Poets & Thinkers
Poets & Thinkers explores the humanistic future of business leadership through deep, unscripted conversations with visionary minds – from best-selling authors and inspiring artists to leading academic experts and seasoned executives.
Hosted by tech executive, advisor, and Princeton entrepreneurship & design fellow Ben Lehnert, this podcast challenges conventional MBA wisdom, blending creative leadership, liberal arts, and innovation to reimagine what it means to lead in the AI era.
If you believe leadership is both an art and a responsibility, this is your space to listen, reflect, and evolve.
Poets & Thinkers
The other “F” Word: Embracing failure to elevate human ingenuity in the AI era with professor and author John Danner
What if our fixation on avoiding failure is the very thing blocking us from building organizations that maximize human ingenuity? And why is this business critical in the AI age?
In this episode of Poets & Thinkers, we explore the intersection of leadership, innovation, and human potential with John Danner, renowned business advisor, professor, and bestselling author. Drawing on his extensive experience teaching at UC Berkeley and Princeton while advising leaders across sectors, John challenges conventional wisdom about what drives organizational success in our rapidly evolving AI-everything world.
John takes us on a journey through what he calls the three fundamental organizational pursuits – growth, innovation, and engagement – and reveals why they all depend on the one thing leaders often fear most: failure. He explains why the status quo serves as the greatest obstacle to progress and how our natural human bias toward familiarity creates resistance to change. Through compelling insights and personal anecdotes from decades of personal experience, John illuminates how fear silences organizational creativity while analyzing startling Gallup research showing only 20% of employees globally are truly engaged in their work.
As we navigate the profound transformation brought by AI and other technologies, John presents a critical fork in the road: organizations can pursue "AI to the max" with minimal human input, or they can embrace a more humanistic model built on human ingenuity, imagination, and collaboration. His vision for “invitational leadership” offers a compelling alternative to extractive models that have dominated business thinking for generations.
In this discussion, we explore:
- Why failure is the unavoidable companion to genuine growth and innovation
- How fear serves as the “border patrol” for the status quo in organizations
- The alarming reality that only one in five employees globally is engaged at work
- The third revolutionary period we’re entering: the inclusion challenge
- Why leaders must shift from extraction to resourcefulness in building sustainable organizations
- The power of “invitational leadership” in unleashing human creativity at all levels
This episode is an invitation to reimagine leadership for a more human-centered future, challenging us to develop organizational cultures where everyone – not just an elite few – can contribute their inherent creativity and imagination.
Topics
03:10 - The three fundamentals every organization strives for: growth, innovation, and engagement
04:20 - How growth, innovation, and engagement all depend on failure
06:30 - The status quo as the primary obstacle to change and improvement
08:50 - The interconnection between fear, feedback, and failure in organizational culture
12:00 - Leaders acknowledging their own fallibility to create psychological safety
13:10 - Gallup research on employee engagement: only 20% engaged, 15% actively disengaged
15:10 - The concept of “growth for both” – aligning organizational and individual growth
17:30 - The three revolutionary periods: industrial, information, and now the inclusion challenge
21:00 - Two possible futures: “AI to the max” versus human ingenuity and imagination
26:00 - Challenging extractive business models in favor of resourcefulness
28:10 - Shifting from “l
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Welcome to Poets and Thinkers, the podcast where we explore the future of humanistic business leadership. I'm your host, ben, and today I'm speaking with John Danner. John is a professor, entrepreneur, speaker and co-author of the two Wall Street Journal and Amazon bestselling books Built for Growth and the Other F Word. As a former lawyer, public official and consultant, his work has centered on helping organizations, from global 1,000s to startups, deal with the leadership strategy and innovation challenges of unprecedented change. Challenges of unprecedented change. As a faculty member at both the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business and Princeton University, he has taught executives, graduate and undergraduate students from around the world, in addition to conducting seminars on leadership strategy, innovation and entrepreneurship for other organizations worldwide.
Speaker 1:To me personally, john has become a dear friend and mentor. His decades-long experience and deep insight on organizational dynamics, the human drivers behind innovation, or the lack thereof, and the roadblocks leaders unconsciously create for their companies to thrive feel incredibly timely today, as every company, big or small, is dealing with a massive need to innovate and transform. So I'm thrilled for today's conversations, where I get to pick John's brain on how to design and lead resilient, future-proof organizations that maximize human ingenuity in the AI everything world. As always when speaking to John, this conversation is full of intellectual gold nuggets and inspiring ideas. If you like the show, make sure you like, subscribe and share this podcast. Now let's jump into the conversation. Hi John, where does this podcast find you?
Speaker 2:I'm in my study in Berkeley, California, not far from the university.
Speaker 1:Why don't we get started with you, just telling us a little bit about yourself?
Speaker 2:Yeah, basically I juggle. I juggle three or four different roles in multiple different settings. I teach I teach at the business school at Berkeley and I just finished a long stint teaching at Princeton as well, and I get a chance to anchor a lot of executive education programs around the world as well. I do a lot of consulting for everything from very large organizations in the business, government and nonprofit sectors to emerging startups, again in many different kinds of fields and arenas. Occasionally I get a chance to write I've written a couple of bestselling books along the way and do articles and those kinds of things. And when I get a chance I also do a fair amount of public speaking and conferences and conventions and meetings in one sort or another.
Speaker 1:I wanted to have this conversation. For a long time. You and I have had plenty of back and forth brainstorming conversations, discussions around leadership, the state of the world, how the world is going to change, and so we'll start with just some high level questions that I had for you that I think are just really interesting to explore. So, as you said, you've interviewed and advised countless top leaders really across the world, across industries and sectors, and you've written two bestselling books around business leadership. One is called Built for Growth and the other one is called the Other F Word, which is definitely probably my favorite of the two. If you had to summarize some of the key insights that you've gained from talking to these top executives, top leaders, thought leaders, innovators what makes great leadership? So what is it? And I'm also especially interested, what is it not?
Speaker 2:All right, so remind me if I don't answer the second one. Let me start with what I think, some of what it is. It seems to me that every organization is striving to do three fundamental things. They're trying to grow because growth is kind of the oxygen upon which future opportunity rests, and that growth can be in a number of different dimensions, but growth number one. Second is, if they're smart leaders, recognize that growth has to be more than just about more, because if all you think of is that growth is more, you're doing more of the same of what you're doing today and more likely than not, that's the path to oblivion, not to genuine growth. So you need a second thing, and the second thing, I think, is innovation, because innovation is about discovery and it's about exploration and experimentation. But the key thing to get both growth and innovation is probably one of the hardest things of all, and that is engagement. Both growth and innovation is probably one of the hardest things of all, and that is engagement, engagement by the organization itself. But I think those three things are fairly universal Growth, innovation and engagement.
Speaker 2:The irony is that those are the three things that organizations and leaders want the most, but every one of those in very interesting ways, depends on the one thing that probably leaders want the least, and that is failure. Because when you think about growth, innovation and engagement, to some extent they all depend inextricably, and to some extent intimately, on failure. Innovation doesn't happen without experimentation. Experiments rarely succeed, so the experiments are about failure, about learning from failure, but fundamentally about failure. Ask yourself about engagement.
Speaker 2:Engagement depends on trust, first and foremost, and trust by employees is not forged when things are going great and everybody's high-fiving one another. It's forged when failure is present, when things are not going well, that's when you know that you can trust one another. And it's forged when failure is present, when things are not going well. That's when you know that you can trust one another and you can trust the leadership of an organization. So I've been interested in all four of those different things growth, innovation, engagement and their interdependence on failure. Of course, leaders know how to execute, but again, execution has to be balanced with experimentation. Leaders need vision, but vision without values is not worth much. So I think it's an ever-changing mix of those kinds of elements, and how individuals put them together depends on their own personality, characteristics, their own style, their own backgrounds and, above all their sense of themselves and their responsibilities.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I wanted to dive deeper on the engagement and failure side because I agree they are very interlinked and in hearing you talk about that is really interesting for many reasons. One of the things that I pulled out of the other F word is this quote that failure is, like gravity, a pervasive, powerful fact of life. You may want to defy it, but you can't deny it. So I mean that resonated immediately with me and sounds very true, especially in what you already said and what I wrote down is everyone would agree with this. Yet many leaders do in fact deny failure, and even more so I think the organizations, at least of the past, are built around the avoidance of failure in many ways. How do you think about that? Why do you think that is?
Speaker 2:Yeah, this is a central question, I think, and it to some extent comes back to the earlier question you asked about leadership, because I think, regardless of what organization you're in or what role you have, we are all in one fundamental business and that is the from to business. We're all trying to move from someplace today to something different and hopefully better tomorrow, and what stands in all of our ways, almost by definition, is the status quo. That's what we're trying to change. The status quo is not a friend of the future, the status quo is a friend of today, and I think that the challenge that leaders face is how to basically recognize the power of the status quo, and it's not just power in the sense of comfort zone of an organization or complacency. It's in some ways hardwired in all of us as human beings.
Speaker 2:Dan Kahneman at Princeton, as you know, had a number of really path-breaking research findings, but among the findings that behavioral scientists and behavioral economists have come up with is this notion of a status quo bias, that we are in some ways unconsciously wired to prefer what we know to what we don't know, and what that means is we have to overcome a kind of almost natural force to stay where we are and not to move to the new place that we might like to think of ourselves in. So what does that mean? I think what it means for leaders is, you know, if I were rewriting that book, the Other F Word about failure, I might add two other Fs because I think they are co-equally important. One is fear and the other, ironically, is feedback. Let me describe that in a second. Feedback can come in all kinds of ways customer feedback, employee feedback, colleague feedback, et cetera. But I have to say I don't know very many people that really enjoy feedback. I think most of us like to think of ourselves as welcoming it, but I think it's very difficult to really listen, pay attention, when somebody is giving you particularly negative feedback. That's true for employees, it's true for leaders, it's true for, I think, most of us. And that connects into this question of fear, because I think fear of failure is one of the central challenges that every leader has to confront in every organization, you know.
Speaker 2:Ask yourself how many times have you sat in a business meeting or an executive meeting in any kind of organization, where a question is asked and people kind of look around uncomfortably and very few people raise their hand to answer the question or engage? Is that because everybody in the room has no ideas about the possible answers to those questions or those challenges? I doubt it. I think there's something else much more profound going on. People are afraid, afraid to voice their opinion, afraid to share their ideas, afraid to challenge assumptions, and that's what reinforces the status quo, that silence. It really is the border patrol for the status quo, and organizations and leaders depend upon some ability to crack through that to make it safe to challenge, make it safe to try things. And that's where I say the fear, the feedback and the failure all kind of converge into one another, because they are all, in different ways, protectors or guardians of the status quo, which remains, I think, the single biggest issue in front of leaders.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I can certainly relate from my own experience leading creative organizations. I can certainly relate from my own experience leading creative organizations. The focus on reducing any potential moments of fear is critical. But what I also realize and I think here you say too is it requires first and foremost the leader themselves to get very comfortable with their own sense of fear themselves, to get very comfortable with their own sense of fear right, and then in turn translate that into a sense of safety that then allows the rest of the organization to lean into that. I made a note when I was listening to you talk, where it's that acknowledgement of fear and then maybe looking at your own values but also the vision that you mentioned earlier, so that you move from fear into courage, right. I think that's that motion you want to actually embed in the organization so that you can then go and innovate and drive change and growth and what have you?
Speaker 2:I think that's correct. I think it has to be acknowledged. It is the elephant in the room and I think leaders beginning by acknowledging their own fallibility is a step forward. And obviously leaders have to always balance how open they are, how humble they are, or show that they are, think that they are, with the kind of decisiveness that organizations depend from them. But I think it does begin with that kind of personal reflection and acknowledgement. You know I was looking at some of the latest Gallup research on employee engagement. It's depressing, you know. On a global basis, something like 20, 23% of employees globally are quote engaged. Now just think about that for a moment. One in five one in five employees in most organizations around the world are actually engaged in what they're doing on a day-to-day basis. In some ways, even worse than that, 15% are what Gallup calls actively disengaged. That means they're not only not doing the work, they're actually working against, in some ways, the organizations itself.
Speaker 2:And that leaves 60%, 60%, three out of every five employees are quote not engaged in what they're doing. That is an indictment. That's an indictment of leadership, it's an indictment of organizational culture and it is a question that, if you looked at it through the lens of any other resource that organizations have to convert into value, can you imagine saying well, CEO, guess what 60% of the dollars you're spending are wasted, 60% of the resources that you have in your technology is wasted. I mean, it cries out for a very different approach, a very different approach, and I'll give you just one. I'll give you one sort of simple idea.
Speaker 2:You know, gallup came up with a very interesting study a number of years ago and it was about what makes for effective, high-performing teams. It's called Aristotle, project Aristotle, and they came up with a topic that I know a lot of people are familiar with now this zone of psychological safety, how important it is for organizations. Now, it was one of five characteristics that they came up with in that study, but it basically says that people, in order to be engaged and to elevate their own capability to perform in a team environment, need to feel like they're being heard, need to feel like their views are respected, that they matter in some way. And as I thought about that some more and reflected it against the work that I've done around the world with various organizations, I came up with a very simple phrase, and it is growth for both.
Speaker 2:I think a central challenge of leaders is to recognize that, in order to get growth for the organization, they and their colleagues throughout the organization need to figure out ways to translate why growth for the company is going to be, personally, growth for the individual. Why is it going to matter to them? Because those two things are not necessarily connected and I think, in order to change those Gallup numbers, to improve them a little bit, leaders have to figure out much more creatively and much more flexibly what growth can mean for the individuals, by listening to those individuals, listening to them, paying attention to their views, their values, their priorities, because, ultimately, if you really are going to achieve the growth you want, the innovation you're looking for, you need to have a higher percentage than one in five.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, absolutely, and I'm glad you're connecting the dots here also into the research, because I think a big part of this is that we know now a lot more about what makes individual humans work at their best. And, at the same time, I think a lot of what the Gallup numbers probably also point to is that over the last 100 plus years, we have really worked and built models around the Industrial Revolution first and foremost, which was not necessarily focused on optimizing, really getting the best out of the individual. It was more about predictability, it was more about consistency, but certainly not about really building out organizations that bring out the best in people.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you can only imagine what Gallup's research would have been like if they went to Adam Smith's pin manufacturing company and said how satisfied are you with your daily job of being a pin head polisher or a pin cutter, whatever? I mean? No, it had nothing to do with it, and in many ways I'm glad you mentioned that, because my own view, at a kind of macro level, is that we, I hope, are entering really a kind of third revolutionary period. You mentioned the industrial revolution. I think that was fundamentally a revolution about making things, about getting to scale and harnessing natural resources and human resources in order to produce things on a mass level, and it did that amazingly at the expense of many things that are only now becoming apparent in terms of fossil fuels and the like, but there's no denying that that was a major revolution in productivity. Let's play it that way.
Speaker 2:I think the second revolution was really the information revolution, which wasn't so much about making things as it was about organizing information, organizing and analyzing information, and that became its own revolution, because information became as powerful a resource as natural resources had been in the previous revolution. But now I think the real challenge for all of us is what I would characterize as the inclusion revolution, and it's really, I guess, and value creation includes and benefits far more people than have benefited from those first two revolutions. And that's where I think AI is both. It's a mixed blessing. It can be both an accelerant to that, but it could also be a retardant, because the very nature, the very name of it is artificial, it's not human.
Speaker 2:And that could take you into a zone of future organizational culture and leadership patterns which make those Gallup numbers look actually good, not bad.
Speaker 1:That's an interesting, very interesting point, and I love the way you broke down essentially how we've how far, on the one hand we've come, but also that we are at a crossroads right when certainly a lot of the organizational principles and workflows are not working anymore and have to be rethought or certainly evolved, which is a good segue in one of the questions that I wanted to ask you specifically. And we're already sort of transitioned into AI, and it wouldn't be a podcast in 2025 if we weren't talking about AI, so we might as well. So we're-.
Speaker 2:Hey, just a quick question Are you real today? Is this really you?
Speaker 1:Yeah, this is the real me today, and with all the German accent that I could package into this. No avatar here. So we're living through a massive paradigm shift. There's no question about that. In fact, probably more than one at the same time, which can certainly feel overwhelming at times. Ai is disrupting everything from productivity, workflows, which we already touched on, but also organizational structures are starting to be affected. I mean starting with layoffs that we've seen really across sectors and industries, which is certainly a big canary in the coal mine, I think, in terms of organizations really having to rethink themselves and how they work. So it's very clear that companies will look very different in the next five to 10 years, not even talking about the decades to come. How do you envision companies to look like in this AI everything futures, given that you have really studied so many in so many different sectors and are interacting with them on a daily basis?
Speaker 2:I'll tell you, I think it's a huge fork in the road, because I think there are going to be many answers to your question, but let me try to synthesize, if I can, and maybe oversimplify it, because I think this is a key choice that leaders are going to face very, very, very quickly. One fork in that road, and let's just call it AI to the max, that fork. You can envision an organization like this. It has very few people. It doesn't mean that it's not enormously productive, it can be. It is powered by a combination of AI, robotics and machinery and it takes very, very little human, personal engagement in order to produce what it produces, to distribute what it makes, to sell what it makes, to maybe even to service what it makes.
Speaker 2:And you could envision a situation in which the balance between human resources and inhuman resources, or non-human resources, is tipped in favor of the non-human Absolutely. And many leaders, I think, will choose that particular model because they think that's the path to longevity, they think that's the path to economic sustainability Leave aside any other dimensions of sustainability and that's a pretty. For me, that's a pretty uncomfortable vision to have, but I think it's very plausible and all you have to do is look back at how organizations and leaders, to many extents, responded in the previous revolutions. What was the human consequence in those organizations of those changes? Was life in a factory in the Industrial Revolution a great experience? I don't think so. For most folks it probably was for the managers and executives and leaders, but not for the employees. What happened when the information revolution occurred? The same kind of dislocation of workers, the same kind of recreation of new value streams, but at least those depended much more on human beings, to some extent the brainpower of human beings, so that A1 to the max path is, I think, a predictable response to this AI paradigm shift, to use your phrase.
Speaker 2:There is another approach which I think is not. It's not yet well articulated or developed and I can't really point to great examples of it yet. But let me put it this way it's sort of the hope for branching that or fork in that road, and it depends not on AI but, if I'm going to stay in the realm of acronyms, maybe HI. In other words, instead of artificial intelligence. It's an organization predicated first and foremost on human ingenuity, human imagination, and it recognizes at its core that it is the collaboration among human beings, leveraging whatever tools and resources and technologies they have available. But at the end of the day, it is their judgment, their creativity, their experiences which is going to ultimately translate into a different kind of higher level, if you will, more humanistic organization in the future. Am I hopeful for that? Yeah, I'm hopeful for it. Am I optimistic about it? Not yet.
Speaker 1:Yeah, one of the reasons I started this podcast was to explore what that might look like, because from our conversations you know that I'm very much so with you on we need to at least attempt to create a more humanistic vision. Not just, not just you know the future of business, but business being such a big driver of socioeconomic change, it is important that we think about that in the context of business, and it is interesting to hear you talk about at the core of that being actually the recognition of our human capacity to connect with each other, to really come up with genuinely new connections and ideas, and then leveraging all the tools at our disposal, all technology that's available, but in what I often call a net, positive way for the world.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it may be that what we need to think through is this notion of resourceful and resourcefulness. Let me just explain that a little bit. If you think back on, at least in terms of capitalism although it's not unique to capitalism, I don't think most of our models about organizational value creation tend to be extractive models. We look at resources as resources to be extracted, not developed, not grown, not sustained, but extracted To some extent. I've often asked my class, as I said, if you can give me a better example of a true capitalist business than a strip mine. I'm willing to listen to it, because it is absolutely about privatizing the profits of the organization, maybe even to investors in the organization. But it is an extractive model. It squeezes resources, it squeezes value out of resources and I think if we're going to have a hope for dealing with some of the huge challenges that the world's going to be facing, we've got to challenge that extractive assumption. We have to figure out ways in which we can be resourceful, where we can add to resources, where we can figure out ways to multiply the value that resources can create, to replenish those resources, whether they're human resources or whether they're natural resources, because otherwise, I think, the future of work in many particularly large organizations is going to be profoundly disengaging because it is not human in its most basic sense. It's not about the relationships with one another, it's not about back to my growth for both. It's not about growth for me as an employee. I'm extractable. I've given myself to the organization. What is it that I'm getting back and what am I contributing that I and we are proud of?
Speaker 2:I had a friend at the business school at Berkeley who has been working for a while on issues of dual leadership models, and I was joking with him one day over lunch. I said you know what? Maybe we need to change this word leadership. Maybe we should be calling it weedership, u weedership and I know that plays differently in German. But the idea that it's not about me, it's not about the organization, it's about we. How can we get this done? And that, to me, gets to the heart of what is in an organization. To me, an organization's culture depends on this a DNA, almost a DNA that links leadership as one of the strands and teams as the other, because teams are the most important performance unit in any organization. How can you put those two things together in a way that potentially makes magic. If you focus on that, I think it makes it easier to come to views and visions and models that are much more, to use our phrase, humanistic, much more human-centered than what the traditional models might lead us to.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it's you know.
Speaker 1:You described this extraction approach to business building over certainly the last hundreds of years, as the paradigm that so far has driven business, and I would agree to the point where it often feels like that's the only way we've accepted will work and that's just it.
Speaker 1:But I really love the way you've started to kind of paint the outlines of what a different approach could look like, which, at the core to me when I was listening to you, kind of brought up this thought of well, in order for us as leaders to get there right and really envision the future where we are adding, like truly adding value, where we're multiplying rather than subtracting, we need to first and foremost also believe or build a skill set about true creativity right. Going back to, you know, when we're looking at business school teaching today or education, business school, it teaches that exact exploitative model more than it teaches the true creativity and envisioning of a future that is additive, multiplying and creates a net positive, especially business leadership skills. Do you think we need to actually start teaching to make progress? Because, I agree with you, I'm neutral to pessimistic but I guess, long-term optimistic. So how do we-?
Speaker 2:A big question, easy to ask, hard to answer. Let me take a stab at it. If I were going to characterize, what I think future leaders need to be looking at is a more invitational model of leadership, invitational across all three of those things that I mentioned early on growth, innovation and engagement. And let me tell you what I mean by that. I often ask executives and students when I'm talking about innovation, because everybody talks about innovation, everybody wants innovation. You can look in every annual report and it's filled with. We're an innovative organization, we hire for innovation, our company's built on innovation, you know, et cetera.
Speaker 2:And I ask people to come up with their own working definition of innovation and then think of examples of either individuals or of things that, to them, exemplify what innovation is all about. And most people, when asked that question, define or identify examples of innov, ma or whomever. Pick your favorite innovation or things like the wheel, the telephone, the integrated circuit, ai itself, and all that is pretty easy to do. And then I turn around and I say, okay, what percentage of the people in your organization today, or even broader, what percentage of the people who you know share your email address or whatever, share your the URL, do you think see themselves as the next fill in the blank, the next Steve Jobs, the next, the next Alexander Graham Bell? And the biggest answer I've ever gotten is less than one 10th of 1%. And and in most cases people say, well, nobody in our organization sees themselves. And I asked people, I said, well, if that's the case, how is it possible that you're ever going to get people's ingenuity, people's creativity, people's imagination working? Because, by definition, you have excluded them from your own expectations of what it means to be innovative, what it means to wear the title of being an innovator.
Speaker 2:That's an example of thinking about invitation. How can you invite people to think of themselves as they are, as we all are, capable of coming up with ideas to improve the status quo? Now, that's the idea. Part of it, the engagement part of it, is inviting people to test things, inviting people to share the results of those experiments. Inviting people to test things, inviting people to share the results of those experiments, inviting people to share what they've learned, what assumptions they're making, what hunches they're pursuing.
Speaker 2:And again, ask yourself how invitational the cultures of most organizations are when it comes to who's invited to think about innovative ideas, who's invited to test things, invited to think about innovative ideas. Who's invited to test things tends to be a very rarefied percentage of the people in those organizations, so it starts by being invitational, I believe, and that, in turn, I think, rests on a fundamental assumption, and that is do you think human beings are capable of thinking of better ways to do things? And if there is one thing that I think human beings are quintessentially capable of that may be unique to them, but I don't know is exactly that we all have the ability to think of ways to do things better, to do things more simply, to do things more beautifully. Everybody does. And if our notion of leadership is that leadership is something that only a few people do, innovation is only something that even fewer people do, then we're not going to get to that situation where we're really tapping into the vast reservoir of ideas, ingenuity, energy and creativity that reside within everybody in that organization.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, that's both super insightful and powerful, and brings me to the thought. Back to your original point about fear, right, when I think we see a lot of leaders being afraid not just of failure but to a certain degree, maybe of their own humanity, which is in itself flawed not in a bad way, in a good way, because I'm a big fan of humans, with everything that comes with it. But accepting your own humanity as a leader is the only way you can actually then connect to the humanity in others and in turn get to the point that you're describing, which is really fundamentally seeing and believing that there shouldn't be just a tiny fraction of the organization that sees themselves as the big thinkers and innovators, but actually the majority. But I think it starts with that recognition and I see the majority of leaders being afraid of not just a failure but their own humanity, and maybe that one is causing the other.
Speaker 2:I don't know the relationship. I would add another important H word to humanity and that is humility. I think recognition of one's humanity almost absolutely has to lead to a recognition of humility, that we don't have the answers. Nobody has all the answers. We're all in the business of kind of fumbling forward to try to find the right things to do. Now we may act like we're clear headed, that we can anticipate the future, et cetera. Back to that from two idea that I started with. But none of us know what that is going to be. We're all experimenting. Most of the things that we're going to try are going to end up failing in some to some degree or another.
Speaker 2:You know, I was working with a big medical products company the other couple of years ago and I was struck by, again, the rhetoric of the organization, which was not unique to them. You know that we believe in trial and error, we believe in experimentation. And yet when you talked with people on a day-to-day basis, when's the last idea that you proposed in your team? When's the last time somebody else's idea turned into an experiment of some sort or another? And why do you think that is? And people described a culture of real fear, of trepidation and I said, hmm, it's interesting.
Speaker 2:Organizations may talk about trial and error and the importance of that, but the real culture in too many organizations is trial and terror.
Speaker 2:People are afraid to try things. They are afraid to try things or if they try things, they may be afraid to share the failure that comes from the experiment that, hey, this didn't work as well as I thought it was or we thought it was. And I think, ironically this is going to sound odd, but ironically, some of this comes back to the power of stories, and I don't mean stories as in create a story to make up to not tell the truth. Tell the truth, I mean a story that leaders can tell, that involves experimentation and exploration and has elements of humility, not at the expense of confidence or courage at all, but simply acknowledges that what we're doing in this organization is making a series of focused experiments. We think this is where we're going. We're going to monitor it, we're going to make changes along the way, as we need to, but our culture is a culture of experimentation, first and foremost because we are human beings. We're going to make mistakes, we're going to learn things we thought we knew but we didn't, because we didn't test about values, purpose.
Speaker 1:you know what drives an organization that we might want to do at one point. I want to ask you one last question before we wrap up, because I'm really interested in this and I know that certainly my students are interested and hopefully many others out there. You've taught both at the Haas Business School at Berkeley, as well as Princeton, as you said at the very beginning. A lot of our students are going to enter this new world that we touched upon and tried to kind of sketch out as, hopefully, the leaders of tomorrow. If you could give a piece of advice to those students your students, my students, all the students out there that are aspiring to be the leaders of tomorrow, what would that be?
Speaker 2:You don't ask easy questions, do you Ben?
Speaker 1:That's the whole point of this podcast, hopefully.
Speaker 2:So, so, let me, let me wear my, uh, my, my commencement speaker. If I had my, if I had my academic regalia, I'd put it up.
Speaker 2:Uh, let me. Let me try to make it as straightforward and simple as I can, which, in my case, tends to be about trying to come up with a phrase that captures some of these things. One is know the difference between pivoting and riveting, and here's what I mean by that. A lot of people acknowledge the importance of pivoting. You know you hit something that's unexpected and you change direction. That's great, that's really important. You know, it's what makes great sports teams happen. It's a terrific thing to be able to do, to not be so locked in your ways. But some things around, some things have to be riveted, they have to be anchored down, and I would suggest to students figure out what things in your life and your career you are going to rivet. What values, what priorities, what self-image, what contributions, what pride, what is going to give you a sense that you have mattered, that you have used your time, your talents in a way that you are proud of. You could tell your kids about it. You can tell your parents about it. You can tell your partners about it. Those are things that you want to rivet around about. You can tell your parents about. You can tell your partners about. Those are things that you want to rivet around Other things. You can pivot, you know what you're doing, what career you're pursuing, what job you have, you know where you're living. All those kinds of things can be changeable. But riveting knowing the few things that you want to rivet around is, I think, critical.
Speaker 2:The second thing is I'll give you an acronym here that I think captures some of what I've talked about earlier ACT, a-c-t. What do I mean by that? A, ask questions, ask questions. If there's one thing again that human beings are very, very good at, it's questioning things, it's wondering about things. It's why my favorite punctuation mark happens to be the question mark, because I think it's so uniquely human and it is the beginning of the creativity that you and I were talking about. But it is be curious, constantly curious. So that's where it starts. But asking questions by itself isn't enough.
Speaker 2:C is about challenging assumptions, and that's where the courage begins to enter the equation. Because asking questions is fine. The assumptions are the key that hold the status quo in power. If the status quo is anchored in any cement, that cement is assumptions, assumptions about who's in charge, about why things are done this way, about who made you the leader, why are we doing this. It's the assumptions about authority, it's the assumptions about certainty, it is about challenging assumptions. And then comes the real courage, and that is try something different, try something different, ask questions, challenge assumptions and try something different. Questions, challenge assumptions and try something different. To me, those things are lifelong, career-long values to think about, and maybe that's a simple enough way to kind of remember it that are you acting?
Speaker 1:I think that's very spot on. If nothing else, the era we are about to enter, or maybe at the very beginning of, requires deep critical thinking anchored in values for leaders specifically. John, thank you so much for all your insight, for your time, and we'll probably do another one in the future. So thank you for that. It was terrific, as always, thank you Thanks, ben, appreciate it.
Speaker 2:See you later.
Speaker 1:All right, that's a wrap for this week's show. Thank you for listening to Poets and Thinkers. If you liked this episode, make sure you hit follow and subscribe to get the latest episodes wherever you listen to your podcast.
