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[Music] [Music] Lisa thank you so much for joining us at knowledge of warden today thank you for
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having me you open your book kill the company with a group of people ferociously plotting to decimate their
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main competitor as they aim for Market domination but there's a Twist we discovered that this group is engaged in
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exercise to help them look at their own company's vulnerabilities it was their
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own company that they had torn apart in fact what is kill the company all about oh I'm glad you asked it's of course my
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favorite exercise because it's the name of the book um you know kill the company
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is about um having an outof company experience it's about um really examining your weaknesses so you can
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make them your strengths so the idea of kill the company is um rather than how it happens in most businesses that each
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year we we do a SWAT analysis you know our strengths weaknesses opportunities threats and most people use it as like a
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political construct to say where they're strong and they're not really weak it's
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where they're challenged and that doesn't really work and so kill the company is pretend that you are your
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number one competitor you have 30 minutes how will you put yourself out of business and what that does especially
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with Executives it kind of gets their War mentality on and they're given permission
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to really look at what's wrong and then ideally what you find out is where are
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you really weak what can you do about it who can you partner with and even best how can you then turn that back onto
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your competitors so it's just a neat way a neat twist in terms of looking at what
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how your weaknesses are but you give it kind of a gaming mentality right and part of what you're looking at is
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removing those obstacles to Innovation what what are some of those obstacles that you see well there's many there's
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many I mean I think inherently a lot of people are adverse to taking a risk and they don't realize it they'll say
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especially leaders that uh they want their teams to take a risk when they may be the biggest barrier to risk because
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they have so much on the line you know quarterly earnings they've got all kinds
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of things that they have to manage but I think U one of them is just aversion to
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risk another thing is is a lack of definition around how much risk you can take so those are some of the biggest
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barriers if you can have leaders all of a sudden be open to more risk and Define
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it I think they'll operate less with handcuffs and more with guard rails and
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be willing to do not just incremental change but really dramatic disruptive ones that's great and if a company is
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committed to making that kind of a change and looking at you know where they are uh where how would they go
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about looking at where they fall in The Innovation Spectrum well it depends on what you're
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talking about it could be around risk I think what they have to do is look at their culture and I talk a lot about
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this in the book and that I think you can really look at a company's culture
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and determine how much risk they're willing to take and I think they can look at a few things um how much do
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their Executives lead by example how much failure or experimentation are you allowed to take how much resources that
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can be time or money do they put towards new Ventures um what metrics are they measuring and do those metrics have to
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do with um uh new things new to Market New to the world types of Adventures and that will kind of give you a feeling for
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what is their culture like and are they really involved in leading Innovation or
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is it more of a lip service you'll get a real feel for that Spectrum quickly
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right right and just in terms of those those uh different types of cultures what what do you see are some of the uh
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main types of cultures within organizations well I uh I'll tell you it's interesting what I did over the
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last few years is I studied corporate cultures and change and what was fascinating to me is we seem to talk
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about change um or cultures in terms of good versus bad but I I don't think it's
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that simple actually I think there's another culture that permeates all the organizations that many of us have
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worked at and is probably like the silent killer um the worst kind of culture isn't a bad culture it's a
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complacent one and I think the world has gotten so complex that we keep putting more and more processes in place and the
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result of that is is that people become complacent they no longer think they can
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affect change even though they might want to they kind of give up it's the everything's just fine mentality and we
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see that at a lot of big corporations they've got the money and the brand and
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they can write it out for a long time until all of a sudden where did that small company come from who knew and
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they had a compl culture so I think that's that's something people really
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have to watch for in the future and if if an organization is ready to change if they have identified
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these things and um sort of reckon with their their own culture what are the what are the tenants to make change
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stick well there's a few in fact we did some um some case studies over the last
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couple years and because we didn't know what really made change stick and why
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corporate culture change was so hard and what we found through some of these case
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studies was it was interesting it wasn't what I thought when we first set out to
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do it the first was is that I think change has to happen not from the top down but from the middle out and what I
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mean by that is it has to really stick with people that are in the trenches and they're respected by leadership but
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they're admired from those that are rising stars these are the guys that are
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in the meetings and emails and slugging it out every day that I think can really
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affect change the most as long as of course leadership wants you to make that change in the first place the second
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thing is I think we think change is a um it's a process and I don't believe
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that's true I think that um if Innovation or change was a process we all could do it because I'm sure people
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are very smart and can follow the rules I think it's a toolkit I really think
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it's in this world that's so complex they need OnDemand tools that they can
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draw on with different things that come at them and then the final thing I think
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with change is um I can't I don't think it can be big mandates I think it has to
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be something called little bigs it's change with a little C we have to start
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affecting change on on an everyday level in those meetings with emails with reports with procedures we have to
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affect it by Leading by example in small ways to get people to them want to take
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big change and that's not something we expected we thought it would be big change initiatives and in fact it was
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the opposite that worked so that was a great cool learning for us in in fact uh just to pick up on the
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first part of what you talked about you cite Recent research from whon management Professor Ethan mik that
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shows that midle managers have more impact on a company's performance than nearly any other part of the
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organization you know according to this work you've done and the research you've
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done uh why is that important and can you tell us more about how um that that works well I think it's very um it's
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important for people that are in organizations and you know there's more managers than there are leaders right
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and those are the people that really are on the ground and that know how to run the business and can really affect
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change with so many different people so I I think it's important one to acknowledge it um I think two what you
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find is like people don't want to fire lit from underneath right they don't
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want to uh fire lit from underneath them by leaders they want to fire lit within
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them and people can't tell you to do that they have to really believe that they can affect change to do it so I
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think the managers are the ones that really we need to concentrate on with change versus always these top- down
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approaches we got to put more money here not just here you argue that employees need certain skills what are some of
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those uh I again you know when we did some research it wasn't what I thought
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it's um it's some basic things it's perseverance I think especially with
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Innovation and change um you can't expect it to happen the first try so you have to have some perseverance that's
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hard in this really on demand do it this quarter World um I think you need to have agility you got to be able to Pivot
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have a plan B that's really important we talk a lot about um provocative inquiry
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I think that there's a lost art of asking questions so we're so focused on
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getting the answer and being right that we've forgotten how to ask the right
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question some of it is because we don't want to make people comfortable um and I think some of it is
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we've just forgotten how so provocative inquiries another one another one I'll
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mention is strategic imagination and I only say that because I want to separate it from you know creativity because I
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think people can come up with ideas but you've got to be a dreamer with purpose
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in today's day and age because there's only so much money and time so people
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that can really have strategic imagination I think will be the ones that rise to the top and can you tell us
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um as a final question about one or two of the companies that you think are are really um headed in the right direction
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when um and have done this type of work oh sure um I'm a big fan of shell and
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not many people mention oil or energy companies I a fan of them because I think what they do that's really
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interesting is they have um game changers or futurists on staff that are constantly looking to disrupt their
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business model so they imagine and they have plenty of money and they can make money for a long time without changing
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but they imagine for example uh will we live in a world soon where we are no longer extracting energy but growing it
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and they start to build that kind of a business I think that companies like GM and BMW um they are looking at their
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business models and saying well gosh if everybody is really moving towards Urban
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models and living in cities maybe they won't be able to drive as many cars so
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maybe we won't be a car company it will be a Mobility systems company so they're
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really doing Forward Thinking in terms of how they destroy or kill their own companies to become ones that they need
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to be before someone else kills them very inspiring thank you very much for speaking with us today Lisa oh thank you
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I appreciate it [Music]