The Great Re-Wiring

This past week, Dropbox announced it will let all employees work from home permanently as it turns its offices into WeWork-like “collaborative spaces”. This was just one of dozens of companies announcing change in work plans. Recent surveys indicate that most employees have no interest in ever going back to work full time, with 50% saying they would leave jobs that do not offer a work from home option for at least a few days a week.

In NY, where 2.2 million people used to take transit into Manhattan (only 1.2 million people live in Manhattan but 3.4 million people used to work there every week day) they no longer do. The sparse streets have led to 20 percent of small businesses to begin the process of closing and hotels such as the Royalton are being sold at 25% below their 2017 purchase price while The Standard sitting next to Google NY has failed to pay its mortgage for three months. Several others have closed down permanently as hotel occupancy remains at 30 to 40 percent far from the 70-80 percent needed to break even. Planned building activity in Manhattan is down 50% and commercial real estate bonds are trading at 30 to 40 percent of their face value.

Regal Theatres have closed down again and AMC says it will run out of money by January and in desperation is leasing an entire theater for 99 dollars so a family can see a movie safely by themselves.

This past week every night for 2 hours, I served as a moderator/emcee of a Publicis Groupe global executive program for 65 top leaders in 13 countries across 6 time zones. Break out sessions incorporated people who were physically living hours and thousands of miles apart but virtually were in the same room sharing notes and solving problems. Speakers and trainers came in from all around the world and there was a lot of interactivity and connection. In a couple of weeks we move the training to India/Middle East and Eastern Europe while the folks who run the program remain in NY and Paris, with me in Chicago.

As someone who used to fly 120 to 140 flight segments a year it was clear that in many ways this was far superior (not that everything can be replaced or replicated in the virtual world but we will need much less and much more well thought out reasons for global gatherings) .It is increasingly likely that the next Athens, London, Bangalore, and Silicon Valley may actually be in the cloud and no longer a place.

What we are seeing six months into a shutdown with at least another six months before us, is the re-thinking of distance and the tyranny of time schedules which is leading to a Great Re-Wiring of the Big 6 Places (Home, Work/School, Retail, Eating Out, Entertainment Venues and Travel) where we spend the majority of our waking lives .

For many months, five of these six places ( home, work/school, retail, eating out, and entertainment venues) have mostly collapsed to the home with the help of zoom/teams/google to study and work, e-commerce to shop, food and grocery delivery bring eating out in, and streaming enabling us to entertain ourselves as more and more museums, operas and much more stream online.. The sixth big area where we spend our time, travel has declined sharply as we commute less and fly almost nothing.

Many of these changes will become hardwired not just as the infrastructure adapts but because our human minds are re-wiring as month by month passes and we adapt to this “new strange” and the normal of December 2019 fades into the past. The first and second order effects of these changes will have huge impact on individuals, businesses and broader society.

Changes in where we work will be the driving force of the rewiring.

At the center of the re-wiring is the place we work, which will vary from Industry to Industry, but is likely to see the end of the five day at the office work week for most white collar industries.

Even with a vaccine and with no virus it is increasingly clear in an age of fast broadband, 5 G, Cloud computing and much more the hauling of our bodies to and fro from home to office five days a week was being due to just plain inertia and even pre Covid-19 made no sense from a use of time, energy consumption or productivity.

Now that we work 100 percent time from home very few of us are pining to get back five days a week to work.Rather we need to ask what do we return to work for? And if it collaboration, training, relationship building and Client work how much does this require?

A good guess will be that in most industries the time spent in offices will decline by at least half and probably much more, and likely hollowing out commercial centers of major cities.

This will dramatically reduce how much we eat out (both every day breakfast and lunch in transit and at work ) and travel ( commute to work or fly on business). A 20 to 30 percent reduction and even more in city centers for eating out is likely and maybe a 40 to 50 percent reduction in business travel. Urban transit which was already losing money will be really challenged with half or fewer riders.

We are likely to see an increase in personal travel as we aim to catch up to all the experiences we lost and meet the friends and loved ones we could not. This will change the economics of airlines which often depended on the business traveller for all their profits.

Retail will also change in that it is likely we will buy fewer clothes for work and with many more millions getting comfortable with e-commerce will continue to hollow out the malls and retail corridors.

The biggest unknown is the future of Entertainment. It is very likely that post vaccine live experiences from Broadway Theater to Concerts to Sports will surge in popularity while movie theaters are likely to struggle as streaming becomes the core business of the Big Studios and the economics of movie going look increasingly expensive to that of streaming at home.

But even home entertainment is in the throes of change and every Marketer must pay attention. This coming Tuesday, E-Marketer will be releasing a new study called the US 2020 Digital Users Report whose author Debbie Williamson shared a preview and key take aways with me.

Six Key Take-Aways From the Upcoming E-Marketer Report

1.Small can be mighty. Activities with smaller user bases, such as live video viewing or video game viewing, were more likely to see significant pandemic-related growth in our forecasts. The unusual nature of the lockdown made consumers more eager to explore new things and try relatively niche activities.

2. Within digital video, subscription OTT is the clear winner. This year, there will be 207.5 million subscription OTT viewers, a 13.1% increase over 2019. In our previous forecast, we estimated just 5.1% growth this year.  

3. Although many social networks have experienced increased engagement, the pandemic didn’t cause an increase in the number of people using social networks or messaging apps. There will be 212.1 million social network users in the US this year, up 3.3% over 2019. That’s just a small acceleration over our February forecast of 2.5%.

4. The large increase in live video viewers is one of the biggest digital media growth stories during the pandemic. Our new estimate of 151.5 million viewers is 15.1 million higher than we had predicted in early 2020.

5.Gaming is another pandemic success story. Growth in our user forecast has come from multiple types of games, including casual games and social games, and across console, desktop, and mobile platforms.

6. Increased time spent at home has caused an increase in our forecast for digital audio listeners, in particular desktop audio. But the number of podcast listeners has not been dramatically affected by the pandemic.

The key thing every business person should be aware of Debbie note was that “You’re only getting part of the picture if you look at whether the pandemic caused consumers to increase their engagement with a particular activity or medium. Smart marketers should also look at where consumer audiences are going next (not just where they are now). Consumers do not have unlimited time to spend with media, and the unexpected growth of some activities in 2020 could cause other longstanding activities to lose engagement, users, or both”

While this is for the US, I have no doubt each part of the world has with the possible exception of China which has returned to business as normal will see significant shifts in behavior.

The Great Re-wiring is Underway…

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Six Thoughts for the Next Six Months

It has been more than six months since the first Covid-19 lock downs began all over the world.

It will be at least six months more before we emerge from our constrained lives since it will be at least April 2021 for a vaccine to be broadly available. In reality, June 2021 or September 2021 are more likely dates for widespread vaccine availability.

Therefore, instead of planning for the next week or next month it behooves us all to plan for six months to a year more of a life closer to the constraints we have been living under during the past six months than any return to life in 2019.

Here are six thought to consider and ponder on how best to make the most of the six months (or more) ahead.

1. There will be no New Normal but a New Strange

Almost six months ago I wrote a piece called The Great Re-invention which anticipated that there would be no return to any “New Normal” after the shock of a health, financial, and social crisis of such great scale (everybody in the world) and duration ( six months or more).

People, Businesses and Society’s fragility had been exposed and to restore resilience there would be a great deal of re-wiring and re-thinking of lives and organizations as everyone sought safety, security and a new way to engage, impact and rejuvenate society at every level.

Re-reading the piece six months later it has been eerily prescient in a) calling out the social unrest we have seen in countries though it was written before the George Floyd murder, b) anticipating that business would not bring back many of the jobs ( in the US 11 million remain unemployed due to Covid-19 and a new round of layoffs have begun as companies from airlines, to hotels to restaurants realize that it could be another year of constrained and diminished business and c) anticipating a complete new architecture for the contours of most businesses.

Think of how you would have done things differently if you knew six months ago what you know now. The good news is you have a chance for a re-do because life for the next six months is going to be more like the past six.

It is time to start planning forward versus regretting backward, thinking of a world where you are starting vs restarting, and where your future is about re-inventing and not restoring.

2. The future of work will be forever changed.

Over the past six months I have spoken with hundreds of people from CEO’s to students, across industries and across countries and some common themes keep emerging.

Here are three comments that best summarize the mind shift that is underway.

“ In the past you had to explain why you were not in the office. In the future you will have to explain why you need to be at an office. Most likely you will need to be in the office if you have to access to equipment, meet clients, need to learn or do a task which requires collaboration and relationship building. Most likely this will be for most people less than a quarter of what they do. So everybody is re-thinking what an office is and where offices or gathering places need to be”

“ Re-mote working has been far more positive than we expected but there are three key challenges. The first is burn-out and wear-out after six months of working from home (see cartoon below), the second is the draw down of relationship equity as it is harder to build and replenish relationships completely virtually since much is missed without human contact, and the third is the challenge to train and educate including new hires”

“ Almost nobody among our employees or management can ever see going back to the way we were working in 2019. There is no doubt that we will do less of many things such as travel for business, physical participation in industry events, and time spent commuting to or being in the office but also we will be looking for more flexibility in who, how and where we hire and more ways to save and streamline every cost component”

3. Build your Screen Skills.

Scott Peters a co-founder of Growth Catalyst Partners, a Private Equity firm that I advise sent me this slide. The orange is the time we spend on video conferencing…

I agree with Scott that even when we go back to traveling and into offices Zoom, Microsoft Teams, WebeX, Google Meet and their successors will be a dominant form of the future of work.

In my book one of the chapters that has resonated the most is one called “Schedule More Meetings”. People thought I was insane but in reality most of the meetings we dislike at work are not really meetings but stare-a-thons. Yes Stare-a-thons where we all gather around a screen staring at it or staring at our laptops or looking down at the mobile device beneath the desk on our knees.

The real meeting happened before or after and most of us are bored to death but if we were not invited we would have felt slighted and now that we are there we wonder why we are there spending an hour being informed in slow mollases motion what we could have been told in five minutes.

Powerpoint is increasingly the crutch that most of us do not need to rely on so much.

Try putting everything down in a paragraph or two and then say it. Then let us have a meeting discussing, building, engaging.

A meeting is when you look at someone face to face and the supporting materials are supporting materials. I find Zoom and other technologies allow for better meetings than the herds that used to gather around screens in rooms filled with stale coffee and aroma of decaying pizza.

Here are three key hints of great video skills besides minimizing slide ware.

• a) Generosity: Decide what gift you will give. This could be a point of view, a perspective, a provocation or a plan of action. Something that helps those who listen.

• b) Empathy: Understand where the person or people are coming from when you speak to them. Customize your comments. Try to understand that Clients, Vendors and Employees are people too.

• c) Energy: People are worn out with Zooming. Find ways to uplift their spirits by replenishing their energy by providing clear next steps, making them believe in themselves and saving them time.

4. Plan your career as if you were a company of one.

You will spend more time working remotely at home in a company which will be looking for ways to plug and play into talent in the ways they access services (software as a service, everything as a service) .

Think of yourself as a better paid Uber driver with benefits if you work for a company. If your expertise is needed at that time or in a particular market and location, and your collaboration and ability to work in teams is highly rated you will be in demand. If not, as companies manage and monitor costs and increasingly find ways to plug into resources all the time everywhere you will find yourself parked permanently.

Or think of the Hollywood model where expertise come together on tv or movie projects and then the people disband and move on. Very few people work at a Studio. Most people work in teams where they bring their skill whether it be casting, directing, catering or make up etc. The future of business will be similar as companies begin re-aggregating expertise around projects versus having hordes of generalists or people hanging around for a project. McKinsey and Bain have done this for years.

I am not suggesting that everyone will be a freelancer going from gig to gig but if you build your career with the mindset of continually honing expertise, working well with other people in teams and being flexible you will succeed in your company of tens of thousands versus thinking of yourself as a cog in big machine waiting for someone to care for or build your career.

That world was already ending and now in a world far faster, far more remote, far more plug and play the onus is on us and not them at the company.

One way to seize your future is to read A Company of One by Paul Jarvis. He ask us to consider if the real key to a richer and more fulfilling career , is to be able to work for yourself, determine your own hours, and become a (highly profitable) and sustainable company of one? If you can not be really good at something you love and be able to thrive wherever you are not truly unleashing yourself.

Another is to spend the next few months truly building out your online presence.

Your resume is not what is on your hard drive or Linked In it is a sum of your web presence, particularly the first page that people see on Google when they search for you. Go look at it today. Go look at news. Go look at pictures. Go look at videos. This is you as the future becomes more distributed and digital.

To help create a better presence think of being active on Twitter and LinkedIn, develop a website ( using Square Space or some other service), think of writing a blog on some passion or hobby or even start a newsletter.

5. For many of us all we need is less.

For many people the tragedy of Covid-19 has been a lack of food, shelter, jobs, money and health care.

For many others especially people with white collar jobs that can be done safely remotely we are realizing that with the exception of space we could do with less.

How many of the things you have, the clothes you wear, the routines and travel you are you using or are you missing?

All the frenzy of movement and meetings and much more remind me of William Wordsworth …THE world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers..

Many people are using this time to re-consider their lives and most find all they need is less.

And if you need less you may be able to pursue the dream your life style may have priced you out of.

6. Build a case for the opposite. Think/Feel/See Different.

Today it is easy to either “doom scroll” or find our minds colonized by algorithmic streams.

If you can, I would recommend watching the Social Dilemma on Netflix to see how susceptible our minds and emotions are to self-love or rage-sharing.

A majority of the feeds and home page you see is made to make you feel great about yourself and your world view.

A huge downside of us being stuck at home is that more and more these streams across our screens become more and more of our windows into life.

We need wipers sometimes to clean the grime

One way is to try to build a case for the opposite of what everybody is saying or what you are compelled to feel.

Every Sunday I publish a free bohemian and eclectic newsletter that shares my thinking. The piece you just read was this Sunday’s newsletter. To subscribe and engage with me on topics such as Change, Culture, Leadership as well as Jazz, Poetry and Loss/Love/Learning please subscribe by clicking here (no subscription, no ads, no reselling of email lists…just some thinking for your attention)…or type in or click this https://rishad.substack.com/

A Unified Theory of Living: Love. Loss. Learning

Earlier this week I was featured at a Lunch and Learn Session of the San Francisco Bay Area Innovation Group and one of my answers seemed to particularly resonate.

When you live your life are there some underlying beliefs and truths that drive you or you measure yourself against? If we are to grow where are we trying to go?

I have long believed that if there is a competition it is not with other people but to get better every day and to get closer to what you believe or your ideals. Your success is not housed in other people’s minds (what they think of you) but in their hearts (what they feel about you) and in your mind (what you think of yourself).

I shared that I believe that in many ways Life is about Loss, Love and Learning (the 3 L’s)

Loss is central to the human experience in three ways. The first is we often lose in our attempts to succeed. We lose pitches, Clients, jobs and opportunities. Many times, we win. Some people win little and others win a lot. But we all lose. But these losses are not the big ones. The second bigger losses are the losses we will face of loved ones and friends either because relationships end, or death comes, and our final loss is that of our lives.

How we live amidst this loss defines a large part of life.

The joy we make is because time is precious, and this moment of victory may not last forever. Given that loss is part of human existence it pays to be kind and to think about how to help those in loss for do not ask for whom the bell tolls since it tolls for you.

A big part of what makes life worth living despite the guarantee of loss is the hope of love and joy of learning. Love of people, of work, of art, of culture. Love may not compute but computers do not love. There is a great deal of progress made over generations on who one can love, the ability to do things one loves and because of modern technology to be exposed to new worlds, horizons and things to love.

And learning is particularly joyous. Learning in its first form is building knowledge. With great knowledge and practice we build skills and craftsmanship.   Learning to see things from other perspectives gives us understanding. Sometimes if we are lucky, we can graduate from knowledge, skills and understanding to wisdom.

The ABCDE of Marketing Re-Invented

Intelligence is the ability to simplify and not dumb down.

To create a way to share and think through complexity by getting down to core issues and ideas in modular ways that people can understand and build from.

Frames are helpful in not only getting the audience to understand but it is a great way to tell your story.

Think of frames as a spine you hang the bones of your ideas on.

Here is my frame for how marketing has changed and is changing that I use as a way to help guide people I advise. I call it the ABCDE model of the future of marketing.

Audience. Brand. Content. Data. Enterprise.

For each of these areas I believe there have been 3 key changes which explains both the birth of new firms, why some companies are crossing the chasm into the future and others are struggling. I call it the 5X3 Frame for the Future of Markeing. Few firms have all 15 areas covered but it is a great way to develop action plans and to make a case for change.

a. Audience: Who we are marketing too, how we find them and their mindset has shifted greatly over the past decade.

From Consumers to People with God Like Power: The biggest mistake companies make is they view things through the lens of their Brands and see us as Consumers. Very few people define themselves by the brand they consume. Even an incredible company like Procter and Gamble with dozens of billion dollar brands cannot understand me if they look at me only through the lens of their Brands ( they are too sophisticated to do that) because at the core all their Brands are about dirt removal. Dirt removal from my teeth, clothes, dishes, butt, kids butt etc. Do you define yourself by dirt removal? Or brands that want to have relationships with me . Very few people want to have a relationship with a brand. I want my headache to go away and not have a relationship with Tylenol. It is key to think about people and not consumers.

But even more key is to stop using words like enabling/empowering and other BS ( Yes Google, Apple and a few other companies empower consumers) but most Brands are grappling with highly empowered people who via use of Search, Social, E-Commerce and Mobile destroy any arbitrage of price, information, or place that a Brand though they had. If you were to describe what we can do with a mobile phone to someone 15 years ago they would say why that is “God-Like” power.

From passive to interactive: A decade and a half ago we thought of people we marketed to as an audience since they were primarily passive receivers. Today they create, share and interact and some of them are so impactful that we call them Influencers and there is an entire ecosystem of Influencer Marketing.

From Segmentation to Re-aggregation: As media becomes digital we need to understand that people come to digital media one at a time. There is no mass media that we segment by finding channels or magazines with high proportion of the people we are marketing too. The power of Google, Facebook and soon Over the top television is the ability of self service tools to buy and scale individual interactions one at a time. We no longer are going from a cow of a mass audience to a steak of a segmented audience. Rather we are are re-aggregating single pieces of mince into a hamburger.

b. Brands: Brands continue to be important but the way they are built is changing greatly. Today Experiences, Purpose and Employee Joy matter the most in building Brands. These changes explain the long term secular decline of advertising and communication but the renaissance and rise of marketing.

From Communication to Experiences: Jeff Bezos of Amazon said some companies spend 30 percent of resources on building a better product or experience and 70 percent telling people about it. Others spend 70 percent of their effort on product and service and 30 percent on telling people about it. Jeff said Amazon was the latter company.

In an era of empowered people connected to each other the focus should be on the experience. The brand is the experience and experience is the brand.

From Great Words to Purposeful Behavior: Purpose matters more than ever especially in todays time of social, financial and health challenges. Purpose is not some words left to wander on a lonely corporate website but the way a company or brand behaves.

Employees as Brand Advocates and Key to Purpose and Experience : If a company does not invest and treat its employees well it will be very challenged on both the experience front ( angry, tired and worried employees do not deliver great products or experiences) but also any purpose statement rings hollow if you cannot look after your own people.

c. Content: Content has always been a key to marketing. The three big differences is that there is much more of it, it is far faster and there are many new ways of making it.

Think Poetry and not just plumbing: Today in a world of granular targeting and algorithmic trading we can get the right interaction to the right person at the right time. But what are we paying as much attention to the interaction as getting it there. We must think of the poetry and not just the plumbing. T

Think response not just creation: Many campaigns are started by people. Meme’s or perspectives of about your brand can ricochet all over the world and you need to ensure that in todays world of weaponized platforms you have a world class risk intelligence partner and a rapid action team

Never Forget People choose with their hearts and use numbers to justify what they do: Content that moves is content that moves product.

d. Data: Data is key to future of marketing. It is like electricity. Without electricity one can not keep the lights on. Without strong data a company cannot compete. It is necessary. But it is not sufficient. Because just like few companies differentiate themselves by how they use electricity, very few companies will find a competitive edge in data. It will be a key ingredient and not the be all or end all of strategy. And very few companies will be able to live on their own data. The three areas to focus on data are

Quality versus Quantity: If 90 percent on data has been created in the last two years most companies “data lakes” are filled with muck/mud/ slime.

Real Time Access and not just Ownership: First party relationships with people who buy from you are key. Using platforms as the roadways to reach them will lead to high tolls or blockades. But first party data alone is not enough and how to access and partner with other firms both to build a better understanding and bridge to people but also to design better and more comprehensive products and solutions.

Meaning versus Math: Data is not information, knowledge or wisdom. Algorithms are bias embedded in code. How do you integrate, interpolate, interrogate data and involved diverse mindsets, interconnect to larger trends and add imagination to make meaning from math.

e. Enterprise: If a company is to deliver experiences in a world of people with god like power while steering itself with a purpose and looking after its stakeholders particularly its employees but also making sure it delivers tangible results today it will new to sculpt itself into a new form by building new muscles.

The Paranoid Die. The Schizophrenic Thrive: Andy Grove the late CEO of Intel said only the paranoid survive. In todays age where we need to connect and work together this leads to polarized and insular thinking which explains why Intel has become a shell of itself and is a shadow in the world of Taiwan Semi-Conductor, Nvidia, AMD and ARM (which Nvidia might buy).

Rather than Paranoia the right mindset is Schizophrenia. Companies should run two models. One focussed on delivering today and the other on building a new tomorrow where some of the best talent are given all the assets of the companies and none of the liabilities and asked to do whatever it takes to move into the future including eating and harming todays cash cows.

Culture is the result of what fear free diverse people do when no one is watching: To navigate change companies need fear free cultures of diverse people and mindsets led by leaders who do the shit they claim others should do. Incentivize and train for change and worship no sacred cows.

Trust is speed: If a company wants to be high velocity it must be one built on trust. A company where information and decision making is transparent. Leaders are accountable and Cover your ass deck writing and meetings to prepare for meetings are minimized.

How does your company or your Client companies do in the ABCDE frame?

On Change, Culture & Leadership

Earlier this month I began publishing a free newsletter on Substack the content of which has resonated greatly.

You can subscribe to the newsletter here….https://rishad.substack.com/

While the writing has covered a wide range of topics including loss, learning, love, why libraries are important and what we can learn from jazz the purpose of the newsletter is to help you see think, feel and see differently about how to grow your company, your team and yourself.

To give you a flavor of the writing and also to memorialize some of it on this blog here are thoughts on three things we all grapple with. Change. Culture and Leadership.

A. Leadership.

Over the past four decades I have observed, experienced and read about leadership.

In the end I have distilled my beliefs on leadership down to this:

Leaders acknowledge, face and communicate reality.

People follow people and not titles since titles are bestowed while leadership is earned.

The five characteristics of great leaders are capability, integrity, empathy, vulnerability and inspiration.

Reality.

A key to leadership is to solve challenges and address problems. This requires confronting issues versus looking away or hoping some form of magical thinking will make them go away.

You cannot hope to get people to follow you if they suspect you are not addressing real issues and challenges however difficult they may be.

Followership.

Without the hearts and minds of your team you are not a leader but a ruler.

Rulers leverage fear, project power and exploit insecurity.

Employees genuflect, fall in line, salute and pander to the hollow and bloated boss, while they silently seethe, plot insurrection or practice defection.

Five Characteristics.

a) Capability: To be a leader you have to be capable in your field of work or craft. You have to know your shit. You have to keep improving your skill. Doctors will not listen doctors who are not great at medicine. A creative will not respect someone whose body of work they do not admire.

b) Integrity: Can you be trusted? Are you transparent about the ingredients of your decision making. Do you look for and use real facts ?

c) Empathy: Leaders can see from other points of view and they understand that employees are people and work is but a sliver of their being. They understand and they listen. They care. They do this both for employees and for customers.

d) Vulnerability: Great leaders acknowledge mistakes. They know they do not have all the answers. This means they are open to criticism and correction and they surround themselves with skill sets that offset and balance their areas of weakness.

e) Inspiration: How do leaders face and acknowledge reality and hard truth but still get people to unite, align and take the challenges head on? They do so by recognizing that people choose with their hearts and not their minds. They inspire through a combination of personal example and storytelling.

B. Culture

It has been said that “culture eats strategy” and often when companies decay (Wells Fargo) or resurrect ( Microsoft) or have distinctly different outcomes in the same industry ( Southwest versus United Airlines) a key determinant is the culture. What it is like, how it is improving or how it is getting worse.

Once I read that the culture of an organization is revealed in how people behave when no one is looking or monitoring their behavior.

I do believe that that this is right in the fact that culture is about people. Yes it requires leaders to set, correct and support the culture but it is how they treat people and how people feel about themselves, their company and their colleagues that is the fabric of culture.

Companies with great cultures tend to have employees who feel most of the following about their jobs and companies:

Fair/ Good Compensation: If people are not paid adequately or fairly it really hard to have a good culture.

Recognition: Great cultures recognize contributors and leaders do not step into their teams video stealing credit.

Autonomy: People are trusted to deliver with limited monitoring and can access resources to do so.

Purpose: They believe in the purpose and values of the company and see the role of their company beyond that of just profit but doing good for society or community.

Growth: The company is growing, has a plan for growth or even if static, the individual is growing and teams are growing by being given opportunities to learn and build new skills.

Connectedness: People feel connected to each other and to their leadership. They feel free to speak up and share and even joke.

Today most of us are working from home for six months and it is likely that we will be doing so for at least another six months until a vaccine is available broadly.

Have been spending a lot of my time advising C level executives, one of the big challenges they are grappling with is how to ensure the mental and emotional well being of their talent who often feel disconnected, stressed for both work and life reasons as they grapple with children at home and other worries and challenges about their future.

Solving for and focusing on these six drivers of culture is one way smart leaders are working to ensure that in a distributed world the fabric of culture is not torn. They and their talent/HR leaders are planning different ways they get there but recognize it is key to ensure that each of these six seeds of culture are watered.

C. Change

Change.

Change is difficult especially for established individuals and businesses since transforming our thinking and doing into new shapes requires one to go through a regimen of pain, mistakes and unknowable twists and turns.

Why suffer sure pain for unknown gain if there is a way to avoid it ?

Therefore it is not surprising that many of us as individuals and companies take the easy way out by pontificating about “change agendas”, hiring “change agents”, announcing “re-organizations for a changed era” and issuing a flurry of press releases and re-decorating one’s digital presence with words like “platform”, “disruption”, “personalization”, “data”, “cloud” “seamless” and other buzz word bingo and mumbo jumbo.

Never works this eruption of vigorous cosmetic application and vocal vociferousness.

The only way a company transforms is if the people in the company transform.

Upgrade the people or upgrade their mindsets.

To gauge if you or your company are really aligning with change ask three simple questions

Incentive plans: Are people being incentivized to change or are the people who get paid the most the ones who run the established businesses, have the biggest existing revenue books, have the deepest current client relationships ? Are some of the best people being allocated to where the company will spend the rest of its life which is the future or is it folks the company does not know what to do with or those between assignments?Show me a company’s incentive structure and I can guess how they behave and if they will really change.The future does not fit in the incentive and power systems of today and yesterday.

Fear: Change is scary but the reason many people don’t change is something is they fear their management and culture even more than they fear change.Management that provides no room for error, or for speaking up or calling out the “turd on the table” will have a difficult time to get people to people to change. Without freedom to challenge and fail, there is unlikely to be any innovation but just a crowd of synchronized head-nodding, bobble-headed people who serve as mirrors to their leaders by reflecting what they believe their leaders need to hear or what will make them look good in their Managements eyes.

Investment in Training : The third key to change in addition to incentive systems and an absence of fear is a significant effort in training. If a company is to change and to upgrade its people it can do so in two ways. First it can bring in and hire talent with the skills they need and second it can upgrade the skills of the people it has.Most companies will need to do both and will require to train existing employees with new skills while training new employees to the company expertise resources and culture.

So next time you or your company speak of change ask if you have got the incentive systems, culture and training to get you to the other side of this difficult transition.

It’s not easy but even though change sucks, irrelevance is even worse.

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