The Future-Ready Mindset - Episode 7

Key Takeaways

When you look at leaders today, I think it's more challenging than ever before. We live in a world of constant change, extreme volatility. I call it the never normal. And I really believe that leaders have to spend time on today and tomorrow or even what I call the of yesterday. But I really believe that you need to carve out at least 10% of your time on what I call the day after tomorrow. Because in a world that is changing so quickly, that is no longer a luxury, but a must. [music] >> [music] [music] >> So in today's environment people tend to think high performing team must have lots of foresight and good idea. I get that. But the more critical thing these days is whether a team is able to create actually options because if we don't have options you get locked into a pre-exist solution and boy when the market change we get stuck. So the best company I've seen the highest performing team that I've seen they actually embrace what I call or some psychologists would call premortm. You imagine the worst and think about a plan B from day one. Now this is not about demoralizing. This is not about not being courageous. But in fact it free up our fear so that when things fall under our expectation the team is able to pivot with courage, speed and scale. People often ask me is it smarter to do incremental improvement or taking the risk to jump right into something transformative. I call these the classic dilemma of perform or transform. But in my work I looking across 400 different companies seven different industry. What I've discovered is that most future ready company they don't make it either or is perform and transform at the same time. The implication is we've got to scale up new capability, learn new skills to help us to do those incremental improvement faster, more efficiently and meanwhile you actually open up new path for growth. No more trade-off do it both. If you think about any successful company, keeping easy growth often times leads to complexity. Now complexity is very insidious because no one get the credit to simplify it. But if we don't simplify every single day just letting complexity to grow just chasing after easy growth when the top line looks good well boy we going to get collapsed under the weight of complexity. So the solution just being disciplined on simplified standardized before we even thinking about automate through AI. So principle number one is what I call the perform transform. Now notice that I call it perform and transform at the same time not either or because future ready company they deliver today and build tomorrow simultaneously. Now average company they behave like pendulum swing. Sometimes they perform sometimes they transform. When time is good, cash flows, they think about venture, startup, moonshot, free beer, pingpong table, bean bags. You know, we're this cool new little company, right? When time is bad, the moment revenue hit a snag or recession looms, the cost cutter arrived. Back to real business, please grind out the next quarterly earning. And that flip-flop in my mind is deadly because in order to scale up new capabilities it require actually a habit. It's almost like I want to stay fit. I sign up for the gym for one month and then decided to sit on the couch and eating donut for the next six. Scaling up new capabilities I learned requires a habit. So you ask how do I know I'm doing well? Glad you asked that. At the center, we actually measure this balance. We're looking at whether a company is able to generate cash, meanwhile invest aggressively in research development. Is it able to strengthen their core and meanwhile expanding into new marketplace? Well, paranoid optimism means that you focus on analyzing your environment. So it's factbased, it's data oriented and once you understand the environment, you understand what can go wrong. You don't shy away from looking at the weaknesses or challenges, but you come up with answers and solutions and plans and scenarios. And because you have done that work, you actually understand what you are facing and you have a good reason to be optimistic. because you can focus on the right things to mitigate the negatives and strengthen the positives. That's the best way to be an optimist rather than shutting your eyes from the dark side and then just hoping. If you want to act really quickly under surprising circumstances, you have pre-thought a number of key scenarios that might surprise you. And you don't have to guess exactly right. It's it's not so that you have to have pre-thought of a scenario which is identical to what actually happens. But if it's close, then some of the actions that you have thought you would take in the pre-planned scenario actually apply to what happened. And the fact that you have gone through these planning sessions with your colleagues has actually made all of you become better in reacting to surprises and mitigating them in advance. I think we spend most of our work week doing. We're just checking things off to-do list, reacting to email, reacting to meeting requests. And we should set aside one hour a week I call curiosity hour to spend time on strategic thinking, which says, should I be doing these things? Are there better things for me to be doing with my time? Are there zombies I need to get rid of? And most of us don't give ourselves the benefit of curiosity hour and strategic thinking during the week. There are people in this room who know what they do. But there are people in this room who in their professional capacity have no clue what they're doing. And if we would ask you to stand up, if in your professional life you have no clue what you're doing, there's a lot of peer pressure to keep sitting down. I understand that, right? But this guy is the king of people who has no idea what he's doing. I mean, if he says, "I'm going to land the rocket vertically on a barge in the ocean with 9 m waves," there must be thousands of NASA engineers saying, "You can't do that." He says, "I'm going to do it anyway." So, let me rephrase it. How many people in your company do you have that know what they're doing? How many people do you have that are comfortable doing things they've never done before? And I grew up in startups. In a startup, you have 99% people who are comfortable doing things they've never done before. If the company grows, the number changes. Google. Yeah, Meta is probably 50/50. Google is turning into an old company. And then I joined the board of a bank five years ago where you have 99% people say I know exactly what I'm doing cuz I've done it for 23 years. By the way, in an insurance company, it's even more pronounced than that. But who are the 1enters? I CALL THEM POSITIVE troublemakers and frustrated enthusiasts. And you know exactly in your team who I'm talking about. And the problem is that these 1enters don't spend all their energy innovating. They lose all their energy trying to change the 99%. [music] [music] >> [music]