Now it's time to listen to one of our thought leaders. And it's Roger Martin, everybody knows that. Just a few words on Roger Martin. He has an MBA from Howard. He has 10 years in consulting with Monitor Group. He is considered one of the top 50 management thinkers of the world. He is voted to be one of the 10 most influential business professors in the world. He writes books. He writes articles in Howard Business Review. And he is the Dean of Rotman School of Management. So I'm looking forward and please welcome Roger Martin. Thank you very much. I am thrilled and honored to be here. And it's great to be here in Copenhagen. It's great to be among my now friends at Implement. It's been great to get to know them. But this is such a wonderful place. I mean, my wife, Sandra, has to watch me talk at many, many places, and I don't think we've ever spoken in as beautiful a venue as this. So I'm really happy to be here. I guess what I'd like to do is actually pick up on Stig's last slide and talk about leadership and how I'd encourage us to think about leadership that might be conducive to bringing about positive change. And what I'd like to delve into a little bit is something I'm very interested in, which is metaphors. I'm interested in metaphors because there are models that we use to understand the world. And when we use those models to understand the world, it shapes the way we take action. So think about the metaphors we use in life. What happens when your computer starts spitting out weird stuff, crashing, freezing? What do we say? It's got a virus. Does it really have a virus? No. Right? It's an inanimate object. Last time I checked, I don't think they get viruses. But it's a useful metaphor for us to think about what's going on here. And why is it a useful metaphor? Well, if you've got a virus, chances are if you don't take care of it, you'll get sicker still. Right? And that's what typically happens if your computer's got a virus. If you don't take it to your IT department to get it looked at, probably it'll infect and corrupt more files than are corrupted at this point. So that's a metaphor that has some utility in guiding us. But it sure puts a lens on what we do. Right? It shapes what we do. And there are many other metaphors, metaphors of your organization as a team, you know, sports metaphors. Business is sometimes used as the metaphor of war, which has got some pluses and minuses, to be sure. But in the world of execution, implementation, there is a very powerful metaphor. Right? A very powerful metaphor. And I think this... Oops, I have to turn on this. And then it'll go... I think this is the metaphor, if you think about it. What we talk about is formulating, let's say a strategy, formulating a plan, and then executing it. And the way we tend to talk about it is, we tend to talk about it as if it's the brain, right, is formulating strategy. And the hands, or the arms and legs, if you want to say, are implementing it. Right? And the metaphor is, well, you know, I think, my brain thinks and says, raise your hand. Right? And the hand just raises, right? As if it's automatic. It's not making any choices. The brain made the choice, formulated, and the hand simply executed. Now, that can be... That's our model. That's our metaphor. That can be good or bad. I worry sometimes about metaphors being really problematic for us. So, I suspect with an audience this large, there's somebody or buddies in this audience, I won't ask, I won't ask people to volunteer their medical condition, who might have suffered or suffers from an ulcer. And I would say there might even be somebody in this audience who has had peptic ulcer surgery. But more likely, a mother, father, aunt, or uncle might have had peptic ulcer surgery. I would argue that that's all based on a metaphor. And the metaphor there is of a delicate bag with acid in it. That's what we... was the medical metaphor used for ulcers for decades and decades. That ulcers are a result of there being too much acid in this delicate bag called your stomach. And the treatments for that were to feed you a diet of bland food, right, and feed you a diet of antacids. So you popped antacids, ate bland food. But if it didn't get better, in fact got worse, and the ulcer would grow and create a lesion on that very delicate bag, they would go in with surgery and chop a piece of that out and knit it back together and hope for the best, right? So, all the thinking was oriented towards that metaphor. In the early 80s, two, then thought to be wacko, Australians said, maybe that's not the metaphor. This is Barry Marshall and Robin Warren that said, maybe, actually, it has nothing particularly to do with a level of acid in that place. Maybe it has to do with bacteria. In fact, there's a bacteria we're suspicious of. It's called H. pylori. And in due course, they did research and came forward with the thesis that this is, in fact, the cause of ulcers. And what happened? Completely ignored. They couldn't get their articles published. When they sent them in, they were rejected out of hand. Why? A metaphor. You're not dealing with the delicate bag with acid in it. Right? You're conceptualizing in a different way. It took Barry Marshall in 1984 to ingest H. pylori, which he predicted would cause him to get an ulcer, and then cure it with antibacterials until people actually started to listen. But it wasn't until 1990 that folks started to say, you know what? It may be that they're right. Every single peptic ulcer surgery in the history of the planet was a mistake and damaged the health of the person who had that surgery forever. It took another six years for people to start cottoning onto that. Now, the happy ending of this story is people don't have peptic ulcer surgeries anymore. People regularly get treated with antibacterials because there's a better metaphor than that. And the happy story for Barry Marshall and Robin Warren is in 2005. They were awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine. So, in due course, these things fall. So, I'm an optimist. I'm an optimist. So, if we say that's our metaphor, brain, thinking, choosing, rest of organization lifting your hand automatically, this is, I think, what we get from that. We get this being the implicit metaphor. The senior leaders, they're the brains of the organization. They formulate the decisions. Right? They create these control procedures for making sure the decisions happen. They create buy-in. And the rank and file of the organization are simply choiceless doers. They get bought in. They get controlled. Right? That's where the metaphor takes you. The problem, of course, is, last time I checked, there are no choiceless doers. Right? There are a lot of people making choices down below. But sadly, and this, I think, deals with, in part, Stig's 14% number, you know, the 14% of people being fully engaged. Right? Is all those choiceless doers are treated that way. And guess what happens typically? If there's a strategy, a new strategy for the company, and everything works out great, and the company makes huge amounts of money, market cap goes up, da-da-da. Why? What is the explanation of that? Brilliant strategy. strategy? What if there's a brand new strategy, and the strategy doesn't work out so well, and nothing good happens? What's the diagnosis of that? Bad strategy? No, typically, flawed execution. Right? So the people throughout the organization understand what the metaphor means. The metaphor means that even though we have to make lots of choices, and those choices are utterly and completely important to the organization, if things don't work out well, it's going to be bad execution. If things work out well, it's going to be brilliant strategy. So I'd argue that the metaphor we use implicitly, nobody writes it down and says this is our metaphor, but the implicit metaphor we use doesn't help good implementation or good execution. In fact, it makes it much harder to have happen, and that's why I believe there's a crisis of implementation or execution out there. That's why everybody's talking about it. They're talking about it because we've got the wrong metaphor. We've got the wrong way of conceptualizing it. I think the better way, and oh, this slide just to say, and by the way, this whole distinction only has been around for 40 years in the world of business, and one of the great men of business, Ken Andrews, wrote this in 1971 in the early days of strategy. Strategy is only applied to business as a concept starting in the late 60s, mid to late 60s, and he said, when he wrote this famous book, he said, basically, I'm going to split up formulation from implementation as if they're separate things, but they really aren't. I think, sadly, everybody read Andrews and said, oh, he's saying implementation and formulation are separate, not the opposite as often happens. But I think a more useful conceptualization of the organization, more useful than the metaphor of the brain and the hand is this, that every organization involves a cascade of choices from higher order choices that are typically, indeed, made at the top of the organization to lower order choices that are made at the bottom of the organization. What do I mean by that? This is an example. People at the top of organizations make decisions like what businesses should we be in. They choose to be in a given business and they tell the person running that business they need to make choices about how to win in that particular business. Perhaps they say we're going to win on the basis of great service and somebody is responsible for figuring out how to develop those service capabilities. Somebody below them is saying, in general, how should we serve customers? And some frontline employee literally has to choose, figure out in the moment, how do I serve that customer who's standing right in front of me? And the great corporations, in my view, are shifting or have adopted this kind of mode of thinking. I'll give you an example. It would be four seasons. Four seasons, hotels and resorts is the biggest and most successful by far luxury hotel chain in the world. It's got more hotels, charges a higher price premium, gets better customer feedback, has a better brand than any other luxury hotel chain in the world. And it's in substantial part because of Izzy Sharp, the founder, until recently, until he turned it over to Katie Taylor, the CEO of Four Seasons, because he understood that to give the kind of service that he needed in the Four Seasons, everybody in the organization, right down to the bellhop or the front desk person or the maid, had to make choices in real time with a customer who was paying $1,000 a night standing in front of them. And if they didn't make great choices, they weren't going to have the service level, they weren't going to have the reputation, they weren't going to have the brand, they weren't going to have what makes Four Seasons great. So he organized his entire organization around the notion that, you know what, everybody makes critical choices. Izzy Sharp makes critical choices at the top of maybe what country we're going to build our next hotel in. But then people don't quote execute that choice, right? They don't buy into that choice and execute it. They have to make really important decisions and everybody on down the organization does. And so his whole training program, the compensation and evaluation systems are oriented towards the notion that everybody's a choice maker. And they know they're a choice maker in that organization. that's a fundamentally different conception, I think, of what it means to have great execution. A fundamentally different notion. It doesn't create a division. So the question I would ask anybody is help me draw a line here. If you want to have a division, so you feel you want to stick with the metaphor of formulation versus implementation. Please draw a line for me. What's formulation? Above the line is formulation and below the line is implementation. Where do you draw the line? I find it hard to imagine drawing a line because if I drew a line somewhere, I'd have to explain that the stuff above it is choosing and the stuff below it is just doing. And if you say, you object, oh no, no, no, why do you say, Roger, just doing? Well, if the stuff above the line is choosing and the stuff below the line is choosing, the way language generally works is when we're talking about the same thing, we use the same word. Right? So, if it's choosing above the line and choosing below the line, I'd say, you know, let's be economical here, let's not waste, you know, this is the era of sustainability, let's waste the extra words, let's just call it the same thing. Right? So, if anybody can help me, that would be great, but I've yet to be able to figure out where I can sensibly draw a line and defend the drawing of that line. So, I then say, why do we have this distinction? Why is it useful? The answer is, I don't think it is. And it's not only not useful, right, not just useless, it's destructive. It's destructive. It causes all those choiceless doers to face a world which is not a sufficiently pleasant world. Now, how does that relate to leadership and what Stig put up as his last chart, which is about what heroic leadership is or what high quality leadership is? I think it changes from our general definition of it. So, as Stig, I think, absolutely pointed out, I don't think anybody would argue with what he pointed out, heroic leadership is sort of thought of as you make the big important decisions from the top. That's the old view of it. I don't think it's that. I think if everyone is making choices, everybody is a leader, and they have a job because the job is to create a seamless choice cascade where everything links together to create an overall effect, like the Four Seasons effect, and what you need to do then is you're going to make some choices. There are some choices that are going to be made by you. If you're the CEO, there will be CEO choices that you make. If you're a hotel manager, there's choices you're going to make. The important thing is to make those choices and explain the rationale for the choices. Why have I made these choices? And then to very explicitly identify the next set of choices that have to be made downstream. Rather than saying, we figured out all the choices, we figured out all the choices, and now you just go do, you say, I've made these choices, and now you have to go and make choices about these things. I don't know the answer because you're probably closer to the action, closer to the answer than that, but you're going to have to make choices. So we're going to be in this business and you have to figure out how we're going to win in this business, for example. I think leadership also is a lot about mentorship, which is assist in making the downstream choices as needed. A great leader says, these are the choices I've made, these are why I've made the choices, these are the choices I'm counting on you to make now, and by the way, if you need some help, I'm here to help you. Because I might have given you a choice that you feel is intimidating or a difficult choice, I'm here to help you. Why? Because I need to take responsibility for the operation of the choice cascade on down. And finally, finally, an unusual thing, which is committing to revisit your choices if the person below you can't make any choices that are consistent with your choices. Why is that important? It's important because you want those dotted arrows, those dashed arrows, to operate. most companies, right, in most companies, those dotted arrows don't actually exist. Now, it makes for a fabulous business. It creates a fabulous business opportunity for strategy consultants. So, there's this great business, so when these upward arrows don't exist, right, the people up here have no idea what these people down here are doing because these people have no desire to tell these people anything because they're being made to be choiceless doers. All right? And they say, actually, I have to make choices. I'm being treated like a choiceless doer. I'll never get credit for the success. If success happens, I'll get blamed if failure happens. So, screw those people. And, so it creates this wonderful business where strategy consultants get paid lots of money to ask these people stuff and tell it to those people. It's a great business. It's really useful. I'm not saying it's useless, right? I'm saying it's very useful to ask these people stuff and tell it to those people because those people are too far from the customer to know what those people know. And so, you know, it all works. it's just not actually necessary if you operated like this and helped people understand throughout the organization that it's all about a choice cascade where everybody counts and if I, if I make a decision, hey, we're going to play in this business and we're going to seek to win on service and you can't figure out any reason why that would actually work as a pair, compared to winning on something else that I will say I'll revisit that choice because we've got to make the whole choice cascade work together. So, I think that's leadership and it's a different form of leadership. It's not a leadership of, of having the largest brain so that you can make the, all the choices and have every, of all the minions go around and, and quote, implement them. it's leadership that involves everybody in a choice process up and down the organization where everybody knows that they're making choices. Everybody's committed to making great choices and you're committed to work together on those choices. I think if we had that kind of leadership in more places, that 14 number that Stig referred to would be a much higher number and I think we'd have lots more companies that are performing better and what, what, what we would have is that metaphor put in the garbage can just as the metaphor of what causes an ulcer was productively put in the garbage can. So, with that, I will turn it back over to you Stig. Thank you very much. Thank you.