Exploring Organizational Change and Leadership

Inspiration and creativity. Where minds come alive to fuel a different way of thinking. So we all can impact the world in remarkable ways.

We are London Business School. We are Minds Alive. London Business School.

A global and vibrant community. In two of the world's greatest cities. A place to learn, together, how to out-think challenges. And where diverse minds connect and collide to shape a better future.

Where new business ideas are formed and have impact in the world. And where future leaders learn how to think. A home to questioning the norm, inspiration and creativity. Where minds come alive to fuel a different way of thinking. So we all can impact the world in remarkable ways.

We are London Business School. We are Minds Alive. London Business School. A global and vibrant community.

In two of the world's greatest cities. A place to learn, together, how to out-think challenges. And where diverse minds connect and collide to shape a better future.

We are London Business School. We are Minds Alive. London Business School.

A global and vibrant community. In two of the world's greatest cities. A place to learn, together, how to out-think challenges. And where diverse minds connect and collide to shape a better future.

So we all can impact the world in remarkable ways. We are London Business School. We are Minds Alive.

London Business School. A global and vibrant community. In two of the world's greatest cities.

A place to learn, together, how to out-think challenges. And where diverse minds connect and collide to shape a better future. Where new business ideas are formed and have impact in the world.

And where future leaders learn how to think. A home to questioning the norm, inspiration and creativity. Where minds come alive to fuel a different way of thinking. So we all can impact the world in remarkable ways. We are London Business School.

We are Minds Alive. London Business School. A global and vibrant community. In two of the world's greatest cities.

A place to learn, together, how to out-think challenges. And where diverse minds connect and collide to shape a better future. Where new business ideas are formed and have impact in the world. And where future leaders learn how to think. A home to questioning the norm, inspiration and creativity.

Where minds come alive to fuel a different way of thinking. So we all can impact the world in remarkable ways. We are London Business School. We are Minds Alive.

London Business School. A global and vibrant community. In two of the world's greatest cities. A place to learn, together, how to outthink challenges. And where diverse minds connect and collide to shape a better future.

Where new business ideas are formed and have impact in the world. And where future leaders learn how to think. A home to questioning the norm, inspiration and creativity.

Where minds come alive to fuel a different way of thinking. So it all can impact the world in remarkable ways. We are London Business School. We are Minds Alive. London Business School.

A global and vibrant community. In two of the world's greatest cities. A place to learn, together, how to out-think challenges.

And where diverse minds connect and collide to shape a better future. Where new business ideas are formed and have impact in the world. And where future leaders learn how to think. A home to questioning the norm, inspiration and creativity. Where minds come alive to fuel a different way of thinking.

So we all can impact the world in remarkable ways. We are London Business School. We are minds alive. London Business School. A global and vibrant community.

in two of the world's greatest cities. A place to learn, together, how to out-think challenges. And where diverse minds connect and collide to shape a better future.

We are London Business School. We are Minds Alive. London Business School.

A global and vibrant community. in two of the world's greatest cities. A place to learn, together, how to outthink challenges. And where diverse minds connect and collide to shape a better future. Where new business ideas are formed and have impact in the world.

And where future leaders learn how to think. A home to questioning the norm, inspiration and creativity. Where minds come alive to fuel a different way of thinking.

So we all can impact the world in remarkable ways. We are London Business School. We are minds alive. London Business School.

A global and vibrant community. In two of the world's greatest cities. A place to learn, together, how to outthink challenges. And where diverse minds connect and collide to shape a better future.

Where new business ideas are formed and have impact in the world. And where future leaders learn how to think. A home to questioning the norm, inspiration and creativity.

Where minds come alive to fuel a different way of thinking. So we all can impact the world in remarkable ways. We are London Business School.

We are Minds Alive. London Business School. A global and vibrant community. in two of the world's greatest cities. A place to learn, together, how to out-think challenges.

And where diverse minds connect and collide to shape a better future. Where new business ideas are formed and have impact in the world. And where future leaders learn how to think.

A home to questioning the norm, inspiration and creativity. Where minds come alive to fuel a different way of thinking. So we all can impact the world in remarkable ways.

We are London Business School. We are minds alive. London Business School.

A global and vibrant community. in two of the world's greatest cities. A place to learn, together, how to out-think challenges.

And where diverse minds connect and collide to shape a better future. Where new business ideas are formed and have impact in the world. And where future leaders learn how to think.

A home to questioning the norm, inspiration and creativity. Where minds come alive to fuel a different way of thinking. So we all can impact the world in remarkable ways. We are London Business School. We are minds alive.

London Business School. A global and vibrant community. In two of the world's greatest cities. A place to learn, together, how to outthink challenges.

Where minds come alive to fuel a different way of thinking. So we all can impact the world in remarkable ways. We are London Business School.

We are minds alive. London Business School. A global and vibrant community.

In two of the world's greatest cities. A place to learn, together, how to out-think challenges. And where diverse minds connect and collide to shape a better future. Where new business ideas are formed and have impact in the world. And where future leaders learn how to think.

London Business School. A global and vibrant community. In two of the world's greatest cities. A place to learn, together, how to outthink challenges.

So we all can impact the world in remarkable ways. We are London Business School. We are Minds Alive. London Business School. A global and vibrant community.

Minds come alive to fuel a different way of thinking. So we all can impact the world in remarkable ways. We are London Business School. We are Minds Alive. London Business School.

A global and vibrant community. In two of the world's greatest cities. A place to learn, together, how to out-think challenges.

And where diverse minds connect and collide to shape a better future. Where new business ideas are formed and have impact in the world. And where future leaders learn how to think.

We are Minds Alive. London Business School. A global and vibrant community. In two of the world's greatest cities. A place to learn, together, how to out-think challenges.

And where diverse minds connect and collide to shape a better future. Where new business ideas are formed and have impact in the world. And where future leaders learn how to think.

A home to questioning the norm, inspiration and creativity. Where minds come alive to fuel a different way of thinking. So we all can impact the world in remarkable ways.

We are London Business School. We are Minds Alive. London Business School.

A global and vibrant community. In two of the world's greatest cities. A place to learn, together, how to out-think challenges.

And where diverse minds connect and collide to shape a better future. Where new business ideas are formed and have impact in the world. And where future leaders learn how to think.

A home to questioning the norm, inspiration and creativity. Where minds come alive to fuel a different way of thinking. So we all can impact the world in remarkable ways.

We are London Business School. We are Minds Alive. London Business School.

A global and vibrant community. In two of the world's greatest cities. A place to learn, together, how to out-think challenges. And where diverse minds connect and collide to shape a better future. Where new business ideas are formed and have impact in the world.

And where future leaders learn how to think. A home to questioning the norm. And creativity.

Where minds come alive to fuel a different way of thinking. So we all can impact the world in remarkable ways. We are London Business School. We are Minds Alive. London Business School.

A global and vibrant community. In two of the world's greatest cities. A place to learn, together, how to out-think challenges. And where diverse minds connect and collide to shape a better future.

Where new business ideas are formed and have impact in the world. And where future leaders learn how to think. A home to questioning the norm, inspiration and creativity.

Where minds come alive to fuel a different way of thinking. So it all can impact the world in remarkable ways. We are London Business School. We are Minds Alive. London Business School A global and vibrant community In two of the world's greatest cities.

A place to learn, together, how to outthink challenges. And where diverse minds connect and collide to shape a better future. Where new business ideas are formed and have impact in the world. And where future leaders learn how to think.

We are minds alive. London Business School. A global and vibrant community. In two of the world's greatest cities.

A place to learn, together, how to out-think challenges. And where diverse minds connect and collide to shape a better future. Where new business ideas are formed and have impact in the world.

And where future leaders learn how to think. A home to questioning the norm, inspiration and creativity. Where minds come alive to fuel a different way of thinking.

So we all can impact the world in remarkable ways. We are London Business School. We are minds alive.

London Business School. A global and vibrant community. in two of the world's greatest cities.

We are minds alive. London Business School. A global and vibrant community. It seems such a shame to cut into conversations which are so live.

So sorry about that. I've just got a couple of things I want to do before we get into the main part of our day today. Thank you for coming here.

Thank you for those who've traveled far. Thank you particularly those who had a few issues with rush hour travel across London to get here on time. And then thank you most of all for then responding to that rather unexpected collaboration challenge. we gave you the minute we walked in. I know we sort of threw you into that, so thank you for your response.

Absolutely brilliant. I think collaboration has already reached peak before we start. So it was our interest to sort of spark your interest around our theme today, around collaboration, curiosity, and creativity. And hopefully you'll see a few things signaled as the day goes on, which reflect that theme. Just in terms of...

Me, my name is John Dorr, I'm a member of the exec head team here at London Business School. It's my sort of pleasure, privilege and purpose today just to take you through a few of our sort of proceedings just to try and keep us to time and to keep us on track. And with that in mind, it's sort of a time-honoured fashion for any facilitator at the beginning of the session. I have a few rather dull notices to share with you but I'll try and cover those as quickly as I can.

First of all, everything you need, you should have with you. Your programme is on your lanyard. There are a few resources in your bag.

There's a special edition of London Business School Review. Do try and keep your name badges on if you can throughout the session. Try and keep your own if you can. That's very helpful as well.

We have a security protocol agreed with the venue whereby you need to have your badge on to get in and out, but do wear it behind. It's easy to connect with one of that way if you can. I'll try and keep us to time.

It's always a challenge. We've got a lot to cover. But there's two reasons for that.

A, so we keep the sessions focused within here, but I'm also mindful this time in the morning, the afternoon and over lunch. If you want to connect and collaborate with one another or if you have to take a call or connect with a client or a colleague somewhere in the world, we'll honor that time so you can actually do that outside of those sessions. And the venue assure me there's no fire alarm or any emergency alarm planned today. So if you do hear one, just leave by the nearest exit.

Please don't use the lifts. Apparently, the meeting area rather romantically is described as underneath Waterloo Bridge. So hopefully, we won't find one another there later.

Now, if I'd done this introduction a few years ago, I would have gone through this rather bizarre exercise now where I try and convince you to switch off your phone and to not look at your BlackBerry and to sort of be focused on the... Sage on the stage. The world's moved on now. We're live streaming today around the world and people can tune into this. If you're uncomfortable with that anyway, there's places you can sit where you won't be visible to your colleagues elsewhere in the world.

But hopefully that's not an issue for you. The thing we are keen for you to do though is if there are things that spark your interest, if you feel you want to share them with colleagues or your social network, do that. You can do that on Twitter or LinkedIn. There is a hashtag LBSHR.

You can use that throughout. And even if you don't want to share after the event, if you look up hashtag LBSHR, you can see the comments, the queries and the highlights from all of these sessions and also the other things that your colleagues in the room wanted to share. I've got a couple of bits of good news for us.

I won't steal Julian's thunder, but it's an exciting day for London Business School today, which we're going to cover in a second. But the main bit of good news today is we're not going to focus on the B word. Most of the conferences I seem to go to, conferences nowadays seem to focus the B word. We're going to move on a little bit down the alphabet, just one step into the realm of creativity, curiosity, critical thinking, collaboration.

On critical thinking, extraordinary. I don't know how the team did this. We're in the Alan Turing suite, the father of artificial intelligence, the birthplace of modern computing. We're in that room today. We're not going to focus so much on critical thinking, though, but we are going to focus on these great themes of curiosity, collaboration, and creativity.

And we have some workshops throughout the day which you can choose to attend where you can navigate whichever particular topic is of greatest interest to you. We have a huge amount to cover. We've got four big themes.

They're four very chunky themes, but we think they're themes which are very relevant to all of you here. Whenever we talk to our clients at London Business School, this theme of transformation and how you create transformation within organisations that encourages this imperative to innovate is there. We have a particular view this year, which is featured in our special edition of London Business School Review, that these critical human capabilities of curiosity, collaboration and creativity are enormously important.

And you'll see a particular LBS take on that as we go through today. And then this afternoon, we're going to get a little bit more serious, but hopefully extremely practical for you. Two of our colleagues, Freck Vermeulen and Hamini Rabar, are going to look at these two big themes. One around how you break existing habits in organizations to unlock innovation.

And also an amazing story from Hamini about Microsoft and inculcating a growth mindset. So we have a huge amount to cover. We have some fantastic...

members of our faculty are going to be with you at various points today and as I said you can choose and navigate your way through today. So I can't wait, hopefully you can't wait, I've got one more introduction to do. I'm going to introduce our first speaker for today. Our first speaker for today is Professor Julian Birkinshaw. Julian wears many hats, he's the Deputy Dean of the school, he's responsible for Executive Education, he's also responsible for Learning Innovation.

He's a professor in strategy and entrepreneurship and he's also the academic director of our Institute for Innovation. So we're enormously delighted to have him to kick off our programme today and also to share with you some great exciting news about London Business School. Julian, thank you. Thank you, John. And the exciting news may be news that you've already figured out, which is that, for those of you who've known us for many years, our brand and everything to do with the brand has significantly shifted over the last 24 hours, literally the last 24 hours.

So our new website went live at about 6 p.m. yesterday. This is the first event. This will be the dean reminding me to... Talk about the brand.

He's very, very keen on that message. This will be the first, this is the first event using our new brand. Now, what is a brand?

As you know, a brand is a collection of expectations and promises that we make to our clients about the value that we deliver. So behind the words, there's an awful lot of stuff going on, which is stuff that we're already doing quite well, stuff that we want to strive to be even better at. in the future.

So we are going to show you a very short video. It's just a 60-second introduction to the new look London Business School. So please could you show the video.

London Business School. A global and vibrant community. In two of the world's greatest cities.

A place to learn, together, how to out-think challenges. And where diverse minds connect and collide to shape a better future. Where new business ideas are formed and have impact in the world.

And where future leaders learn how to think. A home to questioning the norm, inspiration and creativity. Where minds come alive to fuel a different way of thinking so it all can impact the world in remarkable ways.

We are London Business School. We are Minds Alive. Good, so that is who we are and as you dig into the new version of the website you will see a lot more detail about how we make that come alive through our values, through the various activities that we're putting on in the coming months and years. We are now going to shift to the first content for the day, which is from me.

We're calling this Leadership Transformation in a Digital World. It's impossible to talk about transformation today without... without acknowledging digital. But of course, the transformation challenges that your companies have been facing for decades haven't gone away. And the basic challenges around getting people to do things differently are in many ways the same as they've ever been.

Let me start with three paradoxes, three trends, which can be wrapped up in a slightly paradoxical way. The more we create, the more we destroy. This was Joseph Schumpeter, the Austrian economist. who came up with this notion of creative destruction.

And there have been plenty of victims, those famous companies that we always talk about in such situations. But, of course, it's not just big established companies that have died. There's a bunch of companies.

You've never heard of any of these. I'd be very surprised if there's any name recognition at all. And that's the point.

The point is that lots of small companies don't make it either. We live in a time where these digital trends make it possible for small companies to start. But it is absolutely true that... Most of those small companies don't make it. And, of course, many large companies are faced with this challenge of trying to reinvent themselves, trying to sometimes even cannibalize their existing activities in order to try to survive.

So that's paradox number one. The more we create, the more we destroy. Paradox number two, the more connected we become, the more unpredictable the world actually gets, which might sound a bit surprising.

That's the notion of paradox. There's a beautiful picture of the... the airline routes in the world, everything is becoming tighter linked in a macro sense and also in a micro sense.

But you've all heard of this thing called the butterfly effect, the idea that small changes can lead to big impacts. In other words, and this, of course, comes from the world of complexity science, the world of weather systems, small changes in what happens in one place can actually work their way through to dramatic changes later. And John already promised that we wouldn't mention the B- so I'm not going to talk about it as such, but the current political challenges that this country faces can be directly linked back to some unfortunate commitments which the prime minister at the time never thought he would have to live on about five or six years ago. And it's remarkable how this stuff happens.

You trace things back to their source and you think, if only this one thing had happened. been a little bit different, we wouldn't be in the mess we're in now. So, corporate systems are different from political systems, I get that.

But it's absolutely the truth that when you're trying to create change in a complex system, there's no science to that. It is actually an art, figuring out which levers to pull, which levers to change. So, unfortunately, the world is becoming more connected in a way that makes it less predictable.

And then the third... Paradox. Do you recognize this chap? Old guy.

Leonardo da Vinci. A polymath. He knew everything about everything.

He was an artist. He was an inventor. He was a scientist.

He was a geologist. I mean, he had this crazy set of skills and crazy body of knowledge, which actually allowed him to almost be an expert on everything that's happening. in the world.

Of course, that's no longer possible. And when you think about this, just conceptually, as individuals, every generation is slightly more intelligent than the previous generation. It's called the Flynn effect.

Look it up. And if you look at terms of IQ tests or whatever, that's just proven. And perhaps it's just simply a matter of natural evolution. I do not know. But the point is we're getting a little bit smarter individually than our parents were.

Our kids will be smarter than us. And that's the way it goes on. Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on your worldview, collective knowledge in the world is going up at an exponential rate. And I don't even need to prove that point.

Just think of the numbers. scientific publications published any year. I'm not even talking about fake news. I'm talking about proper, genuine scientific progress, proper knowledge about how the world works.

The famous Higgs-Boson discovery at CERN outside Geneva, there were 5,000 people's names on that academic paper when it was published. That's a beautiful example of collective knowledge. But here's the point.

As the amount of knowledge in society grows collectively... We are as individuals, every day when we wake up, we are slightly stupider, slightly dumber than we were the day before on a relative basis. So we might want to be Leonardo da Vinci, but we're actually turning into Homer Simpson, I'm sorry. Such is life.

So this has enormous implications if you think about it. Just one obvious one, John's already talked about it this morning, collaboration, right? We can't do it all ourselves. anymore every organization today has to figure out ways of collaborating more effectively of of creating you know product services technologies through the collaborative efforts of hundreds if not thousands of people we don't have any Leonardo da Vinci's left so the more we collectively know the more are the less I as an individual understand and that is indeed one of the reasons why fake news has become so big is it's so hard for anyone to actually keep up with what's going on. What do we do?

We kind of fall back, almost, on beliefs. And those beliefs are often not based on listening to the people who are most well-equipped to tell us what's going on. So put it all together, very simple observation.

We live in a world where there are more disruptive threats. The future is actually less predictable than it was, and it's harder to keep up. And that leads to two very important questions, which we're going to touch on in the next...

half an hour. One is, what is it we need to do to transform our organizations to keep up given all of those trends? And then secondly, what sort of leadership capabilities do we need?

Do we need to build enough people and do we need to have ourselves to succeed in this world? So we're going to talk about those two questions. What is the organizational challenge? There's an old story here.

I think Rosabeth Moskant the son of the Harvard professor talked about a book called When Giants Learned to to dance, elephants, giants, learning to dance, super tankers moving at the speed of the speedboat. These are the metaphors that we've played with over the years. We want to be big.

We want to be powerful. But we also got to figure out a way of becoming more nimble, more agile, more adaptive. And I and many of my colleagues here at London Business School spend a lot of time working on the evidence that actually big companies can do this and some of the levers, some of the mechanisms they can use. to make that work. It is never easy.

I mean, there is absolutely no sort of antidote to this problem. The hard reality is that the companies that succeed in transforming themselves from being big and slow to being big and relatively agile do it through painstaking effort, enormously expansive change programs, often enormously expensive leadership programs. All of these things are necessary to make that sort of transformation.

The guiding theme throughout this this next 10 or 15 minutes is a very simple point. If we're trying to figure out a way of operating in this fast-moving, complex, unpredictable world, it's sometimes tempting to kind of fall back on structure, to fight complexity with complexity. And so those of you who operate in three-dimensional, even four-dimensional matrix structures know exactly what I'm talking about here.

If we're dealing with a global client who wants to be served across multiple product lines in multiple countries, we feel obliged to put in place some sort of matrix organization. as a means of serving them. And I'm not saying that's wrong, but the trouble is, of course, it assumes that you can build a plan and a structure to support those needs.

And so my tendency is always to push in the exact opposite direction, to try to encourage people to say, look, we can't plan for that future in the way we used to. We can't figure out in advance what everyone needs to do. So we need to create that framework, that guiding light, that set of principles.

And we need to give people huge amounts of freedom within that framework. Now, you've heard that before, freedom within a frame. That is a constant truth in conversations about organizations. But I want us to now kind of home in a little bit on what that might actually look like in practice. So here's the thought experiment.

When you arrived this morning, an hour and a half ago, perhaps you didn't know anybody. And imagine one of the people here was introduced to you, and they said, what do you do for a living? How do you answer that question? I'm not going to pick on somebody. It's okay.

It's not that sort of event. I'm going to give you three answers. You tell me which one of them you like.

The starting point, the knee-jerk reaction, in many countries, of course, is to pull out your business card. You say, hey, who I am? I'm John Smith. I'm the marketing manager of this company. It's a very efficient way of giving some basic information about who you are.

It defines you in a way which is useful. But ultimately, very, very narrow. It's literally putting you in a box on an organization chart.

You can define yourself in terms of what you know. I'm an academic. People ask me at a conference or whatever, I would always start with I'm a professor of strategy ahead of the fact that I work at London Business School.

That's my defining qualities as an academic. Many of you in the room, if you've got a PhD, if you've got a professional qualification, there's a good chance you will actually start out talking about yourself in terms of your knowledge, your expertise. what you know. So that's the second way. And the third way, and this is of course the one that I kind of like the best, what do you do for a living?

Let me tell you what happened at work yesterday. Let me tell you a story. Let me tell you about the people with whom I work.

Tell you a little bit of an incident about something that went wrong and how I resolved it. It's a colorful, it's a more vibrant, it's a more enjoyable way of talking about yourself. It is also a truth that What your job description says bears very little resemblance to what you actually do at work on a day-to-day basis.

That has been proved many, many times. Job descriptions, position on the org chart, very sterile ways of describing the realities of what any of us actually does at work. So, three ways of describing yourself, and these map onto these three organizing models. And several of you, I suspect, will have heard me say this before.

it does bear repeating, which is we tend to start with this notion that companies are bureaucracies. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. A bureaucracy is literally an organization which is privileging standardized rules and procedures for getting things done. But, of course, the word is a bit tainted.

And we've kind of moved on a little bit in our minds to say, surely there's something better than bureaucracy. My colleague Gary Hamill, some of you will know Gary, he is an I. one-man crusade to banish bureaucracy from the world.

And he's estimated the price of bureaucracy into the trillions of dollars to the US economy. Now, I don't know quite how he's calculated this. He is absolutely right that the dead weight of bureaucracy in large companies is huge.

I don't go quite as far as him, by the way. I think there's still a time and a place for a well-functioning bureaucracy. But we are moving on.

And one of the... Expressions for how we organize, which has become very popular in the last couple of decades, is meritocracy. Meritocracy is privileging knowledge over position. And in a meritocracy, we try to promote good people. We try to make sure that the right people are promoted into positions where their expertise can be used.

We want to make sure that we have good conversations to get to the bottom of difficult issues. And indeed, if I asked you... One of the downsides of meritocracy, most people would say, well, actually, I think meritocracy is a pretty good thing. But there are a couple of downsides. Downside one, it's very, very slow, right?

Meritocracies... love the opportunity to kick things around, to discuss things. I've had many years at London Business School now, and I know that if you want to launch a new program at London Business School, you don't just make a business case and present it to the dean.

No, what do you do? You set up a committee. In fact, you set up multiple committees, and everybody on that committee thinks it's their right to challenge and push and to essentially try to kill that proposal at various instances.

over typically about an 18-month period. And if you can somehow survive that process, come through it unscathed, then you can actually make your final proposition to get this thing agreed. So, you know, LBS is a meritocracy.

We love the idea that expertise is rewarded. But we have absolutely created this culture where we make sure that everything gets scrutinized to the nth degree before any changes are ever made. So that's one problem. The second problem is, of course, you know...

Knowledge is great, but by definition, the people at the top of the hierarchy in terms of knowledge are people whose knowledge was most valuable in the past. We are absolutely privileging past knowledge, and who knows whether that knowledge will actually be knowledge that the world cares about in the years to come. So there's a little bit of a risk that it becomes a bit inwardly focused. We put on a pedestal the people who are the experts from the past.

So, again, at London Business School, we have to work very hard to ensure that the knowledge that we have is actually attuned to the knowledge that the world needs. So, moving to the third one, the adhocracy, a term that Warren Bennis, the leadership guru, invented about 40 years ago. What is adhocracy? Very simple.

It is privileging action over knowledge or position. In an adhocracy, if we don't know what the right way forward is, we do... something, we act. And whether that's an individual trying to solve the problems that a customer is facing at an event or on the phone, or whether that is we don't know which product to launch so we will create a pilot or an experiment, that is the essence of adhocracy, is doing things in order to understand how doing that will influence other things.

And of course many of you have now talked about or know about design thinking, many of you you know about the concept called the lean startup. These are concepts which have been around for years now, and they're all really speaking to this same issue, which is that organizations, bureaucracies and meritocracies, have this habit of turning in on themselves, of either following the rules or following the experts. And we need to periodically remind ourselves that organizations should be externally focused first, action-oriented, and then reflecting back on the bureaucracy and the meritocracy as needed.

So what does an adhocracy thing look like in practice? As I said, there's many different manifestations of it. And of course, in your own companies, I guarantee that there are people who are working on aspects of what I'm talking about.

First of all, you've got the separate unit, the separate skunkworks or venturing entity off to the side. The original Apple Macintosh computer was created by such a skunkworks, by Steve Jobs taking a team of his best engineers and putting them in a separate building. We can think of adhocracy...

this framework on the right, this is from GE, from General Electric. They incorporate a lot of this thinking into a product they call fast works, or a process they call fast works. And fast works, without going into the detail, is their way of saying our industrial product development processes are just too slow.

They take two or three years to come up with a new industrial product. So we need to speed that up. And we're using various ideas that they've taken from Silicon Valley and other places in order to create... that build, measure, learn cycle on a much more rapid clip. Now, have they been completely successful in rolling that out?

I would say no. As we know, GE is no longer the exemplar that a lot of us focus on, but I would say they're absolutely pushing in the right direction by doing that. And then finally, you can think of adhocracy as a mindset, as just as a way that we're trying to get everybody to think.

So here's one way of looking at it. Amazon is now what, a half a million people? around the world.

So it's a huge company now. And Jeff Bezos, the chief executive, continues to say it's still day one. His philosophy is we've got to pretend that we're still a startup, that we were 20-odd years ago.

So they've developed a set of management principles. And you see them there. I've just taken those straight from their website. And when I looked at that list, I thought, well, that's kind of interesting. Because if you look at them, and I've highlighted the ones which I think are most relevant, a lot of these are explicitly about curiosity and trying things and experimenting and doing things on the cheap.

Frugality means on the cheap. And I love this one at the bottom here. Disagree and commit.

So as I said, at London Business School, I get my proposals through our committee structure just by never giving up. I just tenaciously take whatever criticism or whatever knows as an opportunity to do some further research. And eventually, I'm still there two years later, and most of my critics have moved on to other roles, and that's the way I get things done.

Not a very effective way, excuse me, of getting things done. Jeff Bezos says that's a lousy way of getting things done. What you really need is a committee which says, where the spirit is, oh, I disagree with that idea.

I don't think it's going to work. But I would love you to prove me wrong, so I will commit to helping you to run an experiment to try that thing out, and perhaps you can get an answer for that within the next three months, rather than wasting the next two years of our lives going through discussions about whether we should do it in the first place. Now, Amazon's got more discretion, shall we say, in all of these things than we do. Amazon, because of what it is, has this, first of all, they hire really good people, but they give them enormous degrees of freedom.

So we've always got to take these little lessons with a little bit of a pinch of salt. But the spirit is exactly right. And there's a lot on this slide which we're not gonna go through, but it's trying to make one important point, which is if you take those three high-level models and underneath each of those models, you start to think about what are the practices that we need in our organization around how we make decisions, about how we coordinate activities, how we motivate people, you can quickly see that it is possible to then design a whole set of management practices that are built as a reflection of that.

of that high level principle. And so in an executive program, the sort that we run here, we would often spend quite a lot of time on this very slide with a company saying, okay, which of these models do you recognize? And the answer is in the top.

I mean, no one organization is ever a single model. I mean, that would be too simplistic and obviously not correct. What you almost always will find is that there are different functions, different departments, different businesses operating by these very, very. different rules.

And that is a good thing, because as I said at the start, a well-functioning bureaucracy can be wonderful. If you are operating, silly example, a nuclear power plant, right? We do not want everybody experimenting and adapting as they go forward, right?

We want a well-functioning bureaucracy in the core of our nuclear power plant. We might have some teams of people around the edges who've got more freedom. So we need to figure out the right model for the right part of the organization. What we must not do though is say, well, can't we just be all three together?

And if you think about it, that actually doesn't work. Cuz I'm saying, by definition, all three of the elements of position, knowledge, and action matter. The question is, which one are we putting first? But literally, it's impossible to put three things first.

You've gotta choose, are we focusing mostly on following the rules, expert wisdom and insight, or getting things done through action? Ultimately, everything leads to action, but the question is, which part of the- of the organization is privileging which of those three dimensions. And I will just say before moving on that perhaps this is obvious, but this adhocracy bit is the one that you've got to work very hard to protect because most of us in the room are very comfortable living in one world or other of the bureaucracy or the meritocracy.

I've lived my life in a meritocracy. Many of you have. Some of you probably have lived your lives in the bureaucracy.

It's only the genuine entrepreneurs who are comfortable living in one world. kind of comfortable in the adhocracy. And so if we don't explicitly defend the parts of our organizations which need to be adhocracies, what happens? We slide back.

We slide back to the left. You've been in meetings, as have I, where someone says, we've got to move on this opportunity right now. And someone will say, well, can we just check with the lawyers first?

Or someone else will say, well, we haven't consulted with this part of the organization. We need to have a further discussion. And bit by bit, those challenges or those obstacles slow everything down.

So we've got to be very clear what needs to be an adhocracy and how we can get the right people running that adhocracy. And, of course, as leaders, to some degree, you've got to have the capacity to actually span across these different areas. We can't ask people in the core of each different business to be wearing three hats, but we can absolutely ask our leaders to be doing that.

Okay, so.... How do we get from here to there? In other words, if you buy the argument that we need to take our large organizations, make them more adaptive, make them more agile, and that adhocracy is one sort of umbrella way of talking about an action-first mindset, what does that look like in practice? I'm just going to give you two case study examples, very short examples, with slightly different ways of doing it. The way I like to think about it is, when we're trying to change large organizations, when we're trying to lead transformation, we absolutely could, if we wanted to, focus on the offering.

What is it that we're trying to sell to our customers? What is the business model that we need to succeed? And that's not wrong by any sense. That's one way of doing it.

But we can also focus on the softer side of things. We can say, look, if we get the right mindsets in our employees, and if we actually figure out a way of working differently within our company, is it possible that by doing that first, we will actually then enable the new products and services and offerings to emerge? And that's a debate that's been going on for decades. Do we focus first on the structures and the products, or do we focus first on the people?

And obviously, as leadership and development professionals, we have a natural bias towards focusing on people, but not to the exclusion, I would say. of the business model side. Let me just give you these two examples. ING, I know there's a couple of people from ING in the room.

I've spoken to at least one of them about this to make sure that what I'm about to say is both true and okay. They became quite celebrated, actually, four or five years ago for being, I guess, the first traditional company to take agile working across the organization. So to be clear what I'm saying, I mean, there's loads of... Startups which are now big companies which were born agile, which have used agile methods of working everywhere, Spotify is a great example. And there's also quite a lot of big companies, probably most of the ones in the room, who have agile working within their IT structures because agile as a self-organizing iterative development process started in the world of software development.

What did ING do? Long story which I'm going to cut short. They adopted essentially a big bang approach. They took about 2,500 people in their head office operations in Holland. And they, simplistically, they sort of laid them all off and then hired them again into these new roles.

And as I think most of you will know, the kind of the unit of analysis in agile working is the agile team or the squad. And these are cross-functional teams, and they have a close relationship with users, and they work in rapid cycles to develop. products and services for those users and those squads are clustered into tribes and then you often have what they call Chapters cutting across these which is areas of functional expertise Huge long story around that which I won't take you through suffice it to say that they decided and the team of people who led This had a direct blessing of the chief executive and the board to do this They decided that by doing it in a single Big Bang That will be the most effective way and they built the whole thing around the transition to what's often called omni-channel in the world of banking. Omni-channel, of course, meaning that retail and telephone and internet and mobile banking are all channels that you and I have as retail consumers.

And we've got to figure out a way of ensuring that all of those services are seamless and working in the same way. So that's one model, the Big Bang approach. A case study which I'm working on now, but this, what I'm about to say, is already in the public record. Is this French gas company called Engie? I mean, it is actually a client of London Business School, but the bit I'm about to talk about is nothing to do with anything that London Business School has done.

They have a division called GEM, Global Energy Markets, 1,500 people. They started a change process which was triggered by the leader, Edward, saying we need to figure out a way of making people more involved and happier, literally the word happy, in their work. He says, we're doing great things, but we've got this really kind of rather slow-moving, uninspiring culture. But the point is, he didn't tell them how to do it. One of his senior guys, a guy called Claude, decided to take this crazy concept from California called holacracy and to implement holacracy within parts of this organization.

Now, holacracy is another species of self-organizing, which I won't tell you about in any detail. But they did that in about 400... 400 employee part of this GEM organization. And then they got people across the organization taking the initiative to create a whole series of their own leadership development courses.

They created a thing called Management as a Service. And this was a crazily long... Project I mean I think individuals doing this training program had to commit something like I think it was 12 full-time days over a six-month period In order to fulfill this particular program and then after they've done that program Then they launched another two or three programs since then and so I was I was over in Paris just last week Talking to them about this transformation. It was the most puzzling Interview I've ever done in some ways because you could just smell the difference in the in the corridors.

Everyone was just so excited about the transformation that they'd done, and yet you couldn't put your finger on any particular product or service or any particular thing structurally, apart from this whole accuracy bit, which is being phased out, that had actually happened. So I throw it in as a fascinating example of, if you allow people to figure for themselves how they will make changes, wonderful things can happen. And in their case, I do believe that this huge investment in leadership development which they actually manage themselves.

They're doing it all in-house. It was a big motivator for that whole change process. So I'm going to switch from the organization to the individual for the final part of my talk, a story that you've heard before with a twist, and I'm going to ask you to get out your mobile phones at a suitable point just to answer a couple of questions about leadership capabilities in the digital age. So, high jumping. There you go.

That's the Men's World High Jump record. Over 100 years, every few years, the bar gets raised just a little bit higher. And you look at that chart and you, of course, home in on that period in the early 60s where the bar was raised seven times. A little bit of audience participation. Anyone want to shout out a word?

Exactly. So some people say drugs. That usually crops up, but incorrectly.

And then I hear people shout Fosbury. And they are both wrong and right in that order. So when I first saw this, I assumed that that period in the early 60s was indeed the time when the new style of jumping took shape. But it's not. And it makes the story actually more interesting than you thought it was.

Because that period in the early 60s was the tail end of the traditional way of jumping. The traditional straddle jump, where people jump over the bar with their chest. touching the bar almost. And you've got these two guys, John Thomas and Valerie Vermeule, American and Russian. This was the peak of the Cold War, right?

And they were pushing each other to greater heights through training harder, through perfecting the traditional way of jumping. So when somebody shouted Fosbury, they weren't completely wrong. There he is.

He's experimenting in this period with this new style of jumping where you try jumping over the bar backwards. And he's a freshman at Oregon State University at this point in the early 60s. He's obviously a talented, promising jumper, but he's trying this new way of jumping. And his coaches, I read up on this, I read a couple of books on it, his coaches were trying to persuade him to stop. They would say, you're going to kill yourself, right, because you're landing backwards, almost breaking your neck each time, and it doesn't seem to be working.

You are a good, back in the 1960s, you're a good 10 centimeters off the pace. If you just... jump the proper way like everybody else.

You might be right up there with the leaders. So, he ignored their advice, fortunately. He persevered, he got better each year.

He had a stroke of luck just before the Olympics in 1968, when the world record holder Valerie Brumell broke his leg in a motorbike accident just a year before the Olympics, so didn't compete. So Dick Fosbury showed up at the Olympics using his crazy new style of jumping. Everyone else is jumping the traditional way. And he gets the gold medal. And that, of course, is the point when the world sits up and takes notice of this new way of jumping.

And a lot of kids start saying, wow, that's really cool, let me try this. Notice, though, that he didn't break the world record, and in fact he never held the world record. What he did do, as I said, is he paved the way for others to become the world record holders themselves, using the new style. So green dots on this chart are the new style of jumping, red dots are the old style.

And nowadays, of course... It is understood that the best way of jumping is backwards. Not by much. I mean, there's small margins in this game, right? But that small margin is enough that all the most recent world champions, and in fact, any event you ever go to, people are all jumping using the Fosbury flop.

He made it famous. Interestingly, side note, a lady called Debbie Brill in Canada also experimented with this style. The Brill bounce it became known as. And unfortunately... For whatever reason, Mr. Fosbury has got all the headlines.

So don't forget, this is also called the Brill Bounce. So three ways of innovation in the high jump industry. You can look at this.

In a similar way to you look at how Kodak got killed by Instagram, right? You see new generations of technology coming along. The most dangerous ones are the ones where the new technology kind of comes from below. In other words, initially, it isn't as promising, but it's on this trajectory of growth that means it eventually overtakes the traditional way. And that's why, of course, the people who spent their lifetimes as straddle jumpers struggled to transition to the Fosbury flop.

But the real point of the story... is of course that this is a story of an individual. This isn't an underlying technology which just happened to emerge, like microchips or microprocessors do. This was one guy who took it upon himself to challenge the rules. He broke the rules.

He succeeded in persuading everybody that actually what he was doing was better. And if you trace my sort of line of logic around the adhocracy as an organizing model, adhocracy says... Action-oriented, action-oriented says we need people to be prepared to be a little bit like Mr. Fosbury and break the rules. And of course, our good friend Elon Musk is almost obligatory to speak about him in this sort of situation. And of course, we'd have Steve Jobs up here as well if he were still alive.

These are unreasonable people. And I use that word unreasonable in the manner of George Bernard Shaw, which is the reasonable people. Those of us in a room who are reasonable, we like to adapt, we like to fit in.

We like to make sure that what we do is consistent with those around us. Those unreasonable people are the ones who persist in trying to change the world according to their personal worldview. And of course, they're the ones through whom change happens.

They're also a pain in the backside, excuse my language. I mean, they're also difficult people. They're also wrong as often as they are right.

And so those of you who've ever had... Elon Musk type characters to manage know how difficult this is. You know, you want to have them pushing the boundaries, but you also need them to be acceptable colleagues for those around them. And you've also got to figure out a way of managing the fact that they're going to get it wrong quite often.

So, final part of my talk, I want to just share a couple of thoughts about how we get the most out of these unreasonable people who are so necessary if we're to actually embrace this adhocracy. movement. Interesting data point. I stole this from an economist at the LSE who studies happiness. And he asked people, who are you happy spending time with?

And he found that we're happiest with our friends, our parents, our spouses, the boss, dead last. And in fact, we much prefer to be on our own than with our boss. I realize that for my direct reports in the room, that is not the message you want to hear.

But in fact, this is a universal truth. And in fact, it turns out that in this country, we've actually made an industry out of horrible bosses, if you think about it. I mean, think back to the original Fawlty Towers sitcoms. Think about Ricky Gervais in The Office.

We have... There's something... Is this UK-specific? I have no idea.

But we absolutely sort of delight in the fact that... There's a lot of very good bosses, but there's also a lot of terrible bosses. And it is an observation that I've reflected on many times.

I actually wrote a book on it a couple of years back called Becoming a Better Boss, which was all about the fact that leadership is just an unnatural act for so many of us. Not for everybody, but for most of us, the skills we need to show as leaders require us to do things which would not innately come to us. So one very obvious example, control.

Everything I've talked about in terms of agile and ad hoc ways of working is about ceding control to others. It's about deliberately stepping back. We all know as managers or leaders that particularly when times are tough, when we've got a little bit of problem, we haven't made our numbers or there's some sort of issue, what do we want to do? We want to take control of that situation.

We want to circle the waggles, we want to make sure that we are on top of every detail. And so we've got to work very hard to Step back from the things that we want to be involved in. There's many more examples, but that's the most important one.

So this final segment, I just want to just share a couple of thoughts about what being a leader, a successful leader, in these sort of fast-changing times looks like. Some inspiration from Google. This is an old story, but they did a big study, a data-driven study called Project Oxygen about a decade ago. And what they did was they used data from 10,000 or so personnel reports to figure out...

The attributes of the best bosses in Google. And this is the list. I mean, some of you might have actually seen this before.

And this list is in order, right? The most important quality you can have as a boss in Google is to actually be a good coach. And the second most important is empowering your team and not micromanaging.

Notice. Key technical skills comes in eighth. Google is a company famous for being the smartest software engineers on the planet. We'd think that somehow being a really good technical expert...

would be important. It is. It's just not as important as a whole bunch of these much softer things, which those of us in the room would immediately say, I get that. That's the stuff we've been talking about for years.

It's nice that even Google ratifies that implicit understanding. So there is a problem with that list. Not that the list is wrong, but just that it's almost obvious that these are the things that we should be working on. And so, in fact, the book that I wrote.

Wasn't a book about what do you need to do to become a better boss? The book was actually why is it that we don't do what we know we should be doing in the first place? So, you know, we know what our employees are asking for on the left We also know that if we're being honest with ourselves We often fall into the trap of doing a bunch of the stuff on the right And so the question why do we do that has to be answered? It's not just that we're short of time, right? that's a lazy excuse because Good empowerment, good delegation is all about saving us time.

It's all about structuring work so that I can actually do a little bit less myself. And if you look long and hard enough at this problem, why don't we do this stuff better? A lot of it comes down to the basic incentives that we have in organizations about what qualities we actually promote and reward. Too many organizations still promote people.

purely on the basis of their technical skills. We make the best software engineer the software manager. We make the best salesman the sales manager.

You've heard that a thousand times before. And if we were only to actually take seriously the notion that managing people, leading people, is as important as the technical stuff, we would make great progress. Indeed, agile working, as I think most of you will know, they explicitly separate out these different management tasks within an agile team.

You have the product owner in agile. who's responsible for delivering a product. You have a process owner, often called a scrum master, who's responsible for managing the process of the work, the daily stand-up meetings.

And then you have a so-called agile coach, who typically will span across a bunch of different agile teams, who is responsible for the people aspects, the personal, professional development issues, any sort of tensions or conflicts in the teams. And so separating those roles out is finally an acknowledgement that actually it's crazy to us, one person, to be really good at product and process. and people. OK, final segment.

What's the impact on all this of technology? Is it true that with artificial intelligence and other forms of technology intruding further into the workplace that our jobs will first of all disappear? I don't think so.

But will the jobs be made more difficult or more different? Possibly so. So we are going to ask you to whip out your phones.

Just a little bit of audience. participation, very simple. Go to that www.sli.do, type in HRSF19, and you will see a list of competencies. And there's going to be seven of them. You've got to choose one.

You've got to say, of all that list of seven, which is the one that I personally think is the most important for me as an individual? This isn't about leadership. This is about me as an individual.

If I'm thinking of retraining... myself to be important in the workplace in the years ahead, what skills should I be focusing on? So we are now moving over, thank you, to the active poll. And in theory, this will populate fairly quickly with your answers. Okay, so give it another 20 seconds.

Empathy. Yeah. Strangely enough, typing skills did not get any votes. You will understand that I was putting that in kind of for fun. There you go.

Thank you, somebody. Somebody is struggling to... Typing is making a late run.

Okay, enough, okay, we're gonna close the poll before it goes horribly wrong. Sorry about that. Yeah, it's okay.

Okay, thank you. So, empathy with others, creativity. I'm just gonna show you the results of a slightly larger, can we just go back to the PowerPoint slide deck, and I'm just gonna give you one I prepared earlier, which. Of course, no surprises is similar. So this audience had decision-making.

I guess what they're talking to refer to there is the amount of human judgment involved in decision-making, obviously not necessarily about artificial intelligence helping. But look, creativity, empathy, intuitive judgment, those four, no surprises. These are all qualities that intuitively we know are the things that become more important as our technologies take over more of the...

the basic activities. We are absolutely ending up with complementary skills to that. So second poll, this is now stepping one step higher.

What are the attributes that were important for being a good leader of others? If the first one was individual attributes, what do we need to be good at as leaders? And again, just have a go at answering that question with choosing the single most important.

Okay, so directional. Okay, so we're going to stop there. Thank you. Sensitive direction, getting rid of obstacles, enabling subordinates, acting decisively when there is uncertainty. So if we can just move back to the PowerPoint.

And again, I did this with a bunch of my executive MBA students about six months ago. And once again, I mean, they were asked to rate all of these on a seven-point scale, I think it was. So you're going to get slightly different.

But the same three at the top are the ones you had in this room. So let me just contextualize this. And I do have a point of view, which fortunately is consistent with what you said, which is leaders have to do two very, very different things in this new look organization. On the one hand, a huge amount of that job is about empowering and enabling others. It's providing that sense of direction.

It's creating that psychologically safe space for trying things out. out and being open to tolerating failures. But if that were the only job of the leader, our organizations would get a bit stuck. Because sometimes, particularly in a high-tech world, we do need occasionally to take decisive action. We do need sometimes to say, look, we can see that this new technology is emerging or this new opportunity is emerging.

If we wait for consensus to form, we will be too late. We need to jump in. And the reason Jeff Bezos appears again is that Amazon, I think, amongst large... companies today has done the best at getting that balance between bottom-up, emergent initiative, and decisive leadership at the right times from him.

So you put it all together, and this is the final, final slide. What you see is, remember what you just said in terms of leadership attributes, the adhocracy, where the emphasis is on flexibility and decisiveness, the adhocracy is about essentially three things. It's about setting direction. It is about enabling others.

And it's about being being decisive in situations of uncertainty, which is exactly what we've got on the right. But it is important to contextualize this. And I guess I've said already, I don't believe everything should be on the right. I believe this is useful because it reminds us that traditional models of leadership, where we're monitoring and controlling, are still relevant in certain pockets of the business world. And indeed, if you're working in a meritocracy, it is an expectation that you have genuine expertise, that you are...

managing that flow of information in a way that everybody has access to it. But of course, the trend is to the right. The trend is towards building that set of leadership attributes that enable us to transform our organizations and make them more agile, more ad hoc, more able to essentially cope with the changes going on in the business world. So with that, I will close. Thank you very much.

So we won't have time for questions now, but Julian's staying with us. He's staying over coffee. He's also staying for this next segment and lunch. So do grab him on there if you can.

We launched three new programs, by the way, at London Business School this year. So thank you, Julian, for getting us there. And just a little thing, just a little conversation just with the person next to you, just before we start this next segment, can you just find out from the person next to you how old the company they work for is?

Just find out from your neighbor how old is the organization you work for. Okay, I'm going to come straight back to you. I'll come straight back there if I can. Okay, well done.

Okay, so interestingly I'm gonna go over here just over here if I can thank you very much Okay guys just come back to you if I can Okay, thank you! Thank you, okay, sorry Sorry, oh my goodness. Oh my goodness. This group Julian, you keep them quiet for 45 minutes bang. Okay, this is a This is fantastic.

OK. Just try and gauge if there's anybody here in the room in an organization over 50 years old. Maybe a show of hands. 100 years old. Oh, a few.

More than 200 years old. 200 years old. One over here, a couple over there.

Over 300 years old. 300 years old. Wow.

OK. Who's that organization, by the way? Lloyd's of London, yeah.

Lloyd's of London. Wow, okay. Still there.

Okay. Anybody in an organization less than 20 years old? 20 years old?

19? 18? 15? Less than 10?

Less than 10? Oh, a few of you. Less than five?

Less than five? Okay. Large company or...

startup? Startup, okay. So we've got a breadth of experience of running organizations from 300 years to less than five. Whichever those organizations are, whether they're old or they're young, these issues that Julian points towards around new ways of working and adaptability and adocracy, I think, apply. While Julian was talking, it sort of reminded me of an experience I had a few years ago.

I used to, forgive me, I did work for a number of years in the human resources function, and I did survive, but during that time, one of the best experiences I had was I worked for a very inspirational CEO, and he said, we've got this great idea about how we can improve collaboration in our organization. And he had this vision for a new... new head office for the organization. We met with him and he talked about this organization being a way we could break down silos, bring people together and create one of the best places, workplaces in the world. And I was inspired by that.

In fact, we were all inspired because this is what the existing workplace looked like. It sort of looked a little bit like this. And he had this vision which sort of ran against the theme at that time. This is not many years ago, but at that time it was uniformity, standard desk sizes, real estate. estate efficiencies.

The sort of humanity of these places didn't really apply. But I think in recent years, and for many of you in here, hopefully this applies, there's been a renaissance, not just in sort of office design, but thinking about offices and the places that we work. You might even see some clues in the way we arrange some of the spaces today. The spaces we work in and collaborating really seem to matter.

So what we wanted to do was we wanted to try and feature an organization that sort of sees this right at the very heart. of who they are and why they are. And one of the major forces in sort of solving problems for organisations in recent years about how they solve that innovation problem about workplaces is not about building your own head office as the CEO I worked for 15 years ago, but sort of partnering with an organisation who can solve your accommodation needs very quickly.

So just we're going to introduce you to a speaker from WeWork in a moment. Who's heard of WeWork? Anybody heard of it? Who's a member of WeWork?

Even better. There's a few members in here, so we might get a view from you, and we will open this up for your view. But it's grown exponentially.

It's a quintessentially 21st century company. It did not exist until about nine years ago when two founders had the idea of doing this. Since then, it's grown extraordinary in a way that's astounded investors, partners, and legacy competitors. But what's the secret source?

What's the secret source of these organizations that may be small and young but grow to such enormous scale? So what we're going to do is we're just going to, before I introduce our speaker, I'm just going to show you a little short film just to remind you of who we work are. People are looking for something that goes beyond just work.

They're looking for something that makes what they do every day a more important part of who they are. When we started the company, we felt that there was a new energy that was emerging. In the last seven years, we've grown.

We're now in over 150 locations around the world. And what we found is that no matter where we go, the spirit of people for change and innovation is the same. When you go into a rework, there's an energy of people doing their own thing while actually still being part of something greater than themselves.

We're as much a co-working space as Amazon is a book-selling store. When you think about the value of community and collaboration and having employees that are more engaged and are happier to go to work, that's something that is much bigger than real estate. This is something that's really key for WeWork is to elevate the people that are a part of the community, and it's definitely impacted the way that I've been able to do business. Our goal is to think, one, how can we make you more successful?

How can we help you on that path? But then, two, how do we leverage the potential for connection? The collaborative energy that that creates. is unique and I don't think you can get it anywhere else.

We're not taking the traditional way of doing things. We'll put our own spin on it. The end product will be more authentic.

That's one of the most fulfilling things for us as a company. It allows us to dream bigger about what we can provide. You as a person are sitting in a room with an extraordinary group of people.

We've literally become such good friends and I think that just says a lot about WeWork. My team is my family. so much from each other.

When they came to me they told me this is a job where you could build something new. We're really engaging with this whole thing at a human level. I think we're all really lucky.

It feels cool to be in a place that you're proud of and be making work that you're proud of and I think they just go hand in hand. It blows my mind every day that we work for a company that's all focused around love, letting people do what they love, letting people be who they are, accepting them for that, loving them for that. We're a company that wants to provide people with an energy source. We want to provide people with motivation, with excitement.

We want them to love what they do. There you go, WeWork. OK, so will you please welcome our guest panelist today, Stephanie Houston from WeWork.

Okay, so the way this session is going to run, I've got a little introduction with Stephanie. Julian's going to join the conversation as well, but we're also going to open it up to you as well. So if you have a question in mind, I'll try and catch your eye when we get to that point anyway.

Welcome, Stephanie. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.

Okay, I have a little bit of your background in my notes here. So I understand that you started out not in this world, but in the oil and gas world. You also worked for Booking.com for about three and a half years.

Booking.com in that time grew from 4,000 people to 16,000 people, and you were partly responsible for the talent acquisition strategy there. And then how did you end up at WeWork? How did you end up at WeWork? I made a decision, and part of what makes me excited about what I do is coming into organizations that are very much at that stage of growth, and it's growing the company, bringing in the right talent. And I'd heard this WeWork story in the press, and people were talking about it, people were getting excited about it.

it. I lived in Amsterdam and when I walked to work along the beautiful canals, I walked past a WeWork every day and people just looked happy there and I thought, I think I want to be a part of this. I spoke to a friend who happened to know that there was a position based in London and I was actively seeking to return to the UK. I met with our CEO, Eugen, who's based in London here, and I was just sold.

I wanted to take my work laptop with me, find a desk and just stay there. So I was delighted when I got offered the role here. How long ago was that? That was eight months ago.

Eight months ago. Okay. So in that eight months, given that the organization's only sort of eight, nine years old, what's happened in that last eight months?

It still surprises me. And even when I first came in, I thought, I've seen it all. I've been at Booking.

We went through this erratic, crazy growth. And I've seen it. It's going to be fine. And when I joined, you have this group of amazingly inspiring people who work so incredibly hard every day to fulfill this WeWork mission. But a lot of what we were seeing were people just working, you know, as I say, very, very hard, very, very fast to bring in that talent.

So my team is responsible for hiring across Europe, Israel. in Australia, which sounds like a bit of a weird kind of cluster. It makes sense in our organization. And it was really about helping them see how we can scale, how we can launch a new market across Europe. and further along as well.

And so within those eight months, in this region alone, we've hired almost 1,000 people. We have implemented new processes, fun ones. We've innovated. We've looked at AI in terms of how we do recruiting. our practices as well and so if we've managed to do this in eight months I'm so excited to see what happens next yeah so what is the secret sauce how does a organization have that dynamic that it grows so fast attracts so many members and opens up in I think over a hundred companies in six or seven years but what is the secret sauce what's going on there that we need to tap into you know we saw both Adam and Miguel who were in the video and there are co-founders so as you said you know we've been around for nine years now.

And I think what's special is that community is at the heart of what we do. And it is at the heart because it's coming from two founders who know what community is all about. Miguel, for example, was raised in a commune in Oregon, and Adam in Israel in a farming community as well.

And so very much what they do every day is bring that sense of community to every single day activities. It's about making sure that our members feel that as well as well as our employees. And so when you walk into a WeWork, the... physical space is what you see you know it's our beautiful plants and our tapestry and everything around us and then the communities that vibe that you you feel and regardless of whether you're in a we work in London or in Shanghai or in Sydney and you get that feeling of community with a local interpretation and stamp so that you still know and feel that culture in the country that you're in as well and it's something that's very authentic and I think that's what's special about what we're doing so that's that's we work as a place how about we work as a place to work Could you describe that for us?

Of course. At the moment our HQ is in Devonshire Square, so I don't know if any of you have visited, but you should. We acquired Devonshire Square last year. If you think about what WeWork members get and what we strive to deliver to them as well is that sense of flexibility, a flexible environment.

It's whether you're, again, if you're based in the UK or if you're based in Spain, you can use your WeWork card and you can tap into buildings. It does open up all of our WeWork. we work buildings to you. It's a sense as well of that autonomy as well and connection and making those meaningful connections and collaborating with others. So our employees very much get the same sense of our members.

So, you know, there's that flexible working environment, the space that they get to work in every day. We hold events every week, about 15 events in every one of our buildings that are open to both members and employees. And those events can be anything from, you know, very inspiring speech.

speakers who come and see us, to yoga classes, boxing, to lunch and learns. And again, because those are open to employees, it really gets them to collaborate with people they may not otherwise get exposed to, whilst really inspiring that creativity in them too. Okay, so I will come to the audience with questions in a second, and I'm sure Julia might have an interest in the secret source that you have as well.

But one thing I'm interested in, you said you've hired like a thousand people in eight months. But the company's only existed for a little time, and I know it has two inspirational founders. But how do you know what you're looking for?

So there are organizations here who, in their maturity, have spent decades analyzing what works within their organization, what competencies, what skills, what leadership abilities shine within there. How do you know, as a young organization, what to look for that will work at WeWork? I think most people in here will agree, especially thinking of this kind of HR background that we're all from, is that culture piece is so important. And it's very difficult to make sure that the people you bring in, and I'm not a fan of the word culture fit. I definitely look at this as a culture add.

I think that as long as the culture that we've created isn't diluted in that sense, but we keep adding to that with people who embrace our values and embrace what we stand for. And, you know, some of our values circle around togetherness. authenticity and being grateful as well.

So when we interview people, when we look at the talent out there who we would love to bring into our company, those are values that are absolutely important to us and we don't compromise on that. I've spoken to and I've interviewed candidates who on paper, you know, we'd be idiots not to hire, but there's just something with that connection that hasn't been there in terms of what gives them satisfaction as well. And, you know, it's a big decision for anyone to make to join a company more so than it is for us to choose someone. And so if we... If we don't think that's a place where they can be their best selves and do their life's best work and do what they love, then we would rather make that decision then rather than bring them in.

and affected that way. Yeah. Julian, did you have a thought? So a question links back to what I said, if that's OK. I mean, I'm thinking in terms of stages of growth, right?

And almost by definition, when you're a little startup, you're an ad hoc, right? It's a couple of founders with a vision, and they gather a bunch of people around them. And while you're, I don't know, 100 odd people, you can pretty much run an organization through direct relationships between the founder and those people.

And yet, as you get to the next stage of growth, and it comes at 100 or 500, you have to start building. building some sort of processes and systems to create enough coherence that the founder doesn't spend every minute of their day managing exceptions. Can you talk about that transition?

Because obviously you're way past the point where everything is done completely informally. What rules, what processes have you done? How have you managed to keep these to a relatively light level?

I love that question. And I think, you know, if you look at our CEO, Eugen Mirapolski, he is, you know, he'll stand in front of you and say, I'm a recruiter. And I love that. And we all should be that way.

And we talked recently, our company All Hands, that creating a hiring culture is something that does happen organically. And where we used to have our founders interview every single person, we're now entrusting that really important task to our people and the people that we've brought in and that we are also trusting to bring in the right talent to the company to keep them growing. So whilst we have retained a sense of that entrepreneurial spirit where we do want people to feel... like they own their decision as to who they're going to bring in as their colleagues.

We have implemented a lot of tools and systems that helps us make those right decisions. So we're currently moving to a new ATS. So we'll be using ISIMs going forward.

We're looking at a CRM tool that's really going to help us build communities of candidates as well. We are providing our interviewers with things, you know, that you would expect, interview training, interview playbooks that include competencies, but also making sure that we ask... really powerful questions around those values and competencies so you know we give them the tools they need we give them the trust and then we empower them to be our brand ambassadors in the company as well great I'm gonna see if there are any questions in our audience here never been a difficulty getting anybody to speak so far we have a couple of microphones around the room anybody's got a question on we work there's one down the front here if we could get that one and then is there another quest in the room as well just one quick questions so far?

Please, there's another one right on the front as well. So we'll take that question and then we'll take the question from Tariq as well. Please, go ahead.

Hi, so I would be very interested to understand from a culture perspective, what are the key challenges that you see considering it's a new religion and do you guys ever then do like... comparing notes with some of the old organizations to see what you'd like to bring in. We're very lucky in the sense that our members are also, you know, a kind of extended team. So we work in a, you know, we work ourselves.

So, you know, we're also an enterprise. client to ourselves which is exciting and so we can definitely have those conversations with some of our bigger um bigger company members too um it's important for you know you talk about culture and i think something that we can talk about is maybe to the outside world people see this as you know very young dynamic vibrant and that you know maybe a specific demographic would maybe fit in better into what we're building as a culture and the truth is far removed from that as well and and so there are people from various backgrounds and diversity and belonging is very important to us as well well in terms of how we view that talent that exists within our ecosystem. The difference with our culture is that it's easy to come to the table and say, I'm a team player.

It's a very different thing to truly embody that. And so we can present, and I'm a big fan of situational questions, but sometimes it's about moving your chair around to next to the candidates, sitting with them, and working through a problem together to truly see how they're going to work through that as well. And that's that culture piece for us. Do we make hiring mistakes?

Absolutely, we all do. And to Julian's point earlier, if we're not experimenting, if we're not actually failing, we're not experimenting. We're not trying and we're not being brave enough. So there may be times where we think we're actually going the right direction and then we think, no, stop, turn around and try something new. So hopefully that answers your point around culture.

We think about our partners as well. So we acquired a company called Meetup, which I'm hoping some people in here have heard about. And Meetup Panayia.

and WeWork share a very similar mission as well, which is that sense of building communities. We use Meetup very regularly as well as a TA and people function, where we attend meetups with recruiting professionals and people that we can brainstorm with and collaborate and ask for best practice. And those are attended by startups, enterprise companies and beyond as well. So it's great to see where the market's at and what we should be doing as well to to just try different things at the same time.

Fantastic. Let's go to Tariq. Then there's a question in the middle. I've got one as well.

Okay. Sorry. Hi.

Thank you very much. It's to both of you, actually, and it's just with regards... The space issue, Regis was in this space a little while ago, and clearly it's only part of what they are as your competitor.

But how have you absolutely kicked it and they haven't? Ah. That's for you to agree to. Oh, boy, OK. I'm just saying, I think most people are familiar with Regis, but the stat I saw is the market valuation for Regis, which has more square footage around the world, is about £2 billion, and the market valuation for Regis is currently about £2 billion.

about $20 billion. So there's something going on where, and that can't all be down to you, I'm sure. But what's going on there? We work as a company that, as I said, it's not just the space.

The space is one thing. And we've been asking, are you a real estate company? And we say, it's community.

And they're like, but define community. What is community? And I think that's where we talk about the secret sauce. And that's what we offer. Having those members being able to talk to each other, and I can give you an example that still inspires me.

I just happened to be making a coffee in one of our breakout areas and everything's very open. So if you haven't been to a WeWork, please come and visit one. you'll definitely get that sense I'm talking about now. So I'm making a coffee and I hear two members talking to each other.

And they're startups. They're standalone, two founders, two entrepreneurs. And they're talking about some challenges that they've got and breaking through. And one of them said, I wish I had this marketing mindset.

I wish I knew what to do. What do I do next? And the person he was speaking to actually is a marketeer.

That's his job. That's his bread and butter. And so he said, you know what?

I'm happy to sit with you. We'll walk through it together. And I'll offer this to you. As a startup, you may not have all the funds available to you that you wish you had, you know, that bigger companies have.

And so having some of that expertise that's readily available in a space where you come to work every day is something that I can say that WeWork offers as well. I can't speak for competitors in that sense. But, you know, being able to find people that you can otherwise, you know, if you can't afford that support or the expertise as a startup, then it can be difficult. And similarly, it can be very lonely. I know there was a few hands that went up when you're looking at startups.

If you're alone and you're trying to get a business off the ground, it's long hours. You know, you could be working, I've heard, you know, 18 to 20 hours a day. You sleep, you eat, and you're back to it.

And so giving you that kind of almost a network that comes with a space of work is something that's truly magical. So my complementary answer, this is not knowing the specifics, but knowing the kind of the big picture, you used that word network at the end. So economists talk about network effects. And. And one of the reasons that WeWork is partly funded by SoftBank, this huge Japanese outfit, which also has stakes in Uber and a bunch of these startups, is SoftBank is looking for companies that can dominate particular sectors in a way that allows the network effects to play out.

And we see this with Facebook. We see this with Google. I mean, there are certain sort of new economy companies that can benefit from the fact that by becoming so dominant within the... their sector, everybody else almost feels compelled to join them.

And the benefits of being part of WeWork are not just, you know, the physical space. But and this is a hypothesis is not a fact. But the theory is that by being part of WeWork, this is going to create opportunities for you in terms of networking with other people within that community that make you make it sticky, make you want to stick with WeWork rather than going somewhere else.

So that's that is the economic logic behind a lot of these venture capital. based valuations of places like WeWork and Uber. Interesting.

There was a start-up question, I think, in the middle. Sorry, just wait for the microphone. If you wouldn't mind saying who you are and where you're from, there's a chance to pitch. I work at Tractable, and we're at the old street WeWork office.

We moved recently. It's been about a month and a half now. And Stephanie, brilliant place, amazing place to be.

Thank you. Welcome. Thank you. And thank you. I think I have one major question that I've seen over the times when I've moved across from big companies to startups.

So there's this thing about marrying what Julian spoke about, meritocracy, bureaucracy, autocracy, and what you spoke about as culture, ad. So two questions for you. One, have you been able to shed away the biases of hiring someone from a purely meritocracy or a purely bureaucratic organization into someone who's ad?

ad-hocrit And the second one is, if you have been able to, how have you been able to do that? Because many startups today, they say, I mean, I potentially received this feedback. I mean, I give this feedback to some people as well, where, sorry, you're from this big organization. You don't know the culture, so it's difficult to put you in place. So how have you been able to shed away those biases?

The company is going through a transformational stage now, right? So there's only so long a company can say that they're a startup. You know, if you look at a definition, you look at the number of employees. But you can still operate as a startup. You know, that never truly goes away.

If the entrepreneurial spirit's there, that will continue. We've recently had to make a few hires who have come from those maybe more structural or structured organization. And I can speak about myself. You know, I don't know if anyone here is from the oil and gas industry.

Yes. If you are, you will know it tends to be a bit of a red tape kind of organization. You know, we have a process and policy for every single thing. I couldn't walk down the stairs without my hand on a handrail.

And if you were seen, you would get a stop card and you would have to explain yourself to the powers that be. And, you know, and then you join a company like Booking.com and then now WeWork where, you know, there's much more of a sense of trust. And, you know, you can bring your true self to work every day and you don't have to worry about that red tape so much.

At the same time, if you have a company full of people who are purely entrepreneurs and who are going off and maybe only creators and only innovators, the execution part doesn't naturally come with that as well. So you do need those people who come in and can add a bit of structure, not in a way that's stifling, not the complete extreme of it, but someone who can come in and see all those amazing innovation and creation and actually put a roadmap in place. I say the word process and people recoil. You know, our stakeholders are like, oh, red tape, you know, blockings.

We don't want to look at this. But ultimately, we need a process to get to the end goal. As long as you frame it in a way and you don't use the word process.

So when I meet a hiring manager, I won't say there's a process for that. I'll just be sure, you know, the way our recruiters will frame it is, absolutely, we can do that for you. And that's it.

They don't need to know what we do at the back end. What we'll say is, we can do this, but here's what we need from you. Or do you know what? X employee in this department does five times quicker. Let me try again.

I'll try this one again. Do you want to know what a hiring manager in that department does differently that means that he or she can hire someone five times quicker than you? To me, that's the conversations that you have that still have an entrepreneurial hat on it.

But to us, maybe especially in this group, we know that we do have a process to follow and compliance comes in and GDPR comes in, but that's all speech that the business doesn't really want to hear in that sense. So hopefully that answers your question as well. But I've hired people from banking, from oil and gas, from established companies, startups, and I think it's that blend that makes it truly special. Okay, so we've got a question here, a question here, and then we've got one in the middle. But take this one first, please.

Hi, Stephanie. I'm Fernando. I work at GSK. As you say, building a community brings openness and it brings a lot of pros. You can find your next partner.

for that project that you are working on, but also have cons. You can be sitting right next to a competitor of yours, and how does WeWork manage these data and information rigs that you can have at the workplace, which is a message that WeWork sends to these organizations where there is very hard policies about data and information. management. Interesting. So our physical space is designed in very different ways, right?

So we have, you know, you don't have to set an open space. We have meeting rooms that are bookable as well. So if you have those confidential conversations, then you can lock yourself away.

And that's very much you, your company or yourself, you know, having those calls and privacy. We have phone booths. So, you know, if meeting rooms aren't available, then you can use a phone booth as well for those conversations. So the competitor thing in that sense from a confidentiality or data part isn't a concern as such because we do provide the space it would almost feel like it's your own space and so there's not that much of a difference as a thing or say an office that was dedicated to you um we works also have you know depending on the size of company you are and we do have private um spaces as well that are just made available for your company and so if that's a an option you choose to go for then that's available what i would say about your question and um you know collaborating is great but excuse me, on maybe competitor side, not so much.

I would challenge that. Some of the things that I've learned actually have come from competitors and in a good way. And I think long gone are the days where we do.

And Julian put up some great slides around what Amazon are doing, what GE have done and what Google are talking about. And that's information that's being pushed out there. And it's being pushed out there because it's through those best practices.

It's through those innovations that we can maybe get an idea and that we can move forward with. So I think. That kind of era is probably long behind us now, where instead I will go to people that are competitors and we'll talk and we'll have a meet-up and we'll discuss what's going well, what's not. If I can share a lesson and that they've walked away with something, that gives me a huge sense of fulfillment, whether they're a competitor or not.

Okay, that's interesting. We're going to go there. I mean, we'll go there if we can.

The amazing thing for me is if I remember that time where we spoke to the CEO of the bank, it was very much about... the bank would be in one place, conversations could be enclosed within this bank. Now I hear there are people like Citibank and Barclays and other organisations are on WeWork floors with their innovation teams, so maybe the barriers are coming down.

Quick question here, and then we'll take the other one from the back as well. Yes, hi, Nick Robeson from Boyden. I think the Prosecco on tap and Camden pale ale is probably one of the reasons why WeWork is being so successful. The question I've got is around how you are using artificial intelligence in your recruitment.

Okay. Yeah. We're doing a few things right now.

So number one with our ATS. So the ATS that we're using necessarily doesn't lend itself to a growing. organization and a lot of things are very manual and we're finding our candidate experience team are actually having to manually open requisitions and then you know we're reviewing CV one by one and so we're we're partnering with a few companies out there I can't share exactly who now because we're still tendering but that will look at things like CV screens for us and that will build a kind of front-facing but also something at the back end for our hiring managers and that will really allow that experience to really We truly embody the WeWork experience. So we hire for community team members, for example, and the community team are the first people that you see when you walk into a WeWork building.

So instead of having those building visits that are continuously happening in our buildings, we'll show them a video and we'll ask them real-time questions. We do a lot of video assessments as well. We're looking at competency-based behavioural type of assessments that will all be done digitally as well for us. which will, you know, if you're looking at from a cost saving, but as well as time efficiency, is going to help us really scale even quicker across what we're doing. OK, there was a question over there, and then I've got a couple more.

We're just going to go for it. It's just at the back, please. Hi, thank you.

It's Wendy from Goldman. I'm really fascinated about your hiring, and I'd love to know more. Once you've got these exceptional people into the door, how do you onboard them to... keep this journey going.

Yeah. So as a very much a young people team, so if I was to tell you guys, we've just found, or we're still actually hiring people partners within our organization. So the role of people...

partners still maybe five months old and we work in this region and so our recruiters were doing everything you know it was very much we get them in and then you process their contract we asked we talked to them about their first date and so we really had to rely on the business and so there's nothing like a manager actually reaching out to their new direct report and saying you know you're starting in two weeks three weeks time and really starting that connection from then as well and so from an onboarding perspective we do have an induction where all of our new hires join in London and then we are now starting to build that out into our different headquarters in the region so in Berlin for Germany etc. From there what we're also doing is something that I feel probably most passionate about which is our community immersion. What the community immersion is that every new hire at WeWork actually spends one or two days typically and then sometimes longer working with the community teams so they meet our members, they get to see what the community does day in day out, they help support with you know, the front desk or, you know, some of the events that are happening in the building as well. And that's what gives, and I know because I did it myself, and that was for me the most valuable thing I could walk away from, because that's where you truly understand what WeWork is as a brand, what our members are looking for, and you get an understanding as well of what the community team does day in, day out to, you know, to delight with those experiences. And then from there, you know, thinking of onboarding, so it's not just day one, it's, you know, as we talked about prior to that day one, and then kind of all the way through.

as well because the employee experience is something that we're investing quite heavily in now and there's a few things a few exciting things I can't wait to be able to announce that that will be happening as well moving forward from a retention perspective too. Great we're nearly out of time there's one thing I just wanted to just touch on because the ambition doesn't stop You've already described yourself as not just a co-working space, there's some other things on. So the organization itself is rebranded as the We Company. Yes.

Thank you for wearing the brand. The We Company. And your founder's talked about this thing which sounds immeasurably more acceptable than millennial or generation. He talks about the We Generation.

There's this generation of people who... instinctively share, collaborate, high-five and share Prosecco. So is this a real thing or is this just a WeWork thing?

Is there actually a WeGeneration that we need to be tapping into somehow or encouraging to join our London Business School programmes? Is there something about a WeGeneration or is it just an extension of the brand? I think everyone can be a part of the We Generation.

We do work as well by the way because the Prosecco is great but there's a lot of hard work that goes in to WeWork but you know the We Generation so if we're talking about you know WeWork's part of that then we look at WeLive you know it's all about sharing living space and there's you know that's happening anyway you know you've got flatmates and people sharing common areas we look at WeRise so we've got Rise by We which is well yeah I know people are looking at me probably thinking what are all these things so you know, there's that. It's all about mind, well-being. It's not just about kind of the workspace. So I think every single person in this room, and if you can talk about we rather than me, we're all part of a we generation. It's about being a part of something greater than yourselves.

And what Adam and Miguel have always said is that together we can achieve more than we ever could on our own. And I'm pretty sure that people in here will feel that way because, you know, it takes an army to build something and it takes a village and, pardon the pun, village and community. But that's very much where it comes from.

I could never do what I do every day without my team and my peers and people around me. So the we generation is very much a thing. It doesn't matter how you term it, but for us it makes sense. It's a we company, but I definitely think it's a thing. And it's not just a trend.

It's not a phase that's going to go through and pass. There's evidence, and we're seeing that more and more. And whether you're a startup or an enterprise, and I think... 45% of our enterprise members actually say that the reason they choose WeWork is because of the entrepreneurial creativity and that side of it. So the We generation is very much alive and thriving.

Fantastic. Well, thank you very much, Stephanie. Absolutely brilliant.

Thank you. Thank you. Are you able to stick around for coffee?

Have you got a run or whatever? I can stick around for a while. Okay. Well, you can connect with them. Stephanie afterwards but thank you very much.

So I'm up for moving Julian if I can get a desk in with the Prosecco and the that'd be fantastic. I think we are right over there in the ad-ocracy world there hopefully. Hopefully inspiring.

Do check it out. Do connect with with Stephanie on that. That's sort of our little morning taster. Julian's given you some Food for thought. You've had a chance to connect with one another.

You've had one example. Just a few little housekeeping things, what's going to happen now. You get a chance to have a break.

There is a balcony. You can see a great view of London. You can get some fresh air.

We do that as well. I think we start again in about 30 minutes, but we'll give you notices for that. But thank you very much for your time and attention.

You're going to be in one of three different places when you come back. So after the break. If you come back to this room here, there's a session going to run here, and then there are two other sessions running different places, so you'll have some choices. So have a look at your lanyard there.

There's one session around creativity, which has been run by Pierre. There's a session on curiosity, which has been run by Jules Goddard. And there's a session on creativity, which is run by Kaven.

So there's three different options for you. Oh, we've got it here. So Jules Goddard is going to be back in here. Jules is here, I think.

Jules, give us a wave. And then Pierre is going to be in Riverside Room 1, and Kaven's going to be in Riverside Room 5. That's in 30 minutes. You've got time to continue the conversations.

Thank you again to Stephanie, and thank you to you. Thank you. Thank you.

Transcript for:Exploring Organizational Change and Leadership

Transcript for:
Exploring Organizational Change and Leadership