Setting the scene
JANE
00:00
Welcome to Imaginize World, where we hear from forward-thinkers, activists, and sci-fi visionaries. Today I’m with Bill Fischer, an innovation expert at some of the world’s top universities. He says that in today’s world, active continual learning is more important than knowing. It’s the key to the future. The reason I was interested in talking with you, Bill, is because I consider you to be one of the really leading voices about the future of organizations. And it is an overcrowded field. So many people, especially with all the AI stuff now, which, I’m not belittling AI, but so many people are just talking about it in so many different ways without really understanding what they’re saying. And I consider you to be a real reference when it comes to how organizations are changing.
The future will be temporary, leadership too
Your article, The future will be temporary, leadership too,” caught my eye, of course. Maybe you could just take it from here, and talk about what you mean by temporary, for example.
BILL
So, first of all, I was struck by the comment that Bruce Springsteen made, regarding how he’s in an industry where, maybe the only industry, in his words, as I recall, where you’re still working with the same people you started out with in high school. And I was thinking how unusual that is in today’s world, and largely because of the temporary nature of employment. It suggested to me that… I thought, is this a good thing or not? And especially with the world about to change with AI becoming more and more of a part of the way in which we make decisions and rely on sources of information. And my sense was that there’s maybe a nostalgic loss, but there’s going to be a loss in terms of camaraderie and a loss in terms of tacit knowledge that is shared between humans, not humans and machines. And I thought that we really need to be thinking about, what does this mean?
I have to say, I have been profoundly influenced over the years by Warren Bennis, the late Warren Bennis, and a book he wrote with Philip Slater, called The Temporary Society, and he wrote it in the ’60s, and I believe he… It’s an extraordinary prediction of the world we seem to be moving into, where work is… It’s not so much work that’s so temporary, but it’s the entire basis of work. It’s, knowledge is considerably more perishable than it’s ever been before. And I asked myself, what does that mean for the way in which we organize, and what do we do about it? And is there a way of dealing with this? One conclusion I have is that learning is more important than knowing. And we spend a lot of our time, and if you think about how, particularly if you’re an academic, how our organizations are structured around knowing, but it’s really learning that is, I think, the key to the future.
What is scalable learning?
And we don’t spend a lot of time on that. We assume that people learn naturally, but I’m a case in point where that doesn’t happen. It didn’t come easy to me. And I think that we need to spend more time thinking about, what does learning mean, both at the individual level but also at the organizational level? John Hagel, who you probably know, who was at the Deloitte Center for the Edge for a long time, John’s talked about how, in industrial societies, scalable efficiency was really the goal, because you had multiple divisions or units or parallel plants, and what you wanted to do was share best practices. But today he argues that scalable learning is the challenge. And I think that that set me off thinking a lot about, how does Springsteen’s comments relate to the world that I see unfolding in front of us? Is that going in a direction that helps you?
JANE
Yes. And what did you conclude about Springsteen’s comments?
What am I proudest of?
Well, unfortunately I think he’s right. I think he’s right that the sort of units that we took for granted for so long, where people would work together… So let me stop for a second and back out of that. You asked me in an email, to think about, what are the things I’m proudest of, in my career? And a few years ago when I was leaving IMD, the business school in Lausanne, Switzerland, I was asked to put on a seminar to talk about what I had learned. I thought that was a really interesting, sobering experience. And I went back, and I took it seriously, I went back and thought about, what have I learned and how do I sum up my career? And my conclusion was that my career, such as it is, was based on four pillars. And three of those pillars were no longer either relevant or right, that the world had changed so much since I had started as a PhD student.
I really had to question, what do I know and what do I believe and how has that changed over time? And what I discovered in the process was that if I look back at what I’ve done, what I’m proudest of is my relationships with the partners that I worked with. There were five or so partners that I worked with, over the course of my career, very, very closely. I’m proudest of that. I’m proudest of those relationships, those partnerships, because they were both personally fulfilling but also because they helped me learn different things than I would’ve learned normally or linearly, I guess, as normal would’ve been in those days. And so when I read what Springsteen was saying, I was both envious because I thought, wouldn’t that be great to be able to hang around with the same people you started out with, but also do recognize that in a world of gig work, in a world of transitory sort of relationships because everything is transactional and because our organizations are becoming more platforms than they are places to roost, if you will, you don’t want to give up that completely. You want to somehow build into your life, some stability in your relationships so that you have trusted sounding boards for the sorts of thoughts you’re thinking.
Relationships matter
Relationships matter, and we can’t afford to lose them completely in our organizations. Or if we do, we have to build them into our lives in other ways than we’ve perhaps done in the past. I asked myself, how am I acting differently in this networked society? And I think if I’m honest and candid, I would say I haven’t really made much of an adjustment to a networked society. I’m still doing the things I was doing prior to being in a networked society, and sort of filling it around the edges. And I was thinking, well, what does this mean for going forward in organizations? How do we begin to take the changes in the world around us seriously and adapt to them in ways that give us the power to fully exploit the opportunities we have?
And I don’t think we’re doing that. I think we’re seeing our confusion over AI as a sign of that. I think we have not evolved in terms of the way in which we work, in our decision-making, to a point that’s compatible with where we are in terms of communications technology and the like. So that’s why Springsteen spoke to me so profoundly, was, besides being a devoted Springsteen fan, I thought, he’s right. This is a gift that he has, and somehow we need to rethink relationships both at work and not at work, so that we don’t lose the benefits of those, more than just work relationship, friendships and the like. Does that make sense?
Strength of weak ties
It sure does. And since I’ve retired officially from work about three years ago and I’ve started now on projects that interest me and only if they interest me, otherwise I don’t do anything, I realized after maybe a year and a half, that I was missing the contacts I had. I had had a very active life in France and in Europe. As a consultant, I traveled a lot to different countries and so on. And in France alone, I used to be the chairperson of the annual conference on digital organizations. And then I ran a small group myself, a small, about 20 people, we would meet every month. And some of those people I became really close to, I realized after I stopped having that regular automatic connection with them. And so I’ve actually made a little list and I’m starting to contact them, because I work only remotely now, I’m not traveling, contacting them, getting in touch one-by-one and catching up. And what struck me is every single one of them is so excited to be back in touch. I think they were probably feeling in their own world, that they and I were missing a connection.
And so I’m trying to build up a little bit what you’re talking about, build it up virtually. And I just started a little while ago, and so far it’s working well.
BILL
What you’re demonstrating is really the strength of weak ties, to quote the most quoted article. Because those people are doing things differently than you are, in different situations, in different expertise domains. And they add a degree of variety and stimulation into your own network. So you have the benefit of both having close friends, but also having the benefit of people who are what I’ll call occasional visitors, but they bring with them the seeds of new ideas.
Difference between the Uncertain and the Unknown
Another question you asked me, if I can reveal this, is that you asked me about, how do I think about the future? So I don’t think you can predict the future. I think there’s a difference between the uncertain and the unknown. I think probably everybody watching this podcast is an expert in the uncertain. We navigate our personal and professional lives day-to-day on the basis of being able to pick up signals around us, signals about supply chains, signals about trends in customer fashion or taste, signals in the politics of our organization. And we navigate those very successfully. And that allows us to claim optimization, in many cases. And we’ve been able to get away with that for a long time because we’ve been on industry S-curves, growth curves, that have been fairly long. But I think that because of digital convergence and because of the internet of things and because of artificial intelligence and because of all this stuff, globalization, that those curves are getting shorter, that we’re having more disruptions in our future, or we will have more disruptions in our future than we’ve had in the past. And those disruptions take us into the unknown. So we’ve never done these things before. We’ve probably never thought of them before. We might not even be able to make that transition. That’s very different than the uncertain. And I think that you can’t predict the unknown because we’ve never been there before.
But there’s two people who have really influenced the way I think about this. One is William Gibson, the science fiction writer who wrote Neuromancer, who said, the future’s already here, it’s just not evenly distributed. And John Seely Brown, who also used to be at the Center for the Edge and the Palo Alto Research Center, who says, you can’t see into the future, but you can see around you.
And since our colleagues and friends are in different walks of life, different professions, they’re moving into the unknown, the same unknown that we’re moving into, at slightly different speeds and from slightly different angles. So by being more observant about what’s going on around you, I think you have a better chance to anticipate what’s likely to happen to you. And by building networks that expose you to the weak ties, that you at least can talk to regularly because you have access to them in that, but who really see the world through very different eyes, I think you have a chance to really think differently about the future and about how you go into the future and about how you prepare for that, than you would otherwise. So I’m a big believer in the benefits of the networked society. I may not be agile in working with it, but I’m trying. Right? I’m struggling. Learning, for me, is really the end-all be-all, and I’m trying to take that seriously enough to do that. And it sounds to me like you’re doing that as well.
Can giants reinvent themselves?
I’m certainly trying to. I have followed your work with the Haier organization. I find it absolutely fascinating. All of my clients over the last 20 years have been global giants. Do you believe that giants can reinvent themselves, or do you think Haier is a big exception?
BILL
So I think Haier is the extreme. Okay? I’m not sure if it’s an exception, but it’s the extreme. They’ve been doing this for 40 years. They’ve been doing it consistently. They’ve done it across the entire organization. It hasn’t been pilot plants or experiments. It’s been all in. And it’s not been a straight shot. They’ve had mostly successes, but there’s been a couple of rethinking of what they’re doing.
So for those people who don’t know anything about Haier, Haier is the world’s largest home appliance company, and it’s based in Qingdao in China. Half of its revenues today come from acquisitions outside of China. But I think what marks Haier is that over these 40 years, it has emphasized three major things. One is, everything we do is going to create a great customer experience. The second thing is, we think entrepreneurship is the best way to do this. And the third thing is, that we think that the rewards should be shared not only by the people who receive the value, but also by the people who create the value. So the value is received by the customers and by the shareholders, but the people who actually do the work, ought to have meaningful compensation as a result, as well. The value ought to be distributed.
And the way they’ve gone about that is to change both the culture and the structure of the organization. So, today, they are an organization of several thousand micro enterprises that run as small businesses that are responsible for what they do and how they do it and how they generate revenues and how they distribute those revenues. And they’re trying to practice this on a global level. And I think they’ve largely been successful at that. If you look at some of the acquisitions, the Qingdao operation is way ahead of them in terms of the adoption of those three principles.
But for the most part, their acquisitions are really interpreting what they’ve done in China, into local culture. So, General Electric Appliances in the United States is owned by Haier. They are faithful to the idea of the philosophy that Haier espouses, it’s called [inaudible 00:16 :07], but they practice it differently, slightly differently. And that’s true for Sanyo and Haier Europe and the like, or what used to be the Sanyo home appliance business, or Fisher & Paykel. So what I think, if you look at Haier today, the thing that strikes me is, first of all, this is a mature, old economy business, okay? This is refrigerators, stoves, things that are not high tech in the conventional sense of the term, but it’s also an industry that’s going through a revolution. So it’s going through a revolution because of connectivity. The internet of things has hit the home, appliances talk to one another, voice-activated, contact.
Zero distance from the customer
And so Haier has been adopting these products to fit contemporary society. They say that 20 years ago, the customer journey was 30 minutes, every 15 years. The customer would walk in, you could sell them a refrigerator. If they liked the refrigerator, they brought it home. If it worked, they’d come back in 15 years and buy another one. Today they have customers who talk to them 15 times a day. They want to know recipes. Haier’s never written a recipe. They want to know what’s in their refrigerator. Haier has never been in their refrigerator. They want to know what the provenance of their foods are. Are they truly organic? How long have they’ve been on the shelf? These are things that Haier has never thought about. So in the process of trying to adjust to the growing sophistication of customer experience expectations, Haier has become ever more a network of autonomous units that are smaller, faster, closer to the customer, zero distance is the mantra. And they are able to fulfill these new customer expectations by building ecosystems of partnerships with other organizations. Pretty remarkable.
I think it’s certainly been commercially successful for Haier. Led to more innovation than Haier’s ever had before. But it’s also quickened the life of Haier. People are more alert, they’re more aware, they’re more engaged. It’s a place where, in an old economy industry, where people truly are engaged in what they’re doing and are benefiting from it, in terms of increased bonuses and things of that nature. I’m a big believer in autonomy in the organization. And I think that organizations need to be rethought to be fit for our times. And I think autonomy is a piece of that, because it gives the workforce a stake in the action. It gives them a chance to run their own businesses. It fulfills the entrepreneurial dream.
Autonomy and entrepreneurship
Everybody doesn’t have to be an entrepreneur, but nobody in Haier can escape the entrepreneurial action. And so I think that this is a model that’s interesting, and a lot of other organizations are looking at it now. The one problem, if I can say so, is that when times get tough at a macroeconomic level, organizations instinctively pull back on autonomy. They reduce it. There’s recidivism back to command and control. But command and control doesn’t work in a fast-moving society. So I’m optimistic about how autonomy within large organizations, both revitalizing them and becoming more a part of our managerial style in the future. Haier was an extreme. It shows you what can be done if there’s a total leadership commitment to stretching the organization as much as it can, to be able to take advantage of the future. So I said I’m not living fully in the networked society, but they are, for sure. And I think that there are benefits as a result of that.
But I don’t think they are exceptional, except that they’ve done it longer and more completely than anyone else. I think they open up vistas of what could be possible in other organizations. And for someone who teaches… I teach executive education. For someone who teaches executive education, you have classrooms full of executives who are smart and bright and ambitious, and you meet them, you meet them at the coffee breaks, you meet them at the receptions, you meet them… And they’re interesting people in their own right, but not in their organizational setting. In their organizational setting, they are forced to suppress that ambition and energy and interest, to the dictates of hierarchy. And so what I think Haier has done is to try to break those constraints so that those people can actually be at work as good as they have the potential to be.
JANE
It started at the top in Haier, didn’t it?
Druckerian logic
It did start at the top. Yes. It started with a man named Zhang Ruimin, who was the government official, if you can imagine a bureaucrat who moved from the Qingdao municipal government to become the managing director of Haier because nobody else wanted the job. But he was a visionary in terms of what he wanted to achieve. And he was a devoted follower of Peter Drucker. And so he really applied Druckerian logic to the organization.
JANE
Bill, if there were one major innovation to be made in the next, I don’t know, 20 years, what could it be?
Humility among our leadership class
So of course I thought of time travel, like everyone else, I’m sure, that’s come along. But I think, I thought that really what we need at this point in time is something, and I don’t know what it is, it’s not time travel, but it’s something that restores humility and awe. I think that we are, particularly in the U.S, the beginnings of an oligarch society where we have tech entrepreneur, high tech entrepreneurs who are quite ambitious, but self-satisfied and the like, and I think we need a healthy dose of humility among our leadership class, so that there’s a recognition of what it takes to be not only a leader but a follower, and they could work together, and that there’s genuine awe in both the technologies that are emerging, but also the potential of human beings to be a part of this. And I couldn’t think of what would do that, but I just feel like that’s something that’s lacking.
JANE
Maybe it’s something that will come somehow through some use of AI that will make leaders stop and think about what they’re doing and why they’re doing it.
BILL
Right. Well, stopping and thinking would be a good start. Because I think that we lack a degree of empathy and reflection, and that is missing in the way in which so many of the leaders that I work with, conduct their business. They’re good people, or they want to be good people, and they’re certainly bright and full of energy. But I do think that there’s a place for reflection and thought and being… What would be the right word? Recognizing that there’s more to this than just market share or shareholder approval.
JANE
Do you think that climate change and all the things happening around it, could be something that would help trigger some of the thinking?
Climate change, the biggest challenge of our time
Very much so. But my fear is that it will happen retrospectively rather than… I think we have displayed a reluctance or an inability to anticipate and take it seriously, what’s likely to happen. So I think climate change is the biggest challenge of our time, although inhumanity to fellow men and women is quickly rising to the same level. But I do think that we need some type of grounding in social values, that we’ve lost somewhere along the line.
JANE
And the wider scope of climate change, I’ve interviewed three or four people from Africa who are really active in trying to make people aware of what’s happening. People who are dedicating their lives to it. And one thing I have realized in talking with them is that the impact of climate change is so much more drastic in countries like the ones I just mentioned, than in the so-called global North. And that’s something that I don’t know how the global north and the big companies in the global north, will ever understand that.
BILL
The office that I’m in is my son’s office. My son is an infectious disease doctor, and he’s just back from Rwanda, where there was an outbreak of Marburg virus. And he’s worked with all of the Ebola outbreaks. And I think one of the things that we’re seeing is that these outbreaks are… My impression is that we’re seeing more of these outbreaks and they’re spreading quicker and they’re spreading to urban areas. And I think that one of the ways that climate change will manifest itself in the rest of the world, if you will, will be through the appearance of more outbreaks and more infectious diseases, at a time when anti-vaxxing is becoming more and more popular, ironically. So I think we’re setting ourselves up for major challenges, because we’re not taking care of the climate change issues, and we are certainly not preparing for the next global outbreak.
Younger generation: comfortable with experimentation and diversity
Is there something that you think the next generation can do, that’s better than what we’re doing now?
BILL
Yes, almost anything, I think would actually fit that category. My sense ,working with young people is, not only are they more tech savvy, and by that, I mean it’s just not the technology stuff, but it’s a degree of comfort with experimentation and thinking about how to convert that experimentation into things that actually make a difference in people’s lives. But I also think that they’re much more comfortable with diverse societies. I think they’re much more comfortable with globalization. So my sense, my hope, is that this bubble of populism, which seems to be decoupling the global economy, is temporary. And I think that when our generation, which is, I think afraid of these things, when my generation, I shouldn’t say our generation, my generation, which I think is afraid of this, I think when we pass from the scene, the world will be a better place because I think that the generation that follows will be much more at ease with themselves in a more diverse global society. I think that… That’s my hope, at least. I hope it works that way. But I sort of feel that in what I see going on around me. And if you’re in university towns like I am at the moment in Chapel Hill, you can’t help but notice that there’s much more acceptance of diversity and globalization than we see at the national level.
JANE
I gather that you’re basically optimistic about the future.
BILL
I’m optimistic.
JANE
Is that, right?
BILL
Yes. If we can escape… FDR said, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. And I think that if we can get past this period where we seem to be afraid of everything, whether it’s the people down the street who look differently or the people in another country who are exporting products to us or our government or our media or whatever, we can get away from that fear, I think we’ll be better off, much better off, because I think that we’re on the cusp of a world of great opportunity. I think, I’m very optimistic about artificial intelligence as a real accelerator of opportunities. I think about genomics and the revolution taking place in healthcare as being a way of dealing differently, intelligently with chronic disease problems. I just think that, yeah, I’m very optimistic, extremely optimistic, but at the moment, we seem to be going through a spasm of reaction, of fear, of… And I just can’t imagine that it’ll last. To the extent that it lasts, it will last to the detriment of the societies that can’t shake it off.
JANE
Do you have any sort of last thoughts?
Explorer or discoverer
One of the things that I think, is that… One of the people who have influenced me in the way I think about what I do and my work is now deceased Librarian of Congress in the United States, Daniel Boorstin, who wrote a number of books about the history of how, I think, science and technology and knowledge changed societies over time. And one of the things that Boorstin wrote was about the difference between explorer mindsets and discoverer mindsets. And he said, or maybe he didn’t said, this may have been my interpretation, but Columbus was a discoverer. He set out knowing what he wanted to find, he went to the wrong place, met the wrong people, called them by the wrong name, but declared that he had found what he had set out to do. He was a discoverer. He had a very closed world of ideas around him. He spoke to a small group of people and never opened up the conversation.
Well, I think we want to be explorers, not discoverers. I think we want to build educational environments and work environments where people are encouraged to open up the solution space, rather than close it down. Right? Being faster in decision-making is not necessarily better. I’m fascinated with, how do we make people more accepting of an explorer, which is risky, right? Because we’re going to take more time and we’re going to have more complexity, but in the end, we’ll have more choices, as well. And I think that that’s something that I would… When we talk about the future, we talk about imagining the future. I think that the explorer mentality is something that we want to encourage. And I think the other thing is, and this was one of the early questions you asked, I think that the future should be ever present in our conversations, organizational conversations particularly, consciously and explicitly.
Zero distance with the future
I think that somehow we should have people whose role is to be advocates for the future, in every important decision-making conclave that we participate in, where they are provocateurs, where they are charged with saying, what about this and what about that, and have we forgotten this? And I think that if we do that, we’ll be always making the future part of the stakeholder group that we consider in any decision. I think climate change would benefit from that, enormously. So I think at Haier there was a slogan, there is a slogan still, called “Zero distance with the customer,” and the idea is, if you can get as close to your customer as possible so that you know them as well as they know themselves, you can anticipate the needs in their lives that need to be filled, and you can be ahead of everyone else doing that, including the customer.
I think we ought to have zero distance with the future. There’s enough methodology around foresight, that I think we should be introducing it into all of our decision-making at the board level down, to be able to make sure that we’re making intelligent decisions not only for the present, but for the future. Those are the things that I would add.
I also think that those would attack zombie ideas, going back to the very early conversation we had, because the reason the Drucker Forum spoke about zombie ideas was because they’re everywhere and they manifest themselves in things that are comfortable and familiar. Time is money is one of the, I think a great example. Or the difference between long run and short run, in a world where the industry S-curves are getting increasingly shorter. And we make inappropriate decisions, or we become distracted by wisdom that’s no longer valid. And so I think that taking the future seriously, thinking about, what are the implications for that, would be one way to check zombie ideas.
JANE
Good. Anything else? We’ve ended with the zombie ideas that we’re going to take away.
Race for better ideas, diversity give you an edge
At one point, you asked me, what do I want the future to be?
JANE
Yes.
BILL
And I made you a a list of attributes. Independence. To the extent that we can create independence of the individual. Active learning. I think that we need to encourage people to be constant active learners. Mass flourishing. When I think of periods like the Enlightenment, I think of almost everybody flourishing in terms of both their expectations for the future, their appreciation for knowledge and insight. I would hope we would see that both at the societal level, but also within organizations, where people are invited in. I feel like that that’s a liberal type of thing, rather than a conservative. I’m thinking of expanding mindsets rather than boxing them in.
Diversity is a big part of this. I’m a big believer in diversity, not because of political reasons, although I think those are valid, but I’m a big believer in diversity because it gives me an edge in thinking about the world around me. If I can assemble a group that thinks differently because they have different backgrounds or different experiences or different traditions or different expertise, I’m going to be better off. I’m going to have better ideas. In a race for better ideas, which, my business school background, diversity is one way to get an edge.
I’m a big believer in global, I’ve used the term globalization a lot, but I believe globalization is… It can be postponed, but it can’t be put off. I think that it’s relentless and I think it’s good. But one of the things I’m proudest of, is I was very early involved in the rejuvenation of managerial education in China. First moved to China in 1980 with my family as part of a U.S government mission to introduce contemporary managerial thought into the Chinese economy. And then in the late 20th century, I was the president of the China-Europe International Business School, which is, I think today, one of, if not the leading business school in Asia actually, or in the world, perhaps. We’re all better off because of that.
On the cusp of an age of great innovation
We’re all better off because other people learn more. And I think we should pursue that. Unless we don’t have confidence in our own learning, and then we want to hold other people back. But I think that goes back to the fear issue. We used to be the home of the brave. I’m speaking from the United States now. We used to be the home of the brave. I don’t see that any longer. I think that should be removed from our conversation. I think we need to eradicate fear before we can say that.
So that’s the way I would hope to see the future evolving. And optimism. Optimism, because the opportunities in the future are extraordinary. I really do believe we’re on the cusp of an age of great innovation. It doesn’t seem like that at the moment, but I do think we will be there.
JANE
Wow. Inspiring.
BILL
I hope so.
JANE
That’s why I consider you one of the voices of the future, Bill. Seriously. You’re pragmatic and at the same time, you express very high-level ideas, but in ways that people can understand and relate to.
BILL
I hope so. I think that’s part of trying to foster learning, is to make ideas accessible.
JANE
Well, thank you very much for your time.
BILL
Great pleasure to be with you.
JANE
Well, thank you. I’ve enjoyed it very much.
BILL
And I look forward to speaking to you on an ongoing basis.
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