You rarely get innovation without diversity of thought. And by definition, once you have diversity of thought, you're going to have the potential for conflict. And most, a lot of us don't know how to do that, don't want to do it. So, we as leaders often minimize difference as opposed to amplifying difference. But you need to amplify difference first before you minimize it. Welcome to the Changing Conversations podcast. I'm Katie. I'm Steve. We're consultants at Implement Consulting Group, and we believe that people and organizations change through changing conversations. This podcast is about inviting you into the conversations we're having with leading thinkers and researchers about the conversations they're changing. They're changing. So, you can get inspired and use their insights and questions to spark positive change and transformation in your organization. Today, we are delighted to be in conversation with Linda Hill. Yes. Linda is a leading expert on leadership, collaboration, and innovation. She teaches these topics at Harvard Business School, where Linda is an award-winning professor and faculty chair of the Leadership Initiative. She is also the co-founder of Paradox Strategies and Innovation Force, and a best-selling author of multiple books, including Collective Genius, and the soon-to-be-released Genius at Scale. Welcome, Linda. Thank you for having me. So thrilled that you could be here with us today. And to kick things off, we would love to get to know you a bit better through the lens of our podcast theme. So, our first question for you is, what is one conversation that has shaped you and made you who you are? The conversation that comes to mind is a conversation I had with a woman who I thought was a nurse, and it turned out she was a prostitute. So, I was doing a project in Kenya, and we were looking at why do some prostitutes get AIDS while others don't. And in particular, we were looking at what are referred to as the positive deviance, those that don't get AIDS. And so, I was spending the day with a woman who was taking me around, who was taking me around as what they refer to as a slum, 20,000-plus prostitutes. And I thought that my guide was a nurse, until she turned to me and said, I understand you're a business professor. Could you help me figure out how I can charge five cents more for each interaction so that I can send my daughter to secretarial school and she will not become a prostitute? I was floored because, as I said, I thought I was with a nurse who was taking me around, didn't realize she was a prostitute. And then I saw, like all mothers, what she wants is a better life for her children. My gosh. What did that do to you? What it did to me is it reminded me of just how ignorant I am. It also reminded me of the fact that people actually often know the solution to their problem. They just need some support to help them make that solution a reality. Thank you for that. How are you carrying that with you? Well, I carry it with me in many ways. One thing is, whenever I do research, I always make sure to do research about people all around the world. I want to make sure that we understand that innovation happens everywhere, many, many places and every day. And so when I first did my first project on innovation, I actually did go to Silicon Valley. You know, that's where you go. But now I make sure to go all over the world and talk to people at all levels and in different kinds of contexts because I learned so much from them. Beautiful. Is there a conversation that pisses you off in the corporate life? Is there something like, what are you yearning? What's the conversation you're yearning to change in the corporate world? I guess the conversation I'm yearning to change is that innovation comes from some individual genius as opposed to, in fact, it comes from what we ended up calling collective genius. And the one thing that I learned from my collaborator and co-author of collective genius, who was from Pixar, he says that everybody has a slice of genius. Everyone has talents. Everyone has passions. And you, as a leader, cannot afford not to use individual slices of genius. And I think that they're not all the same size, doesn't claim, but you need to understand what they are. And if you can't figure out a way to use them, Greg used to always say, then help that person go to a different organization or join a different team so that, in fact, they can use their talents. They can use their passions to do something they care about. So very little really pisses me off. That's not even a word I'm allowed to say. My mother in heaven is probably looking down on me and saying, oh, my goodness. But anyway, I just said it. But I really, I just always think, you know, you're wasting all of, there's this unbelievable set of resources. And I don't really think of people as resources, but there's so much knowledge here and you just need to tap it. So, so, so what, what, is there a conversation that is not happening in, in the classic corporation that doesn't, that, that, that means that we cannot harvest the collective genius? Is there a missing conversation? Well, there are many missing conversations, but I, you know, where, where I started was I studied how do people learn to lead? That was the first book I wrote about. And I must confess I did that because I didn't know how they learned to lead. So I needed to know that because I was supposedly going to be, you know, I was supposedly a professor of business administration and I was supposed to help them. Well, I did learn that you can't teach anyone how to lead. It is a process of self-development. So fundamentally what you want to do is figure out how do you motivate them to want to go through what is a really difficult process. It's really, people are complicated as we discover. So the thing that I think the conversation that I think is missing isn't, is who it's not so much what is the conversation that's missing, but who aren't you having conversation with? So just like that prostitute that I met, I don't normally encounter prostitutes that I'm, that I'm aware of in my life. And I don't normally have conversations with them. So here we were thinking about what to do about AIDS. And I was working on the AIDS vaccine. I wasn't, I was working indirectly. I was a, I was a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation and we were investing in this area. And I, you know, I, I really, you really should always start with the so-called, with, with the person who, the so-called customer, the person who actually you are supposedly developing a vaccine for. So I think that the conversation, it's not so much, are we having the conversation, but who are you talking to? So the more senior you become, the more you can live in a bubble. And as you may or may not know, I, my last two books and hopefully the one I'm working on for the next one, I always start with someone who's much, much younger than me. Someone who's just out of college and they're my co-authors. So I, you know, and as I called them once and they, I said that one of them, well, I didn't mean to say that one of them was a nuisance, but I was being interviewed and I described, you always have to have a nuisance in your group. My nuisance right now is a Gen Z individual, lovely woman. And she said, well, but I have two nuisances. So they said, well, which one of us is the nuisance? You referred to one of us as a nuisance. And I said, I really should have said nuisances, right? So because you're both a nuisance, because they, they always ask me questions that I haven't thought about, but I don't have good answers to. And I don't know whether I just pick people who speak up, but by the time I finish with either one of them, and if they're together, I'm like, okay, that's horrible. Let's start again. Anyway, I think that it's a, who are you having your conversations with? Because if you're having conversations with a range of people, they're each going to bring a different perspective to you or, you know, push you in different ways. So I don't know. I think it's more that, and again, I don't blame, for instance, CEOs, but think about who they hang with and then what are they going to be exposed to? And when you're speaking in your recent work about bringing in different voices, different slices of genius, it is in service of innovation. So leading and scaling innovation have been sort of the headlines for your recent books. So we're curious to start with how you would define innovation, because it's maybe not the intuitive definition that a lot of our listeners might have. So how are you thinking about innovation? Yeah, the way I think about innovation really comes from the leaders that I've had the privilege of studying. And so, as you two know, what I have done is I sort of sample on the dependent variable. I've studied exceptional leaders of innovation. Now, I've studied many more leaders than we actually write about, because it turns out that many of these leaders don't end up, I guess they're not exceptional in that sense, they don't end up innovating time and again. And I'm really interested in leaders who build teams or organizations or ecosystems now, where you actually do see innovation time and again. And one of the things that they all, two of them told me that I first met is, and these, all of the leaders I've studied have been visionaries, unbelievable visionaries, but they understand that innovation is not about vision so much. This surprised me very much, because I'm a protege of John Cotter and Warren Bennis. And John and Warren, I've been really lucky, the people I've had the privilege of meeting over the course of my career. And they both taught us about the importance of leadership and the distinction between leadership and management. And so I kind of grew up on that. And then when I went out to study these leaders who were building these organizations that could innovate time and again, I remember the leader I studied at Google. And when I mentioned a company, I really studied a particular individual at that company, I don't know. This man was the SVP of engineering, very important at Google, very early on. And he said to me, you know, Linda, I only took this job, I'm paraphrasing him, because I have no vision. I have no idea how we're going to store the data from YouTube, an acquisition they had just done. Now, if I knew I was going to be arguing with my son years later about don't watch that YouTube video, I probably would have hoped he did not solve that problem. But it turns out, storing the data, very, very difficult question. Do not ask me why I am not a technologist. But he said, I came because I know about scaling technology, because he was considered to be one of the best leaders at Bell Labs. But I don't know how you scale it at the pace that these two CEOs want to do what they're doing. So I don't have the answer. I don't have a vision. So I talked to three other leaders who also said to me, I don't have an answer. I have no vision. So when I read these books that I'm supposed to have vision, you know, in the first paragraph, it gets me nervous, because I have no vision. That's the only reason why I come to work every day. And it's not just semantics. So here's the definition. I'm getting around to what you said. So I kept hearing this, and I kept thinking, this is not good. You know, what is leading innovation then? And they said, one of them said to me, Linda, an innovation is anything that is new and useful to the organization. Anything that's new and useful. Some other organization may have it. We don't. And you introduce it to us. And guess what? You're an innovator. So they really recognize the difference between incremental and breakthrough innovation. But as one of them also told me, you don't build a whole culture for a few people to be able to do this thing. You really want to have a more democratic notion of innovation at anybody. Innovative ideas can come from anywhere. So it can be a product, a service, a business model. It can be a way of, you know, it can be how to launch a new effort or not just how to launch something better. It can be how to cut costs. It's really a way of doing problem solving. So it's a particular mindset about problem solving. And what you want to do is build the culture and capabilities that will allow a team of people or whatever, a group of people, to do that kind of innovative problem solving. Come up with solutions that are new and useful. So really an innovation for us is anything that's new and useful. And the organizations we've written about, organizations that have actually done, you know, we tend not to include them in the book if they don't do breakthrough innovation multiple times. But they also, you know, most innovations quite incremental. And so one of the people, just to add to it, Ed Catmull, who was one of the founders of Pixar, and I still, I just had my, one of my bigger challenges with Ed. I had to cook dinner for him. I'm a horrible cook and Ed really likes his food. But Ed, you know, said to me, too, it's like, Linda, you know how long it really took us, how to come up with our first full length computer generated movie? Almost 20 years if I look at where I started. So, of course, we had major breakthroughs along the way. I mean, they've won all kinds of tech awards, patents, et cetera. But big problems takes time. Yeah. And to test something with you before we go on, because I think it would be great to get into what you've learned about how leaders make innovation happen. What are they doing? How do they create those social environments? Before going there for our listeners. So one broadening sense that I can see from your work and tell me if you agree or you see it differently. You're talking about leading in situations when there is no clear answer. There isn't an obvious way forward. The authority, the expertise of the leader isn't enough. They need other people. This is true about so many problems and challenges in organizations today. So even if you're not in your own mind leading innovation, do you think that listeners can apply what you've learned to, we could call them complex or adaptive challenges, where we don't have that clear roadmap or way forward? Yes, I think for sure. I mean, I think what we've ended up doing, and sometimes, and often I'll go to companies and I won't even use the word innovation. Because when people hear that word, they think, oh, I'm not creative or whatever it might be. And sometimes I'll just say, okay, how do we come up with something that's new and useful? Or I'll say, not just what should you be doing, but what could you be doing and make a difference to your customer? And so I don't think, you know, rhetoric does matter. So in other instances, you know, I was just out actually in Silicon Valley because I'm looking at doing a big project on agentic AI. And there, of course, I want to talk about innovation because that's the word they like in some ways, even though they struggle with it themselves. So I think that, yeah, when you're trying to, you're just trying to solve a problem. And often the solutions you've been using haven't been working, which is why it's still a problem, or actually address an opportunity. I just want to make sure it's not always that it's a problem per se. And you just need to, you need to think about it differently. You need to come at it differently, et cetera. And we all know that you rarely get, well, I guess we, I shouldn't say we all know that's presumptuous. But in fact, you rarely get innovation without diversity of thought. And when you have diversity of thought, you're going to have conflict. And since most of us, or many of us are not all that comfortable with conflict, you know, we kind of minimize difference and we don't get all those options out. You don't allow the nuisances to speak up until you rewrite it. Miss Linda, it is not working the way you have written it. So you don't want to hear that, but you do need to hear it. So I think that everyone, it's, you're just trying to solve a problem. And you, and for you, if you know it just has to be new and useful for you, as opposed to some whatever. And most breakthroughs, again, it's like, you know, you move along. If you look at neuroscience, it tells us that we really don't make huge leaps. We kind of have to make a lot of small moves before we make that big leap or whatever, how it happens. So I think that that's, so I think there's lots to be understood. And, and I will, I was going to share one story later with you all that I was one of the leaders that I studied. And this man is a pediatric, I'm sorry, he's a cardiac surgeon. He's a Rhodes scholar. He is a pioneer in robotics, in other words, a very capable individual. And I was, had the privilege, or we had the privilege of studying him when he had become the CEO of Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi. So this was his first really huge leadership role, you know, 7,000 miles away from home, as he put it. And I called him because, well, no, I didn't call him. I was learning to use Zoom. This is February 2020, because we were supposed to be together. I always try to make sure to go to that region when it's wintertime in Boston. But of course we weren't because you know what was going on. And, and Rakesh said to me, I suspect you don't want to talk about innovation and digital transformation, because that's what we were going to be talking about. And I said, no, you probably want to talk about this disease. It's COVID. And I'm like, you know, what is it? He said, well, Linda, I have very bad news. This is going to be a marathon, not a sprint. And I thought he meant, oh, three months, six months, no. He meant years, right? And he said, I don't understand it. We don't understand this virus. It's not operating the way viruses operate. And it's, it's a big problem. And I know you don't feel it yet in the U.S. or you're not seeing it. I'm, it's got me very nervous. It's a big problem. But then what he did say to me, understatement, he did say to me, he said, you know what, Linda, I feel like I'm leading through a fog. What does it mean to lead when you can't see, when you have no vision? And we ended up writing an article about that because I think many leaders feel like they're leading through a fog. And what does it mean to lead when you have no vision, when you can't see? It's a very profound observation on his part. And so then we talked about, well, what does that mean? And so we talked about, you know, this sort of sounds like innovative solutions are needed. But then he said to me, my first instinct was to try to take charge and steer this ship. Because that's what you read about in crisis management. And this is a very capable visionary man. He said, but then I realized that was exactly the wrong thing for me to do. Instead, I had to convince everyone in this hospital that there is nothing called business as usual. Nothing. Everything we're doing is a working hypothesis. It's a hypothesis. So how do I empower everyone in this organization, Linda, to understand that everything we're doing is a working hypothesis? We are going to have to make big decisions with, you know, as much data as we have. It's going to be ambiguous. It's not, it's going to be very incomplete. We're going to have to make a decision. And we're not going to know whether it was the right decision until we really can assess the impact of that decision. So what's going to make the difference in whether we survive this is how fast can we learn and get feedback on our decisions and decide, are we going in the right direction or do we need to pivot? And that whole idea, that whole sort of article or piece about, I feel like I'm leading through a fog. Sometimes the fog clears, in which case you have vision, then communicate that vision, inspire people to fulfill it. Other times, admit to yourself, you have no vision. So the last thing I will tell you that Dr. Suri did, and I do call him Rakesh, which is maybe not as respectful as I should be, but I got to know him very well. He said, you know, he said, Linda, I ended up telling my whole organization, I'm scared, but I trust you. So imagine saying in a hospital, you know, in Abu Dhabi, in a hospital, I'm scared, but I trust you. Because he said, this is going to be about helping people manage their emotions. So I need to admit my own emotions and tell them how I'm coping with them and working through them and how much faith I actually have in their capabilities. I was thinking, especially in the era of AI, it's on top of everyone's agenda right now. And I was just thinking to what you said in the beginning, is it so that the ability to embrace the potential of AI actually hinges on your, you could say, leadership model? So the companies that will thrive will thrive because they have a leadership model that somehow does the right thing to this opportunity versus companies that would have a sort of not fit for the future leadership model will struggle because they'll have a harder time embracing the fog in that space. Could you maybe share a little bit? How do you think about that? Yep. As I said, we're doing sort of a major project on Agenda AI ourselves, and we've been doing it for a number of, I guess, a number of months now. We had started looking at Gen AI. So we've been looking at digital transformation. And so in terms of innovation, the two things that I've sort of looked at, one the most is the role of leadership, because there's still not a whole lot of research on how leaders need to think and behave if they want to build innovative organizations. It's not, and I think that's because of the way the academy kind of works. We're pretty siloed. So the people who study innovation tend to be economists or sociologists, and the people who study leadership tend to be more micro in their point of view, and it's really the intersection of the two. The other thing is I have looked over time at the role of emerging technologies and innovation. So it turns out that one of the studies we're doing, and we've been doing it for about eight years, is of an organization that's sort of in the robotic AI space and had moved into, in its own way, Gen AI and Agenda AI now. It's a company called Avatar Inn in Japan. But to answer your question more specifically, so I have two teams of collaborators. One where the focus is on sort of innovation writ large, and the other, which is very, very focused on whether or not you can build what we call a digitally dexterous workforce. And we have an article coming out about that in a month. And that team, what we've been doing, a lot of survey data and roundtables around the world to find out what people are struggling with. Now, it worries me in part, but the characteristics of the organization you need to build, if you want to build an organization that can embrace AI and these new and gen and agentic AI, the characteristics those leaders tell us that an organization needs to have are really very similar to the characteristics we're seeing in the innovation research. Very similar. Now, the thing that comes up a lot in the digital or the emerging, I don't know what to call it exactly, is you have to be, how do you get people to make data-informed decisions? Turns out people do not make data-informed decisions. And there's a whole other thing about do not call them data-driven for a whole range of reasons. One is when you say data-driven, you make people mad because it's like, wait, my husband's also a physician, a professor at Harvard Medical School. You know, when he has these funny-looking people come telling him, you should use this to make a decision about that patient. He's a pediatric cardiologist. He's like, who are these people? What do they know? And you actually don't want them to be data-driven. You want them to be, you want people to use our judgment, and particularly with AI, right? You have to use your judgment. It's a combination of the data, the experience, and the expertise that you want to bring to it. So I think that it's shocking to me how much the research is converging, in some ways, about what kind of characteristics you need to have in your organization to really use these data. But one of the roles that we talk about in Genius at Scale has been the bridger role. So just to back up a minute, if it's okay, so Genius at Scale, we really focused in on how do you not only generate innovative solutions, but how do you actually make sure they become a reality? How do you scale them? And this is hard for both startups and incumbents. So in looking at that, we talk about the ABCs of innovation. You need to be an architect, a bridger, and a catalyst. So just to zero in on the bridger role, the bridger role is a role where you know how to translate across difference. So most companies nowadays do not have all the capabilities they need. Going back to Gen.AI and Agentec.AI, what we see is many companies are realizing, given the speed at which they need to operate, they're going to have to partner with another organization to get access to those capabilities. So Microsoft is working with OpenAI. They're obviously developing their own AI capabilities internally, but to do it fast, they partnered. Too often, what we think about is we get all the contracting right between what's going to be the IP, all the governance issues. But whether or not you actually can co -create across that organizational boundary, that's a whole other question, right? So unless leaders all the way down the organization from Microsoft and OpenAI figure out how to work together and innovate and come up with solutions, and it's not just the top, it's all the way down, the organization's not going to be able to implement or nonetheless develop, co-pilot, and implement it. So what we see is with AI in particular, Gen.AI and Agentec.AI, you need lots of bridgers, people who can talk tech business. And what we're hearing is that we don't have enough of those. We don't have people who know how to translate across, who know enough about the technology, its capabilities and constraints, limitations, and know enough about the business. So what I'm seeing, and I presume you are in your practice, is that you need people who can speak both languages or figure that out to both develop the technology in the first place, to develop the right algorithms, models, et cetera, and nonetheless implement them. So I think that bridger role for us, which is about these are people who know how to work at the boundary of the organization with others across that boundary. Those people are, I mean, organizations are desperate for them. And I guess you also, as a leader, whatever leadership role you have, you have to be a bridger. Or you have to be able to figure out how to find some bridgers in the organization. Yeah, so it's not like we're all going to be good at all three roles. I haven't defined all three roles, but you do need to be a bridger. I mean, CEOs, sort of, one of the things they find new CEOs is how on earth do you talk to shareholders, right? These new groups, et cetera, how do I translate across? So these translation roles exist. But I think that particularly with the, it's interesting, with Gen AI, senior executives became much more nervous about technology and trying to understand more about it than we were seeing before. Really, we have data on that. So before, there were sort of four characteristics they thought you had to have as a leader. Gen AI happens. I mean, we saw the same ones come up year after year after year. Suddenly, becoming, developing some tech, you know, being more tech savvy became urgent for them. And in the spirit of giving listeners the full model, because I think it creates a wonderful language for what kind of leadership is called for right now, the ABCs of scaling innovation. Could you talk us through the A and the C? So we've got the B being the bridger, doing the translation, working across boundaries. What do the A and the C look like? So the A is the architect. And in fact, that's in some ways what we wrote about mostly in Collective Genius. I think we've simplified it a bit in this, in Genius at Scale. But the architect is, this is a leader who knows how to build the right culture and capabilities necessary for the organization to be able to innovate time and again. And we're very fairly precise about what those characteristics and that culture needs to have at its foundation. Then the bridger is, this is about, because that's the foundation. So when you're building this team that can collaborate, experiment, and learn, how do you do that? You build culture and capabilities. That's what your leadership role principally is. Then I think one of the reasons why you might need to be a bit of a visionary or understand that is you're not, maybe people don't see you as very credible if you don't have some vision yourself, even though that's not the role. The B is the bridger, recognizing that, you know what, we don't have all the talent and capabilities we need inside to do what we want to do. So we need to be able to partner. So how do we build robust partnerships so that we can do that? And building those partnerships is really about building social connection. It's like, how do we make sure, you know, because we know how risky and hard innovation is, and to do it with people who are quite different, different priorities, different work styles, et cetera, do you know how to do that? Really hard. And then finally, the catalyst, really, these are the leaders who know how to build out an innovative ecosystem, what we call movements across an ecosystem. And one of the leaders that we, not in the book or whatever, but we did get to study, we just, it's not that they're not going to be successful, et cetera, we were studying him as a part of our understanding of the digital work, was Luca DeMeo, who was at the time the CEO of Renault. He's just become the CEO. He's moved over to luxury brands recently. But the catalyst, what he did is he wrote a letter to the citizens of the EU. Don't know if you all saw this letter, in which he said, you know what, no matter how good any auto company is in Europe, I mean, we cannot go it alone. We need to build out citizens. You need to call your government. You need to call your organizations. You need to engage the NGOs, the civil society, because for us to build an affordable electric vehicle that can meet the sustainability goals of the EU and not become irrelevant to China, for instance. He wrote this very explicitly. We all need to be engaged. This is about all of us, because the auto industry is so fundamental to the economy of any country. So he decided the time had come. It's a beautiful letter. I highly, but it's about, he's trying to play the role of a catalyst leader. Now, he's not going to do this all alone, but he's basically saying the whole ecosystem needs to, we all need to, private, private, private, public. I'm on my way. I'm very excited to Dubai to give a presentation at the government summit they're holding in Dubai about some of the efforts they're making to make sure that there's more cross-sector engagement to take full advantage of AI, for sure, and Gen AI, and also to just solve a whole series of societal challenges that exist for all of us. And so they are developing a whole cadre of cross-sector leaders. And it's a very interesting effort about how they're going about it, because as they look out and see how are we going to stay at the forefront, we need to have catalyst leaders, people who understand how to do multi-party collaboration. But I actually love that point, and it makes me think about, so in the last three months we've been visiting top 100 CEOs and leaders of boards, and we've asked them the question, the following question, we asked them, what would you wish you could say about your organization that you can't say today? So what would you wish you could say about your organization that you can't say today? And we had expected that they would say something with AI. And what's interesting is what they say is with different wording, they are all centering around this yearning for unleashing the full potential that they feel they have in their organization that is not happening. So kind of a longing for a deep empowerment of people to solve problems and feel empowered and have agency, and also a recognition that the management model we have put in place, for good reasons, does not do that. So they all have that longing for something in that space. Do you have any comments to that? What does it make you think, Linda? Well, I guess that's what I've been doing research on for the last 25 years. How do you create that space? Now, I'm not at all surprised about two trends that we see in sort of, I don't know, what's being written about these days. One is about the importance of purpose. So one of the things that, again, sort of surprised me, but not really when we were first doing this research, in collective genius, one of the things we saw in these organizations that could innovate time and again is there was very much a shared sense of purpose, the meaning of the work. So the leaders really focused on why are we doing this work? Why does it matter? And we see all these books on purpose now, because why should I take risks and try to do all this hard work if the work isn't very meaningful to me? So how do you align that shared sense of purpose with what the individual's passions are? So that's huge. The other one that we see a ton of work on, of course, is this issue of psychological safety. So Amy Edmondson, my colleague, I certainly read her work always, her office is nearby, on psychological safety. But the fact that people are desperately trying to figure that out is not surprising. Because often you as a leader, how are you going to behave as a leader so that people feel like they can really share with you, how do you unleash their ideas, and then how do you harness and leverage them? Now, it turns out that to do that, going back to you rarely get innovation without diversity of thought. And by definition, once you have diversity of thought, you're going to have the potential for conflict. And so to go from the unleashing to the harnessing, a lot of us don't know how to do that, don't want to do it. So as, again, one of the leaders said, people, we as leaders often minimize difference as opposed to amplifying difference. But you need to amplify difference first before you minimize it. So when I was just talking to a very senior, he's not a CEO, because the way they're structured, he almost is. But anyway, he's in the C-suite. He said, how do you get that amplitude? Can you send me something to read about how you amplify difference? And I don't think, well, one thing, I said, I think what you really mean is, how are you going to deal with those differences once they emerge? Not so much, how do you, we can think about ways to amplify, but really it's about conflict. I mean, we were talking over time and together. And he said, yeah, I guess that is what it is. So I think that they have that yearning. I'm going to tell you what I found to be a disturbing story. Yes. So I was teaching a case about Ajay Banga, who we wrote about him when he was the CEO of MasterCard. And he's now the head of the World Bank. But this case describes, you know, he had an incredible run as the CEO of MasterCard. To just say this in a very simple way, they went from sort of being a credit card company to being a tech company in the payment space and now in e-commerce. So they ended up providing the rails for both Apple Pay and Android Pay after being a credit card company. So there's a whole story, which we're really privileged to be able to write about, about how they did that. But one of the things that Ajay first found out when he got there is that it was 26 when he asked the company, how important is innovation going to be to our success? So it was 26 out of 27 is how important is it as a factor. And he thought, ooh, this is a problem because it's going to be very important to us. It's existential because FinTech is going to eat us alive over time. And the board believed that deeply because boards also have their risk appetite really varies. So once he saw that, he first said the purpose of this organization is financial inclusion. And I'm going to have to, and that is including everybody, individuals and SMEs, et cetera, who now can't participate in the formal economy. And we're going to have to use, to make it affordable, we're going to have to use digital tools. So this was the story, the narrative. Now, I'm going to assume, and I actually know, I guess I should not, we didn't talk to everybody at MasterCard. Some people were excited about that purpose. This is purpose again. And others were, what are you talking about? Because let's think, they're ex-bankers. These are the people that they didn't consider credit worthy. So it's actually, he's the provocateur in the best sense. But then he was like, well, how are we going to move this organization? So how am I going to get them? He said they were very talented, they just had an IPO, actually feeling quite successful in some ways, because that had gone very well. But they were pretty conservative, pretty consensus-oriented. So in Genius at Scale, we actually have about six of the stories are about leaders in regulated businesses. And six of the stories are about startup types or not in regulated businesses. Again, it's shocking to me how much they think alike, these leaders. But then he began to think about, going back to how do I unleash, this is a grand organization with its legacy, etc., of success in its own way. But we have to think differently, we have to work differently. So what you see again, this case describes how they do it. And you see they've succeeded. And the part that I need to come back to is, when I taught this case to a group of CEOs of major companies, 90 plus of them, they actually, half of them were CEOs, they were allowed to bring someone else from their C-suite. So I said, here's this case. And what Ajay asks is, he asked somebody to help him make this change. And you see the 26, and you see that it's successful, because you read the B case, too, if you will. So I asked these C-suite executives, how many of you, if Ajay had offered you this opportunity to help make this organization more innovative, how many of you would have said yes? How many of the CEOs do you think said yes, I would take that job? You know, what do you think? What number said it? I've read it, so I won't answer. Okay. You go ahead. Few. Very few. So what you read was actually about a group of, they weren't CEOs, they were lower level. So how many CEOs? Five. Yeah, not many. Not many. Four. Four. Four out of 90 plus. And one of them admitted, I have never failed at anything. And this would be the first time I'd almost be guaranteed to fail. He was very lucky. So I asked the question by accident, which is why you read, when I asked the high potentials, there were three, right? So the CEOs, we had one more. So now what is the probability of those? These were all incumbents, pretty successful ones. What is the probability? They want to empower. They want all of that. But they said, nope, not taking this job because the probability of failure is way too high. So the career risk. I said, well, do you ask people to take these jobs? Oh, yeah, all the time. And what do you do when they fail? Whatever, however you want to define failure, right? Well, it's career ending. I mean, maybe I'm okay with it, but the board isn't, right? The board is worried about what this person didn't deliver. So first of all, what are the metrics? We get into this whole conversation. But what does it mean if you find out that of 90 C-suite executives, they don't want to have to lead the kind of culture change and transformation that they know will be required for them to be able to innovate time and again? Yeah. So there's clearly a leadership task here, and there's so much about your work that is just fascinating and challenging conventional views of leadership and inviting us into another way of leading that the moment is calling for. So in our little wrap-up here, if we could, for our listeners, leave them with a few experiments to try in their leadership or their way of working, questions to ask, conversations to start. A few things that I've heard during this conversation are embracing a little bit the fog, not knowing everything, not having all the answers yourself, embracing diversity of thought, being a little bit maybe more open to conflict or at least tolerating it. Wrestling with it a little bit. Leaning into creating a sense of purpose and safety for other people to contribute their slice of genius. Other tactics, tips, strategies that you would offer the listeners to get started with the ABCs and the leadership that you're advocating for? Well, the first one, it's not so much embracing the first, the fog. The fog is there. Yeah. Acknowledge the fog, right? So what I do want to tell you about Rakesh and his team, they actually were testing for variants of the virus in January 2020, and he thought they were late. 2020, he already told me, Linda, there are at least seven or eight variants, operate differently. So this is a man who actually had cleared the fog faster than most, who could not believe he had waited so long because he's an optimist and he didn't believe that this was as bad as his sparring partner said. So one thing that I would say, and in that example just came to mind, is do you have a sparring partner? Do you have someone who you can talk to? And Rakesh specifically picked a sparring partner who was the opposite in style and way of approaching things than him. And he took feedback from them. The second thing he did is he always, something that we know about, he always had someone on the team who had never seen a virus before, the beginner's eye. And the person who had the beginner's eye was sort of began to ask those questions that tested first assumptions. So going back to my nuisances, I don't know that I'd say they, but basically, do you have someone there who is going to, because they don't understand it, they don't have an entrenched way of thinking about whatever it is, they'll look at it differently to introduce. Now, just because you put them on the team doesn't mean others are going to listen to them. So you're going to have to throw your weight behind them. So one is, you know, do you have a sparring partner? Pick somebody who's different. The second is, are you hearing from a voice that you normally don't hear from, going back to who you're having conversations with? And again, it's not like you're going to do exactly what that person says. They're in the mix. The third I was thinking about, which is very, look at your rhetoric. So one of the leaders we studied kept, every time he mentioned innovation, he mentioned technology. And when we collected data, we have an instrument to measure culture and capabilities. And then, you know, so this, what came out on this instrument is everyone who wasn't associated with technology assumed they had nothing to do with innovation. Because every time he said it, and then he looked and he thought, oh my goodness. So he stopped always giving examples that were technology. And guess what? All these people said, oh, I'm an innovator. Yes, I've created this whole new process, et cetera, that I'd like to share. And can we begin to scale this? So look at your rhetoric. Being inclusive with it, it sounds like. Yes. Making sure that people can relate to what you're saying. And the other thing that this particular leader did, actually two leaders did, is they actually shared their 360 degree feedback with their whole team. One with the whole organization. To show, and it wasn't all nice, there was some dirty laundry in there. To show that I'm not perfect, you're not perfect. And then he said, what should I keep doing, start doing, stop doing? Given this, what advice would you give me? About how I can help you do your best work. Keep, start, stop. Collected advice. From one instance, I said anybody in the organization could write to him and say, this is what I think. And got some good advice about it. Did it sting? Yes. Did he get mad? But he just did it at home. How about you? What's your response? Managing their emotions. But leadership is always about using yourself as an instrument to get something done. And it's always about an emotional connection. So even if you think you're being, you know, Mr. or Ms. or illogical, fundamentally people are responding to the emotion that they're feeling when they're interacting with you. How they feel about themselves and experience themselves and you. So I think my advice would fundamentally be, it can make you crazy. And you can't do it all the time. But be much more self-aware of what experience you're creating for people. And is it an experience that is likely to allow them to feel like it's safe enough? There's always risk to start sharing with you what they're thinking, really. And then, you know, I think really just purely helping people learn how to manage conflict is not trivial. The last experiment. So one experiment I would say is, you know, change your words. The other word that this particular leader changed was he always talked about change. He loves change. So he thinks anyway. But someone said to him, can you start talking about evolution instead of change? And he thinks evolution, he thinks dinosaurs. But then he said, she said, you know, it means that you respect what we've already done, that we're evolving. And every time you say change, it's like we've been doing something wrong. We've been doing something wrong. So I guess what I'm saying is often I think we think about the macro actions we take. But think about the micro actions you take that actually are either, you know, helping create that kind of environment you want to create. And the three capabilities, creative abrasion is how you deal with conflict. Creative agility is can you experiment and learn in an expeditious way? And then the last, the other thing I would say, and maybe this is, I don't know, it's an experiment. The other thing that is quite broken because we've run this, used this instrument to look at a lot of organizations, decision making is quite broken in many organizations. Because to, you got to make all kinds of decisions. And we didn't go down here, but if I, one last piece of advice. One thing we see in many organizations is what one organization refers to as walking zombies. Projects that should be killed. Everybody knows they should be killed, but no one will kill those projects because they don't want to hurt Linda's feelings. Or somebody's feelings. And it's another one of those career-ending things, right? And obviously our negotiation experts tell us why sunk costs and all that. But fundamentally, one of these walking zombies. So Ajay at MasterCard, he told the organization, I will personally give you a bonus if you kill your own project. Because we don't, we have limited resources. We need to make choices. And so decision making is quite broken in many organizations because we're not able to deal with the conflict and make those choices. And then we're wasting resources at a time when, you know, Gen AI, Gen AI, is extremely expensive. You actually do need to, you know. Have the courage. Have the courage. Face that. It's not working. Yeah. So, you know, just go through one day and say, okay, what projects should be killed? And those resources freed up to do other things. And our feelings are going to be hurt when it's our project. Let's just be clear because we're human, right? Do you want a final word? And I think it shouldn't be that difficult in the sense that we know from data that only a third of all the projects that are initiated are actually going to be successful in the end. So it should be possible at any given time to identify. Well, you don't know which ones are going to work out or not, really. That's one of the whole issues. But you still have to make choices. And so how do you come up with a way of making those decisions that people will experience as fair and equitable? Yes. Sensible, effective. But, again, it doesn't mean that they're not going to be upset. And, you know, because we're human if they cared about them and they're passionate about them when you kill them. Not good, right? So, but I think it's, you know, organizations are so resource constrained right now. And you actually do need constraint to innovate. Everyone knows that. You don't, when it's just free and open, it's actually hard to. But then coming up with the criteria and agreeing on those that you're going to use to make those choices. So I guess the other experiment I would do is something about how you're doing decision making. Beautiful. A lot of advice for our listeners to grab onto there. So we hope that you'll choose something. Run with it. Let us know how it goes. And thank you so much, Linda. It's been a pleasure talking to you today. Well, it's really been a pleasure talking with you as well. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for joining us in this conversation. We hope it sparks something for you. To continue the conversation with us, you're welcome to send us your reflections and questions through the link in the show notes. We would love to hear from you. We also invite you to use this episode as a conversation starter by sharing it with your colleagues and friends. Take care and see you next time.