tuveryinton.com Hello, Gary, and thank you for calling in. It's a great pleasure, Steve. Glad to join you. It is. It's always a pleasure to have these conversations with you. I would like to start out with, you know, what is your, we're talking worthwhile problems in relation to organizations. I'd like to have your view on what are the most prominent, the most important worthwhile problems to tackle in your view. You know, I think I should start by saying that, Steve, that, you know, every day businesses are solving an immense number of worthwhile problems. You know, if we take Denmark, you know, every day a vast array of businesses ensure that 6 million people get fed. And that happens without any government czar for food. You know, around the world, companies like Apple and Samsung and Vodafone every day are asking, how do we help people connect with the ones they love? How do we help them, you know, use apps and other things to navigate their way in the world? I think of companies like BHP and Rio Tinto that are doing the incredibly difficult and dangerous work of digging things out of the ground that allow us to make computers and cars and so on. You think of companies like NVIDIA and ARM and TSMC that have figured out how do you pack billions of transistors on a silicon chip that allows us to, you know, model the shape of wind turbine blades or to model the effects of a new drug or unpack the genome. So, you know, by definition, if you're a successful business and you're successful over time, you have to be solving important problems. Now, all of the time, you know, we have new problems to solve today. So we worry about climate change and racial injustice and cybersecurity and feeding seven or eight billion people on the planet. So there are always new problems out there. But I have enormous confidence and trust in the power of entrepreneurship to solve these problems if we let that happen, if we get out of the way and we create the environment in which this creativity can get unleashed. I would say, though, having said that, I think some truths need to be rediscovered by each generation. And so perhaps right now, the importance of purpose is getting rediscovered by a new set of leaders. And also in organizations, as they grow and as they mature, it's very easy to start to mistake the scoreboard for the game and believe that the scoreboard of profitability is actually, that's what you should focus on. And of course, it's not. Profitability is an outcome and it's a very important barometer of whether an institution is using society's resources in an effective way. But profit is not purpose, not fundamentally. And so I think it's good to have these conversations about purpose. And for me, when I look at an organization's sense of purpose, I'm looking for three things, Steve. My first question, is it noble? You know, is it inherently worthwhile? Does that purpose speak to something that is deep in our hearts? Does it challenge us to make a positive difference in the world? Is it something that's worth sacrificing for and it will encourage us to persevere despite difficult challenges? That's my first question. Is it noble? My second question would be, is it ambitious? You know, does it stretch us? Does it force us to go beyond the safe precincts of conventional thinking? Is it ambitious enough that it forces us to be innovative, that it demands boldness? I think the third question I would ask is, and is it future focused? Is there real foresight baked into that aspiration? Is it leveraging emerging technologies? Is it proactive rather than reactive? And does it challenge us to lead rather than follow? So to the extent we're having a renewed conversation about purpose, to the extent that every leader, every organization is asking, do we have a sense of purpose that is noble, that is ambitious and future focused? I think that's a very, very important conversation to have. Thank you. Could you say a little bit about if you want to create an organization of problem solvers, like you want to be good at solving the worthwhile problems and you want to create that organization? Both Novo talked about it, but also other leaders are, you know, striving to do that. So, you know, how do you do that? How do you unpack that if you want an organization full of problem solvers, so to speak? Well, that's such a great question, Steve, because getting focused on a big problem and committing your organization to making a real difference in the world, that's certainly the first step. But then the question is, well, how do you unleash the initiative, the enthusiasm, the creativity, the passion of people in an organization to go tackle that problem? Now, you tend to see this in startups, right, that are deeply committed to making a difference in the world. I think of a little company based in San Francisco called Zipline, which is working in Africa and it's using drones. These are literally like little airplanes that launch off a little catapult, but they're delivering by a little parachute. They're delivering vital medical supplies in Rwanda, in Gondon, across Africa. And so, you know, where does that kind of creative energy come that helps you solve a problem in a new way? Or to take a much more significant example, you know, you think about Tesla. This is a company that, you know, set out to change the way we move, that has this deep commitment to zero carbon transportation, that proactively built an entire infrastructure of chargers around the world. So we see this in startups. We see companies that are fearless and bold and there's very little politicking, very little bureaucracy and they've unleashed that capacity to solve problems. But in most large organizations, you don't find much of that entrepreneurial energy bubbling up. And the reality is there are simply not enough startups in the world to help us solve these big problems, right? We need our, you know, the large organizations, both in public sector and private sector, we need large organizations that are every bit as entrepreneurial as any startup. So what does it take to do that? Well, you have to flatten the hierarchy, right? You can't have five or six or seven management layers where people at the front lines are laboring under all these layers and all these rules. Number two, you have to give people on the front lines more decision rights. You have to let them have that gift of making real decisions. You have to empower them in a real way. You need to give them a financial upside in their work and the success they create. You know, the two kind of traits of every startup is autonomy and upside. And yet we know, Stia, you know, you've seen this data. We know from a lot of data that in most organizations, employees have very little real power and very little upside. We know from Gallup that only one in five employees around the world believes their ideas matter at work. We know that fewer than one in ten, fewer than one in ten will say that they have the freedom to experiment with new methods, tools, solutions at work. So, you know, the fact is many organizations waste more human capacity than they use. And if we want to solve these tough problems, we have to unleash that human capacity. That means empowerment. It means upside. It means flattening the pyramid. And it also means investing in the business literacy of every single employee. So they have the skills. They have the knowledge to make smart decisions. So, you know, setting an aspiration is great. But unless you unleash that internal human capacity, that aspiration is very unlikely to be reached. Are you saying that we have some problems internally in our classic organizations that are actually worthwhile solving beyond, you know, external worthwhile problems? Yeah, I think so. Or let me say it slightly differently. It's going to be hard to solve these new challenges without unleashing the human capability, the latent, right, the under-leveraged human capability that exists in our organizations. Again, we know. We know from data that only 15, 1.5 percent of employees around the world are fully engaged in their work. And what that says is they are coming to work every day. They're bringing their physical selves. They're there. They're obedient. They're smart. They're diligent. But what we are not getting, what we are not getting is their initiative, their imagination, and their passion. And there's little hope. You know, if you look at that, the set of challenges we have to solve as a species, and we talked about some of these already, whether it's climate change, whether it's racial injustice, and so on. If you look at these problems, Steve, we're going to need every gram, every ounce, every milliliter of human initiative and imagination that we can muster to solve those challenges. So the fact that when you look at this data and you see that we are dramatically under-leveraging that human capacity, yeah, that's a big challenge. And so, you know, my argument for a CO would be, yeah, talk to me about the big problems you want to solve in the world. Well, that's great. But in the same breath, I need you to talk about how you're going to get rid of bureaucracy, how you're going to empower people, and how you're going to unleash that problem -solving capacity inside your own organization. Because if you're not doing that, all of that grand ambition is mostly, you know, that's sentiment. That's like feel-good marketing. But you're never going to get there unless you turn on the entrepreneurial capacity of every single human being at work. Lastly here, I'd like you to make – at one time when we spoke, you said life is too short to work on inconsequential problems. I think you said that. Isn't that right? That sounds familiar. Okay. And so it sounds as if you have identified a worthwhile problem that you want to, you know, create a movement around. Could you – what is that big worthwhile problem for you? Well, you know, so I've been describing here – Talking about your purpose, you know. Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, I'm part of a little something we call the new human movement, and it's a grand title. But the thought behind it is exactly what we've been discussing, Steve, that, you know, if you look around the world right now, there's some fundamental challenges that I think lead us back to asking really deep questions about how we use people at work. Right? We see that across the OECD, across the G7, productivity growth is coming down. And that has huge implications for our ability to fund these new challenges. And I think that turning around that declining productivity growth means turning on the problem-solving skills of every human being. We see that around the world, people are losing faith in capitalism. You know, now, over the last 40 years, capitalism has reduced the number of people living in extreme poverty from more than 40 percent of the world's population to less than 10 percent. And yet, people are losing faith in capitalism because so often they see the rewards of capitalism going to the investor class, to the CEO class, rather than every employee having that financial upside and that chance to participate and to turn kind of dead-end jobs into get-ahead jobs. So I think if you look at these bigger challenges that we face as a society, part of the solution here is getting rid of these bureaucratic, multi-layered, disempowering, you know, rule-choked organizations that are simply no longer fit for purpose. We need new ways of bringing people together to do collectively what we can't do individually. And that is my passion. And I understand, Steve, that many of these challenges we face today in our world, they are systemic challenges. It's going to be difficult for one organization to solve them, you know, alone or by itself. And so we need to bring, you know, different groups together. We need companies. We need government. We need investor groups. We need unions. We need the consultants. We need the business schools. All of, you know, we need to come together to solve these difficult problems. And then we have to be very smart about what are the different levers that we can pull here, right? How do we create the incentives for people to take on these new challenges? How do you create real accountability? How do we need to change our accounting systems so we can start to measure these problems and measure our success? What are the new models that we need to be holding up that will inspire us? You know, what do we need to change in how we train people and particularly how we train leaders? What are the new tools and technologies we'll need to deploy in our organizations? And how do you go from here to there? So we're trying to work across that entire landscape, recognizing that, you know, any one of us can only do so much. But together, I think we can solve these very, very challenging problems. But it requires a deeply collaborative approach where you don't think you have all the answers. You're very humble and you're eager to partner with others. Thank you so much, Gary. It's always a pleasure when you share your insights with us. And I can't wait till next time. So thank you so much. Thank you, Steve.