Conversation Agent - Valeria Maltoni

Can we Make Transformation Natural?

Ever since I can remember, I wanted to be a translator. From parent to sisters talk was my first interpreting work. Then it was from teenager to mother. Not just language. Turning ideas into things was a favorite. But also creating experiences.

I've had several careers. After the jobs above. Simultaneous interpreter and translator for neurological development. That's where I picked up the strong foundation of what makes humans work... and what doesn't. Marketing, communications, strategy, creative, product in five industries all followed. With considerable overlap. Coaching and advising evolved from there.

Transitions were much easier early on. Almost natural. My work evolved from the compound effects of hands-on learning on the job. I want to keep going. Yet, I somehow sense that the protracted pandemic has created a situation where people must fit into boxes.

I don't. Never did. Even as a small baby. I found ways to get out of the playpen. So, I've been wondering about this. It's a dilemma. Because I think right now we need people who can truly connect disparate domains for strategic development.

And to fix what we've broken. Growth via exploitation got us where we are. With control issues, and diminishing energy. Where value is only one kind. Exploration can put us back into balance. As humans, we need a bit of both.

Hence my question.

 

Can we make transformation natural?

I'm taking the temperature here. In a recent interview with (I'm told the last issue, pity) Departure print magazine, Stanley Tucci says, “In the food of every country is the story of that country.” And its culture of transformation. It all depends on your appetite.

Movie critics found The Devil Wears Prada and Julie & Julia shallow. That's too bad. Plus who cares? They are not the ones in the arena. I found out so much about human nature from both. With the added bonus of the winning duo Meryl Streep / Stanley Tucci. She makes everyone better. He makes everyone interesting.

Food. Yes, I'm in favor. We can learn a lot about natural transformation from food. Michael Polian wrote an excellent book turned into a Netflix docuseries. Cooked: a Natural History of Transformation is not just how humans evolved. It's also necessary to reclaim our health.

The book talks about how cooking involves us in a web of social and ecological relationships. Cooking, above all, connects us. Cue in images of grandmothers making cappelletti from scratch (mine), husbands making their favorite meal (looking at your, Rand), kids helping bake cookies, that scene in Eat, Pray, Love where they're eating outside and talking in Rome.

I love baking. It's more of an exact discipline. Once you get a system down, you're golden. By the way, a baker took exception to some of the science behind bread-making in the book. The lacto bacteria is already is the wheat. The only objection anyone raised, that I know.

Cooking is creative, it reconnects us as a whole person, and gives us the opportunity to support the people we love.

“Our society assigns us a tiny number of roles: We're producers of one thing at work, consumers of a great many things all the rest of the time, and then, once a year or so, we take on the temporary role of citizen and cast a vote. Virtually all our needs and desires we delegate to specialists of one kind or another - our meals to the food industry, our health to the medical profession, entertainment to Hollywood and the media, mental health to the therapist or the drug company, caring for nature to the environmentalist, political action to the politician, and on and on it goes. Before long it becomes hard to imagine doing much of anything for ourselves - anything, that is, except the work we do "to make a living." For everything else, we feel like we've lost the skills, or that there's someone who can do it better... it seems as though we can no longer imagine anyone but a professional or an institution or a product supplying our daily needs or solving our problems.”

And of course:

“When chopping onions, just chop onions.”

Who could forget that eye-watering scene in Julie & Julia where Tucci finds Streep elbow-deep in onion-chopping. The greatest part of cooking is the ability to soak in the history of food in a country and pass it on. With some constraints, like the ingredients, temperature, time, etc.

Constraints are useful for creativity. But also when dealing with complexity. Dave Snowden has long been an observer of natural science. He applies what he's learned to people and systems. Constraints allow us to create sustainable practices.

Language is a useful constraint. The words we use to define things should be the language by which we change things. From description to intervention. Describe the present, see what you can change. A more natural way to transformation.

 

The end is never easy

Of a project, as a career. A relationship, but also of a habit.

Can you imagine alternating your story with that of other people naturally? We all strive do make an impression, leave a mark, make things better. I like the third expression over the other two. They imply some act of vandalism.

Death is the ultimate transformation. We don't talk about it much. People die somewhere else. In hospitals, mostly. And away from the family and loved ones. In this past year, we've managed to make even death data-driven. To the point that it's hard to imagine actual persons.

Rachel Clark's loving account of her patients' stories and her own highlights the importance of human connection. Dear Life is a reminder that death is part of life. And we can have the same degree of care, compassion, and love for that phase as we have for others.

It's a reading to approach with emotional fortitude. I could not have read it after my father died. A day after he was put in a sterile hospital room with a stranger. It would have been useful before. But the experience of being there with him changed me. How I talk about death and prepare for it has changed. There's pain involved. Letting go. We're so attached to life.

This passage in the book is especially touching:

“If there is a difference between people who know they are dying and the rest of us, it is simply this: that the terminally ill know their time is running out, while we live as though we have all the time in the world. Their urgency propels them to do the things they want to do, reach out to those they love, and savor the moments of life still left to them. In a hospice, therefore, there is more of what matters – more love, more strength, more kindness, more smiles, more dignity, more joy, more tenderness, more grace, more compassion – than you could ever imagine. I work in a world that thrums with life. My patients teach me all I need to know about living.”

If only, right? So much of our behavior makes no sense when you look at this kind of transformation. Because “there is nothing more important than another human presence, old fashioned, instinctive, love and tenderness towards one of our own.”

The end is never easy. Even for companies.

 

But all is not lost

The “cult of efficiency” predates World War II. Technology just added the existing culture. Yet, we can't be more productive by treating persons like machines. I've hated the 'lean in' philosophy from the moment it went mainstream.

Celeste Headlee says, Do Nothing, instead. Well, not literally. Given how we've just recently confirmed that our idea of change always involves adding something, doing nothing is design thinking for the obsessive-productive person.

“The truth is, productivity is a by-product of a functional system, not a goal in and of itself. The question is not whether you are productive but what you are producing.”

Research find that subtraction often beats addition.

“We work best when we allow for flexibility in our habits. Instead of gritting your teeth and forcing your body and mind to work punishing hours and “lean in” until you reach your goals, the counterintuitive solution might be to walk away. Pushing harder isn’t helping us anymore.”

The blog is my one online writing tool. For note-taking and thinking, I still use mechanical pencil and paper notebooks. Fabriano. Because they're the perfect size, paper, and binding for me. Mastering different tools can get in the way of mastering rigorous thinking, lead to cognitive overload.

The book pulls together threads from history, neuroscience, social science, and even paleontology. I especially enjoyed the history of work part. England is often a reference. Most people owned some land in the Middle Ages.

My family was quite poor for generations. Though I do have some uncles and cousins who own land. It's a beautiful thing. Vineyards, open space. I've come to appreciate the attachment to a patch, a space to put your roots down.

Yes, we can wake up and smell the garlic. But what we need is a cultural shift. Our desire to belong is driving the choices of many. Even when they're not good for us. We really do much better when we're rested, invest in quality idle time, and are honest about what we can accomplish, when.

Recently, I came across the short blog entry where my mother wrote about bringing home her new puppy thirteen years ago. What joy she describes! Quality of life comes from our creativity, social connections, our ability for reflection, and the capacity for joy.

They're not on the spreadsheet, but they're transformational.

 

Vendoring in Culture

I read a lot of other people's writing. I recommend it, especially in the form of good books. One of the unspoken rules of many writers is that you don't blackbox something if you don't need to. Writers quote authors—a dependency—for efficiency, not ignorance.

In my case, you can assume I've read at least one of their works for context on their thought process.

But in writing, as in thinking, you can also copy someone else's idea and modify it for a different purpose. The work you do to reframe a concept allows you to get a deeper understanding of how it works. Or to see its limits. Just like in a conversation.

For this thought, my dependency is Tom MacWright's excellent piece on vendor by default. If you're looking for a way into how engineers and programmers think, it's a good short article to read.

The concept of vendoring can apply to culture. It involves responsibility, and the willingness to incorporate the new idea as a seed into your thinking. Alan Jacobs suggests this is a way to do “moral repair through vendoring code.” His light bulb went off after reading a short article about what is possible by Robin Sloan.

You can only correct something by making it your own. I'd like to extend and expand on this concept.

 

Making “it” your own

Reading a lot and thinking about what you read creates capacity. Capacity is how you're able to absorb things in your mind. But then repair in the form of rethinking, asking better questions, and/or upgrading code has to be there.

Jacobs says:

When the original is healthier, and stronger, the relation can be more equal and more constructively reciprocal. But even when the original code is destructive, even when it’s a kind of cultural malware, it can seed the act of repair — the act of repair that goes far beyond repair.

A seed is helpful.

As a child raised on the Montessori principles in a family of very modest means, I didn't want toys. I loved listening to people talk and explain things from a very early age. It was convenient, as I spent most of my time exploring environments physically. Climbing on furniture when trees where not available. And giving my mother a fright!

My preference was for making things. On the rare occasion when I did receive toys, I would immediately break them down to see how they worked. This is a good method to see things to their limits. It's a good path to making things your own. Soon, I was building things from parts.

Other people made the parts, but the new thing was my own.

 

Capacity vs. capability

At some point in my career, I worked with an ex-McKinsey CEO. He talked often about capacity and capabilities. Capacity is what you have right now. Capability is the highest level you can achieve. Think capacity as something you hold, capability as potential.

A person, company, or society can have the capacity to change, but may lack key capabilities to do it. Existing capacity has time, energy, and money constraints. You could figure out how to do something new easily, or be confident in acquiring new capabilities.

Many companies hold on to existing capacity. Reducing it when the market contracts. Building capabilities has become the responsibility of individuals. When the market expands, some rebuild capacity.

Capacity is what gets you in the door. Some companies have the capacity to see what makes you better at your job—skills and traits you have. Few consider mindset—how you adapt and learn new things. Even fewer look at your resilience and understanding of purpose. You'd figure these out through behavior, not personality tests.

Passion, purpose, values, and curiosity are the inputs that make up culture.

 

Vendoring in culture

Existing company culture has stabilized. It doesn't change that often, and when it does, it's minor. But the value it got from it's commercial cycles last year or even a few months ago, doesn't apply as well.

You also have patterns in the processes and rules that are probably impossible to remove. And they hold you back. Also, if your company is using a lot of third-party dependencies—as in what others are doing—you're probably inhering their bugs, too.

On the other hand, vendoring means you take responsibility for fixing what's wrong. Analysis of existing culture precedes the production of new things. Because you can only correct something after you've made it your own.

Vendoring is a concept that implies a certain opening. When you apply it to culture, it's an opening of the mind. Perhaps, like me, you're thinking that open equals good. It does wonders for creativity. Comedian John Cleese says:

the open mode, is relaxed… expansive… less purposeful mode… in which we're probably more contemplative, more inclined to humor (which always accompanies a wider perspective) and, consequently, more playful.

It's a mood in which curiosity for its own sake can operate because we're not under pressure to get a specific thing done quickly. We can play, and that is what allows our natural creativity to surface.

An open mind is more receptive to new things. It's a pathway to adapting, and pursuing potential. This is how you build capabilities. But we also need a closed mode to get things done. So it's not either/or.

When the rate of change is too high in mainstream culture, the safer bet becomes dependency. It's too expensive in energy terms to think independently. I'm wondering how much in culture right now is dependency, rather than vendoring.

 

* Alan Jacobs is the author of How to Think.

Want to Make an Impact? Prepare and Do.

“You are what you do, not what you say you'll do.”

— Carl Jung

 

Want to make an impact? Connect with your mind and examine your consciousness.

Every other option becomes an act of vandalism or hubris rather quickly in the modern sense of the word.# For many involved in knowledge work, professional services, or even technology, an actual exchange of value is hard to measure beyond the immediate. But there's a way to prepare for and build over time.

Put into this context, it's not obvious you could translate impact into positive effect, influence, or change quickly. But that's what most of us think we intend for “impact,” and want. This kind of impact comes down to good decision-making.

 

Explaining what's going on

Of course, not all decisions are created equal. What flavors in my gelato doesn't have the same weight as which ingredients. This is something people with food allergies know well. So the question needs precision: what flavors in sorbetto?

All decisions are like this, they have different layers to them. But it's easier to see them as either/or rather than “it depends.” If you don't practice seeing beyond the surface—for example, by putting yourself in someone else's shoes, even hypothetically—you miss the layers.

You can make good decisions by going after the relevant information. That's why it helps to try and explain what's going on. Even better if from the outside looking in. Know too little, and you won't be able to; know too much and you'll get bogged down in the details and might miss the point... or the timing of it.

Also, watch out for what you measure: number of flavors is tactical, enjoyment without indigestion or worse is strategic. So by all means track the small things (metrics), but keep an eye on the big ones, like direction toward your goal (KPIs).

Thinking in layers is useful to expand options and keep people at the center of decisions.

 

Expanding options

Catalent's late-stage and commercial product launch site in Anagni is preparing to distribute the Covid-19 vaccine in Europe on behalf of AstraZeneca. This is a plant that had an uncertain future two short years ago. Bristol Myers Squibb had decided to sell.

General Manager Barbara Sambuco and a small number of her staff had been informed of the future sale.# Sambuco and her small team had a short window of opportunity to involve a sociologist and work together to take stock and enhance the skills of the plant and the people.

The idea was not only to build capacity—equipment and resources—but also capabilities—so they would know how to apply the resources in times of crisis. That time was the upcoming sale. Imagine if they had envisioned a pandemic! They called the project “vocation.”

For about a year of their two-year sale notice they involved a group of middle managers—key people within the company. With them, they talked, constructed the values ​​uniting the company, and drew up goals to guide everyone.

Then the plant organized two big events for the entire staff. The first was a game. Seven hundred people put themselves to the test while having fun. Thanks to the playful expedient they were able to share and convey the values ​​developed with the managers.

The second event was an internal hackathon: about three hundred people from the plant participated, including workers, analysts, engineers, etc. It was designed to highlight the things people wanted to bring into the new reality and those they wanted to leave behind.

You can't just announce an acquisition and wing it. That's where vandalism and hubris come in dressed as impact. Instead, they put a lot of thought and work in training the people at the Anagni plant. When executives announced the sale, the staff were ready to face the challenge. It was a shock, but they were ready to go to work.

This decision to communicate and construct together was fundamental. It helped leaders understand the preparation people needed and the role they could play in the transition. People are not goods, you don't just move them here and there in a spreadsheet sort. In Anagni they felt part of the transition.

“Without this work it was unthinkable to be able to sell a plant with the support of the trade unions, with no strike days, and with absenteeism that remained below 3%,” says Sambuco. “This is work I am proud of.” And so she should be. I've seen enough mergers and acquisitions that did not reach a fraction of their potential in my career to know the power of layers in decision-making.

Catalent is a company that supplies more than 70 billion pharma, biopharma, and consumer health products to market to 80+ countries in 5 continents. And now, the Anagni plant has a key role to play in the European vaccine rollout.

Management decisions involved many layers and time. But they got the plant were it needed to be to execute.

 

Embodying execution

Whenever we see a gap between what we intended and what happened, it's easy enough to explain mistakes away. But we're often blind to them when we let the presentation of our claims paper over those gaps in execution.

Not enough executives feel embarrassed when they overstate impact.# That's a shame, because execution is all about embodying the work. And embodiment is all about being prepared to see, feel, and experience.

Five years ago, I noted how 80,000 Hours put together a list of simple steps on how to choose. A career is their context, but you could adapt these points to many kinds of decisions. We don't do enough of number 1 and 3, and often overlook number 5 and 6:

1. Focus mainly on taking a good next step, not figuring out a precise long-term plan.
2. Write out your most important priorities for the decision.
3. Brainstorm extra options. Most people consider too few.
4. Rank your options.
5. Write out your key uncertainties.
6. Go and investigate your key uncertainties. Many people try to figure out their career from the armchair, when often it would be better to go and speak to people or try things.
7. Do your final ranking. Assess your options based on your priorities, and ask yourself why you might be wrong. Don’t just go with your gut.
8. Make your best guess.

Trying things could include becoming an apprentice. I'm a huge fan of gaining some practice by doing things yourself. In much knowledge work, you cannot opine your way into knowing. It takes doing the work to understand how seemingly simple things are complex, or not easy to do.

Hands-on experience is invaluable. But not in the ways we intend.

We underestimate the contribution of manual work to learning, and the value of embodiment to getting things done. Knowledge work and professional services / technology experienced less of an interruption this past year. Yet, the way we work has changed.

People have had the opportunity to expand their decision-making by seeing the layers. With overlapping work and life, everyone had more opportunity to experiment with circadian rhythms and productivity, integrating life as we embody our work.

It's been almost a situation like the top managers at the Anagni plant. We talked, constructed what worked to unite us in different contexts, and drew up goals for the upcoming year. I've not seen so much enthusiasm in business cycles as I've seen at the start of this year.

And with good reason. The strong became stronger. The smart figured out a way to embody and own execution in a changed environment. This is a tremendous opportunity to be part of the transition to the work we want, modeling on what we found worked in the crisis.

What do you want to bring into the new reality, what should stay behind? If you're waiting to go back to normal... well, that world doesn't exist anymore. It didn't for a while. But it was the forced context that pushed the awareness out in the open.

Value is the ability to make positive change. We all want impact in this sense of the word. If you've prepared for it, you have a shot at being part of the transition.

+

We did something similar to the “vocation” project at a company where I helped grow sales for a divestiture. It involved understanding our capabilities and the gap between work in normal circumstances and work under stress. I've talked about some aspects of the work in an article about opportunity in the gap between what you know and what you don't.

Every company is going to face some form of transition in the coming year(s). Why does everyone insist on hiring people who align with the way things were? Fear? Doubt? If this is you, start by writing down your uncertainties and become a detective: investigate them! 

Also, see the distinction between uncertainty and risk.

Words for the Year

The most important things are often the hardest.

Each month this year had its challenges. It also had its gifts: that was the focus all along. A recap of the words that carried the day—and will take us into the future.

January—impact

February—culture

March—belief

April—habits / behaviors

May—perspective

June—change

July—perception / behavior

August—productivity

September—attention / power

October—role of corporation

November—clarity

December—lasting

Lasting turns into impact through decision-making, and the cycle continues. Creators use words to expand their thinking, anchor action in meaning.

Words are human footprints on the world.

How lasting? What impact?

 

A Reading List for the Culturally Curious

“Looking at life from a different perspective makes you realize that it's not the deer that is crossing the road, rather it's the road that is crossing the forest.” Born Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr., Muhammad Ali was an activist and philanthropist who became known in America and the world as one of the greatest professional boxers of all time.

His convictions cost him at least four years of peak performance. Sports Illustrated declared the heavyweight “Sportsman of the Century” in 1999. Ali won numerous awards throughout his career. But it was his appeal that won him a large following. As Rolling Stone put it, Ali spoke with his body, mind, and soul:

“The only things quicker than his fists and feet were his mind and mouth: Speaking truth to power, the loquacious Ali said things in a confrontational, even 'arrogant' manner that mainstream America was not yet prepared to hear, especially coming out of the mouth of a young black man.”

In 1999, David Bowie talked about how the Internet would become an instrument of conversation, changing the relationship between artists and audiences. That same year, Pulitzer Prize winner Anna Quindlen talked about the artist's struggle in a Commencement Speech at Mount Holyoke:

“every story has already been told. Once you've read Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Sound and the Fury, To Kill a Mockingbird and A Wrinkle in Time, you understand that there is really no reason to ever write another novel.

Except that each writer brings to the table, if she will let herself, something that no one else in the history of time has ever had. And that is herself, her own personality, her own voice. If she is doing Faulkner imitations, she can stay home.

If she is giving readers what she thinks they want instead of what she is, she should stop typing. But if her books reflect her character, who she really is, than she is giving them a new and wonderful gift. Giving it to herself, too. And that is true of music and art and teaching and medicine.”

You probably forgot many of the remarkable things that happened in 1999. We were all focused on Y2K: the round number that promised to bring havoc, if not properly managed. Hindsight being 2020, from this vantage point we're thinking little of all the things that happened in 2019.

 

The power of culture

But here's where culture has power. You, we, still did many things in the years that we have a hard time remembering and may consider trivial. Culture is messy that way. It's a rich store of rituals and tradition that keeps building in communities, countries, and companies.

Unlike money or product, things you constantly have to replace because they lose value quickly, culture doesn't lose value through use. You can turn your time into something that can live forever with culture. Muhammad Ali, David Bowie, Anna Quindlen were and are culture makers: spiritual fathers and mothers of nascent phenomena by recognizing and putting them on record.

What strikes me when I listen to conversations with people like them is that

they can use reason to account for facts and lies.

Ali writes poems to describe experience. The way he talks is itself poetic, “very often, a wise doctor can cure you through word of mouth alone because they realize the power of man is needed.” When Ali talks, he has rhythm: listen for yourself in this conversation with Irish broadcaster Cathal O'Sannon. “Very few boxers can come on a show and match a wise man like yourself,” you need personality to do that, to know how to talk to people. Plus Ali can energize the causes and groups he stands for and all of a sudden, “you have a very large crowd.”

Bowie observes the development of a new cultural phenomenon. His quiet and steady cadence asserts without contradicting, “I embrace the idea that there's a new demystification process between the artist and the audience.” To a skeptical Jeremy Paxman of the BBC, he notes how the Internet has taken over as the conveyor of rebellion, how there isn't “one truth, but always 2, 3, 4, 5 sides to each question.” His insight is that Internet shows us how “we're living in total fragmentation.” And foresaw what it was going to do to society, both good and bad.

Anna Quindlen talks about how fashion shifts reference points in culture. “Trying to be perfect may be sort of inevitable for people like us, who are smart and ambitious and interested in the world and in its good opinion. But at one level it's too hard, and at another, it's too cheap and easy.” 

Because it really requires you mainly to read the zeitgeist of wherever and whenever you happen to be, and to assume the masks necessary to be the best of whatever the zeitgeist dictates, or requires. Those requirements shape shift, sure, but when you're clever you can read them, and do the imitation required. But nothing important, or meaningful, or beautiful, or interesting, or great ever came out of imitations.

Imitation doesn't produce ideas.

 

What energizes creates value

The process of producing an idea and creating from it energizes you. When an experience has value—something you listen to like music or read like the conversations I shared here—you know it because it fills you with energy. The same happens when you receive great service: your heart rate goes up.

That feeling is there to tell you, to acknowledge the creation of value. This is how you can put money into things that have more value, like culture, to encourage good decisions.

A sense of disgust for an experience or situation is literally the feeling of energy exploding in you. Energy that could have gone back to the company or a person, instead dissipates. When something lets your down, it collapses. It takes the energy that was available and shatters it.

There's a cultural undertone in the conversations of Ali, Bowie, and Quindlen that hints at working on the idea, doing the work as yourself, rather than trying to please an audience.

Trying to please an audience takes the power away from the idea, it dilutes it.

When you seek acknowledgement, it may not come, especially if your idea is new. Stay with the idea. It is the power of the idea that will energize the people ready for it.

 

Readings for the culturally curious

Fast gets all the attention, slow has all the power. Slow is continuous over time, it remembers, and disposes. Curiosity helps dig further and seek depth. It's the act of talking with customers to learn about how they see the world. That is slow. Michael Dariano says deep curiosity is good digging.

Reading books, rather than quick takes is how you build the muscle for extracting ideas, seeing things in new ways, and spotting places that might be interesting to dig.

Ease and convenience hamper curiosity. Enthusiasm ignites your desire to be curious. Our culture is filled with opportunities to care for the body. Books are an opportunity to nourish the mind. Here are a few books where I found new ideas:

1.

Awareness: The Perils and Opportunities of Reality by Anthony de Mello

Thesis: You can handle the truth. Most people don't want to know.

de Mello was a Jesuit priest and psychotherapist who became widely known for his books on spirituality. A few quotes that made an impression from this loose collection of thoughts:

“We were brought up to need people. For what? For acceptance, approval, appreciation, applause - for what they call success. Those are words that do not correspond to reality. They are conventions, things that are invented, but we don't realize that they don't correspond to reality. What is success? It is what one group decided is a good thing. Another group will decide the same thing is bad.”

“What you are aware of you are in control of; what you are not aware of is in control of you. You are always a slave to what you’re not aware of. When you’re aware of it, you’re free from it. It’s there, but you’re not affected by it. You’re not controlled by it; you’re not enslaved by it. That’s the difference.”

“Because agreement and disagreement have to do with words and concepts and theories. They don’t have anything to do with truth. Truth is never expressed in words. Truth is sighted suddenly, as a result of a certain attitude.”

You cure loneliness by contact with reality. I appreciate how he talks about not identifying with a feeling (or a belief?), instead watching and observing it with curiosity.

2.

Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World by Tim Marshall

Thesis: How the physical characteristics of countries affect their strengths and vulnerabilities and the decisions made by their leaders.

Marshall was Diplomatic Editor and foreign correspondent for Sky News. Originally from Leeds, he arrived at broadcasting after a wholly unsuccessful career as a painter and decorator. Choice quotes:

“Why do you think your values would work in a culture you don’t understand?”

“Analysts often write about the need for certain cultures not to lose face, or ever be seen to back down, but this is not just a problem in the Arab or East Asian cultures—it is a human problem expressed in different ways.”

“Technology may seem to overcome the distances between us in both mental and physical space, but it is easy to forget that the land where we live, work and raise our children is hugely important, and that the choices of those who lead the seven billion inhabitants of this planet will to some degree always be shaped by the rivers, mountains, deserts, lakes and seas that constrain us all – as they always have.”

Geography was a seemingly easy course in University. But it's a complex topic, especially if you bring in politics, as this book does. It's imperfect, missing Australia, New Zealand and Indonesia, speaking little and incompletely about Europe and Africa. Also, get yourself better maps than what included. The idea is quite interesting. Imagination and curiosity can help you fill the void with additional research.

3.

What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture by Ben Horowitz

Thesis: Culture is how a company makes decisions.

Horowitz is the co-founder and general partner of Andreessen Horowitz, a Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm that invests in entrepreneurs building the next generation of leading technology companies. A few bits to give you a taste:

“Because your culture is how your company makes decisions when you’re not there. It’s the set of assumptions your employees use to resolve the problems they face every day. It’s how they behave when no one is looking. If you don’t methodically set your culture, then two-thirds of it will end up being accidental, and the rest will be a mistake.”

“Culture can feel abstract and secondary when you pit it against a concrete result that’s right in front of you. Culture is a strategic investment in the company doing things the right way when you are not looking.”

“That’s the nature of culture. It’s not a single decision—it’s a code that manifests itself as a vast set of actions taken over time. No one person makes or takes all these actions. Cultural design is a way to program the actions of an organization, but, like computer programs, every culture has bugs. And cultures are significantly more difficult to debug than programs.”

Strategy and context always play a role in determining why make some decisions rather than others. But we often just look at the official leaders, rather than looking at how tribal epochs and communities make unwritten rules work. That's because in our desire to bring order and provide formulas, we notice superficial elements.

 

DNA of culture

We connect on similarities—like language and body of knowledge. Yet benefit from differences—such as cultural context and specific experience.

With remarkable sense of humor, Ali is as light with his words as he was on his feet in the ring when he describes society in 1972.# There are several layers of culture in his stories and examples. Ali is a generous and articulate conversation partner. He talks about how he's entertaining for the Irish audience, because he's from somewhere else.

For David Bowie in 1999, “the gray space in the middle is what the 21st century is going to be about.” In 1979#, a suave Bowie talked about isolation, how he loved rather quickly from afar, his art, and putting himself in situations he detested to see what it did to his writing.

For example, as a Brit in Los Angeles, Bowie felt people were putting on a show in real life. As a producer, writer, and performer, Bowie experimented with separating his stage characters from his backstage self. He could tell the difference. After he left America, he sought another kind of friction in Berlin.

There was a sense of impending collapse in Berlin, that the wall was closing you in, he says. From German expressionism, Bowie then went to explore Kabuki theater as a way to bring pantomime in his work. He noted how in Japan they balance heritage and the modern world. More friction.

“Each of you are as different as your fingerprints. Why in the world should you march to any lock step? The lockstep is easier, but here is why you cannot march to it. Because nothing great or even good ever came of it,” says Anna Quindlen. Before she was a successful novelist, Quindlen wrote a New York Times column, Public and Private, that won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1992. 15 years after her first column.

These are just three examples I grabbed from the year 1999. Then I looked at what happened before that led there. What were the ideas, life situations, and encounters that led there? I could keep going. Lives are not linear, but there are themes. Early discoveries become tools for the next project.

In companies and communities, when you step into real culture, the environment is supporting you. There's accountability in reason for facts as for lies. No BS. There's acknowledgement of your work. On the other hand, you know a low energy environment right away: you have to fight for everything. Often this translates to looking out for number one.

Where are you drawing the lines?

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If you're still curious, here are ten books to gain perspective.

The 3-5 Books That Sit on My Office Shelf

This came as a question to me via Jose. It's very appropriate because companies pay me to write. That's also (but not only) why I read a lot. The other reasons include broadening cultural horizons, which often includes disagreeing with other authors. Rarely with the classics, though. Because the classics don't try to sell me a framework, mostly (more further down.)

3-5 books I reference often enough to keep on my office shelf. They've changed little over the last ten to twelve years. You'll see many references to the thinking, research and practice of the authors in my writing as their work impacts mine.

1.

Metaphors We Live By, authored by Berkeley linguist George Lakoff and the philosopher Mark Johnson at the University of Oregon was published in 1980. I have the edition with a new afterword (2003.) I've made plenty of notes in the margins and reasoned about some of the ideas in my notebooks.

EcoQua : Fabriano is my notebook of choice in many colors, in case you were wondering. You can get them with grid or blank paper.

2.

Finite and Infinite Games: : A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility by James P. Carse was published in 1986. Carse says there are at least two kinds of games—he calls one finite, the other infinite. The difference between the two is that we play a finite game for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing to play.

It's important because play or game symbolizes how we show up in life. Many books attempt to prove or disprove a thesis and exhaust you by asking you to expend energy in going through the reasons why / why not. Carse shares his vision of how to reinterpret the world and lets the reader free to draw personal insights.

This is a book about patterns.

3.

Words That Change Minds: Mastering the Language of Influence by Shelle Rose Charvet was published in 1995. Charvet describes the mental filters or meta programs we employ in communication in practical contexts. For example, what questions to use to elicit a person's position, how to identify what meta program positions are best suited to a given job, how to frame a job or product ad so that it speaks to the audience for whom it is intended, and so on.

I don't reference it as much in my writing as I do in my work. Most pages are lined with notes and I have index cards inserted here and there where I expand on certain chapters with my own examples.

4.

On Dialogue, which collects physicist David Bohm's thoughts on the inclination of modern society to “break things up which are not really separate” and thus fragment the world into “selves” that are at odds with each other.

We hardly experience good conversations anymore, and when we do, we leave unaware of the process that led us to feel satisfied we had a true meeting of the minds. That's because we view conversation as the mere exchange of information where everyone is sending and some people may be receiving.

Taken this way, conversation and communication in general becomes a utility but is not very useful in creating something new. I take this small book published in 2004 from original material by David Bohm to heart. Lee Nichol selected and edited it.

5.

The Clock of the Long Now is the Stewart Brand book I referenced in my article as one of the 3-5 books that sits on my office shelf. This is a curated collection of essays. In addition to The Order of Civilization, which is my most revisited essay, I enjoy reading about Kairos and Chronos, and The Long Now.

The title essay talks about a 1979 conversation with Brian Eno, which instigated Brand's thinking. The collection was published in 1999. Hence the themes and topics were buzzing around Brand's work for two decades. It's fitting as the idea is to expand the now to a period you can experience personally.

Rather that expiring things as they hatch, hatching things through work over the course of three generations.

Reference material

This is my evergreen setup to orient my work. Any time I get stuck, I use one or more of these references to expand my thinking and practice. I also make extensive use of dictionaries—synonyms and antonyms, etymology, translation (technical lingo as legal, medical / scientific especially), and slang (culture.)

As for the notebooks, I tend to jot down notes when I'm listening to podcasts and online lectures. My notes are both in English and Italian as I listen to and read most often in both languages. I read a ton of classics in both languages as well. I never tire of timeless ideas... what makes us human, and the stories of the people whose work endured through the centuries.

I'm curious. Which 3-5 books sit on your office shelf?

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Fast Gets all our Attention. Slow Has all the Power

If you're a futurist of strategist you're in the business of widening your perspective. This is useful for seeing better into potential futures, but it's also a powerful thinking tool for understanding what got you (or your client/company) here.

This is important and often overlooked: what got you here, won't work (as well) or be sustainable in the future. It's valid when you go from individual contributor to manager as it does to go from today's success to tomorrow's.

There's a reason why this is hard to imagine and even harder to do: Fast gets all our attention, slow has all the power. Stewart Brand explained how it works in The Clock of the Long Now, one of the 3-5 books that sits on my office shelf for constant reference. His/their work is a consistent source of value.

Life and work go hand in hand in the order of civilization:

Fast learns, slow remembers. Fast proposes, slow disposes. Fast is discontinuous, slow is continuous. Fast and small instructs slow and big by accrued innovation and by occasional revolution. Slow and big controls small and fast by constraint and constancy. 

Understanding how what works, works can make a big difference on the likelihood you'll be able to leave a legacy. If your work is important enough, it won't be completed during your lifetime. But you can create so much value through your work that it transfers to people centuries after you're gone.

 

How small tests innovate

I officially posted a test here in September 2006. You can still see “test” in the URL. I forgot to change it when I published. I doubt anyone has been reading for 14 years. You may have noticed an article at some point that got your attention, dipped in and moved on.

The initial fashion of blogging has since turned into new fashions of various social media channels. But because I'd been blogging every day for months and years before many of the social fashions came about, I never confused the infrastructure parts of what I was building—parts in a body of work—with the fashion of testing concepts and ideas.

3,375 articles later, I have a consistent track record, literally, of what I've been thinking about and experimenting on. Versions of what worked made it into my day job as commercial programs and campaigns. I iterated on what didn't work. Sometimes you're ready, and the market is not... and vice versa.

I kept the governance part transparent—see the link sharing / contributed articles policy and the comment policy and social guidelines on the sidebar, and the commitment to share useful resources dating back to the very first post.

Writing and publishing consistently helped me become more self-aware, connect ideas in retrospect, and work on my craft—writing and thinking. There's a tremendous amount of craftsmanship that goes into making a truly new product.

I've enriched many jobs and clients in the last 14 years. And this has remained a reliable lab for testing throughout. It's helped me think and do fast and slow. Continuity is critical to creating good mindset and habits, which form and inform culture.

 

Operating at different time scales

Mathematician and physicist Freeman Dyson made an observation about human society that can help you grasp what working at different time scales involves:#

The destiny of our species is shaped by the imperatives of survival on six distinct time scales.  To survive means to compete successfully on all six time scales.  But the unit of survival is different at each of the six time scales.  On a time scale of years, the unit is the individual.  On a time scale of decades, the unit is the family.  On a time scale of centuries, the unit is the tribe or nation.  On a time scale of millennia, the unit is the culture.  On a time scale of tens of millennia, the unit is the species.  On a time scale of eons, the unit is the whole web of life on our planet.  Every human being is the product of adaptation to the demands of all six time scales.  That is why conflicting loyalties are deep in our nature.  In order to survive, we have needed to be loyal to ourselves, to our families, to our tribes, to our cultures, to our species, to our planet.  If our psychological impulses are complicated, it is because they were shaped by complicated and conflicting demands.

He reduces the problem of complexity to its essence. Imagine each time horizon and stakeholders represented by a crystal ball, if you like. You have six of them to keep going at all times. Drop one, and it breaks. “Don't drop the ball” takes a whole new meaning.

That's why it's so hard to operate at different time scales. Difficult, but not impossible. Making reasonable trade-offs is a skill you acquire by doing the work. Operationally, you need to think in terms of pace levels and working structure size.

In a healthy society, says Brand, each level can operate at its own pace. I'd say this is also true in a healthy company culture. Ideally, each level is sustained safely by the one below it, which moves at a slower pace. In turn, each lower level can innovate thanks to the level above it.

Conversation is a great tool to test and iterate ideas because it helps you affect change. Dissent is a useful tool in a legal context. Change needs to happen at different paces for fashion, commerce, infrastructure, governance, and culture to avoid dysfunction.

Another way of saying this is, it's critical to understand how change works, so you can put more energy in the things that have more power.

 

A time for every purpose

Not confusing the layers means working tirelessly in the craft of creating a commercial product or service that helps people do what they want to do well. While also working timelessly at the structure that creates the kind of culture that delivers a superior product or service that does the job.

In marketing speak, we say jobs to be done (JTBD). JTBD is why we “hire” a product or service. The focus is the thing we want to do, rather than the feature of the product or service that does it.

If you need a tablet or a computer, you could buy one based on price. But Steve Jobs understood that it wasn't just about monetary cost. A computer that was easier and more pleasurable to use was worth more to people. Because it didn't get in the way and frustrated you a lot less. Apple led with design and experience. The rest of the industry eventually followed, in their own ways.

If you need a pair of glasses to read, you could start by buying the cheap kind. But when you're wearing them on your face all day long, you're thinking more in terms of identity and comfort. Designer glasses are fashionable, so you could go that route. Or, you could go get a run of the mill design and still spend a lot to add prescription lenses. Warby Parker solved that problem by brokering the difference between cost and style.

This last example is also a good illustration of how not to be at cross-purposes with layers. When you build a company, you're working at the structure, governance, and culture layers at the same time as you're working on commercial and fashion layers. 

Company's purpose and vision transfer value at the structural and culture layers. Mission and values are useful at helping employees decide how to behave as they do the work. In that sense, they transfer value onto customer experience, but indirectly. As Warby Parker learned:#

After style and fit come value and customer experience. Customers want the highest-quality product for their price point, and at Warby Parker, this means selling $95 glasses made with premium materials that are traditionally sold for hundreds of dollars, all while providing amazing customer experiences.

Third comes our Buy a Pair, Give a Pair program. While customers certainly love the fact that we give back, at the end of the day, it's not a critical factor in deciding whether to buy a pair of glasses.

Customers care about certain things. As a strategist, you keep this in mind when you help people make new choices. But as a leader, you need to keep in mind different time horizons. Warby Parker CEO, Neil Blumenthal says:

But, frankly, the social mission is what drives us. It's what gets us up in the morning. It's what prevents us from hitting the snooze button and spending another 15 minutes sleeping. And for our 1,800 current employees and for people that we're recruiting, we lead with social mission. That's the No. 1 reason people want to come work for Warby Parker.

Hence it's part of the mechanism for the transfer of value of intellectual, social, human, and manufacturing capitals into the product. You're buying a pair of glasses produced by a culture that believes in having and fulfilling a greater social mission.

 

Working on what has power

Writing here is my social mission. It's what gets me up in the morning and builds my intellectual, social, and human capitals. But it's not as important to clients and companies that hire my skills for their jobs to be done.

I've learned to work simultaneously at different pace layers, because they're all important. While fast—as in fashion, likes, follows, campaigns—gets all the attention, slow—as in craftsmanship, competence, sustainability, legacy—has all the power.

Taking Stewart Brand's perspective leads to designing solutions that maximize the resilience of the systems you design. That is to be as good for as many futures as possible, rather than optimizing them for a single future, which seems likely in the short run but is in effect incredibly unlikely to materialize over a period longer than a couple of years.

Here's an example from Philip and Turntoo: light as a service.# 

Architect Thomas Rau worked with Philips to purchase light as a service. The end result was a bespoke 'pay-per-lux' intelligent lighting system to fit the requirements of the space, at a manageable price. Philips retain control over the items they produce, enabling better maintenance, reconditioning and recovery.

It's a way of being in a space that has more power than just putting lamps and shades around an office, doesn't it? Paying for performance draws out how everyone is responsible for the consequences of what they produce.#

I was curious, so I took a glance at Turntoo and I found an example of vision as operating system for the work:

Looking at earth from a distance, it becomes clear that man is a temporary guest in a closed system: earth. In this system, everything is equally important to ensure a stable balance with a future. Within earth’s boundaries our only possible growth is a mental one.

The highest aim is to facilitate the continuity of life. In this respect, economy is the organized alliance between man and nature. We facilitate this relationship with a new system architecture. This results in, among others, innovative concepts, products, and services. Our basic principle remains to facilitate our temporary presence.

It explains well how the firm operates at different pace layers. Architects are trained to become system thinkers. The Turntoo website is a good example of system work: product as a service, service as a product, ideas as material, material as ideas.

Rather than a play on words, it's a smart use of words to orient you along dimensions of their work.

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How Remote Work Will Impact Your Company's Strategy

[Calculated risk. Illustration by Andrea Ucini for Certo magazine]

Before digital became a pervasive part of our lives, companies looked to the strategy introduced by Michael Porter to sustain long-term competitive profitability. Porter's 1979 five forces theory of competitive advantage# shaped a generation of leaders.

Digital technology upset those assumptions. Speed of change opened the door to agility practices. It also created the “adapt or die” imperative. Responding to adaptive challenges is still important, but not in the tech industry ways.

Ironically, the disembodiment of work and divorce from physical locations of recent months, revealed a new opportunity in the real world. There's a physical revolution going on, and it will change how people live, learn, and work.

Countries, regions, and cities will vie for a slice of economic prosperity brought in the form of taxes. That's not from corporations, but from people based where they choose to live.

This revolution is called working from home (WFH),# the opportunity is work from anywhere.# A better way to think about remote work is smart working.

 

Where and how to play

In Playing to Win, A. G. Lafley explains the importance of deciding where and how to play in order to win in business. An autobiographical side note is useful to understand the difference between deciding among options and making choices with longer-term impact.

“In my now forty-plus years in business, I have found that most leaders do not like to make choices. They'd rather keep their options open. Choices force their hands, pin them down, and generate an uncomfortable degree of personal risk. I also found that few leaders can truly define winning. They generally speak of short-term financial measures or a simple share of a narrowly defined market.

In effect, by thinking about options instead of choices and failing to define winning robustly, these leaders choose to play but not to win. They wind up settling for average industry results at best.”

The company's former Chairman of the Board, President and CEO details how Procter & Gamble picked markets and developed products based on competence, strength and a robust investment in understanding people's needs and wants. These are still the prerequisites for winning.

At the heart of the network P&G built, there’s consumer understanding, brand building, innovation, go-to-market capabilities, and scale. But you don't need to be P&G, or to have the same research and development budget to be strategic. 

Understanding people, innovating, and building brands and capabilities make a lot of sense when you're a global company playing in the consumer space. They also make sense when you're a small company trying to prosper in a global market.

What's important about where to play and how to win is remarkably similar from company to company:

• Your industry—which segments are attractive? This is where your company can start differentiating. The temptation is to try to be all things to all people. That's a mistake.
  
• Customers—what do they value? Many companies skimp on research in this area. Other mistake.
  
• Relative position—how does your company fare in the jobs-to-be-done competitive set? What are your capabilities and cost structure? Do you factor in time and energy as an opportunity cost? What's not there that could be important?
  
• Competition—what will competitors do once you've chosen a course of action?
  

Strategy is about finding a smart playing field and the choices you make to drive what you'll do to win in that field. How depends on each context. But moving faster will not save the day if you lack preparation. You'll need to think both deeply and broadly about those choices.

A large slice of the context has potentially changed for good—where employees live.

 

A changing playing field

In March 2018, the World Bank issued a call to action urging several large regions to prepare for internal climate migration.# By 2050, Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Latin America could see more than 140 million people move within their countries’ borders, it found.

Projecting out from the current 64 million forced migrants in the world fleeing wars, hunger, persecution, the UN forecast between 25 million and 1 billion environmental migrants by 2050.# These are serious displacement numbers.

A few cities in the U.S. are preparing for climatic and demographic changes. Ann Harbor, Michigan is including these variables into its Capital Improvements Plan (CIP), planning upgrades to its water treatment plant and other critical infrastructure.# Access to water and agricultural land, and moderate weather are solid pre-requisites.#

South Working is a movement in Italy that aims to reduce the economic, social and territorial gap between North and South. By facilitating a more equitable redistribution of the workforce, remote work can help the country rebalance.# But its not just about working from anywhere, it's about working smart. 

Politecnico in Milan defines smart working, “A new managerial philosophy based on giving people back flexibility and autonomy in the choice of spaces, times and tools to be used in the face of greater responsibility for results.” Greater autonomy and the ability to demonstrate results through individual work are important components.# 

Before the pandemic, many companies were dragging their feet on digital transformation. Backed into a corner by safety and health concerns, most confronted their limiting thinking. Because by-and-large it worked pretty smoothly for most knowledge workers.

This was most evident in companies and regions of the world most adamant about in-person, in-office. A recent study by Forum PA in Italy, found that 93 percent of public workers would prefer to continue with smart working.# People found they could get more done with less hassle.

Once people experience what is possible, it becomes critical to rethink what is desirable. Technology may not have faded into the background just yet, but it has given us this experience of being able to keep working. It happened globally and swiftly.

Italy's timid steps became a giant leap forward worth capitalizing on. Many people discovered they preferred to live closer to their families and friends who they'd left in search of work up North. People left New York City, San Francisco, and other large cities in the U.S. Whether temporarily or for good depends on context.

 

Working out who and what

Take another look at the strategic importance of where and how to play of A.G. Lafley. Add to it the idea that humanity has just experienced en masse how the nature of our work has changed.

Yes, we still need physical presence to produce and make things, to service needs. We still need safety for many industries that are limping along while trying to reinvent themselves. But increasingly, we've discovered that we can do many important things from somewhere else. Our policies and agreements have not kept up with what is possible.

The change had already happened. It was many years in the making, now it's here. Some city mayors want their commuters back—in Milan# as in New York City, London, and other large metropolitan areas—an entire economy was built on the assumptions that hundreds and thousands of people would move, or shift daily.

What happens when companies shrink or eliminate central offices? When people don't go out to eat or for coffee, stay in hotels, buy expensive air fares for business, etc. It's really hard to predict whether those activities will come back in full force.

But what we could see is a call for greater standardization of the new ways of working. Would we lean into or resist the same-ification of experience? Robin Hanson says,

Places that resist integration and standardization will suffer, and that is likely to especially include the richest and poorest places. But for the rest, market integration will ensure more equal wages and prices for products and services.

As usual, this will help those whom the prior fragmentation hurt, and hurt those whom the prior fragmentation helped. And everyone will gain from new economies of scale and scope.

The boom in personal habits and skills better suited to this world—introversion, self-discipline and motivation, writing, communicating—suit people who've been preparing for this world for 10-15 years. It helps if you've learned to operate in this new paradigm from your early education.

I'm seeing more remote job ads. But what I'm not seeing, yet, is a shift in recruiting mindset. Companies are by and large still seeking to hire the same mixes of old-style work habits and skills that were valuable in prior contexts of offices, high rises, work suits, parking garages, freeways, and cars.

 

Collaboration is a new competitive advantage

Greg Satell has been calling out how value has moved to the center of networks. Strategic advantage is already going to those who can aggregate and coordinate specialized skills. 

Lorenzo Sistino says when starting something new it's essential to find and choose the right collaborators.# Sistino is ex top manager at FCA and CEO of MiaCar, an online marketplace to buy local new or used cars ready for delivery, with clear and transparent pricing.

Luca d’Alessandro concurs that you need to find complementary skills and converge on philosophy of work. D'Alessandro, PhD PoliMi and MIT, is CEO of Phononic Vibes,# a company founded on the research and philosophy of two cultures and geographies. Its new patented technology uses a circular economy approach to provide greater insulation from vibration and noise control. 

Eliana Leo says collaborators are fundamental. Competence and past experience are important. Trying out a collaboration through a project is the best way to figure out compatibility. Leo is associate professor of pharmaceutical technology at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia# and co-founder of PerFormS, an innovative startup focused on cosmetic and inflammation nanotechnology.

A former GM and manager at a large multinational auto company, a product startup founder and a professor and researcher are examples of the mix of skills and experience companies like P&G and IBM have embraced for more than a decade.

Smart working is a paradigm shift. It requires a revision of the leadership model and the organization, strengthening collaboration and encouraging a new view of working space. Office becomes any place that favors creativity and encourages relationships.

Many multi-generational family businesses in Italy have long created research labs that rival the sophistication of those of multinationals. People can be anywhere, a central hub for synthesizing discovery and innovation is useful.

 

Strategic impact of smart working

You should not have to be a consultant to have less rigid work hours. Smart companies are already making it easier to do non-work tasks during usual work times. Integrating life back into work promotes endurance and staves off burnout.

Several executives and specialists who've been working this way say it's about quality of life. Extend this concept to working from anywhere, and you can see how we could rebuild communities around the world.

I'm not so sure the firms in this new world are larger, or that things will work quite as Robin Hanson says.# I'm inclined to think more in terms of ecosystems of value. More network than chain. More combination of in-person and remote than either one at the exclusion of the other. Smaller, networked teams collaborating across geographies.

Imagination and creativity don't have scheduled hours. They happen mostly in the pauses. In the same way that opportunity resides in the gap between what you know and what you don't, distributed work forces could enrich the idea pool.

Once you zero in on the value to move the strategic needle, you should identify the bottleneck or what keeps you from executing well. When everyone shared a physical office space, having to coordinate across corporate silos or getting multiple layers of approvals were a big problem that cost companies dearly. It happened years before anyone worked from home.

Delays between contract signing and project start or too many projects kicking off at the same time were endemic issues of agency life. This before life moved elsewhere. You can use simple rules to avert or minimize those issues.

The industries that are limping along in this new paradigm are ripe for reinvention. There are likely new product and service ideas most business leaders thought wouldn't work that are doable with smart working. Initially, it may not seem to matter. By the time you notice the shift, it will be too late to catch up.

Like data analysis, disruption is all about hindsight. Agility and speed were the gods in that environment. Preparing to challenge conventional wisdom is another game altogether. In a world of incremental improvements to eke a millisecond advantage, sustained advantage will be due to strategic impact.

And you don't get that from doing more of what used to work. Broadening and deepening connections is a smart bet, as is acquiring new skills, and noticing meaningful opportunities. 

 

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Companies pay me to write. I've been sharing ideas and perspectives about business and culture in my weekly email to more than 1,000 new subscribers and growing. I organize issues by theme to minimize overwhelm. Subscribe here, if you're curious about reframing and rethinking business and ideas.

Innovating: Beyond the Sex Appeal

Innovation, like leadership, is a word that has tremendous sex appeal. But the real sexy part is what happens when it happens. For that, you still need to do the work. Use with care.

The work includes figuring out that innovating is often about behavior change. Whether you're the company doing it or wanting to innovate, the consultants, the sponsor or partner in innovation, your behavior is also up for change.

It's important to remember that innovation demands trade-offs. For example, satellite radio offers a broader selection, but you lose free music; online grocery shopping gets you home delivery, but you lose the ability to pick the freshest foods personally.

It's also about starting with mindset. Innovating is not about fixing a problem, it's about seeking opportunity in the gap between what you know and what you don't. Because it moves us from a scarcity mindset to one of abundance, innovation leads to breakthroughs towards where we want to go even as we may not know how to get here.

To be meaningful, the gains need to be greater than the losses. Based on what motivates us, there are typically 4 main forces that drive innovation: curiosity, fear, wealth, and significance. But even when you have all of that, companies still confuse the structure of innovation with that of strategy.

I've selected three books that provide different perspectives on what it takes to innovate to get you started thinking in the right direction. Below, I'm also sharing a useful framework on seeing patterns and keeping opportunities open.

 

Looshots, Maps and Mechanisms

We're not short metaphors in innovation. That's because often people invent things for which there are no real words, yet. Bringing something new to the world has its risks and the rewards are not certain. Take for example the telephone.

Antonio Meucci invented it. He began to work on a device to communicate through distance when he was 26, in 1834. He was working as chief engineer in Florence Pergola Theater. He built a contraption to provide direction from the stage. He perfected his idea first in Cuba and then in New York, where he started looking for financing. 

Due to poor English he was having difficulty finding a sponsor. Therefore he applied for a loan with Western Union. Meucci sent all his technical notes and a prototype with the application. Western Union rejected the loan, but kept all the materials. The excuse was that they had misplaced them.

Here's my first sigh on his behalf. Two years later, the poor man didn't even have the 10 dollars he needed to renew a 'caveat' patent application. In waltzes Alexander Graham Bell, Western Union consultant with a lab right next to where Meucci's document were in deposit.

Bell might have been no inventor, but he was an opportunist. He deposited the telephone patent, became a celebrity, and sealed a fabulous agreement with Western Union. Make no mistake, it was not his patent.

In 1887, the U.S. Supreme Court recognized the real inventor and found a judgement for fraud against Bell, but Meucci’s death two years later stopped the case. The Florentine invented one of the most amazing technologies of modern times and died a poor (and almost forgotten) man. His economic success went to another man.

The inventor of the telephone has not been officially designated for more than 100 years. On June 11, 2002, with resolution 269, the United States Congress officially recognized Antonio Meucci’s work in inventing the telephone.

If you look for these cases, you'll find them everywhere. There's a deeper reflection on ethics and behavior in this story. What world do you want to live in? To find the Meucci in your industry or company, start with who. Look for these 6 characteristics of deep innovation smarts.

Use good reference material to think about innovation—its nature, orientation, and process. I selected 3 books for your reading list to get you started. Don't forget to stay until the end, where we talk about a framework.

 

3 books on innovation

These references are quite different from each other on purpose. Thinking differently is key. Each explores a different part of the innovation equation. I know from many conversations that what most people would love to have something simple-and-easy to do.

Give me the formula, they say. Add pixie dust and water, whichever is on hand. But, like everything worth pursuing in the field of leadership, innovation happens at the end of work. It takes work to figure out what you're not seeing or doing. But you're worth it.

1.

Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries by Safi Bahcall

The key is nurturing. Bahcall proposes a new way of thinking about the mysteries of group behavior. What's a loonshot? “A neglected project, widely dismissed, its champion written off as unhinged.”

Book's thesis: The most significant and influential breakthroughs are often the results of loonshots, where the ultimate outcome’ pioneers are initially dismissed, written off and laughed away as being loony.

Or die in poverty, like Meucci.

Bahcall is a physicist and entrepreneur. His aim with the book is to show why teams, companies, or any group with a mission will suddenly change from embracing new ideas to rejecting them, just as flowing water will suddenly change into brittle ice.

Loonshots have their genesis in company structure and not culture, drawing a parallel from the science of phase transitions. In the author's language, to generate loonshots, you want fluidity: smaller teams with mostly creative folks (“artists”).

While to generate franchises, or even just to bring the loonshots to market, you want solidity: bigger teams staffed with “soldiers” who have well-defined roles. Perhaps this is the inventor and opportunist distinction.

Loonshot Rules:

1. Separate the phases: Separate your artists and soldiers.
2. Dynamic equilibrium: Love your artists and soldiers equally.
3. Critical mass: Have a loonshot group large enough to ignite.

In the latter part of the book, Bahcall presents a plausible quantitative model for the various forces that incline team members towards loonshot vs. franchise behavior, and how to tweak those variables to get the kind of company you want.

Two thoughts worth pondering:

“The twisted paths leading to great discoveries are the rule rather than the exception. And so are their revisionist histories: victors don't just write history; they rewrite history.”

“As teams and companies grow larger, the stakes in outcome decrease while the perks of rank increase. When the two cross, the system snaps. Incentives begin encouraging behavior no one wants. Those same groups—with the same people—begin rejecting loonshots.”

Update: When I mentioned this article on LinkedIn, Safi Bahcall pointed me to a Twitter thread he created to synthesize the key ideas of the book.

2.

Mapping Innovation: a Playbook for Navigating a Disruptive Age by Greg Satell

Navigating is the operative word. The biggest problem with innovation is that it's a very broad term. Dig deeper into applications―what works for startups doesn't work for large organizations, building a new app is not the same as working on discovering something new in the lab.

I asked Greg Satell about the difference. His experience in different cultures, which is illuminating. As you saw in my example above, Italians have plenty of smart, innovative people but so little funding and structure around it.

This is a strength in Satell's book. His “Innovation Matrix” and his “Horizons of innovation” frameworks are powerful, yet simple tools to understand the continuum of innovation, activities, time horizons and resource allocation.

As he says:

“The purpose of this book is threefold. First, it will help you get a better understanding of innovation by dispelling destructive innovation myths. Innovations don’t happen just because someone comes up with one big idea. It takes many ideas to solve an important problem, and that requires a collective effort.

Second, this book will give you valuable tools to help you frame the problems that are important to you. As you will see, it is only by framing problems effectively that you can find the approach most likely to solve them. Finally, it will help explain how innovation in the digital age is different from what it was in previous generations. Simply put, technology has given us powerful new tools, and we need to learn how to use them effectively.”

3.

How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom by Matt Ridley

Flourishing is a key concept. Ridley makes a stronger case for the conditions that prevent it.

His 3 main ideas:

1. Important innovations tend to arise from many people improving incrementally upon the work of others. The singular inventor's “Eureka!” moment is largely a myth. This point resonates with Greg Satell's, “You don't need the best people, you need the best teams.”
2. Recent regulatory hurdles have hindered innovation, particularly in Europe.
3. The net impact of intellectual property laws has been to hinder innovation as well.

Ridley seems to focus on points 2 and 3:

“Innovations come in many forms, but one thing they all have in common, and which they share with biological innovations created by evolution, is that they are enhanced forms of improbability.”

“The twentieth century saw only one innovative source of energy on any scale: nuclear power. (Wind and solar, though much improved and with a promising future, still supply less than 2 per cent of global energy.)  In terms of its energy density, nuclear is without equal: an object the size of a suitcase, suitably plumbed in, can power a town or an aircraft carrier almost indefinitely.

The development of civil nuclear power was a triumph of applied science, the trail leading from the discovery of nuclear fission and the chain reaction through the Manhattan Project's conversion of a theory into a bomb, to the gradual engineering of a controlled nuclear reaction and its application to boiling water.”

Update: Here's an interview with Matt Ridley by Naval.

Seeing patterns and keeping opportunities open

I promised a framework to get oriented. This is courtesy of Steven Johnson. In Where Good Ideas Come From, he provides a framework to look at the general laws of innovation.

For all the talk about innovation, though, we still do little of it. There are many reasons why. Ridely put it best, “Perhaps the most puzzling aspect of innovation is how unpopular it is, for all the lip service we pay to it.”

Overused has many interesting synonyms, including: drained, dull, exhausted, mildewed, overworked, stale, tired, worn and worn-out, stereotyped. They depend on context, but all have something in common—there's no energy there.

Innovation thrives on energy. Make it positive, and you're on your way to creating value, and impact.

[image of mental models and innovation]

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How to Argue and Win Every Time

Do you have something to say? Could you benefit from improving how you argue your case? Are you looking for something concrete to help you? Given that my recent article on how to argue well went viral, it's safe to assume this is a hot topic.

You may think this is a skill only lawyers need. But you'd be surprised at how far you can go when you can weave a strong argument. For example, you'll ace your pitch, and you'll find the real insight (or close to it) faster when you learn to argue well.

I'm working with clients on writing powerful arguments for articles and pitches right now, and I developed some tools to help them. Could the executive of a large financial company use this advice? Could the veteran executive recruiter do better on behalf of companies and senior talent?

These two examples have one issue in common: how to build the narrative structure in a way that keeps interest high, and gives readers (and listeners) the information they need to make up their mind and pick their idea or product — in other words pick them.

It's a different style than journalism, and not only for the obvious reasons. Let's take a look at the ways in which they diverge and examine the elements of a powerful argument.

How news stories inform

Once you've picked a topic, there's a proven structure journalists use: they call it the inverted pyramid. This means you're attempting to answer all the basic questions about a particular event by asking: who, what, when, where and why (the 5 Ws) and often also how in the opening of your article.

News stories also consider their readers' interest. Thus they include information about proximity, oddity, or consequence. They take into account human interest, prominence, and timeliness. I could write an entire article about objectivity and point of view. But let's keep it simple here.

Your headline is critical. You want it to draw attention to your topic, but also be accurate in describing what you'll say. It's a good idea to use active voice as much as possible and clear, short and to the point sentences. Use your conclusion to summarize the key point(s).

Look at Pulitzer Prize winners for examples. Take the 2008 story by Gene Weingarten of The Washington Post where he chronicled a world-class violinist who, as an experiment, played beautiful music in a subway station filled with distracted and harried commuters.

“Can one of the nation's great musicians cut through the fog of a D.C. rush hour? Let's find out.” That was the headline. You're probably familiar with the topic as it was popular in behavioral science circles.

Here's the set up:

He emerged from the metro at the L'Enfant Plaza station and positioned himself against a wall beside a trash basket. By most measures, he was nondescript: a youngish white man in jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt and a Washington Nationals baseball cap. From a small case, he removed a violin. Placing the open case at his feet, he shrewdly threw in a few dollars and pocket change as seed money, swiveled it to face pedestrian traffic, and began to play.

Read the article here. Can you see the key elements?

Weingarten won a $10,000 prize# for a distinguished example of feature writing “giving prime consideration to quality of writing, originality and concision, in print or in print and online.”

Arguing takes you a little further.

How arguing impacts decisions

You don't need to be a lawyer to argue well, but it helps to learn from one. Gerald Spence is a semi-retired American trial lawyer and author of How to Argue and Win Every Time. It's a book filled with great stories and examples from the person who won some of the most famous cases, like the Karen Silkwood case.

Having never lost a criminal case in his 40+ year career, and achieved a remarkable record of multi-million dollar verdicts in civil cases, Spence came up with some elements that make up the power argument (in italics).

Let's build on them a little here:

1. Prepare. Prepare until you've become the argument — you do that by writing things down and thinking about your argument like a screenplay. You're the good guys, the misunderstood side, the underdog. But, if you're not completely clean, find a way to come clean that still makes you win. (more about this below)
2. Open the other to receiving your argument — literally empower them to receive or reject your argument by telling them the truth, being who you are.
   
3. Give the argument in the form of story — your boss, your family, your colleagues are all primed to listen to stories. It's part of being human.
   
4. Tell the truth — use ordinary words, talk about how you feel, yes even about fear, if that's what you're feeling. Truth is power. It's also liberating, no need to keep track of lies, and it enhances your reputation.
   
5. Tell the other person what you want — if you're arguing for money, ask for it. The idea is not to leave the other party guessing, because they may be wrong. This is also true of pitches. It hurts your credibility if you're casual about it. There's incredible power of justice embedded in each person. Nobody can live with injustice for long or at all.
   
6. Avoid sarcasm, scorn, and ridicule. Use humor cautiously — it may feel good to play the cynic or mock things that others hold dear, but it leads down a blind alley. You being petty doesn't help anyone. Respect is the best course. It's also reciprocal. My mentor once asked me if I liked someone I was interviewing. Yes, very much, I said. That's an indication they liked you as well, he said. As for humor, use sparingly and only if you're certain it will reveal the truth and you can pull it off. It's tricky not to fail here.
   
7. Logic is power — you can ride it all the way if it's on your side. But if it leads to unjust results, it has no power. Opt instead for a creativity in your approach, often served by logic. (more on this below)
   
8. Action and winning are brothers — or sisters. Take control, don't let the other get you into defensive mode. Attack, if you must. But take the initiative. Now, if you're arguing in a relationship with people you care about, do it with love. We're not going to talk about this part here. But it's worth exploring for the sake of stronger families and communities.
   
9. Admit at the outset the weak points in your argument — there's no point hiding them, and if you bring them up first, you'll have a stronger position. This supports a few of the previous points. Honesty will also take part of the argument away from your opponent.
   
10. Understand your power. Give yourself permission — only to win — but not with arrogance and disrespect. Find the vision within yourself, open up and let the magic out.

All these points are related. Spence believes the argument starts with the person. It's more than mere technique. It's about discovering who you are and bringing that into the world.

Your ability to argue well impacts the decisions of others. But it also impacts what happens to you. While you consume a news story, even a Pulitzer Prize caliber story, cannot get you what you want. A good argument will.

To make a power argument, consider the casting carefully

Say that you're preparing an argument to get a project reinstated. You cannot cast your boss in the role of the villain. That's because the ultimate decision-maker(s) will throw their protective cloak around the executive and reject your appeal.

Maybe you don't have a stellar track record, because the project wasn't quite going that well. Plus you had strong words about its cancellation. So it's hard for you to be the good person now. Your manager and the decision-maker(s) have already claimed the role.

The thing is you had to fold that project because of shifting priorities before it could bear fruit. You had no choice. But the lack of results left your boss with no choice as well. Maybe you also had harsh words in front of everyone. Now your boss' position of power in the company is at stake.

Who's the villain then? Circumstance, is it not? Circumstance would dictate the same result in every case a competent manager in a position of authority came in conflict with an enthusiastic, hard-working and strong-headed employee. Both manager and employee are victims of circumstance.

Since you cannot claim the high ground because it's already taken by your boss and the decision-maker(s), you cast yourself and your boss on the same side. You both want what's best for the company. A power argument thus may start from a position of power, one that generates acceptance (or approval).

To make a power argument you must be right, or justice must be on your side, or you must be the underdog seeking redemption. You must evoke respect and understanding, if not admiration. Sympathy is the weakest power position. You don't want sympathy, you want to get going with the project.

How you start to open minds, and close to get the deal

Your opening to decision-maker(s) might go like this:

When you go home tonight, no one will tell you have have done the right thing. No one will give you public recognition for having saved a project that could lead to opportunity in a new market. No one will reward you for your caring and your foresight. But I thank you now. You're wise decision-maker(s) and this company has intelligent, experienced and caring executives. My boss is among the best.

You understand the situation they're in, and respect them. Maybe you also sound a bit like you're trying to ingratiate yourself. But it's true, you are. Yet, careful that what you say in your own words is sincere. Own the argument in its entirety. Get to what you want quickly:

I'm speaking with you to ask you to give me another chance. I'm hopeful that when we're done talking, the project will be under consideration again.

Then outline what went wrong, why pulling the plug too quickly was a mistake. Keep it to circumstance being the villain and both you and your boss being on the same side: results. You know the facts, review them again with the decision-maker(s). Acknowledge that your boss was in the right to make the call and that the project was taking longer than you had anticipated.

Circumstance did intervene with company priorities shifting. You were wrong to speak out of turn when you did. Put anyone else in both roles — yours and your manager's — and you'd likely have had a version of the same predicament happen. No enthusiastic, hard-working employee would back down from proving they could open a new market. No manager could back down from reassessing priorities.

Close strong. Restate what you want: an opportunity to finish the project and prove the viability of your hypothesis for a new market. You'd like to tell your boss how sorry you are for losing your temper, and ask for advice and counsel on how to proceed to make the project a success. Or something to this effect.

The argument I've outlined is spoken. But remember that before you even deliver it, you've worked on a screenplay outlining the characters and the argument. Writing it out helps you make clarity on what you're thinking. Does it hold water? Would you accept if you were the other party?

Winning pitches are the best arguments in the marketing world. The best have no jargon, no frills, just layer upon layer of rationale and emotional story delivered with wit, humility and effortless charm. Advertising legend David Abbott is a good example.

But you may not be soft spoken like Abbott; the rationale and emotion may warrant a more energetic approach, or a gentler one, or one filled with love and restraint. I have several examples of winning pitches here.

As you review them, including the selection from movies, notice what all the winning arguments have in common: laser focus on the issue, no side conversations or back stories if they don't support the main argument, and a strong dose of caring for the outcome to benefit all involved.

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I've been sharing ideas and perspectives about business and culture in my weekly email to nearly 1,000 new subscribers and growing. I organize issues by theme to minimize overwhelm. Subscribe here, if you're curious about reframing and rethinking business and ideas.