133: Data: The New Non-Negotiable | Dr Jonathan Reichental

Hi, and welcome to another episode of the Leadership Enigma. Look, I say this every week. I look forward to every single episode. And I've been looking forward to this particular episode so that I could reconnect with someone that I haven't seen face to face for some time. And that's not just because of the pandemic. Now leaders and their organizations are desperately trying to understand what is coming over horizon 1, 2, and 3. What is that challenge and what is that optimism? Opportunity. But we have to talk about something. And that something is the fourth Industrial Revolution. Now, for that to happen, I need someone much, much wiser than myself. So come back to me as we'll have Jonathan Reichental, and he will be able to explain all wonderful things to us. He's smiling at me already, so I know this is going to be fun. K. Come back to me straight after this.

You're listening to the Leadership Enigma. Powered by Transform Performance International, a podcast for the insatiably curious to explore the power of human centered leadership to create real momentum for positive and sustainable change. Whether you're an entrepreneur, business owner, or corporate executive. Each week we speak to global experts, academics, rising stars, ambitious upstarts and disruptors as we discover that success leaves clues. Now, here's your host, Adam Pacifico.

There you go. How about that for an introduction, Jonathan, to the Leadership Enigma, huh?

Oh, wow. I love it.

I could see. I could see there was a look in your eyes as you were working out. Now, which one of these shall I fit into? What category shall I be now? It is really wonderful. It's truly wonderful to see you. And there are so many things that I want to tell the listeners about you. I'm going to mention a few and then I'm going to allow you to fill in the gap because you're the founder of Human Future. So I want you to tell us a little bit about that as well. In the podcast, the author of Smart Cities and you and I met a number of times actually in Silicon Valley when we were working with one of the big global technology companies and you were actually the chief information officer of the city of Palo Alto, which I know I found that incredibly fascinating in the first moment I heard that title. And then you came in and you delivered. I think there were about 150 of us. And I was captivated in relation to. Wow, that's so far outside of my comfort zone as a trial lawyer originally. So, Jonathan, welcome to this show. You're a superstar for coming on.

Thank you, Adam. No, it's such a pleasure. It's really great to reconnect and thank you for the lovely introduction. Yeah, well, look, I think, think the heart of who I am. I'm an educator. That's what I've discovered in my middle aged years. You know, I love to help others, I love to empower them with knowledge and I like to learn myself, I like to learn from them. So that's really who I am.

And tell us a little bit about the current role that you have, Human future, because I want to understand that a little bit more.

Sure, yeah. Well, you know, I've worked in the private sector, I've been in the public sector, I'm working in academia and now I actually, I'm working. I started my own business. I kind of walked away from, you know, big corporate and you know, being right in the heart of government to be more useful actually on the outside. Now I can get to not have any sort of regulatory limitations. Those exist within all types of businesses and particularly in government. I can be much more independent in my point of view. Right. And the advice I can bring to the table. So Human Future is all about helping individuals and organizations contemplate and action actually the steps that they need to prepare themselves for what is looking like a quite a chaotic and disruptive future through the, certainly the first half of the 21st century. And so that's what I work on a lot. I do some investment in there. We're trying to help social impact businesses make a difference in the world. And so as the name of the business suggests, Human Future, it is all about a better future for as many people as possible.

Do you know, that's really nice to hear because you and I did meet in Silicon Valley and we were working with, let's be honest, some of the most monolithic organizations in the world. And they were also trying to answer that question. How could they be a force for good and how could they be part of a sustainable world beyond an app or a paycheck? And that is where we met. But just help the listeners understand because you had this incredible role as the chief information officer of an entire city. Palo Alto, which is one of my favorite places, you know, Stanford University is there for people who don't realize. So Mountain View, it's well further on, I should say the Bay Area. Just explain what that role was. It was incredible.

Well, thank you. And it did get a lot of attention, you know, maybe more than I would have liked. But you know, I will say this. I used to, you know, because of the work we were doing, to use Technology and innovation to move, you know, cities forward, or to move our city forward and to sort of think differently. Lots of cities around the world were interested. And so I got the opportunity, I got these amazing invitations to go to really amazing, beautiful places in the world. Europe, South America, Asia and beyond. And when I would be introduced, you know, to do a talk, a keynote, I would be introduced as the CIO of Silicon Valley. That's true often. So, first of all, that's wrong that I'm not the CEO. The Silicon Valley isn't a thing. Like, it's like, it's. It's a neighbor. It's a kind of a thing we came up with to kind of denote a region.

It seems to have caught on, though, right?

But you can't actually drive to Silicon Valley and park outside, you know. You know, Silicon Valley, it's a. It's a number of cities. Palo Alto, the city you're talking about. It's not as, you know, not as many people know about it, you know, as one might think, but it is the birthplace of. Of Silicon Valley. We call it the Heart. Right. The name that's come up of Silicon Valley, a lot of luminaries live there. Mark Zuckerberg, you know, and Cook and Steve Jobs, of course, lived there and many others. And so, yeah, when I was working in the private sector, I got this phone call from a headhunter, and I wasn't thinking about working for government. In a way, it's the opposite of who I am.

Perish the thought.

I mean, I break things. I move fast, as they say in Silicon Valley. I don't really like bureaucracy because I want to action. I want to get stuff done. And I get a call to work in government. It's the opposite of that. And I was curious. They said, you know, would you be interested in being the head of technology for Citi? Intriguing, they said, Palo Alto. Even more intriguing. What could I do as the head of tech in the center of tech.

Yeah.

You know, in the world, basically. And could. Could. So when I talked to the city manager kind of deliberating on whether I should take this opportunity, that was the thesis I came up with. I said, could. Can we sort of use this experience for all of us as almost an experiment and a model for cities all over the world? I mean, isn't that. What a great privilege would that be? So it wasn't that I went in, I disappeared, and I was just in the data center doing back office stuff now. You know, the opposite. You know, my view was, let's do Amazing things, and let's share it with the world. And so I became quite a public person in that regard. I wanted to say, hey, you know what, if. If you go big on cloud computing in government, here are some of the results. And also here's some of the things you might not want to do. They might not work. We actually are doing it to help you make your decisions. How might you think about cybersecurity and local government, a big issue today? How might you think differently and use technologies that the public sector were kind of late in adopting relative to the private sector? And we would do it and then we would share it. So it was an amazing seven years. I was there doing it. We did have years. Yeah, yeah. I tell you, I only. I was going to go for three years. Yeah, I thought three. Yeah. One year is not enough. Two years, you're getting stuff going. Three years, you can actually make a difference. Then I said, you know what, I'll go to five. And then before you know it, I was seven years. So we did. We did over well over 200 major innovation projects. You know, there's lots of videos and documentation on this. People can learn from it. So, yeah, it gave me. And so I was able to help the city. But what's remarkable is it changed me because I got really passionate about the future of cities. And it gave me a platform too, of course, to be a person who could share my thoughts and insights.

And then you wrote your book Smart Cities as well, I believe, after that. And that puts you. And I'll come back to that, but obviously that puts you right at what I would describe as the tip of the arrow in relation to this conversation. I'm working with leaders still all around the world, which is a great privilege. And one of the things that is absolutely critical for leaders to understand is, as best they can, what is coming over the chaotic horizon, both opportunity and challenge. So help us. Let's start at the beginning, because we're calling this episode the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which would presuppose that there have been three already. Yeah, and the fourth one. So just can you give us a little bit of overview of what do we mean by the fourth Industrial Revolution? Is how does that fit into the story of the fourth?

Yeah, no, thanks for asking. And, you know, I'll give you my little backstory real quick on how I got here too, and why. This is the most important question to be able to answer. Well, and action, you know, take, take steps. So I've been, you know, between a variety of roles in the private sector, academia and public sector. There's always been this theme of innovation, of creating new value, of kind of reinvention in my career and the work I've done and, you know, for most of my career, which is over 30 years now, despite my youthful appearance.

I was about to say that, Jonathan, I was about to say that, trust me,

I have been able to follow along with some of the trends, right? You know, even going from, you know, pre Internet to Internet to, you know, Web 2.0 and, and everything that came after it. And there was a sense that, you know, you could follow this, you could make organizational decisions in a. At a pace that was relatively manageable. But the last five years haven't been that way, plus or minus, right? Something chaotic is going on, something. The rate of change has accelerated our understanding of trends, of where things might be headed. Our marketplaces are evolving very rapidly. And I was wondering what is going on? This is very different than the rest of my innovation career. And I did stumble upon some work by the World Economic Forum, they had coined this term the fourth Industrial Revolution. And I was, I was intrigued, like, what is this? And I started to, as I do when I'm fascinated by a topic and I think it might be worth knowing more about, I go deep into it and it started to, started to make sense. I thought it was a very nice way that they had started to articulate what the, what the sort of signal might be in the noise, as I say, to, to kind of try to figure out a broader global pattern that was underway.

I love the fact you just used that phrase, the signal from the noise, that really resonates, I think, with many leaders.

Oh, thank you. No, good, good. Look, if you look at the first Industrial Revolution, I'm not going to do a major history lesson here. I could, I was just at the Ohio State University. I did a masterclass. I went into detail on this. But we've got limited time here. But if you, if you look, you know, it's 1750, right? And suddenly steam engines are rolling out and you have the railway and you have steel and you can make machines and factories and you have sort of this impetus to urbanization. A whole set of remarkable things happen. And by the time you get to the end of the first Industrial revolution, approximately about 100 years later, the world is completely different. You get into the second industrial revolution, 1850s, right? Electricity. And now you get into the 1950s and you have the third, which is all about electronics and the information technology revolution, and everything's changing in Each of these revolutions absolutely change the trajectory of humanity. And so if you look at what's happening right now, and we'll get to some of what is happening right now, we have all the evidence of the entry point into now a fourth shift, a transformation. Now what's incredible is third isn't finished. This one's happened faster. The changes will be more significant. Can you imagine then the invention of steam and the use of electricity and the microchip.

So the speed is greater and the change is greater.

Yeah, well, the way, exactly the way I would look at it, here's three things to kind of think about. Velocity is the speed. So things are, you can, you can, you know, if you are the inventors of Pokemon Go, right? If you come, you can go from no product to 50 million people using your product in 19 days. Okay, that's Velocity, right? That's what, that's Velocity Days. Yes, you. When folks in Silicon Valley pitch a new idea, the investors want to know, when are you going to hit a billion dollars and potentially when you're going to have a billion customers? It sounds like a ridiculous set of questions, but they're actually where we're headed. There is nothing in history, when we look back where you can say you come up with a new idea product and you get it into the hands of millions of people within days, we have nothing. This is Velocity on a whole new level. The other two are Scope. So the scale of it, you could immediately be global, right? This idea that, you know, you start local for a couple of years, then you expand regionally and then maybe nationally and then. No, no, there's this expectation of you have a great idea that all types of people around the world can use. You can go global Scope, can go from, you know, a garage in your house to tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of users. And very rapidly.

That's like a Facebook story almost, isn't it? That from something in a garage or a dorm room and then bingo, billions.

Exactly. And those used to be sort of rare and fascinating. Now they're less rare and they're more common. Right. And so if you're a big company today, what you're worried about, this is actually a big theme of the fourth Industrial Revolution. A big theme of what I talk about is you have to be most fearful of irrelevancy, right? Because if some kid or somebody, some person. Doesn't have to be a kid, by the way. That's a cliche. Could be a middle aged person, right? Anywhere in the world comes up with A great idea that can be a threat to your business within months.

Right.

This is why enterprise leaders are worried and concerned, right? How do we work to make ourselves continually relevant? And then the third one is impact, right? The, the, you know, so I tell this, I'll do this very briefly, the story, okay. Because it really brings home the idea of impact in the fourth industrial revolution. So you've got Uber, right? The phenomena of Uber and Lyft and Grab and all the various on demand services like that. And Uber is very popular around the world. It's popular in India. People are making a living driving cars now. Actually quite a lot of, Quite, quite a good living. Well, back in, you know, Uber headquarters, you know, some, there's some programmers and, you know, they, over, you know, one afternoon, they can make a decision and change an algorithm which the next morning impacts drivers in India, right. And there are some stories, you know, they're, they're, they're rare, but they're still extremely important to understand where certain drivers committed suicide because their situation changed so dramatically that they couldn't provide for their family. And, you know, there's probably other details, but think about that. A line of code changed in California results in a person dying or committing suicide in India hours later. The impact of, you know, these, these algorithmic tweaks and, you know, the reach of our services today mean that there is remarkable potential impact. Now, I focused a little bit on the negative there, but let me tell you, most of the time it's positive. Okay, Right. If you're using your smartphone and overnight one of the providers, one of the applications upgrades or even the OS upgrades and you get new capability, you've basically given capability to a billion human beings overnight, assuming they downloaded or they have a push on their machine. Nothing in history compares to that. Wow.

So I'm hearing a number of things here. One is, I'm starting to feel a little bit old. You think about how long it took maybe radio to catch on and spread and then television. And as you say, Pokemon Go, 19 days to be.

It's a commercial flight. For 50 million people to fly on a commercial flight, it took 64 years. Wow. Just to give you an idea.

That's incredible, isn't it? Just as you say, in relation to velocity. And there's also a phrase, I think it was Jack Welsh, which again is, is in my mind, as you've just explained, this was, if the pace of change external to the organization is faster than the pace of change internally, then the end is inside.

Yeah.

And I think that that kind of resonates. So let me just come back to. So people need to understand or be fearful of irrelevancy.

Yeah.

Now that's incredible, isn't it? So can you say a little bit more about that irrelevancy? Because there are, you know, there are those companies who perhaps thought, or may have thought that they would be around forever because people always want what they do, what they sell, but maybe not.

Yeah, no, that for sure. For sure. That's a defining characteristic of the fourth industrial revolution. I don't have my fingertips the exact data on this, but I'll give you the general sense.

Sure.

You know, it used to be that a company, you know, in. On the, in the Fortune 100 or on the, you know, here are the top companies in the stock market. They will be in those top positions for decades. Well, today, you know, the majority of companies are just in the top, you know, echelons for just a few years. You know, you sort of peak quickly and then you drop out because of the rate of change of the vendors, the providers who dominate, including, by the way, the industries. It used to be a lot of the oil companies, now it's a lot of the tech companies.

Right.

And so if you think about threats to a business, there's obviously, you can have things like hackers, you can have cybersecurity threats, you can have regulatory changes that impact your business. You can have people's tastes change over time, behaviors, there's new innovation that starts to happen. The classical example, of course, is people in the sort of newspaper business, you know, just a few decades ago, you know, they saw the Internet, you know, thought it could be a. Could be competitive. They certainly didn't anticipate that it would destroy, you know, largely destroy the newspaper business around the world. And media has completely evolved. And, for example, we would democratize, you know, podcasts the way we're doing it right now. Right. So, you know, if you are in any type of industry today, pretty much any type, no one is exempt from this. You know, what is it that's coming fast that you might be observing but aren't acting fast enough, or what could be coming that isn't strongly on your radar and should be on your radar, because that sort of, you know, looking at that vehicle in the rearview mirror, you know, you'll look once and it'll be far behind you. And you look again, a few seconds later, it's gonna be right behind you. And then within another few seconds, it's gonna overtake you. You know, so if you are an established big business. Don't think that there isn't another entity now that can quickly accelerate and overtake you and make you irrelevant.

Gotcha. So Jonathan, what is the label or the term that we're really putting on the fourth industrial Revolution? Obviously you spoke about steam and electricity and electronics. So is there a term that people are attaching to the fourth industrial revolution, or is it a combination of things that are making this the fourth Industrial revolution?

It's definitely a combination of things. I like to, I'll sort of steal this to kind of paraphrase. It's sort of like change at the speed of thought, you know, which we can do today, which we have the ability to do. But it is this notion of the world changing at greater velocity, with greater scope and impact. And there's a fourth there, actually, which I added, which is called convergence. And convergence is when. Well, I've got this, I'll give you this formula and it's quite simple. I'll simplify it. In the time we have, take a major tech, let's take artificial intelligence and now add an industry. So you got tech plus industry equals and what is the outcome? So sometimes as an example, I might say, okay, let's take AI plus pharmaceuticals and that might equal better medicine. Right? That seems like a nice way to think about it. But in the 21st century, in the fourth industrial revolution, let's expand that. And now we've got a series of maturing technologies. When all combined plus focused on an industry, what does that result? And that can often result can be complete and utter disruption. So again, take AI plus big data plus quantum computing plus pharmaceuticals, and now you get a completely a brand new generation of potentially personalized medicine, Something we've never had before, which is overwhelmingly disruptive to the trillion dollar pharmaceutical industry that exists today.

Wow. And I'm thinking ahead and help me with this, I'm thinking of transportation as well. I've got a teenage daughter who's just learned to drive. And is that something we can also use this equation for With a combination of technologies, with an industry and then a different outcome? You know, we talked about driverless cars. I even saw a couple whilst I was in Silicon Valley, which was a bizarre site, but I'm sure there's probably more of those around now. But can we use that in relation to that kind of industry as well?

We sure can, yeah. This is great. So you've got two guys, they're in San Francisco about 10 years ago. It's, it's a, it's like A week before Christmas. It's freezing by the way. People don't think that Northern California is cold. It gets cold, really chilly.

We just don't want to believe that

the way you don't want to believe it.

I'm from London, you know that, John.

It doesn't necessarily snow, like I'll give you that. But there's two guys out and they're frustrated because they're trying to call for a cab and they can't get a cab, right. And the funny thing, when I heard this story, I was like, I had exactly the same experience. It's so frustrating. It's 2am, you've had a nice meal, you've been at a bar or maybe you've been to the theater or something and all you want to do is get home. And there's no, no taxis. Absolutely no taxis. So these guys, well, I didn't do it, but they did it. They built a $50 billion business called Uber, right? That was the genesis of Uber. And so you might ask yourself, well, why didn't happen before? Like what, what was unique? What is it, 10, 12 years ago now? Well, the equation was, was unique. So think about what is Uber. Uber is AI plus social computing plus gps plus cloud based payment systems plus big data plus, did I say GPS smartphones plus transportation equals a completely new way of being transported around the place, right? So Uber is quintessentially a fourth industrial revolution business. And you know, as we know how, for example, London cab drivers responded, we

know how they responded.

Blockades, Blockades. It's tension. It's, you know, people are emotional. It's phenomenally impactful. Now there will be some resistance, but over time the new momentum will take over. So when we look out and we think, well, what's next? Well, let's do our equation right? We've got artificial intelligence, we have incredible sensors and laser technology and did I say I'll throw an AI again? Plus we have sort of changing behaviors. Big data plus, you know, cars equals autonomous vehicles, basically. You get the point where I'm going with this. So it's inevitable, you know, at this point, of course, autonomous vehicles are. We know they're coming. They're already here in many cities. It's going to happen faster than people think. Eventually we won't be able to drive. Humans won't be able to drive. You cannot have humans driving alongside computers, driving. Because humans are really bad at driving. Computers are actually pretty good. Usually I'm in front of an American audience. Americans love their cars.

There must be A prohibition on humans driving. I can't even imagine that. Can you imagine the backlash from it?

Well, here's just a kind of a little tongue in cheek way of thinking about it, which is, um, you can't ride a horse down I95. You know, you can't. You, you know, I could go and get a horse right now somewhere on a farm. I can't ride it on the highway. You know, it's, it's, it's against the law. I'll be pulled over and I'll get a ticket and I'll be in trouble. Right. But I can ride a horse on the weekend or on, in a farm or something. So context will change the context. Yeah. By the way. So if we just sort of, sort of said, well, okay, so humans won't drive cars, computers will drive cars. Everything's going to be the same. That's the wrong way to think. Wrong way to think. Everything's going to be different. It's been said that autonomous vehicles will be the most disruptive technology of the first 50 years of the 21st century. Now, how do they get away with such a grand statement?

I've said that is a fairly grand statement

because. Okay, here's a couple of thoughts. Number one is when Steve Jobs got on the stage at one of his events about 13 years ago and announced the iPhone, it wasn't incredible. It's nine minutes of incredible. The most amazing marketing. You've got to watch it. It's on YouTube and it's Steve Jobs announcing. And he talks about the four things, the communicator, the phone, the music system, and the Internet connector, I think. And then you say, wow, that's going to be an incredible new device. And you think, well, now I'll have it in my pocket. I can surf the web, I can find directions, and that's cool. What he didn't talk about was the apps economy, the apps ecosystem, because a few months later, when they did relax their rules, anybody could build a solution for an iPhone. Well, today there are tens of millions of apps that do just about everything we want in our life. They've changed the way we do everything from, I don't know, ordering food to, to getting medical assistance from a doctor. The apps economy was not predicted and it's generated millions of jobs, trillions of dollars of economic value that we didn't anticipate. Right, okay, so keep that in mind. Now we fast forward to. We're on the precipice of autonomous vehicles. And again, I wanted to go back to my point which is people are going to think of this as well. I'll just sit in the car and the car will take me to wherever I want it. That's kind of cool. And they may stop there. I ask you, and I would say to leaders listening to this, what's the app's economy for the self driving car? That will be a multi trillion dollar business. Now, it's hard for us to anticipate that because we're trying to think about something that exists in a world of the future. We're not there yet, but that will emerge. And so you'll see things like a whole set of different uses. You'll see different design. Having four seats all facing forward makes no sense in a world of autonomous vehicles because that's all for humans who are driving cars. That all changes. But then you have things like, well, do you have to have lanes on a street, on the road? Computers don't care about lanes. How about the American cities were built around the grid system that was for humans, not for. You don't need to have the grid system. You don't have to have traffic lights or stop signs or signs. You can now design cities completely differently. You can think about city planning from the start. Because the hangover from the 20th century that we're now suffering in the 21st century is that we built our cities around cars, not around people. It was about how do you facilitate cars in some cities? 60% of the land in a city is to facilitate cars. It's horrible. Not parks where kids can play and fly kites or restaurants you can sit outside. No, no, to facilitate cars. So that's, by the way, that's what we mean by disruption.

You see, I'm fascinated by the conversation. I knew I was going to love this chat with you, Jonathan, because it's almost a world unimagined or even unimaginable to some people. Now that's really exciting for a number of people, but that's also catastrophic for others because you've just already given us some examples. And it breaks my heart here. A change of an algorithm led to some people taking their own life because it actually impacted them at a human level so dramatically. So how do we navigate so that we are trying to do the right thing and continue to be a force for good and understand almost the wake that might be left behind and the human toll that might be left by. I just. How does one do that? Is it even possible to do. How does one tread carefully from an ethical point of view, from a human point of view, probably why you started Human Future, but how does one do that? I'm genuinely, I'm flummoxed.

We should end there.

Adam's flummox again on an episode.

I know that's right. No, like, it's tough. And I'm certainly going to be the first to admit that that's a hard question to answer. I don't have the answers for it. I have thoughts about it and I think others do too. This is what we are experiencing in real time, Rand. This is the tension we're experiencing around, for example, social media.

Yes.

Right here we have all of overnight, what appears to be overnight, a set of platforms that we don't fully appreciate, the extent of what we've done, the damage it can do, you know, whether it's about, you know, winning or losing elections or about kids being bullied or, you know, and the, you know, the. We know there are suicides from that as well. You know, mental health issues from social media. You know, leaders of social media companies who are not accountable to anybody except perhaps shareholders, as long as the money's going up. You know, they haven't been democratically elected and yet they are, you know, taking very, very strong positions and all sorts of things. Nothing new in what I just said, other than the fact that this is sort of indicative of what you just raised. Brand new issues that we thought, you know, social media might be just a lovely thing where we share our food and send hearts to our grandparents. It turns out to be a lot more than that. And so when you think about things like sensorization of the environment, which is putting up sensors to do all sorts of things like air qual quality and water quality, and what is that really setting up a surveillance society? Is it the end of privacy as a consequence? And then you've got the moral questions. Right.

Which is, of course,

if we continue on the trajectory we're on with artificial intelligence, it has the potential to displace 800 million workers over the next couple of decades. And by the way, that's 20% of the world's workforce. Right. And so the question, you know, you raised a couple of the answers. One of the things we have to do is we have to place this topic of, you know, ethics or technology ethics or what is known as techno ethics, believe it or not, in techno ethics, we actually have to factor that into the central core of our decision making. And enterprises, CEOs have to be held accountable, just like they are to a whole variety of things under law. Right. There is a growing sort of sense of the responsibility our organizations have towards the environment. Right. That's why, you know, this, this, the environment, social and governance is getting such a big. The ESG topics now are getting such a remarkably laser, you know, focus is because they all are responsibilities. And as long as society is comfortable that we start adopting and actually puts the force on that, an emphasis that we need to do that. That can be one lever. But here, I'll wrap my thoughts here real quick. If anything, I think what we've done is stimulated people thinking about this important topic for sure.

And I hoped we would do because it's too big an issue for answers, but getting people aware and thinking, yes, great.

Well, I'll give you exactly, I'll give you one great thought that somebody else told me. It's actually Gil Friend. He's a sustainability leader in the United States and also a very good friend of mine. And I was having a similar topic with him, but really around the topic, climb the climate emergency. We didn't even go into that. But that clearly is part of this whole context. And so you always get the question, and I get this question often is what, what can it, what can I do? What can I do? Like, the global temperature of the earth is increasing. Seems like it's totally out of my control. Well, the reality is you have a lot of control. People don't realize the extent. And you know, I'll throw out there one, one of the things you can do is eat less meat, right? It's. There is this relationship between our increasing consumption of meat and climate change. It's a big part of it. People don't like to hear it. The decisions, by the way, the things we have to do are going to be hard. And that's why we don't want to do them. And that's why they have the biggest impact if we do them. But he has a great answer. And I would just say this. Everybody has a voice every single day. Actually, they have a voice multiple times a day on these topics, products. And it is how you spend your money. Every time you walk into a shop and you buy something and you put money on the counter or credit card, every time you go online, you buy something, you are demonstrating, you are voting for the behavior of that company.

Validating.

Yeah. Yeah. So I would just say if, you know, if a company is irresponsible, whether it relates to how they treat their people, how they treat the environment, how they maybe monopolize their marketplace in all these areas where you as an individual may be at pains, you can have A voice just by how you spend your money.

And as you say, ESG is a huge topic now. And I think the Endelman Trust Barometer has pointed out that just second to price, it is about how much do people trust what an organization is doing. They are interested now in their supply chain. Who are they using, where are they using, how are they using people? Where are they getting resources from? So, I mean, huge issues that we're talking about. I'm going to try and do something. So listeners to this episode might be leaders who are young disruptors of, of small businesses which are just so precious to our economy, medium size, and then some of the global businesses that you and I have had the pleasure to work with as well. This is such a monolithic issue and in some ways it can feel overwhelming. Where can leaders start? Give them a starting point, Jonathan. We can't give them an end point, but how can we start somebody off in relation to what they could be thinking or doing to start to get ready to navigate and live and lead and decide in a fourth industrial revolution? Start people off.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, this is for the businesses, I guess for the organizations. The first starting point, of course is, you know, is to recognize the risk. You know, that, that sounds weird. It's like, you know, if you're in Alcoholics Anonymous or any of those organizations, the first thing you do is admit what the problem is. And, and so by if you are in a organization that's been successful for 200 years and you're like, ah, it's good and you know, we're fine, nothing's changing that fast. Whatever. I, I would just, you know, ask you to be a little bit more diligent and open minded to think about where change is coming from. Because the truth is, if you are an organization that has created some agility and you are, you have a radar of what's coming behind you and you're able to make tweaks, you can succeed. Still, this is not about, you know, your ultimate demise, you know, as a successful organization. In fact, good vision, good leadership, agility are going to be the things that enable you to continue to be successful in what you do. But sometimes it's going to be about the hard decisions. I'll give a personal story here, please. You know, I used to work for O'Reilly Media. That's how I got over. You know, I left the east coast of the US came to the west coast. I was there. I was there, actually, their first CIO and fascinating company. You know, most tech people have an O'Reilly book on their bookshelf, you know, a Unix in a nutshell probably is on more than one programmer shelf somewhere in the world. And you know, one of the things they did is they grew their business quite healthy, you know, very healthily over time. They became a very successful technology book company and they also built an events business. And you know, they were the ones who coined the term Web 2.0 and had the Web 2.0 summit that was big for a few years, right. And they had a series of very successful events, well, you know, about April last year, in a combination of both Covid plus them kind of eating their own dog food, which is to have a radar and see what the trend was, said there's no more future in person events for us. So they pulled the plug in it and said we're going to be virtual forever. It's the end of in person events. Now that's pretty incredible, right? That's pretty incredible to make that big of a choice for them and to see the future differently than others. They may likely be quite successful. By the way, they did the same thing when it came to ebooks. They said we're not going to print any more physical books. We're going to go pretty much ebooks. When people were like on the fence whether ebooks would take off, of course they bet correctly on that. And ebooks did take off. So they continue to thrive, they continue to do the thing and continually reinvent. They're a couple of their 100 million or $200 million business. You know, the same can be said of smaller businesses, but also of large multibillion dollar multinational companies. You've got to be able to move quickly and see what's going on. I would say more tactically in addition to that is. And the good news, there is a good news story on this is your data science capabilities, your data science capabilities. Organizations have sort of ramp that up. They are investing in talents, they are investing in tools. They are starting to use data in a way that really becomes a tool but also a mechanism for now at least competitive advantage. We are collecting so much data on so many different things. It will and can help big organizations begin to understand patterns in their environment. They're very specific organizational environment, but then the broader context in which they operate. So you know, maybe this is an older tip, but you know, if you're, if you're pursuing that strategy, good for you. But if you're on the way, you know, maybe it's time to ramp that up and get your data governance in place. I think that's a very near term thing that an organization can do. Maybe I could say one more because I'm trying to be quite practical is a lot of companies, you know, they see the change, right. And then the question is, what do they do? And they, they say, well, can we, yeah, can we reinvent the whole business? And you know, unless you're, you know, Bill Gates and you write that famous email which was like tomorrow everything's going to be Internet enabled, you know, they, they on a, through split second and an important directive from the CEO at the time, they changed their direction overnight. That's a pretty phenomenal case study. Not every organization can do that. So how do you shift an entire huge multinational global business? Well, part of the way you can do it is to acquire the new technologies, to acquire the new products and services. Bring it in and bring it right. Biden, we see this a lot. I'm kind of exposing sort of this notion more broadly than just where we see it perhaps in the United States and probably quite well adopted in the UK and other developed nations is to actually acquire the talent and the innovation instead of developing it yourself. And then you do the shift the, the bigger part of the enterprise over time.

Right, okay. So that almost acts as a catalyst for the change by bringing that in Now. Jonathan, apparently it's wrong of me to do this podcast for the next three hours because I could keep going because it's nice to see you again and I'm truly fascinated by all of this because it just raises more questions and answers which always appeals to me. How can people get in touch with you in order to connect and continue the conversation and to get you involved? If you can help them and their businesses, what's the best way?

No, thanks for the opportunity for that and I'm delighted to do this. This is really at the core of human future, particularly a positive human future. It's not just success for the sakes of success or success for increasing share value. And this is actually about quality of life, people having a better life, no matter where they're born in the world. So you can get me on Twitter. That's an easy one. You know, at rife and tile R E I C H E N T A L or you'll. You'll find it in the podcast notes, I guess. Right. Easy to find me online. LinkedIn is a good place too. I'm very active on LinkedIn. I saw and I found it to be very, very valuable. I also have my own website and get this, you're gonna. This will be a surprise. Www.reichental.com There you go. Keep it easy.

It makes sense.

I was able to get that domain about 15 years ago or so, maybe 20 years ago. So just my name, reichental.com and you can watch videos there, podcasts, you can read articles, links to my books. And there is a way for you to contact me. And I will make this commitment. If you reach out to me, I will respond fast. You know, it's not like, you know, a lot of people say to me, you know, they reach out to professors or other folks and, you know, sometimes they won't hear or it'll take weeks. Now you'll hear from me pretty quickly.

Well, that's a pretty good offer if you ask me, for all the listeners. Now I've got my final question. And you're not aware of this question, actually, Jonathan, but it's this. Now you've been a thought leader in this industry for a long time and it is super. It's great to reconnect. But I want to ask you a question and it's going to be something that's going to just pop to the front of your mind because there's probably many answers that you give me and it's this. What do you think was the most. I'm going to be thinking how to actually say this. What do you think is the most powerful piece of leadership advice that you've ever received or given? What's front of mind for you?

I'm hesitating because there's so many.

I know. I appreciate there's dozens whizzing around now for you.

There is. Well, I'd be interested in yours in a moment. But I would say this, that I was working in a big consulting firm and I had an opportunity to apply to a really nice position within the organization. It was the Director of Technical Innovation. Actually, it was the title of the role. It was a relatively new role in the organization. And I was successful. I got it. I was like, yes, sweet. And I got this role. And, you know, I kind of spoke to the person I would report to and I said, well, you know, where's the playbook and what do you expect? And they said, we don't have one. You have to invent it. You have to create the whole thing. And to me, that was music to my ears. And I started doing this work and, you know, consulting with colleagues and sort of trying things out effectively started to be able to play and see results. And for the first time in my life, and this was already almost 20 years into my career, maybe 15 years into my career, I realized that work could be really fun, but also valuable, like add value, meaningful. Right up until that point, I really wasn't in a place where I thought you work because, well, part of it, you have to. You get promoted to earn more money and more power, more prestige, perhaps. But I hadn't thought that, you know, working, you get up in the morning excited, and you have a blast, and you also add value. And then I sort of continue with this thought and I thought, you know, how can I have a life like that? How can. How can I do things like this? How can I play, you know, with. With skills and expertise and. And get paid as a sort of a. As a nice, you know, afterthought and have that kind of life? And I've really kind of. I went on that journey. This is now already over about 15 years ago. And what I learned is I wish I'd done it sooner, but it was okay. It wasn't that long, and I got better at it over time. And so when I speak to a lot of colleagues and leaders and, you know, they talk to me about their frustrations, you might be surprised. 50% of Americans right now who work are looking would like a new job. Yeah, I can imagine that's a devastating number. I think the working population of the US is about 150 million people. So 75 million Americans are unhappy basically in what they've been dealt or their decisions. And so I talk to a lot of leaders, because a lot of leaders are in that number. And the question I ask is, are you doing what you love? I mean, are you getting up every day pumped and excited and know that you're doing work that matters makes an impact. So that's my advice at the end of the day to get to your question is find the thing that you love, work hard at it. You know, obviously what I'm describing here is not something you can just do tomorrow for most people. Most people could wish they could, but, you know, as far as I know, you get one trip, you know, in this life, I think so, as far as we know, as far as, you know. Right. And so, you know, time is the only thing you can't control or slow down or stop. It keeps going. It'll, you know, so, you know, create some urgency to this and do the stuff you love and you're passionate about. I found that when you do that, everything else that you probably like comes with it anyway. You know, things like, you do get compensated better. You do get perhaps the recognition that you so much want. And if getting power, at least leverage over some domain or idea or process is something you like, you get that too. So don't continue doing what you're doing. Expect a different result a year from now.

That's the insanity part.

Yes. How do you answer that question when you think about it?

Well, do you know what? I have been asked that question. And I go back to, and some listeners will know this, and I go back to some great advice given to me by a mentor who's no longer around, where after my first leadership role, he said, remember this. He congratulated me and then said, remember, the children of the people that you lead will know your name. In what context is entirely up to you. And that's always stuck with me. And maybe that's why I'm passionate and curious about all things leaders and leadership. And I love doing this. So I just want to say, Jonathan, what a massive thank you and a pleasure it is to reconnect to see you. You are thriving and loving life. I can see that. So you're living exactly the advice that you just gave us. And I just want to say a huge thank you for being part of the leadership enigma. It's been brilliant. Have you had fun?

I thank you, Adam. I have had so much fun. So upbeat. You are amazing at this. I love that we had this time together. I hope we said something, or at least I hope I said something a little meaningful in the hour we had together. So thank you, Adam. Amazing stuff.

I have notes as proof of the amazing things and we will have a conversation again. You've been brilliant.

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