From Efficiency To Resilience: Building Future-Ready Organizations | Futurist Gerd Leonhard

Hello, this is Gert Leonhard, and welcome to my podcast. You know, I've been thinking a lot lately about what's happening with efficiency. It's funny, you know, for a long time, as I was speaking to clients about the future and about the present, I always got this feedback about people wanting to have more optimization, more efficiency, you know, lower price points, better margin, and be better organized, and digital transformation to get to the point quicker, and so on and so on. But now, since the COVID crisis, the efficiency story is dead. The only story that matters today is the story of resilience, of agility, of empowerment, of collaboration. And efficiency is something that has kind of gone by the wayside. Of course it's important to be efficient, but now it's more like, can we switch? Can we pivot? Can we turn around on a dime? Can we get away from this obsession with better profit, better margins, and all that stuff that was there before? And now the story is much larger, also about purpose, because when you think about efficiency, it has little to do with purpose. It's like perfecting an ongoing story. It's making things work better than before, it's optimizing supply chain or all of those practical things. And those were and are of course, still very important. But now people are asking the question, are we doing the right thing? Should we have a different product? Should we try something else completely? And as you ponder that question, something happens. And a week later, another thing is in demand. And we can safely say that the next three months, starting right now, next three years, of course, are the period of utter volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. Vuca. We're going to live in a permanent vuca. I mean, even when the crisis is winding down, when there is a vaccine, this is a deep cut in our confidence, in our business models. And the narrative has changed. And the new narrative is not going to be about being quicker or faster or digital transformation. It's about human transformation, societal transformation. So, as a headline, I think from the next couple of months, let's expect this really quite simply is going away from this idea of efficiency, optimization, productivity, and keeping that in the back pocket, so to speak, but moving towards being able to change. And resilience means also to have adversary things coming towards you, and you can find a way forward and navigate around it. And much of that has to do with not being a believer in just facts and data. But to look beyond that, it's interesting when you watch Jeff Bezos speak about data, he always said that if you come with a business idea, to him. And you have to support it by data and focus groups and facts and logic and how important that was or is to him. He always speaks about that. But then the other day, six months ago, I think it was a Business Insider event, when he basically said, all the important decisions I make with guts and intuition and based on my heart, not on data. And he says both. And I think it's so true. When we look at resilience and agility and being able to pivot and to reinvent and to flip on the dime, those are personality issues, traits. They're things that we do because we can. They're not downloaded and they're certainly not learned at business school. Can we learn efficiency, optimization and practical things like that? Yeah, we can learn that from others. We can look at case studies. But can we learn mental agility? Can we learn how to be able to instantly look at something and pull something out and come up with a different response? And we have to practice that. This is just like saying, well, emotional intelligence, same story. I mean, we can't download that from the App Store. We certainly can't just copy Jacinda Ardern's emotional intelligence, alleged emotional intelligence that I think she has. We can't just say, okay, we'll do the same thing. We can't. We have to find our own way into agility. We have to find our own way into resilience, and we have to practice it and we have to allow it. Because this is the other thing. Resilience and agility are the opposite of efficiency because they're by nature inefficient. I mean, if I'm looking to just execute well and just move on and take this execution and just make it perfect, that's one thing. That's like a spreadsheet. It's logical. And this is also, of course, what differentiates us from machines. We are not binary. We don't have to say, yes, no, yes, no. If this, then that it's not like this for us. We're multinary. Machines are following the course of logic. And I think it will be for quite some time until we have maybe more Quantum computing, maybe 2050, the singularity where machines cannot be binary. But this is of course, what keeps back machines from being more, I wouldn't say human, but being really intelligent. Human intelligence is like, okay, it doesn't have to be yes or no. It can be yes, it depends, or yesterday, no, tomorrow. Or it can be 0.73 or 1.47. It doesn't have to be zeros. And ones. It's not binary. And we are certainly capable of ignoring facts because we've already made up our mind and we shape the future like this. You know, we have foresight, intuition, and this is what makes us perfectly capable to drop efficiency as the primary concern and to think about reinvention, resilience, and agility to have an agile mindset. And on that note, I think it's really important that we think of agility as what I call the future mindset. That we always have one thought in the future, like, what if? Or I've seen something that kind of sounds like it could very plausibly arrive. And. And I'm keeping this in the back of my mind. F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, the sign of intelligence is to keep two opposing ideas in your mind at the same time. And if we look at leaders around the world, especially in tech, this is what they're doing, starting with Steve Jobs and now Tim Cook, of course, and also Jeff Bezos and many others. This is what they do. So you have this today. You execute well. And that's really all about efficiency and optimization as well. But. But then the future. The future is not an efficiency story because it doesn't exist. And this is something that really, I think, is also a big, big factor. Here in Europe, we tend to look at the future and say, well, we don't know the future, but we would like to see it proven. We would like to see a logical scientific approach to the future in the sense of, yeah, this is a certainty, or it's very, very, very likely. And it's about logic. It's not. The future is not about engineering. We can't engineer the future. The future will contain lots of engineering and production, but it's about imagination. I mean, let's follow the footsteps of Einstein who said, imagination is more important than knowledge. And I would derive from that, you know, agility and resilience is probably more important than efficiency. We are entering a second lockdown phase in Europe. The crisis is not ending. It's becoming more difficult by the minute. We need to switch the conversation from what we had until now, when it was about the Internet and digitization. It was all about efficiency, optimization, production getting faster, bigger, better, increasing the margin. And now we're having a different conversation, and not just because of COVID also because the mindset of people has changed. Now it's about how do we reinvent, how do we pivot, how do we come up with a different model of resilience? How do you become resilient in the first place, how are you going to have Agile team members responding to emergencies which are likely to continue and also add other ones, as I said earlier in my talk. So let's dive right in right now. Clearly we are in a world that the word normal doesn't really exist anymore. It's basically all unnormal. It's all like vuca, permanent volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity. And that seems the next decade is going to be like this. First Covid, then the recession of COVID then climate change, then artificial intelligence. But it's not all bad things. You know, there are many good things hiding behind this, but the key point is we have to get used to a different way of operating. We need to go away from the idea of making things just efficient and then job done, but of perpetual change. Yeah, first wave Covid, that's today. I'm not going to talk much about COVID in this one because we all pretty much are aware of this and what's happening and what does it entail, but it's causing us to change our agenda, sending us warp drive into the future. In terms of technology, it's quite clear all of the indicators show, I'll show you some of them later, is that everything is getting faster. That has to do with technology working from home and E commerce and buying things and learning online and virtual reality and zoom calls and conference calls exploding. We've had more digital change and digital transformation in the last six months than in the previous six years. That's become very clear. And it's a huge gain of course for technology. But, but what does it mean for us, for our mindset, how we look at the future, what opportunities we are taking? And clearly in this future, of this kind of warp drive into the future, we have to get out of this thought of pursuing something that is based on the idea of just making everything faster. This has been very much the case when you talk about digital transformation. Many people think that technology is primarily a cost cutting exercise or of course a people cutting exercise, getting rid of people, because we have technology which has proven to be utterly wrong anyway. It hasn't worked. But the pre Covid world was like this. It was all about reducing and optimizing and maybe coming up with new ideas. And you know, for most companies that was the way of how we would use digital technology. But now we're entering the post Covid world, right, which is much more about this idea of saying, well, how do we become resilient in the sense of resistance and coming up with new ideas and surviving In a new environment, which is a bit like the desert you see here. The post Covid world is going to be a world where it's about coming up with solutions and surviving and prospering despite everything. Taking a wider view. I've talked about this many times in my presentations. Really important that we start saying, well, this is what used to work, but maybe it doesn't work anymore. Now, if you're in the airline business, hospitality, tourism, but pretty much any business, you're going to have to master this period because that is the next few years. And out of it, a new world, a transformed world is emerging. The post with COVID world, for the time being, taken a wider view. So how do we take a wider view? Well, this is a question of mindset taking a wider view. That means you have what works today, and then you have what may work tomorrow, and then you have what may work in the faraway future, 5, 8, 10 years. All of that has to be looked at at the same time by everybody in the company. And this is the most strenuous exercise, is to develop agility in the company, in the organization, and quite clear when we're looking at what's happening now to define resilience, let's start right here is the quality of recovering after being cut down. How do we recover and how do we take a slap in the face? And how do we deal with a wall that's been erected around our business or our lives? Indeed. And to accept failure and to accept that we have to try new things, that requires a mindset, a resilient mindset, an agile mindset that we can practice. That's like saying to people, well, be creative. It doesn't work that way. We have to discover that and we have to nurture it. And how do we do that in a company? This is the crucial thing without failing, because we're feeling crushed by the pressure of constantly being resilient. And also, I want to say this is not really a question of. Of age. It's not like I'm going to be less resilient because I'm 60 or you're going to be more resilient because you're 25. That's not true. I think ultimately we can all recover and find that just like we can rediscover imagination and our brain is plastic, our brain is changing and perfectly capable of doing this. Resilience is first about who you are and then only about what you make out of it and what you do. So we have to change who we are as people in the company as executives or managers or staff or human resources. And then we have to change the company's life and the brand of the company. Think about resilient companies, how they can move quickly. Think about companies that have pivoted. And one interesting exercise on pivoting is now being undertaken by Airbnb. Very interesting case study about pivoting. Let's see if they have a chance and how they can go. I think ultimately I see this kind of chain of events. First you look for resilience and then you want to be agile. And then basically you have to be tenacious about putting something into place which results in pivoting. Usually I'll talk more about that, but really what we're seeing right now is this is about who we are and we have to change who we are to be successful and we have to adapt. So in this world, I see five different points about how that's going to happen. Our personality, companies have personalities. But let's talk about our personality. The way that we take things, can that be changed? Absolutely. There's trigger moments in our life that change who we are, how we react. You probably have seen all of those yourself. Our character, strengthening our character. The good things in our character, our. Our mindset. What we think is real, what we think is possible, that is resilience. When we say, well, you know, that looks like this is over. And do I go into shock mode or do I go into stand up mode, into tenacious mode? Our skills, of course, this is really something we can easily learn. Skills, for example, of identifying things, skills of negotiation, skills of understanding. Those are things that we learn every single day. And finally, it's about our values. Do we believe that we can make a difference? Do we believe that humans are good or bad? In principle? What are our ethics behind this? So that all flows into resilience and developing resilience. And this is a very big point, I think, of our future. Great example here is this fashion company called Jacques Muse. And they showed some amazing resilience and also inventiveness by putting their fashion show into a cornfield because of COVID restrictions. And it's pretty amazing. Of course, I don't know what happened to the cornfield after that, but I think they were looking not to cut down as much as they would otherwise have cut. But basically what we're seeing here is that this cultural transformation that says, yeah, this is possible, yes, we can do something really far out, we can pivot, we can be unorthodox, that is a cultural shift that we have to embrace it is required as part of, of resilience. And that's something we have to look at, especially with older companies or family companies or especially in the financial business or insurance business, where we have often pretty rigid structures. We need a cultural transformation to be allowed to think out of the box, as they say about the future. That is a cultural transformation that we need to do So A very important point here. A resilient culture also embraces failure. You know, there's lots of TV stations that are switching off now, so to speak. Lots of things that don't work anymore. International tourism? No, not working for the time being. Flying like we used to for business. No, it's 80% down. How are you going to embrace a new future? How are you going to embrace trying something and then it fails? I'll give some examples later. But, you know, sometimes you try things because you need to pivot and nothing happens from it. And embracing failure is something that's much harder for us here in Europe. I live in Switzerland. You may be all over the world watching this. But, yeah, culture of failure is. Yeah, this is a very American way of looking at things. Failure is good. Going bankrupt is part of life. Well, that's much more difficult for us here in Europe, especially here in Switzerland. We must embrace failure when we try to pivot, when we try to be agile, because we're responding in real time. We're fixing the airplane while we're in the air. So this is an important thing. How do we do that? Well, that has to come from leadership. Fail fast, fail cheap, try again. I've said that many times over the last 20 years. But don't fail deep and expensive and never try again. That's quite a difference. You have to be responsible with your failure, of course. So resilient culture embraces failure. Great example here is Coke. When Coke launched the new Coke, I think there was maybe. Was it almost 10 years ago, I think. But the Koch CEO fully acknowledged that it took 79 days for them to pull the new Coke from the market was an utter disastrous failure. And now he says, the Koch CEO says they have an award for projects that fail the opposite. We always have awards for projects that are successful, making lots of money. We should award people for trying. A Zulian culture embraces failure, moves forward, and they learned many things. I think, among others, the new Coke came back in a Netflix series the other day. I think it's called some science fiction show, but it made a comeback there. So it wasn't utterly disastrous in the end. So we need to go away from this focus on functioning. And I clearly understand why that is, because we have many moving worlds, especially in large companies. Functioning is okay, efficiency is good, don't get me wrong. But we have to get away from a focus of saying function, function, function, because that's what machines do. Machines are capable of functioning. They're not capable of reinventing their own function. Well, maybe they will be in the future, but for the time being, we have to think about a change towards creativity. That's really what agility is. We can create. We can say, you know, this is what used to work. And. But I have a hunch here something really interesting that could work. I'll give you some examples later. This is a mental gap, taking our outdated assumptions and moving on to a new future. When I was in the music business, the biggest outdated assumption was that if people can download music for less money or for free, then the business is dead. Of course, for free, that would be probably quite true, but it turns out not true. People can download music and stream it for very little money now. Spotify, iTunes and even YouTube now and Google, and still 135 million people are paying on Spotify for music. We created a new industry there, or they created a new industry, despite the fact that the record companies were not playing along for a long time until they saw a lot of money. Different story. But now there's a focus on creating. And we are all creators. Every human is a creator. That may have gotten lost in the shuffle. Especially when you're with a company for 30 years, you're very much used to certain procedures and it works like this, it doesn't work like that, and so on and so on. And this is obviously a crucial debate about how we can move into the future. So when we look at this transformation, it is a shift based on this idea of saying, well, we're going to take the present and just kind of extend it to the future. We're going to take the present and just make it a little bit better. So going into the future as an extension of the present, that's not what's happening today. We are moving into a future of where foresights are important and where foresights are a priority. Because if you look back 20 years ago, maybe foresights weren't that important because the speed wasn't there. Would take a decade to roll out a new engine. If you're in the car business and you didn't have an invention every other week like we do now with quantum computing coming up, and 3D printing. And it's like, you know, look at the curve of invention. It's somewhat like this. And then, you know, off to the sky it goes, right? I mean, this is crucial. So foresight is important. And this is the future that we're going to see, is a future based on foresight. So in this world, as we're going to this digital transformation and we're going to the digital tunnel, great advice here from the CEO of Salesforce, Marc Benioff, who says you need to get to the future ahead of your customers and be ready to greet them when they arrive. That is true resilience. You already are there and you're agile enough to make this work. What happens today, and then also already have the next thing in the oven. The future already being there just as you're going forward. And that's a question clearly of mindset. How do you operate today and in the future at the same time? That is clearly going to be something that has to be practiced. But you know, like any character skill, any like, you know, listening better, observing better, not getting angry or whatever personality challenges you're facing, that's a question of practice and conviction. It is not something that is impossible just because we've always done the opposite. I mean, we have trigger moments like this in all our lives where we experience something. All of a sudden we're like, okay, I'm going to do it differently. I'm sure you know what I'm talking about. So as we're going into this future, it is all about pivoting. It's all going to be about reinventing what we do and how we do it. Not just because of the COVID crisis, but because of the next upcoming crises. More pandemics clearly coming will probably master them better, even better than this one. But also climate change, the biggest crisis in our lifetime that we have to tackle now, along with the crisis that is coming. And then intelligent machines and the nature of work, genetic engineering. Yeah, many, many good angles. And this, all of these create amazing angles. But this is the resilience, agility and creativity that we rediscover. And then I forgot one thing here, which is tenaciousness, to have tenacity, to hang on and just make it work. Not give up, don't give up if it's a good thing to do, but otherwise giving up is a good thing to learn. That creates a pivoting moment. So you can see here on this chart about what's happening and we're going to translate this into a better looking Chart in the very near future. But this is from McKinsey just a couple of days ago. And clearly, I mean it's a mind boggling world. Most leaders surveyed are expecting large scale changes in their organization. 80% meeting structure and cadence, how leaders lead use of technology, 76%. I mean the amount of change, approach to talent and skills. I mean we're talking about the biggest change period in history of business. And that's not all egged on because of COVID but it's definitely this is a change year. The next 10 years will bring more change than the previous 100 years. And that is true because of so many factors. I think if we are not ready for this, we're going to get run over by people and who are faster and more resilient and more agile than us. And here's a great example from Nike. What Nike has done in the, in this crisis is that they said, okay, we're going to sell less in stores. Nike has closed all the stores right in the first period I think in April worldwide and Digital sales increased 82%. So they pivoted and said, well if we can't do it, we're going to go online and sell it online. Of course that's an obvious solution to many retailers. But now you have streaming e commerce that Nike is doing. I mean it's a bizarre story that probably wouldn't work here in Switzerland but does work in China. You have all kinds of new solutions. So this is really crucial that we say, well, how can we pivot? If there's any way of doing this virtually we should like I think airlines should start selling virtual travel. I know you're going to say well that's a crazy idea. There's no engines, you know, no currency, no first class, no slacks, no snacks, no movies, nothing. It's just hopping into a hologram. Is that a job for a travel company? Well, it strikes me as an interesting proposal. Alvin Toffler, the famous feature is one of my key influences. Along with Buckminster Fuller and Marshall. McLuhan says the future belongs to those who can unlearn and relearn. That is a true definition of resilience, unlearning and relearning, saying well you know, this is working now, but will it work in the future? Are we going to see this work in the future or are we just going to ponder about what else can be happening? So what should we do in practical terms? How to approach this change? How to become good at resilience, how to train agility, how to Be tenacious. First, I think we have to accept we're living in this world, the world of perpetual Vuca. Volatility, uncertainty, complexity. I mentioned that earlier. This is important to realize. It's not going to change. We're not going to go out of this world into a new world that is less volatile and the opposite is true. We have to master this. It's perpetual. We have to find that next window. We have to do what I call flip the Vuca. So one door opens, closes, the other one opens. We have to think of a world where we can turn around the Vuca. And I call this velocity. Unorthodoxy, co creation and good old American word awesomeness. Amazing. To create amazing things. And this is going to be our job as we own companies and organizations that have to reinvent. We have to be fast, fast over pretty. That's hard to imagine, especially here in Europe. Unorthodox solutions. I always think of Richard Branson when I think about Unorthodox co creating. Think about all the successful digital companies all the way from the companies like Dropbox and others who are co creating with a universe of things. And of course the big API providers and the big app stores like Apple and Google. It's about co creation, it's about creating awesome products together. So that is one thing that we have to think about. How do we flip the Vuca, how do we get faster? How do we allow that to happen? Going beyond normal. The great example I have here from Emirates Airlines, already three months old, but they're the first ones to say, you know what, if you fly with us, whatever happens, you're covered. We're not going to let you get stuck with rebooking. I don't know what the reality of that is, but to switch on the world again, we have to go beyond normal. Go the extra step always and all the time. Give presents to your customers, encourage people, give nourishment to your customers and support everybody else in the company doing the same. Going the extra mile, not going for the general rule book that we've always used and rehumanize what we're all about. I mean, it's so important that we say, well, you know, we are people, we're struggling, we're working together, we have the same issues as you are, and rehumanize your brand, rehumanize your company. If I could distill it down into one, I'm going to play a short video here about rehumanizing. I'll play this one again so you can see it, this is obviously Jacinda Ardern, right? Jacinda is the Prime Minister of New Zealand, of course, and she summarizes her approach to the crisis. It's pretty amazing stuff, so give it a try. If I could distill it down into one concept that we are pursuing in New Zealand, it is simple and it is this. Kindness. Yeah, that's her approach to government. Right? Kindness. Think about that. That message should be a great message for all of us to be more kind to our customers, to rehumanize and to be agile enough to say, well, this is important and the rules say something else. But we are going to change, right? We're going to be doing something completely different. We're going to actually change the rules and rehumanize. Very, very important view, I think, of our future, take the wider view. I mentioned that earlier, not taking the narrow view anymore, but sometimes we have to take both the narrow view and execute and take a wider view. And imagine this is what companies like Tesla have done. Tesla, of course sells cars, but their cars really are more like software packages. And now the new idea of Tesla is a subscription service for the self driving package. And that's coming up and it's going to be very expensive, as some people are saying in these reviews. But, but clearly all of a sudden some people are saying Tesla is going to make a third of their revenues from subscription services. And beyond that, of course we already have ideas for car subscription services like Porsche has this passport concept and I think Mercedes Benz has the same. We're going to see a Spotify like offering for cars in the near future, especially now, because now it's going to be about sharing and about efficiency and about, of course, electric cars. Let's take a wider view. Taking a wider view means you're still performing narrow, of course, but you're also looking at the future in a much larger way and saying, well, maybe it's over here, maybe we can adapt to this. This is where the chicken come in. Just kidding. Taking a wider view, for example, on food. Well, now we have companies who are saying, well, we are going to make meat in the lab. And Memphis Meats does this and Bill Gates and Richard Benson have invested in various companies that basically cultivate cells in the lab and then sell that like meat. And I've tasted it myself and it's pretty amazing stuff. It tastes good, it's very expensive. But, you know, the unthinkable is now becoming the new normal. What is unthinkable in your business? Are you going to find out what could be the new normal? Or are you going to pursue the things that used to be just thinkable? I mean, this is a key question. When we talk about resilience, be resilient to new ideas. Owning the narrative, making a strong story. That's also about building resilience. Because when we own the narrative, we own the turf. I mean, who owns the turf of artificial intelligence? Well, IBM has been claiming that for, I don't know, 20 years, and there have been lots of up and downs, but that's their narrative. Who owns the future? Well, the tech companies claim the future. Now, we have a great example here. And this, of course, the Patagonia company owned by Yvonne Schouina, who basically drives the agenda of what it means to be a company that takes care of people. And when they shut down all the stores, Patagonia continued paying people even without government programs. They own the narrative of being a sustainable business. Of course, great story, great success story. Of course, all the way through. Owning the narrative is a really important way of showing your leadership and looking for the back doors, looking for new ways of doing things that are not done before, where there is not so many people already in the turf. Spotify is great at this. Of course, Spotify is a very difficult turf because the record labels Keep extracting about 74% or so of all revenues of Spotify for the licenses. So this is a tough life. And as far as I know, Spotify isn't even allowed to start their own production and their own studios under the current deals. That may have changed. I certainly hope so. But Spotify cannot for the time do what Netflix has done, which is to create their own studios. So what do they do? They go into podcasting. Podcasting is a huge driver of, of revenues now, and it's been going on for a long time. But now in the crisis, podcasting, it's going crazy. Of course, I am podcasting as well, and Spotify is looking at this and saying, well, can we become the key pivot point, the platform for podcasting? They've acquired a bunch of companies and all before you know it. Podcasting and advertising on podcasts, of course, is going to become a serious revenue stream. Josh Rogan is now on Spotify, I think 34 million downloads last month, clearly a great move. And this is important part, not as contested as the music business itself. So look for that turf where you can come to the back door and you can say, well, we are very well equipped to do this and to do it better and to do it in scale and to own the turf. The next point is take bold action, but make sure your action is feasible. The city of Bogota and Paris and others have said in the crisis they're going to make bicycle lanes because people have to keep the distance and they don't want to be used public transportation anymore. So let's bike. That's going to be harder in the winter. But in Bogota, this has been very successful. I think it's a strategy clearly that's panned out. The World Economic Forum is a great little clip on this. I think it's on the Facebook page of the World Economic Forum about how Bogota is creating bike lanes. 100 km of city streets into bike lanes, and then how that's taken out. Let's listen just a little bit now. Yeah, I call this bold but feasible action because it's pretty bold to take a space away from the cars in the cities and change all the traffic rules and have the police supervise and all that. But it's feasible. It's a lot more feasible than to say, well, we're going to shut down all the traffic and basically just allow electric shared vehicles. So it's a very good example of how we can be agile and think of things that are real and translate them very quickly. I think that's Mary Hidalgo in Paris is doing many, many of those really interesting things. And we'll see more of that coming up. Sure, I think so. Taking this action is very important. I think ultimately, if you're looking at what's happening there, it's really important to think of things that can actually be done rather than can be thought of. This is a great shot from the Bogota situation where they've actually taken room from the cars to prioritize to bikes. So great shot here from France, television. So vision, leadership, tenacity. I mean, you're going to need a lot of vision to pull this off. And this is part of what we have to practice. And tenacious means, once we have a good idea, we can pull it off. That all goes together. Leadership, proven leadership, having thought leadership. Great page. We can take from the tech companies. Look at the scale, busting revenues of the tech companies. Facebook, Alphabet, Apple, Amazon, up and up and up. And now, of course, regulation is coming, but that's not keeping them back from the revenues. And of course, you know, technology is everywhere now in the crisis and after the crisis, it's one of the big five. I like to talk about big tech, big health, big media, big green, big government. But big tech is here. We can take a page of how they are doing things, because what they're doing, they're saying, well, all around us today we have technology. It's basically something that we cannot avoid every part of our lives, whether it's AI or the Internet of things. And so that positioning is quite clear. We're going to have to figure out man and woman, of course, by the way, we're going to have to figure out how exactly we position ourselves and who can we trust. I mean, this is a very, very powerful scenario and tech companies have taken advantage and built their resilience by saying, okay, we can use these technologies to bolster our resistance, our agility. These are power tools. So think of technology like AI or big data or cloud computing or virtuality as power tools to bolster our tenacity. They're not going to replace our agility, mental agility. So I mean mental resilience and agility, that is something that will come out of us and then we use technology to support this. But technology is there to support us. Automation, great software packages and that is going to explode in the next two years. So make sure you avail yourselves of this technology that allows us to be resilient and to be faster. A couple more examples on this. So first, an interesting graph here by Simon and Kutcher about tourism and how people travel. It's quite clear what's happening. We're moving into what they call staycations. Totally clear. I'm doing the same here in Switzerland. Everybody's doing this and people will take more domestic trips. That is a resilience factor that we should not underestimate. Also, money back guarantees and be able to change quickly. And then we can clearly see here businesses dropping a lot, business travel, it's going to be primarily about leisure and that is the resilience that we have to show in the tourism industry. Switch to local, switch to sustainable, switch to flexible. Yeah, it's still going to hurt, I know, but that's a one or two year period and then the tourism industry will re emerge. I don't know about the airlines, I have my doubts. Definitely not the cruise ships. I think those are kind of a thing of the history. I mean, tell me otherwise if you believe otherwise. But great ideas here for many hotels. This is a website now called St Staycation where you can upgrade your weekends and you can find out deals around you to get away from it. And I'm certainly looking forward to do that myself. Unfortunately, staycation hasn't really added many places here in Switzerland. That's going to take some time. But clearly, of course, new opportunities coming up. If you're a travel company, maybe you do staycations and you organize that in different ways. I mean clearly one of the feature oriented things. And there's a day use website now where you can find hotel rooms to work from and that's extremely popular. If of course for the average worker, you know, €150 a day wouldn't exactly be affordable, but the prices will be coming down and I predict that's going to be a good business, renting out hotel rooms. In fact, I think hotels in the future will rent out workspaces without a bed or with a rollaway bed and then at night they'll rent it again, they can book it twice. That would be a good hope. But working from the hotel. Yeah, that. I think if you really hunker down, you gotta solve a big problem. Maybe the whole team will rent the whole floor and can collaborate virtually. That should be a very interesting variation. So I'm quite excited about this one. Here is a great idea that I found on Springwise, one of those futuristic startup sites. And this is a virtual Oxford street that people can actually build. And it's, it's of course using on the mobile because of the contact restraints. And that was there before, but now people are really using the virtual shopping as they have in Korea for South Korea for a long time, like buying the cauliflower from the side of the subway station with a QR code. And this is now becoming a great pivot opportunity by creating virtual high street, virtual retail scenarios. So let's talk about how you're going to get ready for this and build your resilient and future ready mindset. Again. It's an issue of building and practicing and perfecting and dedicating time to it. Just like a mindset usually is, it's not something that you can instantly install. So we need to think about education here as well. Our own education or learning and development, the human resources department in your companies, but also about the education of kids. We have to educate our kids to be resilient, to be creative, to come up with solutions. They have to learn how to learn, not download information for later. We really have to change our educational system. That's pretty much true around the world. There are some leaders, like Finland, where that's already happening, moving towards a more human centric education. But our obsession with learning, science, technology, engineering, because that seems like a ticket to the future forever. Well, I would say it's true, but it's not forever, it's for the Time being, but in 10 years, machines will do a lot of that work. I mean, take a look at this really amazing graph also by McKinsey showing what we have to do is we have to recommit our skills and then we have to reimagine technology for access, mastery based learning, mastering resilience, teacher preparation, holistic support, future of work skills. Download this and put it on your desk and then send it to the principal at your school if you have kids. This is what we have to do. And for learning and development, quite clearly it's going to be about human only skills. As I've said many times, we have to educate ourselves to find that creativity again, to build resilience, to learn and practice agility. That has to come also from the top. By saying it's okay, you can try something, you can experiment. As long as we can survive the experiment, then you can learn from it. Most jobs of tomorrow don't exist yet. Think about this for a second here. For example, you have the music industry. And the music industry is notorious for having lost many jobs in terms of record stores and so on. But what do we have now? We have playlist makers, we have meme makers, we have people who are mining data royalties and we have people who are in the data business. We have entire companies bought by Apple and Spotify who are in that business. Clearly agility is key, reinvention is key. Think of it like this. In 10 years it's quite unlikely that 50% of all new jobs haven't even existed today. That's because technology is making them and taking away others. 100 years ago, 92% or 95% in Europe used to work in agriculture. Now it's less than 2. Have we all lost our work? No, we have found new work, move up the food chain. This is of course the key for us. So looking at this picture from a recent graph by McKinsey, the likelihood that computers will do our work in the next 50 years, I mean looking at what people say in Greece, it's quite dim outlook. Definitely computers will take over. And robots or probably Japan of course is very similar but higher probability. And here in the U.S. not too many people, well, that's still 60% think it's probable. But clearly what it means, if you work like a robot, the robot will take your job. If you learn like a robot, you'll never have a job. So we have to move up that ladder and that includes agility in practice. And that is what humans do, right? Deciding stuff, creating things. Can a computer write A song, of course. Using mathematical algorithms and faking content. Just like they can probably make a movie of a sort, right? And that's been tried. But is it good? Is it great? Is it going to change our life? I don't think so. I think these are human things that change our lives and that's really where we have to move up the food chain. I talked about pivoting earlier. This is a crucial thing that we have to learn out of our own creativity. You cannot pivot based on algorithms and based on history because the history is not the future. This is something new that we have to learn. So question outdated assumptions. Ask yourself, what am I assuming about the business that's no longer true because the world has changed and get rid of that and say, well, this is outdated now. We have to move on. Like the record industry had to move on from selling units. Not now. They sell well, they don't really sell streams, but they sell access to streams. They're selling access. Show that you care. This is an absolutely crucial branding proposition that's also driving the connection with the customer. Go the extra mile always. Especially now. People are going to look back in three years and say, what did these guys do in the COVID crisis? Did they really support me? Did they come up with something new? Empower your change catalysts and internal company people who are already driving this. That's clearly, I think, a solution that's going to find our way forward in so many ways and take a position if there's issues about the environment, about people, planet prosperity, purpose, the economic, business model, capitalism. Take a stand. Take a page from Salesforce and others. Take a page from the business roundtable that has said we have to move to a stakeholder economy. Get engaged. This is how people think you're real and this is how you can show you are real and you do actually care. So to summarize these four things coming together in the sort of future mindset that I like to talk about in this future readiness program. First, resilience, Being able to stand up after disaster and being able to reinvent. Not being smashed down, but saying, okay, I take a punch in the gut, but I can stand up and try something else. Agile mindset. I can easily move from here to there and I can make another choice. And I'm still there, I'm still responding. And creativity, this is the crucial part. Creativity means I can actually create something from nothing. It can be practiced, it can be prioritized. It should be a top goal of your HR department is to re empower your creativity. And finally, tenaciousness, tenacity. I can't tell you how important that is, because once you have figured out what to do and what you want to create, you have to tenaciously stay on it. I mean, look how the tech companies are doing this mind boggling performance and revenue flows as a result of that performance. So dare to do this, dare to be resilient, to be agile, to be creative, and dare to be tenacious. That's what it's all about. Thanks so much for listening to my podcast. Find out more about my work at techvsushuman.com techvshuman.com and that feature is gert.com.