Peter Fisk

We are living through a time of extraordinary change. And the rate of change is increasing month by month.

That change is unpredictable but it is also somehow connected. Global shock, economic disruption, social pressure, environmental context. It is manifesting itself not just in one area but in our politics, in our technology, in our communities and in our economies, and in our levels of social engagement, activism, and social cohesion (or lack of it).

If we want to survive in this time, if we want to thrive in this time and build something better, we can’t simply extend the old business as usual. We need a new approach to leading ourselves and other people through times of change that is different from how we used to lead ourselves when times were stable.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book “Antifragile: Things that gain from disorder”gives a hint of what that might look like.

In summary, Taleb says that:

• Fragile items break under stress, antifragile items get better from it.
• In order for a system to be antifragile, most of its parts must be fragile.
• Antifragile systems work, because they build extra capacity when put under stress.uncertainty and relentless change

Lesson 1: Fragile items break under stress, antifragile items get better from it.

We all know the label on boxes with glass inside them that reads “Fragile – handle with care”, and we’ve all seen more than one scene in a movie where someone throws a package like that, resulting in a glass shattering noise.

You know that fragile things break when you shock them and toss them around – volatility does them no good. But when you think about it, there isn’t really a word that describes things, which are the opposite, is there?

We might talk about something being robust or durable, but that really just means it can resist shocks and stress better than fragile items – but it doesn’t benefit from them. You’d still label the boxes you ship robust things in with “Handle with care”, not with “Please handle roughly”.

Nassim Taleb took care of this dilemma by giving us a word for what we’re looking for: antifragile. It describes things that benefit from shock and thrive in volatile environments, because as they’re stressed and put under pressure, they get better, not worse.

Can you think of an example? Here’s one: When Hercules fights the Hydra, every time he slices off one of her heads, two grow back. So for every time the beast is hurt, it actually gets stronger. That’s an example of being antifragile.

Lesson 2: An antifragile system usually consists of many fragile parts.

There are quite a few more good examples of antifragile systems, one being the evolutionary process.

Evolution itself is incredibly antifragile – we’ve evolved from our ancestors based on the genetic features and traits which helped us survive the most and succeed. However, that also meant many humans before us had to die.

Any individual specimen of a species is usually fragile – every human being or animal can die and quite easily so. But, because the system can use life and death as indicators of success and failure, the evolution of species in itself is antifragile. For example, our hands weren’t always built to handle tools so well. Through evolution it became apparent that the more advanced our hands got, the longer we could survive, so eventually our genetic code morphed to include the incredibly refined hands we all have today.

So for an antifragile system to work, its individual parts must be fragile, because the success and failure of these parts serves as important feedback for the system as a whole and allows it to get better in chaotic circumstances.

Lesson 3: Antifragile systems work, because they build extra capacity when put under stress.

How exactly does that happen? Why does antifragility work?

Actually you do experience it quite often, if you exercise regularly, that is. When you go to the gym and lift really heavy weights, and when you feel the burn, you push on and do just one more rep – that’s when growth happens.The fragile parts, the tissue in your muscles, is broken down – the failure is reported to the system.

In order to ensure future success, your body now overcompensates for this shock, by building extra capacity to handle even bigger shocks better. Over night, as you sleep and recover, your muscles are rebuilt and they’re now a bit stronger than before. Usually, the human body is incredibly efficient, and doesn’t want any excess capacity “lying around”. But in the case of being antifragile, your body builds redundancy in order to prepare for future extreme situations and emergencies.

That’s how stress can prepare your body for even bigger stress and it’s building this extra capacity that lies at the core of why being antifragile is so helpful to thrive in critical situations.

I thought you might like to see a summary of today’s interview with Bloomberg and McKinsey on the challenges and opportunities for business leaders in the current crisis … plus here are three additional articles, with extracts from my forthcoming book Business Recoded, and more details behind the Q&A:

• How do you see the future? Future Recoded … Reimagine markets. Reimagine work. Reimagine business. Reimagine success.
• Why innovate in a downturn? Whilst everyone else is losing their heads, the companies of tomorrow are being created right now 
• What are the impacts of COVID-19? What business leaders should do now, to support people and society, and secure their business future.
• The latest edition of my “Fast Leader” magazine … Happy Homeworking with Zoom, Finding more purpose, Babylon Health, Fujifilm’s anti-viral drugs 

Q. Crisis feels like a scary time, when we should stop everything, save money and wait the bad times to blow over. Is a crisis more of a threat or opportunity for business?  

Crisis is a time of change. Yes, you need to survive, but it is also an opportunity to thrive.

57% of the world’s leading companies were founded in a downturn – companies like Apple and Disney, Microsoft and McDonalds – when attitudes and behaviours changed, when old competitors failed because they didn’t adapt, and when the psychological constraints drove bolder innovation.

90 of the world’s 325 “unicorn” businesses, those private companies that at least were valued at over $1 billion, were founded in the last economic crisis of 2008-9. Airbnb, Dropbox, Square, and Uber. These 90 companies seized the opportunities of crisis, to create almost $500 billion of value over subsequent years.

I see three phases for business leaders to consider – survive, adapt and thrive.

• Survive: Start by surviving firstly, and most importantly, as a human challenge. Helping your employees, customers and local communities through this difficult time. Indeed, as Burberry makes protective clothing, Louis Vuitton makes hand sanitizer, Tesla makes hospital equipment we realise that business can be tremendously helpful and caring to society. It is also about surviving economically – finding ways to stay solvent, minimising costs and sustaining some revenues.  This is for 0-6 months.
• Adapt: Time to move forwards, even if we are still in lockdown. In particular, understand what has changed about your world, and your customers’ world. Fundamental needs of customers have not changed – to eat, work, learn, play – but how they do it might. How can you embrace these changes, by adapting existing activities, or creating new? How can you streamline, by focusing on the most important audiences and products for your future? Now is the time to accelerate innovation. This is 6-18 months.
• Thrive: Reimagine a better future. How can you use crisis as the catalyst for reinvention, to shift your core business, to embrace the future whilst others are slow to recover?  How can you harness the huge “megatrend” changes in our world – the shift from west to east markets, to ageing populations, to health and wellness, to intelligent machines, to sustainable businesses, to smarter living? Now is the time to reshape markets, and lead the future. Employees, customers, investors will all be looking for leadership out of a crisis, searching for hope and optimism. This is your moment to be that leader. This is 1-5 years.

Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel, once said “Bad companies are destroyed by crisis, good companies survive them, great companies are improved by them.”

Q. After a crisis like the current pandemic ends, in which markets do you see the best opportunities for new growth?

The potential is there now, so do not wait for the pandemic to end. Start now. A vaccine is most likely 12-18 months away. Businesses need to move forwards before then, even with constraints.

Like every market across the world, we see fundamental changes in consumer behaviours, as they are locked down at home, as they fear the economic impact. We are all familiar with these right now. From online working to online education, online health to online shopping, online gaming to online socialising. Some of these changes will stick.

The specific opportunity is to take what you already do well, and take it to places that don’t.  Particularly to the growth markets of Asia. Companies like Grab, which combined home delivery with finance and data engines to know customers in Singapore better than anyone else, or Twitch which is the world’s leading platform for gamers, are poised to thrive in this crisis.

Q. What about Industry 4.0 and digital transformation, will they be accelerated or be delayed by the crisis, as companies focus on survival?

Now is the time to accelerate innovation.

However there are two important warnings. Firstly innovation is not the same as technology. Innovation is about solving problems better, most obviously by creating better solutions for customers. This requires deep insight, creativity and design, new business models and organisation models, plus technology. Secondly digital transformation is not about automating old ways of working, it is firstly about changing how you work. This demands transformation in strategies, in business models, and market models. Then applying technology to it to make it happen.

Most companies have automated processes, but they haven’t really transformed themselves, or their markets. Now is the time to step up. Business transformation, enabled by digital technologies. Of all the technologies, AI will be most significant – massively accelerating the speed at which machines can work, and delivering more personal, predictive and positive solutions. Genetic analysis enabling proactive healthcare treatments before you need them, and personalised medicines when you do. However new technologies are incredibly expensive and risky, so it is much better to work in partnership with technology companies, to share risk and reward, but also to share creativity and create innovatively new fused concepts.

As I said, sectors such as healthcare, education, shopping and education are likely to see lasting change, and fundamental shifts towards putting digital platforms at their core. Companies in these sectors are doing well. Instacart is recruiting 300,000 new employees in USA, going from a small shopping app to the nation’s leading grocer in 6 weeks. Zoom, developed by Eric Yuan to be simpler than other videoconferencing platforms has become our favourite tool for work and socialising, and has seen its market value triple since January to over $35 billion.

In healthcare, 95% of doctor consultations are now done by smartphone, compared to 5% just a few months ago. In Singapore and South Korea we see the benefits of real-time AI-enabled health tracking and remote diagnostics. This is not only fast and easy for patients, but efficient for doctors too. Old habits are quickly forgotten, privacy issues are rapidly overcome, competitors work together. Good Doctor is now the world’s largest health platform, serving over 1 billion Chinese people. Google and Apple are working together on new diagnostic apps.

In education, online learning has become the norm in many countries with huge distances to travel. Online lessons, accompanied by peer-to-peer learning between children has been the norm in countries from Finland to South Africa. Not only does this enable more children to access high quality education in any part of the world, but it is also better. Children quickly learn to learn in new ways – from each other, learning to think rather than just acquire knowledge, learning to empathise, explain and apply ideas rather than know them.

Q. When we look back in years to come, will there be a more fundamental restructuring of economies that began during this crisis?

We will recover from this crisis. However we will likely see an 18-36 month downturn because of the enormous disruption to economies, and the time waiting for a vaccine until we can live and work normally again. Some businesses will fail, but life will get back to more normality.

However the new normal for business, is unlikely to be stable, predictable growth. Markets and consumers will evolve. And we will continue to experience more turbulence, more shocks, including more pandemics. The world is simply more dynamic than ever before.

What I believe will change is the relationship between business and society.

I have a new book coming out later this year which is called “Business Recoded”, defining 49 new codes for business success.

In many ways, I believe we are seeing the dawn of a new capitalism.

We have been heading for some form of crisis for a while. There are 4 fundamental forces of change that are colliding, and driving us to rethink:

• The rapid growth of technologies, has transformed how we live and work, but also brought fear and distrust, of global connectedness, privacy and control
• The environmental crisis, from global warming to declining biodiversity, has strained the relationship between industrial growth and natural resources.
• The shift to Asia, where 60% of the world, including 95% of the world’s under 25s now live, will be the predominant driver of consumer market growth
• Business and society are increasingly out of sync, a growing inequality of wealth, and lack of empathy and support to society.

Businesses need to rediscover their purpose, why it exists.

“Purpose” defines what the business contributes to the world, or equally, why the world would be a lesser place if the business did not exist.

Purpose creates an enduring cause which the business is willing to fight for. For some this might be an urgent call to action, for others it might be a more personal inspiration. Saving the planet with Patagonia, or achieving your potential, with Nike, or seeking happiness, with Coca Cola.

Tesla exists to “accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy”, Starbucks to “inspire the human spirit”, Dove to “help the next generation of women realise their potential”, Microsoft to “empower people to achieve more”, and Swarovski to “add sparkle to people’s everyday lives.”

So what does that mean for Tesla? Well it means they reframe their space around energy rather than cars, and a diverse portfolio that includes a new generation of  battery technology for everything from small devices to smart cities, and new products like their solar-energy tiles. They then use new business models to accelerate the shift, future proofing cars with more adaptive software updates ready for a self-driving future, Powerwalls to overcome consumer fears of not being able to charge, a range of cars to access more consumers, a subscription model to make it easier, direct sales model to engage directly with their consumers, and fully robotic factories to build cars in a pandemic. Not surprisingly they are the only car manufacturer still making money in today’s crisis.

Finding a higher purpose, defining the positive contribution which business makes to the world is not just about doing good. It also creates a new strategic frame for your business – it inspires employees and customers, investors and society. It gives you more clarity of direction to make smarter choices and explore new possibilities, it brings people together with a common ambition, and it gives you a cause to keep fighting for in times of incredible change.

There was a great quote in the Wall Street Journal last week saying “In the fight against Covid-19 though we might look forward in doom, one day we will look backward in awe.”

Henry Mintzberg, the 80 year old Canadian academic believes the time has come to “rebalance society”.

Mintzberg is the John Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies (Strategy & Organization) and Faculty Director (International Masters for Health Leadership) at the Desautels Faculty of Management of McGill University in Montreal where he has been teaching since 1968.

In 2004 he published a book entitled Managers Not MBAs in which he argues that there is much wrong with management education today. He claimed that prestigious schools like Harvard and Wharton are obsessed with numbers and that their overzealous attempts to make management a science are damaging the discipline of management. He advocated more emphasis on executive programs  for practicing managers (rather than students with little experience) built around action learning and their own experiences.

Rebalancing Society

In 2015 he published Rebalancing Society (download free), a theme which he had worked on for several years, but seems more relevant than ever in the wake of global pandemic, racial protests, and ever more urgent issues of climate change and social inequality.

The Declaration of Interdependence

Looking for a way to express his message, a colleague suggested that a  they look at the American Declaration of Independence, and paraphrase it. Mintzberg’s declaration of “interdependence” starts by making the point that “Our world has reached the limits of growth driven by the pursuit of individual rights at the expense of shared responsibilities.”  

By the “rebalancing” of society he means “finding a dynamic equilibrium across public sector needs that have to be respected, private sector interests that have to be responsible, and plural sector, or community, concerns that have to be robust. Businesses have to contribute in a constructive way, governments have to do the work of protecting us from imbalance, and the plural sector associations have to help drive the changes in government and business.”

Asked what will happen if we don’t act now, he says “The answer is on the news almost every day, from flooding and fires to the election of thugs by people who are angry.”

Image: Unsplash

Change is relentless, innovation accelerates, crisis shakes everything up.

For business leaders, now is the time to reimagine. To explore, innovate and accelerate a shift to the future.

How are markets changing? What are the structural and economic changes, the attitudes and behaviours of consumers, that are shifting right now. In just a few weeks, for example, most of the world shifting from physical to online eduction, online working, online shopping, online entertainment.

95% of doctor consultations now take place by mobile phone. Will we go back to the old ways? As children embrace online classrooms, enhanced by peer to peer chat, will they find physical school slow and boring. As Zoom has come to dominate our locked-down home working and personal lives, will we want to need to travel and meet in the same ways as before?

Technological progress, environmental crisis and economic shock have now come together, to create a moment of potentially seismic change.

What new opportunities will come with tomorrow’s technological advancement, for both people and for business? Where does your organisation fit in? How will you respond to constant disruption? It is time to reimagine everything.

The current pandemic rolling across the world has accelerated a world which was heading for a meltdown, as the business status quo looked increasingly out of sync with the world.

Rapid technological developments  created ever more strain on society and the environment. People reacted by rejecting progress. Brexit and Trump, nationalism and migration. The environment responded with ever more unpredictable and extreme weather, global warming, rising sea levels and diminishing biodiversity.

So how can we use this crisis as a turning point, to recognise that capitalism as we know it cannot go on, that business and society, technology and humanity need to work better together, to create a better world for all of us?

Recoding business

Over the last year I have worked on a huge RECODE project to understand how business can and needs to respond to a changing world.  This include 49 new codes for business, built around a new DNA for business and leadership.

The project drove me to more deeply understand the drivers of change, the huge forces that are causing us to shift. My book comes out in September, but in advance here is a sneak view of the megatrends changing our world right now:

Five megatrends are shaping our future right, shifting the way we live and work. They fall into 5 categories:

• Megatrend 1: Aging World … the shift from young to old … People are living longer, healthier lives throughout the world, as healthcare, education and lifestyles improve.
• Megatrend 2: Booming Asia … the shift from west to east … Consumers are more affluent, particularly across Asia. So-called emerging markets will represent 6 of the 7 largest economies by 2050.
• Megatrend 3: Cognitive Tech … the shift from automation to intelligence … Technology unlocks new possibilities, and exponential progress. 125 billion connected devices by 2030.
• Megatrend 4: Dense Living … the shift from towns to megacities … 65% of the world will be concentrated in urban environments by 2050, today in the megacities of Asia, tomorrow in even larger cities of Africa.
• Megatrend 5: Eco Renewal … the shift from crisis to circularity … 50% of the world’s energy will be sustainable by 2050, as we seek ways to combat climate change, and also the stress on natural resources.

In his book Future Shock, Alvin Toffler identified the watershed of a new post-industrial age, pinpointing the enormous structural change afoot in the global economy, and the acceleration of technological advances towards a ‘super-industrial society’ in an information era. 50 years later we see much of what he predicted coming true.

Using a range of data sources, including UN and OECD, and most usefully Max Roser’s fantastic website, OurWorldinData.org, we explore these five trends and their implications for business:

Megatrend 1: Aging World … the shift from young to old

Socio-demographic changes, particularly the aging of populations throughout the world, will have a huge impact on every nation:

• Asian boom: Global population will likely increase to 8.5 billion by 2030, from 7.2 billion in 2020 – made up of 5bn Asians, 1.5bn Africans, 750m Europeans and Latin Americans, 400m North Americans, and 50m in Oceania.
• Declining youth: Birth rates are declining, particularly in wealthy nations, resulting in fewer young people, and 90% of the world’s population under 30 now living in emerging markets.
• Living longer: Most profound is a likely 45% increase in the world’s over 60s population by 2030, with 80% of them living in Asia by 2050 (Asia’s over 60s already outnumbers the entire USA population).
• Global citizens: 4% of the world’s population are migrants, not living in the country of their birth. Some individual countries are much higher – UAE 85% due to migrant workers, but also Australia 29%, Canada 22%, and USA 14%.

The implications for support include:

• Healthcare: As population’s age, demand for heathcare and home support will grow rapidly. US healthcare spending is set to rise by 8% of GDP each year for next two decades, around $3.4 trillion every year.
• Pensions: A $400 trillion gap in retirement funding will likely emerge by 2050, as pension funds prove insufficient, people live longer than expected, and need more support. Young people will find need to meet this shortfall, and be less well off.
• Robo workforce: As people of working age decline, we will turn to automation to do more, machines and robotics becoming a necessary rather than unwelcome substitution within the workforce, taking manual jobs, as humans add more value.
• Consumption: age and health will significantly shape markets from travel and entertainment, to food and fashion. In terms of food, we will demand products that are fresh and organic, functional and medical, convenient and delivered.

Megatrend 2: Booming Asia … the shift from west to east

From west to east … population growth drives a significant global shift in economic power, and the rise of a huge new middle class of consumers:

• Made in Asia for Asia: “Emerging” economies have shifted from being producers for developed countries, to becoming the primary consumers of the world. They now account for 80% of the world’s growth, and 85% of growth in consumption
• Chinese superpower: 15 years ago China’s economy was 10% of the US economy, but will surpass it by the late 2020s. China expects to have 200 cities with over a million people by 2025.
• ASEAN tigers: South East Asia’s growth will outpace China, in particular Vietnam and Thailand. India has world’s 10 fastest growing cities. Delhi will soon displace Tokyo as the world’s largest city, whilst the port of Surat grows fastest.
• New consumers: Asia’s new “middle class” has boomed in recent times, and will represent 66% of the world’s 5.3 billion mid-income consumers by 2030. 70% of Chinese will be in this group, a $10 trillion consumer market.

The implications for markets include:

• China’s economic power will be consolidated in coming years, despite being driven by high debt levels and property market valuations. China has also grown astute in developing “soft power” using culture and business for global influence.
• Chinese business growth is relentless with over 100 unicorns, and over 7500 new companies registered per year and more patent registrations than any other nation. It’s support to start-ups help them survive infancy and accelerate scale-up.
• Intra-Asian markets will dominate the global economy. 15 of the world’s 20 largest air travel routes are within Asia, led by KUL-SIN with over 30,000 travellers per year (compared to LHR-JFK with half as many, the 13th largest).
• The E7 (as Goldman Sachs termed the emerging economies of China, India, Brazil, Mexico, Russia, Indonesia and Turkey) will be larger than the G7 by 2030, and double their size by 2050 (E7 already outperforms G7 on purchasing power parity).

Megatrend 3: Cognitive Tech … the shift from automation to intelligence

The “fourth industrial revolution” sees a shift to connected and intelligent technologies that underpin every other trend: 

• Exponential change, as digital platforms connect markets, IOT connects everything and network effects multiply the impacts, robotics displace manual workers, and artificial intelligence outthinks our minds.
• Merged reality. The concept of digital v physical is rapidly evolving into a fused state, in which every experience is both real and technically enhanced. Augmented reality and holographic 3D displays accelerate this, as does gaming and movies.
• Data is the new oil. 90% of the world’s data was connected in the last 2 years, with 1 trillion connected objects by 2025, over 90% of stock trading is now done by algorithm, and around 66% of the world’s population is “online” at any one time.
• Intelligent life. 60% of all occupations could see at least 30% of their component activities automated. Robotics and AI have can enhance are human capabilities, free us from repetitive tasks, enhance sporting prowess, and release our creativity.

The implications of fast tech progress include:

• Ideas unlimited. The speed of technological advancement accelerates beyond the shifting behaviours of consumers, or the needs of business. The creative challenge is not the technology development, but how to apply it most usefully.
• Beyond the singularity. Ray Kurzweil describes a hypothetical future point, around 2045, when intelligent machines is no longer controllable by humans. Elon Musk shares his fear, and is a critic of Alphabet’s Deepmind.
• Sustainable tech. Many of today’s environmental challenges will ultimately be addressed by technology, through new approaches to additive manufacturing and renewal, or the capture of carbon and conversion of waste.
• Ethics and security. The growing intelligence of machines pose many ethical dilemmas for business and society. Security and privacy issues will only be addressed by considering new approaches to authenticity and regulation.

Megatrend 4: Dense Living … the shift from towns to megacities

More than half of the world’s population now lives in towns and cities, and by 2030 this number will grow to about 5 billion, mostly in Asia and Africa.

• Megacities of 10 million. In 1990 there were only 10 such cities, by 2025 there will be 45, with 33 of them in Asia. Many large cities are building secondary overflow cities, like Xiongan New Area, which is 100km from Beijing.
• Migration to cities. Globally, more people live in urban than rural areas. In 1950, 30% of the world lived in cities, today it is 55%, growing to 66% by 2050. Cities disproportionately attract young people in search of work and prosperity.
• Life is better in the cities. Cities typically have better services, schools and hospitals, better access to sports and culture. People are healthier, better educated and wealthier. In China urban income per capita is triple that in rural areas.
• Smart cities. Cities are first to adopt new technological infrastructures, from free connectivity to driverless cars, intelligent homes and renewable energy. The “smart city” market will triple in 10 years to $1.2 trillion by 2030.

The implications of this urbanisation are

• Cities are driven by modern urban populations that demand advanced infrastructures, and quickly embrace technology and innovation. New cities are able to build from plan, whilst older cities have to adapt legacy structures.
• Health and safety will drive new levels of surveillance, as authorities seek to overcome crime and improve traffic flows, sanitation, and emergency response. Alibaba’s “CityBrain”, for example, is deployed in many Chinese cities.
• Consumer aspirations change, as traditional symbols of progress, like a car or larger house, are infeasible. Instead new priorities emerge such as fashion and entertainment, product miniturisation and personalisation of services.
• Virtual communities, replace the more traditional forms based on location and neighbours. Resources become increasingly shared, from energy suppliers to mobility solutions. Virtual, group behaviour dominates in new ways.

Megatrend 5: Eco Renewal … the shift from crisis to circularity

 The impact of climate change is all around us. Rising temperatures and sea levels, forest fires and food prices,

• Population strain. Growing numbers of people drives huge demand for energy, water and food, testing the planet’s finite resources of the planet. The population of 2030 will demand 35% more food, 40% more water, and 50% more energy.
• Industrial strain. Food production has depleted the land and oceans of natural stocks, damaged ecology and reduced biodiversity. Technological products have stripped the earth of precious metals, and oil is increasingly a limited resources.
• Carbon emissions. Greenhouse gases, primarily carbon dioxide from fossil fuels, will drive warming above 2 degrees by 2036 at current rates. That could cause sea levels to rise by 2m by 2100, flooding the homes of 250 million people.
• Extreme weather. Global warming drives more unpredictable and extreme weather, hot summers driving desertification and loss of agricultural land, storms threatening cities. Extreme weather caused $148 billion damage in 2018.

The implications of these environmental impacts are

• More from less. Meeting the population demands, requires innovation to improve production with less resource. Detecting weeds with sensors and spot sprays could reduce herbicide usage by up to 95%.
• From oil to renewables. Converting to sustainable energy, particularly solar and wind, will accelerate as battery storage develops rapidly. Government policies and taxation will be key drivers of business, alongside consumer demand.
• Electric travel. The shift to non-carbon fuels in road vehicles will accelerate rapidly, seeing carbon-fuelled vehicles eliminated by 2040. The same shift is now required in all modes of transport. (Road drives 70% of emission, air and sea 14% each).
• Circular consumption. 66% of consumer would pay more for environmental-friendly products, rising to 73% for millennials. This will be the biggest driver of businesses adopting more sustainable, and circular economic models.

Decision-making in a crisis can be tough.

Situations change at bewildering speed, there is more complexity, more uncertainty, more urgency and more pressure.

How do we react under pressure and what can we do to improve our judgements and decisions?

• How do you see the future? Future Recoded … Reimagine markets. Reimagine work. Reimagine business. Reimagine success.
• What are the impacts of Covid-19? What business leaders should do now, to support people and society, and secure their business future.
• Why innovate in a downturn? Whilst everyone else is losing their heads, the companies of tomorrow are being created right now 
• The latest edition of my “Fast Leader” magazine Happy with Zoom, Finding more purpose, Babylon Health, Fujifilm’s anti-viral drugs 

Leading in a world of Covid-19

As the Covid-19 pandemic spread across the world, the response of different leaders will remain a case study for years to come. Whilst some were fast to act, like South Korea, others dithered and lived in denial, like in the UK. Stock markets too were slow to respond, with dramatical falls in late February, 6-8 weeks after the first signs of what was emerging.

As the reality, the magnitude of the crisis dawned on leaders, they swung into action. Whilst some had an immediate concern for people, like in New Zealand, others were more concerned about the economy, like in Germany. Whilst come decisions changed, others just looked for scapegoats.

Whilst these leaders, whose skill is typically more political than leadership, they were clearly unprepared to adjust from their normal behaviours in good times, to those required now.

Making better decisions

There is no magic to making decisions. Leaders typically create a strategic framework for their organisation – purpose and strategy, objectives and metrics – within which decisions are about making the right choices.

The are 4 important moments in any devision

• Define the problem – Identify the problem, although this is not obvious, why may require deeper analysis – asking why. Then establish the decision making criteria, which would normally be aligned to the strategic framework.
• Explore the options – Options are based on creative solutions, balanced against the risks involved – which decision will solve the problem, or achieve the goal best?
• Make the decision – Having evaluated the options, and the implications, and the criteria for making the decision – then its time to be decisive.
• Review the impact – Whilst decisions are clear, they can sometimes be wrong. This is not a failure, more important is learning about what’s wrong, and making the decision better.

A useful models, similar to the above, often used for decision making is DECIDE, an acronym for six decision-making steps:

1. Define the problem
2. Establish the criteria
3. Consider all alternatives
4. Identify best alternative
5. Develop and implement
6. Evaluate and monitor

There is much more depth into what makes good decisions, which is covered elsewhere. At a high level, decision-making can be an individual or collective activity, it can be more rational or irrational, usually meaning more analytical or intuitive, using knowledge that is explicit or tacit.

It also depends on authority, and therefore how much influence over actions one has, how idealistic or “perfect” you want the decision to be compared to a “good enough” practical solution, the culture in which you work which may differ significantly in the use of authority and consensus, and your own thinking and behavioural styles.

“A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week.” General George Patton

Jeff Bezos discussed how Amazon takes decisions, in his recent annual letter to shareholders, and in particular how it is willing to take big risks with the knowledge that 90% of them will fail. He distinguishes two kinds of decision-making that affect how he thinks about risks.

• Absolute decisions are not reversible, and you have to be very careful making them.
• Agile decisions are reversible, like walking through a door — if you don’t like the decision, you can always go back.

The problem, he says, comes from confusing the two, and that as organisations get larger, there is a tendency to favour absolute decisions. The end result of this is slowness, unthoughtful risk aversion, failure to experiment sufficiently, and consequently diminished invention.

Making better decisions in a crisis 

Approaches to problem solving and decision making that work well in normal circumstances might not work well in a crisis. e The “Cynefin” Framework developed by Kurtz and Snowden. This is a sensemaking framework with five domains:

• Obvious or Simple (the known) — We’ve seen this a million times and as such can categorize and respond according to established best practices. The relationship between cause and effect is well known.
• Complicated (the knowable) — Although we don’t immediately know what is happening, we can analyze the situation and come to a conclusion of what must be done. We can enlist experts to analyze, set up constraints and a process addressing resolution.
• Complex (the unknowable) — We’re not able to determine what will cause a particular result. The best course of action is to conduct experiments and check if any or all take us in the correct direction. A lot of time when human opinion and decision is involved we could be working in this area; simply because humans are complex beings.
• Chaotic (the incoherent) — The situation is very unstable. We don’t have time to experiment or probe since the situation is dire and we need to act. An IT issue that must be taken care of immediately with no delay may be categorized as such. If we have no time to figure out a system deadlock issue, we may opt to get ourselves out of this chaotic state by rebooting the server.
• Disorder (not determined) — Anything whose domain has not been determined falls into this domain.

Leaders who don’t recognise that a complex domain requires a more experimental mode of management may become impatient when they don’t seem to be achieving the results they were aiming for. They may also find it difficult to tolerate failure, which is an essential aspect of experimental understanding. If they try to overcontrol the organization, they will preempt the opportunity for informative patterns to emerge. Leaders who try to impose order in a complex context will fail, but those who set the stage, step back a bit, allow patterns to emerge, and determine which ones are desirable will succeed.

Pyschologists suggest that, in the face of a crisis, our mental state tends to move from one of relatively restful contemplation towards increased anxiety, worry and anger.  The fatigue that inevitably comes with a period of prolonged crisis only heightens the level of emotion.

Why does this matter? Because a change in our emotional state is likely to affect the way we make judgements and reduce the effectiveness of decisions.

Many will call for faster decisions,  because humans are programmed to respond faster to threats than opportunities, but also urgency may be able to save lives or reputations, however others believe that it is better to make slower decisions in a crisis.

Important issues to consider include:

• Stress reduces thinking power. Worrying uses up valuable mental resources resulting in less thinking capacity to solve a crisis. Just as our computers slow down when we have lots of applications open at the same time, our processing power is also reduced when we are distracted by the anxiety caused by potential hits to personal reputation, share price or product sales.
• Crisis encourages narrow thinking. On some occasions, concentrating on priority information can provide a necessary and helpful focus. Too often, however, it can lead to myopic thinking which may miss the bigger picture. This bigger picture is often crucial to managing the crisis effectively.
• Time pressure can lead to bias. Even when professionals do try and consider the bigger picture, there is a tendency just to confirmation bias and groupthink – select the facts and information that support or confirm initial interpretations and conclusions.
• Emotions drive quick decisions. Crisis decision-making is stressful and uncomfortable. One means to overcome the emotion is to drive towards quick decisions. The first reasonable option is selected, with little or no thought given to the optimum approach. This approach manages the negative emotion at the cost of taking effective decisions.

There are some useful ways to avoid these traits, and improve crisis decision-making:

• Don’t hide away. Fight the tendency to hunker down and maintain your worldview, and connections. Social support reduces stress, keeps issues in context and improves the thinking process. While tempting, the hunker down approach often leads to narrow thinking.
• Set clear goals at the outset of the crisis. It’s important to be realistic about what can be achieved and not be overly ambitious. The process of setting goals also helps the crisis team stick to objectives and prioritise the right issues.
• See crises as an opportunity to learn from adversity. This more positive ‘frame’ of a crisis can reduce anxiety and stress, build resilience and lead to significant improvements in the future. Run a full debrief once the crisis has been averted.
• Put things in perspective. Think carefully about whether you need to apply a sticking plaster or carry out a full-blown crisis operation. There is a difference between a relatively isolated crisis and an incident that’s reflective of a much bigger problem.
• Accept that some things are outside of your control. There will be some aspects of a crisis that cannot be changed, regardless of what you’d like to happen. Move on to other things that you can exert some influence over.
• Prepare for it. Easy to say afterwards, but by identifying and practicing reactions to different scenarios, we can help to remove some of the negative emotions naturally associated with live crises.

By recognising the effects of emotion we can introduce measures to address the likely flaws in our decision-making process. By understanding the psychology of crisis, we can improve our approach to communications and protect, and sometimes even enhance, company reputation

More articles: 

• New Scientist: Making better decisions
• Jeff Bezos on reversible and irreversible decisions
• HBR article: Slow down to make better decisions in a crisis
• Forbes, Comparing business to military models of decision making

More videos:

• The Art and Science of Decision Making Daniel Kahneman
• Decision making under uncertainty
• How do smart people make decisions? Gerd Gigerenze
• The OODA Loop: A Competitive Decision-Making Tool

In a world of limitless media noise, how can businesses break through to customers? Context.

We are in the midst of a massive media revolution. For the first time in history, ordinary people around the world have the ability to create, distribute, and consume content instantly, from anywhere, using connected devices. The massive increase in media “noise” created by these consumers and devices creates an entirely new situation that makes conventional marketing models obsolete. And yet countless companies and marketing organizations continue to rely on traditional models, assuming that their “campaigns” will sway customers. They couldn’t be more wrong.

First a little context of my own.

I first met Mathew Sweezey at a huge digital marketing event in Rimini. It’s a strange place out of season. I ran for 10km along the seafront, and saw beach after beach, cafe after cafe, incredible homes and luxurious spas. But not a person around. It was April, so the sun was shining. But not one Italian was heading to the beach. Rimini is a bit like Atlantic City in the USA, or Blackpool in the UK. Bold and brash in summer, dormant beyond. And then in walks Sweezey. He had chosen to make a bit of a world tour of his trip to the keynote, with Rimini included. A kind of late gap year as he already works for Salesforce. He wasn’t brash , but he did have a bold vision for marketing.

Having spent my early career as a marketer, and been CEO of the world’s largest network of marketers, I feel its my subject too. But beyond Kotler and Aaker, Godin (that permission word, again!) and Lindstrom, few people have really challenged the rules of marketing. We still have the 4Ps, 4Cs, or variants on them. But then up stood Mathew (his opening line is always his name – his mother chose Mathew with one “t”, so nobody would call him Matt, or Mat). His session was fresh and fabulous, and he has a personal obsession to design great slides, which I love. So much that a few months later I invited him to join me on stage again, this time in Istanbul. In between the Grand Bazaar and much meze, he gave another fantastic session.

Sweezey’s new book The Context Marketing Revolution: How to Motivate Buyers in the Age of Infinite Media boldly outlines this new “infinite media” environment and poses a profound question: In a transformed world where customers shape their own experience, what is the key to breaking through and motivating them to buy? It is context–the close linkage between an individual’s immediate desires and the experiences a brand creates to fulfill them. Drawing on new research and new insights into current consumer psychology, Sweezey defines the five key elements of context. Customer experiences must be:

• Available: Helping people achieve the value they seek in the moment
• Permissioned (is that actually a word?): Giving people what they’ve asked for, on their terms
• Personal: Going beyond how personal it is to how personally you can deliver it
• Authentic: Combining voice, empathy, and brand congruence simultaneously
• Purposeful: Creating a deeper connection to the brand, beyond the product.

He uses vivid examples to highlight a new marketing model used by high-performing brands big and small. The final part of the book shifts to execution, providing a new rule book for context-based marketing.

“The Context Marketing Revolution” he likes to declare, will change forever how you think about the purpose and practice of marketing. Maybe it will.

By 2010, Eren had moved to Silicon Valley, working for several startups. He had partnered up with two other Turkish in the Valley to pitch an e-learning platform. They pitched 30 investors, and they got rejected over and over. His drive and curiosity primed him for a life beyond the expected. And when he first got the internet, his life changed forever.

The path from the village in Turkey to running the leading online education marketplace was not a straight line. In college Bali said he could imagine “a world where anyone could learn anything — from any expert in the world.” Bali and a co-founder created a product with Udemy’s vision six years ago in Turkey. They failed.

Named in the San Francisco Business Times 40 Under 40, Forbes 30 Under 30 and Business Insider’s Top 100 Innovators, Eren brings his entrepreneurial drive and ambition to Carbon to reimagine healthcare and build the world’s largest hospital.

Interview with Thrive Global

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLzi4GeoRiQ

 

In a recent keynote at the San Francisco Founder Institute, Bali compared and contrasted his own entrepreneurial journey and experience across two separate startup ventures, and illustrates some broader lessons for the cohort of new companies to takeaway as they continue to grow their ventures. Here are 5 insights he shared:

1. Internet Levels the Playing Field.

Bali explains that wherever it goes, the internet levels the playing field. He compares the ability for entrepreneurs today to develop breakout global businesses, from anywhere in the world, to the rise of the young Norwegian world chess champion, Magnus Carlsen.

Back in the day, you could only be grandmaster, you could only expect to be the world champion, if you were born in the Soviet Union or one of the major areas where chess was very competitive. But now with the internet, it’s so much more democratized. Now who gets to the top is far more diverse across a lot of countries, and Norway which is a small country has the world champion; Magnus Carlson for instance is from Norway, and so the Internet definitely democratized the concept of being competitive at chess.

Bali explains that his own startup success story is also one of an improbable boy who came from nowhere, and that only the internet made it possible, saying,

I was born in a very small village in the southeast part of Turkey, kind of a very rural village with not too much opportunity… But something happened that changed my life: my oldest sister was going to college, and my parents bought her a computer. So over the summer, I had access to the computer. I started finding mathematic resources and communities, and long story short, I ended up self-training myself in advanced mathematics using the internet and nothing else, and I ended up winning a national gold medal in Turkey for mathematics.

If you listen to the audio, you can tell that Bali does not tell this story to brag about his algebra skills, but instead to emphasize why entrepreneurs absolutely must think globally, both in terms of their future competitors and in terms of their own addressable markets.

2. Some disruptions hide from the entrenched competitors.

Talking about underlying factors of startup success stories, Bali says,

To start a very successful company, two things have to happen at the same time. First of all, your idea has to work, has to be a good idea. In addition to that, it also has to be somewhat controversial idea – if everyone thinks your new idea is great, the best thing you can get is a small exit to an established company.

While it is certainly true that the hottest startups receive early acquisition offers, I think Bali is also saying something more: that many great startups succeed because their future competitors don’t yet see them as threats, even after they’ve initially launched and already begun to disrupt the established market.

Because a startup’s go-to-market strategy can be so novel, the older entrenched competitor is often skeptical of the new innovation, and much slower to adapt than it should be. This extra time can allow a nimble startup to begin growing userbase and refining its offering, all while still somewhat under the radar of the big competitors.

Along the same lines, but more emphasizing the spirit of innovation, Bali notes,

Sometimes something that sounds just so crazy that there’s no way you can do it, is sometimes a much better idea than something that seems very viable and doable.

3. Entrepreneurs must actively network in order to fundraise.

While Bali admits that he was able to very quickly raise a round (and with much more favorable terms) for his second venture Carbon Health, he credits the Founder Institute with being absolutely critical in helping him build the network he needed in order to raise funding for his first venture, Udemy. He says,

Fundraising was not easy at all, but still it was great to start with some network. It’s really hard if you’re not a Silicon valley native or a person who has a huge network in the Bay Area. If you’re not in that kind of minority of the population, it’s really critical to get some initial network who will make some introductions, introduce you to more people—so for us, I don’t think there’s any way we could have got this up and running without the Founder Institute.

4. Reimagine new ways to deliver familiar, needed services.

Talking about the genesis of his second business, Carbon Health, Bali emphasizes that he not only wanted to improve inefficiencies in healthcare, but find a solution where he offer improvements at scale. Noting that Uber built the largest ridehailing service without owning a single taxi, and Airbnb essentially became the largest hotelier without owning a single room, Bali says,

We were looking for a more scalable model, and we realized when we started working with hospitals that we could centralized the user experience for physicians and for patients – all the technology, all the design, all the marketing for a provider brand – but we decentralize all the physical clinics. So we’re running some clinics ourselves, but by and large, the clinics that operate Carbon Health are actually owned by hospitals – they love this user experience, and they want to provide this in their own geographic region. The physical clinics are owned by the hospital, the physicians are employed by the hospital – so we don’t have to take that whole financial risk, and we can actually scale this to thousands of different clinics.

5. Get out the door, and go talk to your customer.

Last, Bali echoes a tried and true tenant of entrepreneurship: go talk to your customer. Ideas are cheap, but strong execution on ideas is rare. Very few founders succeed by staying at their office desk or lab bench—instead, entrepreneurs solve problems by talking to real people who experience real problems. Asking prospective customers smart questions always saves entrepreneurs countless hours of wasted time.

Bali admits that even in his second startup, he re-learned that his team was not the same as his real users were. Answering a question about whether wearables or other health monitoring devices were a major part of Carbon Health, Bali replied,

That was one of the things that I thought was so important that we should do it ASAP – and it ended up that we deprioritized it, because the reality is that once we opened the clinic and started seeing real patients, we realized this was not even in the top 10 priorities of the real patients, who wanted reliable prescription alerts, lab results, and essentially getting in and out faster. So if you’re a technical person like me looking at healthcare from the outside, it sounds like one of the top three most important ideas; in reality, it’s maybe idea number 30.

Purpose defines what the business contributes to the world, or equally, why the world would be a lesser place if the business did not exist.

Purpose creates an enduring cause which the business is willing to fight for. For some this might be an urgent call to action, for others it might be a more personal inspiration. Saving then planet, or achieving your potential, with Nike, or seeking happiness, with Coca Cola.

Tesla exists to “accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy”, Starbucks to “inspire the human spirit”, Dove to “help the next generation of women realise their potential”, Microsoft to “empower people to achieve more”, and Swarovski to “add sparkle to people’s everyday lives.”

Purpose creates a richer sense of meaning in your business, inspiring employees to raise their game, to transform and grow themselves and the organisation. It encourages a strategic focus, to rise above the distractions of today, to align on bigger goals and to innovate more radically. Productivity and performance typically follow.

Consumers seek purpose-driven companies

Consumers prefer them:

• Cone/Porter Novelli found 66% people would switch to a purpose-driven brand, and to 91% of millennials. Also 78 % of consumers would tell others to buy, and 73% would defend them
• Edelman Earned Brand says 50% of consumers across 14 major markets, are belief-driven buyers, and they skew younger, with higher percentages among Millennials (60%) and Gen-Z (53%).
• Fuse Marketing, says 85% of Gen-Z are more likely to trust a brand, 84% more likely to buy
• Sustainable Brands and Harris Poll found 80% of people say they are loyal to businesses that help them achieve “the Good Life” (defined by four major components: balance and simplicity, meaningful connections, money and status, and personal achievement) and 76% believe making a difference in the lives of others is necessary for living the Good Life.
• Accenture found 53% of people disappointed with a brand’s words or actions on a social issue complain about it, with 47% walking away in frustration, with 17% not coming back.
• Wall Street Journal found that “Almost 60% of Americans said last year that they would “choose, switch, avoid or boycott a brand based on its stand on societal issues,” compared to just 47% in 2017.
• 2018 Edelman Earned Brand study found that “nearly two-thirds (64 percent) of consumers around the world will buy or boycott a brand solely because of its position on a social or political issue.”

Consumers pay more:

• Nielsen found that 2 in 3 consumers will pay more for products and services from brands that are committed to making a positive social impact.
• IBM research and National Retail Federation found 70% of purpose-driven shoppers pay an added premium of 35% more for sustainable purchases, such as recycled or eco-friendly goods.” (based on 19,000 consumers in 28 countries)

About purpose:

• Harvard Business Review found that purpose helps “redefine the playing field” in a way that opened up new territories for growth, and “reshape their value proposition” in a way that broadened their mission.
• Fortune survey by New Paradigm Strategy Group found that nearly 72% of the adults surveyed agree that public companies should be mission-driven, as well as focus on their shareholders and customers. In that same poll, 64% of respondents say that a company’s primary purpose should include ‘making the world better’.
• Edelman Trust Barometer reports that “80% of consumers agree that a business must play a role in addressing societal issues; they want a company to take actions which increase profits, improve social conditions, and make the world a better place.”
• Deloitte’s Retail Trends 2020 report, which outlines the top six retail trends for the coming year, found that an “authentic purpose is now as important as digital to the next generation of customers.”
• Accenture Strategy’s ‘From me to we: The rise of the purpose-led brand’, 30,000 consumers, found that 62% want “companies to take a stand on current and relevant issues like sustainability, transparency or fair employment practices.”

More creative and innovative

• Harvard EY Beacon Institute survey found that “companies with a strong sense of purpose are able to transform and innovate better.” Executives with purpose have “greater ability to drive successful innovation and transformational change.”
• 53% said their organization is successful with innovation and transformation efforts, while less than one-fifth (19%) report success at companies who have not thought about purpose.
• Deloitte Insights 2020 Global Marketing Trends Report also found that purpose-driven companies report 30% higher levels of innovation.
• Harvard Business Review, found companies with above-average diversity have 19% higher innovation revenues and 9% points higher EBIT margins.
• Also, when Fortune-500 companies were ranked by the number of women directors on their boards, those in the highest quartile reported a 42% greater return on sales,  53% higher return on equity

And growth

• Kantar Purpose 2020 study demonstrates that over a period of 12 years, the brands with high perceived positive impact have a brand value growth of 175%, versus 86% for medium positive impact and 70% for low positive impact.

Employees seek purpose-driven companies

Attracting talent:

• Inc, found that millennials, who will make up 75% of the workforce by 2025, are looking for socially responsible employers.
• Cone Communications Millennial Employee Study found that 64% of millennials won’t take a job if their employee doesn’t have a strong CSR policy, and 83% would be more loyal to a company that helps them contribute to social and environmental issues
• WeSpire found that Gen-Z is ‘The first generation to prioritize purpose over salary. They read Mission Statements and Values documents to select where they work and want their employer’s values to match their values. They expect consistency and authenticity and will call you out, often publicly, if they don’t see it. They will leave companies they believe are hiding or putting too much spin on bad news, ignoring their negative environmental or social impacts, or that have toxic workplace cultures.’
• Peakon says Gen-Z is “the only generation to reference social concerns within employee comments. Raised in a time when the effects of climate change are making weekly headlines, it shows that they care deeply about the world around them.”

Employee performance

• Gallup’s Employee Engagement Poll found that only 34% of American workers were “actively engaged” (defined as “those who are involved in, enthusiastic about and committed to their work and workplace”)
• Organizations and teams with higher employee engagement and lower active disengagement perform at higher levels.
• Compared with business units in the bottom quartile, those in the top quartile of engagement realize substantially better customer engagement, higher productivity, better retention, fewer accidents, and 21% higher profitability.
• Fast Company found that ‘most millennials would take a pay cut to work at an environmentally responsible company.’

Reducing turnover

• Deloitte Insights 2020 Global Marketing Trends Report found that purpose-driven companies had 40% higher levels of workforce retention than their competitors.
• Benevity’s Engagement Study,  found that turnover dropped by an average of 57% in the employee group most deeply connected to their companies’ giving and volunteering efforts.
• Studies show that the total cost of losing an employee can range from tens of thousands of dollars to 1.5–2 times an employee’s annual salary, which for U.S. companies totals more than $160 billion a year. This shows that giving employees a sense of meaning in their work has tangible and hugely impactful benefits.

Investors seek purpose driven companies

A 20-year study by the Torrey Project explodes the myth that an ethical, stakeholder-driven approach to business cannot lead to shareholder returns by examining the long-term historical performance of different sets of companies including the S&P 500, Jim Collins’ “Good to Great” companies, Raj Sisodia’s stakeholder-focused “Firms of Endearment” and Ethisphere’s 2019 “Most Ethical Companies.”

After comparing these 4 sets of companies’ financial performance on the NASDAQ and NYSE over the past 20 years, they found that while Ethical Companies do enjoy a higher level of stock price growth (50% higher than that of the S&P 500 over the same period), stakeholder-focused companies (Sisodia’s Firms of Endearment) had the highest growth of all in stock price (100% higher than that of the S&P 500 over the same period).

This data has two clear conclusions. (1) Ethical business behavior correlates with high financial returns. (2) Companies who take things one step further and adopt a stakeholder-focused model (that explicitly serves employees, customers, suppliers, business partners, investors, local communities, the environment, and society) have historically shown even higher returns than standard ethical companies.

Current Investors:

• According to Morningstar, “net flows into sustainable funds this year are on track to triple their 2018 total, driven by ESG (environmental, social and governance) factors as well as the desire to make a social impact.”
• Bank of America Merrill Lynch report predicted a “tsunami” of capital flowing to “good” stocks, fueled by high levels of interest among women, millennials, and wealthy individuals. They say over the next two decades, $20 trillion in assets will flow into sustainable funds and strategies, nearly equaling the market value of the S&P 500 today (some $24.7 trillion).

Future investors:

• Coldwell Banker, says the “Great Wealth Transfer” will see an estimated $68 trillion passed down from boomers over the next 30 years, and by 2030, Millennials will hold five times as much wealth as they have today.
• DeVere Group, survey of Millennial investors found that some 77% of them say that environmental, social and governance concerns are their top priority when considering investment opportunities.
• It found that ESG concerns topped traditional factors such as anticipated returns (cited as most important by 10% of those polled), past performance (7%), risk tolerance (4%) and tactical allocation (2%) when making investment decisions.
• Swell Investing’s ‘Money Meets Morals’ survey found that 84% of Gen-Z investors are either already invested in socially responsible or impact investments or plan to invest this way in the future. Nearly one in three Gen-Z investors (31%) said they would be willing to allocate 50% or more of their investment portfolio to socially responsible or impact investments. One in four millennial investors would do the same.

 

Steve Jobs said “the only way to do great work is to love what you do.”

In a remarkably personal address, the Apple founder and CEO advised graduates to live each day as if it were their last.

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life,” he said. He’d been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer a year earlier.

“Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important,” he continued. “Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

Jobs said this mindset will make you understand the importance of your work. “And the only way to do great work is to love what you do,” he said. “If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.”

Settling means giving in to someone else’s vision of your life — a temptation Jobs warned against. “Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.”

JK Rowling said “it is impossible to live without failing at something.”

The author of the “Harry Potter” series told Harvard’s class of 2008 about the dark period she experienced before achieving success. “An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears that my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew,” Rowling said.

But when she was at the bottom, she realized that her life went on, and she decided to press forward. “You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable,” she said. “It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all — in which case, you fail by default.

“You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more than any qualification I ever earned,” she said.

Tim Cook said “call upon your grit. Try something.”

Apple CEO Tim Cook delivered the 2019 commencement speech for the graduates of Tulane University, offering valuable advice on success.

“We forget sometimes that our preexisting beliefs have their own force of gravity,” Cook said. “Today, certain algorithms pull toward you the things you already know, believe, or like, and they push away everything else. Push back.”

“You may succeed. You may fail. But make it your life’s work to remake the world because there is nothing more beautiful or more worthwhile than working to leave something better for humanity.”

Sheryl Sandberg said “not everything that happens to us happens because of us.”

During the Facebook COO’s deeply personal commencement speech about resilience at UC Berkeley, she spoke on how understanding the three Ps that largely determine our ability to deal with setbacks helped her cope with the loss of her husband, Dave Goldberg.

She outlined the three Ps as:

• Personalization: Whether you believe an event is your fault.
• Pervasiveness: Whether you believe an event will affect all areas of your life.
• Permanence: How long you think the negative feelings will last.

“This is the lesson that not everything that happens to us happens because of us,” Sandberg said about personalization. It took understanding this for Sandberg to accept that she couldn’t have prevented her husband’s death. “His doctors had not identified his coronary artery disease. I was an economics major; how could I have?”

Stephen Spielberg said “your job is to create a world that lasts forever.”

“This world is full of monsters,” director Steven Spielberg told Harvard graduates, and it’s the next generation’s job to vanquish them.

“My job is to create a world that lasts two hours. Your job is to create a world that lasts forever,” he said.

These monsters manifest themselves as racism, homophobia, and ethnic, class, political, and religious hatred, he said, noting that there is no difference between them: “It is all one big hate.”

Spielberg said that hate is born of an “us versus them” mentality, and thinking instead about people as “we” requires replacing fear with curiosity.

“‘Us’ and ‘them’ will find the ‘we’ by connecting with each other, and by believing that we’re members of the same tribe, and by feeling empathy for every soul,” he said.

Shonda Rhimes said “ditch the dream and be a doer, not a dreamer.”

American TV producer told grads at Dartmouth to stop dreaming and start doing.

The world has plenty of dreamers, she said. “And while they are busy dreaming, the really happy people, the really successful people, the really interesting, engaged, powerful people, are busy doing.” She pushed grads to be thosepeople.

“Ditch the dream and be a doer, not a dreamer,” she advised — whether or not you know what your “passion” might be. “The truth is, it doesn’t matter. You don’t have to know. You just have to keep moving forward. You just have to keep doing something, seizing the next opportunity, staying open to trying something new. It doesn’t have to fit your vision of the perfect job or the perfect life. Perfect is boring and dreams are not real,” she said.

Gallery of Commencement Speeches

Steve Jobs at Stanford in 2005:

 

Elon Musk at Caltech in 2012:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxZpaJK74Y4

JK Rowling at Harvard in 2013:

Bill and Melinda Gates at Stanford in 2014:

Shonda Rhimes at Dartmouth in 2014:

Matt Damon at MIT in 2016:

Barack Obama at Howard in 2016:

Donavan Livingston at Harvard in 2016:

Sheryl Sandberg at Berkeley in 2017:

Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard in 2017:

And a montage, of a few more themes:

We all tend to have a preferred or “natural style” of leadership.

Leading in a way that feels right and natural to you, is both easier for you, and more consistent and authentic for others. Whatever your style, people will engage with and trust you more, if they know that you are genuine.

At times though you may need to adapt your style, or embrace aspects of other styles for a specific purpose. Daniel Ek, CEO of Spotify, for example, found that he was too laid back for his teams when they were looking for direction and focus. He worked on making the most of his own style, with aspects which met this need from his teams.

There are many theoretical models of leadership to take ideas from, and it can get very confusing.

Kurt Lewin classified leadership styles into autocratic, participative and laissez-faire. Tannenbaum and Schmidt saw leadership as a continuum of styles, ranging from autocratic to freed, but saying that the best style at any time depended upon a variety of factors, such as the leader’s personality and the situation they faced.  Daniel Goleman, who coined the phrase “emotional intelligence”  developed a framework of six different styles built on a leaders ability to emotionally engage with people in different ways – visionary, coaching, democratic, pacesetting, affiliative and commanding.

Here is a useful decision tree exploring the different approaches:

To summarise:

Leading in an inspiring style … when you want to encourage people to work with you in creating a better future, providing energy and direction to move forwards:

• Transformational … “Imagine if “… opportunity to grow, change, self and organisation
• Visionary … “Come with me” … a new direction, empathetic, builds confidence
• Pacesetting … “We can do this” … driven to achieve, is energising but also exhausting

Leading in an nurturing style … when you want to support people to be their best, although not necessarily about thinking about being creative or moving forwards:

• Servant … “Here for you” … secures resources and support, so people can act as see fit
• Coaching … “Try this” … empathy, supports individual needs, but less directive
• Affiliative … “People come first” … empathy, reassures and builds team, but can lack focus

Leading in a more less engaged style … when you want  to let people get on with their work, trusting that they have capabilities and desire to do the task:

• Laissez-faire … “Do what you think” … entrusting people to deliver, giving them space
• Transactional … “You know what to do” … clear tasks, and intervene if not delivered
• Bureaucratic … “Follow the process” … clearly defined steps, good when technical or legal

Leading in a commanding style … when you want to be in charge and make the decisions, often when you believe people don’t have the capabilities to decide:

• Consultative … “Tell me what you think” … you listen to people and then decide yourself
• Persuasive … “This is what, and why” … you decide then seek to persuade them it is correct
• Autocratic … “Do what I tell you” … you are commanding, demotivating but can work in crisis

Knowing when and how to adapt your leadership style to different situations can have a huge impact on how your team will respond.  For example if you are trying to build capabilities within your team you may find that the coaching leadership style works best.  If you have urgent deadlines, then pacesetting. If you need to be highly structured and compliant, the bureaucratic. If you want people to work together to create a better future for all, then transformational.

Ultimately you will need combinations of different styles for different people on different occasions. How you combine these approaches, in a way that works authentically for you, will determine your personal style.