Can you innovate while turning around a company? with Hubert Joly (former CEO of Best Buy)

Brilliant.

Hello, everybody. Welcome to this month's Strat Chat. Can you innovate while turning round a company? My name is Nick Kimovic and I'm very, very excited because we are going to be joined by our very own Alex Osterwalde, CEO and founder of Strategizer, author of the Invincible Company, and I'm also very, very, very excited and honored to have Uber Jolie on the show. The former chairman and CEO of Best Buy, the Harvard Business School professor, and also the author of the Heart of Business. We're going to look at the heart of business. Let us know. Have you read this already?

It's a must read for leadership. I remember reading it in this background. So I deliberately put up this picture because while I was going up the mountain with my skis, I was listening to the Heart of Business. It's absolutely a must read. It's a new type of leadership right there. How long did it take you to write the book? Because, you know, writing books, not so easy, right?

It took me 30 years. Because it took me 30 years to develop these ideas. Now writing the book itself, so writing, you know this, Alex. Writing a book is not difficult. Writing a good book is extremely difficult. So I had a great partner, Carolyn Lambert. It took us about seven, eight months to write it. Once we had the idea of the book and the structure.

And the first question that we've got is to answer the title of the session, which is, can you innovate while turning round a company?

Can you innovate while turning around a business? Sometimes it may not be priority number one. In the case of Best Buy, we first had to fix the basics of the business, which was broken. But we did innovate. There was a couple of meaningful innovations at the beginning. One was, you could say it was a lifesaver, matching Amazon prices, taking price off the table. Don't know whether you call this innovation, but then it was the partnership with the world's foremost tech companies like Samsung and Microsoft and Sony and Apple, even Amazon. In the end, that turned. We killed showrooming and we turned the table on showrooming by developing, showcasing. So that was a game changer.

It's interesting as well to see the other answers that we've got from people. So absolutely, it's perhaps even easier to innovate. So everyone has a do or die mentality.

Love that.

Whoa.

The team told me after the fact. Super. You were very clear, if we don't change, we die. So we decided to change. There you have it.

I like the ones who said yes, to the business model canvas. So I do think it requires a little bit more. I think the tools are important, but unfortunately not enough. How taxing was it in terms of energy and discipline to a, you know, fix and innovate?

The energy level at that time was fabulous. And I think as leaders, in fact this may be our most important role because the actions cannot be limited to what the CEO or the leaders think about. Our role is to create an environment where you can unleash that human magic and it's all about creating energy. In physics we learned that energy is a finite quantity. In a human organization it's not. So our key role is to create that energy by co creating the plan, showing confidence in the future, also clarity on where we are getting going and then celebrating the early wins. And if something doesn't work out, you say, oh, this one didn't work out as intended, we need to rework it. So energy management may be our most important role.

And you can see that we've got the plan for the session today. First, what we're going to be doing is leadership and innovation. A quick intro from Alex, setting the context. Then what we're going to be doing is talking about a quick Innovation Culture Readiness mini assessment to kind of reflect ourselves. We'll go to the Invincible leader of the month, which we're very excited to present to you, Beth, shortly. And then we will move on to a hot or not quiz and also have a little bit more time for self reflection after that. So that's the plan for the session.

Okay, so I'm going to leave the Swiss mountains and go quickly. Just a couple of slides to put some framing and it'll be great to see how you react to this. Right, so some of you have been following us for a while. You've seen us talk about innovation culture readiness assessment and these three areas that we kind of dive into. Right. The leadership support. What can leaders do? Organizational design, ultimately also what leaders design and then the innovation practice. How do you do innovation? Kind of the ecosystem also that leaders unleash. So I'm just going to keep it relatively short. Go into these three and show how you can do a quick mini assessment to see if your organization is ready to innovate from a leadership perspective. So for those of you who know this, you can download the Innovation Culture Readiness Assessment. But I want to simplify this with three questions so we don't have to go this whole thing. This is a mini assessment and look at it from a leadership perspective. If you're going into A company and you want to understand, you know, you're in an innovation role, could they innovate or not? The three questions you want to ask, the first one is time. How much time does the CEO spend on innovation? And I like to say that if it's not at least 20% of his or her time, I'd actually go towards 40% of his or her time. You're not going to see innovation happen. And the role there is not to pick the winning ideas, it's to create the environment and to show symbolically that innovation matters. Because if the CEO doesn't spend time on the future, well, guess what, kind of shows, well, why should I? And how does that affect my career? If I do things that are not important to the senior leadership right now, that doesn't mean that at the next level we shouldn't have a role that is focused 100% on innovation. And some companies say, yeah, we have the cto, we have R and D. I'm not talking about that because R and D is research and development. The CTO often has a very operational role. This is something a lot more related to growth and strategy. Or we like to call it the chief entrepreneur sometimes, right? And he or she reports to the CEO. If you don't have a model where you have a co CEO, we talked about this in earlier webinars like Jessica Tan at ping, an co CEO with 100% role on innovation. So those are first two questions, time the CEO spends on innovation. I'd like to call this the read them a graph test. She says, look at the agenda of the CEO every week to see if there's time carved out. And, and the second one is the org chart. The third one, probably one of the harder ones as well, is in the innovation practice. Is it safe to fail? So failure is never the goal, right? Never the goal.

Of course not.

Nobody wants to fail. But if you want innovation to happen, it's inevitable that people have to experiment and often many things are going to go wrong and you course correct very quickly and you try to keep those failures cheap. And it's so easy to say those things, but they don't always happen. So we like to say, look at the kill rate. And maybe that's an aggressive term. I remember talking to one CEO and said, alex, we don't kill anything at our company. We could call it the follow up investment rate. How many projects do you retire? And if you don't retire, 9 out of 10 innovation projects and only do follow up investments when there's evidence There maybe after three months, after six months, if you don't have a high retirement rate, guess what? It's not safe for teams to fail. They're condemned to succeed. So you won't get experimentation. So if you look at the time of the CEO organizational design and the kill rate, you'll be able to immediately assess if a company is able to innovate. Uber, this is our point of view at Strategizer. How do you react to this? Quickly, you have been doing this for quite some time now.

For us, a trigger point was when we it was the recommendation of one of our board members. We officially decided and declared that the turnaround was over, that we were moving to a growth phase because that changed the way we planned, we budgeted, including the risk factors. So that was an important point, but it's not enough. One of the mistakes I made for a while was I was expecting that's going to resonate with your point that the organization that's in charge of running the business would be able to innovate. And here's the scoop. If you're running a $50 billion company, 100,000 people, there's a promotion every month, there's no capacity. So a breakthrough moment was when we established the Strategic growth office. About 50 people led by Corey Barry, who later on became my successor. So really staffed with top notch people, 100% dedicated to identifying which opportunities, prototyping, piloting, testing and then looking at scaling. That was really important. The point about failure, I gave all of the officers at Best Buy a get out of jail free card.

I love it.

So that when they failed at an innovation, they would come to me and I would give them two more of these cards. Of course, we're not talking about if you're Amazon, you're opening your 1000 warehouse. That's not about messing this up. This is about Amazon launching a new phone. And then the other thing that I discovered was autonomy. One of the things that was really helpful, it's really a system where there's clarity around purpose, there's clarity around values and strategy, there's a tolerance for failure. But then you're able to push decision making down to these empowered agile teams and making it clear that no, you're empowered. And I don't care whether a senior executive doesn't like it. You may take their inputs, but you're empowered. So creating a space where it's autonomy without chaos, I think is a really important part as well. And I think that it falls into your innovation practice. So everybody, we're listening to Alex and he's the master at this.

I love it because what you were saying is this strategic growth office and here is what I really like, and this should be more the case than it is today is this person became the CEO in most companies still today we have the COO who becomes CEO. And look, not all CEOs are equal. Some are focused on innovation, but that's not normally their biggest task. So I really love what went on here. And I think Nick is going to get us to do a little mini assessment where everybody can participate just on these three factors. Let's see the organizations that you are working in, all of you participating here, how do you think you're doing on these three questions? So it's going to be fun to see. And probably we're in an audience where we have more people from innovative companies or people who are frustrated because their leadership is not innovating if they're not the leaders. Right. And I hope we have some enlightened leaders. We had some participants recently showing how leadership can do it.

So you can see there, how much time does your CEO spend on innovation every week?

Are you surprised about the results? I mean, when you think about your former peers, how much time they were spending on innovation, Are you surprised the result that we're seeing? Or is that something you've seen as well? Or because it also can be a perception issue, right?

Yes. And I think that it also depends on how we define the time spent on innovation. If I'm spending time on creating the right environments for everybody at the company to write themselves into the story and become the biggest, most beautiful version of themselves and create amazing things. You could say it's not directly working on innovation, even though it's your third bucket, but it is working on innovation because it's about creating the soil where seeds can grow. And so there can be an ambiguity. If you more understand it as, no, I'm personally working on designing the new widget. No, that's not what we're talking about.

Absolutely not. And I think that's the big point, right? As a leader, what you do is design that fertile ground for innovation to flourish. That's the, the top down part. And what we've seen is when leadership gets too involved, you know, they think they can pick the winners. We usually end up with projects that fail big. And, you know, even Jeff Bezos admitted that with the Amazon, you know, Kindle fire phone, that was a big failure. And maybe because, you know, it was more of a baby of the CEO, rather than something that was kind of a attested through the market, bottom up with autonomy.

That's such a game changer, Alex. And it's so tempting for us leaders. We're very smart, so we think that we know the answer and we're going to make sure that everybody listens to us. That's the wrong approach. And when I was talking about pushing decision making down and having empowered agile, multifunctional team that can innovate, fail fast course. Correct. And as the CEO, you may tell them, look, I have some input for you, but make sure that you understand you're in charge. And my input, it's hard for people to understand this. My input is not a directive. It's just the best input I can give you. But it may not be good input. It's the best I have, but that's all.

And our common friend Marshall Goldsmith often says as a CEO you have to be careful to not create too much value. Because what you say as a CEO is not always seen as a suggestion or as an idea. Right. So where does innovation live in your org chart? I actually think this is one of the biggest challenges, that innovation doesn't have enough power in the sense that if it's not officially high up in the org chart, not 100% job with budgets and people, innovation doesn't happen. So the CEO alone obviously can't do this. So there is a. And you talked about the strategic growth office. What's your take on innovation and the org chart? And my belief that innovation needs power and many organizations it doesn't have because it always loses for the direct business, for the operational needs of the P and L. What's your take on that and how did you manage that?

One of the biggest innovators in the world, largest innovators is JJ right. I mean, they have a $12 billion R&D investment and they keep coming up with new drugs, new medical equipment and so forth. Of course you want the innovators to be in the divisions because it's 80 or $90 billion company, but having on the board and on the executive team, great innovators. We have a Nobel Prize winner on the board, Jennifer Doudna. And Paul Stauffels, the chief science officer was sitting on, was vice chairman of the company because that set the tone. And so I think it can be, you know, it can come in different facets, but the tone at the top, which is your first bucket. Right. Is so critically important.

I love what you said about the board. Right. Because the CEO doesn't have all the power because the CEO is hired by the board, right? So that's the key bastion. I just had a call before with a big, big investment fund on some of the biggest companies on the planet. And that's exactly where they saw their biggest influence. If they under understand innovation better, they can help, you know, educate in quotes the companies and support them in that. So that was pretty, pretty good. Let's do the last one. How good are you at killing projects or allowing failure to happen? Zero projects. You know, failure is, is not seen as something positive. And of course, as you said, let's be very explicit, operational failure. You mentioned Amazon Warehouses. Not a good thing. We're talking here about experimentation and innovation. Right. Do you actually know in the venture capital world, startup world, early stage, venture capital world, how many investments it takes to create an outsized winner? Early stage, 1 out of 250 or 4 out of 1000 are outliers and return more than 50 times the capital. So think of it, right? That's the business of venture. They can't pick the winners. They're not the most humble breed. They admit it. So what about us? You know, in businesses, we need to get back to accepting that we can't pick the winners. So I'm seeing Nick is getting impatient with timing, so he's pushing us to what's the next agenda point? Nick, you're absolutely right. You're more Swiss than I am today.

It's my job just to make sure that we keep on time. I don't want to be the bad guy, the bad cop, but somebody has to. Somebody has to. So we're going to be moving on to this next section, which I'm very, very excited about. So you can see that next up we've got the Invincible Leader of the Month. And it's an absolute pleasure to say that our Invincible Company. Invincible Leader of the Month. Because sometimes we call it Invincible Company, but in this case, certainly the Invincible Leader of the Month is Uber Jolie. So Uber. Thank you so much for being on the show. And this is now the section where we're going to do a Q and A between yourself and Adam, Alex, and really dissect and get into the stories and lessons that you've got for all of us. So I'll hand it back over to you too.

I know it doesn't make you feel super comfortable being called the Invincible Leader of the Month. In particular, compared to the title of your book, the Heart of Business, where.

You'Re showing the contrary vulnerability and the idea that gives the idea that the leader is the superhero and knows everything and is there to tell other people what to do. Nobody wants to follow that.

Completely new the servant leadership, which is sometimes we have this cliche image of the leaders, but I remember you talking quite a bit about the image maybe of leaders today is not the reality of your former peers. So there is a lot more servant leadership than one might actually expect. Expect. And maybe the image of leadership is a bit misaligned with the reality. What's your take on that?

Yeah, because we have the lagging image of last century, right. There's the myth of the leader as the superhero who knows everything where it's too much value, tells everybody what to do. Nobody wants to follow a leader like this. And so today, and certainly we've seen it in particular during the pandemic, words like vulnerable, empathetic, humble, authentic. Keywords empathetic. We were not using this word 10 years ago, and it's become so essential. And vulnerability. When I was growing up, the friend of my parents once told me, I said, I don't know the answer to this question. He said, young man, never say this. Alex, during the pandemic, did you have the manual on how to deal with the pandemic?

Not so much. Right.

Do you have the manual on back to the office? So I think, of course, today it's very comfortable to say, my name is Hubert and I don't know, my name is Hubert and I need help. And so that's a. And so in a sense, to be invincible, you know, you need to have this humility and this ability to ask for help. It's such a sea change. In the book, I talk also about the quest for perfection, being evil. This is not about being perfect, it's about being human and then working together and trying to do something good in the world.

And that's exactly how we define invincible. Also in our book, you can't be invincible if you don't accept that you can't be right. So you need to be humble, because the moment you get arrogant, it's your death penalty as an organization and as a leader, it's not possible anymore because you will get killed for things that you can't control. You can create that ecosystem. But now back to the theme of the day, this idea that can you innovate? Or the question of the day, can you innovate while turning around a business? And you already gave part of the answer, which was, well, you didn't start with innovation, because there was a couple of comments in the chats and we're saying, well, you have to innovate to turn around. But the reality between what we call Exploit Explore is a bit more refined. So how did you turn around the company? When did you start innovating? To a certain extent it was innovation because you changed a lot of things from the start. But I'd like to get your take on this question. Can you innovate while turning around a company?

Yeah, of course. Every situation is going to be different. But in our case, it was also the situation of IBM in the early 90s when Gerstner joined the company and IBM was failing. He said, the last thing that IBM needs at this point is a vision. We need execution. And at Best Buy, we needed execution. We needed competitive prices. We needed a website that would work. We needed speed of shipping. We needed associates in the store that would be welcoming and helpful. We needed to get our cost structure in line. And so fixing what was broken was important. I've learned from a board member at a previous company that operational progress creates strategic degrees of freedom, and it's okay to start with fixing what was broken. Now. We did have a couple of innovation, but the overall mindset was this was how do we get back to basics? But after a while, we decided, yes, yes. We had proven that Best Buy had a reason for being and that we had stabilized the business. It was starting to grow. But then we paused when we moved from Renew Blue. That was the turnaround to building the new Blue. We asked ourselves, what kind of company do we want to become when we grow up? And that's when we did strategy. That's when we worked on our purpose. It's very popular to work on purpose. I think it's fundamental to innovation. One of the things we said, Alex, is that we believe we're not a retailer. So here's the Best Buy is not a retailer. We're a company that's in the happiness business. We're in the business of enriching lives through technology by addressing key human needs. That's, of course, more inspiring, but also it vastly expands the addressable market. And that focus on purpose is what led to the innovation. This is how we introduced the In Home Advisor program, where if your need is too complex, we'll come to you, to your home for free. Or that's how we got into the health system or the health space. Helping aging seniors stay in their home longer independently by putting sensors in their home, remote monitoring, and then an intervention if needed. That's sold through insurance companies, not through our stores. And so I think Purpose as we reimagine our companies is a key foundation.

Now, one question. I had a friend of mine who started your book and then he loved the purpose aspect. He said one point. He said, I put the book down and was wondering, can you talk about purpose in the retail business? It sounds so aspirational. But the reality of retail, when you're at bottoming quotes of the chain, when you're at the front lines, might not be so rosy. But I think you have a very strong point of view on purpose across the organization, not just for highly intellectual, highly paid jobs or where you're changing the world. I'd be curious about your take on that.

Yeah. So here's the good news. A noble purpose can be the focus in pretty much every business. It's not limited to Margaret Theresa or Johnson Johnson or Mayo. Click. And by the way, I was talking to somebody in the healthcare space yesterday. He was saying that in healthcare companies, they may have this noble purpose of helping save lives. If the way the organization work is not inspiring, it's not going to be a great place. I think every company can rethink what they do around the human needs they're serving. In our case, it may be health, it may be entertainment, it may be learning. The key to the point of your friend, we get to it in the book. So I encourage your friend to finish reading the book or give me a call. Is helping everybody at the company write themselves into that story. Because what doesn't work? Let's imagine, Alex, you and I walk into a Best Buy store and we say, we have some great news. We have a new purpose. It's to enrich lives through technology. People are going to say, we love you guys. You look like you're fun people. But you said, what? And so all of the work, and we go into great detail in the book, is helping everybody write themselves into that story. And then I learned there was a point where the performance of the company, the growth of the company accelerated. And this is a time when I heard about stories of amazing things that were happening on the front line by associates who would. There's a story I won't have the time to tell, but about a couple of associates who cured a dinosaur toy that the child had brought back to the store. There was no SOP on how to deal with sick dinosaurs, but these two associates found it in their heart to make this child happy. That's when you have human magic. The key question is, what are the human needs we're trying to address? How does that connect with My own quest for meaning in life. That's when magic happens.

And one of the things you also say is that if I remember correctly, you talk about purpose so you can attract the right people and retain the right people. Right? So maybe that purpose is not for everybody. And you know, you don't, you don't really want the people who show up for, you know, another dollar. You do need to get people to identify with where you're going as an organization.

And at this time, Alex of the great resignation. 40% of employees and companies are thinking about leaving and doing something else. We need a time of great re recruiting. And I'm not talking about recruiting new people, but with your current employees, be curious, what are they struggling with? What are their dreams? How can you create an environment where they can become the biggest, best, most beautiful version of themselves? And that has to do. There's a chapter in the book about connecting dreams. At a store general manager in Boston, he would ask every one of the associates in the store, what is your dream at Best Buy or outside of what is your dream? Write it down in the break room. He said, my job is to help you achieve your dream.

Wow, that's beautiful now. And you know the aspect I really like when you talk about purpose and labeling dreams. Also, the guidance that you need to run the business and to innovate is crucial. And I think too few companies actually give very clear guidance to both. You know, what are we going to do to fix the business? Run the business. But the same guidance is actually there to innovate. But back to innovation. And you know, one of the really impressive things, I think that of the many impressive things you did, but it just stands out because it's counter that kind of common approach to restructuring and turning around a company you actually fixed or, you know, you and the leadership team and everybody at Best Buy, you fixed the business and you started to innovate without actually, you know, going down that path of just firing a lot of people to cut the cost.

Right.

So maybe you can talk about that. And then also, you know, how did you get. Because a lot of people say, oh, we're missing the talent to innovate. You use the same group of people to actually turn around a company. Right. So when people say there's no we don't have the talent, you just prove in the contrary, actually cross the board, not just leadership, but bottom up, top down, left, Right. So how did you make that work? It's so contrary to most of the kind of practiced turnaround.

Yeah. And yes, because the usual manual of turnarounds is cut, cut, cut. Right? And that's the advice I was getting when I started. Close doors, fire a lot of people, as if people were the problem. My view is that people were going to be the source. And so the initial focus was on re energizing the workforce across the board and giving them the tools. Churchill told Roosevelt during World War II, give us the tools, we will finish the job. People needed the tools and this, this empowerment. We did recruit from the outside in a number of areas. We did a few acquisitions to augment, but it's too easy to say cut, cut, cut. And for me, what we did, entire approach, both in the turnaround phase and in the growth phase, was a very human centric. I have this vision of business which is about pursuing a noble purpose, which provides the frame, right in the chat there is a comment, it cannot be everybody's dreams. It needs to be framed around a noble purpose, a strategy. But then you put people at the center as the source, create an environment that can unleash that human magic, giving them the autonomy within that frame of purpose and values, embracing all stakeholders in a declaration of interdependence and treating profit as an outcome, not the goal. That's a key component. Now the thing is that everybody believes, I think today in these kinds of ideas, but we also know it's how to do. Which is why the book is really a manual, a handbook on how to for leaders who are keen to move in that direction. It's offering the best advice in many, many stories and examples of how to move in that direction.

And I remember hearing you say once, you know, we're beyond inspiration now. It's about the action, right? So this is pretty much common. Everybody talks about these things, that maybe there's not enough action. So before we jump to the next section, because I know, you know, I feel Nick breathing down my neck here in the mountains. But you know, you said about, you talk about unleashing the human potential. What would you say, you know, if you, if you gave other leaders advice to unleash the human potential in their organizations? What are the structural changes? You talk about purpose, but what would you say were the structural things you put in place to make that happen?

See, the traditional approach to making things happen is the Bob McNamara style of scientific, top down management. You take a bunch of smart people, they come up with a smart strategy, they communicate it, they cascade it down, they put incentives in place and hope something good happens that doesn't work. And part of it is because People, we could ask people in the chat, raise your hands, put an electronic hand or some kind of positive symbol. If you like to be told what to do, say yes. If you like to be told what to do, say no. If you don't like to be told what to do. Okay, so we'll see what happens. Usually nobody likes to be told what to do. And so the key is because we. Yes. Okay, so it's coming, right? Nobody. Because motivation is intrinsic. It comes from within. So the biggest structural thing is this is to go from purely top down to bottom up, balancing the two, and from outside in to inside out. The first thing probably starts with who do you put in positions of power.

There?

It's a combination. Of course. You want people who have experience and expertise, but also the right orientation as leaders, the right soul, the right heart, the right personal purpose that begins to create the environment. And then it's a lot of gardening. We talking about the soil. It's about connecting these dreams. It's about fostering an environment where you can have genuine human connections, where people can be themselves, autonomy. As we talked about, helping people grow. So giving them the tools, but also the ability to grow. It sounds very soft, but one, it's really hard to do. And B, I know this is from experience a great way. That's not the only way, but it's a great way to create irrationally good performance because you get things that defies logic, because you're surprised by what human magic can do.

I love that because I usually tell leaders I don't think any company that has beyond 100 people usually doesn't have a lack of skills or ideas. And even before most companies have, it's unleashing that magic. I'll throw it back to Nick to get us on track because I could go forever asking you questions.

Let's do that. Let's go forever.

Don't worry, we're actually going to continue the conversation. So we're not actually stopping it yet. We're going to continue it. We're going to move on to the hot or not section. And this is quite interesting. This is quite fun because this is based off of. To give a bit of a history. This is based off of a video segment that Gary Vaynerchuk's been doing called Underrated or Overrated. And what's very cool is Uber, you were. You did an interview with Gary. So that's very, very exciting. And it links it back to that nicely as well. Okay, so you'll see here that we're going to Go back to the mentee and we've got a few different topics that we're going to create a discussion around. If we move over here, you'll be able to see them coming up on my screen. So there we go. The Hot or Not. And I always find this fun because there's always a little bit of friction, a little bit of controversy, and I'm pretty sure today there will be. It's not going to be an exception. So we'll start off with the first one because I think Uber, you weren't a big fan of this idea of the concept of invincibility. When we said you're going to be the invincible leader of the month, you weren't as happy as we thought you would be. So I don't know, Uber for you, is this concept of invincibility hot or not?

It's not. Absolutely not. Absolutely not. Okay. At the end of goldeneye, there's the Russian guy who says, I'm invincible. And then what happens? Click. So that's particularly true. And you said it right, Alex. The moment you believe you're invincible, you're dead. And I think, if you don't believe me, watch goldeneye.

And absolutely, I'll follow Hubert on that one. Not in the sense that the moment you believe it, that's where you're in danger. And that's why I do love this idea of Day one that Jabesos talks a lot about. And the funny story there is I was in Thailand with one of the big companies there and they have a building. They said that's the headquarters, it's called 100 years. And I told them the story. Okay, well that's nice. But today you probably want to call yourself day one because after 100 years it kind of gets complicated.

I love when Jeff says that his main job was to delay for as long as humanly possible the day Amazon is going to die.

And it's interesting here we can see that a lot of people are voting for not. So this is an interesting one. And it was very interesting seeing in the chat as well that someone said invincible or invisible leader. That was quite nice. Right, so, interesting one. Let's move on to the next one, which is top down innovation. This is one that I'm really excited about, hearing the different perspectives on. Who should we go for first on this? Who wants to take the first shot?

I'll be controversial and see how Eva reacts. And obviously top down hot in the sense of creating the environment for. Right. So I do think, I mean, I lost. I Lost my hope that bottom up innovation without top down is possible. I see a lot of great innovators out there trying bottom up and it's usually an accident if it happens with only bottom up. Right. So point is, the idea has always come bottom up and it has to happen bottom up. But bottom up, I just haven't seen it work enough without the top down support the environment. Case in point, Nestle. I love the company, very good at incremental innovation. But they created one nespresso the last 40 years, which was an accident.

Right.

Guess why? Because they're very good at incremental innovation. They've been around for over 150 years. But I would believe, and I can say that these are our neighbors top down, they're not enabling transformative innovation that would allow them to do another Nespresso. That's my take.

Yeah. What's interesting, Eric, this is a subtle one. So if you just have bottom up and you let 1,000 flowers bloom. We know what it did in China in the 60s and we tried it for a while at Best Buy. We asked people for ideas and then you have pages and pages of ideas. It's all over the place, you don't know what to do with it. Then you try to filter. And so that doesn't really work if it's purely top down. And so you, Alex, as the CEO, are the ones coming up with the ideas. And it's not going to work either. So what's the frame? Right. I think the ingredients, for me, the purpose is really important because it redefines how we think about the business. Values are really important strategy, saying what we're not going to do versus what we're going to do, and then creating a space where autonomy, which is the bottom up part, can function. And so in a sense we are as leaders, we have to be architects or conductors, but conductors more of a jazz ensemble rather than a symphony. So it's very subtle because it combines different ingredients, I think.

And I love that you're emphasizing autonomy again and again and again because that's how we unleash the potential of people today in particular when it comes to inventing the future. Because most people don't know, Right? So the autonomy happens there, where people know. Okay, interesting. Nick, what, what, what are, what is everybody voting there?

It's interesting there because what we've got is most people are voting for, not generally, but there was an in a very good comment in the chat that I saw from Lisa, which says, and I really like the imagery of this, which Is that bottom up only works if the top can catch the innovation. I love this idea of catching the innovation.

I think one of the things that's awesome because the transfer from an idea that kind of got to a certain amount, like taking a large company got to 10 million, that's where it's most fragile. Because 10 million in a large company is not enough. You do need to get it to scale and that's where it needs to get caught by the operational business or leadership needs to create a new P and L. If that doesn't happen, usually even ideas that get to that size can still die.

So we'll move on to the next one which is coopetition. Now this one is collaborating with competitors Uber. I'm very excited to hear your perspective on this.

So other than the pandemic, there's another disease in the world which is the idea of zero sum games. The only way for this show to be a success is if Alex and Nick win and I lose. That's crazy. Yeah, it's like crazy. So the most jaw dropping part of our transformation at Best Buy was the strategic partnership we did with Amazon where Jeff gave us the exclusive rights to the Fire TV platform to be embedded in smart TVs that are exclusively sold at Best Buy and Buy Best Buy on Amazon. Remember Amazon was supposed to kill us and then we did this strategic partnership and when we did the deal announcement, Jeff came to one of our stores and he said, well, a TV is a considerate purchase. You need to see it. The best place in the world is Best Buy. The media was like, what are you talking? And so if you obsess, a mistake that sometimes we make is obsess about competition, learn about them, want to copy them and so forth. If we're obsessed with the customer and their needs and what we trying to do for them, then we look at partners, competition, completely different. Same with Apple. Apple is a competitor, they have their own stores, but they partner with Best Buy because there's many parts of the country where they don't have stores and they love the fact that we have the geek squad and so forth. So the obsession about the customer. And if Marshall was here, we'd say also see the vendors. In our case, they were vendors as customers. What can you do for them? And that was part of our OPM strategy or other people's money strategy or it's my money, it was just in the wrong banking account strategy.

So maybe just before we move very briefly, you need to convince investors, the market, the analysts of these kind of new approaches. Was that easy or hard? Because I often hear leaders say, we can't do this, we can't do this, we can't do this. You did a couple of things that most people would say, you can't do this. Right?

Yeah. But I think that people who use others as excuses don't you love this leader? They have the most creative, most compelling excuses in the world, Right? Oh, I can do this. Because the investor. We don't need leaders like this. We need leaders who know what they want to do and then can explain why they're doing it and then get the benefit of this. For me, in this new era, I think we're in a new era, Leadership is completely changing. We talked about it, and it's more about leadership to create the environment and get this declaration of interdependence. And for me, this leads me to want to point to something innovation. As part of the book, we have developed the first and only business electrocardiogram to assess the health of your business. Because again, so many of the traditional methods of leadership are either dated or incomplete or simply wrong. And so this tool, which is accessible on our website, is a tool that people can use to assess where they are and where they can start. What are the strengths in some of the opportunities? I think that. Nick, we can show a couple of examples of questions, right?

Absolutely. That's what we're moving on to now. So that was fun. First of all, thank you very much for the Hot or not. I think we've done well there, and I think everyone's still happy with each other. Thankfully, there wasn't too much controversy caused. So we'll move now onto the next section, which is then, yes, this opportunity to talk about the business Electrocardiogram. And the first question that we've got is, to what extent are your team members able to write themselves into the story of the organization? So I'll hand it back over Uber.

It's such an important question. It's back to this point. If I just tell people what the purpose of the company is and I try to convince them. Aren't you excited by our new purpose? Back to this question of nobody likes to be told what to do. It's not going to work. So our role as leaders is to find a way to allow people to write themselves into the story. And in the book, we tell the story of how we did it at Best Buy, which entailed organizing workshops across the entire company about trying to describe what we look like when we at our best. And we Went into small groups and we were asked to tell each other our life story and the story of an inspiring friend in our lives. And the positioning we were trying to get to for Best Buy was that of an inspiring friend. And so I was paired with a young woman. She had been in an abusive relationship with an ex boyfriend. She had been homeless. And Best Buy for her was her family, was her home. So all of a sudden I see her not as an employee, but as a human being. The inspiring friend for me is my older brother Philippe is an amazing guy. And what we then said, well, what we are trying to do, which we already do when we are at our best, is to treat each other as human beings and treat the customers as a human being and treat each other and the customers as if we were an inspiring friend to them. Now everybody can relate to this because it's the golden rule. Do something good to others. And that's how our team found a way to make it very human, very personal. And that was a game changer because Cammy, our head of stores and head of hr, was then able to say, SOP doesn't stand for standard operating procedure. It stands for service over policy.

Amazing. It's really impressive what you were able to do in that time and actually get that purpose infused because it's not like putting up posters and just saying, this is it, come on, guys, now follow this is leadership. So you had to really create that.

Engagement in a very practical exercise, by the way, that everybody can do, like tomorrow. It's one of the things we did during one of our executive off site, and it's part of the answer to the second question. During an off site with my executive team, I asked everyone to come to the off site with a picture of themselves when they were little. Alex and Nick, we got some really cute pictures. And then over dinner, we spend the evening sharing with each other our life story, including our struggles in life and our personal life purpose. Very rare in my experience to get into these questions in the business world, yet that was completely transformative. We discovered that all of us were human beings. Quirky, beautiful, messy human beings. Not a cfo, not a cmo, cto. And then two, we discovered, with a couple of exceptions, that all of us had the same kind of purpose in life, which is do something else. Do something good to somebody else. And that led us to say, we're the leadership team of Best Buying. Why don't we use the platform we have to create an organization that employees, customers, vendors, shareholders are going to love and be a Force for good in the world. That was transformative. That's what I call writing yourself into the story. And you can do this tomorrow with your team and I encourage you to do that. I won't say more.

And we're running towards. Then I'm going to throw it back over to Nick, but, you know, I want to. I really, really love your take on leadership and, you know, the book that you wrote, because I think you transitioned now, you know, retired. Right? I'm not going to use that word because you're just getting started, but.

You.

Wrote the book, if I understood correctly, also to spread this type of leadership and to show it is possible because it's counter to some of the cliche images that we have. And probably business doesn't have the best image at the moment. This is really a new journey for you, right? In terms of showing what leadership is.

I think we're at the beginning of a new era. Business can be a force for good. Business needs to be a force for good. I love the quote from the poem from the Lebanese poet Khalil Gibran, who said that work is love made visible. And my purpose today is to add my voice and my energy to this necessary and urgent refoundation of business and capitalism, you could say, around this idea of purpose and humanity and to help other leaders who are keen to move in that direction. That's why I wrote the book. That's why I joined the faculty at HBS. That's why I'm coaching and mentoring a number of CEOs with my amazing wife, Hortense Le Gentil, who Alex. You know, that's the mission I'm on. And I do this with humility because I don't have the corner of wisdom on that. But I think that the. Some of the things we did give me some credibility and some insights into some things that work and don't work. I have a few scars on my face that indicate that I know some of the things that don't work well.

I find it incredibly inspiring what you show, but you've also done it, so there's real credibility. And I'm trying to still learn and follow what you're doing. So appreciate all that you're sharing. Now throw it back to Nick. Thank you.

Thank you so much. That was fantastic. And if you want to get access to the business ecg, I put a link in the chat and we're also going to be sending a link to the business ECG that you can do yourselves free on the website. In the email after this so you'll be able to access that there as well. I highly recommend that you go and answer the rest of the questions. I've done it myself and very, very helpful. You definitely want to make sure that you are going to be checking out the Heart ofbusiness huber jolie.org book. You'll be able to get it there. We highly recommend it as well as.

Well as any good platform Amazon and you can get it anywhere. So to make it very simple. But on the website there's also good information, some tools, some materials that can.

Be helpful and Definitely check out huberjili.org business electrocardiogram as you can see on screen, but we'll share that link. Last point is we're going to be running a virtual master virtual Boot camp next year and if you go to strategizer.com bootcamp you can check that out as well. So that's an exciting thing just to drop in there quickly. And on the next session we've got one with Sergey Zverev, who is from Merck, who's done some wonderful things in the innovation space that'll be in our next session. Now that's pretty much it from us. We've got one minute left, I think. Alex, have you got any thoughts that you want to leave us with or Uber as well? Before we sign off, I want to.

Catch one last piece of wisdom from Hubert.

Oh, so over back to me. So the one I would say is that during COVID as we couldn't go outside, it was a good idea to go inside. And maybe the most fruitful thing that we can do as leaders is spend time with ourselves and be clear about who we are. What impact do we want to create in the world? How do we want to be remembered at Harvard? An exercise for the new CEOs that we do is we ask them to write their retirement speech. So start with, finish, and then in these changing times, take care of yourself. Exercise, meditate, ask for help. My most frequently used phrase these days is, my name is Hubert and I'm struggling and I need help with my students. That's what I did. After 10 classes, I said, how am I doing? What would you like me to stop, continue or start? And anytime you ask for help as a leader or as everybody's a leader, right? At least minimum myself, amazing people are always eager to help. So go inside.

On behalf of everybody, thank you so much, Uber, for joining us. Thank you again, Alex, for joining us. We're one minute over, so we'll leave it there for now. Thank you so much, everybody, and we look forward to seeing you next time. Take care.

Thank you.

Thanks everybody for joining. Bye bye.