Ep064: Adapting to disruptive innovation and exponential change with Frode Odegard

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ep064 adapting to disruptive innovation and exponential change with Frode Odegard on the TalentGrow Show with Halelly Azulay
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Success in our ever-changing, turbulent times not only hinges on successfully adapting to things as they are, but correctly anticipating change. This is the understanding that drives my guest Frode Odegard, thought leader in disruptive innovation and author of Post-Lean Thinking: A New Vision for Corporate Innovation, to help leaders and organizations stay on the cutting edge of history. In this truly eye-opening episode of the TalentGrow Show with Halelly Azulay, Frode shares his vision of human economic change from the Stone Age to the Industrial Age and explains what he believes are some of the most important factors defining our current transition into what he calls a Post-Industrial Civilization. Listen now to learn what he means by the “cycle of disruption”, what are the two trends he was able to reduce 12,000 years of human economic history down to, how the relationship between corporations and employees is changing, why leaders need to focus on recruiting “makers”, and so much more!

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WHAT YOU’LL LEARN:

  • What are the two distinct trends that Frode was able to reduce 12,000 years of human economic history to? (5:46)

  • What’s the “cycle of disruption” that is changing organizations and is going to require a change in leadership and management practices? (8:06)

  • What about the “counter cycle”? (Frode gives a vivid real-life example of this) (9:42)
  • What does Halelly say we need to take from all of this? (12:34)
  • According to Frode, a defining feature of the disruptive landscape that’s starting to emerge is the transition from stable corporate giants to networks of smaller organizations that don’t last very long. Listen to his fascinating analysis of this and what it means for individuals. (13:27)
  • Frode shares a surprising figure on average employee tenure in startups (14:40)
  • What’s a specific economic opportunity Frode says is likely to come out of all this? (16:31)
  • Why leaders need to be focused on recruiting “makers” (18:04)
  • What does Frode say the new generation is less interested in than previous generations? (18:57)
  • What’s the new relationship dynamic between corporations and employees that Frode envisions as becoming more attractive in the future? (19:46)
  • “Organizations now realize that they need to _____ __________ at a faster pace than before.” (20:59)
  • How does Frode use the purchase of Instagram as an example of the type of world we’re moving towards? (22:07)
  • What’s the most important shift that leaders need to make in their thinking? (23:06)
  • What does Frode mean when he says we’re moving towards a “post-industrial civilization” and a “civilization of creators as opposed to producers”? (23:38)
  • Halelly puts her best devil’s advocate foot forward, temporarily giving a voice to the “naysayers” (25:34)
  • Facial recognition + drones + artificial intelligence + assassination = yikes, how’d things get so dark? (26:15)
  • Want a new garage for your house? Just turn on the ol’ 3D printer (27:50)
  • What’s Frode’s final tip? (30:59)
  • What does Halelly say can make a person much more likely to succeed in their career? (32:38) 

RESOURCES:

ABOUT FRODE ODEGARD:

Frode is a thought leader in disruptive innovation and organizational design. He led LSI’s decade-long effort of reinventing Lean for modern knowledge work, resulting in the Lean Systems Framework™. The methodology has been used in larger organizations such as Lockheed, Honeywell, and Schibsted as well as in smaller firms across many industries. For this contribution Frode was made a Fellow of the Lean Systems Society.

Frode’s second major contribution goes beyond Lean Thinking to the heart of the dramatic disruption from exponential technologies that we see today. Researching 12,000 years of human organizations, he concluded that we are transitioning to a post-industrial civilization and economy. This means that a fundamentally different set of ideas and principles must now be used as we innovate, develop organizations, design jobs and pursue careers. The result of this work is Post-Lean Thinking — management science for the post-industrial transition.

Frode has more than 25 years of experience as an entrepreneur and trusted advisor to high-tech executives. Before founding LSI in 2004, Frode was the CEO and founder of Ødegård Labs, Inc. in 1991, a software engineering research and consulting firm. In 1996 he founded Ødegård Media, an early online content developer. While attending high school, Frode in 1986 founded his first company, M2CS, a startup building next-generation tools for embedded software development.

Originally from Norway, Frode immigrated to California in 1990. His biggest passions aside from work are philosophy, history, mathematics, historical linguistics and Aikido. He resides in Silicon Valley, but spends much of his time traveling overseas. He is always looking for another dojo to visit.

Transcript:

Announcer: Welcome to the TalentGrow Show, where you can get actionable results-oriented insight and advice on how to take your leadership, communication and people skills to the next level and become the kind of leader people want to follow. And now, your host and leadership development strategist, Halelly Azulay.

Halelly: Hey there TalentGrowers. This is Halelly Azulay, your leadership development strategist here at TalentGrow. I’m excited this week to share with you a guest who is not going to talk about nitty-gritty small stuff, but rather big, heady, futuristic things. I hope you have your thinking cap on tight for this one. You’re going to love it. It really requires us to stretch our imagination and this guest, Frode Odegard, is a friend of mine and a colleague, and CEO and chairman of Post-Lean Institute, is going to talk about the cycle of disruption that is going to change industries, organizations and the future of work as we know it. He’s going to also break it down for what it actually means for us, as leaders, as team members, as professionals, for the people that work for us and in general, for the work that we have to do in terms of developing people and what that’s going to mean in the future, with artificial intelligence and all of the things that the future brings. It’s really a very interesting conversation.

I wanted to let you know that I want you to stick around for the end because I have news, and a challenge for you. The news is that now you can leave me a voice message on my website, and that you can do from any device. Whether you are on your desktop or on your iPad or on your phone, right on the right-hand side of any page of my website, talentgrow.com, there is a little button that says, “Voice message” and you can leave me a message. That message can be a question, a comment, feedback, an idea, a suggestion, a request – anything. You just record yourself for a 90-second message and it gets sent to me. If you want me to use it on a future show, of course just give me your permission and we’ll use it. Other than that, I will use the information to help make sure that this show is better for you, whatever it is that you tend to leave me. In order to entice you to try this out, because I really want people to take a chance and just leave me a voice mail, I’m going to hold a contest. In this contest, I’m going to draw three lucky winners from all of the people that take advantage of this opportunity and leave me a voice message through my website, anytime between the time that this is released – which is October 24 – and the end of October 2017, so whatever time you’re listening to this, hopefully it is before October 31, 2017, because that will make you eligible to win one of the books of a previous guest from our show. Stick around to the end. I’ll give you a little more detail, and in the meantime, enjoy this episode with Frode Odegard.

Welcome back TalentGrowers. Today I have my colleague and friend, Frode Odegard, on the show today. He is a thought leader in disruptive innovation and organizational design. He is the founder and CEO of the Post-Lean Institute, and he has been on the front-end of thinking about the technology disruption that’s going on in our world, and the exponential changes that it’s going to bring to our organizations. That’s why I wanted to have him come on the show and talk to us about this. I think that he can really open up our eyes to some of the changes that are coming down the pike, but more importantly about all of the thinking that he’s been doing about what we need to do to prepare.

Frode is originally from Norway and he came to the U.S. in 1990, but he’s been an entrepreneur for a very long time, including when he was in high school. I’m looking forward to our conversation. Frode, welcome to the TalentGrow Show.

Frode: Thank you for having me. It’s great to be here.

Halelly: Well, it’s wonderful to have you here and I appreciate your time today. Before we get started thinking about exponential technologies and disruption and all of these buzzwords that everybody likes to throw around – and I know you’re going to help enlighten us about what they mean – I’d love for you to describe your professional journey. Where did you get started and how did you get to where you are today, in a brief way?

Frode: I grew up in Norway. My parents had a tech company, so I sort of grew up in my dad’s lab. Did a software company in high school, couldn’t find any venture capital, so it was sort of an entrepreneur refugee in Silicon Valley, so I came here just over 25 years ago. Started two or three companies and sort of gradually went from the extreme end of the technical spectrum, from theoretical computer science, into organizational design, because I was curious about why organizations weren’t smarter about developing products. Then ended up looking at how the world around us is changing and how organizations still have to change dramatically themselves.

Halelly: So you’ve been kind of in that space of technology and innovation and entrepreneurship and Silicon Valley for a really long time, which gives you I think that kind of interesting vantage point to talk about what we’re going to talk about today. Most recently you published an eBook which I’m going to link to in the show notes. It’s really great and an easy read. Not easy, easy, but clear. It’s clear and it makes sense. It’s called Post Lean Thinking, a New Vision for Corporate Innovation and in this book, you describe a cycle of disruption that is changing organizations and therefore is going to require a change in leadership and management practices as well. I’d love for you to describe that cycle for us.

Frode: Sure, it’s the whole backdrop for how everything around us is changing. Actually, it’s a pretty big and old story, so I looked at basically 12,000 years of human economic history, from the stone age and the introduction of agriculture and the bronze age and into eventually the industrial revolution and the information age that resulted in where we are today, and I was able to reduce it to a couple of trends. One was our mastery of our world around us, shaping the world around us as we wanted, with technology, essentially. If you think about the introduction of agriculture, that was big technology disruption which resulted in a whole new type of human culture where we settled down instead of hunting and gathering. Then with the bronze age, you get the sort of further refinement in technology that results in written laws and we went to writing systems, we got contracts, outsourcing global trade, bureaucracy and administration, so all the organizations we have today, in a way, can be seen as sort of high-tech versions of what was in the bronze age.

Then if you fast-forward to the industrial revolution, we get mass production, automation of production, and more centralization and more automation. It’s kind of like the technology portion of this is only half of the story. The other half of the story is how it changes how we live and how we work and how it changed our cultures. In addition to technology evolution, the other trend we looked at was stratification. Basically how many layers in society, how many layers in an organization. I’m sure a lot of your listeners work in large organizations where you have a lot of layers, with the CEO to entry-level employees. But when we were doing hunting and gathering, there were basically two levels. It was you and the leader of your band, your extended family. You got to the Neolithic, you have division of labor, so you have people who are specialized in whether it’s religious rights or soldiering to protect from neighboring tribes raiding your crops, or people minding the livestock or people doing the gathering of harvest, and so on. In the Bronze Age even more so, and of course now we have a gazillion different types of jobs and we have many, many layers of management in a lot of organizations.

What we started looking at was how, what we call the cycle of disruption, it’s not just about technology. It’s about how that technology is changing society and changing organizations. What’s happened now is technology development is becoming exponential, so we all know about Moore’s Law - every couple of years, microprocessors get twice as fast, etc. That continues to rise, ever since the stone age, but stratification now is starting to collapse because now we’re seeing new kinds of organizations like Airbnb and Uber and so on that decouple people and assets and services from firms. We’re entering this very loosely-coupled world that’s enabled by this cycle of disruption.

The cycle itself, what it looks like, if you have investment in developing of these, or further refining these exponential technologies, and that can be whether it’s artificial intelligence or sensors or augmented reality, virtual reality and so on. Those technologies are then used in organizations to not just make them more efficient, but create new kinds of business models that have much higher capital efficiency. Think about Uber or Airbnb versus the Marriott, where Marriott has 400,000 employees and Airbnb has less than a percentage of that. The capital efficiency for the later of the business model is much higher. What this does is it frees up more capital to further invest in developing and improving exponential technologies so the cycle continues. That’s the main cycle. There’s a counter cycle, which has to do with regulation and mindset and anything that creates friction in adopting these technologies and using them to change organizations, ultimately change the world.

Halelly: Can you give an example of that?

Frode: If you look at both Airbnb and Uber, who are the most well-known examples of these new types of business models, you see that they struggle with countries where, for example, even in the States, where in New York they passed legislation restricting people’s ability to rent out their spare bedroom on Airbnb. In Denmark, Uber had to actually give up upgrading and they announced they were going to exit the country because regulations prevented them from competing with traditional cab drivers. In Norway, it’s sort of semi-legal, but if you are a the equivalent of an UberX driver, in Norway, the police are now arresting you when they catch you and they’ll take away your driver’s license.

Halelly: Why?

Frode: Because regulations and laws are written in cooperation with and to protect established businesses and business models. And of course, we don’t really have politicians generally who really understand these changes very well yet, and so there is a lot of education that’s required to update or remove regulations to allow for all of these technologies to benefit customers. Because it’s not the customers they’re protecting, it’s the incumbent businesses.

Halelly: That’s right, I agree. This is probably a topic for a whole other show, because it’s very interesting to think about what’s behind it. It’s probably under the veneer of protecting the public, but it’s probably driven by a lot of special interest groups and lobbyists and so on and the establishment, right? So a company – and I’m not saying that Marriott has this or any of the actual competitors of these new disruptive technologies are the ones that are doing the lobbying – but I'm sure if you are a very established and very big and very wealthy corporation that has a lot of vested interests in the current way of doing things, you probably also already have a very established process to influence politicians to keep them that way.

Frode: Yeah, you’re exactly right. They pay lobbying firms to make sure that regulations and laws are continued to favor, to protect the status quo.

Halelly: Putting that aside, because we are not going to get into politics on this show, I know that what you’ve been talking about and you’ve been going around the world speaking about this, very impressively, it’s coming. Whether or not we get bumps in the road or obstacles set up through this counter cycle of disruption from lawmakers, let’s say, and regulations and so on, I’m probably not going to stop this bus from rolling down the hill. The changes are already here and they’re coming at a faster and faster pace. We all need to recognize that it’s probably going to change the way that our organizations will need to work in the future, and specifically for the TalentGrowers community here, we’re thinking about ourselves as leaders and probably also for our own careers, what does this mean for us? How can we prepare for it and what do you think is going to be a problem with the current style that organizations are implementing management and leadership and people development versus the style that we need to adopt in the future?

Frode: I think the landscape that’s emerging now is one where we’re probably going to be transitioning from these corporate giants more to networks of small organizations that don’t last very long. We call them micro organizations. And these micro organizations will be highly automated. The kind of jobs that are any kind of repetitive, that involve repetitive tasks, whether it’s physical labor or knowledge work, those jobs are unquestionably going away due to robots and AI and so on. So, if you are doing even if you’re doing repetitive knowledge work, you should be looking at what does that mean for your career, and maybe you should be moving into creative knowledge work – some type of design or creating new businesses, maybe becoming more technologically literate and so on. Because it’s not necessarily the case that you have to develop a brand new technology from scratch as much as being able to find and employ technology to create value for others.

The other thing that’s happening is employee tenures are likely to continue to go down. I mean, we have to go back to our parents, our grandparents’ generation, to find lifetime employment as something that’s a realistic ideal. In Silicon Valley where I am, we found one study that showed the average employee tenure in start-ups was 10.8 months as of 2014. That will probably continue to go down as organizational lifespans are also shrinking. If you make the Fortune 500 list, you’re probably not going to stay on there as long as before.

Halelly: Because your organization is just not going to exist as such?

Frode: You’re going to get disrupted by others, you’re going to get bought out. It’s a more turbulent and faster moving world, and I think what that means for individuals, and especially to an American audience – I know you have a global audience – but I think especially in the States, people are kind of used to the idea of taking more responsibility for their own education for their career development. The old ideal was you would go to work for an employer and they’d have kind of a safe career, spanning multiple years with that employer, and the employer would pay for your professional development and they would sort of take care of you. I think Toyota is an example of an organization that did extremely well with that type of leadership model, where leaders basically are teachers and they’re expected to develop their people as problem solvers. That empowers people to then make the organization better, make it more efficient, create more value for customers and shareholders and so on.

We’re really moving into a world now of just in time micro organizations, where people are going to be much more involved with creating their own jobs. Of course that means there’s going to be a huge new industry of human capital development, both for people who are just becoming more proactive about their professional development, but also for all the people who are going to lose their jobs because of new technologies. Anyone who is driving or works in the fast food business or any of these types of repetitive jobs, they’re just going to be gone over the next few years. We’re going to start seeing dramatic reductions in employment in those areas. There’s an economic opportunity for people who think they can help those people to create new lives and new careers.

Halelly: Are you saying that the opportunity is in developing and providing development opportunities?

Frode: Yes. We used to think that to have an education, you have to go to an established university, the brand of university was important. Now we’re starting to see an alternative. Some people call this micro degrees, nano degrees. You have some incremental human development, whether learning a new programming language or some new type of marketable skill, and you have then private sector actors who can provide that, perhaps using online education, leveraging AI, and so on. So, we’re going to see human capital development industry that’s going global, that’s going to self-utilize these exponential technologies to help uplift a lot of people no matter where they are in that ladder from trash collection up to particle statistics or doing quantum computing. There’s always something that all of us can learn, and where we’re going to get that development from, that’ll change dramatically I think over the next few years.

Halelly: Very interesting. I know something else you wrote about in your eBook is about how we need to start being focused on recruiting people, you call them makers, and developing those types of employees. Focusing on recruiting and developing those types of employees. Tell us more about what you mean by makers.

Frode: American culture, in particular, has always had this sort of cultural strand of self reliance, and the maker movement is – and there are conferences now around the world that have started up – where they’re teaching basic electronics or mechanical engineering skills, sort of do it yourself projects that used to be for our parents’ generation, that would be like chemistry sets or Tinker Toys. Now it’s microprocessors and sensors. So you have kids learning about this. The new generation now, the Millennials, are really not interested in going to work for large, traditional corporations. They would rather just have autonomy, have experiences, maybe not too concerned about status. This varies by culture somewhat, but overall, attracting this new generation who have the kind of dynamic spirit that young people have, independent thought that young people often have before they’ve been corrupted by too many adult concerns and life experiences, this is a challenge for large corporations. Because the ones who are comfortable working in a conservative, slow-moving, hierarchical type of environment, are not the ones who are going to do radical disruptive innovation, which is what you as a large company especially desperately need.

So one of the ideas we’ve been working on is a concept called a higher order organization, where a corporate basically becomes a platform for creating these disruptive new micro organizations. That’s not just about being able to analyze industries and finding disruption opportunities. It’s also about a new kind of relationship, a new kind of social contract, if you will, between the corporation and the people they recruit, to do this work. In short, you basically have to treat them more like co-founders than employees. Instead of striving for keeping them as long as possible, maybe the opposite is better – maybe you should give them a maximum tenure and then say, “Okay, you have 24, 36 months. We’re going go give you all this training, these resources, access to partners, to markets and so on, and in that time that’s your chance to make your mark on the world and develop a new business.” That’s going to be much more attractive we think.

There are some examples of companies moving to that sort of structure, where they have a portfolio of new ventures, and that’s just because organizations realize they have to renew themselves at a faster pace than before. Whatever you think your core business is today, it’s unlikely if you’re alive in 10 years, your core business will have changed two or three times over.

Halelly: That’s amazing. I’m sort of envisioning what you’re describing, and you’re saying that because it will no longer pay to be a very large, hierarchical organization, and because the business that you’re in and the products that you provide or services and the people that you serve, everything, all of that is in flux, that you can’t really take the time or it makes no sense for you to take the time to build major processes and structures around departments and silos and following protocols and all of that, but you need to be so agile and adaptive that just sort of like these pop-up shops, I’m thinking. Just pop-up project teams, and have them be a finite project, and the employees are just sort of project contractors?

Frode: Not so much contractors, more co-creators. In the early days of talking to people about this, these ideas, we used pop-up restaurants as an analog, but it’s more the micro organizations you create, ideally will be as automated as possible. So scaling those micro organizations doesn’t mean creating lots of new jobs that need to be done, or tasks that need to be done by humans. So think Instagram, for instance. Acquired for a billion dollars when they had 13 employees. That’s the sort of world we’re moving to, where if you create something that’s not scalable, you’re just basically … it’s temporary survival until whatever you created can be automated, using robotics and AI.

Halelly: It’s so interesting. So we all have to shift. We also have to shift our thinking about the world of work and the role of organizations and our jobs. So as leaders, those of us who are already leaders, or those of us who are preparing to take on leadership roles, what do you think is the most important shift that leaders need to make?

Frode: It’s fine to develop people, but the time horizon you have for developing people is shrinking dramatically. And the type of work that everyone will be doing, it’s not going to be routine execution work, so much. It’s going to be creating new stuff. Creating new businesses, creating new design, creating new experiences. What’s happening is, the result of these two trends now that I mentioned earlier – stratification and technology development – parting ways, is actually that we think it’s a signal that we’re now moving into a post-industrial civilization. That’s a civilization where we’re becoming very decentralized and decoupled, because we’re less constrained by physical constraints, but where our ability to automate things increases dramatically. If you compare that with the industrial revolution, it was automation but we also got centralization, production. Now we’re getting, we have the first primitive version of nano-technology, which is 3D printing, so what will happen is the physical goods that you wanted to buy will be created closer and closer to the site of use and consumption, as opposed to being created far away, say in China, and then you ship them by boat and so on and so forth.

This kind of civilization that we’re becoming, this post-industrial civilization, is going to have people in it that are not doing very much routine work, unless they want to, unless it’s something that their customers want to have done manually. People will want to go to a bar that has a human bartender, because it’ll be exotic and cool to have someone that’s an actual human, telling stories. At first having a robot bartender will be cool, then it will be routine and boring and having a human bartender will be extra special. So we’re becoming a civilization basically of creators, as opposed to producers. So a civilization of poets and artists and engineers and scientists and explorers, that’s the type of civilization we’re becoming. That used to be occupations for the elite, and now it’s going to be something that everyone is going to be involved with.

Halelly: If we could have another hour, what I would want to ask you about is, I know that some of the naysayers, or some of the opponents of this kind of trend – I don’t even know if there’s any point to being an opponent of it, it’s coming – would say, “Well, you say that it used to be just the elite, and now everyone needs to move into that direction, but not everyone can, and so are you being elitist in creating a future where only those people who have those kinds of skills or those kinds of aptitudes will survive?” Is this some kind of Darwinian tragedy where the majority of people will die?

Frode: I think of it more as an anthropological view. So in other words, if we fast-forward a few decades, there will be no people who ever had those manual jobs, those kinds of jobs, where people are going to be losing their jobs for the next 10 or 20 years. Those people just won’t exist anymore. They’ll just have died out. So this is a transitional, in human history, it’s a transitional type of problem as we go from one type of organization to another, and this is not a frictionless transition. I mean, we’re going to see, we could even see military conflicts as a result of this type of development. And because exponential technologies, for one thing, of course enable you to do bad, violent things at a much lower cost. So you’ll think of the coupling of artificial intelligence with a drone with an explosive, with facial recognition, and you send it down the street and it’ll find the pattern match to face of the person that you want to assassinate and that drone could be an anonymous drone and it could have been assembled from components that cost $50.

Halelly: You see why you listen to the TalentGrow Show? To be uplifted, just like this! [laughs]

Frode: Yeah, so what I’m saying is, we have citizens and we have governments who largely have an industrial-era mindset, centered around top-down control and the idea of resources being very limited and all of that, and with a type of world we’re moving into, very soon if you want the new garage for your house, you can have it 3D printed over the weekend, right? So that the world of buildings and architecture will change. The physical world around us will change at a much faster pace. I always point people to Las Vegas as an example, especially people from Europe or people from where it’s common to be nostalgic, and also the East Coast. Keeping things the way they’ve been, right? So preservation societies. In Vegas when a hotel gets boring, people just tear it down and build another. Nobody feels sentimental about that. So when technology allows us to do that at a much, much lower cost, then anyone can be a designer, if you will, a creator.

Halelly: That’s really neat. Well, super exciting and we’re running out of time, so what’s new and exciting on your horizon? What’s got your attention these days in a short form?

Frode: In part, it’s just finding more ways of reaching more people with our research. We mostly help private equity investors and corporates make sense of the changes and so that’s kind of the business development side of my day job, running the Post-Lean Institute, because we’re developing new management science for this transition, so new innovation practices, new tools, and so on. Then we’re also working on some research to understand how mindsets in different countries translate into policies that enable or hamper this type of transition, because our mission is to accelerate humanity’s transition into this new type of civilization. We want to be able to help both business leaders and investors and policy makers kind of understand what the impact of these policies are. Instead of making that a party political type of discussion, we’re trying to go deeper and then look at what are people’s basic assumptions about how the world works and how it should work? That’s some very interesting research, so there are a couple of things. Other research stuff that we’re doing, too, that I can’t quite talk about yet, but it’s really about helping people make sense of and navigate these changes. That’s what we’re in business to do.

Halelly: Very neat. Well, I’m glad that you are, because I think a lot of people feel very inundated, overwhelmed or confused by all of this change, and some people have more maybe time or just the interest to learn more about it and a lot of people feel like their current job and other priorities are taking up a lot of their time, and so anybody that can help them figure it out or create shortcuts to know what to do is probably going to be in high demand. So what’s one specific action that listeners can take today, this afternoon, tomorrow, this week, that you think can help them become a more effective leader or maybe help them in their own career, given your view of things? One specific action.

Frode: I think that the most important thing you can do as a leader is if you’re not someone who is already working in the tech business and so on is to get some conference or get some reading material that specifically addresses technology disruption, and kind of bring some of that perspective into your organization. Otherwise, at whatever level people are in organizations, most of their focus is how can we get the quarterly, monthly, weekly goals done? How can we get stuff done that we need to get done now? People kind of lose track of that bigger picture. Of course our eBook, too, has some big picture information and some history about how we got to where we are and where we think it’s going. Hope that’s not too self-serving, but we worked hard on that, so I’m happy to recommend it.

Halelly: Well, awesome. I agree. I shared it already on social media and I will definitely link to it from the show notes. Anything else where you think maybe like a TedX talk or some other formats where people can consume more information about this trend?

Frode: I think really understanding the role that you play and I guess it’s just repeating what I said earlier, but understanding, getting more perspective on where your organization and you as an individual fit in, into all of this. And so maybe going out and having conversations with people who work in technology companies. If you have a friend of a friend in social media, try and make that part of your network, part of the people you talk to, to kind of bring some of that mindset, some of that thinking into your thoughts and your organization.

Halelly: I love it. That’s a great suggestion. I think this is very related to some of the others, there’s a lot of research out there on network technology that says that people that read and talk to people and connect with information and people that are outside of their own field and their own industry are much more likely to succeed in their careers because they’re able to think more divergently and then connect and make those connections between things between people that are within their industry who are reading their own industry publications and sort of attuned to … they’re reading the same things, they’re meeting the same people, they’re thinking about the same stuff, they have the same ideas. But these kinds of people, and you’re saying listeners can easily become those, can then see things differently, which makes each of us more high-value to everyone we know.

Frode: Yes. Bringing that perspective, especially in the large firm, most of the people you talk to and most of the people you network with during work hours are going to be people in your own organization. They’re likely to have the same blind spots that you do. Because there is so much complexity within the organization, so many relationships you have to maintain, political stuff going on, and frankly just leaving the office and talking to people doing dramatically different things involving technology, especially things like artificial intelligence and virtual reality, augmented reality, if you’re not in technology and there’s someone in your organization already playing around with those things or doing pilot projects, try to get yourself on that team. Volunteer to help them with anything you can, to be part of that effort. This is going to add to your value and also give you valuable perspective.

Halelly: Perfect. I love it. Awesome. Frode, it’s been really a pleasure speaking with you and I’m sorry that our time is up. How can people stay in touch with you and learn more about and from you?

Frode: Well, I’m on LinkedIn, so I guess you can add my URL there for people who want to connect with me that way. And also, our website has some information and every so often there’s a blog post, we have a newsletter and so on, and the address for that is www.PostLean.com.

Halelly: Gotcha. Okay. Awesome. I appreciate your time today and you sharing the insights from all of your research with listeners of the TalentGrow Show and thanks so much for all of your wisdom today.

Frode: Thank you. It was great to be here.

Halelly: What did I tell you? Mind blowing or what? I hope you enjoyed this episode, TalentGrowers. All of the information that we talked about, plus the links of how to stay in touch with Frode and his excellent eBook that you can grab are all on the show notes page which is on my website, talentgrow.com/podcast/episode64. And, while you’re there, of course sign up to get my free 10 Mistakes that Leaders Make tool that’s going to be very helpful for you. Plus, I hope that you will join me and leave me a voice mail message.

As I said earlier, I’m running a contest because I want more people to try it out. It’s not hard. Just pull up your phone, go to talentgrow.com and on any page on that website, you should be able to see a tab on the right side of any page and you just click on that. You sign in and you leave me a voice message. It’s 90 seconds or less, and it can be a question, a request, some feedback about the show, what’s your favorite thing, something you’ve tried to implement you’ve heard on the show and how that went, or something that you’re going to be implementing from this particular episode or a request for a guest or a request for a topic … the sky is the limit! I’m hoping in the future to do some “Ask Halelly” type of episodes, and when people leave me a voice message with a question, I can actually play that on those Ask Halelly episodes. I would love for you to send me a question like that. Then you might be in a future TalentGrow Show episode. How cool would that be?

So to sweeten the deal, to make you want to do it, I hope that you will anyway, but I’m going to pick three lucky winners, randomly, from all the people that submit a voice mail during the timeframe between when this episode is released, which is October 24, 2017, and the end of October 2017, so up until October 31, Halloween, you can leave me a voice mail to be eligible for this contest. I’m going to pick three winners and send them a book.

The TalentGrow Show is part of the C-Suite Radio Network of high-quality business podcasts, so I hope you will check it out over there at C-SuiteRadio.com. That’s it for this episode. I’m still Halelly Azulay, your leadership development strategist here at TalentGrow and I thank you so much for listening. I thank you for being part of this community. And until the next time, make today great.

Announcer: Thanks for listening to the TalentGrow Show, where we help you develop your talent to become the kind of leader that people want to follow. For more information, visit TalentGrow.com.

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