Innovation, AI & Executive Education || Dr CJ Meadows

Hi, hello everybody. Thank you so much, Cj, for joining us on this podcast on a Friday afternoon. You know, we have heard about you a lot, right? I went to your profile. I saw you have been into, you know, you know, a lot of academic works as well besides being into the industry for quite a long time. Why not you take it up, you know, for a couple of minutes and introduce yourself to your, you know, to our audience, you know, talking about your journey right from when you started with Accenture and, you know, you went ahead and, you know, now lead innovation entrepreneurship and, you know, teach a lot of off in strategy inside Goodby Schools?

Absolutely. I will try to give you the, like, just 2-minute version of, like, 25 or 30 years. So I trained as an accountant, a CPA, a CMA. Did I ever work in that capacity? Of course not. Like everybody does now, you learn one thing, you apply it somewhere else, and a lot of innovation comes from that. So I took a job with Accenture, which back then was Arthur Andersen and Company, so it wasn't that big a stretch, and immediately went to work creating big systems, you know, mainframes, early online systems for like Defense Department, United Airlines, all kinds of folks. And after a while, I got the chance to make a transition back into academe because I decided I wanted to be a professor. I actually really enjoyed teaching. And we had the huge budget cuts in Washington, D.C. So 550 of us were all like thrown out of work at the same time. So I took that opportunity to move to Japan and live with a family that I had taught earlier and teach. And then I went and got my doctorate in business administration at Harvard Business School in IT and economic development, international business, all that good stuff. So afterwards I became computer science faculty, and that lasted all of a year. I couldn't hack the bureaucracy. I just couldn't stand it. So I founded my first consulting firm, uh, the first of two, and we, we did that for a while. I eventually went back to Accenture, but as a strategist in Asia. I was in Singapore and we had just coined the term e-commerce and everybody was so excited and it was just a wonderful time. And then I also went to a boutique firm for that. So then of course the dot-com crashed Boom! And everybody was thrown out of work, thrown out of IT, thrown out of financial services, everything. So I became an entrepreneur and also started a family, which was a very, very big thing for me and for my family. And after about like 15 years or so of that, I popped up and said, okay, I'm running global businesses from Europe and I've got the kids, but I really want to go home to Asia. So I took a job at SPJ Global and we came over here to Singapore and And that was over a decade ago. I didn't think that was going to happen, but it did. And I'm happy. I'm glad. And yeah, I was brought in to head up an innovation and entrepreneurship center. So, okay, I'm an entrepreneur consulting innovation. I had also led, co-founded an innovation center to help corporates in the e-commerce days. So that was, that was cool. And from there went on to write books. And speak and do a whole lot of other things. So I've done a lot of stuff. Oh, and somewhere in the mix, a little over 20 years ago, I co-founded with family and friends a not-for-profit organization in India to help the tiger, help the environment, and help the people.

Help the tiger, help the environment, and help the people, because all the three are—

Yeah, the Tiger Center.

Yes. Great. So, you know, Cj Meadows, we will start with some bit about innovation because these days a lot of big companies have got innovation teams which evaluate a lot of digital technology products from across the globe and see what fits into their scheme of things. I'm sure, you know, you must have worked with a lot of financial services organizations helping them with IT and other industries too. Yeah, the other industries as well. So we'll start with the financial services as such. Is that— what do you think are the major breakthrough technologies that are shaping the financial industry right now and what seems to be the future?

You know, like everybody else, financial services is taking advantage of of GenAI instead of search engine optimization to help get clients, they're doing AI engine optimization, AIEO. It's a huge problem in financial services like a lot of other companies to have legacy systems. And if you go talk to Oracle like I did pretty recently, you know, they said, yes, we do help clients take advantage of AI, but first that is very, digital, that is very data dependent. So we've got to dig into the data that you've got, the legacy systems you've got, create data lakes, data fabric, and all of that, and cleaning up data. It's a huge investment. I did talk to a startup founder though, who said, "Oh no, no, these days you don't need to do that. You can put a layer of Agentic AI," on top of those systems and then work from there. And I also had connected before then with, I believe it was Naveen Suri. Yes. Who, yeah, he founded a company that does something brilliant. Everybody knows about digital twins for physical assets and for processes. And now for people, I've got one, but he made technology that will digitally twin your digital assets. And then you build on top of that and take advantage of GenAI and AI agents and so forth. And that technology was just bought a few months ago by Accenture. So some of those are some of the many technologies that are coming out and revolutionizing financial services.

Absolutely. And, you know, just on a side note, actually, Cj Meadows, this is what we are doing at Dodle as well. So what we do is that we bring in the customer stories of various products on our platform and we show it to the enterprise buyers so that You know, they have, because what we believe is that the only source of truth for any product is the customer story, what they have implemented so far. And, um, you know, to, to reduce the buyer regret of buying a technology, it's very important to give them an access to what has happened with that technology in a similar company. So that's what we do in Dottl.

But those case studies are case studies.

Gold.

Yes. And especially they're gonna ask you about cybersecurity cuz that's top of everybody's mind, et cetera. Yeah.

And because, you know, exactly what, you know, you just talked about. So, you know, the legacy systems and, you know, because, because it was developed at a time when people used to believe that horizontal SaaS is everything because there were no good integrations. Like integration was a big headache for the companies, you know, to integrate one thing with the other. So they went with products like SAP or Oracle or something like that. But now I feel, and, and I would like to take your insights on that, I feel is that companies are looking for more vertical SaaS because products do well in a particular niche. If there is a product which is serving a particular niche, that is always better than a product which expands across the organization, you know, in terms of efficiency, in terms of productivity. But what has been your experience like, you know, working with the clients? What are the major challenges which they face while they are undergoing a digital transformation stuff and, you know, related things?

Thinking back to the beginning of our conversation where I mentioned building big systems and it was the late '80s when I did that. We never intended for our systems to last 20 years and more. We really weren't thinking about that. Yes, you need, you need the deep systems, but you also do need them going across the organizations because the organization, because when you need to problem solve, generally you need to problem solve across the organization. Those are the really tough ones and you need tech to back you up in that. So, I don't mean to like disagree and contradict you, but I would say that instead of vertical tech or horizontal tech, what we need is a network of tech and bits of tech that can seamlessly talk to each other. And you know, some of that tech nowadays is coming out of AI-first, AI-generated startups who are attacking the bottom and the middle of the market. That's being addressed now by, you know, the big enterprise systems. And then they'll, per disruption theory, they will slowly eat their way up.

Absolutely. Now, what is this innovation audit like? You know, people talk about innovation audits and toolkits and all that. Can you shed some light on what is an innovation audit? How do organizations do that?

So, I personally have not been involved in any innovation audits, but I do know that companies want to systematize innovation in the same way that Thomas Edison systematized it at GE so many, many years ago. His point was, no, it's not inspiration and genius and that's it. It is a systematic way of going about things. So an organization, yes, should really be thinking, number one, does it need innovation? And I think most of us know the answer to that. Somebody else is going to come in and take your customers and offer better products if you don't. So what are your innovation structures? Do you have centers? Are they connected? How many people are innovating? Is it a culture of innovation so that everybody who's on the bottom of the organization doing the work comes up with ideas? And are they engaged enough to do so? Then you get into the whole disengaged workforce problem. There's also infrastructures like the one that IDEO put together for P&G to connect 30,000 scientists and product developers worldwide. Because what we're discovering is innovation is not just something in the R&D labs in one or more. It's a whole network of people who need to find the technologies and the people who have the knowledge or maybe unfinished innovations that can now be used. I mean, what kind What comes to mind is Steve Jobs when the iPhone came out and it was in his pocket and it was rattling around with keys and change. And he took it out and he's like, oh my God, this thing is gonna get scratched up by everybody's keys and change. What are we gonna do? So did they have the tech? No. He called up the CEO of Corning, which years before had been trying to make a special windshield glass. And he's like, I want that and I want you to make it. Now. So, they went through the R&D cycle faster than they ever had before, and that was the start of Gorilla Glass. So, we need innovation systems, people, structures, incentives, all of that kind of stuff within organizations. But now increasingly, we need those structures to be across the organization and with outside organizations. So, Innovation audit, let's go through and measure all that.

That's true, actually, Manz. Absolutely right, Manz, because I still remember while I was taking care of innovation portfolio at one of the MNCs, you know, kind of 7, 8 years back, the biggest challenge was, was that, you know, a lot of these consulting firms will bring in the right solutions, but to get them implemented on ground across the teams require special change management principles. And that is where You know, these are all kinds of concepts that, you know, time to value becomes very important because people want to see, is it actually bringing change to our life, you know, as soon as possible so as you can motivate the people towards it. Now, you know, with this, my next—

Sorry, sorry, sorry. If I could hop in there and build on that, you know, one of the things that we're finding now with GenAI is those initiatives should not actually be led by the CIO. The CIO needs to give guidance and guardrails and all of that. But CIO, like any other C-suite individual, has no idea what happens on the ground or how the organization actually works. And they can't, that's not their job. So, they've got to set kind of the context so that the people on the ground can innovate ways to use these new technologies. And we're going to see a lot more grassroots innovation going on within those—

Yeah. When you say grassroots, you know, it, it's, it just kind of resonates because you're absolutely right. You know, once people across the organization are empowered to think innovative, there's a lot of $1 ideas that, that actually starts coming in. So, uh, so Cj, you're absolutely right. You know, once, once there is a feeling of innovation across the organizations, a lot of $1 ideas starts coming up. $1, $2 ideas, you know, rather than big budgeted ideas. And those ideas have really the potential to change a lot of processes, you know, for the betterment. So you're right. So we were also creating an innovation pipeline, you know, kind of making sure that even a supervisor or an engineer on ground should have that kind of, you know, a setup, a mechanism where he can push his, you know, push his ideas top rather than it's going to be a top-down approach. It should also be a bottom-up approach because those people are actually facing problems on ground.

And to some extent, there's a stunning amount of money, of value that can be unlocked with those ground-up innovations. It's huge. And companies who do that get huge benefit.

Absolutely, Cj Meadows. So now I will go to, you know, I will kind of, you know, take your mind on a bit of consulting work that you have done. You know, whenever a consultant or a consulting organization start working with a client, The first thing what they do is that understand their processes. You know, what is, what is their process like? It's called the Agile process. And then they design an Agile process. So while they're designing the Agile process, Cj Meadows, you know, they actually start talking to a lot of technology products which can solve, you know, for that process and can make it a better process. And you must have been in that cycle a lot of times where you have to evaluate products from the market, see, you know, which will be the best fit for your client. And then get them introduced there. You know, what were some of the parameters that you used to look for while you discovered that kind of a product, evaluate them, analyze them? What was your process like?

To be honest, I haven't done a lot of that kind of work, but I have supervised a few projects that are, that are related to that. I mean, you have to understand the, the organization itself, what kind of strategic What kind of vision do they have and what kind of timeframe do they have? Are they actually agile? What sort of rollouts can they handle and what sort of, sort of data do they have and existing technologies do they have that the new software is going to have to integrate with? And one key reason to go out and get a consultant who knows about all of the different software products like an Accenture or somebody else is that they are independent. So, one thing is, you know, how stable is the technology itself? How stable is the company, the vendor itself? How integrated can it be with the existing systems? Don't take shortcuts in terms of identifying your processes and your data and your systems now, because I've seen companies later who they were like, oh my God, well, yeah, this is a great thing, but we didn't really understand ourselves first. Also, what kind of growth trajectory do the vendors have? What sort of innovation processes do they have? What sort of pricing and flexibility? I mean, IBM, for example, they realized a long time ago companies are not all going to be able to have multimillion-dollar system design, build, and integrations. And now they provide software as a service to startups, and they charge per API call, which is pretty amazing. That's a very non-IBM thing, you would think, but they're like, no, we just, we know you're at the beginning of your journey. We want to be there and grow with you as you grow. So, that's a very smart approach. So, which of your vendors are willing to take that kind of approach, etc.?

Now, we'll get back to your, you know, graduation subject. So, you graduated in finance and accounting, and you have You have done quite a bit of work around that, as I can see in your experience. Tell us, Cj Meadows, a few of the use cases of AI/ML coming on, which is helping the finance teams inside the organizations, maybe from your experience of working with various clients.

Hmm. Funny enough, I'm just about to teach a JPMorgan Chase case that's just been published at Harvard Business School on their use of AI. So one of the things that AI AI can do in financial services is everybody is accustomed to the AI companion, which as you're talking to a private banking client can say, oh, did you know we have these other products as well? And you know, you'll need to consider these issues as well. But with actually Streams.ai, Streams.ai is a platform for sales teams. Let's face it. Financial services organizations do traditionally operate with sales forces, basically. It goes way beyond the companion suggestion AI into actually having a score, a pulse score of the knowledge of the person who is selling. And financial services is extremely complex. So yes, it requires a great deal of learning and how confident that person is in presenting these financial services products, tools, and solutions. And that pulse score is directly correlated with customer satisfaction and the sales outcomes. So now, for the first time, you've got a metric for learning. So L&D budgets are always under threat. It's a metric that's tied to learning and the revenues, you know. So yes, we're going to invest in this thing because here's the money that we make with it and without. About it. So there's, there's tools like that that are very, very helpful. Another thing is, I don't remember if it's a financial services example or not, but KPMG studied one of their clients and their optional gamified learning simulation. And it was all about the products and services that the company offered. Nobody had to, nobody had to do the training, totally optional, but people started And then, oh my God, they got so much better at their job and it was measurable. And then they told other people and more people and more people and more people. And then they gathered the data to figure out that offices that use the training had 25% more new clients, a certain percentage more revenue, new revenue per client, and all kinds of metrics. So part of Part of what organizations need are those kind of tools. And part of what you need is to collect the data to figure out before, during, and after, is this really having an impact on us and on our clients? And there's tons of client metrics too. The spend per client, the longevity of the client, the speed to onboarding, how many new clients, first-time clients you're getting, you know, and the wallet share. There's tons of stuff. But you've got to figure out what data is going to make what case that you're interested in. So it all, it all requires a great deal of thought and you can have your GenAI help you with that. Yes. Another thing, another thing that's useful to these organizations, financial services is very, very cautious and rightfully so. Yes. So large language model, OpenAI is often not going to benefit from them because they can't release the data, but they can make small language model closed AI systems just for them.

This is very insightful because, you know, this is a nightmare for a lot of startups who are building in the financial spaces.

Yes.

Yes. Now I will kind of, Cj Meadows, I will, I will take you back to your, you know, recent adventure that you're doing at SPJ for the last 10 years. You know, you have been taking care of executive education. Innovation, entrepreneurship, you know, executive education plays a very important role because everybody, everybody can't go to a college for like 2, 3 years again to do an MBA or to do, you know, any, any other post, you know, postgraduate degree. There are a lot of people, you know, who have to work. Where do you see, you know, there has been, there has not been too much technology involved while, while you see, you know, the way in which executive education is being imparted. But as I was going through a lot of articles, what I found is that There's a lot of use of AI that's happening and imparting that education simulator, you know, case studies and all these things are coming up. Tell us a bit about how executive education is being transformed with the help of technology, you know, being in place.

Well, where we are, for example, I mean, let me, let me start off by saying that the industrial age model of education was learn, earn, return. You learn something, you earn money doing that thing you learned and then you stop working in the marketplace and return good things to society. Now it's learn, earn, return all the way through your lifetime. Yes. Everybody's going to be learning all the time, especially because everything is changing constantly and your tools are changing within 3 to 5 years. Your skills need to do the same. La la la la la. And learning is also the, the the linchpin of innovation. So the earning part, yes, you've got to keep an eye on that, but remember to tie the learning into the innovation, which helps with the earnings. And return, doing something meaningful. Organizations are really, it's not an AI issue. They're having to make sure that their workforce knows the good for society that they do and the good for their own people. And the good for their customers. So where I am, SPJ Global, we've got the AI-ELT, the AI-enabled learning tutor. It's a one-to-one tutor and it's a brilliant, brilliant tool. Proprietary. I've not seen it anywhere else. And I've got a video that I can share with you in which you can see real students interacting with the real AI-ELT. It's audiovisual and it's a conversation with what looks like a human tutor, you know, and it can coach you not only to learn stuff, but also to present it well. And another thing we have are the ELO Studios. So those are, those are, you know, terrific studios with like 75 people on a screen. Everybody's in the same position week after week. So one of the things that happens with those, those ELO Studios is that relationship development is much easier. And I can see everybody's name a lot easier. So I learn people's names and faces, and I know this person over there, I should have them do point-counterpoint with that person over there because I remember them spatially. And it's also supported by simultaneous translation because we've got global groups in there and the facilitator is full body walking around what looks like a television studio. Um, and it's very, very engaging. Another thing that I do is microlearning. Learning. So when I put out, put out a multimedia textbook on design thinking, and when I take groups, whether they're exec ed or MBAs, when I take people through them, they learn a little something with a video or, you know, reading or, you know, something really small. And then they've got to do an exercise or take, use that idea on your project, you know, and it's a little snippet of information and do something and share something with with the community, you know, and then your idea that is, that's out there, you're inviting feedback from others. And so you've got to give the feedback as well. And then people can also connect on that platform and co-create and collaborate outside of the platform. So a little learning, a little action, a little learning, a little action, a little learning, a little action. So again, it's the, it's the bringing together of learning and performance. So those are, those are some of the things. And then of course there's my digital twin. I came up with her before our AI ELT, and she's just a copy of me, an AI copy of me. I fed her my books, articles, videos, my websites, all kinds of stuff, and instructed her, hey, you are a digital version of me. And if all of this material doesn't cover what somebody's asking, then give a GenAI sort of response. And she has the capability to talk to ChatGPT and Perplexity and all these other kind of Gen AIs. But first and foremost, she helps people take the ideas and apply them to their situations. So there's a whole lot of the learning tech that's pretty cool and useful now.

Absolutely. And there's, you know, a lot of the institutions have a long way to go because if If you find even the very senior educational institutions in India, I feel executive education is somewhere, you know, not technologically enabled. And that basically leads to a person completing the education, say an MBA degree from a college through a distance learning or some executive thing, but he doesn't gain a lot out of it. But, you know, with the technology that you are talking about, I think it becomes very interactive. People learn and people actually contribute to their organization better. I think a lot of organizations will also be interested in sending their people you know, to colleges like yours.

Absolutely. And there's things like virtual reality, you know, for example, if in an MBA classroom, the executives are talking about a case, maybe, you know, like a car company putting, putting out a robotic factory and so forth. Well, fine, everybody put on your headsets and let's go. And you can take the whole class into the actual factory and talk with the factory manager and some of the workers and Everybody can see something different. Their eyes are going to different places and then come back into your shared online or physical experience. And you were really there. It's a richer, richer experience. Another, another thing that happened with the studio is that when we did the video for the ELO, the CEO of the company was traveling. So, okay, he couldn't be part of that, that case discussion, but we did a very Harvard Business School kind of thing. Which is one of my favorite things, have the actual CEO come in at the end of class. And he was calling in to our studio from Heathrow Airport between flights. So all of a sudden you can bring in the actual people to say, okay, after the case that you studied and you've been discussing, here's what we did as an organization and here's some new issues. And it's the conversations after the publications that are so valuable. You know, what's really, really new that hasn't even been written yet.

And that is so, so true. You know, executive education is good, but even at the school level, you know, Cj Meadows, I think there's a lot of role of AR and VR, which students kind of visualize the things, you know. So just for an example, you know, you're taught, you know, you're taught about soil erosion, suppose soil erosion, forestation, and all those things we read in the book as a second year, third year old kid. If this guy can have some set which can take him to the jungle and can kind of show him how this soil erosion is happening. And, uh, you know, how deforestation is affecting you. It has so, so great use cases, which I think are yet to be exploited. And, um, this will make the students innovative. This will help them avoid mugging up stuff, which a lot of students still do, you know, mug up the things and kind of vomit it inside the exams.

And one of the things that happened in one of my Design Thinking workshops was there was a particular— there were some groups who wanted to do some social good among some of the world's poorest people. So I'm like, yeah, yeah, my not-for-profit corporation works with those guys. And so they had audio-video experiences just with WhatsApp going out and getting a tour of a village and a villager's home and, and the situation that we were trying to to design for, and they talked to the people, some with translation, you know, so, so they had a real experience, but they didn't even have to fly over there. Just any day you want, you can connect with somebody and enter a new reality and learn and think about stuff that, yeah, these are the problems we need to deal with. Let's automate away some of the stuff that, that machines do better. But this is something that, you know, finding needs and handling unstructured situations is what humans are better at.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely right. This is what machines can't take care of because they work on data, which is already there, but they can't think of a foresight.

That's the point. When you have no data and you don't know what's wrong, you need a human for that.

Yeah, absolutely. Are you, are you only dealing with Singapore or you also come to this SP Jain India office as well? Because they have got an institution here as well inside India.

Yeah. So SP Jain School of Global Management is in Mumbai, Dubai, Sydney, now part of the SP Jain Group, London and Silicon Valley. So I've been, I've been to the Sydney, Mumbai and Dubai campuses. Silicon Valley and London are quite new. I haven't been up there yet. But yeah, yeah, I do get out some, but we've got people everywhere and there's a lot of value in that. People who know the local context.

Yes, absolutely. And I think the real value of MBA education is about globalization only because unless or until you see how other things are working, you know, you know, you can't kind of devise a strategy which is actually global.

And that's the whole, that's the whole idea of the school when it was founded a little over 20 years ago, as businesses have gone global. Well, so too, business schools should go global. Why are you going to sit in a classroom somewhere? You need to be out in different countries and you need to be integrated with the business community. So we do a lot of projects for like Google and UBS, and my design guys are doing Unilever projects and so forth. So work with the actual companies in the actual locations, helping with problems that are there and that are real.

It was great talking to you, Cj Meadows.

This is— Savni, take care.