Podcasts

Episode 3- Decoding AQ with Ross Thornley Feat. Michael Keane - Lessons from the former CHRO of P.F. Chang's

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Intro

Hi, and welcome to Decoding AQ, helping you to learn the tools mindsets, and actions to thrive in an ever-changing world. 

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Ross

Hi and welcome to another episode of Decoding AQ. Today we're joined by Michael Keane, and his CHRO, strategic innovative change director and a fascinating background plethora of experience. So I can't wait to share the insights that he will share with us today. And your background is come from a whole range of different roles, industries and areas. We'll get into that a little bit more, but at the moment, you're the managing partner of The Sierra Institute. And you can tell us a bit more about that. So yeah, please introduce yourself with your story and a little bit of some of your background to be really great.

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Michael  

Well, it's great to be invited here today, Ross. So thank you very much for the opportunity to chat with you. But 30 years, I feel older every time I get to tell this story, but 30 years in corporate HR roles, if you will, companies like Whirlpool, in retail Express and Victoria's Secret, and most recently with PF Changs. So large distributed workforces, if you will consumer facing exclusively almost today, I'm an independent consultant, advising companies on how to organize themselves differently more effectively, and also on leadership, how to make their leadership more effective.

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And as regards the car Institute, it's a consortium invitation only of heads of HR of companies across industries within the United States, that have been around for almost 15 years. And so I'm one of three managing partners in that organization. And so we're focused on how to make the function the best it can possibly be, if you will. So that's the thumbnail sketch if you want.

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Ross  

A thumbnail sketch, I think any anybody who's been doing something for 30 years will surely gain loads of thoughts of wow, I wish I could do that again to I'm glad I did that, and everything in between. And in fact, when I was preparing for this, your last role you mentioned was at PF Changs. My wife's parents used to live in Florida. And for 20 years, we'd be going and visiting them. And PF Changs was one of our favorite places to go. So I thought this will be fascinating. And I know this won't necessarily go out live straight away. But for reference, you know, we're right in the middle of COVID. You know, it's 21st of April, and restaurants the world over, are having a really tough time right now.

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Michael  

It's fascinating because my oldest stepson is actually a manager at PF Changs in Ohio right now. And, and they were the number one restaurant a year ago. So they're going up against great numbers. And his restaurant just doing drive thru is doing actually exceedingly well, if you will. So it is really interesting time. Some restaurants are clearly not going to make it out of this. And yet some restaurants are clearly going to come out okay. And they'll probably modify their their model, I have no doubt that Chang's is probably learning a lot. I'm no longer with the company, obviously, they had a change of control.

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And most of us in the leadership team left but I have little doubt that they're learning a lot about how to do their business differently and possibly more profitably as a result of this. And it's so funny, it plays into the cop topic of adaptability, right? And sometimes you adapt because you choose to and other times you have to because you have to. And so organizations right now today are adapting because they have to. And so Chang's is one of those organizations,

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Ross  

In terms of your history of each of these, you know, as you express distributed large workforces, you know, these are tens of thousands of human lives, you know, families, communities that represent in a lot of these enterprise organizations, and what's perhaps been, for you some of your favorite highlights of different experiences, perhaps that might be relevant today, you know, maybe big changes or things that happened, that we might be able to learn from that you can perhaps share thinking back.

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Michael  

Probably the easiest one instance was the most dramatic change that I was a part of making. I was it was during,  it'd be 12 years ago, this coming summer. I was with a company called Tween Brands, tween is the description of typically Well, girls, but that's at age between your junior years and then your your teenage years, right. So is that that term for those years, so typically, eight to eight to 11 years seven to 11 years of a trade. And so I was with the the business that coined that term from a retail standpoint. So those of you that are listening, if you've had daughters, you know exactly what I'm talking about.

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And so I was with the business that had created that space in retail called Tween Brands for months thought ticker standpoint, and we were The business that I had created limited to TOL. And so it was a very successful, almost a billion dollar business. And it was iconic at the time. But this was in 2008. And so this was pre great recession, we had a very successful business. But we saw the storm clouds coming, we did not forecast the great recession. We weren't that smart. But we just saw the storm clouds growing. And so we had that business that had about 680 stores. And the business had started to plateau and was starting to go into some measure of decline.

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And we had another business that we started to build called Justice. And it was it was a price about 20%-25% below and it was a real estate play. So it was going into strip malls, whereas limited to is in all the really good malls, and so limited to is starting to decline and justice was was kicking his tail. And we could see that in the weekly results. And so we made the bet to actually save the business. We made the strategic shift to get rid of Limited Too and change all the stores to Justice nameplate even though Justice was a fraction of the size of limited to, and there was a lot of internal angst about that decision. And boy, the extra lines with the security analysts was five times as great as the interlink. So much so that the day that we announced that the stock went down 40% What the strategic change enabled us to do though, was we had a built up a lot of internal costs to manage two different brands separately, and we were getting paid nothing for it.

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So for a whole bunch of reasons, we couldn't figure out any positive outcomes from doing this strategy. So we took out in one day, we took out 110 jobs in our home office. So 110 People got terminated in one day. And my organization had never gone through anything like this. It was a fairly young organization. We were kind of I'm gonna use the word juvenile it without trying to be disparaging. But we were juvenile on our thought process about these things. And it fell on me, of course, to try and manage that in a humane way, if you will. And we were publicly traded. So we had to communicate in a way that was fair, both to our public obligations, and to our internal, so forth, and so on.

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So I don't need to get into details for this. But to do that in a way that was thoughtful, and responsible was a bit of a trick logistically, and then all that distributed workforce all those lives. So they were the lives in Columbus, Ohio, where we were based. And then there were lives out into the workforce, because there were 680 stores that had limited to on their nameplate. And the immediate reaction was, We're shutting all those stores down. Well, no, we're not. But then you had to go out and convince those people. So you out to do something which I'd never done before, called "roadshows". So you do an executive roadshow, I've now done that to the other companies.

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And it was a remarkable experience, you literally get on planes, and you go out and you bring people together, and you tell them, you go make the case for what you're doing. And it's a fascinating in a highly effective experience. But it's like a political campaign, you go do those things. And I did that Chang's when we change the culture at Chang's. And I'm actually working with a client today, I'm not going to go into that specifics, but I've actually proposed that they're considering a significant change in their field. And I think it'll work if we do it there. And so it's a fascinating learning experience that I think can be replicated. And what I learned about this is you got to be able to survive the what I call across the table eyeball to eyeball conversation. And if you can't sell it to someone sitting across the table from them, then you probably don't have it, right. It's as simple as that.

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Ross  

It's interesting, because you you talk about, you know, experience where you as an internal team, juvenile or not, we're looking at a strategic decision to pivot and adapt the organization to provide a better future. So you look at the situation, you look at the market, you look at your numbers and say, okay, in one example, this brand is declining, this one's increasing, we're going to shift. So there's going to be a series of requirements from redoing the store, sign to shift of personnel, and then falling on certain individuals, like you said, to do that in a humane way of having conversation with human beings and employees about that change. What fascinates me about the time we're in at the moment, is a lot of it's happening from an external burning platform.

And the changes are not brought out where you've perhaps sold it to yourselves. You've done all of the things that you're excited about it and you're going right, this is how I can sit eyeball to eyeball and say, We got you, you know, the future is going to be A-okay, now let's go and that roadshow comes from a sense of internal excitement. How my people use that same strategy of being able to go out and be humane, have conversations, communicate, maybe it's much more virtual right and how, but how can they do that? Maybe when it's not been even well thought out, communicating or the more reactionary? Yeah. So what are your thoughts around that?

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Michael  

Yeah, it's a really thoughtful question. I think you get to the same place by how you contextualize your reaction, right? So, in my mind, the number one job that a leadership team has, they have to recognize the prevailing reality. And that's what people expect of their leaders, right? What I've seen people quit on their leaders in organizations, it's because they don't think that they're choosing to recognize the prevailing reality. And therefore they think, you know, these guys just don't get it. And that's when people therefore then say, Wow, I'm not sure that I'm playing for the right group of people.

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And so I think in this world, especially when it's external, you walk out and you just lay your cards out, and you say, This is what the realities, this is what's happened to us. This is how we're reading it, and you go make your case, right. And so every time I've done one of these road shows, the way we've structured them is we make the case for change. And so you just are substituting the set of data that's the case for change is fundamentally how I would structure it.

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And in terms of some of the challenges with that changes, how might some of the leaders who are feeling vulnerable, who might not either know the answers, so like you say, you know, understand the prevailing reality, and communicate that? What if then themselves are feeling so uncertain? So under pressure? Where would you draw the line between complete transparency? Or no leaders need big shoulders? You need to take some of this and show up in this kind of fashion? To say, Where's the balance in that for people that might be in a leadership role that may be struggling? How can you advise and help them to think about their communication flow with their teams?

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That's where I think it falls on. Certainly the person holds the role that I've held, I think that, whether fair or unfair, I think that's part of what you sign up for, when you become the head of whatever the title is of the moment. And I think that the most powerful form of how you lead is how you show up every day. That's why Sarah and students exists, quite frankly, TSI, as we call it exists, because we believe that the head of HR role is the loneliest job on the C suite team. Because to do it, right, we think that you do have, in some cases, especially in times of stress the broader shoulders, because everyone, including the CEO, should be leaning on you and and who do you get to lean on, except other people who have your job.

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So, and I digress on that part, but I do fundamentally think that especially during times of stress, a high performing head of HR should be the person that goes to and leans into and says, Come on, I'm your person to lean on on, and should be the person who holds up that mirror to the C suite people and says, This is a time for you to be your best. And you being stressed is okay, it's part of you being human. And we don't want people during times of adversity to be anything less than human.

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Because whatever version of that is, for each personality type is part of what makes people resonate with people with their leaders. Now, you still have an accountability elite. So what we need to do is figure out how you're going to leap and do the work of leading effectively. But yeah, it doesn't mean you stop being you know, you become an automaton.

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Ross  

I think it's exactly where you mentioned, The Sierra Institute and other peer organizations and alliances really come into their own is great sailors are made in choppy seas. Right, we're in choppy seas right now. So what an opportunity for every leader to see just how good they can be. And deciding to lean in using your peers and your community of likes to gain strength to then go and face your role that you have chosen.

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So I think that's a huge opportunity. And maybe a benefit for the communications of peer and alliances in groups is so essential right now, to leverage that and be able to show up super vulnerable, and gain the strength from everyone together to go back with that energy to your organization and be what everyone needs you to be point really, really well made. I agree. And to take that point and extend it just to touch. I think that one of the unintended consequences of this is that every organization, this is a huge real time test of whatever their succession plan is looking like right now. I mean, you are getting a real time test of oh, we thought Person A was really a successor. Yeah, maybe not, you know, or, Wow, is this a confirmation of what we really thought about her/him? So your points are really, really well made a whole bunch of it.

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It's that challenge of A-players and how are they nurtured? How are they made? Were they already there just waiting to be discovered? Or did the opportunity make them and it kind of leads me on to another thing that I'd like to share with our audience in terms of, you've seen multiple challenges. You talked about the specifics of one organization transcending from one brand to another, and the 87 financial impact, you know, 2000- 2008, there's been lots of different situations that you've lived through. Have you seen? Or is there any stories that stick in your head of where teams or leadership or organizations have transformed well, and what were the key skills that showed up? You know, was it communication skills? What were the things in those periods? Maybe it's back to your example of justice. That story, what skills made it possible to transform into something better and a brighter future?

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Michael  

To complete the Justice story, which ended up being a home run? The strategy worked, and the reason that it worked? Is because an alert to your question it hits the heart of your question is, it worked in my mind, because the strategy did not ask the organization to do that many things differently than it already knew how to do. And so my takeaway is that when you ask an organization to transform, you have to think to some extent, what you're asking the organization to do differently from what I already knew how to do. And as I think about adapting, it actually completely resonates with on an individual basis to you know, the, the more you ask yourself to do differently, if you're thinking about on an individual basis, if you're asking yourself to become something so dramatically different than you already are, obviously, the risk is, you know, just stands to reason, the likelihood that you're going to transform it obviously lessons, the more significantly, you're asking yourself to become, if you asked me to become a power lifter, anyone who sees me knows the likelihood that's going to happen, pretty darn low.

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But if you're asking organization that's been in the case of tween, we were not shifting its requirements in this transformation, to be all that dramatically different. It already knew how to develop product and knew how to develop VFS fashion company, all that kind of stuff, we were just mildly shifting the angle of what we were asking it to be. But  when I was involved with Victoria's Secret and we changed that model fairly significantly, it became very successful, I wasn't there, because I moved on between by the time they put that into full motion. It ensued what happened there after I left was five years of record performance that ensued, by and large, because we changed the way we organize and we made some slight tweaks in that organizational model.

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But fundamentally, again, we didn't ask them to do things that they didn't know how to do already, as well, we just put a different context in place. My lift up is, the more you can keep the organization using muscles that it already had, but just change the context for how they use those muscles, obviously, the more likely you are to get it done. Now, where I have great respect is where I read, you know, organizations that got into totally different business models and all that kind of stuff, where you learn how to commercialize totally different products and all that. That's big time stuff.

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Ross  

It reminds me of the sort of three horizon framework of innovation, you know, and a lot of organizations are quite adept at Horizon one, you know, it's led by productivity and efficiency. So they're taking what they already know, move this a little bit this way, this a little bit this way, we might extend either a margin or a market share or life of a particular skew or product. The next horizon, and some organizations do this reasonably well, is slight changes on current. So what you've just said, you know, take one product and let repackage that product, or let's take one capability, this production facility and apply it to a slightly different audience.

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And so those sorts of incremental pivots still have one half in the core, the really hard stuff is the horizon three, which is the imagination stuff that bears no resemblance to what you did yesterday. And I think what's interesting is, you can have success in any one of these horizons. But the context right now living in an exponential world is the pace and speed at which we need to do this. So whether it's horizon one or three, we are facing it under such pressure, whether it's COVID-19, or any exponential technology that's allowing us to either be disrupted because we, you know, aren't pivoting or embracing it or to transform in terms of your experience that you've had before. Now trying to predict the foresight of what is coming next, you know, you said, you know, perhaps you weren't smart enough in 2008 to zero but you you saw the cloud, you saw what was going on? What would you advise organizations right now in terms of the types of skills and types of elements for talent for their workforces, to ensure that they're going to survive and maybe even thrive? In the years to come? What would you advise organizations focusing on?

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Michael  

I'll tell you what I'm talking about with my current client, you know, my current client is right now indicated, they've said, why waste a good crisis, which I think is actually.. So they've said, when we talk about building fill in the blank of the name 2.0, and I think that I applaud their, their mentality, it's the appropriate mentality and, and 2.0 will basically put them not at the forefront, they're not transcending and going to 2050 by getting to 2.0 just to be clear, there'll be getting to current state, but it still represents a transformative leap from where they are today. So I applaud their thinking it's the right way to do it.

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The way that I'm advising them to think about it, and which will represent a transform relief for them is, I'm advising them to think about what's the operating model from a from a structure and integrative process way. I believe that if they do that, the way that organizations can operate, which gets to the heart of your question, apologize for the pre mumble, I believe that the spine of an organization, I don't care if you have 20,000 people in it, or if you have 300 people in it, but the spine of the organization processes is a strategic planning process, because that process, depending on how the timelines are, and if you do it right, it sets you up to be thinking the way that you're talking about.

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And it doesn't have to be super complex with McKinsey or Boston Consulting Group doing it, it just what it does is it puts you in a forward looking mindset. And that mindset, that process is exactly what got us to the storm clouds in tween. And it wasn't overly dramatic, or it didn't have any consultants involved it. But it created the question that led to the process of who's winning, and why are we not winning enough. And so I believe that if you have some sort of a forward looking process that has the appropriate time mindset in it built in, you then as an organization, have mitigated the risk of getting caught not looking ahead, it's as simple as that. So that's the first thing I would advise to a client, and then everything else just can flow within that, because then you've knocked off the first skill set, which is you're not looking ahead.

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And then secondly, then the capability that already rests in your organization, whether it's industry specific, and or function specific, by and large, those that you've hired in are going to fill in the blanks behind it, in my opinion, you know, a lot of people debate whether or not strategic thinking is a specific skill or not, I don't tend to think it's a skill. I think that capability is something that exists in a natural level, and it actually grows over time. I think that if you have enough highly capable people in the room, and you focus it, you get strategic thinking as an outcome. That's my belief. So I don't think you hire for strategy skills, I think you just hire really capable people, and you give it a really consistent common focus, and you probably get strategic thinking in the room. But that's my own personal perspective. So I tend not to think in those terms. But now that's where I would focus it. That's what I'm actually advising my current client, and we'll see if they listen.

Ross  

So that the challenge, then if I hear, right, you know, in uncertain times, and unpredictable futures, even just thinking about the future, you know, is starting point one, and having a framework that allows the organization to ponder and think you know, everything's created twice, first in the mind, and then in reality, and so give the permission to create in the mind of future, maybe now encouraging people to be quicker at implementation maybe. So in a linear world, you could spend time thinking and you could spend maybe 18 months getting a product to market. I think one of the big challenges now is the gap between the thinking and then the doing and then the learning. So that that open feedback loop is accelerated and speeded through an organization, I think is a key asset.

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Michael  

Here's the other thing about strategic planning that I've learned, strategic planning is not about predicting the future either. That's the thing that some people get caught up in, like, I've got to predict the future because there's capital and there's dollars that I put against it. There's a great book that I read a long time ago early in my career called "The Art of the Long View", and it was actually written by someone who ran strategic planning for Shell, so Shell operates in 30 year timeframes, because that's where their capital gets allocated.

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And it's all about scenario planning. If you just do scenarios, then that hedges, in quotes, "Just create some possible scenarios for crying out loud", that at least starts to make it potentially less murky. So even more uncertain times to use your point well made Ross, just create some scenarios that you can plan your way into, and then say, Okay, well, we're willing to bet on the possibility of scenarios one or two, and then we'll just plan with that period.

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Ross  

I love it.

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Michael  

Don't use strategic planning as a way of saying, "Oh okay, we have to predict the future", just create some plausible possibilities, and then move forward. That's all.

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Ross  

I like that. And if the listeners are thinking about creating and maybe using science fiction, as a stimulus for visualizing possible scenarios, and then it's a bit like war games, you know, lots of governments have been very good at playing war games. And that is part of the operation to then know, what might come up what might not come up, what things do we need to work on what pieces on our board need to be where, and when, whether it happens like that you've got a bit of forethought to it.

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We haven't had this scenario planning and gamified at massive scale for pandemics. So we're caught short, we don't know how to figure out supply chains, you know, all these kinds of challenges. So in an organizational level, that strategic planning to be built around scenarios, be thinking doesn't have to be overly complex. But that muscle will start to give more and more strategic output for the organization as well. I think your shared, you know, it doesn't matter, like say whether you've got a 20,000 organization, 100,000 organization, or 10s, or hundreds, you can use this same kind of principles of looking at it. If you were to advise a leadership team who may be has been doing that in the past, they've been doing strategic thinking, they go off, they do their executive leadership off sites, do these types of things, what maybe one or two tips in all of your experience that has happened in either the structure or environments that you think would improve the chances have a great outcome of that kind of strategic planning and think of what what very simple tips could teams actually implement? From your experience, practically.

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Michael  

This won't be new to some of your listeners, or many of your listeners, but it's one that sometimes people haven't considered but you know, your sales better than you know any of your competitors. So turn the tables on yourself and decide how to beat yourself as though you were doing a competitive thing on yourself.

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I do you know, that's just triggered a thought. Are you familiar with XPRIZE the organization? Have you ever come across them? A little bit of background for XPRIZE for context, it was started by a chap called Peter Diamandis, he was the founder of Singularity University done lots of very interesting things. And XPRIZE was a competition fee for the first private team to be able to do a suborbital flight. So it's what spawned a lot of this space private spaceflight now. And he announced, I think it was in like 1996, a $10 million prize fund for a team to be able to do a suborbital flight, about to go up twice, within two weeks, you know, with human beings come back safely, etc.

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And it was one in 2004. And Richard Branson, then bought the rights to it, and it's what became Virgin Galactic. And what's interesting in these, these situations of outdoing yourself, now XPRIZE, over the last 20 plus years has been putting together challenges and prizes that then allows the crowd and world to compete to win them. So it derisks innovation, and r&d, a large scale to solve big challenges and big problems.

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And there was a an aviation company. And they've sponsored an avatar prize, which will disrupt them and their industry. So it's really brave about for example, we can foresee a necessity where knowledge and where that knowledge is required, being either at a distance or speed or where a human doesn't want to be. So for example, in disasters, in fires in these sorts of sending humans in who have that knowledge, we might have access if it's in a certain location or country. If it's in other areas, it might not be even accessible or we have that knowledge if we could then instead of fly people or transport them to tsunami situations, if we have deployed avatars that a human can control with their knowledge and see all the senses of temperature of bit and deploy them, that would disrupt a lot of travel.

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And I thought how brave, but that organization not for it to happen outside and come and disrupt them, but then to sponsor the disruption happening on themselves. And that's the principle that you just shared, you know, how can we outdo ourselves?

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Yeah, if you know how you would do it, and then figure out whether or not you do it, well, then you, you've created the ultimate firewall.

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Ross  

Yeah, you can either do it or you can mitigate some of that risk around it. One of the questions I asked at the end of the podcast, is there a book that you're currently reading? That's really interesting, or one that's really affected you over the years? And you you mentioned one already, which was by the chap who worked at Shell, can you remind us the name of that book.

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Michael  

The Art of the Long View and I read that actually over 25 years ago.

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Ross  

Are there any other books or things that you would like to share ah, personally affected how you think what's happened in your career over time?

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Michael  

As a regards this I mean, I've talked about capability is probably pretty obscure. But Elliott, Jaques' work, J-A-Q-U-E-S, Elliot, his research. He's an MD and a PhD. But his work I was exposed to during my early years at Whirlpool. His research on human capability was his to this day, still, what influences me, I believe it's truth about how people grow over time and how capability is innate. And yet it gets better over time and all that it's not the easiest read. I will confess, but he has a couple of books. The one that I like the best is just called "Human Capability". It's a dry read, but it's it's really, really good. This stuff is fantastic. I would recommend human capability among everything, even for actually reading "The House of Morgan by Ron Chernow", which is a complete home. It's like The Alliance, but all that about JP Morgan and all that kind of stuff. It's fascinating. It's fascinating read it's the modern finance and all that kind of stuff.

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Ross  

It leads me to an interesting kind of line of thought around a person's talent. And you mentioned innate and you believe it might be innate versus it's developed? Can you unpack that a little bit more for us to be thinking in that kind of way?

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Michael  

It's not a huge debate. I think our talents are naturally innate. I mean, what you were born with you were born with? It's a function of DNA, obviously, and all that. And I don't think that's a huge debate. But what's interesting for a business, I think, for an organization issue you need to find and this is why we were working with Elliott at Whirlpool is, you know, we were trying to say, okay, we need to find who has the innate skills to eventually be capable of running a business unit around the world, especially sitting in the C suite, as I like to say, and this may sound perverse, but you know, horses without breeding don't run in the Kentucky Derby. I mean, it's as simple as that. So early in my career, I ran a global development program. And so my job was to go into Wharton University, Michigan, INSEAD like and I had 20 minutes to interview people who were first year MBAs and say, Okay, which one of these are the future stars? Right. And so I had to find out who had the innate capability, and then you can't determine it off a resume.

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And so I had to figure out that I found one question that I could get people engaged on, and I could listen to them speak and what and what Elio teaches you has taught me at least was if you get people engaged, and you watch them process their information, you can actually determine if you roughly know how old they are, you can see where they are in their thought processes. And then you can determine what trajectory that they're going to be on of their capability. And so I just believe that's true. And I had it play out with multiple candidates, and you could project doesn't mean that that's what they're going to become. But it just means that's what they have the capability to become

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Ross  

Higher propensity for the outcome. 

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Michael  

Now, obviously, you don't become something just because you have the capability, you got to actually put the work in you got to be engaged over time. There's a great book called The lessons of experience that was done in the late 80s, early 90s, by people that eventually became one of the Luminor people, which says, the certain kinds of experiences fill people in in their gaps, whether it's be part of a startup and part of a turnaround, your first supervisory experience, yada, yada, yada, if you are just really engaged and curious, when you combine that with a great capability, that's how you get great careers, by and large. If people are engaged, curious, and they have capability, you're going to have great careers by and large, and you're committed, right? And I happen to believe if you throw in a healthy sense of just decent values, by and large people have really, really good careers. That's how I look at these things. So it's a little bit both.

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Ross  

I'd love to get your thoughts on a couple of aspects that are going on in my mind the moment we're in the early stages of our business. And whilst I've had 20 years of running other businesses, you know, you talk about the experience, you know, when you have to fire a load of people When you win something, when you lose something, all of those things, you then decide what do I want to let go off? What do I want to repeat? What I want to do better next time, you know, all of those areas. And something that is endlessly fascinating me is this challenge around how our values of being good human beings through transformation and change and disruption.

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And all of the clouds predictions, whatever it might be, is that there's going to be significant change rescaling and upskilling change, there's going to be huge layoffs redundancies, the US at the moment, you know, an all time high of these kinds of situations of my identity wrapped up in who I am. And what my work is, the pressures on mental health, the pressures for organizations to ensure employability, inside or outside of their organization is a concept around ethical redundancy. And I'm interested, you know, we've probably got maybe five minutes left, you've faced transformations of workforces, and doing it in a humane way. And often what I've seen happen is, is your check that will allow you to go figure out what next, if you're slightly higher up, you might then get some access to counseling or support or various things. But at scale, it's very hard to support people through how to find what their next career path is, when they've been valuable, and they no longer are valuable for whatever situation, how might organizations do better? In the face of hard challenges of a workforce at scale, no longer being valuable, or able to provide value for that organization? What would you like to see change and shift? And how might we navigate this very real situation better?

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Michael  

Really have five minutes huh?

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Ross  

Maybe we'll make it a bit longer. On the episode, let's see how it goes.

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Michael  

We could get a whole group of people together, I think you hit a massive, massive vein, if you will, of opportunity, right? Because business is to me Darwinian by nature, right? And now Now we're talking about a whole bunch of people. I think it's the number one issue facing the next 20 years in the United States is that the economy is really, really good at being Darwinian. And there's there's a whole swath of the population that's going to be victimized because they're about to discover that through AI, it's really, really clear that AI is going to expose a lot of people who don't have opposable thumbs.

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So the question is the free marketplace going to fill in the blanks and help people find new opposable thumbs? Ultimately, maybe? Probably not fast enough, is the answer. And so, as a believer, I'm a personal believer that business is best suited among all the social institutions to actually help people. That's one of the reasons I chose to go into business and not some other form of work. So I ultimately believe that businesses will find opportunity, and therefore fill the blanks, I would like to see people ultimately not just count on someone else to go do it for them. And so I think that in a world where you're leaving people behind as you transform, I would like to see it not just be left to the right management's and the heck Harrison's of the world, because they're not going to do it.

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Now, they could try. But that's not really what they're skilled at. And so they're not equipped to do it. If they were really enterprising, they might build those models, but they're really not. They're not capable of doing that. It's not that they're in the business of doing, they would be an example of trying to transform their business model in a way they're not skilled at doing right. So the question to me is, in a world where post secondary education is clearly falling flat in that regard, to me, that's an opportunity where post secondary education institutions, there's 3700 colleges and universities in this country, and that's way too many. So I would say that's an example of how the post secondary education were 3700. Some number of those 3700 could probably figure out how to fill that void is the short answer for our five minute conversation. Yeah, I think here's the opportunity.

Ross  

It's such an exciting opportunity to where I founded this organization with mind to make sure no one's left behind. Yeah, we're not going to do that alone. That's going to be through load collaborations. And to me, it's not about equality of everyone being the same. It's about co-elevation. So wherever someone is that they have an opportunity for a tomorrow, the looks brighter than yesterday, and we need to do it fast and we need to do it at scale. And the reality of all of the knock on effects, mental health, physical health, all of these things if we get this wrong, it's a big deal. And I think organizations need to play a role in how they help serve and support and it has to be two way. Yeah, 100%. Right. I believe the same, you know, it can't be done for them. But it has to have an opportunity, a pathway and a roadmap for them to get back to whatever is chapter two, three or four, you know,

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Michael  

Yeah, yeah. And I respect what Amazon's doing when they, they go into their DCS. And they say, look what we'll do tuition assistance, because we assume at some point, you're gonna want to leave us. And so then they look at tuition assistance related to the the employee ability in the market that in which you're operating. I think it's a good thought. I happen to think that a public private partnership that has a sort of broader reach, you know, living here in Phoenix, you've got Arizona state where the President is saying, basically, his strategic plan is I want to educate the world. Right? I want to educate everybody.

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I don't think you leave it up. But there's an interesting partnership possibility, right? You know, and you've got University of Phoenix that clearly has and Southern New Hampshire, you know, you've got these schools that have put their toes in the water on providing broad access to education, it requires some more thought. But there are there are partners out there that have started to go down this path. So anyhow, I want to be respectful of the time. But it's a great thought talk about an industry that deserves disruption. I mean, post secondary education, second highest cost inflation rate behind pharmaceutical industry, or health care. Where's the value? I mean, the whole conversation about forgiving student debt. I mean, if that isn't a cry for saying, you know, look, we're not getting value from what you're doing. There's a bifurcation going on. I mean, the whole place so.

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Ross  

There's a huge reorganization coming isn't it? I hope that we come out with the least casualties as possible. And that's going to take innovation, maybe at Horizon three level.

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Michael  

Everyone is going to be horizon three.

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Ross  

Somebody is going to be. As a final piece. If there is one area that somebody who's listening to this has been inspired by some of your thoughts and pieces, how might they be able to reach out get in touch with you? Or if they're in an organization that would like to know more about the Sierra Institute and those sorts of things? How do people get in touch with you Michael?

Michael  

Just connect with me on LinkedIn. I'll be glad to link back in with you. And I look forward to that connection.

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Ross  

Brilliant. It's been a real pleasure. Have a great rest of your day and look forward to continuing our conversation overtime.

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Michael  

Absolutely, have a blast.

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Voiceover  

Do you have the level of adaptability to survive and thrive in the rapid changes ahead? Has your resilience got more comeback than a yo-yo? Do you have the ability to unlearn in order to reskill, upskill, and break through? Find out today and uncover your adaptability profile and score your AQ visit "AQai.io" To gain your personalized report across 15 scientifically validated dimensions of adaptability for limited time enter code "Podcast65" for a complimentary AQ me assessment. AQ AI transforming the way people, teams, and organizations navigate change.

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Outro

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