Today on episode number 790 of cxo talk we're discussing
business transformation and secrets of the unknown.
Our Guest is teef Rafiq. He's the former president of MGM
Resorts International and he's had an extraordinary career.
I really came up through digital native tech companies and I've
been part of startups, as well as Tech, Giants and Rose to a GM
level at Amazon and I ran a fairly sizable business unit in
2013. Many Industries began to see
that technology would reshape how those Industries work and
there began to be more technology focused roles in more
traditional companies outside Tech and I then went on a
10-year run starting as a chief digital officer for McDonald's
and over that 10-year period i Rose to the president level.
In this case that a large global company called MGM Resorts so I
have Kind of been in the pure Silicon Valley culture and also
in the traditional culture of other large businesses T.
If you wrote this book, it's called decisions Sprint.
Tell us about that. The sound bite is a lot of
people are calling decisions for an atomic habits for Innovation.
And the reason why they say that is because it is very focused on
Innovation. But what's different about it is
looking at Innovation and looking at the specific building
blocks of how Innovation Works what the pitfalls are and how to
avoid them so that you can get a higher hit rate on your
Innovation, some more quality but also move faster with more
velocity, which is something I think every every company in it,
any industry is looking for a little to be a little bit more
specific. The book helps you make the leap
from ideas to action by confronting the unknowns and I
have really chosen to focus on I believe is the hardest part of
turning ideas into action which is embracing the unknowns.
So in the book, I introduced the notion of Upstream work, which
is where promising ideas, face more questions than answers
that's in constant contrast to Downstream, which is the
execution part of an initiative. So there's an upstream part that
I feel hasn't really been elaborated on in enough detail.
And so I focused on that I walk through the hidden structure.
Of Upstream work and introduce the methods that any team can
use to apply it to a specific thing that they're working on.
When you talk about Upstream work, can you be a little bit
more specific? So that we have a clearer
picture of what that actually is.
The first thing you realize after having a bright idea, is
that there are more questions than answers and what one
typical response to that is essentially To build a plan and
moving on to start to build something based on the things
that are known inside the company.
What do we know about this problem?
We're trying to solve, but what typically happens is that along
the way you realize there are blind spots, there are unknowns
they come up and they're very disruptive to the you know to
moving the idea forward because these blind spots, make us have
to basically go back to the start and start again from
scratch. And so when I talk about
Upstream, Like I'm talking about the process of actually
servicing all the important unknowns and knowns at the
beginning and getting to the bottom of them and some
structured ways. So making the unknowns
actionable so it could be as simple as developing a great
question list of organized by subject matter and giving a team
space a week or two to run an exploration which is essentially
a discovery process around the key questions and develop Think
something like an FAQ. This is a very common practice
at Amazon for example, in every single initiative that they work
on and on the basis of that high-quality detective work,
that's when they move onto alignment.
So they don't move on to the suspend judgment on.
What's the right course of action or strategic Direction,
they spend time on exploration and Discovery.
They do a really great job of it and then they move on to
alignment then when people start nodding their heads because
they're standing out, high-quality understanding of A
problem. They're ready to move on to
execution. And so there is a little bit of
a sequence that a structure to how you go from the ambiguity of
a great idea. However, great it is to being
able to get a company to commit resources and be confident
enough to move on to execution. How is this different from
traditional approaches? I think anybody who's running a
project of any type will look across the landscape and come up
with With some type of list of what we don't know.
What we're what the uncertainties are, or the risks?
How is this different from that? I think it's really two main
differences. The first is making Innovation,
more purposeful, and the second is making, it more inclusive,
but without being slow. So let me walk for each one.
A lot of times when we have a bright idea, we rush ahead to
developing a plan to realize that in start building it.
But instead, we might start with a problem statement and really
getting a lot of clarity around the problem that we're trying to
solve. Like if you take an example in
the world today, let's say your Netflix and you have a problem
with password sharing, all right?
If you define the problem in in one way versus another, you're
going to get very different recommendations that the team
puts on the table. If I say the problem or Netflix
is to, you know, kind of crack down on password sharing that's
very different than saying the problem is trying to find a
balance. Between the needs of the user
and the commercial needs of Netflix and trying to find the
fair fairness within that space. If we start out with the right
problem statement, the team is going to produce very different
work along the way. So when we I think when we look
at Innovation, it's not just having a bright idea, moving on
to start building a prototype. We need to, for example, make it
more purposeful by anchoring it in the right problem statement,
and then running our exploration against that problem statement.
Now that leads me to my second Point around more inclusive
because it's my belief that the kinds of problems were solving.
And business today are complex, meaning.
You cannot solve them at one corner of a company and so when
I talk about being inclusive, I mean really getting enough of
the right brains of the company. Around the problem we're trying
to solve. This doesn't happen enough in
business because we think Innovation is the job of one
corner of the company, but when we do that, what happens is
that, you know, the idea moves forward a bit It but then it
runs into roadblocks because of some missed items or some blind
spots. And then the project experiences
some fits and starts because people are not confident because
they can poke holes. So I'm providing a workflow and
methodology where you could be purposeful and more inclusive,
but not slow and bureaucratic. And I think that's The Sweet
Spot of innovation that we need in this era.
Give us some examples of how this This works in practice
because I think the goal that you have the or the goals, I
should say that you've set out, which is to be very clear to be
thoughtful and inclusive around where you're headed again.
Everybody would kind of take that as motherhood and apple
pie. And so what is different and how
do you address this challenge? Because it is such a profound
challenge. For many organizations.
Well let's say you form the team around a strategic initiative,
you're up to start, you don't have to be able to start.
But let's say you are what happens in companies will teams
spend weeks and months and they go through a process of putting
recommendations on the table socializing, those
recommendations. And if those things look good,
then they get move on to decision making where the
company commits to the necessary actions.
Now, this entire process takes So weeks and months.
What I'm suggesting is that we break it into three main stages
of forces, exploration. And exploration is a concerted
effort to surface the right considerations, especially the
unknowns, and get to the bottom of them.
Now, when you do exploration, it's a very neutral process.
So you're not leaning one way or the other.
You know, with this idea is too crazy.
It's too small. It's the right direction.
It's not the right direction. It's a More neutral exercise
around servicing the important consideration, especially on
knows but also the knowns and developing enough of a
high-quality ground to to then move on to the next page, which
is alignment and Alignment is about bringing together.
What's been explored to draw conclusions?
Now, this is an important point because in my book, I write
about a mistake I made where I banned the word alignment in
companies and being in the c-suite managing.
Also the people, you know, that was a big decision.
The reason I banded is because I was reacting to the tendency and
companies to align before they explore and that led to very
small thinking because if you don't explore then you don't
know if something is really risky or hard to pull off.
It may be very achievable but if you rush ahead to align on the
known Commodities you generally do a line on very small.
Oh thinking and produce small outcomes, which I didn't want
and I write about in the book, how I, you know, I refrained my
thinking and it wasn't about banning a line and that wasn't
the right move. It's about reframing alignment
so that you do exploration before alignment.
And so I started to preach the Mantra explore, then a line.
And so teams got that, I gave them the space to do their
exploration, but the second phase of a line.
Is about drawing conclusions but you need to do that based on a
really good process of exploration and Discovery.
When you do that, you tend to get very easy alignment and
companies because people tend to now their heads because they
can't poke holes, the blind spots are covered, you know,
they can see how you got to the recommendations.
That can draw the Red Thread between what you're recommending
and how you got there, which is very essential and that is
common, as you would like in companies.
And once you have alignment, your third phase is
decision-making which is identifying the necessary
actions and those are usually very layered that you need to
begin executing. So if you bring this together
into a flow it becomes very very powerful.
Today is very unstructured. It sounds like, you're
fundamentally driving a culture change based on a shifting
mindset shifting Away from structure first and decisions.
First in order to reduce the ambiguity instead you're saying
let's have an open field at first.
And let's narrow down from there based on our initial goals.
Is that a correct way of looking at this?
Yeah. In fact I refer to it as input
Obsession like you want to be obsessed to get inputs,
especially up front and that up for Upstream stage because Cuz
that's really going to save a lot of pain down the road.
And when I talk about input, I mean things like what do we
know? What do we not know?
What could go wrong? What do we need to get, right?
And you should be hungry for those inputs at the start
because they're not like casting judgment on your idea.
They're just trying to help you develop a mature that idea and
make it super strong. And in a company it's not one
corner of a company that has enough of these.
Inputs. And this is a big problem today
because, you know, if you look back as last 25 years of
innovation and you have different models where you say,
okay, let's have an autonomous team that's doing Innovation.
Nothing wrong with that to start, but eventually you need
to get input from the center of a company or the core of a
company in order to see hey, how can you contribute to our
exploration? What should we be thinking
about? I'm trying to find the sweet
spot where the core of the company is not going to crush
the idea because that happens a lot and that's not good but also
we're not doing autonomous isolated Innovation that
eventually fails to scale because it missed a whole
tranches of considerations that it didn't build into how it's
all through the idea if that makes sense.
So there is a sweet spot to Leverage, The Connect
collective, intelligence of the organization.
But do that up front. So that as your Developing and
maturing the idea winning the recommendations on the table.
It just feels like it really holds together and that's where
people start to nod their heads provide their support and the
idea gets momentum. And so that's what I'm trying to
propose and I think if you look back, we've the pendulum, the
all the swings and companies between autonomous Innovation,
and sort of doing innovation in the core.
And I think neither is exactly, right.
So I'm trying to offer an alternative T''v the problem
that you've just described is so endemic.
You know, we hear the term and anti Innovation antibodies in
some cases that when a business wants to go down a new or a
changing or a different path, you have the entire weight of
existing processes and compensation plans and
incentives and All many, many, many different kinds of reasons
to keep going with what we're doing, especially if we're
successful. And what you're describing.
Seems like a seems like a, like a really big almost unobtainable
kind of goal for many large organizations.
It is hacking the system, that's for sure.
And I have a chapter on how to hack a company's culture and I
have a chapter on personas related to Innovation and the
reason I put in the personas Michael is because in my view,
you can Take advantage of the Skeptics in an organization and
actually, you can flip the script and the way to do that is
to take their input. Actually.
So not to ignore them but to take their input and take it as
a neutral input in the form of a question.
If someone get, if I have a bright idea, I'm at the, I'm at
the start and I have a question. I can do something about it.
I can make that question actionable.
I can get to the bottom of it. I can say we looked at it and
It's not as big a barrier as we thought, or thank you so much
that actually made her idea stronger.
However, if that question comes up Downstream, when we have the
one, we're at the big meeting with the recommendation and the
ask then that question turns into questioning.
The idea itself is very different.
So the reason I'm obsessed with this idea of Upstream work is
that if you get that input of front, make it actionable, you
can do something about it. You can hack the The
organization, even Skeptics actually.
So I do look at all roles in the company as being contributors to
Innovation. People who are, you know, let
more skeptical about ideas fine list neutralize their input and
take it as a let's build it into our question list, people who
are Visionary and who get it and who are living in the future.
Great, let them take advantage of that input to make their
ideas stronger and more sound. Don't Get, please subscribe to
our newsletter. Hit the Subscribe button on our
website and you can subscribe to our YouTube channel, check out
cxo talk.com. We have amazing shows coming up.
Can you give us an example of where you took a situation in
any one of your various really interesting positions that
you've had and and applied these principles, there are many
examples in the book just to culture Two real quick.
I mean, at Amazon, which is, you know, very forward-looking and
open to new ideas and pushing new territory.
So, culturally, it's aligned. But it does face hard problems
where it doesn't always know the answer.
So when I was running a part of the Kindle business where we
allow authors to independently publish their books without a
publisher. For example, we wanted to
introduce the an exclusivity program where they would
incentivize The only publish with Amazon which would really
help the company quite a bit and we would give them more royalty.
So it's out. It sounded like a good idea that
we could probably pull off. But the challenge is it's
Amazon, it's a behemoth and so you don't want to do things
where you're already strengthening your already
strong position in the marketplace, you have to be very
careful and sensitive. So when it comes to things like
making sure people honor their commitments and this Lucidity
program and compliance and monitoring and governance and
all that stuff. It was an easy stuff things in
terms of how you enforce the policies.
We definitely had a lot of ambiguity around that.
So, looking at The Stance, we should take when someone
violates a policy. Like, should we be directly
enforcing it? How strong should we be?
We use the idea of servicing the things that could go wrong and
developing the right questions to to come to the Right.
Sort of sweet spot of finding that balance between enforcement
and not trying to be, you know, an overbearing, John giant of
sorts. So that's one example and Volvo
cars and something where no, I wasn't necessarily directing,
but I think it's very relevant, you know, bulldoze big on the
idea of sustainability. And so, you know, right person
in the company had an idea which was about the Interiors of the
cars and the idea was Was vegan leather?
So, you know, of cows, have a lot of emissions, how about
producing a leather? That's, you know, from
sustainable resources. There's a bright idea.
I think it's part of the sustainability, positioning of
the company, but is it something that the company should act on?
There's a lot of questions, you know, is a feasible to get
enough materials for vegan leather.
What kind of customers would be customers pay more for it?
For example, could you even try Back the materials and verify
that they're actually, you know, from sustainable sources.
Could we get enough volume for the amount of cars were going to
produce, you know, a lot of questions before, you know, hey,
this is a good idea or not. And so embracing those questions
at the start and making those questions, something you get to
the bottom of it before you draw conclusions or have a strong
opinion. It is something that was helpful
to the company. In that case we have a really
interesting question from Twitter from our Salon con, Our
Salon is a regular listener and I always ask is very
thought-provoking questions and he says this.
So I'm going to ask his question and then broaden its lately,
okay? He says digital transformation
is an enterprise-wide effort. Not everyone is interested in
doing it. And now, here is his question.
He says, how do you create a pipeline of innovation?
That is not only done by the R&D department?
And then I want to broaden it to the larger issue of you spoke
about alignment earlier, and inside any large organization,
you have so many conflicts of interests and different goals
and silo. Rose.
And as I said before, compensation incentive plans
that produce certain outcomes that are entirely at odds with
this this unified approach that you're describing and so
building on our salons question. How do we, how do we bring the
pieces together? Every company needs a North star
and some strategic pillars. And I find companies are
generally pretty good at that. So to use an example, when I
arrived at McDonald's, And we can talk about my transition
from Amazon to McDonald's but the, you know, the idea was
okay, digital transformation. But people didn't know what that
was. So I didn't you really use that
term? I talked about convenience
because in my mind McDonald's for over 60 years has been about
3, things taste value and convenience, and I got a lot of
nodding heads when I spoke in that, and that way, And then I
talked about reimagining convenience and you ways to use
McDonald's because there were a couple ways to get your food
from McDonald's. And how about, we invent a
couple more we've been so successful.
If we invented a couple more compelling easy, convenient ways
to use McDonald's, you know, could we grow the company and
people understood that line of thinking?
So the first point I think is a company needs a North star.
It needs some strategic pillars and needs to be in A language.
So it's not about lingo, it's more about the heritage of the
company but reimagining it in the modern sense, that that
makes sense. And so I doubled down on
convenience and then I could talk in detail about the more
lingo like we need to new service models.
These service models need to be technology-enabled, they will be
digital experiences for the customer and in order and in the
process. Providing this, you know, next
level convenience through digital experiences, we're going
to become a direct-to-consumer company.
We're going to have a lot of profiles and data and be able to
be personalized with each customer and and that's sort of
a business model shipped as well.
So the digital experience for the customers for the customers
shifting to a different way of looking at the business.
So now you have a cohesive sort of strategic right now, that's
not part. It is within my arrival at
McDonald's. That took me about 45 days to
put together that together, the rest of the years were about
making it real. And so that's where we come to
the actual Transformations. That, you know, that are a part
of this question which is essentially that, you know, any
given idea, okay? Curbside pickup at McDonald's.
You just drive into a parking spot of your food is brought out
to you, or let's say table service which is basically you
order a Kiosk take a seat and we bring the tray to you to new
ways to use. McDonald's didn't exist before.
There's a lot of hairy things that need to be thought through.
So it's not easy to know exactly what the execution plan would
be. That's where this idea of
Upstream work creates the space for teams to.
It's okay for them not to know the answers to questions in the
beginning. As long as they know, the right
questions, they should be exploring.
And then if they drive that, At through a method of of, you
know, exploration Discovery where we can have them draw the
right conclusions and be convinced about the things that
are recommending, that's the way to make the glue.
And of course, when it comes to corners of the company, some
folks are more on the day-to-day, but they also need
to contribute because they have good input.
So I would recommend saying hey you know percentage of your time
goes to helping us innovate because Aviation is kind of in
some respect, everyone can contribute to it.
We hear people talk about Clarity of goals and use, you
will spoke about that earlier. Would it be accurate to say,
based on your comments, that Simplicity of goal is also
crucially important here? I think 100%, I mean, it needs
to be conversational. So if I walk in an elevator with
a normal person is not in the company.
Honey, I can explain where our organization is headed, and that
could be, you know, like I said, convenience in the case of
McDonald's that could be in the case of Volvo that, you know, a
car and all the tech in the car, from the Safety Systems to the
infotainment to the cloud, controlling my car, through my
app, you know, it's it needs to be easy easy-to-use and simplify
your life, you know, you need to be able to explain that.
High-level direction would supposedly but I have one point
to make around goals which is that companies are pretty good
at setting goals and objectives and you have ideas like okay
ours but those are incomplete because if you look at okay are
you have the 0? Which is the objective and then
the result which is all the way down here but in the middle it's
a lot of hard hard work and so team spend weeks and months.
Figuring out. How do you convert this
objective into a concrete initiative and what's the nature
of that initiative and all the Contours of that initiative?
And what are we actually going to execute in order to achieve
that result? And that's that's where I focus
and I guess my overall point is that, that is where we need, not
just the clarity of the goal, but we need the clarity of
thinking and the clarity of thought How do we actually
develop this idea? You know, across, you know, in
all and every different Contour of this idea?
That's, that's the hard part in my view.
But when we talk about the goals and simple goals, and
conversational goals, and that's just great advice for anybody,
and really, really hard to do to distill down and come up with
the concept, the right concept, the simple concept.
And then the right words, the simple conversational words
around that But in a large company even getting folks to
agree on the goal is sometimes in almost impossible feat to
accomplish. And so in your experience,
you've had these very diverse set of senior management
positions. How did you do that?
How did you how did you heard these cats is my view that
people, you have a very hard time getting people to agree on
the solution generally like They agree with the North Star.
I mean, let's say your MGM Resorts and you do a great job
of catering to people who gamble, but then you realize,
well, there are a lot of people who open up the wallet and they
don't gamble they go and attend shows, they spent a lot on very
nice restaurants, they buy sweets and hotels.
There's a lot of big-ticket spending going on, but those
people don't Gamble and we don't do a great job.
I'm just rolling back a couple years ago to coming in.
Progressed a lot, but we weren't doing a great job of being
customer-oriented, treating them, you know that are
recognizing them being, you know, generating a loyalty and
rewards for them. For example.
So generally, I think people agree though, that's the Gap,
that's where the growth is going to be the objective is to really
grow that part of the business, okay?
Fine, and the solution is where people, you know, well, this one
work, or that's too. Our door.
This is the right solution, etc, etc.
That I think is very hard and companies so the way to herd the
cats is I think to see really what I'm pushing is the idea of
suspending judgment you know creating a space and actual
space in it, actual workflow to do something like exploration.
So in my case, if a team came to me and said we have the big
idea, we don't know what the solution are done.
A nation is yet. We don't have the plan to xq
yet, but we're going to spend one or two weeks, and we're
going to build an exploration. We're going to get input from
the right. You know rains in the company.
We're going to make a list of all the right questions and
we're going to start with these questions and that the end of
this week or two we're going to deliver to you an FAQ and and
that's really going to help us begin to kind of converge are
thinking on what actually makes sense in terms of That the
solution we need to go after I would say that's a really good
use of time and I would support them and that's why I'm
advising, you know, generally speaking is that we create a
space for to build and run explorations to feed.
The alignment is necessary in companies in order for something
to actually happen. To be explicit at the outset
that there are things, we don't know, and stop the posturing and
the Means that we are the Masters of the Universe who know
everything to be explicit about that, and build that build that
time and capability in essentially is what you're
saying, 100%. I think we're all part of the
problem as my overall point, because we like to blame the
person who says, I've been here 30 years and I know that won't
work and we know that's not the right answer either, but as a
very Innovative person or the person brought into in it, help
a company innovate. I've been part of the problem
too because I said, well, No, I've said the opposite.
I said, no that's a wonderful idea.
Let's, let's start concepting, and prototyping, and let's get
10 people on this right now and start to test it and experiment,
and let's just get going. And sometimes, that's not also
the right answer because you, you need to be explicit around,
you know, more purposeful around what you're experimenting
around. It's not just about getting
started with the prototyping and the experimentation it's about
We need to learn and making the experiments based on the gaps
and the unknowns that would help us be much smarter about things.
So, I think whether you're you lean towards Innovation or lean
towards like business as usual, you know, we need we need a way
that's kind of mitigating. Some of the, you know, the
downside of both approaches are salon.
Khan comes back with another great question and I'm Our Salon
listens a lot and I'm afraid that our two minds are sort of
becoming very similar because I love this that the questions he
asked, sometimes it's like, oh yeah, I should be asking that.
Okay, so he says this great question.
He says, why should a front line employee be involved in
Innovation after all? They don't get incentivised.
Nor are they? Eat enough to do this.
Executives might care about Innovation because ultimately
that's going to be connected to their performance and their
compensation. But why should Frontline
employees care about this at all?
It's like you know, just I'm serving hamburgers or whatever
it is that I'm doing just leave me alone so I can do my job.
Usually, we have interfaces to the from lightworkers so it's
not like you put a front light worker in your, you know, your
Innovation squad, or your strategic initiative team or
anything like that. But I mean, you typically have,
you know, some field level manager, old people who are
listening and have a pulse of, you know, what the front line,
you know, workers seeing with customers.
And so, that's what I'm assuming.
So, really, my book, and my ideas, and my background, quite
frankly is really more for knowledge workers, you know, in
different corners of the company, they could be
incorporated, they could be in the field, but they're generally
knowledge workers. Who are ya trying to figure out
what makes sense for the business and for customers.
So I'm not suggesting that you know, the from length will be
part of that Innovation Squad here presenting to the CEO.
But of course they have you'll see some patterns in what
they're what they're sharing and I think those things are
obviously need to feed it into things but you know it's a guy
like the question because I think Too often.
If you had a project in a company, what happens?
Well, it's the same three or four people that you're meeting
with every week or every month about the idea.
And then you think, well, this organization is 40,000.
People are 10,000 people or 2,000 people.
There's got to be more input than just these three or four
people. I think that's important in
companies is finding a way to say, okay, what are we not
seeing that someone in this company?
You might might be seeing there has to be a way to do that and I
think a way to encourage getting that input is curiosity is an
obsession for input and and if you accept that as an
expectation, then there are probably ways to to kind of get
to to get your hands on it. It strikes me and maybe this is
an obvious point but it strikes me that to do what you're
describing. Choirs, the senior leaders to
actually have an interest in change, in this kind of
exploration. It helps a lot, but it's not
required. Because and here's why it's not
required. Because typically the
interaction with senior Executives is on some Cadence it
all Bi weekly check-in or a that we gave you the assignment.
For the big idea, come back in a month and tell us how we should
be thinking about this. You know what, you're
recommending so that Executives, probably are not involved in the
brainstorms, the Deep Dives, you know, the work, the team level
work. So what I'm suggesting and I
write about this in the book is that teams as opposed to having
unstructured, deep, Dives and rainstorms and and then you know
it's three days before the meeting and that we're not
really clear like what we're going to put on the table, you
know, bring some approach to it like like decision Sprint.
And now in the end, what the executives will see, is the
content, which is essentially, mmm.
I'm able to follow where you started.
What? You investigated the
conclusions, you drew the recommendations you're putting
on table based on those recommendations.
Here's the commitments and actions to company needs to take
on and whether that's great or not great I think they'd be able
to follow it. And so the way you drive change,
Team level up bottom up, is by just producing that better
having that better interaction that better content.
Then what happens is the executive Satan?
This is so much more streamlined than my last meeting.
What did this team do different? And they'll say, you know, we
have a different methodology. Like we actually have brought
some method to the chaos and and Executives will be like wait, we
should apply that to other things, we're working on.
So that's That's the way to help Drive change in a company.
I believe that change can absolutely be bottom up.
The senior leadership is really interested in seeing results,
and if you can demonstrate any kind of result, interim results
included than a smart, senior leader is going to take that
ball and carry it or suggest that you take that ball and and
run with it. Further if we Define result is
basically your work product. Is easier to follow and allows
for confident decision-making that I've you're making the life
of an executive so much easier because the job is very hard
decisions are very hard to make. It cannot predict the future,
but if you can help the organization stand, on much
higher quality, ground of information or confident
decision-making, you've really, really helped your company and a
good executive will say how how are you approaching that?
And how can we scale better? Across more of the organization
and then also it shifts. The role of the executive, the
executives tend to then give space and release a control
orientation. And then moved to what I call
calibration over control. And what I mean by that is they
help become a thought. Partner in your work, it'll tell
you what to do and they don't, they are much better listeners
and they help calibrate your thinking.
To improve it but they don't don't go back and regress to the
tendency of saying, this is what I want the answer to, because
that's always going to be very risky.
Even if someone is senior in a company for one person to be
saying this is the right answer is very dangerous.
That's why we have teams that if we are almost out of time, can
you share advice for I'm thinking that maybe specifically
for a Two different roles. Starting with the CIO, you were
a Chief Information officer so you have so you understand that
role? Certainly can you can you share
your advice given all of this for cios the CIO months, one of
my roles, always shifted the conversation to be, you know,
not just having the it organization.
I rebranded it as Enterprise digital, not just be an order
taker, be like a true bona fide partner in Thinking things
through, but for any role in an organization, I think the the
what good looks like to me is basically the engine behind the
work and embracing the idea of exploration before alignment,
you know, getting people to postpone judgment, not Russia
had to sing. This is the answer, this is the
solution and to really invite people to to really do The
Upfront Discovery around. And what could go wrong?
What are the right questions? How do we give team space just a
week or two? To get to the bottom of these
questions and then use something like even if they cues help
drive, you know, some common understanding of the Strategic
Direction. So whether it's a CIO or any
other role, I think that's really what, you know, being a
senior leader is all about, is being able to kind of direct the
collective intelligence of the team.
The right kind of brain trust and give them the space to do
these things and then help calibrate their ideas because
you probably see more information in your higher level
role if that makes sense. So, it's more of the workflow.
I like to think of the next big role in the company.
In fact, the role of the CEO, I think in the future is the chief
workflow officer. And because if you can get the
workflow right around How people progress ideas and plans and
actions? Then, you know, you are really
really helping the company. Then why don't we finish up with
advice to CEOs on managing being aware of encouraging?
This Upstream work, the CEO. Basically you have the North
Star. You have the Strategic pillars.
Your you're putting this in front of Wall Street, it's in
all your board decks, you know, we get it, but we all know that.
Inside the four walls of the company.
You know, these initiatives are very hard.
They're very complex and it's not obvious what needs to be
done? And so if we want momentum, you
know, the idea of building a sequence, like, if you have a
big initiative, we would your team in three steps.
You know, the first meeting is the messiness, like you
mentioned Scott spoke, okay? Share with me all the messiness.
I don't need any any Others. We're not deciding anything
that's going to come later, but show me you did a good job of
canvassing, the messiness that's progress in it of itself.
Your second meaning, you got to the bottom of the messiness.
Did you make sense of it? Give me one or two, or three or
four conclusions, you're drawing from having gone deep into this
messiness, on the deep end. And then number three, like now,
what is the solution? What is the direction?
Because if you do it, if You orchestrated in that way.
You have fewer blind spots, fewer surprises.
You've done the best job you can is as Executives.
We are responsible to be on top of the nodes and the known
unknowns. If there's anything else, you
know, we don't predict the future, but those first two,
we've got to get them. Right?
We have to be on top of them. And we have to be able to
connect them to the actions, the company's going to proceed with.
So I think these three steps Oops could be a good use of time
for everybody. Great.
Well thank you for the insightful advice and with that,
we're out of time. So I want to say a huge.
Thank you to Chief Rafiq. Thank you for being with us
today. I really appreciate it.
It's been a pleasure being with you Michael.
Thank you so much and huge. Thanks to everybody who watched
you guys are a great audience and don't forget, please
subscribe to our Our newsletter, hit the Subscribe button on our
website and you can subscribe to our YouTube channel, check out
cxo talk.com. We have amazing shows coming up
during the summer. Our newsletter will notify you
of all of them. Thanks so much everybody.
I hope you have a great day and we'll see you again next time
next week.