thank you thank you all so I believe
that organizational leaders who build
smart human networks will build the
companies that succeed in the future and
further I believe that organization
leaders that don’t do this are not going
to be able to make it because the world
is changing at an ever-accelerating pace
and there’s a couple reasons a couple
big themes and I’ll talk about those and
explain why smart human networks will
get us there but let me give you a quick
definition so a smart human network is a
network where people are connected
together digitally so we’ve got humans
and machines that connect and we connect
them together in purpose-built groups
and we ask the people to go work on
together digitally in a network to solve
complex problems to generate and spread
ideas to teach and learn from each other
and from experts both inside and outside
of their organization and to capture and
amplify that knowledge and do it in a
way where they might be more useful at
predicting and prescribing the ways
forward as the organization executes its
strategy to get to its destination of a
successful place in the future
so there’s two trends that are getting
in the way and the first is this idea of
artificial intelligence so we hear
everything and I’m sure you hear that
robots will soon be running the world
and humans won’t have a role to play in
this world and I think that although
many of the experts in artificial
intelligence that believe there is a
coming super intelligence this point at
which machines get smarter than humans I
think that we can expect that the
learning curve will keep accelerating
and machines are indeed going to learn
way faster than we can learn and the
military uses them to prosecute a war
without a person flying in a plane we
now know that surgery can be done by
robots people are getting
operated on we know that there are
machines AI algorithms that can diagnose
cancer as good as or better than some of
the best physicians in the world and
think about our lifestyle changes if and
when inevitably autonomous driving
vehicles enter our lives and robots in
the form of Alexa or Google home enter
our home and so this march forward is
continuing a relentless drive of
technology and many people again they
believe that machines will take the
future I believe that humans with
machines working together in a symbiosis
will create the future and create
profoundly different radically different
changes for humanity so let’s talk about
how you get there the second issue is
that the pace of change continues to
accelerate so the time to build a
billion-dollar valuation company typical
fortune 500 company today it two decades
that curve continues to get shorter and
faster organizations are building from
start up imagine you could have an idea
today and by 2020 have a billion dollar
valued company and I’m guessing that
that will happen by the same token how
is change impacting large organizations
so look at the lifespan of an SP 500
company you see that in the past that
lifespan was over 60 years so an
organization made it and got really
large and they lived in a stable world
in which you continued to stay a large
company competitive today that pace has
been cut by two-thirds it will continue
to get tougher organizations that learn
and adapt faster than their competitors
by building smart human networks of
people and teams that work together and
work with machines are going to be the
winners of the future so let’s look at
how good are we at management management
leadership the people that actually run
the business let’s talk about the human
side of change
so I’d like to walk through a little bit
of the literature together to see what
we can find out about how well we’re
doing in the practice of management and
so there’s no one better than Gary Hamel
the steam professor from Harvard and
London Business School’s he teaches at
both writes bestsellers and he’s one of
the preeminent authorities on the
practice of management and so as you can
see he believes that the time is now for
nothing less than a complete revolution
in the practice of management so it’s
time for a revolution
we’ll look to McKinsey and company
McKinsey & Company is the leading
management consulting organization in
the world they’ve done more work on
defining strategies and working with
organizations to take those strategies
and implement them and what they have
concluded and they published this in
2017 so this is fresh this year is that
you have about a 30% chance if
management has a vision for the
organization if you have a vision and
you say this is where we’re going and we
want to take everybody on a journey in
the organization to get to this
destination this future place our vision
2020 wherever we’re taking the company
we’ve had a 30% chance of making it and
that’s if we use some of the best
consultants in the world the best
strategy the best strategic thinkers on
earth and is that getting better no it’s
getting worse so we’ve not despite all
of the technology we have not been able
to bend the curve the learning curve is
exceeding our ability to execute
strategy so at the same time that we’re
pursuing that what else has been going
on in business organizations have been
delayering they’ve been getting more
efficient how do they do that by cutting
out middle managers and flattening the
organization as a result the average
individual contributor in a business the
person who’s not a manager that does
work they have to work with ten
different people to get their job done
on any given day and these are ten
people that do not report to them so
this whole new thing has driven this
idea
of collaborate or die if you can’t work
with other people and have influence
without Authority and work on teams
without the authority you can’t succeed
so we know we got to work with ten
people to get the job done but here’s
the confounding factor seven out of ten
of them don’t know what the strategy is
so even as we’re working together we
can’t even define as a group where it is
we’re headed seven out of ten this is a
large study this is a study where seven
out of ten at top performing
organizations these were the better ones
they gave them the right answer on a
list of answers and employees could not
pick the one right strategy out of a
list that was the strategy for their
organization so we’ve got to work with
ten people don’t report to us seven out
of ten don’t know what the strategy is
and the economists did a study they
surveyed executives and they found the
same phenomena going on that executives
feel good about formulating strategy
like we know where we’re going we have a
plan but they don’t feel good about
getting there and that’s the messy part
of taking people on a journey that’s
getting moving thousand five thousand
ten thousand I work with customers that
have millions of employees that they
have to move from where they are to
where they need them to be and it’s a
tricky tricky thing and finally just to
talk about why or where are we with
management being stuck another
meta-analysis of a number of different
studies found that a supermajority of
leaders believe that their organization
doesn’t have the capability to execute
their strategy a super majority believe
that the strategy isn’t tied to metrics
and a super majority believe that people
don’t even understand what it is those
that work in the company so imagine your
customers in the marketplace if the
people that work in your own business
and work at this full time don’t even
know where the business is heading the
overemphasis hypothesis big data and
stem we hear about its relentless march
everywhere everything is big data and
stem but I got news for you you
we don’t look at the human side of
business the people side of business
change we’re gonna miss something so we
know that pollsters in the last
presidential election in this country
they had the best big data on earth with
the best technology on earth the best
opportunity in the world to make that
prediction right almost all of them got
it wrong the British exit almost all
pollsters got it wrong if we look at
that same over focus on stem that over
focus on big data and I’m not suggesting
for a second those things are bad I’m
suggesting that we have to be careful
not to over emphasize their importance
and that it must be balanced otherwise
we cannot predict herd mentality things
like bubbles
remember the dot-com bubble remember the
housing bubble so many lies are
massively negatively impacted because of
our inability to study the human side of
change and it’s not that difficult in
hindsight when you look at what the
human side of change looks like the
stuff that anthropologists look at and
sociologists look at and psychologists
look at that human side is much fuzzier
it’s thick descriptive data it’s hard
it’s stories it’s the it’s cultural
phenomena if you study cultural
phenomena you can start to make sense of
these things but it’s a part that the
rise of big data and stem has taken on
so so much emphasis in the last 15 years
that we’re missing the humanities and
some of the human side so I would
suggest that there’s a little bit of an
overemphasis there and he do you think
about that as you’re developing your
strategy you don’t want to over
emphasize that we over focus on inputs
rather than outputs inputs are like
holding meetings and sending emails when
you have a strategy who wants more
emails who wants more meetings hey we’re
gonna go let’s go to a meeting who wants
more meetings but that is the focus of
inputs or outputs why because the inputs
I can control somebody told me that when
I’m leading change management
communicate communicate communicate why
I can control that I’m gonna do a town
hall meeting and have a series of
meetings and go on a road show
tell everybody what it is I’m gonna
print up some posters why cuz I
measure all that I can put it on a list
and go do it but let me give you an
example of some outputs suppose I got to
get a thousand people to help work
together to collaborate to drive that
strategy I need evidence of
understanding evidence of buy-in do they
even like it do they get it evidence of
connecting across boundaries are they
actually going to collaborate around
this and solve a problem I need some
evidence of that imagine trying to do
that for a thousand people well with
smart human networks you can make sense
of that and we can measure evidence of
commitment are they committed I actually
going to get it done and then finally
overload sensory overload again do we
need more social media do any more
device time usage is anybody not using
their smartphone enough should we all
start using them more I would suggest
the answer to that question is we’re
overloaded we have sensory overload of
new media sensory overload of social
media it’s happening and it’s making us
shallower it’s making us less social and
it’s making us more depressed those are
facts proven in research and evidence
and then the other one I just call
system overload the system’s overload my
company we have too many initiatives
we’re focused on too many things I got
too many things going on I’m getting too
many emails I’m over surveyed to death I
can’t take it on anymore work you’ve
delayed the middle I’m doing more work I
can’t do anymore
people are reaching system overload so
these are the three hypotheses and they
all have the same thread in common what
are you doing to think about the human
side of business and change and so we
know that we learn alone and in groups
and we learn in ways that are formal and
informal this is how we learn from
kindergarten through twelfth grade this
is how we learn in college this is how
we learn over our lifetime but let me
tell you what’s easy it’s easy to tape
some speeches put it in content put it
on a server and stick it in the left
hemisphere of this picture the left side
is things you do alone
it turns out that connecting people to
content can be flat it can be boring
hard to pay attention it’s hard to stick
with it therefore it’s hard to learn so
you can ask senior leaders from large
organizations and I do this every day
what are you doing to drive your
strategy we have a TV channel that looks
like you two with all the senior leaders
made tapes of their one-hour
presentations so there’s 40 hours of
videos on their thousands of emails
posters newsletters does any of that
work we know the answer but if we move
over to the right side it’s about
connecting people together in
purpose-built groups to engage in
dialogue and we use that content let’s
say there’s some strategy content I want
to teach you three things today we use
that content as a lens through which
these people have a conversation and
they do it online they do with
technology you can have that
conversation you can you can participate
in this global dialogue if you have an
organization with people that are
separated by geography they can get on
their laptop they can get on their
tablet they can get on their smartphone
and they can participate in that
dialogue and we could do it in formal
ways with an expert that walks the group
through and we can do it in informal
ways that say we’re leaving you in an
environment that’s unique to our
organization where you can engage in
structured dialogue structured
conversation because it’s through
dialogue that we go from vision to
shared vision and only dialogue you know
I love about dialogue it is a 2000 year
old technology and it works
better today than it’s ever worked
because we have these incredible tools
we have incredible technology that we
can connect people together and have
them solve complex problems generate and
spread ideas teach and learn from each
other and experts in purpose-built
groups we can capture and share that
knowledge and then we can use artificial
intelligence and natural language
processing to mine the data so now we’re
doing a blend of the human side we’re
engaging humans we need hearts and minds
they have to engage in finding the way
forward for your business they have to
engage in committing to the strategy
deeply understanding it and then
translating it for their geographic
region in the world for their part of
the country that they work in for the
business unit or segment or
area of the business that they work in
and large organizations have to grapple
with all of this and with analytics when
we’re taken when we’re managing
structured dialogue online we can mine
all of that information and find the
patterns and themes of what’s going on
that might allow us to accelerate and
barriers that might be emerging things
that we’re not capable of doing or
barriers that are arising that are
giving us fits and starts in executing
the strategy if we can analyze that
information we can find our way forward
but we’ve got to empower smart human
networks connect them together we’ve got
to create the conditions and shape the
environment for that conversation to
happen we need to implement a 2,000 year
old technology all the bits and bytes on
the technology to do on social media
today inside your private organization
we all know there are lots of ways to do
this but I would implore you that you
must focus on the human side and you
must engage everyone in a dialogue and
when you engage them in dialogue and
mind you this is not telling them and
this is not surveying them some people
confuse those two things it is dialogue
not monologue communications like this
one is monologue it is one way engaging
people in a dialogue is how we take them
from vision my vision to shared vision
something that we do together share
vision of a common problem that we might
want to solve so an example would be
give you three Dow Chemical needed to
find ways to drive efficiency gains in
advance of the merger with DuPont and
they connected a group of people
together and they had an interesting
hypothesis that that Millennials would
engage in this new social way behind
their company firewall and that baby
boomers wouldn’t they were surprised to
find out that they found nearly a
hundred million dollars in efficiency
gain finding ideas that Millennials love
the new environment and baby boomers
used it and liked it just as much and I
would argue it’s because you engaged
their hearts and minds in dialogue
coca-cola used this process in this
method to find access to fresh drinking
water around the world and I’m reminded
of a time
when a new piece of research came out
and all of a sudden within hours they
had 57 pages of dialogue going through
the social media 57 pages of people
thinking about it from Beijing from
South Africa from Mexico from Spain so
thank you all so much for your time and
please let’s build smart human networks
for the people side of business change
thank you
that organizational leaders who build
smart human networks will build the
companies that succeed in the future and
further I believe that organization
leaders that don’t do this are not going
to be able to make it because the world
is changing at an ever-accelerating pace
and there’s a couple reasons a couple
big themes and I’ll talk about those and
explain why smart human networks will
get us there but let me give you a quick
definition so a smart human network is a
network where people are connected
together digitally so we’ve got humans
and machines that connect and we connect
them together in purpose-built groups
and we ask the people to go work on
together digitally in a network to solve
complex problems to generate and spread
ideas to teach and learn from each other
and from experts both inside and outside
of their organization and to capture and
amplify that knowledge and do it in a
way where they might be more useful at
predicting and prescribing the ways
forward as the organization executes its
strategy to get to its destination of a
successful place in the future
so there’s two trends that are getting
in the way and the first is this idea of
artificial intelligence so we hear
everything and I’m sure you hear that
robots will soon be running the world
and humans won’t have a role to play in
this world and I think that although
many of the experts in artificial
intelligence that believe there is a
coming super intelligence this point at
which machines get smarter than humans I
think that we can expect that the
learning curve will keep accelerating
and machines are indeed going to learn
way faster than we can learn and the
military uses them to prosecute a war
without a person flying in a plane we
now know that surgery can be done by
robots people are getting
operated on we know that there are
machines AI algorithms that can diagnose
cancer as good as or better than some of
the best physicians in the world and
think about our lifestyle changes if and
when inevitably autonomous driving
vehicles enter our lives and robots in
the form of Alexa or Google home enter
our home and so this march forward is
continuing a relentless drive of
technology and many people again they
believe that machines will take the
future I believe that humans with
machines working together in a symbiosis
will create the future and create
profoundly different radically different
changes for humanity so let’s talk about
how you get there the second issue is
that the pace of change continues to
accelerate so the time to build a
billion-dollar valuation company typical
fortune 500 company today it two decades
that curve continues to get shorter and
faster organizations are building from
start up imagine you could have an idea
today and by 2020 have a billion dollar
valued company and I’m guessing that
that will happen by the same token how
is change impacting large organizations
so look at the lifespan of an SP 500
company you see that in the past that
lifespan was over 60 years so an
organization made it and got really
large and they lived in a stable world
in which you continued to stay a large
company competitive today that pace has
been cut by two-thirds it will continue
to get tougher organizations that learn
and adapt faster than their competitors
by building smart human networks of
people and teams that work together and
work with machines are going to be the
winners of the future so let’s look at
how good are we at management management
leadership the people that actually run
the business let’s talk about the human
side of change
so I’d like to walk through a little bit
of the literature together to see what
we can find out about how well we’re
doing in the practice of management and
so there’s no one better than Gary Hamel
the steam professor from Harvard and
London Business School’s he teaches at
both writes bestsellers and he’s one of
the preeminent authorities on the
practice of management and so as you can
see he believes that the time is now for
nothing less than a complete revolution
in the practice of management so it’s
time for a revolution
we’ll look to McKinsey and company
McKinsey & Company is the leading
management consulting organization in
the world they’ve done more work on
defining strategies and working with
organizations to take those strategies
and implement them and what they have
concluded and they published this in
2017 so this is fresh this year is that
you have about a 30% chance if
management has a vision for the
organization if you have a vision and
you say this is where we’re going and we
want to take everybody on a journey in
the organization to get to this
destination this future place our vision
2020 wherever we’re taking the company
we’ve had a 30% chance of making it and
that’s if we use some of the best
consultants in the world the best
strategy the best strategic thinkers on
earth and is that getting better no it’s
getting worse so we’ve not despite all
of the technology we have not been able
to bend the curve the learning curve is
exceeding our ability to execute
strategy so at the same time that we’re
pursuing that what else has been going
on in business organizations have been
delayering they’ve been getting more
efficient how do they do that by cutting
out middle managers and flattening the
organization as a result the average
individual contributor in a business the
person who’s not a manager that does
work they have to work with ten
different people to get their job done
on any given day and these are ten
people that do not report to them so
this whole new thing has driven this
idea
of collaborate or die if you can’t work
with other people and have influence
without Authority and work on teams
without the authority you can’t succeed
so we know we got to work with ten
people to get the job done but here’s
the confounding factor seven out of ten
of them don’t know what the strategy is
so even as we’re working together we
can’t even define as a group where it is
we’re headed seven out of ten this is a
large study this is a study where seven
out of ten at top performing
organizations these were the better ones
they gave them the right answer on a
list of answers and employees could not
pick the one right strategy out of a
list that was the strategy for their
organization so we’ve got to work with
ten people don’t report to us seven out
of ten don’t know what the strategy is
and the economists did a study they
surveyed executives and they found the
same phenomena going on that executives
feel good about formulating strategy
like we know where we’re going we have a
plan but they don’t feel good about
getting there and that’s the messy part
of taking people on a journey that’s
getting moving thousand five thousand
ten thousand I work with customers that
have millions of employees that they
have to move from where they are to
where they need them to be and it’s a
tricky tricky thing and finally just to
talk about why or where are we with
management being stuck another
meta-analysis of a number of different
studies found that a supermajority of
leaders believe that their organization
doesn’t have the capability to execute
their strategy a super majority believe
that the strategy isn’t tied to metrics
and a super majority believe that people
don’t even understand what it is those
that work in the company so imagine your
customers in the marketplace if the
people that work in your own business
and work at this full time don’t even
know where the business is heading the
overemphasis hypothesis big data and
stem we hear about its relentless march
everywhere everything is big data and
stem but I got news for you you
we don’t look at the human side of
business the people side of business
change we’re gonna miss something so we
know that pollsters in the last
presidential election in this country
they had the best big data on earth with
the best technology on earth the best
opportunity in the world to make that
prediction right almost all of them got
it wrong the British exit almost all
pollsters got it wrong if we look at
that same over focus on stem that over
focus on big data and I’m not suggesting
for a second those things are bad I’m
suggesting that we have to be careful
not to over emphasize their importance
and that it must be balanced otherwise
we cannot predict herd mentality things
like bubbles
remember the dot-com bubble remember the
housing bubble so many lies are
massively negatively impacted because of
our inability to study the human side of
change and it’s not that difficult in
hindsight when you look at what the
human side of change looks like the
stuff that anthropologists look at and
sociologists look at and psychologists
look at that human side is much fuzzier
it’s thick descriptive data it’s hard
it’s stories it’s the it’s cultural
phenomena if you study cultural
phenomena you can start to make sense of
these things but it’s a part that the
rise of big data and stem has taken on
so so much emphasis in the last 15 years
that we’re missing the humanities and
some of the human side so I would
suggest that there’s a little bit of an
overemphasis there and he do you think
about that as you’re developing your
strategy you don’t want to over
emphasize that we over focus on inputs
rather than outputs inputs are like
holding meetings and sending emails when
you have a strategy who wants more
emails who wants more meetings hey we’re
gonna go let’s go to a meeting who wants
more meetings but that is the focus of
inputs or outputs why because the inputs
I can control somebody told me that when
I’m leading change management
communicate communicate communicate why
I can control that I’m gonna do a town
hall meeting and have a series of
meetings and go on a road show
tell everybody what it is I’m gonna
print up some posters why cuz I
measure all that I can put it on a list
and go do it but let me give you an
example of some outputs suppose I got to
get a thousand people to help work
together to collaborate to drive that
strategy I need evidence of
understanding evidence of buy-in do they
even like it do they get it evidence of
connecting across boundaries are they
actually going to collaborate around
this and solve a problem I need some
evidence of that imagine trying to do
that for a thousand people well with
smart human networks you can make sense
of that and we can measure evidence of
commitment are they committed I actually
going to get it done and then finally
overload sensory overload again do we
need more social media do any more
device time usage is anybody not using
their smartphone enough should we all
start using them more I would suggest
the answer to that question is we’re
overloaded we have sensory overload of
new media sensory overload of social
media it’s happening and it’s making us
shallower it’s making us less social and
it’s making us more depressed those are
facts proven in research and evidence
and then the other one I just call
system overload the system’s overload my
company we have too many initiatives
we’re focused on too many things I got
too many things going on I’m getting too
many emails I’m over surveyed to death I
can’t take it on anymore work you’ve
delayed the middle I’m doing more work I
can’t do anymore
people are reaching system overload so
these are the three hypotheses and they
all have the same thread in common what
are you doing to think about the human
side of business and change and so we
know that we learn alone and in groups
and we learn in ways that are formal and
informal this is how we learn from
kindergarten through twelfth grade this
is how we learn in college this is how
we learn over our lifetime but let me
tell you what’s easy it’s easy to tape
some speeches put it in content put it
on a server and stick it in the left
hemisphere of this picture the left side
is things you do alone
it turns out that connecting people to
content can be flat it can be boring
hard to pay attention it’s hard to stick
with it therefore it’s hard to learn so
you can ask senior leaders from large
organizations and I do this every day
what are you doing to drive your
strategy we have a TV channel that looks
like you two with all the senior leaders
made tapes of their one-hour
presentations so there’s 40 hours of
videos on their thousands of emails
posters newsletters does any of that
work we know the answer but if we move
over to the right side it’s about
connecting people together in
purpose-built groups to engage in
dialogue and we use that content let’s
say there’s some strategy content I want
to teach you three things today we use
that content as a lens through which
these people have a conversation and
they do it online they do with
technology you can have that
conversation you can you can participate
in this global dialogue if you have an
organization with people that are
separated by geography they can get on
their laptop they can get on their
tablet they can get on their smartphone
and they can participate in that
dialogue and we could do it in formal
ways with an expert that walks the group
through and we can do it in informal
ways that say we’re leaving you in an
environment that’s unique to our
organization where you can engage in
structured dialogue structured
conversation because it’s through
dialogue that we go from vision to
shared vision and only dialogue you know
I love about dialogue it is a 2000 year
old technology and it works
better today than it’s ever worked
because we have these incredible tools
we have incredible technology that we
can connect people together and have
them solve complex problems generate and
spread ideas teach and learn from each
other and experts in purpose-built
groups we can capture and share that
knowledge and then we can use artificial
intelligence and natural language
processing to mine the data so now we’re
doing a blend of the human side we’re
engaging humans we need hearts and minds
they have to engage in finding the way
forward for your business they have to
engage in committing to the strategy
deeply understanding it and then
translating it for their geographic
region in the world for their part of
the country that they work in for the
business unit or segment or
area of the business that they work in
and large organizations have to grapple
with all of this and with analytics when
we’re taken when we’re managing
structured dialogue online we can mine
all of that information and find the
patterns and themes of what’s going on
that might allow us to accelerate and
barriers that might be emerging things
that we’re not capable of doing or
barriers that are arising that are
giving us fits and starts in executing
the strategy if we can analyze that
information we can find our way forward
but we’ve got to empower smart human
networks connect them together we’ve got
to create the conditions and shape the
environment for that conversation to
happen we need to implement a 2,000 year
old technology all the bits and bytes on
the technology to do on social media
today inside your private organization
we all know there are lots of ways to do
this but I would implore you that you
must focus on the human side and you
must engage everyone in a dialogue and
when you engage them in dialogue and
mind you this is not telling them and
this is not surveying them some people
confuse those two things it is dialogue
not monologue communications like this
one is monologue it is one way engaging
people in a dialogue is how we take them
from vision my vision to shared vision
something that we do together share
vision of a common problem that we might
want to solve so an example would be
give you three Dow Chemical needed to
find ways to drive efficiency gains in
advance of the merger with DuPont and
they connected a group of people
together and they had an interesting
hypothesis that that Millennials would
engage in this new social way behind
their company firewall and that baby
boomers wouldn’t they were surprised to
find out that they found nearly a
hundred million dollars in efficiency
gain finding ideas that Millennials love
the new environment and baby boomers
used it and liked it just as much and I
would argue it’s because you engaged
their hearts and minds in dialogue
coca-cola used this process in this
method to find access to fresh drinking
water around the world and I’m reminded
of a time
when a new piece of research came out
and all of a sudden within hours they
had 57 pages of dialogue going through
the social media 57 pages of people
thinking about it from Beijing from
South Africa from Mexico from Spain so
thank you all so much for your time and
please let’s build smart human networks
for the people side of business change
thank you
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