Nota Bene Podcast Ep. 162
Creating the Good Future with Gerd Leonhard of the Futures Agency
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Listen to the original podcast released March 29, 2023 here:
https://www.sheppardmullin.com/notabene-474
In this episode, futurist Gerd Leonhard, founder of The Futures Agency, joins host Scott Maberry to discuss the future, including the role of futurism in corporate strategy, and how multinational companies should be planning for the “good future.”
Guests:
About Gerd Leonhard
Gerd Leonhard is a globally recognized and top-rated futurist, humanist, author, film producer, and TV host. Pursuing the concept of "practical wisdom," he forgoes the all-too-common techno-optimism in favor of progressive humanism, balancing exponential technological progress with human needs. Gerd zeroes in on what the future holds for humanity and how we will create the future we want (rather than just the one we could have).
A musician by origin and a digital music entrepreneur in the 1990s, Gerd is the author of five books, including the bestseller The Future of Music and his latest work, Technology vs. Humanity, a ground-breaking exploration of the mega-shifts that will radically alter society, the economy, values, and even human biology. He is also considered one of the most remarkable and unique keynote speakers in the world today, having so far appeared - virtually and in-person - before a combined audience of over 2.5 million people in 50+ countries.
About Scott Maberry
As an international trade partner in Governmental Practice, J. Scott Maberry counsels clients on global risk, international trade, and regulation. He is also a past co-chair of the Diversity and Inclusion Working Group for the Washington D.C. office, serves on the firm's pro bono committee, and is a founding member of the Sheppard Mullin Organizational Integrity Group.
Scott's practice includes representing clients before the U.S. government agencies and international U.S. Department of Treasury Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), the Department of Commerce Bureau of Industry & Security (BIS), the Department of Commerce Import Administration, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Department of State Directorate of Defense Trade Controls (DDTC), the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), the International Trade Commission (ITC), the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. (CFIUS), He also represents clients in federal court and grand jury proceedings, as well as those pursuing negotiations and dispute resolution under the World Trade Organization (WTO), North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and other multilateral and bilateral agreements.
A member of the World Economic Forum Expert Network, Scott also advises the WEF community in the areas of global risk, international trade, artificial intelligence and values.
Transcript:
Scott Maberry:
Welcome to Shepherd Mullins' Nota Bene, a twice monthly podcast for the C-Suite where we tackle current, national and international headlines affecting multinationals doing business without borders. I'm your host, Scott Mayberry. Let's get started.
Welcome to episode 162 of the Nota Bene podcast. I'm your host, Scott Mayberry. Our guest today is Gerd Leonhard of the Futures Agency. Before I introduce him, I'd like to thank our listeners in over 100 countries worldwide. We're so glad you're tuning in, and please do keep the feedback coming. It definitely influences our programming.
Our guest is Gerd Leonhard. He's a futurist. He's a unique voice in today's crowded futurist market. From 1995 to 2002, he founded and ran several internet startups. Since 2002, Gerd has been a CEO of the Futures Agency, a global network of leading futurists, speakers, and personalities. He's also the founder with filmmaker Chris Nolan of The Good Future Project. Gerd, welcome to the Nota Bene podcast.
Gerd Leonhard:
Great to be here.
Scott Maberry:
Great. Well, I'd like to start with a little bit of background before we get into talking about our future, which is going to be the main thrust of our talk today. But how did you get involved in futurism in the first place?
Gerd Leonhard:
Yeah, I realized early on when I was doing the internet stuff that I was very good at seeing how things were going to be. Like I said, in the end of the '90s, I said, "Music is moving to the cloud. We're going to tap on something and the music comes down." And the record labels made great fun of me and nobody thought it was possible, but I was very good at seeing things, and I wasn't so good at building businesses around it, because I didn't really have the patience for all the details and all those things. And so I realized very early I was good at sort of seeing what's coming. And then after I did a bunch of startups, I figured, okay, I'm going to try and write a book about the future of the music business.
That's the Future of Music book, came out in 2005, and it became an instant hit in the record business, and also in the film and television. And from there people started calling me and said, "Hey, you're a futurist." I was like, "I have no idea what a futurist is." I'd never heard of one because it's a very agonal thing. And then I realized, yeah, it's sharing observations about the future. And in that context, my most important work is really about just realizing things right and observing. It's not predicting. And I was always good at observation. And so what I do for my clients now, I basically observe the future for and with them. And then from there we come back to today, and then we try to shape today so that's a good fit for the future. That's a certain skill you have to develop.
Scott Maberry:
I've heard you talk about the future in the present, and I feel the same way. I have a good friend that we talk about this a lot. His view of it is we live in the future now. And so I imagine that what you're saying a little bit is it doesn't take as much prediction to know what's going to happen next. It's more about observing what we're seeing now and picking out the trends.
Gerd Leonhard:
Well, there's things I call the hard futures, which means a definitive future. So those are things that are completely obvious to people that bother to look, right, that are just certain to happen. So when I said that music is moving to the cloud, that was a certainty in 1999, Napster. It took us 10 years, 15 years of Spotify, and now that's basically our reality. And so today I say, for example, the end of fossil fuel economy and of oil and gas is coming. Because we have the technical means, we have to do make that shift, but basically it's inevitable. And so for me, this is a hard future, a definitive future. It's not a question really of if but when. And then of course, it's also the important question.
Scott Maberry:
Yes, I agree. Tell me a little bit about The Good Future Project. How did it start and what is it?
Gerd Leonhard:
Yeah, The Good Future has become a very big topic since COVID for me because I used to travel around the world a hundred or so trips per year for keynote speeches. And then COVID came, and then I was thinking like, okay, what am I doing here, and what shall I be doing in the future? And really what is the biggest topic today? And out of COVID, and the whole discussions in COVID, when we went online to talk basically, for digital events, this topic of The Good Future came out. It became sort of the topic that everybody talks about. What can we expect? More pandemics, less collaboration, less globalization, where's everything going? And out of that, I developed a theme of the Good Future, which especially saying 99% of people around the world would agree on what good is. Not dying, not being sick, having civil liberties, having personal growth. Basic stuff like this, not talking about consumption or money or any such things.
And so I went out to make a film called The Good Future Film, you can watch at thegoodfuturefilm.com, and that was recorded in Lanzarote, Canary Islands, one of my favorite places in the world. And that set out how we can envision the good future, for example, with next generation healthcare, next generation capitalism, with a new turn towards green energy and so on. And in that process I basically laid out all of the ideas of that good future, how it could happen. And then later on, the film became so popular, now it has always a million views on YouTube, that people started contacting me and said, "How about if we create an organization that is going to bring this all about?"
And The Good Future Project is the humble beginning of this, is basically collecting people, companies and organizations and people, who are talking about the good future and helping to make it a reality. The focus is not so much on research or futurism. The focus is on creating amazing content that creates a narrative that the future is good, because the biggest problem we have today, most people look at the future, like my kids, millennials, and they say the future will be terrible. Because we're not going to get anything done, we're going to emerge in climate change and never get out of it, and we can't collaborate. So they have a negative view. And I think it's really important, because as the saying goes, as you see the future, so you act. As you act, so you become. All right, so it's really important to have a positive view on the future, and that's what the project is all about. Goodfutureproject.com, of course, or the domain.
Scott Maberry:
We will link that in the program description for this podcast so our listeners can take a look. It's a beautiful film and it's a magnificent idea. I think one thing that you probably hear objections to is isn't it kind of magical thinking to think about the future and hope that your thinking will affect how it comes out? I happen to believe very strongly that we need to think positively about things, and about the future specifically, because we can. My view is that those of us who are capable of envisioning a good future have to do that, and we have to take actions that will help make that come about.
Gerd Leonhard:
Of course, there's two ways that we look at the future today. One is utopian. Utopian means pie in the sky, that we will never reach, because we're not perfect. Utopian is more like a painting or the style of looking at media. And then there's dystopian, which is 99% of what we see on television, on the news and in films is dystopian. Whether it's Black Mirror, whether it's Ex Machina, basically the robots are coming, they take over the world, and then they harvest our bodies for energy. It's like that's the story. And so what I'm proposing is Kevin Kelly's way, my favorite futurist at Wired magazine, who says our future is protopian, which means one step at a time towards a good future.
He also says, which I think is crucial, the future is never invented by pessimists, because pessimists sit back and say, "Oh my God, now it's not happening. We have to protect ourselves and go away. Or hide in New Zealand, or stash some stuff, become a prepper for doomsday and so on." And now it's so important, I think, that we realize one step at a time, climate change, new energy, next generation of healthcare, new way of looking at the world, new paradigms, and we can build a good future. It's not that we can't, and the main thing that I realized in the last couple years is that we basically have all the tools and the tech we need. And we have the money, too, to address most of our practical concerns, practical means food, energy, water, disease, those kind of things, right? But we're always making the wrong decisions, and that is really what we have to work on, is we have to collaborate to create the possibility of making the right decisions.
Scott Maberry:
Well, and that requires us to see what's happening right now, and to see those tools that we have in our society now, and be able to make decisions about how to use them. And my sense a lot of the time is that people can't quite see those things. And so I guess my question to you is what tools do you use when you're looking at the present and seeing the seeds of the future? What are the tools for futurism in your view?
Gerd Leonhard:
Yeah, we call that the future mindset. And really what that is, it's a way of developing intuition and imagination. Einstein said 70 years ago that imagination is more important than knowledge. And of course that was easy for Einstein to say, given that he was very knowledgeable. But at the same time, we need to develop imagination and intuition about what is possible. For example, my intuition is that climate change is something that we can and will solve. It will take a considerable amount of work, but it also creates a new world, and new business, and new jobs, and new money. So if you develop that intuition about what is possible, you try things. And like Jeff Business once said, all of his major decisions with Amazon by him in his life were based on a lot of research and fact finding, but in the end, intuition. And if you don't have intuition that says, okay, in five years my job will look like this. In 10 years my country, my company will look like this. If you don't have a hunch, then basically you just going and going with the current reality, but the new reality is already happening, you just haven't noticed.
Scott Maberry:
That's amazing.
Gerd Leonhard:
And that's really important to notice what is coming and to perform in today is this sort of bifocal kind of way.
Scott Maberry:
You do have to multitask a little bit, but I think a lot of people have a very hard time doing it. I talk to a lot of people who have a very powerful set of impediments to seeing what's happening around them and to seeing the good in it. In your view, are there any particular impediments to having good foresight or good insight into the future? For example, are there any cognitive biases that make it hard?
Gerd Leonhard:
Well, I mean, of course there are a lot of people saying, for example, that the future cannot be predicted, so why bother? But they fail to see, of course, that the future is not something that just falls down on us, that's made in Hollywood, or made in Silicon Valley, or in China. The future is created by us every single day. What we use, what we don't use, how we create, how we react, how prepared we are. The purpose of looking at the future is not prediction, but it's to be better prepared. And so the other mindset that's really in the way is fear. So as we're looking around ourselves, we are seeing all the things that aren't working. And this has really been a great problem with social media, the polarization of 90% of what you see on social media is bad or sensational and half untrue, and it's kind of a big mess. And then you sit down and watch television, and most of that is bad, too.
Scott Maberry:
There's a big problem that we're entertained by that, actually there's a strange feeling of excitement when you watch the robots crushing the skulls of the dead humans and taking over the world.
Gerd Leonhard:
And I think it's entertainment getting a little bit out of hand here. The last really positive science fiction was really Star Trek. Where they formed a society that didn't have money, for example, or they had a replicator to make a fried catfish, just on the voice command, and all of those things. And there's more of that coming. But I think one of the biggest impediments is first we want to be perfect, especially, I'm originally from Germany. In Europe, we love being perfect, especially in Germany. If it's not perfect, we won't touch it. And that is a huge mistake. So Americans are different. Americans are like, "Everything is in progress, everything is in flow, everything is possible. We're pioneers by nature." And you can't avoid risk when you're looking at the future. So if you run a company, you're avoiding a risk, you're fearful of the future, you mistrust the future, and on top of that, everything you're seeing around yourself is negative, then you just won't be ready for the future, which means not 10 years, but one year. Right? So you have a major problem to change your mindset.
Scott Maberry:
It's so true, and that fear mindset is very pervasive. And what in my profession we try to do to address that is we talk about risk mitigation or risk preparation. And I think that at least gives you a sense that there are decisions to be made about future risks. And I think in my experience, that helps reduce that fear mindset.
Gerd Leonhard:
I think there's practical things that we do as companies to mitigate, or to adapt, and everybody's doing that. But in our minds, we have to be open for the perspective of something that isn't already here. And this is basically what every human does all the time. This is what makes us human. But a lot of companies are so focused on efficiency, and optimization, and productivity, that everything else are kind of pushed aside. So basically humans are working a little bit like a robot in that regard, and that is mostly about efficiency. And the future isn't about efficiency because you can efficiently do something, go briefly wrong, and your company will crash. And now what you have to do is you have to adapt, right? This is global change, exponential change. You have to be resilient, you have to be creative, and you have to collaborate.
Scott Maberry:
I love that idea.
Gerd Leonhard:
It's completely different, right, than 10 years ago.
Scott Maberry:
And what you're telling me is in order to be able to deal with the future, we have to be human, because all of those things that you just described are particularly human traits. And to me, that gives me a tremendous sense of optimism because one thing humans know how to do is to be human. And I think if we can unleash those characteristics in human beings, we've got a chance of building a better future.
Gerd Leonhard:
Well, this is of course our superpower and my whole idea of the good future is based on that.
Scott Maberry:
Well, you mentioned at the very outset your book, The Future of Music, which we'll link to in the program description. But my question for you is what's it like being a musician and a futurist? What for you are the links between musicianship and futurism?
Gerd Leonhard:
Well, I had a great time as a musician, I made many records, and I toured, and I had a fortune meeting, really amazing people. But I realized that as a musician I wasn't good enough to get to the top, which I wanted to be as a musician there. So I took that experience, which basically means in music, you have to collaborate, you have to improvise. It's always different than you thought. It's really about creativity, not about handicraft and having the right skills, it's about what you make out of it. So as a musician, you're constantly an entrepreneur basically. And I took that on later on into my life and said, okay, now I'm going to improvise using this idea of technology.
And then when I wrote in The Future of Music, which is 2005, it's an old book now, we basically took this saying, my colleague Dave Kusek and me wrote this book, we took David Bowie's quote who said, "Music will be like water." And we were riffing on that and improvising like a band. And then out came the book, so a few years later, the guy from Spotify, Daniel Ek, we must have read the book because that's what Spotify does, right? Music like Water. And so it all came in. And my last book, Technology Versus Humility, which is six years old, that's my main book now, really. The same thing, a lot of improvising, a lot of juggling of things, a lot of making up things.
Sometimes you're with a band, sometimes you're not, and that's kind of the life of the musician. And I think more of us will have a life to where you have to adapt to constantly changing visions. So you have to learn how to learn. The problem with us, with humans is generally that we, it's hard to change what we are and what we think unless we have really tough experience. I always say it's either pain or love, that's what changes us. And in business, pain means that your company goes bankrupt, you run out of customers, you're finished, right? And you have to start again. So all you fall in love with an idea. Musk fell in love with the electric self-driving vehicle. And also, Jeff Bezos fell in love with the Kindle, which nobody knew what it was, and this is what we have to do. And we just have to make it a little bit easier to have less pain and more love for new things so that we can move a little bit quicker to the next thing.
Scott Maberry:
That is a lovely idea. And also, again, it brings it back for me so powerfully that what you're talking about is very uniquely human. We adapt to love and to pain, and nothing else can do that. No machine, no animal. The way we adapt is by responding to inputs, and finding the response to pain, or the thing that we fall in love with, and we move into the future. But bringing it back to the needs of the audience that we have today, it's interesting to start thinking about the way we would use these concepts to run a business. So in your view, what's the role of futurism in corporate strategy?
Gerd Leonhard:
The story really is not that we have less struggles, or less problems, or less challenges, but to focus on our capacity to change things. I mean, our capacity is exploding. So for example, use technology for climate change, smart computing, fighting pollution, recyclable plastic, new kinds of concrete, new ways of drive a car. So instead of sitting there and then saying, okay, we're going to have a world that's four degrees warmer, and to prepare for exodus basically, and going to Mars if you can with Elon, it's much better to say, what are the things that we can address today as a company? Like, in my view, dramatic action on decarbonization in this is the ticket.
And so it doesn't help for us to say, well, there's nothing we can do about it because it's the government messing up or whatever. That is also true, but there's many things that we can do, including of course, voting for the right people, but also taking our personal action. So companies now have this huge opportunity is to put their foot down, say, this is what we're going to do about this. Because in our lifetime there's three big revolutions, the digital revolution, the sustainable revolution, the green revolution, and then the purpose revolution, which is why we do things. What is our economic logic, and where are we going? What kind of future do we want our kids to have? And so those are all decisions that companies have to make today and leaders. And it's no longer this fig leaf thing, where we just say, okay, it's nice to have, but a planet isn't nice to have. Without the planet there's not much to have. So this logic is now dawning on people.
Scott Maberry:
Yes, it is. And what you just said reminded me of my children who are in their twenties now. And as you said earlier, they're immersed in social media, and they are fearful of the future, generally speaking. But I'll tell you one thing that if we can tap into would be an enormously powerful force. They are very concerned about the world, and about meaning, and about work as meaning. And I think there's a huge revolution coming in the way our current and future young employees will demand of us. And I think we should think about tapping into that.
Gerd Leonhard:
Well, it's quite clear that the Gen Y, the people between say 25 to 35, maybe even 40 as a large generation, they will never work for companies. They will hate companies in fact, that don't have a larger purpose. And they're coming into business now. And the millennials were delayed because of COVID. They had to tread water for a while, and now they're coming with the full force. Remember also that these people are going to get money from people like me, because when we are moving out of business, they're inheriting our money. And they will be 50, 60% of decision making in five years. So if you don't find a way to attract millennials and Gen Y to your company to do the right thing, you will in five or six years’ experience a complete brain drought. Nobody will want to work for you because you're just not interesting. And that includes remote work, it includes a flat hierarchy, it includes other benefits, and includes not just this basically making more money and living comfortably.
Scott Maberry:
And you've touched on this topic a couple of times of globalization, and when I look at the future of global trade generally, I'm seeing very powerful forces of fragmentation really starting to overcome the forces that we used to create the post-World War II economic order. We began advising clients of this fragmentation idea in 2017 around the Brexit, and the pullout of the Iran deal, and all kinds of other things that started really snowballing. And Peter Zeihan is breaking this down in his new book the End Of The World Is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization. And I feel that happening to us now, but I also feel a strong need to manage that transition because I don't see it as a collapse of humanity. Some people do, but I do see it as a very fundamental shift in global trade.
Gerd Leonhard:
Yeah, I mean, that's actually two things here. One is that on a paradigm level and a societal level, we are moving towards much more of a one world thinking. If you talk to a 20-year-old today, they will tell you in many cases, they're a global citizen. They travel everywhere, and they may feel German, but they've been all over the place. And they're not like us, where I used to say, "Well, I'm German, or I'm American," or whatever it was. The other thing is that we used to have globalization as a way of manufacturing cheaply and then just shipping all over the place to reduce cost to take advantage of the differences in salaries and money.
And that is melting, and that's actually good because it decreases inequality maybe in the end, and also decreases CO2. So we don't have to ship the cheap plastic shoes from China, we can 3D print them in America, or in the UK. So I wouldn't be so sure. I think that world globalization actually kind of belongs on the junk heap. It's kind of like artificial intelligence. It's like, okay, which variation are we talking about here? The global objective, for example, of world peace or the good future, we cannot obtain by fragmenting into different regions that have their own internet and their own digital money. And that just won't work.
Scott Maberry:
And I love the way you brought it around to global inequality because the idea that the supply chains that we built in the '90s and early 2000s are collapsing. It's not just because we're fragmenting globally, and the World Trade Order is breaking down, as I believe it is, but it's also because there are fewer and fewer places where we can place a manufacturing plant, and pay workers 10% of what we pay them elsewhere, and expect that to be stable.
Gerd Leonhard:
It's a lot more short term now, and there's things that have been ingrained in the system for a long time that are collapsing finally. For example, the idea of growing cheap pork in Brazil, and putting it to giant containers, and shipping it to China, that idea should collapse and that is collapsing, and that's probably a good thing. And the Brazilians will have to look for other revenue streams, which they have plenty of. They have a half country full of huge plains where they could grow wheat and all kinds of things that they haven't done because they have to do the meat thing.
Scott Maberry:
And when you put it that way, too, I realize first that those of us who have the capacity to understand this, and to bear the tax that it's going to put on us, have an obligation to adapt to that, and to help others adapt to it, and to feel these human emotions of, oh, that's painful, but that's the adjustment that we're going to make. That's the first thing that comes out of it for me. And the second thing that comes out of it for me is that when we're talking about this to companies, we're just asking them to do better what they're pretty good at doing already, which is recognizing a constraint, and figuring out how to make a sustainable margin out of what's left for you. And I think what's really happening is that the constraints are getting tougher, and they're going to get exponentially tougher over time, but it's uniquely a human project and a human requirement that we see those, and understand them, and prepare for them, and adapt to them.
Gerd Leonhard:
The other good thing to realize, of course, that we're not talking about the philosophical stand of altruism here or something. Or something nice to have, or hold the hands in Nirvana kind of thing, to switch to the green economy is the most substantial switch in society in the last hundred years. And it's going to rate generate hundreds of millions of new jobs, and lots and lots of new products. Like the CEO of BlackRock the other day, so Larry Fink, said that the next 100 unicorns will all be in climate technology. So I mean, it's not that we're going to suffer from money because we switched to green.
It's only the ones that have sunk costs. They may be suffering for a while, but just like the record labels shifted from CDs to the cloud, new record labels will make a lot of money with this. And so they're suffered for a while. They lost two thirds of their revenues for 10 years, but now they're back making lots of money. So I think this is basically, it's just we have to realize the fossil fuel window, the fossil fuel economy is closing, and that is irrefutable. Not because it has to, but also because it can, right? We have the tech, right, and now's a new window. And so you can ignore that and just be tossed aside like a record store, or not.
Scott Maberry:
Or you can adapt. And I'm seeing it in many, many industries as we're talking. I know that even the legacy energy companies are finding ways to adapt to the green technology revolution. And if they do, they'll be Spotify. And if they don't, they'll be your neighborhood record store. And I think that's the challenge that they're facing, and it's a very, very difficult challenge because it's redefining their very existence.
Gerd Leonhard:
I mean, let's keep in mind, of course, all of the giant industries and the big companies of the world, most of them aren't or weren't changed by internal action, by internal revolution. They were changed by outsiders coming and saying, "Here we are. We're going to take away most of your stuff."
Scott Maberry:
And we're very good at that in the end, if we can eliminate the fear of the transition, you are seeing people finding ways to manage this transition. And I think it's the people who maintain an optimistic view about the future, and who understand the trends and the way things are going, and they are adapting. And if you're a multinational in the carbon industry, you're already investing in green technology, and the hope is that you're investing in these transitional technologies that will get us to the next level, because that's where they're going to be anyway.
Gerd Leonhard:
Well, my bet is that it sounds kind of science fiction, but I think a lot of oil companies will invest very heavily in decarbonization. So they're going to invent the carbon sequestration, and for example, water desalination, same basic concept, the same direction. They're going to do the opposite of what they used to do, rather than putting out the stuff, they'll take it back in.
Scott Maberry:
And there are now new US tax credits for doing that, and that's actually one of the most hopeful signs I've seen in years.
Gerd Leonhard:
Oh yeah. I mean it's amazing to me what, this is typical American, of course, going from nothing to everything on the flip of a coin, and showing Europe what to do, I mean, if only Europe could do the same thing and say, "Let's put together a 300 billion Euro fund." Of course we couldn't do that, but we don't agree on the agendas. And of course, Americans didn't agree on the agenda either. It just kind of happened inadvertently. It happened anyway, at the disguise of something else.
Scott Maberry:
It did. It came in under the disguise of building infrastructure and reducing inflation. Those were the two big bills. The Inflation Reduction Act and the infrastructure bill. It's brilliant.
Gerd Leonhard:
The CHIPS Act on the IRA. But in the end, really, this is of course how Americans think of the future, which is you examine it, you understand it, and then you set out to create it. And that's what you do, right? In Europe, we're like, "Okay, the future, that's kind of scary. Let's wait and see." Right?
Scott Maberry:
Okay.
Gerd Leonhard:
And this has to stop.
Scott Maberry:
I so agree with that. Now, bringing it home, and maybe we'll end on this, speaking about big global multinational business, which is the majority of our listeners, how should the C-suite in big businesses be specifically planning for the futures that we're seeing here?
Gerd Leonhard:
Well, I think first you have to make the future mindset, future readiness central to your strategy. So basically saying, okay, we're doing this today, but what do we think we're going to do in three years, or five years, and 10 years? And how likely is it that we could do this? And how different than today is it? And what is the most plausible next window for us? And so to do that, you have to develop your future mindset. We have to spend, as Bill Gates says, roughly an hour a day, 45 minutes to an hour a day in the future. I'm not talking about Netflix over here, I'm talking about reading, studying, the serious work on becoming future ready.
Because basically what happens as you go through that exercise, it accumulates all these new ideas and information, and one day you're sitting at the conference table and saying, make a decision about where to put the next a hundred million dollars. And your idea is going to be dramatically different because you have already stacked up all of the knowledge and the intuition. So to be a future ready mindset is number one, and to have this sort of, Deloitte always says a hybrid strategy, so execute well today, but be prepared at the flip of a switch to bring out the plan B, which is tomorrow. You should always spend time in tomorrow so that you're ready to switch when the time comes.
I think Salesforce CEO Benioff said, "It's our mission to get to the future ahead of the customer and be ready to greet them when they arrive." That is a tall order because you have to spend time in the future yourself to do that. And most people are already way overloaded with all this intellectual working. They're working 200%. So it has to come from the C-suite to say, everybody in the company is required to think about what the future of their thing looks like and to develop new ideas. That's 10% of your time, and this is going to be our official agenda like Google used to do 15 years ago.
This is a question of company culture, and I always say culture eats technology for breakfast, riffing off Peter Drucker. Culture is the most important success factor. If your culture is narrow, not collaborative, not future focused, too much performance, too much high pressure, too much efficiency, you are very lucky to still be here. Okay? Because what is happening is that the future will be the opposite. So while you're performing and doing all the things right, you have to invent something else. So that is about culture. And big part of culture, of course, is the purpose question, what is your purpose, and how do you get people excited about being part of that purpose?
Scott Maberry:
Yes. And that is the good future, and that is an excellent place for us to stop today. I'm really grateful to have had some of your time today, and thank you very much for being with us.
Gerd Leonhard:
Thanks. You're welcome.
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