Hi, I'm Julian Berkenshure, I hope you enjoyed the second week of the program, managing the company of the future. I'm just going to give you a couple of reflections on the discussion threads that I've been, I've been watching with interest. And there was some fascinating ones there, obviously the two main ones were the two. That were linked specifically to a couple of videos and I'll come back to those, but there was also some other quite nice ones. There was a fascinating one on kind of the working at home versus working in the office. That was an interesting thread. And there was also an interesting one on, for example, reward versus recognition programs. So, if you didn't get involved in those two. I encourage you to take a look. Let me just spend a couple of minutes talking about the two videos and the conversations which follow from them. The first video was, was Gary Hammel, talking about this notion that big companies particularly have allocational rigidities. In terms of how that they, they, they fund new ideas. And he had lots of creative ideas, and end up creating kind of, an angel fund, an angel-based fund for investing of new ideas. My thought on that had the following, he does a really terrific job of kind of nailing the problem. Every big company you talk to recognise that this is an issue. They're much better carrying on, doing what they've always done, than getting new ideas started. He also, I think, brings a very creative angle by bringing his experiences up from Silicon Valley of how the market, ideas in capital work, and how you might inject those kind of concepts into the company. Where I think it's more difficult, Gary would recognize this as well I've spoken to him several times, is that the devil is in the details. In other words, whilst this notion of creating seed funding mechanism and getting people to put little bits of their budget into it is terrific in principle. The actual practical realities of doing it are really challenging. And I've seen many, many companies dabble in versions of this. And some of them have worked, but many of them have come a little bit unstuck. They kind of worked for awhile, and then they kind of lost interest. Or their, the projects ended up being put into a separate fund where the, the money existed. And the reason it is fairly obvious, which is that a program like this realistically takes a good three, four, five years before it's got a chance at really working. In other words, the time it takes for a program like this to yield meaningful results is far longer than the typical tenure of a manager or the appetite, if you like. For people within the company for playing with one of these sort of schemes. So, almost always what happens is that after about a year people say well, it's not quite working and it's posing down, perhaps a new manager comes in. So, the devil's in the details in terms of designing the thing and having. The patience to see it through.So I remain very excited about the potential of the sort of scheme Gary's got in mind. But what we need is to find companies who will hedge to kind of stick with those ideas for awhile to give them a chance of succeeding. So that's the Gary video. The second video that you had this week was a video from a chap called Steven Weber at Berkeley. It's a much more philosophical video. He doesn't give you a very practical answer. What he does is talk in very abstract terms about this notion that if we left kind of a trail of our actions. If everyone could see what each other was doing. The world would be a better place, because we will be able to actually follow through on the full consequences of what we've done. And we'd also be able to coordinate better with one another because we can actually understand what each other's doing. So he's all for transparency, transparency. A societal level and also transparency within the firms. And for the most part I'm also in agreement that more transparency is good, because most organizations are much too secretive with information which should be shared. I think it is worth pointing just as was discussed in, in the threads that there are also cost of transparency. Transparency is good because it helps us to coordinate with each other. It makes things work more efficiently, because you know what each other's doing. There are risks to transparency inside organizations. There's always this risk of what you might call social comparison. In other words, if I know exactly what my colleagues are earning, what sort of bonuses they're getting, what sort of promotions they're getting. All of the transparencies about sharing information which is usually held secret, that actually creates some negative spill overs. It really does make some people a little bit unhappy and it can actually have. You know, very kind of, negative consequences. There's also a complexity story, if we throw all the information out about everything to everybody. There is risk that people just get burdened and it actually gets quite difficult to know which information of all the stuff that's been given to us, to focus on. So, it turns out that actually, yes transparency is good, but we still need gate keepers. We still needed trusted gatekeepers, who will take the responsibility for deciding what information actually is beneficial for sharing, and which information frankly, is better just to keep, keep private. Now, the libertarians out there would disagree that everything should be kept quiet. Long experience in organizations tell me, tells me, that actually there are times when we should be keeping information, some information a little bit off limits. The third and final thing I'm going to say links to the Steve Weber video, which was the question about what roles managers should play in a highly kind of a transparent environment. And I think, I'll make two points there. The first is that the more information is shared, the more information goes around the organization without managers being involved in some ways the easier, or was rather the, the, the, the, the less burdensome the job of the manager is. Because in the old days, managers spent a lot of time actually acting as a conduit for information. They, they shared information, that was their job. Well, if information is shared, it means that suddenly that part of the manager's job is gone and they have to start thinking about, shall we say, the higher order parts of their work. And what that means is, go back to the famous expression from Warren Buffett, that it's only when the tide goes out that we know who's swimming naked. The same applies there. In a world when information is shared. It's only when everything is shared that we figure out which managers are actually doing the job that managers are actually supposed to do. Which is about mentoring, and coaching, and developing the people that work for them. The job of management actually becomes more difficult in a transparent world because we actually have to work harder on all of the softer aspects of the job. So that's point one. The second point, in a transparent world, you know, there's assumption of trust. There's an assumption that everybody actually is acting in an honest and egalitarian sort of way. And for that to work, the manager has to respect their trust. In other words, the manager has to be very acutely conscious. I'm not playing favorites because that sort of favoritism just doesn't go well, down well, in a transparent society. So it really again, raises the bar in the terms of the quality it manages that actually will survive and thrive in such an organization. So, hopefully that's useful. A little bit of additional kind of color. On the, the discussion threads, I look forward to speaking to you again a week from now. Thanks.
