CIO Leadership Live ASEAN with Dr CJ Meadows, S P Jain School of Global Management

Hello and welcome to CIO Live here in ASEAN. My name is Chris Holmes, Editorial Director Asia for CIO.com. I'm excited to be your host for today for our Leadership Live series where we talk to tech leaders across the region. And today I'm pleased to welcome Dr. Cj Meadows, author, speaker, professor, entrepreneur, and former Accenture consultant. She has written many articles and books, and perhaps the best known being a multimedia series called Fusion: How World-Class Innovators Create the Unexpected. And her most recent books are focused on the future of work and education. In today's discussion, we'll be exploring the future of work, how that is changing with AI, and how organizations should prepare for this change. So welcome, Cj Meadows.

Thank you very much.

So before we get started, maybe you could just share about your background and how you became a tech leader.

Oh, thank you. I mean, I started off right out of uni where I did not study IT and went straight into Accenture. And what was interesting to me was that you did not, they were not all computer science grads. I was accounting and they took in French majors and English majors. They just needed people who knew how to think. And they would teach us, and they did, what they wanted us to do. After a while, I realized it wasn't so much building tech for the defense department or United Airlines or whoever that I was really in love with. What I was really excited about was the future and what we can do with tech and the tech that everyone's building. So I actually went off to Harvard Business School and got my doctorate in business administration. Focusing on IT, international development, emerging economies as producers of tech. And back then everybody told me I was nuts for going to India to do a tech thesis. Like, what are you doing? And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, this will be big. And sure enough, outsourcing to India then became really big. And that was when I was studying virtual teams. Because I thought, yes, this is the future of work. We've globalized manufacturing. Now let's globalize our offices and all of our service work. And nobody wanted to do it in the early and mid-'90s. So I learned a lot of strategy and I wound up founding consulting firms and other businesses. I went back to Accenture, but this time not in IT, but in strategy. And traveled all over Asia and I was so excited about e-commerce, but there was a lack of focus in that area even though I'd done work for all the banks in Asia. So Boutique Firm and other things happened and basically now I have a portfolio career. I do business, government, academe, entrepreneurship and not profit and coach and consult and do some exec ed as well to, to help others grab what new tech can do and either push it when there's a crisis like COVID brought us virtual work or push ahead as a leader, but at the right time, which is really hard.

That's great. And in fact, I mean, that's a lovely segue into our conversation around the future of work. I mean, particularly that portfolio-based, because again, it's one of the things we hear a lot about. But let's get into that future work conversation. I mean, we've been through digital transformation for, you know, it started pre-COVID and then during COVID and then we've sort of seen that almost the conversation moved from digital transformation to AI transformation, certainly in the last year, last 2 years. So what are you hearing? What are you seeing and what are you thinking about? How, what does this mean for the future of work?

Yeah, funny enough, I really got intrigued with that. So I did some research on it and I scoured World Economic Forum and a whole bunch of other, you know, publications, talked to people and that's, you know, that's what fed into this year's book. On Future of Education. Basically, I gathered together all of the skills that people are gonna need in 2030 to 2050 in this world of AI. And it made a big mess all over my desk. And so, you know, I was trying to sort through that and theme them and kind of come up with some kind of framework, a way to understand. And I did. And all the skills that we need for the future center around doing. But it's not only running today's businesses, it's also creating tomorrow's. So that entrepreneurial spirit and innovation needs to be there. Thinking. So yes, we need critical thinking and logic, but we also need the creativity because now it's up to us the messy-brained humans to go into unstructured situations, find problems, and create novel solutions, things that AI cannot actually do on its own. Then there were skills of interpersonal and intrapersonal being. And it stunned me. I was like, oh my God, why is this the biggest bubble? And then I thought, oh, duh, stupid. Oh, come on. If robotics is taking over so much of what we do and AI is taking over a good chunk of what we think, then we need to develop ourselves as humans and the most extreme and unique humans that we can be. At the same time, we need to partner effectively with our AI and our computers are no longer tools. They're colleagues. So step one might be for us humans to co-create together, or step one might be co-create with your AI. But whatever the case, it means a different future of work that's intensely human and collaborative.

It's very, very interesting. I mean, We talked to 25 CIOs to get their predictions for 2025. And one of those CIOs said, we're looking to create employees that embody the spirit of a mini CEO. And I think that's exactly what you're talking about. But I mean, he was talking about that for this year.

Well, absolutely. Absolutely. And with the rise of agentic AI, you're going to have AI agents going out to do stuff. And you're managing that team. But also AI in some regard democratizes our work. Your frontline people can do so much if we get out of the way. There's also a great Harvard Business Review article about how AI initiatives should be driven by your frontline, not by your CIO. Because the CIO doesn't know the operations of the company. The CIO knows the IT. Okay? So the people who actually do the work and actually know how the work happens, they're the ones who need to be driving this, the AI initiatives instead of so many organizations that I see, you know, the CIO creates some great tools, great AI stuff, and then they create policies whereby they force it on everybody. And it's not always useful.

I mean, we saw that almost with the start of analytics. It was giving data to the people who could actually use it. Yes. So actually giving them the data and then giving them the tools where they could actually interrogate and question that data and then act on it.

Well, and also people need to learn to question the rules, question the data, question the recommendations, the analysis. Because AI, you know, we hear so much about AI, the hallucination problem. And I'm like, well, no, no, no, it's not a problem. That's all it does. It's a hallucination machine. It's a prediction engine. So no, that's not a problem. The problem is with us when we look at a prediction and we don't do the homework, we don't do the research, the background, and actually ground it and verify.

Very interesting. I mean, just to continue the conversation, I mean, one of our regional CIOs, again in the same article, made the following prediction for 2025: AI agents have the potential to replace many current roles, and simply using AI tools won't guarantee relevance. Leaders must rethink and redesign corporate structures and roles to integrate these agents among us. So, I mean, you've already talked around sort of the AI colleague. But let's just get a— let's just sort of touch on this idea that leaders need to rethink and redesign corporate structures and roles to integrate these AI agents amongst us. I mean, how, how's that gonna happen? How's that gonna play out?

First of all, you need to— I mean, it's basic strategy. Where are we? Where do we wanna go? How do we get there? Okay. So first of all, where are we? You know, what, what is AI and not AI in your organization? What could be AI and not AI? And what people are finding is that roles are not going away, jobs are not going away, but work is, tasks are. So you'll have to do some homework to break down the roles into actual tasks. What do we need to get done? And then identify What can go to the AI? What can go to the human? And what's gonna require human oversight? And how is that gonna happen? Once you have done that, then you've got this human stuff left. And go ahead and rethink from a white sheet of paper from bottom up, you know, what actually makes sense going together and be prepared to try something out, experiment, maybe experiment in your innovation center, creating a small version of your organization so you can try some of these out with a prototype instead of scaling up big. Take the time to do that because that will lower your risk and raise your success level. So, okay, so now you've got some ropes. So you've got, you've got the start of a vision of what your future organization should look like. You will have to live with a good deal of democratization. Change from hierarchy to a networked organization with a lot of leaders all over the place, and you can't control them. Guess what? You don't control them today anyway. So get over it. But you do need to track and coordinate and have your AI track and coordinate actual results and have people become master problem solvers because things are gonna fall through the cracks. That's why we're here. People asked after the digital transformation and the age of automation, why do we have more problems in bureaucracy than ever before? It's because we can deal with it. That's why we're here. So create a vision of the new organization. It's not gonna be what actually happens. You know, that goes back to Eisenhower. No war was ever won according to plan, but no war was ever won without one. Okay. It's in the planning process and the envisioning that you figure out what you need to stick to. But don't forget to experiment and come up with things. I mean, the airline industry, for example, when they started with digital transformation, then they discovered dynamic pricing. And yield management and could make so much more money than, you know, than with check-ins. You know, nobody wants to stand around for 2, 3 hours trying to check into the damn airplane. But yes, so they, for quality and operational reason, they put it onto a computer, but then they discovered strategic significance. All of a sudden we could charge for stuff that we could never charge for before. And, and choosing a seat has become a major revenue earner for an industry with razor-thin margins. So build in experimentation and learning and also revamp how you're evaluating people. Focus on the outcomes and the roles are changing. So now we've got a big vision and organizations like Deloitte have tools to help you create the vision of your organization in like 5 years, possibly even 10. Epidemy at a company level and at a national level helps folks not only track skills and what skills we need, but recommends, along with SkillFuture, recommends to the individual employee, if you want this new role, here's the 2 things you need to learn. Oh, and here's how to go learn them. Stuff like that. So that sort of stuff needs to be built in the AI coach, the digital twin coaches. So planning how to get there. Yes, it's gonna be a mess. So again, organizations like the ones I've just mentioned can help you do those plans, but don't think they're set in stone.

I wanna take you back because I mean, you talked about something very interesting. I mean, Right at the beginning, when you were talking about this idea of creating almost a mini organization to sort of try out the processes, try out the tools, I mean, you know, I have a manufacturing background and we always used to talk about this factory of the future. You had the demonstration plant where you tried out all the new technologies to actually demonstrate, but it's actually very interesting that you're now saying, okay, we need to go from a factory to actually the entire organization in terms of actually being able to trial that out and demonstrate that it actually works.

Absolutely. And I come from a design thinking background as well as doing the tech. And you have to make the little prototypes because the first thing you make is going to stick. Get ready. It's really going to stick. And you've got to socialize it and get all kinds of inputs. And people have far better ideas, especially when you're talking at the front line. So yes, do that. In the organizations.

Yeah, very interesting. Very interesting. I mean, we started to get in there as to sort of how should organizations proceed? And again, you mentioned sort of the approach they have, and obviously there are people out there to really help. But I mean, this is going to be a big change. This is going to be a fundamental change. I'm, dare I say, I'm old enough to go back to the days of the BPR, the business process re-engineering, where throw everyone out into the car park, come back in and you all have new roles and new jobs based on sort of enterprise systems coming in. But I mean, how should CIOs really start to think about moving forward with this? I mean, because again, it is a fundamental change. What should they actually be doing now? What should they actually be thinking about? What should they be sort of putting their time and effort in, in to, you know, start to get ready for this change?

First of all, use the AI yourself and replace yourself as much as you can. One of the things that we are going to need in the new organizations is engagement from everyone. You know, there's 85% disengagement right now, which costs trillions of dollars worldwide. So you've got to use your AI, maybe digitally twin yourself with a company like Personal.AI so that you can have personal conversations with everyone and gather information about, hey, well, what does this mean for you, the human worker? Also, put your digital workers on your org chart. There's a wonderful TED Talk about that. I think it's Nasha Haider. And once you start to do that, you realize that, hey, you need to train your AI, but you also need to socialize it. You need to have peer review and work, et cetera, et cetera. So use the AI, start letting people experiment with it and find the opportunities and let them come to you. Don't think you're gonna do it all top down. Consider legacy retirement. Firms like DBS have already moved to the cloud and AI native. And although it is daunting and it's gonna be hard to get budget approval for that, It could be important. I do know of another organization that has digital twins for your legacy systems, which is brilliant. I've only heard of it for buildings, processes, people. But consider getting some of that. Partner with schools in new ways, driving skills and innovation. Realize you're going to have to do just continuous change. You're going to be in a continuous Yes. So use some personalized intelligence, agentic AI. See what they can do for you. And there's 5 capabilities apparently for leading in the age of AI. So you, you need to embrace this as well. So learning the new tech, I'm sure you're all doing that. Build your data focus and your own analytics. Are you— is there anywhere where you're not making data-based decisions? Improve your own network and relationship skills. I never— when I was building mainframes at the Defense Department with AI, I never saw my productivity shoot through the roof so much as when I started my day with a cup of coffee and walked around people and they would all tell me things. And I solved problems when they're little, all kinds of stuff going on there. Engage with ethics. So your AI ethics and governance is gonna be super, super important and it can bring down entire firms if you don't, if you don't take care of it and get more agile. Run these little projects and prototypes. With many people contributing.

Wow. Wow. There's a lot to take in there. And again, I just want to come back because again, I mean, you talked about the walk around bit, the communication bit to the teams, the communication as to what this future is going to look like. Because again, it does appear quite daunting and we are on— everyone says we are on this major transition, this major change that's going to come, some say 2025, 2030, you know, somewhere in this there is going to be something. But what should CIOs be saying to their teams?

They should be saying that, you know, the future of your work is the human part. You guys need to be going out into unstructured situations or you get a problem landing on your desk and you need to collaborate with people, first of all, and AI. You know, LinkedIn looked at the top 10 skills that people are looking at for employees. 8 of them were entirely human. The one that grew most, adaptability. Number 1, communication. So even saying to your team, look, you know, instead of just doing what you're doing today, Let's, let me help you to come up with some small initiatives that will open up time for you. And with that time, I want you to create, I mean, Amazon is famous for the one day a week policy or half a day a week where people are supposed to work on their own innovation projects. And that has actually done well for, for the company. So, you know, I want you guys to be doing the same. I'm not going to be micromanaging you. I'm not going to be, but I will ask for the outcomes. And I will ask for whenever there's a failure that you're upset about and you don't want to tell me, I'm just going to ask you what you learned. It's not a failure if you learn something and you share it with everyone else. So democratization is kind of what we're going to see a lot more of. But everyone needs to think strategically, think like entrepreneurs, learn innovation processes, tools, and techniques, and do that straddle between today's business and tomorrow's business.

That's great. That's great. Some real words of guidance and some real Things for organizations, CIOs to digest as we go forward and again, get ready for this fundamental change that we're going to see. I'm afraid that's all we've got time for today. So thanks, Cj, for sharing your journey as to where you got to today, and also that fascinating conversation around the future of work and what that looks like in the age of AI. That concludes today's CIO ASEAN interview. My name is Chris Holmes, and I've been talking to Dr. Cj Meadows. If anyone's got any comments, please reach out to either of us on LinkedIn. Thank you all very much.

Thank you.