but much rather
because the advice contained in it is
psychologically absolutely right
and it's called The Serenity Prayer by
reinold neber who said God grant me the
serenity to accept the things I cannot
change the courage to change the things
I can and the wisdom to know the
difference this is just
brilliant because if you can't change
something just let it
go that's part of it but the real
challenge here is Having the
courage to change the things we can
because there are things in your
life that are Nob brainers things you
should be doing
differently the question is are you
actually going to do them
differently um and it takes real courage
any change event any good event any bad
event uh you have a choice how you
respond you can either see it as an
opportunity or you can see it as a
threat and in the words of uh Frederick
ner uh famous what doesn't kill me makes
me stronger you really do have a
choice to choose how you respond when
things happen to you all of us there are
things in our life we know we should be
doing
differently they're kind of obvious if
we're not careful we will end up
regretting them so why don't we do the
things we know we should be doing this
is the question that probably I think
about more than any other question in my
working career here at London Business
School why don't we do it because we
know what we should be
doing I want to give you an example of
this uh a medical example uh we I said
I'd come back to heart disease the
biggest killer in the world today uh and
um uh if you have you know heart disease
and they catch it in time uh they
typically do something called bypass
surgery I less than they used to uh but
this is still the main intervention and
if we just take data from the US here um
they do more than half a million of
these graphs and angioplasties every
year whilst it keeps you alive it
doesn't stop the heart disease in fact
it only prevents a future heart attack
in 3% of patients and within one year of
your first Heart Attack One in four men
will die and one in three women will die
but a lot of these are unnecessary
because what happens is after you have
your surgery the doctor comes in sits
down and says great news the surgery was
successful
however you need to change your
lifestyle that's the point around heart
disease uh you need to change your
lifestyle uh so the classic medical
advice here is uh if you're a smoker
give up
smoking uh you might want to eat a
little bit more healthily and take a bit
more
exercise change your lifestyle over here
death over here that's about as simple a
mod of as you thought you could get but
in this
situation what percentage of these
patients actually Chang their
lifestyle kind of scary here's one of
the leading cardiologists in the US Dr
Edward Miller who said if you look at
people after their bypass uh surgery two
years later 90% of them have not changed
their lifestyle and that's been studied
over and over and over again can you get
a sense of his frustration here a lot of
people say Well I'm I'm going to try and
give up smoking I'm going to try and do
this uh I'm going to set a New Year's
resolution which is one of the stupidest
things that you can do um don't try in
the words of the great uh Guru Yoda no
try not do or do not there is no try so
here's some advice what action can you
take to really help you coat well uh
you've got to take more control of your
time uh you know emails all the time
meetings kind of a crisis in most
organizations and studies are done over
the last 10 years over 95% of Executives
say that emails got out of
control and over 95% of Executives say
that meetings in our organization are a
mess they're inefficient and
ineffective so in your working life take
control of your time uh and certainly
take control of your mental energy uh
when you're in your 20s you kind of
throw your mental energy around and all
sorts of things as we get older
hopefully we get better at focusing
energy on the stuff that really
matters secondly spend time for your own
renewal with all these other things it's
very easy to say well I don't matter got
to focus on my work focus on the kids on
my partner and all these other
commitments uh and uh not on yourself
this is both on your well-being in terms
of diet and
exercise uh but also those hobbies and
interest things that keep your mojo High
because if you don't have a high Mojo it
damages all of your relationships to
make sure you do get some time for the
things that matter for
you own your own
decisions aim for Clear realistic goals
don't set yourself up to fail set
yourself up to succeed if you get into a
habit of at the end of the day saying
yes I've achieved what I set out to you
today then just psychologically you're
in the right kind of Zone and you're
building the right momentum there you're
building that sort of
confidence uh create non-negotiables
this is probably the most profound one
for me uh because um the boundaries
around work have just
evaporated you got to create boundaries
not just around work you got to create
boundaries around all the things that
are important to you in your life
boundaries around time with your partner
boundaries around time with your friends
boundar around time for you uh your
Fitness your well-being uh time with
family whatever it is that's important
to you uh and get help a friend to keep
you on course uh and uh if you are going
to go to the gym then you know if you
possibly can meet a friend there because
then if you don't turn up what why the
hell weren't you there it's kind of
pretty uh pretty compelling to get you
out of bed in the morning this so far
has talked about you and your personal
resilience what I want to do for the
last 10 minutes here is really focus on
organizational
resilience uh because uh there's a real
risk here uh that uh whilst it's our
responsibility to take control of our
own lives uh what kind of organizations
are we creating what kind of environment
are we creating around us and I want to
really focus here just briefly on
something called dunbar's number because
Robin Dunbar is an anthropologist who
didn't analysis of our human
brains and um what is TR to do using an
analysis called neocortex ratio is
figure out for the average human being
how many active stable social
relationships uh can we cope with and he
came up with a rather precise number 148
um another group of anthropologists did
a very different analysis they were
looking at all of the hunter gatherer
Societies in the world today and
apparently there are 19 of them and they
found something remarkable wherever they
were around the globe the average size
of the community was exactly the same
and it typically been stable for tens of
thousands of years the average size of
these
communities
148 now this could be a coincidence of
course but there's something I want to
argue here that is fundamental about the
nature of human Community because human
beings have lived in villages tribes of
around 150 people throughout history in
our lives today today kind of feels a
bit different to this because in the
1880s following the Industrial
Revolution and the American Civil War
the entire fabric of human Community
exploded with the birth of these massive
organizations often hundreds of
thousands of people working in the same
plant now how do you get things to
happen in this
environment well the answer was provided
in 1911 by the book that I would argue
is the most influential Business book of
the 20th
century uh written by a guy called
Frederick Winslow Taylor it was called
the Principles of Scientific Management
and tailor ISM as it sometimes was known
uh became and still is in many ways the
dominant model that we really use to
define our organizations
today because what Taylor said in in
this book is in the past the man has
been first in the future the system must
be first
and this is the world we live in today a
world of rules a world of processes a
world of bureaucracy and the benefits
are
breathtaking this Mass standardization
as Henry Ford called it any color so
long as it's black the benefits to
society are just
breathtaking uh life expectancy has uh
more than doubled in this time uh you
know food is available all year round
international travel is relatively uh
cheap and extremely safe how do you do
that well Mass
standardization uh there's a
standardized process every flight you go
on uh you'll have a safety briefing
you'll have a seat belt you have to go
through the same security process that's
how you give these benefits to society
but there's a problem embedded in
scientific management I think it's quite
a fundamental problem and the problem is
this uh and it's not new even during
Henry Ford's lifetime the Ford Motor
Company lost its dominant position in
fact it took them 70 years to tear it
back
because uh Along came a very different
organization with a very different
leader who wasn't obsessed by control uh
the great Alfred P Sloan and we still
have the Sloan Masters program at London
Business School uh in his honor and
Sloan said you know what there's a funny
thing here at GM we pay for their hands
for their physical
labor get their heads for
free and ever since
1911 organizations have been struggling
with how do you actually get people to
care about the organization to go beyond
the bare minimum if you use the language
of today we talk about Employee
Engagement when you look at the data of
Employee Engagement studies it's kind of
depressing most people in most
organizations don't want to be there in
fact over half of them are actively
looking for jobs elsewhere so how do we
actually create uh these engaged
organizations how do you create an
organization where people actually
care well um a good example of this uh
is Southwest Airlines in the last 20
years Southwest Airlines every single
year has been the most profitable
airline in the US domestic uh airline
industry uh it's got the lowest prices
uh the best departures and arrivals best
baggage hand you know it is just the
best airline how do you create that
airline in a horrible
Market uh it's not the rules the
processes it's simple if you treat
people as adults they behave as
adults if you actually create an
environment where you actually look
after each other where you put the
people
first that's what defines Southwest
Airlines and there's a professor at
Barkley called uh uh Daka Kelner who's
doing some very uh important research
now that says if you treat people well
you'll make more money you'll be more
successful than if you don't and this
ability to create these kind of
organizations uh more human
organizations uh that for me is really
at the heart of how we build a confident
Organization for the future so let me
try and wrap this up with a final
quotation uh and
um uh this is from the great Mark Twain
who said 20 years from now you'll be
more disappointed
by the things that you didn't do than by
the ones you did do so throw off the bow
lines the ropes sail away from the Safe
Harbor don't get to that stage where you
have regrets and it's lack of courage to
really stand back from the alligators
and really think about what really
matters to me that I urge you to take
away from this afternoon thank you very
much
than

---

### The challenge of making it happen l London Business School
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bz-37FePEO8

Idioma: en

good afternoon and the very first thing
to say is what a pleasure it is to see a
lot of familiar faces for those of you
who' not met me before I'll just say a
little bit about my my own my own
background um and um I was reminded of
this because um I was recently at a
30-year reunion from my own MBA program
30 years um and what I did um after
finishing my MBA um in the US was to
follow a well trodden path into strategy
Consulting are there any strategy
Consultants current ones past and
reformed ones here in the room apart
from me and we've got we've got a number
of a number of um strategy Sinners or
Saints here in the room on the
Consulting side what a lot of
Consultants of course do after a while
is to roll up their sleeves and um move
across the Great Divide and um instead
of selling advice um become buyers of
advice I I moved into industry as group
strategy director for a large
multinational firm and I have to say it
was the perfect opportunity to get my
revenge on my former
colleagues from the Boston Consulting
Group as it happened who were desperate
to sell me very high-priced advice which
I was able to beat down ruthlessly and
then and then in more recent times and
then more recent times I've been here
with with all of you um as a strategy
Professor here here at London business
school now what when we come back to
what strategy should be about um at
least on a good day it should be all
around the question what next and what
we would love as strategists would be
able to realize those hopes for riding
the next wave of performance uh or even
making that wave um we'd also like to be
able to banish those fears and
fundamentally that's the central
question that we're looking to address
as strategy people back in the day um
what strategy people did was very much
focused on formulating strategy it was
very much around the the great strategic
idea the answer to the question what are
we going to do my colleagues who I've
kept in touch with at BCG at Boston
Consulting Group now say that what we
called in in the day 30 years ago the
strategy is now just the
proposal it's now just the proposal you
have to do the work they were saying in
order to get the work um because the
answer to the question um where will
Advantage come from from how will we
banish those fears and realize the hopes
is perhaps less now to do with the way
in which we formulate strategy and more
down to the way in which
we execute execute um which is the the
theme I hope we can explore but let's
personalize it because um given that
I've spent my entire career pretty much
30 years of it in the strategy field I
feel pretty strongly about strategy
questions um but what about all of us
for example one way or another how much
time do any of us in the room currently
spend on anything to do with strategy
how many of us would say we spend a lot
of our time formulating strategy show
show of
hands very interesting very interesting
for a strategy Professor who might have
been teaching lots of good courses on
strategy formulation that looked to me
like how many hands went
up and again it was a rather low
question what does a lot of time mean um
but I but I don't think we had more than
a dozen hands going up how many of us in
the room spend a lot of our time
executing strategy sh of hands now look
around um so that does that does rather
point doesn't it to what should be the
balance in the curriculum in other words
emphasis on the what yes 12 people put
their hands up but when we come back to
the how that's Universal around the room
um over the next 5 years looking ahead
how many of us would expect to spend
less time on anything to do with
strategy more time sh of
hands and do you expect strategy to um
get easier or harder as you look ahead
who'd
say why why who who'd like to who'd like
to kick us off why harder
complexity complexity if we Define it is
all about
interconnectedness more connections it's
become a much more connected World on
multiple Dimensions therefore much more
complex I do a lot of work with some of
the large Global Professional Service
firms but also in the London Business
School context with um a range of firms
large small who come through our doors
on our executive education programs and
pretty much universally
the answer to the question will what got
us here get us there is no because of
the way in which context has been
changing how many of us in the room uh
enjoy sailing do we have any Sailors oh
we got a lot of sailors excellent so um
what's happening in the
picture we've got the Spiner up and we
would only put the Spiner up if we had
um a good steady relatively gentle
Tailwind um and uh again without wanting
to to overdue the metaphor it may be
that these are the conditions in which a
number of us a number of our leaders a
number of our organizations um came of
age there's um an economist that um a
number of you will have come across mvin
king um who is um running the bank of
England well Deputy Governor um was part
running the bank of England who talked
about the great moderation uh and the
great moderation according to mvin was
the period which began in roughly 1989
and ran for nearly two decades in which
measures of volatility by just about
every count got greatly
compressed in other words um we were
finding that there was the same steady
wind behind all of our
boats and uh we could see out into the
distance in this picture because it's
rather a nice day uh of course then the
weather changed didn't it how many of
believe that um gentle Tailwinds are
about to
return that's called a rhetorical
question um mind you you have to be very
very careful with forecasts and I can't
resist here stealing um a line from a
very good friend and colleague of mine
who I'm sure many of you know Andrew
Scott
macroeconomist um who indeed worked very
closely with mvin King at the time the
notion of the great moderation was being
formulated and um some of you may have
um been been taught by Andrew the three
rules of forecasting rule number one if
you make a forecast never give a
number you can say it's going to go up
or it'll go down if you give a number
you never give a
date because one day you'll be proved
right whatever you said this is
sometimes called the stop clock theory
of forecasting and we've seen seen a lot
of use of that made recently by British
politicians and the third rule of
forecasting is if you give a number and
a date then never come
back now now in your
organizations I'm sure you'll talk about
a range of Mega Trends which are shaping
the future uh and of course the picture
in Emerging Markets which many of us
would have been blly optimistic about as
drivers of growth a few years back um
looks um looks rather Rocky at the
moment but it would be ridiculous to say
that there's no Headroom for growth left
in China India and um Brazil it's much
more a question of when we see the
return um but of course it's going to be
a very Rocky ride isn't it we're we're
not going to be looking at smooth
patterns of growth in Emerging Markets
there'll be many capacity
bottlenecks um it's going to be a stop
go process or um a go stop go back go
forward process in other
words we're looking at a pattern of
growth looking ahead but probably highly
disruptive growth we see social
transformation this is a McKenzie
forecast looking at a more than doubling
of um what they call the global middle
class and um we could continue to extend
the list but fundamentally all of those
um we could regard as being drivers of
growth but at the same time drivers of
growth and disruption there's some
interesting work that's been done at
Harvard on
volatility um look looking at the
dispersion of profitability between
firms in given sectors across cycles and
what stands out is what we might
intuitively expect which is to say that
in the era of the great
moderation the great moderation when
there was the Gentle Wind coming from
behind propelling all boats pretty much
evenly the variance of profitability
became very low in other words the gap
between winners and losers in given
sectors became much less than in periods
of higher volatility higher volatility
much more dispersion of
profitability much bigger gap between
the winners and the losers all around
the opportunities and threats and who's
going to seize them or avoid them first
and fastest so the Holy Grail of
strategy was
always sustainable competitive advantage
and
um what's the issue here not that
competitive advantages are relevant but
that much of what we used to rely on uh
if we come back to some of the classic
language of strategy we talk about the
the ability to succeed because we create
value we capture value at the same time
and this is suggesting that the rules
for Value capture and value creation are
going to be changing much faster so a
given competitive Advantage will not be
to the same extent a rock on which we
can build our whole corporate edifice a
lot of the work I'm doing with
professional service firms is exactly
around this which is um welcome to a
different world welcome to a different
world we may as magic circle firms in
law have felt that we had a rock solid
Advantage customer lockin um but in fact
even the nature of what the legal sector
is is starting to converge convergence
volatility um which those of you who put
your hands up have been dealing with um
for many a year um also now come right
to the four um for all of us sustainable
competitive Advantage I think we now
have to talk about transient competitive
Advantage so the issue then uh is how we
renew so back to the sailing conditions
where's the wind coming from now over
the last three plus years we've been
running a research initiative which is
also a learning initiative uh on
where Advantage might lie in terms of
how we how we execute so we run a one
week executive open program we typically
take about 30 senior middle managers a
time and as well as running a course we
we also collect data what we do is to
ask each participant ahead of time ahead
of time to carry out a 360 degree survey
uh on effectively on execution in their
own organization around some themes um
which I'll share with you very shortly
um so effectively this is allowing us to
identify execution bottlenecks to see
what patterns can be seen across
different sectors looking at what might
make it really difficult in this more
turbulent world to get our crew to move
fast across the deck of that boat and
pick up the sounds of the waves breaking
on the rocks in the distance from the
old days there are some myths or let's
say biases if we were going to be kinder
in strategy execution which we believe
need to be countered the first myth that
um we are looking to T
is the idea that execution is really
about vertical alignment so here's the
golden thread where we Define the
strategy the vision if you like it gets
embedded in the plan um we would then
Define kpis individual and team
objectives um and then we'd um provide
some feedback on performance does anyone
lived in an execution model of this
kind no um let's let's be clear um that
a place for vertical alignment um what
we're talking about here is is undue
emphasis in one organization I work with
they talk about cascading the strategy
have you ever heard that term cascading
the strategy I I find it's very
interesting to um examine these
metaphors that we use uh in business
life what in real life is a
Cascade it's a waterfall what direction
does the water go in and if you're
standing underneath the waterfall you
get very wet and rather annoyed um so so
immediately there's questions about
reversal of the flow but there is a such
a strong bias in so many organizations
towards this and what we believe is that
it comes from an underlying view of
hierarchy because if we think of a firm
as a
hierarchy then very naturally we'll
think of execution as vertical alignment
because we'll have been relying
essentially on organization design um to
do the job for us now um we've already
identified one concern one concern which
is this is all one way but what else
might be an immediate concern that leaps
out at us as we look at this what's
missing yeah so here we're asking
questions about horizontal coordination
how how are we making those links across
not just the links down the vertical
chain which starts to be
crucial doesn't if we're looking to
create Solutions which typically involve
connecting different product and service
Arenas it starts to be crucial for
Innovation which typically is about
boundary Crossing uh and indeed uh if
we're if we're missing horizontal
coordination um at that level then we
may find that our ability for example to
work with others becomes severely
limited but using a different lens we
asked ourselves what would it be like if
we s saw the organization as being
predicated not so much on power but on
commitments promises and um those uh
what you've got here on the screen is
simply
um a download from Facebook you can plot
your map of relationships as Facebook
would see them pretty easily any
relationship that has any meaning
carries with it some degree of
commitment um which is um about promises
and it's about promises that bring about
trust and it could well
that the crucial carriers of performance
commitments in our organization have
very little to do with the formal
hierarchy and of course those
commitments would go beyond firm
boundaries and we'd already touched on
this how many of us in the room know
armm based in Cambridge I find this a
fascinating organization it's one of the
UK's rather rare um technology success
stories if you have um an
iPhone or a Samsung Galaxy or any
handheld device device inside it you
will have arm technology um effectively
armm technology arm technology uh is all
about the chipset that governs power
consumption and enables low power
consumption so you don't have to have
one of those huge batteries that you see
in movies about mobile phones from the
1980s and your phone doesn't burst into
flames as it might with high power
consumption so armm indeed do create
these designs but it goes much further
than that because armm around those
designs create and manage an ecosystem
and it's an ecosystem which in many
cases involves no transactions no money
is changing hands however the effective
coordination and cooperation of those
ecosystem members is absolutely critical
for arm success um but none of them
actually work for
armm in other words we've moved Beyond
if you like the hierarchical model to
one which is about um influence so the
oems might for example be apple and so
then the question would be just how good
a job are we doing at the horizontal
dimension of alignment not just within
our organization but beyond its walls
because I'd argue that many of us if
we're going to succeed in this world of
transient competitive Advantage will
indeed need to be highly effective in
working swiftly with others outside our
own boundaries so um we'd mention that
everyone coming on that program
executing strategy for results completes
a 360 degree survey and one of the
questions is who can I rely on who
delivers the goods I can rely on X to do
what he or she says they will all of the
time or most of the time and it turns
out that people can rely on their boss
um about 85% of the time um direct
reports about
83% probably because they wouldn't stay
direct reports for very long if the
score was rather lower than this but
then when we come to colleagues and
we're talking here about colleagues in
other units and partners partners
meaning partner
organizations oops then we're then we're
talking we're talking about um a much
lower degree of reliability now I just
stress this is aggregate data uh and it
starts to get even more interesting when
you when you break it down when you
break it down by sector and by geography
but it's coming out of roughly
now 8,000 respondents from about um 300
300 companies and if we do need
horizontal alignment this starts to um
raise some very important questions in
terms of what we're doing at or we're
not doing now um from our own personal
experience what happens when we can't
rely on our colleagues DIY does that
ring bells around the room um now what
else might we
do you're not getting any cooperation
from him and it's a crucial project and
you know you're going to be judged on
the success of that
project he doesn't work for you what
will you do talk to his boss talk to his
boss ah right so um this we call
escalation escalation um which um in
some organizations seems to become a
primary strategy execution tool for that
reason so as we escalate um to his boss
then you're going to escalate to her
boss presumably and then they'll
escalate to their bosses and um then
life in the boardroom is going to start
to get really depressing um because um
what we'll be doing up there in the
boardroom on the executive committee is
dealing with these endless endless uh
escalations on a bad day what we might
do in order to deal with this is to say
I've had enough of the escalations so
now we're going to have a proper plan to
deal with it which makes it absolutely
clear what everyone's job is and what
they're expected to
contribute the problem I believe the the
correct term quote from count Von muler
who reformed the Prussian Army um is no
plan and survives first Contact um with
with the Enemy um so again we won't be
able to address this by relying on the
plan will we so then the question might
go further which is what is
fundamentally our execution Challenge
and this we believe is one of the major
sources of confusion um which is to say
in some cases the important challenge is
coordinating across units but not always
for example um if we're trying to do a
turnaround disaggregation may be very
important um it's no coincidence that PE
houses private Equity houses that
essentially look to do turnarounds um
look to keep units very separate not
least because eventually we want to sell
them and we don't want to have created a
tangled web which will make it
extraordinarily difficult to unplug uh
an invested business the question there
is as we coordinate more effectively
across units do we also then become
somewhat less flexible in terms of being
able to adapt to shifting circumstances
so one of the key questions is which of
these is going to be most important
because all of of them are in fact
intention um it's not going to be
possible realistically at a given point
in time to be a superstar on all three
of those Dimensions it could be that the
balance shifts over time Nokia not the
old Nokia but the new Nokia um the old
uh noia Sean networks as it were and um
the leadership challenge there was to
call the change which is to say the the
the execution priority has been during
the darkest days of Nokia's
underperformance
has been indeed all about vertical
alignment but now now we've done the
Alcatel deal um what we're looking to do
is to shift gear because um coordination
across what we've created with Alcatel
Lucent the solutions might be that we
might be providing um has become the
crucial piece so for any of us in the
room um it might be worth keeping in
mind that
question what is the execution challenge
primarily now in our
organizations and how might we we how
might we see that shifting as we look
ahead here are a few more
myths the third one might strike you as
odd because a lot of organizations put
huge efforts into communicating strategy
one senior middle manager of a company
will be nameless said actually he needs
to understand the strategy said I need
to understand the strategy but it's my
job not just to pass on the PowerPoint
it's my job to translate the strategy
into a set of executable
priorities because the issue is not have
I seen the bubble charts and the 2 by2
matrices um nor is it uh about um some
level of understanding about how we're
here to make the world a better place
important as that is from the standpoint
of emotional buyin but my question if
you want me to execute your strategies
just what is it that you want me to do
um and why does it matter and who else
does it matter to so in other words if
we're coming back to the question of
coordination the horizontal coordination
um again back to what you want me to do
who do you really want me to do it with
so this would then come back to the
theme of
priorities let's say priorities rather
than the strategy and the organizations
we were working with pretty much all
have Employee Engagement surveys often
the employee engagement surveys have um
something like what we see in the top
box here do you agree with the statement
I am clear on the firm's top priorities
and then what we find from the sample is
that 84% of managers agree with that
statement we asked the same managers to
list the company's five top priorities
actually it was the priorities for their
own unit um less than half of two of
half of direct reports could list two of
the five this by the way might be a very
interesting exercise for any of us to
carry out because um even before we get
to the how do you want me to do it and
with whom um just what might those
priorities be um without wanting to to
be awfully depressing um we we kind of
um made it a little bit easier rather
than the top five how many of you can
get the top three and um again in this
sample of um uh now 8,000 people or
thereabouts coming from some illustrious
companies which might even be
represented in this room
who knows um we were finding that if you
just made it one priority um you'd get a
somewhat higher hit rate and uh you saw
on the slide a little earlier that
rather forbidding German character um
count Von muler who reformed the
Prussian Army um after a disastrous
defeat at the hands of the French who
are the who are the French people here
in the
room excellent so so this was the Battle
of yena the battle of yena and you have
the yenna by the Eiffel Tower I believe
and this is where Napoleon defeated the
best Army in Europe the prussians
because they were the the best trained
they could March in time better than any
other army they could shoot more
accurately they were the best but they
were smashed and in the in the uh
examination of the ashes that followed
um an Insight um which was a very
important Insight not just for military
history Buffs but in this context around
the quality of commitment was that um
the Prussian Army had been trained very
much on the basis of what mka called
beels tactique beel translates from the
German as an order be's tactique so the
notion was that you'd be given an order
and you'd pass it down the line um the
problem then arises in the fog of War
when the chain of command is
broken as a sensible Soldier what do you
do when no more orders are coming wait
wait you stop you wait you wait so the
question was could we move in terms of
the nature of the commitment that was
being asked from be's tactique to arr's
tactique um which when the arrag would
be much more defined as um there's still
an element of command in it but it's the
level of purpose it's providing the
reason why so if we understand the
reason why and if we have been trained
to understand the reason why then when
the chain of command is broken what
might we be able to
do think think and adapt also we learn
the skill of not cluttering our
subordinates with too many commands um
in other words um we're able to ensure a
much better signal to noise ratio and
those reforms around arrag tactique um
were fundamental in um re-energizing
that particular organization with
somewhat mixed blessings um some decades
later of course but it would come back
again for us to the question when we're
talking of priorities do we have an
understanding of the what um are we
providing some tools for the how and um
have we also um addressed the why um
because let's be clear in turbulent
environments we're not going to get it
right all the time are we but what we do
want is to have large numbers of
people assuming that our organization
has large numbers of people or our
ecosystem contains large number of
people making more or less the right
decisions most of the time um and given
the challenges of turbulence if we can
pull that one off then we will have
built a very powerful and much more
sustainable source of competitive
Advantage now here's a fourth myth uh
sometimes execution I've found gets
confused with operational excellence
operational excellence is doing the
thing right but as well as doing the
thing right there's the question
of doing the right thing doing the right
thing um which brings us into the theme
of resource
allocation and um this chart may be a
bit of a site test for those of you at
the back um but it's a summary of what
to me at least is some very interesting
work um done by Steven Hall at McKenzie
um looking at the
implications of
dynamically allocating resources from
year to year or simply sitting on your
hand as a resource allocator so the
comparison um is to do with the degree
to which your allocation of capex
capital expenditure is essentially the
same as what you've got last year if
that's the case the correlation index um
will be up at one the lower it is on
that chart the more we find that you
won't necessarily have the resources
that you had allocated last year this is
about Capital spending but it could be
about it and it could be about Talent
and um from this survey um which is
called how to put your money where your
strategy is um the evidence is
that if you are not a dynamic resource
allocator then your performance measured
here is TSR total shareholder returns um
is likely to suffer so not surprising uh
as new opportunities and new threats
emerge the question again um is you know
are we biting the bullet um in terms of
having the tough conversations about
resource reallocation
because again this is a line taken from
Steven in many companies Investments
like War which is to say it's easy to
start
one and um in their survey in the
McKenzie survey um typically middle
managers said not much of a problem
getting hold of resources particularly
if we built up a bank of credibility
over T over time um but what is the
problem with it may be easy to start one
but very difficult to get out of one um
so here was The crucial question um
around exiting too slowly or struggling
to exit and it's not just about the
waste of resources but it's also about
the emotional wear and tear so you've
got some initiative which should have
been um painlessly put to sleep years
ago but it's someone's baby and you're
the person who's now got to say I'm
sorry it's an ugly baby um which um
again again starts to come down to the
kind of discipline that we're going to
need that we're going to need as that as
that um portfolio of opportunities New
Opportunities and new dangers um starts
to shift now performance culture uh how
many of us how many of us in the room
would um like to have a performance
culture in their organizations so we
reward performance show of
hands we like
that because we want people score those
goals don't we if the challenge is
fundamentally vertical alignment
vertical alignment then what we
typically call the performance culture
where we're rewarding individual
performance down the hierarchy could
make perfect sense but what we found
again in our survey in our execution
survey was some disturbing results so
for example considering
adaptation um of the eight roughly 8,000
managers in the survey more than half
were saying that experiment ation and
failure had hurt their career at least
to some degree that ring bells
yes then when it comes down to
coordination 15% was saying that issues
got addressed promptly U if it hit their
numbers um but
otherwise if you want to follow the
gypsy's warning get your own job done
first before you start collaborating
with others and um then 2/3 um
regardless by the way of whether or not
this was identified as the challenge or
that but two-thirds of the people in the
sample were saying that individual
performance was the top driver of
promotion decisions so again we would
want to come back to the classic
question um what are we really seeking
to achieve then what are we really
seeking to measure then what are we
really seeking to reward Here's the
final
one the problem you don't you don't you
don't what we're are after here is
identifying what we've been calling the
distributed leaders in the organizations
of those who were coming on this program
and taking the survey and um I like I
like the last one um Steve Jobs's test
which is if you are leaving for a new
company and could take a hundred people
from your current company who would they
be the importance of this is that the
distributive leaders back to that web
that network of commitments are those
who are commanding the key nodes um
they're often the cross- pollinators if
we're talking about the translation of
the strategy into executable priorities
they will very often be those who are
doing that they will be the people who
in fact are effectively collaborating
with other distributed leaders across
your organization if we've got the the
what and the why and the have the
priorities clear so again where we might
find Once More in a highly turbulent
environment um execution Falling Down is
where we've simply
looked at the organogram from the top
rather than identifying who are the
holders not necessarily of
organizational power from a structural
sense um but who are the holders of of
influence so so just in summary um if
we're if we're looking at the relatively
new world which is not a new world for
many of you in the tech sector where
volatility and uncertainty and
complexity ambiguity the vuka world has
been around for a while but more and
more of us I believe if we're not doing
so already um we'll have to ask
ourselves just to what extent are we
building an execution Advantage by
moving from what may have served us
perfectly well when we had the wind
behind us and the sper on our boat up um
to what's now going to serve us I hope
um in in in a world that's Much More
Much More turbulent if it is a world
that we've got to discover progressively
rather than thinking about the linear
approach approach to strategy um my
colleague don don suul um talks about
replacing lines with loops and the the
notion of the strategy Loop is that the
first part of it is about making sense
making sense of um an an ambiguous
situation then from making
sense the question is making choices
what are we going to do um not do what
are we going to stop doing from choice
we come to commit M um which is all
about the tough discipline that means
that the choice we've actually made
really has some teeth what do we have to
do with the top left close the loop so
this is where we're making revisions and
the key here the key here to my mind uh
and this is back to the the leadership
challenge is that these are very
different
conversations they're very different
conversations let's remember unless
we're at the sharpest Edge in our
organizations where we're physically
coding software or using screwdrivers
and hammers the only tools we have are
words when we're making choices um this
is where we want to have a debate a
debate with people taking up a position
and arguing for it and defending it when
we want to make it happen the debate is
over and this is about what's the nature
of your commitment um is there a good
promise Happening Here conversely is
there a good ask uh the tone when we're
making revisions the wheels have come
the wagon didn't work out as expected
what's the worst thing we can do at that
point the blame game the blame game way
back um the Boston Consulting Group
where I worked had a tool that they
called The Experience curve and the
notion was that as you gained experience
you'd improve on cost uh or on
technological Discovery you'd move down
the experience curve but if you indulged
in the blame game what would be the
slope of the experience
curve it'll be absolutely flat because
there been no learning and therefore no
competitive Advantage the final point is
really this when we come back to success
um is it about the hand we had dealt or
is it about the way we play the hand and
um the session's been um
really pushing very hard for the way we
play the hand um to be the source of
competitive Advantage rather than Market
position the resource based view that
you took in in your core strategy course
at lbs so I hope I hope this has been
useful and interesting and um I have to
say it's been a real pleasure to
reconnect wonderful to have you back
[Applause]

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