The Great Re-Invention: Address Fragility
In 2008/2009 we lived through the Great Recession.
One way to frame the impact of the Covid-19 tragedy is to think about it as the start of the Great Re-invention.
Of Business, Of Government, Of Society.
And of our ourselves.
I believe the impact of this crisis will be greater than the ones I have lived through including the the dot.com bust, 9/11 and the Great Recession because it is a human, economic and social shock happening to everybody in the world, at the same time, for an extended period ( 8 to 12 weeks or more).
Peoples habits change if they repeat or stop a behavior for 60 or more days.
People’s mindsets change when they go through a severe shock.
Peoples relationships change when they get the opportunity to see, feel and think in new ways.
All this is happening to all of us.
Over the past few weeks I have read, researched and thought about the implications of our current tragedy in the future and will be publishing them here on this blog.
Predicting has always been a risky business and all futurists need to be humble since the tomorrow will prove them often wrong. This is particularly true today given the unprecedented circumstances. So in order to ground my observations I am beginning with what I believe is a key to understand and frame the way forward.
The first thing we all need to do is to address the reality of Fragility.
Human Fragility: If there was ever a doubt about the frailty of our bodies and minds and the reality that we all are carbon based feeling filled creatures with limited life spans and parts that go wrong, Covid-19 has brought us clarity. Never have so many people been so anxious, fearful and uncertain for their futures. Even the well to do who are working from home with financial reserves are stressed. As I remind people we are not working from home. We are working under duress in homes filled with children who should be at school, worried about parents and loved ones and our jobs, while being scared out of our wits via our television and social feeds and dealing with toilet paper shortages and the grocery trip as a hazardous life risking endeavor!
Economic Fragility: Tens of millions of businesses and hundreds of millions of people all over the world have less than two or three weeks of reserves after a decade of a booming economy. Huge corporations including airlines spent all their reserves buying back their stock and would go out of business without government help . The CEO’s who believed in free enterprise and told government to back off are going hat in hand and pleading for help.
Social Fragility: In the US about 16% of the population are immigrants but over 25% of the people who are working on the front lines whether it be delivery, warehouses, drivers or nurses are immigrants. In Chicago as I write this African-Americans are dying at a7X rate to the general population. The harsh downturn is impacting labor particularly gig workers, poor people and young people. The walls we put up thinking that we could live compartmentalized lives are eroding as it is becoming clear that we are all connected. Boris Johnson the Prime Minister of the UK is in intensive care as I write this
The Great Re-invention: Think Different. Feel Different. See Different.
As businesses and a society we need to think, see and feel differently to ensure that we work to re-invent our world in the light of the learnings of our fragility. This is likely to mean that successful businesses and leaders will acknowledge the following in all their behaviors, product development and messaging : Society, Safety and Security:
Society: We live in a society where we are all connected as people. We have to ensure we are optimizing for society and not just for consumers or businesses.
America is different from Europe with a rugged individualistic streak that is part of the national character but today when we see CEO’s who were capitalistic in boom times turn socialist when they run into trouble ( or as Professor Scott Galloway says they want to individualize the gains in good times for themselves but socialize the losses for everybody when things go wrong) or politicians who claimed had no money to address infrastructure or social issues but now have unlimited money will give people pause on nonsensical ideologies.
The days of pooh poohing government or causes that focus on common good are likely to pass. I anticipate a new found appreciation of blue collar workers and people on the front lines and would not be surprised to see increased unionization particularly among gig and warehouse workers.
Safety: This crisis has shown the most important asset is our health. It has placed a new spotlight on the importance of safety and the people who keep us safe.
Funding for some form of Universal Healthcare will become essential and new found appreciation for medical staff, first responders will remain long lasting. Too many people are too vulnerable and there will be a hunger to keep oneself and one’s family safe.
And Climate Change will be taken seriously for the first time by many deniers.
For a few months and maybe longer messaging will need to emphasize safety. Why is this conference safe. Why is this theater safe. How does our company keep you safe.
Security: A joint survey by the Financial Times and the Peter G Petersen Foundation released this morning indicated “how widespread the pandemic’s economic impact has become, with almost as many families making more than $100,000 a year reported a hit to their income (71 per cent), as those making less than $50,000 (74 per cent). Similarly, 53 per cent of those making less than $50,000 said they would lose their pay if illness forced them to stop work, while 47 per cent of those making more than $100,000 were in the same boat.”
People all over the world at all income groups will feel far more financially insecure after Covid-19 than before it. The Millennials burdened with student debt and facing a constrained market for employment will feel particularly vulnerable and older retirees are facing lower retirement balances, zero to negative interest rates on savings and the possibility of higher inflation as 6 trillion dollars in the US flows through the system.
As businesses restart up they will have limited to no pricing power since their customers will watch their spending and will be needed to be incentivized to re-start behaviors they may have given up.
Society. Safety. Security.
In conclusion a key to driving the Great Re-invention will be to focus on society and how you are serving society while helping peoples ( customers, employees, stakeholders) need for the safety of their and their families health and the need for financial security.
The Great Re-Invention: Constrained Growth
Today’s constraints on our physical movements can provide the opportunity to enlarge our mental and emotional capabilities to such an extent that it may lead to a great re-invention.
Emotionally the crucible of change we are in can make us feel differently about our lives, our connections and our work.
Mentally the stress in the foundry of uncertainty will twist our thinking in one or more ways as we seek to make sense of what has happened and plans for when the constraints lift.
In many ways it will make us appreciate what we took for granted
In others as we forgo certain behaviors and have the time to ponder and ruminate on our previous days, we may question why we did certain things
We will question many aspects of our lives and we will make resolutions
And many of these resolutions in some form or the other are likely to stick unlike those we make for New Years because for 6 to 12 weeks we will be forced to do things differently day after day and this is how new habits form.
And unlike previous events like 9/11 or The Great Recession, Covid-19 is a health, financial and social crisis that is happening to every single person in the world at about the same time for at least three months.
Every one of us will adapt, evolve and meld different versions of ourselves and interact with a world of people and institutions that are different.
And while it is likely that for the majority of us the world, we emerge will be more constrained due to lower financial assets, fewer job opportunities (if we are lucky to have jobs) and many other challenges, we have the opportunity to upgrade our mental and operating system.
We may have gone into this crisis as MS-DOS and focused on the narrow corridors of ourselves but if we spend the next few weeks correctly, we could come out as Windows 10 and expanded Horizon.
So, let us use these constraints to ask three questions.
How can I use the next few weeks to do some of those promises I made to myself I would do if I had more time? Culture to ingest, skills to learn, dreams to forge into reality.
What is important and if I had half the time and half the choices what would stay and what would go?
What if the opposite of what I believe is true?
The constraints we are living in cannot be changed and is out of our control.
On the other hand, our tomorrow’s self is more under our control.
Maybe instead of thinking of this as the Constrained Era of Covid-19 we reframe it as the Era of the Great Re-invention.
Of Business, Of Government, Of Society.
Diverse Faces are not the same as Diverse Voices
This article was first published in AdExchanger.
All leaders, and particularly those in marketing and media, face many challenges today, including organizational designs built for the past vs. the present, hierarchical command-and-control management styles that do not resonate with a new generation and employees who question their intent.
One key change that companies are making to address these issues is to ensure that they have a more diverse work force that will resonate with the marketplace and with their talent.
Ensuring diversity is not just the right thing to do, but is proven to be good for the bottom line as a representative workforce is a competitive advantage when talent is key, change is widespread and new ways of looking at things become critical.
However, ensuring a diversity of faces is a necessary but insufficient step. Not only do companies need different faces around the table, but they also need diversity in thinking. We need to ensure that every person in a firm and around the table has a voice.
Most importantly, it is critical to have voices that can speak truth to power, question the status quo, call out potential issues and be heard without the risk of being punished.
Today in the field of marketing and technology, there are huge issues that need to be discussed including a) the control major platforms have over marketers, who find themselves with limited data and customer relationships; b) how advertising technology built for engagement has become a society operating system that has created polarization and a breakdown in trust; and c) the long-term secular decline of advertising, which will be accelerated by cheap, ad-free streaming services.
There are voices that question and have suggestions on how to solve or mitigate these issues.
If such voices were listened to, many companies, such as Wells Fargo and possibly Boeing, would not have suffered their reputational and market valuation losses. There were people who knew there were issues, but they either kept quiet or were silenced or ignored.
For true diversity it is key that people can call out the turd on the table when everyone else is celebrating what looks like a delicious brownie.
This is very difficult since the issues being called out are challenging. Financial impropriety. Cutting corners to make deadlines, which hurts product or service quality. Loathsome behavior by management. Incompetence in adapting to change.
In addition to the difficulty of speaking out, there is the risk of job loss, increased workload to fix the problem, career blackballing and, of course, the possibility of being wrong.
But speaking one’s mind is not just important in helping to avoid big problems or issues. It also creates an environment that helps day-to-day business.
Increases effectiveness of teams: The best teams feel connected to each other and feel a sense of empathy and trust. Straight talk helps foster these qualities.
Gets to the root of problems: Continuous improvement is critical in a fast-moving competitive age. This means identifying threats, weaknesses and issues. These are much easier to do when voices are not stifled.
Fosters creativity and innovation: For great ideas and creativity we need trampolines of trust and an environment where disruptors can disrupt without having their lives and careers disrupted.
Speaking up is difficult in all circumstances but particularly if management and the culture is not supportive.
Studying many companies and organizations, including firms as diverse as Pixar and the Navy Seals, has revealed some best practices that one can unleash to encourage diversity of voice.
Ask everyone to speak, from the most junior to the most senior.
Celebrate truth-tellers and status quo breakers when they are right with promotions and financial rewards.
Bring in outside speakers and truth-tellers to share cases from outside and run workshops.
After each project ask how things could have been done better.
Management should ask people to build a case for why the decision being taken by management is wrong. A postmortem before the project has begun allows people to say what they need to.
Being sensitive to diversity of voices as much as to diversity of faces will ensure long-term success for companies.
Rishad Tobaccowala ( @rishad ) is the author of the bestselling “Restoring the Soul of Business: Staying Human in the Age of Data” published by Harper Collins globally in January 2020. It has been described as an “operating manual” for managing people, teams and careers in the age we live in. This article is a segment from the chapter “The Turd on the Table”
Why Should You Read My Book?
Time is all we have.
So why should you allocate a part of your most precious asset on engaging with this book?
Because my hope is that it will leave you seeing, thinking, and feeling differently about how to grow and remain relevant in transformative times.
How to grow yourself, grow those around you, and grow your practice, passion, or company.
How to remain relevant by understanding what it takes to make sense and thrive in a world of rapid technological, demographic, and global upheaval.
And it will do so by questioning much of what business takes for granted:
• why data is often not the way forward and we may have too much of it;
• why change sucks;
• why having more—rather than fewer—meetings is better; and
• why it is essential to have a culture and courage that calls out “the turd on the table.”
You not only will learn what makes great leaders but also how to deal with, or not become, a bad boss.
You’ll discover how to extract meaning from data and see poetry in the plumbing.
This book recognizes that while our world is increasingly filled with digital, silicon-based, computing objects, it is populated by people who remain analog, carbon-based, feeling creatures.
People like you.
And me.
Companies can choose to upgrade the skills of their people and reimagine the way they work or swap out their people and acquire new ways of working.
Often both are necessary.
This book is about upgrading the operating systems of people and companies by remembering the thinking-and-feeling component of the operating system.
A central premise is that successful individuals and firms can never forget the importance of people, their emotions, the culture of the organization, and what cannot be measured. I refer to this as the Soul of a Company.
This Soul is critical even as individuals and firms reinvent themselves for an increasingly AI-augmented, data-driven, networked and distributed, screen-based future.
As the world becomes more data driven and real-time twitchy, and as financial markets punish companies for failing to meet their goals, I worry that our short-term focus on numbers is destroying the long-term health of business, countries, and people. I worry we are losing our humanity in a world where modern, data-driven economies and cutting-edge technologies are seeping into all of life.
Yes, results, data, speed, and technology are keys for businesses to remain relevant and thrive. But while they’re necessary, they’re insufficient for long-term success.
Over the past five years, I have seen a significant tilt to the numeric, to the algorithmic, and to the measurable. This causes organizations to think short term, prize individualism, and adopt a mercenary mindset rather than think long term, prize teams, and adopt a meaningful mindset.
Increasingly there is a premium and a dominance on the quantitative, or what I call the spreadsheet, and a diminishment of the importance of the culture, humanity, emotion, and complexity of people, or what I refer to as the story.
Successful people and companies combine the story and the spreadsheet and by doing so restore the soul of business.
Lest you think I’m an antitech zealot who believes we should go back to a kinder, gentler, analog time, let me tell you a little about myself. I grew up in Bombay, India, receiving a degree in economics and advanced mathematics from the University of Bombay. I then came to the United States and received an MBA in marketing and finance from one of the most quantitative schools in the world: the University of Chicago.
Over a thirty-seven-year career at the companies of the Publicis Groupe, an eighty-thousand-person global marketing and business transformation firm, I helped found or cofound some of the first digital agencies and future-oriented strategic consultancies as well as contributing to the shaping and growth of one of the two largest buyers of digital, data-driven media in the world.
I have served as chairman of major global digital-and e-commerce-oriented firms such as Digitas for Publicis and served as a chief strategist and chief growth officer for Publicis Groupe, while also serving as a trusted advisor to many of our clients’ reinventions and reimaginings.
I relate this short history to establish my credentials in the data-driven, digital space. I am obviously someone who believes in digital change. Not so obviously, I also believe in the power of people to make transformation work.
As much as I value data, devices, and software, I value empathy, innovation, and relationships.
My career has been about change. Seeing it, managing it, and adapting to it. Change requires adopting the latest technology, but it also requires maximizing the best qualities of people.
My career has also been about reinvention—reinventing companies as well as myself.
Reinvention involves implementing state-of-the-art software and digital processes that produce something new, but it also involves getting people to embrace the new and enhance it with their ideas and actions.
I’ve led transformation efforts both in the US and in countries throughout the world and earned a reputation as a digital pioneer, while also being known as someone who has helped inspire and grow talent. The two roles are not incompatible.
This is a book about the future, fed by the best of the past.
A book about cool data that does not forget warm humanity.
A book that believes business can and should have a soul.
It is nearly forty years of learning distilled into two hundred pages that answer the dozen questions I have consistently been asked in the last few years—regardless of country, industry, or age of the person asking.
Often people asked if there was a book they could buy with the answers.
There was not. Until now.
Restoring the Soul of Business has been written to allow you to read any chapter in any order, since no writer can know what will be most relevant to each reader at each stage.
You are in control, and in this way I respect your time, since that is all we have.
Hopefully I will get some of yours.
Thank you.
To look inside the book including Ken Auletta’s foreword and the chapter descriptions and and if you are interested in ordering it please click here….
The Turd on the Table
Earlier this week, I participated in a meeting with the CEO of a very well regarded large company to discuss ways our two companies might partner.
After sharing visions and perspectives on the future, it was time to get down to figure out how our companies might work together.
So I suggested we begin by addressing “the turd on the table”, which was the fact that on the fringes we were competitors and both of us saw the same path to growth which could make us bigger competitors in the future. Was this a “lets learn about the potential competitor meeting” or a “lets find a way to partner so we can both grow recognizing the potential of friction meeting”?
The CEO said, “I am so glad you brought up what I was thinking about but you brought it up so “elegantly” ”
We had a very positive meeting and dinner for the next few hours since the CEO and his team and our team addressed “the turd on the table” and because of this our conversations moving forward were “bull shit “free!
Many years ago a boss of mine identified leadership as the ability to understand, face, adapt and align with reality.
Too often, particularly in meetings, we hide reality within layers of protocol, diplomacy, and dazzling multi-media shows. We are so afraid of the truth breaking out that we hold meetings to prepare meetings to get ready for a meeting.
Time passes. Opportunities come and go. The world spins.
And all the while instead of addressing the “turd on the table”, we talk about being sensitive, being politically correct and we all think we are in some psychological thriller or dramatic play where every move and word can make the difference. Meetings are thick with intrigue, back room dramas, meaningful silences, and side bar “bathroom break”conversations.
The joke is on all the participants because everybody knows what needs to be addressed. We all know what is the” turd on the table” and after the meetings we speak about how no one went near it.
So instead I suggest calling out the turd.
Call it out. Shine a bright light on it. Place it on a pedestal. Address the damn thing !
Here are some suggestions for you to become a “turd slayer”, even though you may have been have been indoctrinated not to do much of this advice.
a) Say what you think. In business we care what is between your ears. If you cannot say what you think (hey if its wrong you will be told so, in fact even if you are right you will be told you are wrong….). Truth eventually has a habit of breaking in. Why not open the door and save time and damage ?
b) Assume the person you are trying to be diplomatic to about an issue knows what the issue is. If you bring it up you will be more respected by them. If they did not know, you will earn an ally.
c) Do not go with the crowd if your instinct says no. Often group and crowd dynamics take over in much decision making. People think about what their boss wants to hear rather than what they should say. People worry about the impact of their career rather than what is right. Sooner or later too many people are dodging their own shadow and playing mind games that lead to slow and bad decisions.
d) Do not work for a boss who you cannot bear the truth or whom you fear. We are living in a time of change and most of the time senior folks need to be told that their core beliefs may no longer be true. I have seen too many companies from newspaper to magazines to many other companies hasten their decline because their leadership did not face reality, in part because their staff was scared of them.
e) Tell all the truth but tell it slant: Once you have decided to address the turd on the table, you might want to do so in a way so the message gets through. Ideally it is in a way that does not make the person receiving the news “lose face” so much of this is best done person to person. In other times some humility, self awareness, metaphors or humor will be called for. Emily Dickinson says it best in her poem, too much of shock and you will have blinded someone to the turd!
Tell all the Truth but tell it slant --
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind --So lets address the “turd on the table” wherever it might be.
For instance this post might be a turd in itself.
We would then call it a “meta-turd”