Rishad Tobaccowala's Blog, page 15

The Four Shifts: An Overview

Art by Damien Hirst

This is the first of a series on The Four Shifts already underway that will revolutionize every aspect of society and business.

1.     Technology Shifts.

2.     Power Shifts.

3.     Boundary Shifts.

4.     Mind Shifts.

Art by Damien Hirst

Technology Shifts.

Today a series of revolutionary technologies have all reached a critical momentum.

Each one interacts with the other creating exponential advances.

a)    Artificial Intelligence: Over the past decade AI has been progressing at a rapid pace doubling its capability every 10 to 14 months. One flavor of AI, Regenerative AI, as illustrated by Chat GPT and Dall-E-2 has seized the imagination and indicate the revolutionary potential of these technologies.

b)    Gene Therapy: Building on a detailed understanding of the human genome and leveraging modern computational power and AI we have already seen the first break through drugs in the BioNTech and Moderna MRNA vaccines.

c)     5G: The smart phone and continuous connectivity have re-configured business and consumer behavior this past decade. Two aspects of 5G in 200X faster speeds and almost zero latency to less than 1 nano second will turbo charge this impact. Remote surgery and ultra-small devices connected at blazing speeds to computation in the cloud will enable a range of new devices and behaviors.

d)    Blockchain: While tarnished by the crash of crypto and the Ponzi like nature of many projects the underlying mathematics and potential of the Blockchain continues to be invested in not just by Silicon Valley but all the major banks and many large companies.

These are just four of the key technologies that have advanced dramatically over the past few years both independently from and intertwined with each other.

Art by Damien Hirst

Power Shifts.

Driven in part by technology and in part by demographics, power is moving from the center to the edge in three significant ways.

a)    From the West to the East: Earlier this week I was in India for the first time in 3 years and on a drive from Thane (about 30 miles from Bombay) to the city reminded me of being in Shanghai a decade or more ago. Infrastructure everywhere. Temples were optimized for digital donations. Food delivery was not just fast but inter-city. Almost every friend wished they were 30 years old again. The optimism and momentum were infectious.

The same feeling was felt on trips to Singapore and other parts of Asia. China while challenged is going to continue to rise. And even as companies re-allocate resources out of China, they still have significant presence there and much of the re-allocation is to India, Vietnam, and other Asian countries. Companies like Starbucks see China as a key to their future.

Africa is the only continent whose population will increase significantly in the next 25 years from 1.3 billion to nearly 2 billion plus people accounting for 25 percent of the world’s population by 2050 and potentially 40 percent of the world’s population by the end of the decade.

Globalization continues but shifts to a multi-polar globalization with many seats of power and impact such as China and India today and Nigeria and other countries tomorrow.

b)    From Institutions to Individuals: Technology and individual agility is moving power from institutions to individuals. In every industry we see empowered customers and consumers armed with data, technology, and networks (Blockchain and AI technologies will exponentially empower individuals and smaller firms in most cases).

c)     From Consolidated to Fragmented: We may have seen peak returns to scale in many industries. While scale continues to matter greatly the top 2 or 3 leaders in every industry appear to be losing share to several upstarts serving a range of different needs. Moats like a social graph did not prevent TikTok from impacting Facebook. ChatGPT may enable Bing to gain share over Google. One of the most interesting things about Search Engine Marketing is that it works because Search does not work well enough. If you got what you were looking for would you click around trying to find the answer?

Art by Damien Hirst

Boundary Shifts.

The future does not fit in the containers of the past. Technology and globalization are like hydrochloric acid. They burn through boundaries. We see digital leakage.

a)    The Office/Home Boundary: Two years after a vaccine most downtown offices have 50 percent or less occupancy. Nearly 15 percent of employees have moved 500 miles from where they had worked prior to Covid. Companies are either totally remote or “Hybrid” with 40 percent or so of time being mandated for in person interaction to maximize culture, learning, delivery standards and ideation. Very few service-based companies will ever go back to 2019. And even in-person interaction is often at events, restaurants and offsite with offices themselves being completely re-designed.

b)    Blurring of behaviors: If you watch a video on TikTok and click on an ad which has an embedded commerce call to action allowing you to pick up the product from a local Walmart how does one that define this by the old rules of marketing and customer journey? Was it online (TikTok) or offline (Walmart pick up). Was it above the line (a brand ad) or below the line (a sale)? Was it video or mobile or e-commerce or social? People have changed and most companies are organized for a world of clean lines versus blurred lines. Today every point of contact is both a tattoo moment to build a brand and complete a sale.

c)     Multi-dimensional companies: For the last couple of days, I was at CES (Consumer Electronics Show) where I had the opportunity to speak to the leadership of many companies to help frame their learning journeys.

Walking around it was so clear that companies were now morphing into multi-dimensional players. Huge signs for Samsung Ads, Netflix Ads, Best Buy Ads, and much more were everywhere. Amazon Ads now had their own location and no longer were bundled with Amazon Web services and the momentum of Walmart Connect was spoken about. What were technology, streaming, retail companies were also now advertising juggernauts combining their first party data, customer knowledge, brand reputations and willingness to partner to create a new multi-dimensional landscape.

Art by Damien Hirst

Mind Shifts.

Human minds are like champagne corks. With new experiences and interactions, they swell and expand. And they no longer fit back into the bottle they emerged from.

During the past 1000 days everybody in the world has gone through a social, health, government, business, and personal crisis because of Covid, rapidly shifting economies and other changes.

This has exposed the fault lines in society and business that existed before 2019 and new technology break throughs and work behaviors have created secondary and tertiary shocks and people are different.

The future does not fit in the mindsets of the past.

a)    Generational Mindshift:  Recently I completed the first chapter of my new book (will be published globally by McGraw-Hill in 2024) called Re-Thinking Work. The opening chapter begins with a deep dive into the societal changes including the fact that for the first time in modern history four or even five generations will be working together. After completing research on one area which was the generational differences between GenZ/Millennials and GenX/Baby Boomers what was vividly clear is that most businesses are focusing on almost all the wrong things as they try to get their employees re-engaged.

Most boards and political leaders are Boomers and GenX which explains a lot of the rumble in the work jungle and the political world.

b)    The Role of Work: Work is important, and people are willing to work hard. “Quiet Quitting” is less about quitting work then quitting bosses. While companies are grappling with where people work most folks are asking Why do they work? Who do they work for? When do they work? And most importantly What is Work?

Next Week: The Implications of The Four Shifts.

What will the implications of the Four Shifts be on individuals, governments, and business as they accelerate, intertwine and morph?

If strategy is “future competitive advantage” how do individuals, leaders and companies ensure relevance and resonance in the coming world.

As Time Goes By.

Happy New Year!

2023 is here and all the years before are receding backward on the timeline. They have left their mark and will continue to impact our tomorrow’s when we least expect it.

For years whenever I came across a good paragraph or phrase, I would copy it down into a notebook.To mark the passing of another year I share a very small selection of the best writing on the topic of “time”.

Time and History 

“People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.”

“Each person’ life is dominated by a central event, which shapes and distorts everything that comes after it and, in retrospect, everything that came before.” 

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past”

“The past is a life sentence, a blunt instrument aimed at tomorrow.”

“No one who lives long enough can be surprised to find their biography has been molded by distant events, by other people’s wills, with little or no participation from our own decisions. Those long processes that end up running into our life — sometimes to give it the shove it needed, sometimes to blow to smithereens our most splendid plans — tend to be hidden like subterranean currents, like tiny shifts of tectonic plates, and when the earthquake finally comes we invoke the words we’ve learned to calm ourselves, accident, fluke and sometimes fate.”

Time and Change.

“Now I weigh about 160 pounds. When I left the hospital after being treated for a burst appendix, I weighed 140. When I was nine months pregnant and starving every second, I weighed 210. I have been everything from size 4 to 14. I have been the life of the party and a drag. I have been broke and loaded, clinically depressed and radiantly happy. Spread out over the years, I’m a harem.”

"We will lose everything we love in the end. But why should that matter so much? By definition, we do not live in the end: we live all along the way. The smitten lovers who marvel every day at the miracle of having met each other are right; it is finding that is astonishing. You meet a stranger passing through your town and know within days you will marry her. You lose your job at fifty-five and shock yourself by finding a new calling ten years later. You have a thought and find the words. You face a crisis and find your courage.”

Time and Impermanence 

“Fading moments of the now”

“You can’t get attached to the moments she said. They fly away. “

“All of this is made more precious, not less, by its impermanence. No matter what goes missing, the wallet or the father, the lessons are the same. Disappearance reminds us to notice, transience to cherish, fragility to defend. Loss is a kind of external conscience, urging us to make better use of our finite days. As Whitman knew, our brief crossing is best spent attending to all that we see: honoring what we find noble, denouncing what we cannot abide, recognizing that we are inseparably connected to all of it, including what is not yet upon us, including what is already gone. We are here to keep watch, not to keep."

Time and Erosion

“His face was like a mirror, and it was better not to look”

“Only a couple of years had passed in fact. But he looks considerably hammered at by the interval”

“His face was fuller, his center of gravity lower”

“But after all this is America where you can swap out the parts of yourself that do not work”

Time and Living

“Narrative is the strategy of the mind for putting things in relation. You try to get lined up”

“Our need day to day to calibrate, adjust and maintain our equilibrium”

“Let everything happen to you. Beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final”

“The business of life is the acquisition of memories. That is all there is.”

Sicilian photography by Rishad Tobaccowala

The 4P’s: Perspectives. Points of View. Provocations. Plan of Action.

Photography by Uwe Langmann

In a world filled with increasing amounts of data, computational power and advances in AI, talent will matter even more if we a) focus on what is unique to humans and b) do so in a way that leverages the power of technology.

Data is as important as electricity.

No business or leader can survive without it.

But just as no company differentiates itself through its use of electricity, data alone will rarely differentiate a company or leader.

Photography by Uwe Langmann

Where the differentiation is found.

What story do we extract, weave, and tell from the spreadsheet of the numeric, the files of facts, and the streams of prompts that cascade, glitter, and dance on our screens?

Three years ago, almost every Government leader in the world had the same data about Covid-19 but they all made very different decisions on how to combat the disease.

Every year investors have access to more data and more tools, but this access has rarely made anyone a better investor and what usually separates great investors from lesser ones are how they mentally and emotionally determine what to pay attention to and how to stomach risk. Data and technology are inputs, but it is experience, wisdom, patience, and emotional fortitude that are the key ingredients when added to the inputs that result in differing results.

It was not the data or the technology that made the difference. It was the people, the history, the geography, the culture, the emotion.

Photography by Uwe Langmann

How to lead and add value today.

True leaders do not hide behind numbers and say things like “there is too much uncertainty.”

Life is uncertain.

If things were certain, a machine could do our jobs.

So let us be glad the future cannot be lived forward with only backward-looking databases.

What do we bring to the data and next generation tools when we bring the data and tools to our management, clients or to meetings?

What matters is not the data and technology but the perspectives, points of view, provocations, and plan of action we bring.

Photography by Uwe Langmann

The 4P’s

Perspective: How is what we are recommending today or what is happening today look from different vantage points? For instance, the vantage point of a longer time horizon or the vantage point of a different person. This is often what machines or less experienced people do not have.

Points of View: We often bring well documented cases and facts to buttress our arguments. These are essential. But the documentation and facts will never differentiate us versus others or machines since most people will bring the same facts. It is the point of view which matters. What do we believe this means versus what others say or what the facts state.  What do we believe especially when we believe differently. Points of view matter.

Provocations: The best organizations and teams find ways to balance, unify and integrate different and diverse points of view including those that challenge the status quo, speak up to power and question accepted thinking. It is when the internal challenges go missing does a company and leader begin to miss delivering results. Thinking provocatively is often key.

Plans of Action: While perspectives, points of view and provocations help determine what needs to be done one does eventually have to “make happen”, “to do” and to take ideas and convert them to reality.

Machines will often suggest potential actions and we may calibrate different paths with probabilities of success but sooner or later true leaders and successful individuals suggest a clear-cut plan of action.

A plan of action that may be revised once data suggests otherwise but it is key to commit to action.

To succeed in an age where data is plentiful, pattern matching cheap, and machines are becoming smarter we should all begin lots of valid data and differing points of view.

But to add true value to a company and our careers it will be key to ask ourselves all the time what we offer as a) a perspective, b) a point of view, c) a provocation and/or d) a plan of action on everything we have imbibed versus just reporting facts and process.

If we do, we will forever grow and succeed.

If we do not, we will be undifferentiated and will be automated away.

Talent Will Matter Even More.

Art work by Note Thanun

Decades ago to get people to sign up, the Book of the Month Club would offer several free options which were marketed as an extra-ordinary value. (Hundreds of dollars of books for free).

This is the way the 11 volumes of The Story of Civilization by Ariel and Will Durant ended up in my father’s library in Bombay, India. (Since renamed to Mumbai).

Thousands of pages which before computers, before television in India, and before the Internet one could finish over several years.

Books were then the best technology since even radio programming was very limited in India at that time.

One key concept resonates decades later from The Lessons of Civilization.

Every advance in technology places a premium on superior ability.

During those years I was also doing a deep dive in Mathematics which was willed upon me by my parents who suggested that my passion to be a writer could wait till I had something worthwhile to say. Till then I needed to learn how to think, and Math might help in that direction.

The final year at college at the University of Bombay I had 8 courses. Each one in math. The regular ones such as Calculus and Statistics. But truly exotic ones like Mechanics.

I do not recall much if anything of those subjects all of which I ended up excelling in, but one concept stood out in Mechanics.

Leverage.

Leverage matters.

Archimedes famously said, "Give me a lever and a place to stand, and I'll move the world." This expresses the power of leverage, which, at least figuratively, moves the world. Archimedes realized that to accomplish the same amount or work, one could make a trade-off between force and distance using a lever. 

Artwork created using Stable Diffusion

Technology is leverage.

As technology is widely distributed it helps individuals as much as it does institutions.

A sling shot is technology that helped David bring down Goliath.

A bow and arrow are leverage versus those who do not have arms.

But sooner or later everyone will have the armaments.

But the great archer will use the bow and arrow to create great distance between her and the less talented.

Every advance in technology places a premium on superior ability.

Today there are marvelous breakthroughs in AI technology in the currently trending ChatGPT and Lensa AI.

Experiment and sample them both and while you are it check out Stable Diffusion and  Runway ML among so many other break throughs.

But remember the typewriter did not write “A Farewell to Arms” but Hemingway did.

If I had a word processor and ChatGPT and Hemingway has a pen he would write better.

If Hemingway also had ChatGPT the distance between us would be even wider.

Hemingway with a Substack would have scaled amazingly better than most.

As talented individuals do with a TikTok.

It is not the technology, it is the talent.

Today streaming and the Internet makes one of the most popular courses at Harvard on Justice or Happiness at Yale available to everybody for free.

It is not the marvels of the Internet, streaming and more that make these courses great. It is Laurie Santos and Michael Sandel.

Talent has scaled globally using technology like a lever.

So, we should worry less about how AI will replace us but how we will leverage AI to scale ourselves, our teams and companies.

Six ways to thrive.

Here are six things we may all want to consider as we move into a new AI age (which is just one of four factors including….5G, Voice/AR/VR and Block Chain… that is so going to revolutionize the future to ensure individuals, teams, and companies which in the end are just one thing TALENT continue to thrive.

Embrace technology: Those who embraced the fire and the wheel out lived and were more successful than those who did not. Learn, invest, and experiment with technology. If one is world class and does not embrace technology a good company or talent with technology will likely end up doing better. The photograph above “Theatre D’Opera Spatial “by Jason M Allen recently won a photography award and was created using Mid Journey another option to Stable Diffusion and Dall-E2. In many ways these new tools are the Photoshops of today.

Complement Technology: Machines cannot yet feel. Machines do not look ahead but are amazing at seeing patterns of the past. Machines are bad at nuance. Machines do not get cancer. Machines do not cry.  How do we work with machines? How do we complement machines?  Last week Stanford’s Yoav Shoham one of the leading AI researchers in the world spoke on What Next? the podcast I host on the topic of People Plus Machine: The Future of Work and describes how a young child is often more sophisticated at certain tasks than the best Ai.

Invest in learning: The problem with technology is that it has a shorter and shorter half-life and a faster and faster pace of advancement. Moore’s law saw chip technology double in capacity every 18 months but today AI progresses twice as fast.  Be wary of people constantly speaking about the “good old days”. The best days are ahead but require constant learning.

The future is carbon and digital: We are going to be increasingly in a digital, data driven, silicon-based future but the differentiating edge when everyone has tech will be analog, feeling carbon-based people whether it is talent or consumers or clients. Combing the two will be key. Art plus Science. Math plus Meaning. The Story and the Spreadsheet.

Fixate on talent: Talent is job one, two and three for all companies. Companies that win will be better at attracting, retaining, and upgrading talent that can collaborate, co-exist, and combine skills with Ai. Finance will matter. Technology will matter. Logistics will matter. But people are everything. The best companies from Microsoft after Satya Nadella to Southwest and Delta versus United and American recognize that people are the differentiator and as technology scales talent will be the key.  Because technology not only can replace talent that do machine like jobs, but machines also greatly magnify the impact of talent who do jobs that are synergistic with computers. And these will be most of the jobs.

Hone your talent: Every human is talented. The key is to discover what we excel at and find ways to hone our craft and skill in ways that can be enhanced with technology. This requires continues practice, re-learning and re-imagining our work and how we will work.

Author Update.

My parents were right as parents often are.

The math mattered and decades of time unearthed something worthwhile to say.

My first book, Restoring the Soul of Business: Staying Human in the Age of Data continues to sell well and will have another very strong year as companies realize that it has predicted all we have gone through in the past three years but more importantly laid out actionable ways on how to thrive as we move ahead. HarperCollins just ordered another reprint.

What Next?

Half of our waking lives our spent working.

Work has and will continue to change more in this decade than in many decades prior. Work is central not just for income but to identity, community, purpose, meaning and more but the how, why, where, what and more of work will be re-invented.

As a result society, industry and life will shift.

McGraw-Hill has just purchased the global rights and provided an advance for my next book tentatively titled Re-Thinking Work: The Future Does Not Fit in the Containers of the Past which I have begun writing and will be published in 2024

Thank you for supporting the first book which helped sell the second book.

And for reading and sharing this thought letter.

After note: In 2010 the Durant books travelled from Bombay to Chicago after we closed our parents home. They sit by a new Quest Pro.

A Way of Seeing …

Photography by Gary Winogrand

Recently I came across two separate pieces of art which resulted in me doing a “deep dive” on Gary Winogrand who has been described as “the central photographer of his generation”.

The first was Leslie Jameson’s essay “A Street Full of Strangers”  which is a reverie on how viewing Gary Winogrand in a gallery made her see things differently including understanding her own challenges. It is a remarkable piece of writing catalyzed by his photography. ( the link takes you to to the sane article under its original title)

Jameson writes: “These were stunning scenes not because they were extraordinary, but because they weren’t. They were full of ordinary people seen so clearly that they became extraordinary in their beauty. “How do you make a photograph that’s more beautiful than what was photographed?” Winogrand once asked. But I didn’t see his photos that way. I didn’t think he was making the world more beautiful; I thought he was excavating beauty that was already there. His alchemy didn’t turn the world holy so much as it revealed that the world had been holy all along—"

Photography by Gary Winogrand

The second was a 2019  documentary on Gary Winogrand “All things are photographable” which reminds us that great art like great architecture can only be admired from a distance whether it physical distance or the passage of time. Pictures taken in the 1960’s make us see who we are today better than many photographers.

“There is nothing as mysterious as a fact clearly described,” Winogrand said, and his photographs perform some version of this seduction by way of plain exposure. “That’s all there is, light on surface,” he also said, which made me think of a deceptively simple statement Edward Hopper had made about his own art: “ What I wanted to do was paint sunlight on the side of a house. ”

Photography by Gary Winogrand

The Gary Winogrand Way of Seeing

Gary Winogrand who died in 1984 was the first digital photographer decades before digital in that he was not constrained by the scarcity of film and took over a million pictures. He combined a disinterest in technique with an obsessive devotion to shooting on the street all day, every day.

Gary was most alive when he was outside of himself which was when he was behind a camera lens. He once said “I get totally out of myself. It’s the closest I come to not existing, I think, which is the best – which is to me attractive.” 

To him seeing was key:

“Sometimes I feel like … the world is a place I bought a ticket to,” Winogrand once said. “It’s a big show for me, as if it wouldn’t happen if I wasn’t there with a camera.”

“When I’m photographing, I see life.” 

Photography by Gary Winogrand

Gary Winogrand on photography as the work and craft on how to see.

“You have a lifetime to learn technique. But I can teach you what is more important than technique, how to see; learn that and all you have to do afterwards is press the shutter.” ~ Garry Winogrand

“Photography is not about the thing photographed. It is about how that thing looks photographed.” 

“No one moment is most important. Any moment can be something.”

“You know, I really don’t think you learn from teachers. You learn from work. I think what you learn, really, is how to be- you have to be your own toughest critic, and you only learn that from work, from seeing work.”

Photography by Gary Winogrand

A Winogrand way of seeing: The tilted camera

“There’s an arbitrary idea that the horizontal edge in a frame has to be the point of reference.”

“Frame in terms of what you want to have in the picture, not about making a nice picture, that anybody can do.”

“You’ve got to deal with how photographs look, what’s there, not how they’re made.”.

Photography by Gary Winogrand

A Winogrand way of seeing: Focus on the choreography of legs.

How often do we look down versus looking up when we take photographs ?

Winogrand often looked at the ballet of his subjects movements.

Photography by Gary Winogrand

A Winogrand way of making us see: Show others seeing.

Gary Winogrand often focussed on now what people were looking at but at them looking at the object.

He believed we saw when we saw others see.

Photography by Gary Winogrand

A Winogrand way of making us see the specialness of of every day: Bringing feeling to the ordinary.

“If Garry Winogrand photographed everything, all the time, as he is famous for having done, his pictures of airports convey the many still very familiar sights and spaces and sensations attached to air travel. Arriving at an airport, checking baggage, watching other travelers amble, walk and sometimes rush by luggage trailing and flailing and neatly rolling along, passengers waiting forever on those long rows of attached seats, friends and relatives greeting each other and saying goodbye…

Photography by Gary Winogrand

Garry Winogrand suggests to see better we need to look more often, look with different perspectives and look where others do not.

Growth.

Photography by Peter Delaney

In a 24-hour period I had the opportunity to a) attend an Ad Council Event in New York where one key takeaway was how we grow and learn in our jobs and experience and not just by gaining academic credentials, b) launched this week’s latest What Next? Episode with a Vice-Chairman of JP Morgan Chase (link below) who discussed how to grow Client relationships and c) spoke with Kat Gordon the legendary founder of the 3% Conference on evolving careers and she noted that there are so many flavors of the way people and organizations grow where many of them are not about scale and size.

Photography by Peter Delaney

Most growth is internal.

When we speak about a person growing unless it is about a child or teenager it is not about physical growth but an emotional and mental deepening, a honing of craft, an enhancement of skills.

This growth comes through some combination of the turbulence and cycle of life, deliberate practice to improve or just the enhanced cognition, connection and tactile skills that come from repeated work or different experiences.

While some of this “growth” might be measured in financial metrics and some in other quantitative measures most growth is about a “way” then a “what”, about an internal shifting of priorities and perspectives than an external enhancement.

In fact, and unfortunately most growth comes when the external signs point to diminishment whether it be illness that brings a reduction in well-being, a career or financial setback that creates a dilution of assets and reputation or a loss of relationships and sense of bearing.

When most growth that matters and that makes people and organizations more resilient, or grows new muscles and perspectives and which builds mental, emotional, and other assets cannot be measured in the ways we gauge success we should think again about what “growth” is.

Growth might be about learning, recovering, overcoming and the scarred and tattooed with shocks of life might be the people we most want in these turbulent and changing times?

Photography by Peter Delaney

Growing business may not be about selling, speaking about your company’s way, or claiming you and your organization can do it all.

Fabrice Braunrot spent his entire working career at JP Morgan Chase where he worked full time for 34 years and now continues to be connected as a teacher and guide in their learning and development arenas helping mid-level executives grow and helping the adjustment of external senior hires into the company. Fabrice’s new career is as an investor in many areas including his passion of healthy food and eating.

In four decades of observing companies and clients all around the world Fabrice identified ways to grow business and relationships.

Growth comes through solutions, relationships, and trust.

Selling rarely works solving problems does.

Few clients or consumers are interested in buying what a company is selling. They have problems that must be solved, jobs that need to be done, goals that need to be achieved.

While this may be obvious, and many companies claim they do this look carefully and one observes 1) a focus and pressure on making the quarterly number which leads to pushing product and services versus understanding needs 2) following of “scripts” about how the sellers’ company has a new approach, a new organization, or a new product.

Understanding a clients’ needs takes time and any smart buyer knows when a seller is following a script. How many understand deeply what they are offering so that they can take the script and company mumbo-jumbo and frame it in their own language and to the Client needs?

Relationships are built on common frame of references

The buyer or client is a person too.

They have interests and passions. Today there are so many ways to learn about the person who is the buyer versus the buyer’s role and power in a company.

By understanding the person and connecting on what helps them grow as a person or what they are passionate about versus just the growth of the company is a way to connect.

Trust is often earned by helping Client’s find other solutions than the one you or your company is offering.

Often some or all the solution to a problem that a buyer may have might not be what you do at a world class level. Guiding and helping them find the best solution even if it is outside your organization is a very smart move most of the time.

a)  The Client gains trust in you and will come to you with many more problems to solve whether you or your company can do it for them. This will allow for more opportunities to potentially solve problems for them or see patterns in needs that you and your company can build expertise.

b)  The companies you send business to you will become strong partners and will often send business back and may be potential merger and acquisition candidates.

Grow by helping the other grow.

Photography by Peter Delaney

Growing by upgrading our mental operating systems.

Companies and teams grow when people grow.

Here are three short pieces (6-minute reads) on learnings on how we can all help our teams and ourselves grow in these turbulent times:

1)How to learn and build a habit of learning:

Learning to Learn

2)How to better understand other people and point of views:

Practice Understanding

3) How to take time to grow ourselves:

Sacred Hours

Appreciation.

Among the teachings of the Stoics is the ephemeral nature of life and the passing of time.

The followers of Wabi-Sabi in the Orient recognize the impermanence, imperfection, and incompleteness of all things.

The Poet Kate Ryan writes of the “joy of finding lost things”

And Carly Simon in “Anticipation” sings that she will stay right here because these are the good old days.

From all these individuals one learns three mental exercises to appreciate what we have:

Imagine a thing you own or a person or place you appreciate lost.

Imagine that you were doing something for the last time.

Imagine that the life you lead is the life that millions aspire to as you aspire to some other life.

Photography by William Eggleston

The joy of finding lost things.

All of us have lost things and sometimes re-found them.

Often not.

A set of keys, a wallet, a passport.

Sometimes a child in a crowd and sometimes a friend after an argument who we make up with.

Other time it is our health or a home or a job.

When we lose something, we often feel more pain in its absence than the joy we had in its presence.

Whenever we have the opportunity to recover it, we appreciate it more than ever before.

An exercise from the Stoics is to imagine you have lost something to appreciate what one has.

As the line goes “we do not know what we have until we have lost it”

Photography by William Eggleston

Paying attention as if we were doing it for the last time.

What makes the ordinary and every day extra-ordinary is that one day it will not be so.

There will be a last day a child will crawl. A last day you will see someone. A last day you will visit a place or drive a car or go to a restaurant. Sometimes we know the last times and often we do not. When we are aware of the last times, we have a higher sense of attention and a sensitivity to the specialness and the passing of the moment.

But these last times come every week and sometimes every day.

The ordinary becomes extra-ordinary when we pay attention, and we find poetry in the crevices of every day.

Photography by William Eggleston

We are living the life that many aspire to.

Most humans aspire to the next better and bigger thing. A combination of our hedonistic adaptation (getting used to what we have), benchmarking against others and other things (the income and home we thought would be amazing a decade ago may be seen as just okay when compared to others) and imagination (our ability to imagine greater, bigger and better or be reminded of it in our media streams) all drive us to next.

We sometimes define our happiness by our advancement toward the things we do not have versus the things we do have.

Most people living in the Western World of the Upper and Upper Middle Classes of most countries who also have their health are living the life that billions aspire to.

The life we have got used to is the aspiration for most people.

We are living the dream life for many as we dream of living some other life.

We may wish to celebrate every new day as a day of thanks and gratitude.

Community.

Photography by Michael Kenna

In her book Retirement and Its Discontents, Michelle Pannor Silver’s research reveals that for millions of people work is much more than output or income they generate. It is a source of meaning and social identity. It is where they feel intellectually stimulated and can express their creative selves. It is where they feel a sense of community and connection.

If organizations lose these attributes, they will struggle to attract and retain the best talent. Admittedly, this is a challenge when they feel in a mad competitive scramble and think that only by devoting all their time and money to data, measurement, and the like can they survive. At the same time, they need to find a middle ground, a place where they make room for story, for meaning and identify. If they lose these crucial elements, what does it matter that they can measure stuff in nanos?

Photography by Michael Kenna

The Importance of Community at Work.

People are looking for work to provide a sense of community as never before. In a Harvard Business Review article, Lori Goler, and her colleagues identified three factors as necessary for job satisfaction: career, community, and cause: “Community is about people; feeling respected, cared about and recognized by others. It drives our sense of connection and belongingness.”

You might think that community is only important to certain types of people holding certain types of jobs in certain countries. Goler, however, found that community (as well as the two other factors) transcend types. In fact, on a 5.0 scale, engineers rated the importance of community as 4.18—a surprisingly high rating from a group that is often thought of as idiosyncratic loners.

Think about community as a forum for storytelling in the broadest definition of that term. In any organization where people have a strong sense of community, they also are constantly telling and listening to stories—stories about the behavior of bosses, about the machinations of teams, about the heroic efforts of one leader and the villainous actions of another. More than that, stories about the organization reside in all employees’ heads.

A major merger with a competitor a few years ago is analogous to a historical treaty signing between formerly warring nations—this event and everything that led up to it is embedded in people’s consciousness.

The multiple stories of an organizational community provide people with common language, ideas, and personalities, offering a narrative of which they are a part. As Goler asserts, community fosters a sense of “connection and belongingness,” and these positive attributes emanate from the ongoing organizational story.

Photography by Michael Kenna

The Loss of Deep Engagement.

Companies used to talk about their people as family. In the wake of downsizing and in workplaces where people work remotely, travel constantly, and change jobs frequently, family no longer seems an appropriate term. But should workplaces be the opposite of family—impersonal environments where people measure their satisfaction by the size of their paycheck and bonus?

To address this question, let’s start with the highly influential paper“Measuring Meaningful Work,” which examines several studies and concludes that this type of work is aligned with passion and seen as a higher calling; growth in a job and making a difference in the world represents a greater purpose than income.

Similarly, CEO Tony Schwartz identifies twelve attributes of a great workplace and notes that a key to these attributes is standing “for something beyond simply increasing profits. Create products or provide services or serve causes that clearly add value in the world, making it possible for employees to derive a sense of meaning from their work, and to feel good about the companies for which they work.”

Most organizational leaders probably agree with these notions of meaningful work, at least in the abstract. Yet, many don’t create the necessary conditions. Willis Towers Watson, a global advisory firm, found that two out of three workers were not fully engaged at work, with almost one-fifth completely disengaged.

“The most significant factors relate to how their supervisors support them on the job, their levels of stress and the severity of their workloads. For the detached, by contrast, company leadership stood as the focal point. Detached workers lack an emotional connection to the organization, stemming from feelings that they do not work for a company with strong values, clear vision, and a leadership team that takes employees’ interests and needs into account”

Photography by Michael Kenna

Architecting Emotional and Physical Landscapes.

Organizations possess a lot of physically and emotionally detached workers these days. Think of it from a landscape perspective. There’s the physical landscape of homes, offices, off-site meeting spaces, and so on.

There’s also the emotional landscape of relationships with bosses and fellow employees.People feel spaces and connections both emotionally and physically, and therefore sculpting environments are key for establishing meaning and purpose. These spaces whether they be emotional or physical (whether it be an office, an event or an off-site) where the culture of a company is created and sustained.

In these spaces, stories are told; stories about values as relates to customers, employees, communities, and shareholders. Stories about the company’s founders, how it was founded, and why it exists beyond creating products and services. Stories that employees create as they find purpose and growth and meaning.

These stories are lost, or at least diminished, when people fail to get together in-person on a regular basis or fail to feel emotionally safe to speak up and share stories. When they’re enmeshed in data, working remotely, transfixed by screens and not fully present for other reasons, people don’t tell or hear the stories that imbue the workplace with meaning.

Companies will need to combine working from home, the office, events and experiences in different ways for differently experienced people and jobs to balance the benefits of distributed and in-person interaction. They will not be a single model for every firm or level and in the differences will be the challenge and where the magic of managing will lie.

Photography by Michael Kenna

Robots Compute. People Dream.

At a time when people change jobs with almost the same regularity with which they change their passwords, community keeps people loyal to their organizations. More than that, in a volatile, uncertain world of work, it provides certainty and satisfaction. We need to be aware that in our rush toward all things digital, we’re endangering this sense of community.

In author Don DeLillo’s landmark novel Underworld, he writes:

I was driving a Lexus through a rustling wind. This is a car assembled in a work area that’s completely free of human presence. Not a spot of mortal sweat, except, okay, for the guys who drive the product out of the plant—allow a little moisture when they grip the wheel. The system flows forever onward, automated to priestly nuance, every gliding movement back- referenced for prime performance. Hollow bodies coming in endless sequence. There’s nobody on the line with caffeine nerves or a history of clinical depression. Just the eerie weave of chromium alloys carried in interlocking arcs, block iron and asphalt sheeting, soaring ornaments of coachwork fitted and merged. Robots tightening bolts, programmed drudges that do not dream of family dead.

This paragraph has stayed with me for a long time, particularly these three

lines:

Hollow bodies coming in endless sequence.

There’s nobody on the line with caffeine nerves or a history of clinical depression.

Robots tightening bolts, programmed drudges that do not dream of family dead.

All industries are becoming increasingly automated. While DeLillo’s book described robots in an auto plant, we now see robots of some type nearly everywhere.

With the dawning of AI, the rise of intelligent objects with the Internet of Things, and new interfaces such as voice, A/R and V/R we will see our workplaces augmented, encrusted, and infested with machines of every type.

In today’s distributed workplace, where we interact across screens with machines that spew data that is collated and compiled by computers, how do we maintain a sense of community?

Messiah Karma.

During the past two weeks a few “Messianic” figures have imploded or are in complete melt down mode.

Kanye West in the world of music whose business and reputation have cratered as he went on a verbal rant of great rage.

Sam Bankman-Fried the CEO of FTX who transformed from being a face and savior of the crypto industry to losing most of his wealth overnight and potentially facing jail time for fraud.

And then there is Elon.

While Kanye and Sam have imploded we are viewing the rapid decaying of Elon Musk who is running a master class on value and reputation destruction one tweet at a time.

And further afield in Russia is Mr Putin who is destroying lives, economies and reputation at the end of a long long table.

A Messiah or God Complex

What is a Messiah Complex?

From Wikipedia :A messiah complex is a state of mind in which an individual holds a belief that they are destined to become a savior today or in the near future.

What triggers a God complex?

It can manifest as a justification to behave a certain way or take a particular course of action that is unethical and even dangerous. Similar to many other mental disorders, the exact cause of this complex is not known.

Messianic Traits.

Messiahs share three common traits.

1. The Rule of Law is not for them: Contracts do not matter. Financial regulations are for the birds. Other people are lower level creatures who do not have rights. Borders are decided on personal predilections.

2. Incestuous Thinking: Get high on their own fumes. View everything from narrow perspectives. Do not listen to other perspectives.

3. Sycophantic Choruses: They surround themselves with yes-people who aid, abet and re-enforce their worst impulses and behaviors. Anyone who disagrees is banished. Often fawning press furthers their self-regard by echoing that they are just awesome in every way.

The turd at the head of the table.

In one of the most popular posts of this though letter called “The Turd on the Table” best practices on addressing tough issues such as calling out that the moist brown thing on the table is not a brownie but a piece of excrement are discussed.

Companies and leaders that do not create an environment where mistakes and bad behavior can be discussed are doomed to great problems (Wells-Fargo opening fake accounts is an example).

But what happens if the turd sits at head of the table?

The dear leader is the problem which will end up costing everyone dear.

This is a far more difficult challenge which is why many leaders who are not constrained by boards, advised by truth tellers or who look for data that does not support but challenges their beliefs, destroy not just themselves but create massive havoc in peoples lives and significant financial destruction.

Avoiding the Karma of Self-Defeat.

Most messianic leaders end up defeating themselves by stretching things too far.

Napoleon stretched his resources too far by opening the the Russian front.

Bankman-Fried stretched the truth and line between FTX and Almeida so there was no line.

Musk is twittering too much and is now frittering so much.

If one believes one sits as God in heaven above all , does not see other points of view and is surrounded by a chorus of enablers, sooner or later hell arrives.

Successful individuals and companies should learn from these tragic stories and damaged people in the following ways:

1.     Diversity: Diversity of backgrounds and thinking particularly in leadership teams are critical. If everybody thinks the same way, it can be dangerous. Disagreement and challenging points of view is what boards, external perspectives and independently successful people bring to a company or to a person.

2.     Building a case for the opposite: Whenever a key decision needs to be made a team or individual should be charged with building a case for the exact opposite of what you as an individual, a leader or board are considering. This provides two benefits. First it allows one to make sure that group think does not disconnect us from reality since there is a reminder that we may be wrong. Second it helps us correct gaps in the thinking of our original recommendation. It is like stress testing our proposition.

4.    Remember the future comes from the slime and not the heavens: There are many benefits of being a leader, working at a very successful company and being on the top of the world. Everybody wants to meet with you or think you are cool because of the fame and reputation of your company. The press fawns and friends’ gush. It gives us all a great rush.

The future usually does not emerge from the gatherings at Davos, The Allen Conference or at TED but where no one is looking or visiting. The Auto companies were looking at each other and they missed Tesla and Uber. Procter and Gamble missed Dollar Shave Club. IBM missed Microsoft. And today TikTok has more engagement than every Facebook property combined (Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp). So, let’s meet the crazy folks who have an idea, go off the beaten path and not take ourselves too seriously.

Or let us remember just one characteristic to minimize self-defeat.

Humility.

On Poetry.

Photography by Rishad Tobaccowala

“Poetry is accelerated thinking.”

“Poetry is the best words in the best order.”

“Poetry is stored magic.”

“Poetry restores us to what is deepest in us. It consoles us.”

“The greatest poetry is written at the borders of what can be said. It makes a strong effort at expressing the unsayable.”

“The meaning of poetry is to give you courage.”

“The purpose of poetry is to remind us how difficult it is to remain just one person.”

Photography by Rishad Tobaccowala

The impact of reading poetry.

“A poem pierces the shimmering surfaces of the modern world and somehow penetrates the core of reality itself.”

“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know it is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know. Is there another way? “

“In an old book. I stumbled across a saying.It was like a stranger.Punching me in the face.”

“Implicit in poetry is the notion that we are deepened by heartbreaks, that we are not so much diminished, as enlarged by grief, by our refusal to vanish-to let others vanish-without leaving a verbal record. Poetry is a stubborn art.”

Most of all it gives us the courage to speak up and to recognize authentic voices..

“Where the voice that is in us makes a true response. Where the voice that is great within us rises up”

Photography by Rishad Tobaccowala

Poetry reminding us of what we need today.

Kindness

by Naomi Shihab Nye

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
forever.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

Photography by Rishad Tobaccowala

Poetry and the beat of time

From Sunlight on Garden

By Louis MacNeice

The sunlight in the garden

Hardens and grows cold

We cannot cage the minute

Within its net of gold

Lines on a young lady’s photograph album

By Phil Larkin

At last, you yielded up the album, which
Once open, sent me distracted. All your ages
Matt and glossy on the thick black pages!
Too much confectionery, too rich:
I choke on such nutritious images.

My swivel eye hungers from pose to pose -
In pigtails, clutching a reluctant cat;
Or furred yourself, a sweet girl-graduate;
Or lifting a heavy-headed rose
Beneath a trellis, or in a trilby-hat

Those flowers, that gate,
These misty parks and motors, lacerate
Simply by being you; you
Contract my heart by looking out of date.

In short, a past that no one now can share,
No matter whose your future; calm and dry,
It holds you like a heaven, and you lie
Invariably lovely there,
Smaller and clearer as the years go by.

Photography by Rishad Tobaccowala

Poetry’s application to current events.

Shakespeare on social media.

All the world’s a stage.

And all the men and women merely players.

The all have their exits and entrances

And one man in his time plays many parts

Seeking the bubble reputation.

William Wordsworth on the competitive world of work and consumption.

The world is too much with us.

Late and soon

Getting and spending

We lay waste to our powers.

Yehuda Amichai on this past week’s events at Twitter

Here is a poem written nearly 10 years ago (with two phrases removed and nothing else changed) that serves as an elegy and lamentation for this week’s events at Twitter.

A Pity, We Were Such a Good Invention

They amputated
As far as I am concerned
They are surgeons. All of them.

They dismantle us.
Each from the other.
As far as I’m concerned.
They are all engineers. All of them.

A pity. We were such a good
And loving invention.
An aeroplane.
Wings and everything.
We hovered a little above the earth.

We even flew a little.