Rishad Tobaccowala's Blog, page 14

Architect. Sculpt. Hone.

Photography by Christian Fletcher

These days waves of change, seas of surprises and tectonic tsunamis are transforming our landscapes on an almost weekly basis.

Rapidly accelerating AI.

Bank failures.

Tech and other layoffs.

China Cards. Russian Wars. Indian Nationalism.

And the list goes on.

Doom scrolling. Hyper ventilating. Dramatic emotions. Screeching headlines.

All of these are understandable human reactions as we grope to find a place to stand in rapidly shifting sands.

But nothing gets better at the end of the venting of feelings though we may feel better as we rail against a world out of control.

Rather let us embrace, respect and focus our feelings to align with the forces of change

It is a time to use the fuel of feelings to architect, to sculpt, and to hone ourselves so we can continue to thrive in the future.

It’s more up to ourselves than we think.

Photography by Christian Fletcher

Architect.

“The way we spend our time defines who we are.” Jonathan Estrin

One way to gain control is to architect one’s week in ways that time and its vagaries do not toss us around.

Consider setting aside an hour a day or seven hours a week to feed each of one’s physical, mental, emotional systems.

Physical operating system: A long walk or exercise.

Mental operating system: Learn or read or watch or do.

Emotional operating system:  Connecting with friends and family. Helping others.

Architecting one’s day to feed each of the operating systems is independent of income, employment status, or country in that they do not cost much if anything.

And no day where one has learned something, connected with somebody, and helped the body can be deemed a wasted day.

3 hours a day, 21 hours a week sets the foundation for the other 147 hours in mood, tempo, and control.

Build tomorrow by architecting today.

Photography by Christian Fletcher

Sculpt.

“Every block of stone has a statue inside it, and it is the sculptor’s job to release it” Michelangelo.

Every individual has one or more talents, and it is our job to find, feed and sculpt these talents.

Today we are increasingly in a world of builders, makers, creators, inventors and in sculpting something special out of raw materials is a way to find flow and make and leave one’s mark.

It may be writing or photography or video or writing code, cooking a meal, investing in a relationship, building a company or many other things but transforming and building is both an anti-dote and a homage to a transforming world.

We transform and are not just transformed.

Build things. Make stuff. Create something .Unleash potential.

We can release the statue within us or help others find the statue within them.

Photography by Christian Fletcher

Hone.

“To hone my voice, I read everything, from books to cereal boxes, three times: once for fun, the second time to learn something new about the writing craft, and the third time was to improve that piece.”  Amanda Gorman

In a world of change we must hone ourselves to align with change since change does not care to adjust to us.

Honing through iteration, upskilling, re-inventing, and many other ways of enhancing excellence of craft.

For many of us in the coming years it will be how to incorporate, build on, extend, and leverage AI as a tool, enabler, extender, and idea generator for our work.

How to find new ways to communicate and connect as Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality enable new canvasses.

Machines will replace people who do not hone their craft to incorporate machines but will not replace talent who hone skills to incorporate and complement machines.

We cannot control or impact what a world leader may do, what shocks may come or what others may have planned but we can twist ourselves and our skills into new shapes to make sure that we bend with the arc of the future and are not broken.

The future may not fit in the containers of the past.

But by architecting, sculpting and honing we will thrive in the container called the future.

Scale. Speed. Skill

Successful companies are adept at combining the power of scale, the leverage of skill and the swiftness of speed to win.

Technology companies like Apple and Samsung aided by their partners at places like Foxconn and TMCC continuously improve, iterate, and ship.

Many food and packaged goods behemoths are filled with highly skilled people who innovate and produce at huge scale and have significant clout with distribution and advertising channels.

This week we saw Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan Chase leverage his experience from the 2008 crash and his knowledge of the system with the scale of his bank and other leading banks to attempt to stabilize First Republic bank. These were huge organizations whose CEO’s moved rapidly proving that elephants can dance fast and quick if they need to under skilled leadership.

The challenge for successful organizations moving forward is not they do not have scale, skill, or speed but rather what happens as a new world emerges where the benefits of scale diminish, when new skills become critical but the ability to hire the newly skilled with the old incentives are reduced, and the speed of the world outstrips the speed of the organization.

Scale

In the past three years in the US all the net new jobs have been created by companies with fewer than 250 employees.

Modern technology including GPT4, influencer and social media and the explosion of marketplaces from AWS to Shopify to Upwork to manufacturing and fabrication on demand by scaled foundries allow individuals and small companies to scale quickly with very limited resources.

These new platforms, technologies and marketplaces are significantly reducing the benefits of some types of scale and many types of expertise.

Today the scale of manufacturing, communication spending, resources and people are being augmented by a new scale of network, data, influence, and talent/ideas.

The Mr Beast’s, D’Amelio sisters and Kardashian sisters leverage the new eco-system to scale their talent without having to become big as companies.

A new form of media company built around world class talent whose bylines are featured as prominently as their publications logo combined with simple and low cost/no cost distribution such as email has made Axios, Puck and now Semafor influential and impactful with dozens versus hundreds or thousands of employees.

Scale! is a short piece on how scale is changing and what leaders and companies can do to scale their companies but themselves.

Not only can individuals  now work at the scale of companies by upskilling, unleashing their talent, scaling through their teams, and building reputations as stellar as big firms but large companies now need to re-configure around talent rather than believing talent will cluster around companies.

The shift of power from big to small, management to talent, and from the towers of power to the talent with wrenches in the trenches has only just begun.

Skill

Every advance in technology places a premium on skilled ability.

Chat GPT, Runway ML, DALL·E 2, are modern paints and new canvases but in the hands of skilled painter (who has learned the new brush strokes necessary to unleash the potential of these tools) they can be far more magical than that of a lesser talent.

Ironically some of the skills in highest demand such as coding may become less scarce as the machine writes code, while the “softer” skills of creativity, curiosity, imagination, story telling and innovation which now will easily have all the facts, figures and charts at their disposal can connect dots in new ways by standing on the shoulders of machines to create new worlds and ways to wealth.

The demo of Microsoft’s Co-pilot which gives a glimpse of how AI will be weaved into the fabric of everything enabling individuals to have superpowers.

In today’s fast-moving environment, the half-life of skills decays much more quickly and unless one is continuously learning, enhancing capabilities, and upgrading talent a firm can suddenly find itself with herds of people skilled in yesterday’s tongue when the world is speaking a new language.

Today with 62% of Gen-Z having a side-hustle, free-lancers about to overtake full time workers and unbundled and distributed work offering a plethora of possibilities, large companies must re-invent themselves in every way to attract and retain talent.

Human resources, people development and talent leaders will become even more strategic to the fabric of the future company. Sadly, in the most recent round of layoffs many companies blew up their talent teams since they no longer were in “recruiting” mode.

Talent will matter more builds the case as to why talent will grow more and not less important in an AI and modern world of technology as we incorporate technology and re-design organizations around the best of people and machines.

Speed

It took nearly two weeks for Washington Mutual to fail.

It took less than two days for SVB to fail.

It took Instagram 2.5 years to reach 100 million users.

It took Tik Tok 9 months to do the same.

It took ChatGPT 2 months.

Moore’s law saw processing power double every 18 months. In the world of machine learning and large language models the rate of doubling or even tripling is less than six months.

Fueled by software, social media, and a twitchy and connected world everything is accelerating at a speed which is leaving most organizations feel tortoise like.

In a world of espresso too many companies are going through the rituals and machinations of high tea.

We should all evaluate how much of our time do we spend working on output and how much time in meetings, check-ins, sign-offs, all-hands, temperature checks and other group gropes where we gather like herds around PowerPoint slides.

Quality control, risk management and inclusive viewpoints require a process that for good reasons slow down production or delivery while enhancing the eventual output and are essential.

But too many companies may still be following processes for another age with too many people and too many check-ins. A study by Bain indicated that any project moves forward in an organization less than 5 percent of the time and is waiting for the next sign off or is on hold the rest of the time.

When the benefits of scale are reduced the lack of speed now becomes a bug rather than a feature of a large company.

Feedback, Re-Thinking Presentations, and Fewer reveal how large companies can move faster by actually providing feedback versus check-ins, curtailing long dog and pony presentations that wind their way through time and limiting the number of people involved in a project.

Implications.

Every leader, every company and every individual must determine how best to hone skill, create new scale and determine where and what to speed up. Some approaches to consider:

New Strategies: Many moats like scale will soon become prison walls unless companies learn to break free from their containers and mindsets of the past. Think different. Do different.

Outside perspectives critical:  Management and Boards need to look outside and below versus at people like themselves or upward.  By the time stuff gets to Davos it’s too late and often the opposite of what is actually going on. The future does not only come from the heavens and a cabal of insiders but from the slime and outsiders.

Scale is not bad but needs to be leveraged differently: Being scaled does not mean one cannot move at speed and build new skill sets. Just look at Microsoft over the past five years. Or how the New York Times has re-invented itself for a new world.

Openness is the key:  A mindset open to partnering which allows for speed and agility in incorporating new skill sets is important. An outlook open to other points of view when the future can come from anywhere and most importantly open to continuous learning in a world of change.

Focus and Flow

Photography by Rishad Tobaccowala

Bryan Wiener is one of the early digital pioneers who has created over half a billion dollars of shareholder value across the many companies he has either co-founded or helped grow and sell. He is best known for his leadership of 360i which he sold to Dentsu and his turnaround of Profitero which he sold to Publicis Groupe and which he continues to lead.

In the latest episode of the What Next? podcast titled “I am not Nostradamus” Bryan shares many learning and beliefs including:

a)     how large companies can innovate by becoming fast followers.

b)    how digital commerce will leak into everything and in doing so re-sculpt marketing and organizational design.

c)     how future organizations will be built with product at the core and service at the edge.

During our conversation a theme emerged on how successful individuals and organizations combine focus and flow.

Photography by Rishad Tobaccowala

Focus One: Right time/Right market.

Successful individuals and companies pick their spots and time to market.

Surprisingly the companies that succeed the most are not pioneers but fast followers.

They identify where consumer/customer behavior is outstripping current market supply or where existing business models are falling short and then they focus on improving upon the early pioneers.

Facebook, Google Maps, and the iPod were all fast followers to My Space, MapQuest, and Rio Player.

Moving too early requires years of investment in trying to find a product/market fit and moving too late means a crowded marketplace where margins are low, and differentiation is hard.

Large companies need to a) be ready to follow fast through acquisition and/or b) ensure they have focused teams that identify the small but about to become big marketplaces which the larger company may not be paying attention to.

Centralized innovation that does not utilize small teams focused on unaddressed markets, which are not sufficiently outward looking or too driven by the metrics of the big company is why too many companies burn through tens of millions without anything to show for the investment but power points and innovation offsites.

Photography by Rishad Tobaccowala

Focus Two: Outcome vs Activity and People versus Process.

We often confuse activity with outcome.

So much time spent on the sounds and processes of the colon versus the cool shit that is created.

We often forget its talent and people that drive success versus structures and processes.

A few great players aligned as a team but otherwise unleashed will overwhelm armies of mediocre people chanting some corporate song written in yesterday’s script.

Photography by Rishad Tobaccowala

Flow One: Commerce is flowing into every corner.

Twenty-seven years ago, Time-Warner launched the Full-Service Network in Orlando Florida which would combine television and on-line buying, broadcast, and commerce.

It went nowhere but did eventually lead to the disastrous AOL Time-Warner merger.

Today online companies like TikTok and Firework, Cooler Screens. emerging connected TV models and Walmart Connect, Amazon and Roundel are making this reality not just connecting video and commerce but re-thinking what next generation commerce can be.

It is greater than just e-commerce and is not on the side but encrusted everywhere.

We are moving into a world where a grocery store is a media company, a connected automobile is a huge part of commerce and Marriott is not just a hotel chain but a network to find, build relationships and sell to travelers.

Commerce has flowed into every corner of every enterprise and connection point.

Organizations must now learn to flow and be fluid and no longer fit into the old container of above the line, below the line and other containers of the past.

Digital transformation and modern marketing transformation is often about organizational transformation.

Eric Clapton sang “Let it Grow.”

Today it would be “Learn to Flow.”

Photography by Rishad Tobaccowala

Flow Two: Water over Rock aka Perseverance and Humility.

Today for the first time in 15 years the tech and digital media industries are facing very difficult times. Many people under 35 have never seen such tough situations which unfortunately got much worse this weekend due to the failure of one of the keys of the tech industry for over forty years (Silicon Valley Bank).

This too will pass.

During our conversation Bryan with over 25 years of ups and downs speaks about the importance of persistence.  The need to remain calm and harness emotions. The need for humility.

Right now, everyone is finger pointing and blaming each other: Silicon Valley Bank Collapse Sets off Blame Game in Tech Industry.

It is now that one must recognize that rock beating against rock just makes both rocks smaller.

“Water is fluid, soft, and yielding. But water will wear away rock, which is rigid and cannot yield. As a rule, whatever is fluid, soft, and yielding will overcome whatever is rigid and hard. This is another paradox: what is soft is strong” Lao Tzu

The game is long.

Technology is long too and from the advent of fire and the wheel is a key to  the advancement of humanity.

It is time to help. Time to resurrect. Time to show up.

Time to persevere.

Technology will go on and in fact is now integrated into every company. 

Every successful company will both be a product/tech company and a service/custom delivery company.

That is how things are built.

Flow on…

Fewer.

An underlying assumption many individuals, managers and businesses incorporate into our decisions and choices is the concept of maximizing.

While much of growth and well-being may be driven by more, a case could be made that less is what many should aim for if we are to solve problems, be happier and grow.

We are moving into an age of “fewer”.

Fewer things.

Fewer “managers”.

Fewer big companies.

Fewer people.

Which might give rise to greater rather the fewer opportunities.

1. Fewer things.

In a piece on Sustainable Commerce Rex Woodbury points out the following:

a)Brands overproduce more than $500B of goods annually. In many categories less than half the inventory is sold.

Source: Hannah Murdoch & Rebecca Kaden of USV and Shopify data

b) Much of this unsold product ends up in landfills like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which covers 1.6 million square kilometers in the Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and California. The garbage patch is growing exponentially, swelling 10x each decade since 1945.

c) Most of the fast retail clothing is worn fewer than 6 times and is tossed filling landfills

What if one of the most powerful ways to address environmental challenges is to buy, consume and sell less? 

2. Fewer Managers.

Listen carefully to many employees as to why they prefer working from home or away from the office and in addition to flexibility, freedom, and work-life balance it is that they are more productive away from micro-managing, controlling, monitoring, continuously checking in management.

The past 3 years of working from home and or hybrid work has revealed that many managers are in crisis because they were not really managers but monitors, not leaders but bosses, not problem solvers but project assigners, and the talent who they oversee have begun to wonder what actual value their managers create besides “managing”.

Managers are an important role but as wonderful survey of research by NPR “Why your bad boss will probably lose the remote-work wars” reveals much of the blather about the importance of returning to the office is because management has failed to re-invent itself and recognize that there is much less need for their hovering. That in person interaction is key for training, creativity and relationship building but a forced march to x days in an office may not be the way to achieve this.

Fewer great in person interactions versus doing work one can do at home from the office.

We have entered an age of “De-bossification”

In many industries particularly “White-collar” ones the era of “bosses” is in decline.

There is a rise in the need for leaders, guides, coaches, mentors, role-models, creators, and builders.

Less of a clamoring for bosses, managers, controllers, monitors, evaluators, and paper pushers.

This shift has been driven by changing demographics, the spread of technology, the rise of unbundled and distributed work, new behavior expectations, and a re-definition of what “work” is including the rise of fractionalized and free-agent talent who work for themselves or at multiple jobs and are expected to comprise most of the work force in the US by the end of the decade.

More and more companies like Meta are interrogating why they have so many levels of managers and do these managers create enough value and to offset their cost and the extra slowness multiple layers can create.

2023 will be the year of “The Great Flattening” as multiple layers of hierarchy are interrogated.

People think the threat of a recession will give the balance of power to managers over employees when the exact opposite is likely to be true where employees have many more options because of a new world of marketplaces and technologies and three years of recognizing that individuals succeeded without too much management will have Board look at the layers of bosses and cut real estate costs.

3. Fewer Big Companies.

A recent Wall Street Journal article, relying on labor data and an analysis from Jeffries, an investment banking and capital markets firm, determined that small companies were responsible for all of the net job growth since the start of the pandemic and accounted for four out of five job openings.  According to the government’s Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, companies with fewer than 250 employees hired 3.67 million more people than have been laid off or who quit since February 2020.  Larger companies, on the other hand, have cut a net 800,000 jobs during this time.

Increasingly scale is a disadvantage because modern technology, cloud computing, and marketplaces from Upwork to Shopify allow small firms and individuals to tap into scaled resources just in time while being agile and keeping costs flexible.

Technology is the slingshot that allows David to take on Goliath.

In addition to enabling technology there is a new mindset favoring small:

Over a third of Gen-Z have side-hustles and side-gigs as being a maker, owner, creator, influencer is far more compelling than being just a managed employee.

4. Fewer People

It takes 2.1 children per woman to keep the population flat.

That number in most advanced countries is less than 1.7 and declining.

The latest UN projections suggest that the world’s population could grow from 8 billion people to a peak of 10.4 billion before the end of this century. But if we exclude population growth in Africa the population of the world has peaked and, in a few countries, we are starting the great shrinkage.

The Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences team predicts an annual average decline of 1.1% beginning in 2021 pushing China’s population down to 587 million in 2100, less than half of what it is today.

Every business should interrogate their strategy to ask two questions a) how will our plans be impacted in our key markets with declining populations and b) what is our plan for the continent of Africa which will contain more 40 percent of the global population in 2100?

So, as we navigate the future, we may want to start planning on how to grow in a world of fewer, smaller and less than a world of  unlimited, bigger and more.

Sports=Future

Artwork by LeRoy Neiman

A few months ago, I was connected to Dr. Sascha L Schmidt the Director of the Center for Sports and Management at WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management which is a leading German business school in Dusseldorf.

Dr Schmidt began his career at McKinsey and worked on a start-up before combining his hobby and passion for sports with his job. Today he is one of the pioneering thinkers and researchers at the confluence of sports and technology. He also lectures at MIT and is an affiliate professor at Harvard and is the editor of 21st Century Sports: How Technologies Will Change Sports in the Digital Age 

Over the past few weeks, we have worked together on two projects. Dr Schmidt asked me to contribute a new chapter to the updated edition of 21st Century Sports which is titled Sports in the Third Connected Age and we spoke at length about where business, sports, technology, and the future intersect for the What Next? Podcast I host. ( Listen to it here or see more below)

Over these weeks it dawned on me that one way to both understand the future, to get people excited about the future ad to re-imagine the future is to follow the future of sports which is far more approachable to most people than the future of technology.

So here are five ways that sports are shapeshifting which is directly applicable to every individual and business.

Artwork by LeRoy Neiman

1. The Great Mongrelization.

Sports and entertainment were always integrated and today it is live sports that dominates entertainment and in many ways is the heartbeat keeping linear television alive.

But  sports does not just drive television now television resurrects and gives new life to sports as seen in the massively popular Drive to Survive series from Netflix.

Nielsen found that 34% of Netflix viewers became fans of F1 racing after watching the series. Another 30% said they understood the sport more, and 29% said they felt more engaged with the sport.

Sports and television have been long intertwined and 25 years ago Michael Jordan in Chicago fused fashion with sports by dressing in bespoke suits as he arrived and left the locker room.

Since then fashion has weaved its way into every aspect of sports as illustrated in the fact that the World Cup trophy handed to Lionel Messi was delivered in an LVMH case.

If fashion is a form of identity so is our sports allegiances and except for Harley Davidson most fans tattoo their teams and not brand logos on themselves.

And sports and fashion and social media make for a quantum force of congruence and re-enforcement.

The CEO of Endeavor, Mark Shapiro recently noted the intersection between sports, fashion, and new media “In the era of social media, when Instagram moves product and the camera is always on, the legend gets made on the field. But every other waking moment is an image-making performance about what you are wearing, the products you use and how that gets shared.”

To understand the future of media, business, fashion and much more follow the future of sports! This way it is easier to explain to Board Rooms who may be less passionate about technology than sports to open their eyes to the future and open their pocketbooks to fund the future. And Sports also helps one to understand why the threats and opportunities to a business come from adjacent areas which intersect and combine like fashion and sports.

Artwork by LeRoy Neiman

2. Only the Schizophrenic Will Survive.

Most businesses struggle with ensuring that they make their numbers today, keep true to their brands, and focus on their roots while also enabling their future, re-imagining brands and finding new wings. It is never either/or but both/and.

It is the schizophrenia of balancing today and tomorrow versus being paranoid about the future or remaining rooted in some psychological fixation on the past which creates long term success.

Sports has grown, surged, adapted, and morphed but has worked hard to remain conservative, true to history, respectful of legacy.

Rules and governing bodies are strict but adaptable as new technologies from lighter equipment, stronger materials and other innovations change the contour of sports including a world where fans expect more, faster, and quicker.

If one looks at the highest levels of Cricket which began as five-day affairs with white clothed players and breaks for tea and lunch one sees these “Test” matches between countries continue but now limited over cricket has taken the world by storm and IPL cricket in India has become the fastest growing sport.

To understand how to take our company, brand, and ourselves into the future by balancing today and tomorrow, risk and reward, roots and wings we can learn from how different sports are adapting to the future. Translating their moves to our industry allows for examples but also much easier translation and buy-in.

Artwork by LeRoy Neiman

3. The Future is Global.

Sports is the canary in the coalmine that reminds us that globalization is here to stay.

Sports, entertainment, and food are three human desires and needs common everywhere and these three have been turbocharged with advances in communication and other technology.

Advances in travel have globalized food, advances in communication and technology have globalized entertainment (the biggest shows in the US on Netflix are often from countries outside the US and many of the hits on Spotify today are from Latin America).

Communications and Technology has truly turbocharged sports bringing Cricket and F-1 sports to the US and taking NBA and NFL basketball to Europe and other areas.

As importantly 6.5 billion mobile phones and the Internet have created a constantly connected and engaged global fan base. With some small exceptions sports is the one content type that is not censored or edited around the world.

Any business or talent that questions globalization ( a multi-polar globalization with many centers of power versus just the West)  just needs to look at the success of sports and the focus that each sport is trying to globalize itself.

Artwork by LeRoy Neiman

4. The Triangle Rules!

There is no silver bullet in business because every business has three core constituencies that must be listened to and served.

The customer/consumer is one, management/shareholders are the second and employees/suppliers are the third.

No business can endure without finding a way to balance these needs as they move into the future.

Skewing too heavily in only one direction leads either to bankrupt companies, destroyed brands or an inability to attract and retain the talent.

Sports  franchises continuously work out a way to balance the fan, the player and owners needs with a plethora of different rules, salary caps and much more.

To understand how to balance, weigh and adapt to changing needs and circumstances of the three key constituencies as one’s industry changes look no further than different sports leagues to learn from their successes and failures.

Artwork by LeRoy Neiman

5. Reset. Resurrect. Reimagine.

Every sports player works to reset continuously through feedback and iterative improvement.

Many of those real time and constant feedback loops are now becoming available outside of sports due to large amounts of real time data and our instrumented selves and dashboards. Using this information, we all need to learn the value of resetting each time we start a project from the learnings of what worked and what did not from the past.

As AI and other technology spreads, we can learn from Sports Leagues which have pioneered many of these technologies and data from the Oakland A’s of Moneyball fame to how to chess players integrate computers into their training.

Athletes lose much more than they win land need to resurrect themselves from defeat.

Similarly, today many companies find themselves threatened with potential defeat by new entrants, new technologies and the new needs of the people they serve. The ability to re-invigorate, refresh and reboot is a key to success in these fast-changing times.

Finally, technology is forcing Sports to re-imagine not just each sport but what sport is.

E-Sports of today will morph into new types of sports in an AR/VR world.

Ownership of sports and creation of leagues may change with Blockchain and DAO’s.

We will soon have virtual players playing virtual games in virtual worlds which we will all watch virtually.

Sports has shown that anything is possible if one is willing to balance today and tomorrow, address needs of different constituencies, be open to incorporate and blend parts of other industries, never lose the focus on globalization, and continuously measure to reset, resolve to resurrect when down and re-imagine what can be!

The future is sports.

Great Interactions!

Photography by Paul Wakefield

At times when we meet with people individually or participate in a meeting, we leave believing that we enjoyed a great interaction.

Over time it has become clear that to ensure great interactions individually or with teams we should focus on leaving them with three things:

Clarity. Belief. Energy.

Thanks for reading The Future Does Not Fit In The Containers Of The Past! Subscribe for free to receive new posts.

Photography by Paul Wakefield

Clarity.

The Cambridge dictionary defines clarity as the quality of being clear and easy to understand.

In a great interaction or meeting people come out with a clearer understanding of a situation, with greater precision of knowledge, and clear-cut next steps than before the meeting or interaction.

Doubts are cleared. Any mixed signals clarified. Hedges eliminated.

Everybody is clear as to what they need to do next and who is doing what.

One leaves the interaction better informed and equipped to tackle whatever the challenge or problem might be.

Now think of the meetings one has when people come out more confused, more unsure of what to do. We have all attended these group gropes or even individual one on one meetings which were thick with dense mumbo-jumbo, buzz-word bingo, oozy obfuscation and mixed signals that left us more mystified and doubtful than before we had the interaction.

One way of ensuring clarity is to speak simply using plain language and have people play back what the next steps are.

Photography by Paul Wakefield

Belief.

It is one thing to be clear as to what must be done next but as important is to leave an interaction with a greater belief in your or your team’s ability to do what is necessary.

Many managers collapse the mood of a room by berating an individual or team’s performance without some offsetting knowledge or guidance on how they can do things better or improve themselves.

A great interaction occurs when one leaves a meeting feeling more confident about one’s capabilities in tackling what must be done. Even if one had received feedback in a meeting about not having done a good job it is key to leave with guidance and a sense of motivation that one can fix the situation and finding a remedy.

A dirge like procession of individuals with hang-dog faces, droopy shoulders and shuffling feet is not just a downer but a negative vibe that echoes through everybody who interacts with the individuals whose self-belief was drained out of them.

A key is to leave someone feeling better about themselves after you meet them rather than worse even if you provide them with less than positive information by showing how you or another individual tackled the same problem, reminding them of the times they recovered when they were knocked back by a challenge or sharing your individual stories of tackling similar situations.

Photography by Paul Wakefield

Energy.

We are living in a time of great change, accelerating velocity of business and multiple pressures.

This is leaving people often drained, burned out and wanting to just curl up under a blanket from the noise and tension.

Great interactions leave people rejuvenated, replenished, and refreshed.

While clarity is about the mind, belief about the heart, energy is about the body.

Bringing energy to a meeting can boost others. Energy is contagious.  Other ways to leave people more energized can involve leveraging humor, providing the opportunity to take a break, or bringing empathy and understanding on the forces that drain energy with some ideas of fixing them that can leave people with a boost.

Regardless of whether one interacts in person or remotely, individually or in groups, how senior or junior one is the likelihood of having a great meeting or interaction is likely to improve if one focusses on leaving everybody you interact with clarity, belief, and energy.

A Gift.

Two and half years ago on Sunday, August 16, 2020 I began the first edition of this thought letter as follows:

The idea behind this newsletter is that of a gift.

Like a gift it is free (no subscription fee, no up-charges to access special content, no advertising, no affiliate links, your email will not be shared or sold, and no algorithm is running in the background mining your behavior)

Like a gift I hope it will be of some value in helping you see, feel and think differently about how to grow yourself, your team and/or your company in the future.

Like a gift, I hope it will generate goodwill for the giver. Your attention and time which is so valuable. Good karma. Stronger relationships.

Since then I have written every Sunday for 131 weeks on a different subject.

Have been fortunate that tens of thousands of people subscribe or read my writing every Sunday (it is also reprinted and distributed by other publications all over the world) and increasingly there has been a request to find ways to access past writing when someone wants to share or use it for some reason. Almost all my pieces are evergreen since they are not aligned with the news or politics so you can read a piece from two years ago and it is likely to be relevant to the times and your needs.

So, I have curated the best 6 pieces of writing in the 12 areas that I write about on a single page that can be bookmarked, shared, and accessed by anyone anywhere on any device without charge or even entering an email.

This page will constantly be updated always containing the six best pieces in each area. A better piece will replace a current piece. So, it will not only be current but continue to be a distillation of the best.

Here is the page: https://rishadtobaccowala.com/100 and below is a look on what is available in each of the 12 areas and how best to leverage it.

The Future.

We all should be concerned about the future since we are going to spend the rest of our lives there. This section contains a broad thesis on the future (The Future), the four shifts remaking the future (The Four Shifts) as well as ten specific forecasts for the next 10 years (Ten Forecasts for the Next Decade) and why every company needs to re-think its strategy (Re-Thinking Strategy) and how future organizations will be elastic in nature (The Future is Elastic)

Managing Change and Upgrading Ourselves.

The future does not adapt to us but we must adapt to the future.

This means we must change. But change sucks. However since irrelevance is worse, we must change. How do we manage change especially our own? (How do we slay our own inner dinosaur?) And what are the essential elements of making a company transform (Six Keys to Change)

One of the ways to transform and change is to upgrade our own mental operating systems. (Learning to Learn), ensuring that we do not get so high on our own fumes that we fail to adapt and defeat ourselves (Self-Defeat),

Enhancing Effectiveness and Becoming a Leader.

In an accelerated world of unbundled and distributed work and next generation technologies such as AI we will see a decline in the power of “bosses” (De-bossification) and a need to work not just in tandem with but add value to the increasing capability of machines. (The Four P’s). How does one lead and be effective in such an era? (Management Next?) How do we re-imagine meetings and how do we give feedback in a world of DEI, ESG, Remote Work and concerns about our own relevance? (On Feedback) We will work with machines but influencing, inspiring, and building people will still be critical (Tattoo Moments, On Leadership)

Re-thinking Marketing and Selling Better.Marketing is being re-invented but frankly people have made it needlessly confusing. The Dawn of a New Era attempts to explain the future of marketing with one single chart! The Future of Marketing is People makes the case we should not think about consumers, customers, and members but people, that we should market through people versus to people and that marketing people need to upgrade their skills and their roles in the company. The Age of Creativity reminds us that in a world of plumbing it will be poetry that will differentiate.

We are all in sales in one way or the other. The Art of Persuasion:4 Magical Potions distills the best learning on this topic from Eight Things Clients Want, how to Solve Problems Using Photography, why S.A.V.E is a key filter for sales and why if you need to have a deck of more than 9 slides you truly have nothing to say. Re-Thinking Presentations remains the most popular post I have written.

The Future of Work and Creating Great Cultures.

My next book (in progress) to be published globally by McGraw-Hill in Fall of 2024 is tentatively titled Re-Thinking Work. The challenges of distributed work post Covid that companies are struggling with is but a side show to what is coming in a world of four generations at work, next generation technology, new marketplaces, and a wave of multi-polar globalization among many things (How to Thrive in the Modern Workspace). Work in 2029 will look nothing like 2019 in how it will be done, who will do it, where it will be done but why we work and the importance of culture (Culture), the need for employee engagement (The Triangle of Engagement), the critical role of talent ( Identifying, Retaining and Growing Talent) and what will attract people will stay the same (The Great Attraction).

Managing Careers.

Make no mistake every single person at every level of every firm is re-thinking their career. My career writing except for a post on how to write presentations (Re-Thinking Presentations) are the most read and shared. Thousands of executives have leveraged these learnings. Read Career Tools for an overview, 12 Career Lessons and Looking Back, Looking Ahead for everything I have learned in a forty year career on how to manage a long and winding journey that we will all have, and Career Turbocharging is an exercise that will change the way you frame and filter yourself and your opportunities forever.

Personal Growth/Wisdom.

My older readers find these pieces particularly relevant, and this is the section most shared by many leaders with their teenage or young adult children.

The only thing we have is time (Time Passages). And so much of life is a combination of Story. Place and Loss.

While we are growing our companies and our bank accounts and our reputations let us not forget to grow ourselves (Sacred Hours), that we got here because of mentors and guides and other elders (Go the Extra Mile it is Never Crowded) and let us not forget that in the end it is about Architecting Joy, Generosity, and Dignity.

Hope you will find this page (https://rishadtobaccowala.com/100 ) helpful in your work and life. Feel free to use all of it. Nothing is copyrighted. Nothing needs to be attributed. There is no cost and there will never be a cost.

A Gift to you for the gift of your time in taking time to read my writing.

Thank you…

The Future of Marketing is People.

Painting by Edward Hopper

The future of marketing is people.

A)    It is about understanding people as people and not just as consumers, customers, members, and users.

B)    It is about getting people to advocate for a brand to other people.

C)    It is about upgrading the status of marketing people and upgrading marketing people.

Painting by Edward Hopper

Marketing is about understanding people.

For too long marketers have fixated on consumers, customers, members, and users.

While these are important what is critical is seeking to understand people as people.

When one looks at a person as a consumer one is liable to miss a lot for the following reasons.

1)    Narrow Lens:  When one looks at a person as a consumer it is looking to understand the person through brand usage which is by very definition one of hundreds of brands filling met and unmet needs of a person. People do not define themselves by brands and rarely want to have relationships with brands. Some marketers define themselves by brands and have the delusion that people want to have a relationship with Tylenol versus just wanting their headache to go away.

2)    Failure to see competitive threats: Viewing people as consumers or users means evaluating and benchmarking one’s brands with their use of other brands in one’s category. However, the greatest threat and opportunity tends to come from outside one’s category today due to technological disruption and changing behavior. Newspapers were disrupted by Google. Magazines by Instagram and today Television by Netflix and TikTok for example. Focusing on consumers and users meant that none of the incumbents were monitoring these other players. A focus on one’s category may lead a brand to be less pathetic than others in their category but not great or relevant for the future.

3)    Failure to understand needs: One of the reasons categories get disrupted from outside is because by seeking to understand a person through category dynamics one may miss understanding what they are truly seeking. Dollar Shave Club and Harry users were not just looking for the best shave but a decent shave at a great price and convenient purchase. Multiple blades, vibrating blades, heated blades were no longer the key.

Painting by Edward Hopper

Marketing is getting people to advocate for you to other people.

The most powerful form of marketing has always been word of mouth.

Word of mouth has become exponentially more powerful due to social media and new tools and technologies.

Tik Tok provides editing and other tools to let anyone create and mix videos. Substack enables reaching tens of thousands to millions of people. It is easy to create and distribute podcasts.

Social media channels enable distribution.

Influencers and creators become key to a brand.

Instead of marketing to people we should consider marketing through people by arming them with assets, information, tools, and incentives.

Also, every marketing company should fixate on their employees and suppliers.

Make employees advocates by treating them well and aligning them with the marketing program.

Inform, trust, and pay suppliers well. They can be a source of ideas, marketing, and competitive intelligence.

Emerging AI tools such as ChatGPT will further empower the individual and the underlying trends of Web3 will now give them not just a voice but ownership.

Every company’s marketing and media programs should be grounded in marketing through people with significant investment and emphasis on generating and building advocacy among one’s external and internal audiences and partners.

One should fixate as much if not more on people than fixating on first party data, AI and the Metaverse.

Painting by Edward Hopper

Marketing is about upgrading the status and skills of marketing people.

Forty years ago, in my first marketing class at the University of Chicago we read Philip Kotler (a renowned marketing guru operating a few miles away at Northwestern University) who defined marketing as “understanding and meeting people’s requirements”

For the next four decades I got to work with some of the best marketing companies in the world and looking back two things stood out which taken together raises concerns:

1)    Marketing has become more critical: People became more empowered as technology enabled them to have “God Like” power particularly in the past two decades since the scaling of Search, Social, E-Commerce and Mobile.  These new technologies also have merged offline/online, above the line/below the line and fused marketing and experience into one. Therefore, understanding and meeting the requirements of people/gods became more important. So marketing was growing more and more critical.

2)    Marketers power has diminished in most companies: The first two decades of my career it was not just Agencies that got to present to the Board room, but marketers did. Today look at the Board of Directors of companies including marketing firms, and few have CMO’s on the Board. There is the voice of money in the CFO, the voice of technology in the CTO/CIO, the voice of talent in the Chief Human Resources/Talent officer but where is the voice of the people/customer/consumer just when they are growing more and more powerful?

Companies will find it very difficult to succeed in a world of empowered people unless they have empowered marketers, marketing fuses into every part of the company and every individual upgrades their skills. Marketers need to be in the room where decisions are made rather than implementing or informing decisions.

But the wheel may be turning…

Recently there are signs that marketing is getting a voice by transforming the CMO role to one of a Chief Growth Officer, Chief Experience Officer, or Chief Transformation Officer or combining a CMO role with a Chief Data Officer role and no longer separating CMO from Chief Digital Officer.

Companies are beginning to look for “full-stack” marketers who can drive performance leveraging data and technology and platforms in the short run while building brand and reputation with storytelling, design, cultural relevance and more.

Marketing people need to have a greater voice and to have a greater voice marketing people need to upgrade our skills and capabilities for a world where marketing is not a side car attached to a motorcycle with some carnival barkers but the engine that makes the motorcycle and its engine throb.

The future of marketing is people.

The Triangle of Engagement.

Photography by Karl Taylor

Since the beginning of 2023, I have had the opportunity to either deliver a keynote talk with questions and answers, run an interactive workshop, or moderate discussions at senior executive off-sites with 11 different companies.

The companies have ranged in size from less than 100 to over 100,000 employees and have spanned categories as diverse as food and beverages, media and entertainment, finance, technology, academia, and healthcare.

While much of the content has focused on the future, managing change, leading in these times, and learning to remain relevant, in almost all these sessions a new topic of concern, challenge and uncertainty has arisen regarding employee engagement.

How does one engage with teams and with colleagues in meaningful ways in a world of distributed and unbundled work, rapid acceleration of the speed of work, increasing burnout, and a workplace with four different generations each with different mindsets and expectations?

Photography by Karl Taylor

The Triangle of Engagement.

Engagement within and across teams, offices and expertise groups have always been a key to culture.

The ability to 1) collaborate, 2) feel connected and 3) learn/grow are three of the four keys to Culture in addition to 4) a commitment to excellence and all of these three require teams to be engaged with each other and the work.

Over the month as the question of engagement arose again and again in different ways during my sessions and I attempted to guide, extract, and build from the talented individuals whom I was interacting with, it became clear that one way to re-enforce both individual and team engagement is through a Triangle of Engagement.

This triangle consists of three behaviors which in combination boost engagement.

The three sides of the triangle are

Curiosity

Empathy

Generosity

Curiosity

One simple way to get people engaged is to ask about them and by doing so also get them curious about others.

If someone asks you questions about yourself that are not tricky or puts you in a vulnerable place it is very likely that you will be engaged.

One simple question that few people ask but significantly boosts the ability to connect is this one:

What three decisions or events have made or shaped who you are? (These really two different questions depending on whether you chose events or decisions)

This makes the person who you are asking the question to have to think a bit and in that way is difficult.

However, there is no right or wrong answer and everyone can come up with an answer, so no one is on the spot.

Their answer helps build a conversation because the person who is asked the question may then ask the questioner for their answer to the same question.

Try it on yourself and people you wish to engage with.

Photography by Karl Taylor

Empathy

Today a mixture of polarization, generational differences, work pressure and speed give us very little time to figure out what we are doing, let alone getting to see people from their perspectives and understand where they are coming from.

But to engage one needs to be empathetic and often part of being empathetic is to understand both you and everyone around you are also vulnerable regardless of projections of strength and power.

Asking others about the events and decisions that made them which is being curious about them is one way to generate empathy.

Answering the same question if they ask you to so builds empathy further.

In addition, a simple question can let you be more empathetic.

How can I be of help to you?

A very simple question that few people ask.

People find it hard to ask for help (though we all should) but we should find it easier to ask people how we could help them.

This question can be refined in many ways to better telegraph understanding of a situation or elicit a particular type of answer.

For instance.

How can I help you more to manage X (X might be a client, an employee, a situation) which signals you understand the situation and ensure that you can provide the help.

How can I do things differently in the way I work or manage to help you become more effective? This signals empathy by understanding that sometimes helping someone is not changing what they do but what you do.

Photography by Karl Taylor

Generosity

Whenever you give someone a non-monetary gift of time, kindness, help, or a monetary reward of a special bonus or one time award which is unexpected and goes above and beyond they will be deeply engaged.

Give first.

Give more than you get.

Give without strings.

And you will find that you will get attention, time and much more at a multiple of what you give.

In a world of transactions and negotiations try not being transactional or a negotiator.

Today people get taken aback when people help people with no strings attached.

When one is generous there are two amazing rewards:

First one earns goodwill which lasts a long time.

Second one feels good about oneself.

Photography by Karl Taylor

Why the Triangle of Engagement may work for you and your company.

Clearly engagement is a challenge and there are multiple ways one needs to address it but this method is one that can be part of the solution and works because:

It is easy to do since it involves asking questions or paying attention and can be done by anyone at any level and by managers.

It does not cost anything (if generosity is time or attention) or costs little (one time reward or bonus).

It works regardless of type and size of company, mix of talent, in-person or over Zoom.

It does not require your manager to approve so you can do it today.

It is contagious in that when you ask the questions or behave with generosity others ask the questions and think generously.

The Four Shifts: Thriving in the Next Era.

Photography by Rishad Tobaccowala

This is the third of a series on The Four Shifts that are revolutionizing every aspect of society and business.

Technology Shifts: AI, 5G, Biotech and Blockchain.

Power Shifts: From Center to Edge. From Institution to Individual. Consolidated to Fragmented.

Boundary Shifts: Office/Home boundaries. Blurring of behaviors. Mongrelized and Multi-Dimensional Companies.

Mind Shifts: Generational Differences. Re-evaluation of Work and other institutions.

The first of the Series which describes each of these shifts can be read here.

The second of the Series which discusses some of the implications on Government, Education and Business can be read here.

This the third and the last of the series shares some thoughts on how individuals and teams can thrive in a rapidly shape shifting world by controlling what we can and aligning with the Force.

It is to build and hire for the Six C’s and hone, architect and sculpt our attitudes and mindsets with the Five P’s.

Photography by Rishad Tobaccowala

The Six C’s

Six key skills will be essential in the future to complement computers, co-exist with change, and ensure continuous re-invention.

Three of these have to do with individual competence (Cognition, Creativity, Curiosity) and three how we connect with each other and the world outside our minds (Collaborate, Communicate, Convince).

Very few people will be world class in all six areas, but we all need to grow to be very good in at least two in each area.

Many companies hire or tolerate unbalanced people who are ultra-strong in individual skills such as cognition and creativity but are terrible at collaborating or communicating and learn that these lop-sided folks almost never ever last.

Being great at collaborating and communicating but being lack luster in cognitive or creative and other skills also flames out as these folks do not earn credibility of insiders or clients. Similarly, brilliance without some basic people and communication skills always ends up poisoning cultures and eventually flaming out because the organization rejects these “smart porcupines”

Photography by Rishad Tobaccowala

The 3 Cs of Individual Competence

Cognition. Curiosity. Creativity.

Cognition is simply learning to think and keeping your mental operating system constantly upgraded. This requires deliberate practice and sustained work. Improved cognition is achievable.

But one must work at it and many of us are so swamped with keeping up with our daily workload that we do not invest in growing our skills and expertise. This proves to eventually lead to irrelevance as the needs for yesterday’s skill sets erode and one has not replaced them with a new set of skills for the future.

If we cannot upgrade our mental operating systems we will become less relevant.

Creativity is connecting dots in new ways, looking beyond the obvious and this skill will be key as AI powered computers, data crunch and co-relate faster than we ever will.

To be human is to be creative.

Creativity is at its heart the way we deal with a world of change by adapting, evolving, and re-inventing.

We need to learn and feed this inside us. The future will be about data driven storytelling and not just data or storytelling and the ability to leverage modern machines and algorithms to unleash connection and meaning will depend on creativity.

Curiosity is simply being alive to possibilities, questioning the status quo and asking what if? Today the key competitor or opportunity in any category comes from outside it.

Curiosity may have killed the cat, but the lack of curiosity killed the careers of many people. When boundaries between industries shift and our minds are like champagne corks swelling and no longer fitting into the past the key is not to accept but question the status quo.

AI co-relates and connect dots and look back but rarely anticipates forward and what is next. Humans ask why? as well as why not?

Photography by Rishad Tobaccowala

The 3C’s of Connecting

Being cognitively gifted, creative, and curious will not be enough since we are living in a connected world where eco-systems, teams and linkages is how ideas are born, value created, and long-term careers forged. For these we need to hone and build and train for three other skills.

Collaborate: Collaboration is key to work in a world where API’s (Application Protocol Interfaces) are not just about handshakes between software/hardware but between individuals with different skills, teams in different countries, partners, suppliers and much more.

As the world re-imagines and re-configures itself we need to be like Lego pieces and learn to fit and connect and combine with others to transform ourselves and our companies.

Communicate: Learn to write. Learn to speak. Learn to present. It may be so old school but watch the people who succeed, and they are good at communication. And all of these can be taught and learned.

But communication is not a one-way street and as important as it to write, speak and present it is as critical to be able to listen, to hear and to understand what others are saying with an open mind and a sense of empathy.

Convince: Every one of us is a salesperson regardless of what we believe our title is. This is true even if we do not sell anything at work. We must convince colleagues of our points of view.

We all must learn to convince and learn to sell.

Humans choose with their hearts and use numbers to justify what they did.

Humans are stories. Stories are data with a soul.

Convincing is often a soup of facts and stories.

Photography by Rishad Tobaccowala

The Five P’s

To thrive individuals and companies will need purpose, perspective, perceptiveness, pioneering, and persistence.

Purpose: Sooner or later those who succeed have a sense of where they are trying to go and some clear goals.

A star to steer by and outcomes to measure progress against.

If one does not know where one is trying to go it is unlikely one can get there.

Today in a world that is accelerating, changing and overwhelming with stimuli, data and news this is key or one is just tossed and turned by the latest blast of news and information.

In time this purpose or these purposes get chiseled into one’s individual DNA or the fabric and culture of successful individuals and companies.

When a company is successful it is often seen as driven by a purpose, it has teams built with individuals passionately aligned against a common outcome.

The passion many equate with those who succeed are usually driven by a focus and ferociousness of purpose.

Perspective: With time and experience comes a sense of perspective.

An understanding that the world does not revolve around oneself which allows one to become more empathetic, generous and invest in relationships.

A sense of perspective also brings with it the realization that life and career while in one way are short in other ways span decades and will bring a tangle of good and bad, ups and downs. To succeed one needs to grimace and march on in the bad times while not losing all sense of proportion and propriety when the force appears to be with us.

Machines do not yet have perspective. Their memory is not our memory. Everyone is a compilation of where they have been and what they have experienced and mining and learning from this history is key.

Perspective is also important to companies, so they see where they fit in their eco-systems and can determine both who to partner with but also to visualize their category broadly enough to see opportunities and threats outside a narrow slice of geography, time, or market.

Successful people and firms also put things in perspective when explaining and making their case. They place things in historical or other frameworks to build convincing stories.

Perceptiveness: The Cambridge dictionary defines someone who is perceptive as one who is “very good at noticing and understanding things that many people do not notice”.

This noticing and understanding can be about being emphatic in how one deals with people or seeing a niche or hiccup in a process that many may miss or to be self-aware of one’s weaknesses and mental models.

Perception will be key to ensure our relevance in a world of AI, diverse and globalized marketplace and generational differences in attitudes and behaviors.

Perception can be honed and grown and will be a key for success as it will be what helps differentiate carbon based analog feeling individuals from increasingly powerful silicon based digital computing machines.

Our perception and their power and precision will be what will drive profitable results.their roots tie them down but rather use roots to feed their wings to fly to the future. These innovations can be across a range of a company’s system from supply chain to logistics to customer service to pricing to engineering breakthroughs to re-thinking their business.

Pioneering:  Long lasting firms and successful individuals innovate, invent and are idea driven. They do not let their roots tie them down but rather use roots to feed their wings to fly to the future. These innovations can be across a range of a company’s system from supply chain to logistics to customer service to pricing to engineering breakthroughs to re-thinking their business.

To succeed as an individual eventually everyone needs to become who they are.

We need to find our voice and superpower and each of us in doing so pioneer by becoming special and differentiated in our own way.

Defining oneself is an act of pioneering.

Switching jobs, cities and goals are all acts of taking a different path and trading the known for the unknown.

In a world that will be shifting around us we need to be able to re-invent our boundaries.

Living is an act of constant resurrection and re-invention.

We are all capable of being pioneers.

Persistence: Part of persistence is continued practice.

Practice of a craft, a skill, an art.

A portion of it is patience and recognizing that the reaction to a thing is what will determine how the thing affects us and often not reacting but instead waiting is the most prudent thing to do.

A lot of persistence is recognizing that it is in the everyday doing, the everyday improvements, the everyday re-invention, and repair after setbacks that forge us in the foundry and furnace of industry and life.

It is sculpting each block of stone and placing them together that builds the cathedral.

Day by day.

Year by year.

The power of compounding skills, relationships, and returns.

How every “overnight” success comes to be…