Miniseries: Startup Mind, Corporate Grind – Episode 1: Why Ideas Die Inside

Welcome to Startup Corporate Grind, the latest miniseries from Empires of Innovation with Ozon Sonmez. We'll explore the fundamental disconnect between the industrial era corporation and the modern entrepreneurial workforce. This series confronts the uncomfortable truth that the old corporate structure wasn't built for this generation and this generation wasn't built for it. We'll dissect why shiny employer branding fails to attract the builders and creators you need, why corporate startup partnerships are a dangerous trap that can bankrupt a young company, and how the very definition of a job is being rewritten. Whether you're a corporate leader frustrated with your inability to attract talent, a founder navigating the treacherous waters of corporate partnerships, or a recent graduate facing a choice between creating value and becoming unnecessary, this series is for you. Join us as we challenge the obsolete rules of work and explore what it really takes to survive and thrive when a startup mindset collides with the corporate grind. Now, let's jump into today's episode.

All right. Welcome back. Good to see you.

Good to see you too.

Are those anxious or excited jitters?

Yeah. The third miniseries and this is a, this is a very tricky one.

Tricky, but should be good for everybody listening 100%. I think anybody could who's listening could really think of a lot of topics that might come to mind with exactly short description. But this miniseries is going to be about why we can or cannot attract and or keep entrepreneurial talent. So pretty interesting topic. We've touched on entrepreneurs, we've talked about, about intrapreneurs, we've talked about corporate culture, we've talked about what you do, the work that you and your team do as well. And I think this kind of brings it all together in a way.

It does, yeah. I, I think it also brings the topic to real life decisions made by a lot of people because at the end of the day, young people are struggling to find out the best education path in order to find the best employment path in order to find the best fulfillment path in life. And this whole ties the whole conversation together.

So pertinent topic, I think.

Agreed. Cool.

So I think we should kick off with sort of the big question that people might be asking themselves why their employer or why their employer's brand doesn't attract builders. So we talk a lot about employer branding. We sometimes purchase products because of branding or maybe the company sounds really good.

Or there seems like they're doing great stuff.

But as we know, glossy websites, career pages listing great values, videos of exciting team outings on a boat or in some tropical place. Yeah, you Know that can be employer branding. But if you're trying to attract people who build, real builders, not people who check boxes, all of that really could be missing the mark. So I think the question to kick off with is what do entrepreneurial minds actually look for in a place to work where they can build, where they can be successful, where they can contribute.

So the question is pretty on point for many reasons, one of which is companies keep telling we care about talent, we care about talent. Talent is our number one agenda, especially HR divisions, human and culture divisions. But when they define talent, they define it in a pretty vague manner. Most of them still look into talent from a very diploma or credentials perspective. Where did you graduate it from, which department, who did you work with, et cetera. So very credential oriented, which is of at best a poor sign of competence and poor sign of intellect or interest. Whether they graduated from this school or that school, knowing how they got there, which is solving tests, does not necessarily mean that's how they're going to be adding value to the company. So that's one area which is we feel it's broken like not being able to find the right people because the system is not designed for that. The second part of that puzzle is not just the HR divisions, but a lot of research and development divisions. New product development, new innovation divisions are trying to find people that will add value to the company and add value in a sense that they'll come with new ideas, they'll come with new tools and techniques. However, the companies are usually not welcoming everything new. And in our last miniseries we talked a lot about the corporations not being able to host or cultivate innovation or innovation that's not just 0.1%, 1% improvement in revenue, but literally creating or disrupting their own business models, finding new solutions to new to existing problems in different ways that are demanded by new technology or new cultural change or new economic changes. So everybody talks about talent, talent, talent. But when you look outside and try to check which is the right talent to hire to create innovation or run innovation projects using the old methods, old designs don't work, but they still do it. Why? Because there is nothing to give them the right measurement, right guidance in their hiring process. How do you hire an entrepreneurial talent different than you hire somebody that will do a normal job? And that's the challenge. So most hrs are not equipped with the right tools and sources and they look, they just look for a different division. They look for entrepreneurship innovation degrees, which is okay, fine, but again, still the same decision making Tree, which is false. On the other side of the equation, we have young talent. For most of them, entrepreneurship is an option. Now it might not have been the case when I graduated from university. It was seen as very risky. You would need a lot of money. But today a lot of young adults at college age want to try their chances of building a story. Right reason, wrong reason doesn't really matter. Right methodology, right methodology doesn't really matter. But they want to do it. So they're inspired to become entrepreneurs, nurse. And usually when that endeavor, that inspiration doesn't get fulfilled. Whether they try it and can't get revenue, can't get the product, can't get investment, or they can't find a co founder, they start alone and it doesn't work. Learning by doing is the only way to move forward. But after they try and they turn, there is no doing left and they have, they run out of money and they need to work. And unfortunately, companies are not equipping theirselves are not creating employer brands, attracting these talented individuals who might have a really strong sense of what they want to do, which is building, creating. They just don't have the right infrastructure or the right resource allocation. So they want to create and they need resources to create. They need people, they need insights, they need the brand name and sometimes easier to start those things inside the corporation. But they too never seem to be coming together as frequently or as easily as they should be coming together.

Definitely. I think, yeah. I mean it's a big question also about what employer brand even means to an entrepreneur or entrepreneurial talent today. Like is it really the big name? Is it the culture that's innovative?

Is it?

Yeah. What about it would really bring in an entrepreneur or someone who has that talent or that skill or that even that interest could be enough.

True. So what we. So at Sage, we deal with a lot of young people and we tell them something very interesting. As an observation, when you look into the last four years of anybody's graduation rollback four years ago, and when you ask those people at graduation which companies they would like to work with at my age, that difference would be the same. When I was growing up, when I was graduating, the answer I would give at my fourth year would not be so different than the answer I'll give my first year. Even like maybe even longer because the pace of change, of attracting new companies were not that much. So large companies are always large companies, I want to work with them, etc. But now these days, especially since 2005, 2008, almost a unicorn is being created every week, even, even amidst the recent financial backlash and everything that's going on in the US and the rest of the world. If on average one company, one private company was becoming a unicorn every week for the past five weeks, that makes at least 200 companies. These 200 companies are no longer small startups built in somebody's garage that nobody has heard of. These companies have a lot of backing, a lot of capital, a lot of talent, a lot of technology, a lot of services and products being born out of them that are not always business to business facing, but some of them are B2C based. So all of a sudden what you have is when you get into college in your first year, you start using a new thing that your friends really liked. And by year two it becomes ingrained in your skin, you can't live without that app. And by year three you start trying to figure out where you want to work. And the minute you see that companies advertising or really looking for a product manager, we're looking for somebody to work in finance, we're looking for xyz. So the minute you see that company looking for talent, you will be inclined to go for that one of course, because that's the app you've been using. So the strength of consumer facing startup, especially consumer facing startups, had been super important in their own branding, employee branding purposes. So they know they can get to their users and they don't need to convince them this is a beautiful startup, this is a beautiful company to work with. So they have a huge advantage. Older companies that are 20, 30, 40, 100 years old companies, they don't have that brand user connection to most of these young adults anymore because they haven't been innovating themselves. Their products are more or less the same with the products that my mother used. So they're not cool. And they don't actually come to you and propose an opportunity to do something new. They'll telling you, oh, you're going to be doing something similar people had been doing for the past 20 years, they just moved on, they became now managers. Now there's an empty space for new vacants. You're going to come and you do exactly what everybody else had been doing before you. That's not a very appealing story for young people. And they don't want to feel like they're just another continuation of the business machine. They not to know they want to contribute, they can contribute, there's something they can add. So even that framework or this is a moving company. The people before you now become managers. So here's a career ladder that doesn't seem a lot of enticing opportunity for young people these days. So the companies that are not out there creating new tools, new technologies, new services for the young people are starting to feel that they are no longer number one in the list for companies to work for. And they try a lot of things, trying to put them into the best places to work with lists. They try to put them, put themselves in front of the young people by sending their recent hires to universities to attract people. But again, when you look into a builder, if they see sorry for your friendship, they see bullshit from afar. They understand it's. And unfortunately the disadvantage, and I've seen this in action, probably YouTube. You start seeing somebody in your university presenting a company, oh, we're this cool, this important, these are the opportunities. But you can follow that person on Instagram very quickly, on Twitter very quickly, and you start seeing that person was complaining hell out of their workplace. They're desperate, they're miserable, they're like shit, naming their company because that's what there are like real life person is complaining about the company and you see them miserable in their work life. And it's not that difficult to do that. Like go to a company, look into LinkedIn, try to find these people's private lives. Then you can actually try to really understand like are they happy or not, that that's obviously out there. And yes, companies are trying to stop their employees to name and shame what's happening inside the company. But in this day and age, like if 10% of a thousand people company is just very open, very honest and actually they have given up on the company, they will just say everything that's true and happening in the company and that's not going to be nice. And this day and age, these young people are very accustomed to hear what their peers are saying. They can dig through a lot of things. They can see who is paying, they can see who's being mobbed. And those circles of informal communication come and bite large companies in the ass.

Definitely. I mean the, the famous saying is misery breeds company. Right? So it's, it's easier to complain and, and have somebody commiserate with you on it always. So, I mean, yeah, regardless of the fact that some of these companies can be totally crappy to work for and folks still go out and advertise at, you know, universities or on webinars or whatever to attract new talent, I mean, if we were looking at a legacy company, we're looking at an old Corporation. And we're trying to think about rebranding it for, for, for builders, for innovators, or for young talent who have this wish to be entrepreneurial or innovative. Where would you start in that rebranding process?

So apart from just putting on walls, communicating values is the core of any good sales, any good marketing approach. What do you stand for? And it's very difficult for large companies to be very clear on what they stand for because they have customers in all walks of life. And when you are going through a polarized economy that is suffering through wealth redistribution issues, growth issues and anything else, if you are a company in that sense, you can't polarize yourself, you can't pick a side. But that also means you don't kind of stick to your values, which is not the best thing. We see this in the technology companies especially for example, which is really hot topic. Gaming companies. Gaming companies, they're doing something fun by default, but they're also very demanding by default because it's, they require a lot of investments, they require a lot of talent and they require a lot of creative talent, they require a lot of operation talent, they require a lot of marketing talent and measurement talent and data analytics talent. So AI talent. So these companies are really looking for the best of the best and competing with the large brands and large companies. But they are actually pretty clear about what they're looking for. And they take stance, they take sometimes very political sense, sometimes very environmental friendly sense. So they make themselves known for what they stand for. And I think it's an advantage of startups against large companies. Startups can really start being putting values at their core and live by that until they got to a larger state. And large companies, I think they can easily start with values, but they also need to not talk to talk, but walk to walk, which they have hard time doing. The minute they say, oh, we're very innovative and you look into their product portfolio and they have no new products for the past 10 years, it doesn't count. Like innovation is like a value for you. And again, as we said, young people can smell bullshit from afar. So if you're really looking to brand yourself, don't do the general marketing, messaging, branding stuff like oh, we're very innovative, we're looking for the 21st century talents. And your website doesn't load really fast on the iPhone. It doesn't mean like you're, you're paying attention. So lib servicing doesn't make too much sense. So they really need to meet it and they also need to show it sometimes there's a huge disconnect. And we discussed about corporate entrepreneurship, how it's not being able to filter real change or creates real change. It gets filtered out when economics don't work in our previous miniseries. So I believe a lot of the work that needs to be done from the corporate side is actually find out the islands of innovative talent that's necessary to be deployed into the company use, maybe even like reverse engineer that process where I need people to be more innovative and to create new things. In this division especially, it may not be the finance division, but it may be the marketing division. So if you're hiring for people in marketing, you really need to go and say, do we really want people who are innovative? There's just wanting people to become innovative is also not the best idea. If you don't have the right structures, you might get a lot of people with a lot of new ideas. But if you don't give them the right place or the right structure, they'll start leaving, which is going to create more costs for you and which is going to create more bad mouthing after these people are gone. So you need to be really careful in what you wish for. And not all companies should look for entrepreneurial talent to create new products and services. But all companies need to find ways to give back. And sometimes that giving back even starts with clearly identifying values. If you're saying we care a lot about the environment, we like to leave a people planet profit measure, we want to live them measurably, then just don't leave your freaking lights on for all the stores that you have, 24 7, for example. So they don't need to have entrepreneurial talent. But entrepreneurship is more value creation. And when that meets, I want to create value for this and this is the company I want to create value for because they trust in this, they believe in this, they have a value for this. So people are also looking for ways they will be heard, they will be listened, and they have a value that they share with an entity. It's not easy, but starting with values I think is a good way to start thinking about it.

And I think maybe that's hard for some corporates that could be listening right now to think about if they're trying to be more attractive to a younger audience, if they're trying to be more attractive to builders and innovators. You know, these values have been, could have been around for decades, right. And they don't always lead to the most innovative solutions, the most innovative people. So how do you go about, you know, looking at, at what's there, what structures are there, what values that are already in place and think about, yeah, rewriting them or how to twist them in a certain way that can enable more innovation.

So I think for some companies, it's really difficult to be honest with themselves. Especially we know this from large companies. If things are working, nobody wants to change stuff. So when things are not working, everybody freaks out and they say, okay, what are we going to do next? And it may be too late. You might not have the right people to manage a company in terms of turmoil with the people who knew how to manage that company where anything's peaceful. I think there are a lot of military analogies. In different times, you need a war general. In different times, you need a peace general. Because it's a different thing to manage an organization during a wartime. It requires different skill sets, different assets versus managing a military operation during peacetime or military existence during peacetime. So this is very important for senior executives to understand what are the challenges that the company will be facing for the next five years. And of course, they can't change everything. The large company culture, people they hire, they can't change it overnight. They can't change it based on, oh, I see, there's a problem. I need to find a better team. I need to change my structure. However, as we talked a lot in our previous miniseries, I think the way to incorporate new talent into the organization is to create smaller organizations that are semi independent, that are resourced enough, they have a different direction of operation, they have a different reason for being. And the major dilemma is always, oh, we already have an R and D department. Why do we need new products and services? We will hire just new talent who are entrepreneurial into our R&D department. They're going to kill both of each other. So they'll be on their throats from day two. You need the right models, systems of thinking to bring in innovation into the totality of the entity without needing to get a few startups here and there are a few people who are interested in entrepreneurship with success and put them into the company. And this mistake has been done many, many, many times. When a large company goes out and buys a small company, a startup, there is always a fight when they want to incorporate them and kind of have them operate and do exactly what the large company is doing the way they had been doing. It doesn't work out. So most of the buys, buyouts and M and A had been failures because they underestimated the differences in culture and Operations and understanding the ones who had been successful. Mostly it's much like hiring a company, hiring an individual who's very talented and giving him the worst jobs and worst structure. Same as buying a company with a lot of talent, with a lot of revenue, with a lot of opportunity and service and product and kind of swamping them into the same location. So you need to have different structures to make the best out of the people. And sometimes it's creating structures outside if you really want to build new companies and new products and new services. But sometimes also finding the right change agents to change the culture in the company to become more innovative, to become more appealing to young people. So there's an aspect of culture change which doesn't happen quickly. Understanding you need a culture change will require different tactics and different tools and also understanding there's new technology coming and we need to make the most out of it in terms of value creation. And then you acquire different infrastructures. Depends on where you are as a company in your growth journey. You might start thinking about doing things and building programs that will change or impact the culture a little bit. And also if you really need, if you feel there's a opportunity, you're missing out, you need to move fast. Then you need the right talent to come to you and work for you. But maybe not in the large company setting, but some skunk works setting, maybe somewhere away from the company, somewhere away from the institution.

So if we're talking about attracting talent and we're looking at who actually does that in an organization that happens to be most typically human resources, and somebody in recruitment who's tasked with finding this Persona that fits, you know, builder, innovator, entrepreneur, however you like, whatever adjective we should use in this context. Context. But does HR really communicate effectively how to attract that person? Like is what they write on the job, you know, description, exactly what we need for an organization and how does that work? If we're even thinking about a culture shift now or in the future in an organization, how do you really navigate that sort of distance between HR and what the company strives to be in the future?

So I think in large companies, especially who have 30, 50, 100 year old histories behind, just blaming on the weatherman, just blaming and putting everything into the hands of HR is not fair. Because when you task HR people that are in recruitment, in talent hunting, I'll go find this new talent that are entrepreneurial, that are innovative, that's almost like telling them climb Mount Everest with a week of exercise. That's, that's not going to work, that's not going to happen. So HR and culture divisions need a lot of support from senior management when it comes to issues around culture change when it comes to issues around not just finding the right talent at early stages or entry level positions, but also finding talent in mid management stages, finding talent in C level stages. So of course job descriptions and roles matter a lot, but they also need to be supported with the C level. So some companies that we work with have taking human centered design approach a lot of into their workforce in its entirety, including new hires, including employer branding opportunities, including insider happiness indexes and measuring them. So one good example is a bank that we work for. And I realized that I didn't realize how important our corporate entrepreneurship work was for them in terms of attracting new talent. But I figured it out when I entered to the branch of that company and I saw in large screens the intrapreneur that I mentored. We built the program for them and I mentored intrapreneurs. They are now external companies, they operate outside the bank. But the program we built was only for the people working for that bank. And then I realized, well, I'm outside. I met a branch where it's not in the company. Now a lot of customers are coming in and this is a good real estate. Like why are they not presenting the latest loan product or the latest credit card brochure or anything that's commercially more viable? But why are they advertising inside the bank's branch this entrepreneur that just spun out of the company? And then I realized it's talking the talk, walking the walk. They are using that entrepreneurship program that I worked with to create with my colleagues and peers, which leads to inside employees to become more entrepreneurial. Nothing from the outside, completely internal. And that internal pool of innovators and entrepreneurs are running through a program, getting a lot of mentorship and then spinning out as separate companies doing some new product and service that the bank has nothing to do with. And this process, although it's very internal, is broadcasted to the rest of the world through advertising on branches, through radio jingles on for everybody, for the whole crowd, for the whole community to hear. And then I realized they're sending a message. They're not just saying, oh come, they're not branding themselves or come work with us and become an entrepreneur. That's not what they're doing. They're saying, here's a company that's giving opportunities to individuals who want to create their own companies and go outside the network. That is new, that is strong. And I Think most companies can take these learnings and can work through understanding that connection of what you do internally can become a huge asset to attract new people with the belief, with the knowledge and with the examples. They see everywhere that oh, if I work for this bank, I might have a chance to join an entrepreneurship program and I might actually graduate from the bank with an investment and build my own company. Yeah, I'll go with that bank, that bank. If five banks give me an offer, I'll go with that one. Because there's an example of culture change and of course that is really smart on a strategical level because the more people you have coming into the organization with the hopes of doing something different, they start bringing an innovation, entrepreneurial mindset immediately to the company. And that's why that is a very long term strategy. So we are doing our best to help the bank find the right opportunities, build the right business models, spin out the right companies, invest in them. But the bigger win for the bank will be I need to create more products and services faster. I need to be attractive to young people. In order to do that, I can start working inside, but I'm not going to change everyone and I'm not going to make everyone entrepreneurial. This is a hundred plus year company. But what I can do is like I take people from inside and spin them out. I bring in people with new insights, new information, new aspirations and all of a sudden everybody on the inside already knows they can be an entrepreneur. Everybody who's coming in as a new employee, they're not coming in and be an entrepreneur. They're coming in to work for the bank, to work for the branches, to work for whatever positions are. But all these people are aspirationally more closer to what I want the company to be culturally relevant in the next 10, 20 years. So that becomes a long play. Rather than oh, I want new people, I want them to be innovative, I want them to be entrepreneurial. Without touching the culture, you can't do it, you can't change the culture in day two, day three, year one, year three. But you can start showing examples internally which you can broadcast externally. And with the people you bring in with that external broadcasting, employee branding, you can start changing culture from within so that fresh people will have a better understanding of what they will need to do to do that. Kind of run the full circle. And that's actually probably the smartest application of corporate entrepreneurship in being used in employer branding for corporate entrepreneurship. Branding and attracting new talent.

For sure. I mean, when you think of banking, you think Old. And that definitely changes the game for a lot of people who would, who would bank with them. Right?

100.

That's pretty cool.

It's definitely a much better strategic opportunity the bank is creating than just creating a product for young people. Oh, now we have a young people, a teenager credit card or we have a first employee. Okay, fine. That's a product. Yes, you should do that. You should do product innovation going back and forth. But that also needs to come up with people's real needs, real problems and real, real initiatives.

And I think, you know, you've, you've touched on Sage briefly at the beginning of this episode. So you're working with a lot of young people. These are folks who have an interest at least a little bit in entrepreneurship and innovation and you're offering them greater exposure to that through your programs and some of the classes and stuff. But do you have a segment about talking to them about what they should be looking for? You know, when they think about starting a new job or going into the workforce, what is it? What advice do you give them?

So it's a very timely question because I was in Saudi Arabia last week training a certain topic for the new hires of a bank. And I'm teaching things around entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship, innovation, design thinking, human centered design. And some of these individuals, they're already hired. So they're, they have finished their hiring process. They're recent graduates. They are in the bank. They're going through this three to six months program to become better employees. And I'm there talking about entrepreneurship, innovation, design thinking, customer centricity. And some of them are like, like, I'm not going to be an entrepreneur. Like, why are you teaching me design thinking? Why are you teaching me lean startup, Startup business model accounts, Lean commerce? I have nothing to, I'm working in a bank. I don't care about entrepreneurship. I said, like you wish you have nothing to do with entrepreneurship. So there is no way in hell they're going to graduate from that bank or retire from that bank.

Bank.

These people are like 20, 25. And I tell them maybe your parents made you think you will retire at one point in time from an institution, but that's not going to happen. At one point in time. You will need to create value by yourself for yourself. If you learn how to do it by creating value by yourself for the company, you will be in a much better position to do it by yourself for yourself later on in your career. Yes, large companies are great. I learned a lot by working in consultancy. I learned a lot by auditing a lot of companies that are hundred years old, 200 years old. And I learned a lot from the professionalism, from the corporate strategy, from running an efficient operation on scaling and everything else. However, the world is changing, it's changing really, really fast. So one example I give to young adults as well as the corporate people who are mid managers, I tell them, do you remember the last time you used a VHS cassette? And people under 20, they don't even know what a VHS is. And when I do that in mixed groups, like people that are older, people that are younger, some of them, some of the older people and older, I don't mean like 60 older, like 40 people, 40 years old, they were like yeah, I remember whatever, I used to rent a VHS cassette tape. And they are shocked by the fact that these 20 year olds have no idea what we're talking about. I asked the same questions and asked them what is the relationship between a cassette and a pen? And older people realize, oh, we used to put a pen into a cassette to roll it faster, not to consume batteries or to fix if it's broken, to use it in our Walkman. And some of the people, recent graduates are going, what is a Walkman? Ah, it's a complete shock. How do you know what a Walkman is not. And then they start blaming this Gen Z boomer. Beautiful conversation. However, the truth of the matter is it's important to know we had no idea when it was our last time. When we used a cassette or bought a cassette and listened on a Walkman, we never knew that was the last one we will buy. We never thought it will end. And then we slowly shifted to CDs and then we never knew when was the last time we went to a music store and bought a CD or even played it, same as vhs. We never knew when was the last time we rented one, we bought one, we never knew when was the last time we bought a cd. And then we never knew when it was the last time we bought a DVD before we switched to streaming. And I tell this to a mixed age group and tell them there is nothing to be, there's nothing to be said to blame. Oh, you don't know this. You're young, you have no idea. You're ignorant, you're lazy. Da da da. You guys are born digitally. There is no reason to blame each gender or generation. It's stupid. Because we don't know how fast things are moving when we are in the same train. Things are moving fast, we're moving fast, we have no idea what's happening and that's becoming more and more and more accelerated. That's the problem. These companies that are very established, old, they think like they are their grandparents and their mothers, they will remain relevant. They're not going to remain relevant. Not because they're doing anything wrong, but doing everything as they were doing before is not going to give them a competitive advantage going forward because there's so many new companies coming back and forth that they're not going to realize, oh, wait a second, when was the last time I actually used a credit card? When was the last time I actually went to a bank? When was the last time I actually went to a bank and got a loan? Now I can do this thing on my phone, through web3 applications, on blockchain. I really don't remember when was the last time I actually called someone at a bank. This is going to be exactly how what happened between VHS to dvd, from Walkman to CD to streaming. We will not know when was the last time we were using this large instructional institutional organizations because things will be moving so fast and it'll just switch and all of a sudden a lot of people will start switching and all of a sudden nobody will ask, oh, are you paying with this coin or dot coin or Bitcoin or Ethereum or Stablecoin? And it won't be a question like, yeah, of course I'm paying with one of them. What do you mean? Like, where is the alternative? What was there before? People will forget. So especially in customers, customer centric organizations, the changes are coming really fast that we don't know. So it's better that we start understanding that we need people who might not be coming from the same university, who might not be coming from the same degrees, who might not be coming from the same country. We need to find ways to incorporate a lot of different thinkers, different generational thinkers, because when something's happening, older generations, Unfortunately, I've been 38 for the past eight years, so I don't intend to become 40, even though I'm 46. So there is no point in people like me blaming it on how fast things are moving. And these boomers are doing this as Gen Z is doing this digital generation is doing this digital noise that's pointless, that compensation should end. We need to build companies that are resilient, that are more ready to change at any given point in time, because change is not going to wait for us to hire new people in a flash. And all of a sudden they start discovering new products and services that are relevant for tomorrow. That was a very long answer for a very smart question.

No, I think it's great. I mean we need to talk about these things and we also need to talk about tactics, about, you know, true. Getting these people interested in, in whatever company we're talking about, whatever company we're representing, I think you're talking about. Yeah, change is coming. We see that. Right. We, we touch on it in every miniseries. Artificial intelligence, AI, that's a tactic. Now these days I think there's a lot of companies that are investing heavily in employer branding tools that are facilitated by AI. I mean they could also be facilitated by E MVP consultants or you know, new career site platforms that are integrating AI or otherwise. True. But you know, does any of that really resonate with the people who build who we want to bring in or do we have to get a mix and do we have to rely on, you know, old school stuff like career fairs or branded swag, you know, those sort of things. What, what do you feel in terms of getting excitement, getting recruitment going?

So I, I think there are couple of different buckets of talent, innovation, talent that companies need to tap into. And as I help these young people get accustomed to thinking entrepreneurially and finding customer centric design work into their life. Last week it was like 20 young graduates from various universities in, in Saudi. And I can see that there are like different characteristics that even in a small group of 20 we, we had different characteristics. So some are very much interested in finding new things but they're not geared towards doing them themselves. Some are can be really taught and given examples and they can be a little bit more self starting. Very few are just get go, they'll just create new things. It is the same and it's very relevant to what I see in my day to day work with a lot of founders. So we work with incubators, accelerators, I help founders to build stuff globally that are successful, easy to scale, et cetera. And I see we see the same thing in entrepreneurship space. There are a plus plus founders that doesn't need an incubation accelerator program, doesn't mean it. They'll go and they do it. They'll find a way. They'll go and they do it. They'll find the mentor, they find the money, they'll find the customer. They're exceptional. There are others who are in the path to become exceptional, but they need guidance, they need help, they need mentorship, they need some sort of support. So those are the ones that usually are. They know what they want in an accelerator program. Incubator program and they go and they get it, they get into the good ones and they become really good. And there are some others who really need convincing and who really need to be a little bit more handholding to come to that level, to become more entrepreneurial. You need to drag them. They're really good, but there's something holding them back. They don't have the right, sometimes right connections, right network. And they're also really good for accelerators and incubators because you can really accelerate their career as a founder. I think we have the same buckets in the corporate corporates trying to find the right people. So from a technical perspective, if you really want super successful startups, startup minded people, innovation minded people, they will not come and apply to a job. You need to buy them. You need to go and find the team who has built the product, built the service that your customers are liking a lot more than your product. Or they have a different tangent, then you need to buy them out. Like you can't convince them to come and work for you. But buying them out is also a very valid way to bring them in, bring their talent in. But as we discussed a little before, when you bring them in, you still need to give them the space to keep on buying and building. So they will not remain with your company for 20 years. You know, they will live at a point, but you need to make the best out of them as long as they're there. So that's when you bring in a talent to innovation roles, to entrepreneurship roles, to new product roles like AI roles. A lot of automobile companies tried to do that with self driving cars or robotics or AI or visual recognition or computer recognition. They had a lot of startups, a lot of them start to build traction, get revenues and the automotive companies needed them so they start acquiring them instead of building from ground up. So most companies need to have that understanding of we might need to go out and buy a new talented team to get a product and service. The others, they will probably need a little bit more convincing. So career path wise, there are so many things HR company HR divisions can do to build for individuals whose roles will be given creating value, creating new services and products. So apart from the traditional management trainee paths, companies need to build tracks for innovation talent, innovation talent that will create new things, explore new business opportunities. And of course there are other people who are a little bit more hesitant to become innovation talents. But you can't let them go and just become part of the same old machine and then two years later you'll say okay, well we need to downsize because we haven't been able to do so. Those are the people that are majority in numbers inside companies where you also need to feed them a lot, maybe more than others. On why new business creation, new value creation is important for the entity. So they feel like when time comes they will still have a role to play in the company for the next level, next stages of a product, next stages of product development, or next success stories coming out from the traditional structure of the institution. So I think HR really need to carve out different strategies for different peoples that are in the buckets that we mentioned so that they don't just go out and blanket the try to find, oh, we want you to be innovative, then you bring them and they'll be upset. Or we want you to be no way to ready in three years, but these people are ready today. So you're wasting your time. Or you can't just say, oh, we'll hire everyone. You'll be doing exactly the same thing for five years and five years down will become very innovative. No, it doesn't work that way. So you need to change, start building incentives, start building different opportunities for people inside the company and for people who are coming inside the company.

Walk the walk. They can't just talk the talk. And I think that's, that's very clear. I mean, yeah, people in, in my generation and younger definitely want opportunities to be innovative, to grow and yeah, but we also still want to support the companies that have been around for decades and have stability.

And one of the things that in my generation, people were always going for stability because when I was graduating there was financial crisis everywhere. So stability is something everybody looks for. It's not like they're. Well, except for a little tiny majority of people who are always in constant motion, always looking for chaos. A lot of people would love stability. There's nothing wrong with stability, but stability and security, job security is non real in another way. There is no stability. There is no job security. Even in the largest companies of the world who are born in the digital era, they fire 5,000, 10,000, 7,000 people back and forth. So there is no stability. So that's what we try to teach people in our Sage program, Spark program. We say you assume it's stable and you're going to remain in that job for a while as long as you remain and you do your work. But that's actually not true. So I don't, I don't know any other company that's more radical than Netflix And I think we gave the same example, like adequate performance gets a generous severance package. That's super radical. I'm looking for other examples of this type of incentivization to create new things, outsize performances. But normal companies still will need people that will do things differently, that will do things more efficiently, that will do things more effectively. But if they're very effective in doing a business, following a business that is dying doesn't really make sense at the end of the day because the business is not going well. So it's like getting into the taxi business. What taxi business? Like, that's not going to work. Like, if Uber is not going to kill it, driverless cars will. Will kill it. So again, trying to understand what type of business you're in and what type of business you are need, you will need to be in the five, 10 years is the skill set of the C level executives and boards. But when they understand some things are changing, they also need to put a plan together to get, okay, what do we need? We need more talent, we need more ideas, we need more people that are outliers. So there could be different strategies trying to make sure the company goes through another decade, another decade, another decade. And the funny question is always which? You ask which company knew they would die in the next 10 years? And the answer is none. But how many companies died? A lot. So none of the companies that are that have died, not because of fraud or other stuff, like their time has come. They did not accept that their time has come. So it means your time might be coming up, but you may not be recognizing that. So why don't you try and find out different ways to do things and build the resilience in the organization, build a new talent that is more innovation and more outward thinking and more customer centric design thinking. And then also find the opportunities to see which your domain is moving forward. And if somebody else is moving forward, then you bring them in and you create new opportunities for your growth. I think lots of companies have hubris that they assume they're never going to die. And that's a big, big mistake. That, yeah, they are always, and they should know they're always in constant flux of the economy of the world. And there's always an existential threat. They might underestimate it. Much like Blockbuster underestimated, much like Kodak underestimated, much like Compaq underestimated. But then they died. So every company CEO has to have a plan B, plan C, plan D to be ready for the next future move, be ready for the next future technology, be ready for the next customer, interest, change. And, and I think the best way to do it is find the right people, give them the right space, and make sure the culture always stays not rigid, but flexible, like applying new principles and also like being, being open to change.

I think that's a great way to close this episode and I think it opens the door for a lot more for deeper conversations on culture, on, you know, what kind of Persona you're looking for and a whole lot more. So I think that's, that's great.

Yeah, it's a good drop. It's more than an hour, so I hope this was useful for people listening. And we're happy for kicking off the third miniseries.

Yeah. Thanks so much, Ozan. We'll catch up in the next episode.

Thank you so much. Great questions. See you soon, we hope.

Today's conversation has given you a stark look at the challenges and choices facing today's workforce and the companies that want to hire them. Don't forget to subscribe to Empires of Innovation for more unfiltered discussions. For more about ozon's work, visit www.mrozan.s O-N M E Z.com this is Startup Mind Corporate Grind.

Signing off.