Empires of Innovation | Episode 4: Resilience Rebooted

Welcome to Business Reimagined, the latest miniseries for Empires of Innovation. With Ozan Sonmez, we'll explore the evolving world of corporate innovation, where legacy structures meet groundbreaking ideas, and where the old rules get reimagined. We'll dive into the complex journey of reshaping corporate culture, fostering entrepreneurship, and crafting an environment where innovation can thrive even in the largest organizations. We'll examine how companies can overcome entrenched barriers and balance risk and stability and align with emerging trends to stay ahead in an ever evolving world. Whether you're a corporate leader, an aspiring intrapreneur, or just someone fascinated by how businesses transform, this series is for you. Join us as we uncover what it takes to build a future focused company culture and rethink the meaning of success in today's business landscape. Now, let's jump into today's episode of Business Reimagine. All right, we're back again.

Yep. You're getting tired of me.

No, it doesn't stop. There's too much to learn, too much to talk about.

I agree. I like talking about this stuff.

Yeah, me too. It's great stuff. And hopefully our listeners are enjoying the conversation. We are chatting about corporate innovation and innovation at, you know, huge organizations, small ones, how to involve entrepreneurship accelerators, how to shift company cultures. We, we've touched on a lot of different stuff in this miniseries, and this is our second miniseries. So first we started with tech for good. Now we're here. Who knows where we're going to go next? But I think, you know, this is basically our last episode for this miniseries, unless we think of more stuff to talk about, which maybe we'll circle back. But I wanted to just sort of do a reflection on, on all that we've talked about in the last couple of episodes and really just get some of your key insights for our, for our listeners.

So I think the, the major stuff that we talked about in our first episode was culture and how culture eats, strategy for breakfast stuff. And I think it's a good reflection again to touch because that's, it's elusive. Like, I recently read a book about Netflix culture, especially things that are revolving around their culture deck, their transparency culture, their ability to give significant amount of autonomy to their people, and actually their ability to say good performance gets a good severance package. I think that's a very interesting model where they are looking for outliers and if you're a good employee, which should be enough for everybody else, they give you a good service package and they let you go. If you're not the best. And seeking that inside a multi billion dollar company that's globally producing content, that's globally creating a footprint in entertainment, in education. Now they're into gaming as well. They do a lot of co development. They want to get as much of our free time as possible. So they're kind of going into all the mainstream models and they have a very counterculture to hiring. They have a counterculture firing and I think the results speak for themselves. So it did work. It's not like, oh, they're just going crazy and people will not like it. Like a lot of people will still want to work with Netflix even though they know when they did good, they'll be let go. So they have to do fantastic. And that is something very interesting when you see especially coming from large companies like Netflix and others are trying to emulate different models. And the book was really great because it talked about how difficult it was at the first stage of developing this culture, people not willing to let go of their fellow co workers when they did not do anything wrong. They did everything they could, but it's not just great. So I think that's a culture. So you need a set of people who would embrace that culture. And if there's no culture fit now this is all hugely talked about topic. We're looking for culture fit, we're looking for culture fit. If it's not just a buzzword, then it has to be defined, it has to be designed. And most companies don't do that. That's when it becomes very difficult. Especially like this is a difficult problem for startups when they have 10, 20, 30, 50, 100 people and imagine a company that has 1,000 people and now trying to build an innovative culture. That's kind of not going to happen. What could happen, and I think that kind of ties us to the second or third episode is you can create subcultures that are semi autonomous outside of the company, main body of the company. And if you give them autonomy, they can build their own cultures, they can have their own structures, they can have all their decision making tools. And as long as you don't interfere with the bureaucratic aspects of how you do things in the main company, those models could work. So I think it's, and I am looking into my bookshelf, business model innovation and almost all of the successful stories that I've read so far and I've been doing this for the last 10 years, definitely put people first, culture first and autonomy first. You need different sort of people that have a sense of Urgency that has a sense of ability to cope with uncertainty and ability to accept pain and misery and failure. Those people may not be in your own organization and if they are, you can still give them options, but by not forcing them to act differently than what the company requires, but just getting them out a little bit, giving them a little bit of autonomy and of course giving them clear vision. Why are you doing this at the first place? So I think a lot of companies are trying to do it internally because they have a very structured R and D function and they know what R and D does. So we give them a budget, they search on something, they improve 1 or 2%. Not anything breakthrough comes through that and everybody's kind of happy. That's not innovation theater, though. That's actually how R and D works. It's a little bit predictive, but there's very little risk taking and not much room for failure. But it works. It did work for years for large companies, but now, when things are changing very rapidly, that model of incremental improvements, incremental innovation does not work. And some companies are worried about new technology waves, recent one in robotics and AI. And most companies are freaking out about this. And they want to do something, either a corporate accelerator or they want to build a venture fund or they want to do a corporate venture fund themselves. They want to build partnerships with startups that's not in their DNA, that's very difficult for them to execute. I remember having a conversation with a large holding company that wanted to do this startup seeking or startup hunting program. And the first meeting ended with a disaster for us because we couldn't get the deal. And the reason we couldn't get the deal is I asked them, is your procurement department on board with this? And then they said, the person in the operation said our procurement structures will not change. So they have to go through SAP, they have to get the vendor registration, they had to do this. And I told them it's not going to work, so don't bother. I'm a terrible consultant. So I should have taken their money in order to say this, but I didn't because I don't want to waste my time as well. And I told them it's not going to work because startups don't have any, anything that would fit into the procurement structure that I have. And they were hell bent on changing that structure to work with startups. So I kind of challenged the wrong people with the right questions, but it didn't work out well and I have no idea what they did afterwards. And I don't think that's only me or my experience because large corporates fail to change how their main operation works when they want to do something different. And they can't give up on both. So they still want to do the same things, like business as usual, procurement as usual, finance as usual, every like branding as usual. But then on the other end, oh, we want to be innovative, innovative, innovative. It's not going to work. So I don't think it can survive easily at scale. So it could work in fringe cases, but I don't think it can be replicated, can survive at scale. When a company really wants to transform itself and really wants to be at the forefront of something that's happening either in technology or in social moments or in customer appetite. So it's very difficult for them to switch because of vested interest, vested structures, people's alignments, procedures and policies if they're publicly traded, their market price, their share price. So it's a really uphill battle for people inside corporates. And I think one of the best ways we talked about was corporate accelerator programs. So I believe grassroots movements are very important inside the company. So culture changing, culture infusing programs or structures can be embedded even if it does not lead to the company being completely transformed. It might help people to think differently and that's what we try to do and give them frameworks of different thinking and methods of working. And sometimes those methods of working are easy to replicate even in the existing structures. One example is like we focus on design thinking exercises and design thinking methodologies together with lean startup methodologies, together with customer discovery methodologies. And we always tie them to their existing infrastructure rather than just on new products and services. It definitely works on new products and services. But we also tell, even if it doesn't work with this new idea that you have, why don't you apply to your existing infrastructure, why don't you apply to your existing product line and discover what you could do better with your product line through the eyes of the customers, how you can prototype products faster for your existing customers or for your new customers and kind of change the methodologies that you already have inside, which did work but are not sufficient anymore. So I think those are the fundamental things we kind of touched based on in the first three episodes. I think this is the fourth.

Yeah, yeah, I think, yeah, you, I mean, you touched on all the key messages and I want to dive deeper into some of them. You've just mentioned accelerator, so I think I'm, I'm curious to know, you know if someone's just tuning in for this one episode, you know, how should companies go about deciding which model of accelerator best fits their needs? Like we talked about external collaborations, we talked about internal entrepreneurship. So intrapreneurship, or even a mix of that, how do they go about figuring out what fits?

So I have a methodology that I'd like to share freely with anybody who's interested inside the corporate trying to figure this out, which is they have to understand what will not get them fired. We teach entrepreneurs to think about the user as well as the customer. So we teach innovation professionals who are either tasked with this duty or, or who are newly assigned or who are executing some other function. But now they have found this new baby born in their hands and somebody told them, oh, now you run the innovation department as well as three other things in your hands. So it could be assistant general manager of product or marketing. I've seen many cases where a company doesn't know where to put this. They don't want to hire someone full time. So kind of give birth to a baby and kind of hand it over to a stepmom or stepdad. And I always ask those people, which is a little bit counterintuitive to most advisors and consultants that I know because I asked them very quickly and very like bluntly, like what would get you fired or and what will get you promoted. Those two things open up and sometimes a Pandora's box, because not many corporate employees are accustomed to hear that. And they don't like the idea of getting fired, although they like the idea of being promoted. So they might start with that. I'm okay. And the reason I asked this is I need to understand my user who is selling our products and service to their manager, who's the budget holder. But before they understand, before they kind of think through this question, they need to talk to their manager, they need to talk to their board, they need to talk to their decision makers. And what often comes is, I don't know. And that's risky. That's double risky. Because you even won't understand if you're successful or if you're not successful when you don't have a criteria to measure, like you need a yardstick, you need somebody to tell you, okay, here's what I think success looks like. Here's what I think failure will look like. And I keep telling this to a lot of people. There is no failure. We can design failure proof programs and it's not because we're geniuses and we know everything. We design a program to Understand and fit that culture, fit that answer. And if you design the answer as we will learn faster than we did before, we will test more ideas than we did before, we will give guidance and inspiration to more people than we did before. Those are easily attainable objectives. The KPIs that will come after that are very vague and that's the I don't know sphere. But we can always guarantee these three things. Faster learning, faster prototyping and getting feedback and faster culture change, adoption or infusion. It usually doesn't change much at the first couple of years. So any innovation manager who is tasked to do something different, something new, something more, quote unquote sexy, has to figure the question, has to figure the answer to a question. What will get you fired? What will get you promoted? Those are very far extreme events but we want to design for the extremes. And that's also another design thinking like mantra. If you understand the fringe cases, it won't be very easy to fill in the blanks in between. So if a corporate innovation manager wants to bring in new insights from customers, I think that's a good win that can help the rest of the organization as well. So it's not isolated to innovation department. They can work on problems that the company overall has with the products that the company already has in the market competing in the existing structure. So if an innovation manager wants to promote something, wants to build a program, they have to first prioritize. Let's learn what are we doing, what products are we having, what are the competition that's coming. And usually sometimes corporates miss out on those new cases where competition is already there. But they haven't realized it because their salespeople are still meeting their quotas. But challenges are if a market is expanding greatly, meeting quotas may mean you're actually losing market share. So maybe you should be pushing the quotas or adding new product mark product lines into that market infrastructure market need that your product team does not know because your product team has happy, everybody's happy, you get more sales, everybody meets Kota, products are done. But even staying at the same location or even improving your location doesn't change the fact that the world might be spinning faster than yourself. So the world is spinning faster than even a few steps moving forward is not going to be enough for you to even remain in the same position. So I think that's one key takeaway for any innovation manager, anybody tasked with an innovation principle, rule or job inside a corporation. And the second part is the learning. Apart from learning from the customers, they also have to learn by applying new prototyping methods, new product methods, new design tools and new service tools to talk to their customers. That's the easiest, very low hanging fruit. And if they want to test it with somebody else, that's when things get exciting. Okay, we never did consumer before. We're always a B2B company. And every B2B company has to touch a consumer at one point, most of them at least. So why don't we understand what our consumers, end users of our products, need and want? So maybe we can convert some of our knowledge and infrastructure to build something for our end users rather than building something for our B2B customers. So different business models can be explored not on some like flip a coinbase, but through insights gathered from customers that you want to learn from. And again, prototyping what you learn. Building is also a skill set that a company should learn and it can improve their existing processes as well. And also on the investing side, we have worked with companies who invest into their internal capacity with trainings, education and programs, but also invest as equity investments to people who are spinning out companies from them. Which is counterintuitive, but it also kind of refreshes the mindset and cycle of new talent. Some companies have a lot of talent. They've been sitting there for 10 years, 20 years, doing the same old stuff and they're excited to do something. Letting them go out when you have a piece of the pie is not a bad idea because the people that are coming in, they will be filling that gap and then you can have more fresh blood coming in. And all of a sudden you're not only changing how your talent, infrastructure, talent, composure is becoming a little bit more younger, more agile, but also the experienced people are now out there building companies that could potentially return money on their investment. So that level of I want my talent to be able to go out and do something and I want to invest in them is also a beautiful employee branding tool. When you really want young people to come and work for you, you need to show you actually help the existing people to go out and build outside. I think that's a risk that's, I wouldn't say risky, but it's rare when HR is aligned, finance is aligned and infrastructure is aligned. But when they're aligned and when they work in tandem, I think this tool has much more potential than just building a standard corporate accelerator program where there's education and learning, those are great stuff. But I think what really hits the market, if you're able to put new products and Services in the market with the people that are going out from your experience line with the brand equity. I think that's a very underutilized tactic or tool.

No, for sure. I mean, I think especially on the point of like new or younger employees, they don't want to like go into a position all the time and think that they have no way to move up or create change or, you know, make a difference. So yeah, I think that's, that's super key. And it touches back on one of our previous episodes about intrapreneurship and the, the role of that in creating these pockets of innovation within companies, within organizations. I think, you know, it's easy to say, or to look at another organization and say, yeah, you got an intrapreneur there going on, or whatever. But what would someone in management like, what sort of characteristics would leaders, managers look for in identifying these potential entrepreneurs? And, and how can they start providing the support that they need to, to really create and innovate?

So when everything that touches the human potential, there are huge variances in the answer to that question. Because everybody has a different mindset, different structure. So I'm not a big fan of personality tests because when somebody, when someone goes and looks into the history of those personality tests, Myers Briggs and others, there is very little scientific evidence that you can box people into one type. And I know people like to talk about their types, the letters. I'm not a believer of any of that. However, there are tools and I'll name one like the one that I use. The most frequent is Ray Dalio's principles view model. It does not tell the individual, it's not prioritizing the individual and give them a type. Because nothing in work environment is about the individual itself. It's about the team that individual is functioning in. So if any company wants to test this thing, and I have no affiliation, nothing whatsoever, except for respect and love for the whole thing. It helps you to understand who does work well in a team of three to five people, five to 10 people. And for innovation projects, you don't need 100 people to start with. Maybe at scale you need, but to start with, you need very small teams going around their own business and working closely together for a common goal. Learning, like empathizing, building insights from the empathy, testing those insights and bringing back the knowledge and to reiterate the whole process. So any manager who would like to find an innovation tool or innovation project, build something inside, should have that kind of tools available for them. And those tools are usually free, by the way. It's not like it costs thousands of dollars. And the other aspect is building external relationships. If you want to build any internal project within the company, with the internal people that had been in the company for 10 years, there are a lot of biases, there are a lot of blunt sides and they may not be on par with what's happening outside. So you definitely need to enroll externals how as trainers, mentors, coaches, one way or another, or advisory board members that have no execution power, but they're there to just give guidance and their blunt support and brutally honest feedback. So those are the really important things. I think a manager should go. Nothing can be built in isolation to the external world. Insight, information and guidance can come from the external world in a structured way and it doesn't cost millions. Internal people can be triggered, can have a grassroots structure where you see talent going back and forth. And it's usually very easy to spot the innovators in the company because they're usually the ones who are making the most noise about things they don't like. And we see this all the time. If an employee of a manager keeps suggesting new things, keeps complaining about new things that are tangibly worth of progress or exploration, not just change how the toilet paper works and which side of the air fryer. Like things that are not related to their comfort but related to their work environment in regards to their existing customers or potential customers. Those people are easy to spot. Inside any corporation that has, let's say 1,000 people, there is at least 100 people that will be very eager to test new things, learn new things, apply new things. It's easy to start projects, innovation camps, innovation programs, even to spin out organizations that will work the challenges. That's, that's how we connect to the employees going out and building companies and giving ability to others to move up. You need to fresh that pool. You need to have more people coming into that pool. Otherwise that 1,000 people will not be that 100 people out of the 1,000 will not be 150 or 170 or 200. It's not going to work unless you still have the same 1,000 people. So there has to be ways to incorporate external ideas, external models. And that's where venture models, venture builders are starting to take shape and to take importance in most of the corporates because what they do is like they bring in external talent that are usually technical and in marketing, they bring in corporate business mindset from internal and they blend them in together. But the desire is to just get it out immediately as soon as possible when there's validation. So this is why venture builder model works. There are different problems with that, but the fundamental reason why it kind of solves most of the problems is like the external internal moment. The managers already have a lot of people that would be trying to do new things, try to find new things, because, frankly speaking, a lot of people, a lot of large companies are pretty comfortable. It doesn't mean they're not working. People inside are not working hard. But usually if you have been an established player in your market for the past 10, 20 years, you are a little bit more complacent than most of the other guys because they're trying to prove something and you're kind of comfortable and disrupting that comfort may not be for the best, may not be for the interest of everybody in the company, so you don't need to do it for the whole company. But those people who are curious still have some more extra energy to put into ideas and projects. They can be fined, they can be utilized, they can be trained and mentored and coached far easily than innovation manager would like to admit, I should say, or HR managers would like to admit.

Yeah, that's for sure. I think this is a great recap of the last couple episodes and I think we can talk a little bit about the future of corporate innovation and some of these emerging technologies and trends that we tend to highlight in this podcast. But they're key to what you're doing, what we're interested in and what we're discussing. So I think maybe important for us to talk about is all these rapid advancements in AI and all these other technologies that are coming about. What sort of skills or new mindsets should companies be cultivating to remain innovative, to remain competitive, to really be considering as they look forward in this innovative space that we're, we're trying to facilitate.

So I have been trying to find the right framework to talk about the new wave of innovation, especially through AI. And I think the closest I got to is the, this, this following one. We had bits and atoms. The bits part is famously quoted like software is eating the world stuff. A lot of stuff is becoming digital. A lot of business models are becoming digitized. A lot of process now, like it's, it's really remarkable that at 2024 you're still talking about digital transformation, transformation. Most companies, digital transformation, government, digital transformation in X and Y. We're kind of late on that, but that will catch up. And what's being caught up is like atoms, when the physical infrastructure is being Digitally transformed with bits. So to function better, more efficiently, more productively, I will add to that kind of in. In between all the quants and the robotics. So traditional bits and atoms were software and hardware. Now we have quantum stuff coming up as well as robotic stuff coming up. So it's another layer that is becoming more entangled with each other. What I see happening in most corporates is they are just barely scratching the surface of this whole digital transformation stuff. Most of them are done, they are efficient, they're working, everything's digitized. Although there are some pockets of their operational work that is still pretty manual. And that's always surprising when you see that in a very large company. Geographical boundaries have caused a lot of discrepancy between how the first world is acting and how the third world is acting, sometimes the other way around in mobile technologies. For example, the African continent is far more advanced and far more able to build mobile technologies rather than old web technologies because they just leapfrogged the whole thing. So I think we're going to have another leapfrogging. I don't know where it's going to be, but at least I know it's not going to happen in the US or Europe. Leapfrogging is not going to happen. And significant investment and funding will still be in the US but some pockets of insights and some pockets of deep innovation will happen in places like Salvador, where the central bank is now working on crypto and everything will be crypto and everything will be digital money, digital currencies and everything around that. So it's a small country making a huge leap of faith in the crypto space. I think recently I saw one central bank that started bitcoin mining. That's very significant, that's disturbing to the existing infrastructure. So crypto robotics embedded with AI. So AI having the sense and robotics having the action, none can do that without each other. And then coming maybe in the next leap, but probably sooner than I thought, I think is the quantum leap where things will be very different and difficult to manage for the financial sector, especially to keep a hold of their value in the market. So I think those are the things that are coming not in 10 years or 20 years like they are right around the corner. So corporates should start finding ways to educate their people on the possible futures, possible scenarios of different futures. And this cannot be done by just inviting one famous keynote speaker with a best selling New York Times best selling book once every year to their large gathering of the. It has to be done on a regular basis. One example I give, usually I stopped watching anything on YouTube. I really don't have that much time, but when I do, the first page I go to is like Google talks. Google invites these crazy people and stuff. Interesting, not necessarily always about business. It could be about ancient Mayas or another research. So there's a lot of interesting talks there. And those are the methods where you kind of have interest groups inside your company, especially if you have more than a thousand people, especially when you have different geographies of operation. I think companies will be more global not because they are just willing to branch out and access the markets of other countries, but because the people of other countries will have a lot more to add into the main structure of the company. And when you have that kind of principle of finding global talent, giving them the floor to build something global, not build in us and carry it forward with good operations, good structures, but actually building something Global from day one. That's why Web3 is an important space where everything is decentralized by nature and everybody working is decentralized by nature. Or when you go to robotics, it's still functionally location driven, but when you have the AI working in a different infrastructure and then robotics being built and then is applied is using the same structure elsewhere, I think those will be interesting topics. One example is probably the first global one that we see is Tesla. Like the car is actually just a robot that carries things with heavy use of software and AI inside. So we are inside it. It doesn't seem like the Terminator robot that we are inside it, we're not. But like when you look at it, it is a machine run by software and it swallows us and our goods and things and takes us from point A to point B. So it's the first mobility robot on working with software. And when you frame it that way, there will be a lot of those coming over. And it doesn't need to look humanoid for us to get scared about it. And we actually don't need to be scared about it. I write dystopic and news topic short stories and I sometimes freak out about the stuff that I write, but that's the nature of it. But it also helps me think, what are the safeguards? What are the insurances against the overlord story of oh, they'll come and they'll get us. We had a lot of these overlord stories with aliens. Now we have a lot of overlord stories with AI and robotics and like killer machines. It's an interesting time to be thinking about this stuff.

It is for sure And I think just touching on sort of the comments about internal employees at organizations and opportunities to learn and grow. I mean, we have to hope that learning and development manager is internal communicators. You know, all those folks have this stuff in mind and are encouraging learning opportunities and sharing opportunities about these sort of topics because that's also how you drive innovation, is the opportunities that you offer inside an organization. So I think just to flesh out the AI topic a little bit more, I think we have to touch on sort of the ethical ramifications of engaging with it. And also for large corporates, large companies coming in to work with it, how do we really maintain an ethical adoption of these technologies?

So this is the trickiest piece because our species have not yet figured out the ethical way of living and value creation and preservation of life, liberties and opportunities. That's pre AI. We haven't figured this out. Cultures are still clashing. It's an age old phenomena. A lot of people are still debating about the merits of population control. So we haven't. Humans haven't figured out this human thing yet. I just came back from Azerbaijan, baku, where the COP 29 is happening and the majority of the discussions will be, starting from tomorrow will be on what are we going to do about this one place that we live in? And there is no agreement on site. So given that bias, cultural bias, economic bias, natural bias, natural resources bias and national interest bias, we are completely biased. We're biasing ourselves out of the planet. And then on top of this, we are building a technology layer that is learning in ever growing pace with ever growing data that is generated by this bias animal. So of course that AI will by itself by definition will be biased. And when there's, well, we can talk about philosophy and ethics forever, but we can't come to grasp when we have. I don't think like this has been scary. I've been reading a lot of philosophy and a lot of history recently to kind of help me connect to my utopian dystopian future building stuff. And we were a couple million people at one point. We were a billion people at one point. We were far less smaller than how we are now in terms of size and number and complexity. And even then we could not have figured this shit out. There's schools of thought evolving by human progress, but no school of thought has dominated what is ethical, what is culturally appropriate, what is the future of humanity, what's the meaning of life. So we're always still in constant flux of new ideas, new terminologies. We're learning as individuals, but it doesn't seem like to be a societal waking up moment yet. So therefore our AI, our children of immense power and strength will have its own flaws. It's like the children of Kronos Zeus and all his brothers and sisters who just did great stuff but ran mayhem into the planet as well, if one believes in mythology. So I think the ethical piece is very complex because whoever runs the data, whoever feeds the machine the data, will by default build in their biases. The good story out of this dystopic chaos is it will be easier to track what is biased because the tool will be used to solve real world problems. I think there's a great documentary on Netflix or any one of those streaming platforms that has traced down AI decision making algorithms through their results. And because the results are biased, they can go back and say, okay, here's why it was biased. I think one example was how much banks have accepted loan applications from the minority. And it actually reflects how much the bank is doing already. So it reflects what the bank fed them, but it does not necessarily mean that's what it should be. So when you see the result of the tool applied to a decision problem, decision making problem, you can argue about the results, you can comparatively navigate the results and dissect it into functions. Say, okay, this is the piece that's not working. This should not have been the case, but you need some output. You can start rolling back from the output, but if there's no output that we see, then it becomes a complete paradigm shift because we can't even know how it impacts. And if you can't know the output, if you don't see the output transparently, there is probably very little chance that we can come back and say, okay, here's white, got the output that's obviously biased. So we have to see the outputs clearly. And when we do that, then there's a chance to go back and retrain the kid to say, okay, here's the output. I know why you did it. No blame. Here's the data, here's how you do. You have to do it differently. So we can try and retrain the models to be more unbiased, which is hypothetical and again biased against who. So people who are in superior position, who are in position, power would like to be having results that are biased towards them. So then it becomes all this power dynamics question. Whoever runs the algorithm will decide on the outcome. And if the outcome is fuzzy and kind of hidden away from transparent eyes, then we'll not going to have Any, any tool to fix it. So that's this topic overlord technology, overlord story that kind of creeps into all my writings as well at one point or another. But that's also the reality. Data is biased. People who are using the data train, the algorithms are biased, therefore the outputs are biased. But you have to be in a position of power to contradict that outcome and output and then fix it. But without the power, why should anyone fix, even if, even if, when it's biased? So in a way, that's the dystopia that we're living in. For some, that's the utopia that we're living. Because decision making will be as it should be, because the data has been that way, so it should be that way. And I said that's a discussion that will not end anytime soon.

Definitely not. I mean, I think, you know, maybe the lesson out of that is that companies that are thinking about adopting this sort of technology or working with it more and more need to have these sort of checks and balances in place. Yeah. And need to consider also how they're utilizing this, these technologies. You know, what, what's the purpose? Why is it coming in? You know, how's it being used? Does it need to be reevaluated multiple times or not? Yeah, there's a lot to, to consider, especially with the ramva. Patient ramifications of decisions that are made by AI or otherwise. True. I think it's super intriguing and I guess I would close out with asking you for corporate leaders and for innovators, what advice would you offer to building a resilient, future ready organization that continuously innovates and continuously contributes to the society that we're in.

So I like the world. I like the word. Nassim Talib put. I think unfragile resiliency is a big part of it and unfragility is a big part of it. So corporate leaders, I think we can also divide them into two. Like people who are decision makers on behalf of shareholders are the leaders that should educate the shareholders. So there's a lot more responsibility and there's the shareholders, and the shareholders are the people who are reaping the benefits of the work of the corporate leaders. And I think the world is more fragile, the companies are more fragile and the people who should turn those companies into unfragile, resilient entities should be given more authority as well as more ownership of the results. We had started seeing a huge gap of pay between CEOs and shareholders and everybody else. I think there has to be more transparent conversations on making sure we understand the result of this huge discrepancy. Yes, it's great for CEOs, they get hundred and seventy. I mean, I think we are at the point in the financial history where the multiple between an average salary of a company worker being the least in comparison to the CEO's pay grade. So that pay grade multiplication difference starts to make no sense when the leaders in that company down the CEO level are not feeling part of the wealth creation anymore. I mean, there's nothing wrong with wealth creation. We can argue about the best ways that capitalism or is it a kind of social version of it? Everybody discusses that. I think that's going to be another discussion point. I'm really curious. I write a lot about, but I think the wealth transformation, wealth sharing with the company itself is going to play a huge role in turning that company into a more resilient, more antifragile organization. As the individuals in the company are being more trained, more educated, more efficient through the use of new technologies, they will want to have more share of the wealth they're part of creating. And that is going to start playing a bigger role, I think, in how decisions should be made. Because companies who don't share that wealth well enough to incentivize people to do their best at work, to incentivize people to be on top of new technologies, on top of new thinking models, on top of new business models, they will start to crumble and there'll be acquisition targets, they'll disappear by name and brand. And yes, of course the majority of the wealth will still be transferred into shareholders and CEOs and, or at a C level. But again, those structures can be made more antifragile, can be made more resilient if there is more decision making autonomy if there is more wealth sharing and I think if there's more survival biases removed from decision making. Survival bias in the sense that, oh, we have survived for the past 50 or 60 years, 100 years, we'll keep on surviving. When you are surviving and you think you're the only one, you're the smartest one, you may not know what's going to hit you because survival is not by default anymore. So the large companies of yesterday are disappearing faster than ever. So every company has to have this survive, has to be aware of the survival bias. Oh, we are good. Because whatever we did paid off because we survived. That may not be the case going forward. So most companies have to understand building a more resilient infrastructure and culture and organizational workforce requires to change a few things in wealth sharing, in decision making and autonomy. And I hope innovation leaders and managers can become the canary in the mines who can kind of notify the powers to be about what things are new, how things are changing. So they have a major role to play inside corporates in letting everybody know that there's another way, maybe there could be another way, like can be another way to test new things. And I think they have more to do than building corporate accelerator programs or innovation programs. They can play a pivotal and critical role in the future of their companies.

I think that's a beautiful way to close out this episode and this mini series. So that was great. Thanks so much. I think your insight is, you know, it's a lot, it's a lot to think about, it's a lot to reflect on and I think there's a lot of learnings there. For anybody that's tuning in, may the.

Force be with the people who are trying to do something new in the corporates.

Definitely. Yeah. All right, take care.

See you.

Thanks so much.

Take care. Bye bye.

We hope today's conversation has offered fresh insights into the world of corporate innovation and sparked new ideas for research reimagining what's possible within established organizations. Don't forget to subscribe to Empires of Innovation for deeper dives and more forward thinking discussions. For more about Ozan's work in the innovation space, visit www.mrozonsomez.com. this is business reimagined for Empires Innovation. Signing off.