Embark on a visionary journey into the future of leadership and innovation with our guest, Jan Henrik Bartscht, the dynamic force steering Leadapreneur's innovation powerhouse. Hailing from both the UK and Germany, Jan is not your typical CEO; he's a futurist, disruptor, and visionary committed to reshaping 21st-century leadership.
In this episode, we unravel the intricacies of Jan's approach to building an ecosystem that engages talent for innovative outcomes at scale, all executed reliably, predictably, and with guaranteed ROI. Drawing parallels to our previous exploration with Jan, we delve into Jan's dual cultural roots, examining how they shape his worldview and contribute to redefining leadership in the interconnected landscape of the modern world.
Prepare for a robust discussion as we dive into Jan's entrepreneurial journeys. He will articulate his perspectives on the inherent benefits of creativity and innovation. His aspirations extend beyond mere business enhancement; he aims to leverage innovation as a catalyst for positive transformations in the world, seeking to bring forth the utmost benevolence to those in his sphere of influence.
Join us for an episode that stimulates the mind and serves as a clarion call for changemakers eager to navigate the evolving landscape of leadership and innovation.
Embark on a visionary journey into the future of leadership and innovation with our guest, Jan Henrik Bartscht, the dynamic force steering Leadapreneur's innovation powerhouse. Hailing from both the UK and Germany, Jan is not your typical CEO; he's a futurist, disruptor, and visionary committed to reshaping 21st-century leadership.
In this episode, we unravel the intricacies of Jan's approach to building an ecosystem that engages talent for innovative outcomes at scale, all executed reliably, predictably, and with guaranteed ROI. Drawing parallels to our previous exploration with Jan, we delve into Jan's dual cultural roots, examining how they shape his worldview and contribute to redefining leadership in the interconnected landscape of the modern world.
Prepare for a robust discussion as we dive into Jan's entrepreneurial journeys. He will articulate his perspectives on the inherent benefits of creativity and innovation. His aspirations extend beyond mere business enhancement; he aims to leverage innovation as a catalyst for positive transformations in the world, seeking to bring forth the utmost benevolence to those in his sphere of influence.
Join us for an episode that stimulates the mind and serves as a clarion call for changemakers eager to navigate the evolving landscape of leadership and innovation.
Daddy, we can do this. Yeah, Is that? Yeah, let's do this.
Speaker 2:Indeed, let's do this. Okay, let's do this, let's go, yeah, okay. Whew, what a story, yeah.
Speaker 1:Maybe one day when, I'm lucky, I have a production team that can do all of the heavy lifting. That would be nice. Yeah, I suppose there is some level of self-reformant that keeps you honest with the process.
Speaker 2:So it's nice to have those things. I have a friend. He's doing wildlife, shall we say. He has a what can I name you describe now? He's married man of 14 years, right, german guy, but he has a what can we describe as a house mom? Okay, cooks, cleans, but like really looks after him and his wife. Yeah, I can be sort of that motherly love right Kind of, and so that's really cooks some amazing food, makes sure everything's great. I mean he also got a driver for his car. Oh, and I asked Just his little things.
Speaker 1:Where is this in KL? Yeah?
Speaker 2:in.
Speaker 1:KL. Okay, so I've heard of a few people because of you know, especially if you have a stronger currency with your end, while you can, yeah, it's comfortable.
Speaker 2:It's actually really not that crazy. It's really not. It's doable yeah.
Speaker 1:Nice Well, jonas welcome.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Really excited about this conversation, and I mean we only met two days ago, yeah, and immediately we knew we have to get into the studio and go down the rabbit hole, exactly. So, yeah, welcome Welcome to the podcast and excited to explore the amazing work that you're doing. Thank you.
Speaker 2:Thank you. Thank you for being here and thanks for taking your leap of faith and inviting me. You know meeting at the meeting at the event and just saying, all right, this guy, let's go. Yeah, let's give it a shot?
Speaker 1:I think you can. You can tell when you meet people, when they have like I think, for me at least when they have a good story to tell where they've put their hearts and soul into something.
Speaker 1:And obviously Jasmine helped facilitate and was like message me. It's like you have to meet someone or you still, yeah, I can make sure my way out and I'm glad that she introduced us and, yeah, I'm blown away by what you created. But before we dive into that, maybe just for everyone listening or watching, just a quick snapshot. So, jonas, where does he come from and where is he now? Right?
Speaker 2:I always actually start by saying with a cheeky smile on from earth and you know it's such an interesting way to start conversations because people like double check and some people obviously edit. You know they don't listen and they're like, oh yeah, cool, cool Anyway. So you know they're wandering off right, so it's a nice. But I do think the question that are you from earth.
Speaker 1:How deep do you want to go? Wow, you just a visitor.
Speaker 2:Yes. And then there's also that's where I kind of feel like when I look into my heart, I kind of feel like you know, that's like that sense of if I ask my heart, truth, it's like you know, child of God, son of a nurse, that's just what comes out Love, this. And so I was kind of that just kept coming out. And so I mean my full name is Jan Henry Barst, right, and so then that's a German name, born to German parents in the 80s, and they just moved from Germany to the UK and so born in London but already sort of a schizophrenic identity. Okay, right, german, but growing up in London and sort of post war time, obviously quite a few decades past, but still some sort of friendly banter some banter better than others. How long were you in Germany for before you moved to the UK? Well, that's the thing. I wasn't. I was born in Wimbledon.
Speaker 1:Oh, so your parents, okay, got you. So you've got German heritage, but born in the UK.
Speaker 2:Yeah, this is where the plot thickens right, that's like I don't say at the time, the citizenship came through the mother, not through the birth land. Okay, so I did. I got a German citizenship because I was born to a German mom, even though it was in the UK.
Speaker 1:Okay, with you, with you, Okay. And then, how long were you in the UK for?
Speaker 2:So grew up in, went to school to 18, went to Southern University for the bachelor's.
Speaker 1:Which part of the UK did you grow up? Because it generates different people, kind of like Africa.
Speaker 2:Yeah, depending where you go.
Speaker 1:You can just look at Johannesburg and you I mean someone's like North East, southwest, very different.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, you'll get to judge it. That London, which bit right Not judging so much but just different characteristics.
Speaker 1:I suppose there is a bit of judgment, but I try not to judge. I enjoy the colorful pastry of humanity, but where?
Speaker 2:where? So where did you grow up? Where did you grow up? Yeah, southwest London. Okay, it was worth, was worth common, specifically Okay.
Speaker 1:Which is near a popular place called Clappen. Okay, what's the main football scene there? That's always a good way to understand your.
Speaker 2:Probably the closest would be a toss up between Chelsea or Fulham. Okay, it's in the Southwest, but you should know it. I mean it's like it basically is like a SAFA colony. I mean there's so many South Africans and then there's Moseys and Kiwis as well. They gravitated there.
Speaker 2:But yeah, when I was growing up there, I mean, you know, I'm a little bit posh by most people's standards, okay, but what does that mean? Well, I don't know either, but they would get my because, again, coming from Germany to the UK, like I didn't grow up with anything sort of Germany has a different culture and approach around class and these things. The UK is very important, the way you talk, because I went to a private school, to a day school, so that makes me instantly posh. Apparently, okay, got some guts. It's more something I've learned by being told it than anything else, and so so, yes, you're growing up in London, but there was, it was just an extraordinary spirit.
Speaker 2:I think London is such a cool place, it's such an extraordinary city to experience such a spectrum of possibilities, so many realities. I think that's what's so integral of things, that makes it so interesting and just really. Yeah, I mean Clatham today is probably very posh very well, very middle of a class, very aspirational for people I think would love to live. But back then it was pretty ghetto and you wouldn't go out at night Like you're definitely going to get into trouble. Really. Yeah, people would not go out with Daffodil unless you were like really cool. I was not. I don't think I have become Okay.
Speaker 1:And what did you study in the UK? So I did.
Speaker 2:So when I graduated, I did the International Baccalaureate when I was 18.
Speaker 2:And so then you had these three higher categories, which was philosophy, physics and chemistry, and then English, english, French, maths as a standard subject, and then you take those into and I got I'm really into science. So I actually built a part of the International Baccalaureate courses to do a what's called an extended essay, where you do some research on something. One of my friends chose the Loch Ness Monster, which I thought was quite interesting. You know it was a truth of fiction, right? And then so you do a kind of a proper exploration.
Speaker 1:I mean, that hasn't been debunked and there's some fizzle that still goes strong.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well there's. I guess there must be something there, right, you know there's some. I think that's very something we can touch on later. You know these sort of patterns that repeat and what might be there, right? So I did. I made a superconductor which I thought was very cool, the Meissner effect, which basically that you'd levitate in the air. Are you super cool? The superconductor placing a magnetic field and it would just levitate, naturally.
Speaker 1:I literally this morning just saw that they released a device that does that, with sound frequencies that can levitate objects in between it. Then, like a product has to, I didn't dive into the article and don't know what the use case is outside of it being pretty like. I mean, from the first time I saw that people can make things levitate through vibrational frequency, I was like there's something there, right. I mean you start going down that rabbit hole. Well, they're going to end up with the ability to cross dimensions, or you know, I don't know if we think about levitation, if you think about UFOs or UAPs as a lot to call it, and trying to grasp how there's no heat signature, probably going down that realm of physics.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, you know, the two leading theories of physics that we have today are quantum mechanics and relativity, and in quantum mechanics, everything is a vibration. It is it's both a particle and a vibration at the same time. So it's not something that is, I think. I think it's just true Everything is vibrating at its own frequency. Working with mediums is about, ultimately, working through vibrations. Everything is vibrating at some point, in some way, and it never stops vibrating.
Speaker 2:And you know, when you kind of think of, you know, I had a beautiful realization a while ago, which was this you know, reflecting on this word, universe, right, and so, if you kind of break that word up, you have two parts to it uni and verse. And so I looked at the first one. Verse is like a song, right, the verse that is sung, right, it's like it's, you know, it's almost that sort of sort of Genesis, like story, where creation is sung into being. Now, that's not quite the Bible story the way it's described, right, but in many cultures there's this element of a song bringing forth reality, or a singing words, the word bringing forth reality.
Speaker 2:And then, as part of that, you then have uni, the one, the United, what I kind of realized that actually is the universe I don't think is one, I think it's my universe. I think I have my universe and I think you have your universe, and actually what that really means is my song and your song. You have your song right, and we're in the part of this. Maybe, potentially, sometimes the word multiverse comes up for other words like that right, but there's that element there of implicit in the verse is the vibration, the singing right, the song of it. Like if you listen to a song that has a vibration, that is a frequency, right, it's going on and down, but then you just amplify that up Because that can be used to describe anything, the vibration or frequency of it, and that could be potentially be described all things in reality itself, and love it yeah.
Speaker 2:And this is a bit like my approach of what I've taken.
Speaker 2:I've kind of tried to take in my life this sort of approach of trying to start with an understanding of the first principles of physics, that we have physics and chemistry in particular, and then weave that into philosophy, spirituality and others and try and identify what are some common grounds there. And many others have done this beforehand, right, I think that's. I'm just sort of a past, as many before me, about that kind of ability to combine spirituality, philosophy, art, science and to realizing that all of those are. You know, the universe doesn't separate itself out to chemistry or physics. The universe is. We use chemistry or physics to try and make sense of it. And and so that we shouldn't try and create these artificial divides where we say, oh, that's only physics or it's only art and they can't talk to each other no, the different ways of making sense of what we see together and that's such a refreshing perspective because more often than not you'll find I'm generalizing here, but my perception is that scientists will have a very scientific view.
Speaker 1:They won't have a religious or spiritual view and they won't try and understand the intersection of the two. So what I'm picking up from you is that you absorbing all of it and harnessing all of it, trying to make sense of all of it together and how it all plays into each other, which is quite a refreshing take.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that you know, in the sense, that's really, I would just say, at the heart of my life story. That's endeavor to try and do that and to aspire to do that. And I think in that journey what's difficult is translation across domains. What is the interface to translate between art and science?
Speaker 1:Where do you find the?
Speaker 2:common ground.
Speaker 1:Is it robust and reliable?
Speaker 2:Is it credible? And so that's where I think you know, when we look, when we look to the past is so fascinating. Like chemistry, comes from alchemy and alchemy you know, we might see it as a little bit of a hocus pocus today, but it was the chemistry of its time. And in alchemy, one of the primary pursuits of alchemy was the search for the Philosopher's Stone, the capacity to turn lead into metal or, sorry, lead into gold, apologies and guess what it turns out? You can. You can transmute lead into gold. It's been done.
Speaker 2:You just have to add more protons to lead nucleus and neutrons and you then are able to transmute one element into another. These guys were right. Really they were right. I didn't know that that was possible. Yeah, it is. So you have. You know the periodic table, right? Can you imagine all the elements lined up and the difference between the elements is just one proton number? You just add one more proton to the nucleus and it becomes a different element. And if you then are able to correctly add I mean, it's complicated, right, but with the correct and most, because otherwise gold wouldn't be stored.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the energy required to do it is way more than the value you get out. Yeah, gotcha, and the possibility is correct. Right, and so you know we might mock them, but actually they were correct and they just didn't have maybe the language and the precision and the tools that we have now developed, but we stand here today because of the work they did before us.
Speaker 1:Well, this is saying I love. I think it's a steep job saying I'm not sure I'm going to butcher it, but something along the lines of we walk on the backs of giants that are created to the world that we live in. Yeah, and we should never take that for granted. Every small innovation, every small step forward in the respect of discipline, and every aspect of our lives has given us this reality that we kind of see, feel and touch. So you know, I've spent the last two weeks.
Speaker 1:I've done two keynotes. The first was to the print industry and I remember I met with the Singaporean print chapter and I sat down with the guys and they were explaining how challenging the industry is at the moment because of disruption, because of the onset of the digital age, and they kind of took time to explain everything to me and it was kind of moved me to understand just how intermole there are at being disrupted. And I ended up doing a keynote which forced me to study the history of the print industry. So in 1440, johannes Gutenberg created the first version of the printing press and adorned on me when I started building out this keynote if you can understand that, the invention of the printing press alone how that fundamentally shaped humanity, because before that knowledge was power and all the knowledge sat with the Catholic Church and only a select few were able to tap into knowledge.
Speaker 1:And when he developed the printing press, it resulted in what they termed the democratization of knowledge and it allowed us, especially when they scaled it, to share books and fundamentally changed everything from religion. We had new sex that were emerging, challenging the status quo economic, science, art, everything One invention. And I try to just inspire them that there's no sunset industry, there's only sunset thinking, and they have to embrace the emerging fourth and fifth industrial revolution because they are the custodians of knowledge. And then I also had a keynote this Friday to the creative industry, because there also been, as I said earlier, panic at the disco. Such a good phrase, I love it. Yeah, I don't go take that one.
Speaker 2:It's a vigil, but they also. Because your disco is fun and you're panicking and you're like oh, it's not.
Speaker 1:It's not so funny, but they're feeling disintermediated by the revolution that is artificial intelligence. It was a rather year ago. It's been around AR for a while, but I think the introduction of chatGPT introduced a use case capability for people to flex with tests and by opening it up to humanity they've been able to see how people will use it. That's rapidly evolved in the last year and it's fundamentally changed. And for me, the essence of the keynote is you're not just a content creator, you're not just a video producer. You are now a digital architect Because I, as Llewellyn, all of a sudden can generate my own content, I can write my own scripts, I can turn those scripts into presentations and turn those presentations into beautiful slides.
Speaker 1:I'll show you the visuals from some of the presentations I created to really inspire them. All of a sudden, I have this 360 capability and FIR. I built my first AR models no coding capability and now I've built my own AR models. And then, on top of that, I set when I met you. I was at SFF and I met the guy from GitHub and it's going from large language model to code. I know you can do it on GPT as well, but they created this code pilot, and it just dawned on me that the point of this long-winded kind of narrative from myself coming back to what we were discussing, is that we walk on the backs of giants, is that everything that we have is because of people innovating, and the rate of innovation is going to increase so dramatically now. What a time to be alive, and I suppose that Mr Segway is beautifully into the work that you do, right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, there are so many great points there when to dip in. Right, I love your point about that the printing press revolution and the democratization of innovation and the information.
Speaker 2:I think one of the things that I'm passionate about at today's age, as we go into this acceleration you're describing, is, I think the new frontier is to democratize innovation, and the reason why I think that's important is innovation is the way we materialize a better world. Yes, right, you can kind of think there's three trifectas, which is peace, progress and prosperity, and they kind of are like a triangle and, as you try, and human society essentially is a combination of choices made about trade-offs around those three factors. So, if you want to have lots of progress, you'll have little peace, because there's always going to be constant disruption and the status quo is always being broken down. Right, and generally, if you want to have prosperity, you might have to have a little bit of trade-off on progress. Right, because you generally a great example of this would be someone like Nokia on that they wanted to have prosperity, monetize more the investments that they've made, and they wanted to delay the launch of the smartphone until about 2015. Apple had other ideas, right, and so we're coming to this new age, but bringing it back.
Speaker 2:What I essentially really believe is important is that, as we go forward, one of the challenges is always going to be this conversation around what is the better world? Who gets to decide what that is? And that's where I think one of the great arcs of history that can be useful for making sense of where we are today is through the power of the narrative of the Industrial Revolutions. And so, when we look at the transition from the traditional world to the modern world, modernism in many ways actually started in art. Right, because the birth of the camera made many art suddenly useless. Right, because everyone's trying to paint perfect pictures and suddenly this machine can do it perfectly. Right? So what does the artist then become? And that's where we can see people like Picasso, matisse and Van Gogh and many others use impressionism and other ways to redraw what reality was, which, at the time, was just crazy. Right, sort of a tick to off of its time. Right, and what that then did? Is it challenged conventional understandings of what even the nature of reality is?
Speaker 2:Modernism is rejecting the traditional truths and saying there are others, and that's where modernism births, ceasings communism, nazism, capitalism, even saying environmentalism and feminism or whatever it is. But it suddenly, in the traditional worldview, there isn't even a. In a traditional worldview, there isn't even a world. There is just is, because there's nothing to contrast it with. That's just the truth, that's just it. You wouldn't, you wouldn't think anything otherwise, Whereas modernism challenges it and that's where we see the great conflicts of the 20th century, and even today is, in many ways, you know, the world war two is capitalism versus communism versus nationalism, right, and that's really it those great ideologies are. The production of modernism produces an ideology around what they think truth is, whereas in traditionalism truth is monolithic. This is the truth and that's it. It says it in the book, no conversation needed. In modernism, truth becomes, um, uh, early polarized. Oh, actually, you know, we're the capitalists and those evil commies are the wrong ones, or we're the, we're the communists, those evil. You know, capitalists in their wicked ways, right, and they sell off much, one ass versus their mentality. Um, but we're not bound by tradition, we're not fighting because of tradition, we're fighting because of ideology, and this is a fundamentally different approach.
Speaker 2:And then, after World War II, we sort of began to see the birth of globalism. It's not, it's not a one, two, three, it's kind of it layers on top of each other. But then, in globalization we saw, then the world becomes multipolar, right, it's no longer just dominated, perhaps, like a Western narrative, there's other narratives coming into play. The world becomes connected together. Um and then truth again is reshaped by that. And then now we're in the age of the individual. And you know, the great transition into industry 4.0 can be, from an economic point of view, be understood as industry 3.0 ultimately is about mass consumption. Mass consumption you have the consumer what they want, but they don't get to choose too much. You can have a TV and you can watch five TV channels. You can have radio stations, but you have to listen to what they play.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:And so, etc. Etc. Whereas today, um, industry 4.0 is about mass individual individualization. That's the key. I want to watch my YouTube for Netflix feed, I want to listen to my Spotify songs as I want, when I want, how I want, and so that ability to serve at scale that solution actually ultimately is going to is actually really about having many individual realities and who they get to decide who's in what that reality actually means, and so that's where I think innovation becomes important, because it empowers individuals to create the better world that they want to serve, and that's really that kind of possibility of a Promethean fire there, where you're letting out the.
Speaker 2:You're talking about control, right In how information was under control in the Catholic era, certainly in the West, right In the 15th century and beyond before that. In many ways, what we think good is what we think society should be, is controlled by, by authorities that we perceive. But if we then make ourselves the authority and use the power of innovation to actually materialize the better world we want to see, then this is incredibly disruptive and incredibly empowering, and it can be dangerous, but it can also be immensely positive because, in a similar way to, maybe, the Catholic Church where, it's said, it's very dangerous. Everyone learns to read and write. God knows what will happen. And so there's that.
Speaker 2:I think part of the challenges in navigating through this tumultuous change is how not to lose our sanity and our humanity right, and that's where there's sort of a really interesting idea of outer and inner technology.
Speaker 2:Outer technology is everything you see in here, all the digital, everything that we see, but there's an inner technology around our consciousness, our morality, our ethics, and so when we see these great disruptive times coming through, right when the printing press came, it initiated hundreds of years of slaughter in Europe as the Protestants fought against the Catholics right. One of the first documented examples of deliberate mass extermination was when the Catholics mass murdered the Protestants in, I believe, in La Rochelle in France, and they would take these Protestants and put them into boats, large boats, and they would deliberately sink the boat to drown everyone. Then they would raise the boat, take out the bodies, put in the next batch and do the same right. And so that's always the danger as we light this spark for the next level of growth. Yes, it's exciting, but there is also this incredibly difficult, challenging and inevitable sense of the destruction that can come with it.
Speaker 1:But that destruction tends to come from the body that feels like they've been disempowered. It's because it's like a power structure right and as soon as they feel like they're losing control, they will do the most atrocious things to maintain control. And it does feel like you know in such a great way. I love what you just said there. It got my brain ticking because I firmly believe that most humans on this blue rock want peace and prosperity and to live in harmony.
Speaker 1:I've had the benefit of growing up in South Africa and seeing how we went through a peaceful relatively peaceful transition from apartheid to a democracy, how different races, color, creed, religions could come together and create a beautiful society, and it's one of the things I love most about my country, singapore, has very similar sentiments. Lee Kuan Yew also made sure he created a multicultural society and I do believe, just generally speaking, humanity does want that. It does feel like there are other forces at play that try and create this polarization. You know they kind of jumped at me when you were talking about it, this creating contrast. There's a lot of it.
Speaker 1:It comes through for me quite strongly across different photos the black, the white, the Christianity versus Islam, democrat, republican, whatever it's like there's always people being boxed in and there's no need for that. You can be the individual that creates a better future. I love that. I think that the democratization of innovation is such a powerful term that you mentioned here and that can enable humanity to create a better future that isn't dictated by power structures, sovereignty. But you know, that's one of the reasons why I love Bitcoin.
Speaker 2:I see Bitcoin in many respects as a revolution of finance and separating money and state On that word sovereignty there, I think, you know, speaking of these sort of, I kind of have built out these frameworks around industry 123.0, 1234 to kind of help make sense of transitions, right, and I think that sort of in industry 4.0 reality, it's about the sovereign self and the truly other level of selfhood that hasn't been there in the past. Right, it can be enabled through, you can make your own currency, right, you can in a way become your own sort of state in a sense. Right, and that is really sacred and really important, because we were just talking about this a bit before we started, right, but the ferocity of destruction is always inevitable. It's naive to think it won't come. And you know, having grown up, I think part of being German, which is different, sort of in like white Caucasian culture, because it's so dominated by the Anglo narrative, right, and it's the French, they're like the winners of World War II in many ways, right, and the Anglo, the Germans, were not the winners, and kind of it's a very different story, because you kind of have some of that element of quote, unquote, white and culture, whatever that might mean, but let's chuck it out there, right, but then you're kind of with the losers as well, right. So it's kind of invited a sense of reflection and, you know, reconciliation in some way to try and make sense of how can we have done that? Like you know, start two World Wars right, it's a Holocaust there's.
Speaker 2:We don't want the patterns repeat. What is it in our pattern that you kept that to be happening? Right, because I think that's so important to be able to face your shadow, because if you can't do that, you will just repeat the same things over and over again. You have to look at your shadow. You have to look at your silliness, your stupidity, whatever it is to go deeper, and that's really the only way you can break the cycle of suffering.
Speaker 2:One of the things that it has taught me is that it's actually inevitable, and I think it comes back to that great point you made earlier, and this is really sort of having worked in the innovation field for 15 years. What I can say very clearly is what stops innovation is politics and power, because they are the ones that are getting. But then, equally, also it's understandable Because you want to create. It's scary, you know. Yeah, you can say we have all these ideas for a better world, but when the world starts to disintegrate and your being disrupted and everything falls apart. Things can really go to shit and they can get really bad as well before it gets better.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, you know, you have that sort of it's a release, there has to be a release mechanism of the power authority by the holder. Yes, that will never happen. Well, I think it naturally does happen, you know, and it's slowly, and then suddenly, Okay, that's a good one.
Speaker 2:Okay, so you're saying naturally in the sense of well, I guess it's the way the world works right.
Speaker 1:If you look at the Catholic Church, they still hold a lot of authority, but they don't have humanity in the group completely anymore.
Speaker 1:Yes, because of something like the 20th place, I mean, they still hold a lot of influence, sure, but as we create more innovation, you will see power centers being disrupted. They won't let go of that power easily, and throughout human history we've seen how that gets worse before it gets better. But the universe has a very interesting way of making sure that change comes and I suspect, if it has to drop a comet on Earth to reset what we can know, probably has in the past.
Speaker 1:You know like we go down ancient civilizations and you know, I'm sure there was a time where humanity was stuck.
Speaker 2:Well, this is, like you know, I got really into like UAPs, UFOs, ancient Graham Hancock.
Speaker 1:Graham Hancock is just like taken, taken to another level. I mean I've listened to all of his podcasts, watched all of his content, love how he's challenging the status quo and pushing back the timeline of existence. I mean his theory is that we're a species with amnesia that we're. We've forgotten where we've actually come from because of these cataclysmic events that transpired. Andre, the what's it called? I forget the name now, but essentially a comet 11,000 years ago.
Speaker 2:Oh the Younger Dryos, younger Dryos impact. Sorry, what say that again Younger Dryos impact? Yeah, that's it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:And how that hit North America, which was covered in us, resulted in mass flooding that shaped and kind of changed the world as we know it, and there's a lot of compelling evidence and I love that. He's challenging the status quo, but to the narrative of this podcast, that's that's emerging is who's attacking him the most? Which power bodies are taking him the most? Architects and the status quo right? Yeah, and they. They have been the custodians of our history and now the narrative has been challenged and he's biggest challenges, or naysays, are archaeology archaeologists, not architects.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that's. I think there's an element of what's which is underestimated dramatically is you must. The price of a better world is blood-scented.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And because these archaeologists themselves have been working very hard to build a credible sense of history, yeah, right, because that also didn't exist hundreds of years ago, right, and so they have built this sort of what can we call it Like it's not just a worldview, they have built a construct like a science, right, and that is rigorous and is respected. And to suddenly have that life's work, and many life works and all that to suddenly be so radically challenged is always inherently threatening.
Speaker 1:It's the same story in Petton that you see, you, you, you. I suppose we could take what we say and apply to many different things, but they're letting go of their construct.
Speaker 2:And this is something. So this is, I think, something I've really studied at a very deep level. We can. We can jump into that in a minute. That's sort of my fascination and part of my family history.
Speaker 2:And I do want to mention one point, that kind of you know, it was during the pandemic and that's where I started to get into a whole alien conversation and stuff. And I just had this moment one day where I realized I just wouldn't know. I just wouldn't know if it's real or not. What makes me think that I would know if there were any? I just I just had this sudden understanding that it could well be happening and I would never, ever know. And even if it's not true, right, let's say it's all made up, right, and there are literally zero aliens or whatever. Let's just say it's all ridiculous and nothing's happening, right, there is still something as crazy as aliens happening that I'm not aware of. So the, the, the concept of aliens becomes a sort of a general metaphor for ignorance, and that it may not be that, that, but it may be there. There is going to be something else that's as crazy, or even more crazy in terms of how it changes my worldview.
Speaker 1:Well, this is the thing. What again? Kind of to the emerging theme, there popping a construct Ooh nice, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:And that's, I think, what Graham Hancock's work has also inspired which is when the younger drives event happened. And this, this is recognized by the, by the, by the scientific community. We can see it in the data the sea levels rose 180 meters in 50 to 100 years. 180 meters is huge.
Speaker 1:And it does with a civilization, or we set up base camp Exactly Along the water's edge.
Speaker 2:And when this is happening, it's a kind of it could potentially have been. If it really is a media, media asteroid strike, right, it's catastrophically bad. And so you know, for example, lots of Southeast Asia would it be. It would all be one land bridge, it's all very shallow seas here. I mean, you could be able to, you could walk from Bangkok all the way to Bali, right, there would all be one landmass. And so suddenly now it's not. And, and it just made me realize that you, his, you know, I think one of the points that he made so well is that you wouldn't know Now whether it was a solar flare or the what's the Earth's magnetic field rearranging itself? Right, if there's something like hella crazy bad, right, it would raise things. Right, we know the Earth's magnetic field resets itself dramatically, I mean that's happening right now.
Speaker 1:That's what's a little bit. What's some interesting stuff about that. So I was like, oh, how do I prepare for this?
Speaker 2:How do I prepare for like a two kilometer tsunami and the like everything? So that's that kind of amnesia center, right. But yeah, popping the construct, that's a good one.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I want to. I want to quickly anchor the discussion again and come back to innovation, because that's that's the core of your work and it's something I'm deeply passionate about. I have the privilege of working with startups and understanding their DNA and helping them understand their own DNA and make sure that they're crafting the right DNA so that they can scale successfully within the ecosystems that we have which, specifically, is Huawei and help them kind of grow to grow with us or enable them to grow through our ecosystem. I get to do a lot of innovation at an enterprise level. So, you know, I think whether I'm talking to the print industry or if I'm talking to the creative industry, I have the same message, which is that the disruption is agnostic of industry.
Speaker 1:All industries are feeling it, whether it's a bank, whether it's an airport company. You know, I do these design thinking workshops with these big corporates to help focus the North Star and understand what they need to get there. What's holding them back? Okay, what's the causality of holding them back? What's the risk of that? And when you get to the causality, then look at that and see how we can solve that through the application of a redesign or a reduction of a technology and that gives you a focused product roadmap that you then kind of shape your future against.
Speaker 2:So can I tell you. So that means you're helping them clarify what their early proposition is and you're then helping them envision a future roadmap that will keep them aligned and relevant at the same time. Correct.
Speaker 1:And to whenever I speak to the C-suite. There's so much emerging technology, there's so much concern at the rate of change. There's the challenge of dealing with the frank and stack. Okay, so they've got this.
Speaker 1:What's the frank and stack the frank and stack is, as we've progressed through the different revolutions, depending on older companies, but even new companies, you have this mix of analog and digital and you've got these silos of assets that are stitched together and, instead of your assets serving your strategy, your strategy becomes managing those assets, and it's supposed to be the other way around. So what the name suggests the frank and stack is this like mix of your assets that you're trying to manage and stitch together, and the common theme with any of the C-suite's boards bodies that are engaged with is how do we deal with our frank and stack? How do we adopt new technology? Which technology do we adopt and why?
Speaker 1:Often, they will jump into something very loosely and then, as you would well know, if it's not done correctly, results in a no value derived from the technology, a lot of efforts, a lot of time wasted, which creates a disillusioned view of you know, and it becomes like a rudderless boat in the ocean. So what I try and do is remove the noise and focus them, because you're almost back, costing your future.
Speaker 2:Can you help me get that? I kind of get it by casting, so you can design the future.
Speaker 1:You don't have to be a victim to your future. You can set your North Star and then you know what you need to get there. And then there's that back casting, because you're designing the roadmap to go forward, yes, and then you know exactly what you need to do from a redesigned technology adoption perspective to be able to get there Solving very specific use cases that have been linked to compelling pain points that are preventing you from getting there. And by doing it in that methodical way, you can have laser-like focus and everyone the whole process of the design thing in workshops is very inclusive and empathetic and getting the product, the sales, the data teams all in the same room agreeing to everything that we design. So then everyone's going in the same direction and that's how we at least dirt.
Speaker 1:And you know, when I came across you and you two days ago and saw the work that you're doing, you've just taken it to another level. So I really want to zoom into that and understand before we dive into what you're doing. How did you get and you kind of, I suppose, gave your prelude to it? Because you've got these different aspects of your life that you stitched together, which is a combination of science, philosophy, and I think it's building up towards what I'm asking you for now, which is how did you, what led you up to the start of your business, what's the name of your business and what does your business do?
Speaker 2:Right? Well, so that's a great question and you know, I think I'd like to start it by saying I have been in a very fortunate position in my life where I've been born into a privileged environment, almost entirely due to my parents and my grandparents. So I am the guy, I am the white, privileged male. I was born white, I was born male, I was born privileged. It's a provocative term today, but it's also just simply my truth, and I always knew that growing up. I was conscious of it and I had the opportunity to travel and see that there are lots of different worlds out there, right, and I think the purpose of privilege is to use that to go further.
Speaker 2:Yes, we all have different privileges in different ways. What matters is how we use that gift to advance our humanity, to advance ourselves. The French call this the noblesse oblige, the noble obligation. Yes, you are a noble, but you have an obligation to the people that you are the lord of to ensure that they succeed and thrive, and that is your duty. Love that and I felt that sense of duty in my heart as a way of guiding me through my life and its help, and so that has always been in there, since a young teenage boy just materialized this, and so what I went on is this search where can I make a difference? What's the difference? Where I can make a difference, where I can use the fortunate advantages that I have to go a little bit further than others might be able to, to see a little further.
Speaker 2:So I kind of in my mind, I kind of went on this sort of quest, and the quest was to go beyond the normal frontiers and find something extraordinary and to bring that back and to then be able to share that with humanity. And what that meant in practical terms was, first of all, travelling around the world as much as possible to learn and to see and get to know the world. So I've done, for example, trips when I was 19, from this was 2004 from St Petersburg to Hong Kong by train. So Russia, mongolia, china travelled from Rio to Lima by bus. So that's Brazil, paraguay, argentina, bolivia, peru and many other trips as well.
Speaker 2:Those are just a few insights, but had a chance to really see as much as I can, to absorb and listen and understand to humanity rich, poor, smart, uneducated, all these different times but to really expose myself as much as possible and from that then balance that with going and to stand on the shoulders of the giants who have come before us and to read philosophy and science and go really deep. And then as you go into knowledge you get more and more specialised. What more esoteric, right. But that's where you can kind of make those breakthroughs and eventually what I kind of came fused together as part of this organisation called ISEC. It's a student organisation and university and I was passionate and driven by how this organisation can inspire young people to materialise a vision which it describes as peace and fulfilment for humankind. That's the vision of the organisation and as a young 20-year-old just kind of at university and just finishing university, that was such an inspiring thing.
Speaker 2:I didn't want to go be a banker in London, I wanted to go help create peace and fulfilment for humankind's potential and so that's why I made the leap, with some friends, to go to Cambodia and we set up this organisation in Cambodia, and that's where, in doing that, I could see that it wasn't just about theory. In Cambodia it's such a wild west of reality. It's about how do you practically empower people here and now, within the constraints and limitations of that space, but also the amazing energy and spirit that it contains, and so that's where they're kind of birthed this term 21st century leadership. It's about envisioning a new kind of way of materialising the better world, because what has happened is especially after the 1950s, is in the age of globalisation is the dominance of the management bureaucracy, and basically we just use this word manager. But what we've kind of become obsessed with we do an MBA as a master of business administration. Nowhere within that is leadership. Nowhere within that is entrepreneurship.
Speaker 2:From a technical, theoretical point of view, the content is only focused on a process like worldview, that prioritises productivity and efficiency and the production of profit for shareholders, and that's just a description of what it is. And so what we have kind of unconsciously lost is the realisation that management is not leadership, it is not entrepreneurship. They are different. Management is the capacity to organise and optimise processes to produce for productivity, whereas lead and it's in the domain of the process. That's why, when we look at organisations, they dehumanise people. They are human capital and not humans. They are assets to be deployed around the machine as efficiently as possible, and it's not a criticism, but that's just the way it is. It's worldview, whereas leadership ultimately comes from the heart. It's about relationships, it's about caring about humans and people, and we kind of have this sort of tension between leadership and management. And so what?
Speaker 2:After I finished this Isaac Cambodio adventure in 2010, I realised that this term 21st century this was in 2010, so before the word innovation got really big, and this is what it is today. But I have this intuitive sense I need to go and take the great leap now to search, to find, and what I basically ended up doing was finding a Masters in System Science with the Open University in the UK, and this is a whole thing we can go down and rabbit hole on, but basically there is this science called System Science and Complexity Science, and it is a radically different way of seeing the world, because it sees the world as complex, connected systems that are dynamic, emergent. They can't be reduced down to simple parts. They are network, not hierarchical, and they are emergent.
Speaker 2:They are unpredictable and so tied into complexity. Science as things like cybernetics, systems, dynamic chaos theory, evolutionary landscapes there is all these incredible advanced sciences that really underpin our day and age today, but they are kind of stuck in the really advanced academic space. They haven't migrated yet into the sort of normal world right, and so I was the first graduate of the first system science course in the world like so that's amazing.
Speaker 1:So yeah, that sounds like something I would lap up. I love you, miss.
Speaker 2:Okay, continue and so one of the principles of that science is that and this is quite well known today is that there is essentially, for a system to be successful an organisation, a person you have to make a basic trade off. It's called the Exploration, exploitation Trade Off.
Speaker 2:It's written, created by a man called James March, on a famous paper he wrote, I think, in 1990 or 1991 and it's basically very simple you have to exploit the opportunities of today and you have to explore the futures of tomorrow, and your success depends on effectively balancing that ratio.
Speaker 2:If you do 100% exploit today, you will definitely die because you don't prepare for the future, and when the future arrives that you're not expecting, it will take you up. On the other hand, if you focus too much on the future, you will then find it difficult to make money today, and so you might actually have a great strategic plan, but your cash flow runs out and, boom, you're dead. So it seems so simple, but really the role of governance and this is interesting in organisations, the role of governance in an organisation from a cybernetic systems point of view, is to effectively allocate resources between this trade off, exploration and exploitation, and the reason why organisations die is because they get it wrong, and so it's not a lack of money, it's an ineffective way of balancing the present and the upcoming future, and so what I realised is in this exploration trade off.
Speaker 2:There's actually a third element, I believe, which is the adaptation. So, yes, you're exploring the future, yes, you're exploiting the present. So, for me, exploring is really about the entrepreneurial endeavour. Entrepreneurship is about imagining new possibilities, creativity, the future, and whereas management is really about exploiting the present. So how do we make the most money now, this quarter? But in between, there's this element of flexing and fitting into the world that's changing around you. You have to be adapting to change and adapting is neither exploring nor exploiting.
Speaker 2:It's flexing and moving through, moving with reality, so, potentially. And so what I kind of realised is what those map onto is really leadership, management and entrepreneurship skills. Leading is about adapting, management is about optimising and entrepreneurship is about exploring, imagining, creating the future. And what we've done is we have unconsciously trapped ourselves in the word manager, because if you say a manager, that person can't be an entrepreneur because they're a manager and they also can't be a leader. They can sometimes be called a leader, sort of unconsciously, but the problem is the identity is attached to that individual and you're either a manager or a leader or an entrepreneur, but you don't have that capacity to combine those three important skill sets. You're trapped in the identity and you become what you believe.
Speaker 2:What do managers do? Well, they manage things, and managing things means optimising processes. You're not going to be leader like, and this is why today many organisations are over managed, under led and with very little entrepreneurial endeavour, not because the people can't do it, but the identity of the organisation doesn't allow it. And this was sort of one of my great realisations in reading the work of many people I was studying is that the capability is constrained by identity. Basically, what you can do in your life is fundamentally limited by who you believe you are. So if you're an organisation that you believe you're a bank, then guess what you're going to do banking stuff, but maybe the banking stuff isn't always going to be the stuff that you need.
Speaker 2:If you're an organisation like Nokia that believes it's a feature phone maker, then that's what you're going to do you're going to make feature phones, you're not going to be able to build a smart digital ecosystem like Apple has done. If you're a blockbuster, who believes that you are a company that supplies video, vhs tapes and DVDs at stores and that's your identity and that's how you do it.
Speaker 2:So I think this could be something to come back to. On the construct pop, it's related to identity, and so ultimately, what I sort of had this insight around was if we could create a new kind of identity for individuals that would give permission to a new set of behaviours, and so basically, then I just kind of took the word leader and manager and entrepreneur and kept writing it down on pieces of paper and then one day I was like why didn't I just, oh yeah, cool, stick it together and that could work. And then both.
Speaker 1:What leaderpreneur? Leaderpreneur, yeah, what are they?
Speaker 2:thank you, yeah, and actually there's an A in the middle, and the reason is that that man represents management. Sometimes people write leader D-E-R, and I did actually initially play that around with that, but it gets a lot of. There's lots of E's and R's then in the word. If you do it, so isn't that good. But yeah, because I think essentially a leaderpreneur is able to build a better world by using leadership, management and entrepreneurship skills, and then the deeper insight to being a leaderpreneur is to realise you are a networked individual, you're part of an ecosystem, ecology, a community of leaderpreneurs, and so your communication and collaboration skills are your sort of, your two other skills that facilitate your ability to plug into the environment around.
Speaker 2:It's not just about me being a brilliant leaderpreneur, however brilliant I may be or not, but it's also about me fundamentally being enabled by the brilliant people around me, and for me to plug into that capability I will need communication and collaboration skills, and so that kind of ultimately led to this realisation. Hey, if we could build loads of leaderpreneurs, that could then really dramatically improve the capacity of organisations to innovate, because at a basic level, you need one person to produce one project, right. So if you're, and this sort of becomes in a constraint, because one of the things I think that's underestimated in the innovation and disruption game is a critical question, which is how much innovation is enough? Innovation because it's a number, right, it's a real number. How many projects do you need to produce in your organisation every year to keep up?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think for me there would be. If someone is asking that question, I'd be worried that they're not focused, because it means that you're innovating loosely, which is possible, and I've made that mistake.
Speaker 2:I've wasted time, resources, money, my entire pension innovating loosely, but you're such a young handsome man, you don't have a chance to build up a pension or two, right yeah?
Speaker 1:It's what I stack sacks, but for me it's not how much innovation, how are you doing the right innovation. It's a qualitative thing, not a quantitative thing, because and I saw this in the IOT space when I was doing Internet of Things and a workforce startup in South Africa that we scaled through Vodafone and we had to shape how co-creation happened and some of the biggest learnings that took away from that IOT journey was IOT. The nature of IOT has been able to integrate old, new, analog, digital, inter-horizontal platform. Visualize it, bi-directional control, have control of your ecosystem and your assets. But you've got to start at the right place and you've got to integrate the right use cases and you've got to understand the compelling need versus the need.
Speaker 1:You always say to people that I engage with. Do you understand the difference between a need and a compelling need?
Speaker 2:Well, maybe I don't think I do. Okay, Do you share with me what you think?
Speaker 1:So you lie in bed with your wife, okay, and it's raining outside and the gutter outside the bedroom is broken and you can hear the water is not flowing, it's making a noise, right? It's like there's a need to fix that gutter because it's obviously a problem. It's not how it's supposed to operate, so that's a need for sure. A compelling need would be that the geyser in the ceiling has burst and now the water is dropping on your wife's forehead at 12 PM. Not which one do you think is a compelling need, right? You're going to have to fix that very quickly, otherwise you're going to have some real issues. So it's about identifying those compelling needs. There's pain points that are keeping the CEOs, ctos, coos, awake at night, and that, for me, is where you start innovating, because by solving that use case, you must either be introducing a risk reduction, driving an efficiency or generating a revenue. Because you can innovate, you can create anything.
Speaker 2:You can connect anything with IoT.
Speaker 1:But if you connect the wrong thing and it doesn't deliver value, then you can't scale it and it loses its momentum. So, to come back to your point, how much innovation is enough? I suppose for me it would be. Are you innovating on the right things? And if it's too loose and it's not centered against the North Star, you go in many different directions. So there has to be focus. For me, I think I'm well-appointed.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and you brought that into a sharper view for me, because I think that you're totally right. Basically, honey, I mean, there's so much innovation activity that doesn't seem to generate a value to it. It's kind of a challenge in terms of being able to translate that idea into something that's really gone through the whole value chain towards it. It has measurable ROI, whatever IPO, whatever language you want to use at the end. So I guess, to kind of bring it to sort of the question of the how, because it's designed to provoke conversation, what is the answer? I actually don't know. I don't know, right, you don't know, but it shifts it because there's an interesting element, which is a nice quote from Napoleon, which is quantity has a quality all of its own, which is more is more.
Speaker 2:So let me give you an example. So I would say, okay. So the large organization asked me what? Because I find it fascinating how is it that all these large organizations die? Right, you have money, time, talent, technology, reputation, you've actually got everything and you stuff it up, whereas these hot startups coming out of this so-called garage right Kick your butt and grocery. So it doesn't make any sense and it keeps happening over and over and over and over again, not just in the last 50 years, but like for centuries, right, even if you look at empires and this common meta pattern, right, and I think part of what I could say in today's age, let's say, let's say, you're a bank, right.
Speaker 2:You have 30,000 people in your bank. So, okay, how much innovation would you need to be producing in the lead-up to now wave thinking to be able to consider we're probably in the green zone? Not definitely, but you need to get there from a strategic point of view, in the sense of, if we use an army analogy, it's important to use your tanks effectively, but if you have 10 tanks and they have 10,000, you're going to die. Right, it's just numbers is numbers, right, no matter how well you use those 10 tanks.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, I think when the Japanese took over Singapore, they had one tank. There was the differential yeah. Yeah, the Singapore didn't have any, yeah, or the English. I think it was the Australians and the English that lost the island at that point and have a tank.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so you're starting to understand that. Yeah, because they came overland them with the bicycles through the rubber plantage and stuff.
Speaker 1:Sorry, but I interrupted your thought process there because I think you're on to a better point there.
Speaker 2:So then? So let's say yeah, okay. So we go back to the analogy of the example of the 30,000 person bank, right? So what I would say is this so, to give you a sense of trying to arrive at a rough idea of what the number could be is, well, let's look at your talent and your organization and an organization.
Speaker 2:Talent is maybe 20 to 30% of people. So if you're 30,000 people, then that means at least 20% is going to be 6,000 people as your talents. So we would say those 6,000 people should be leader-pronounced. And the way you become a leader-pronounced by producing one innovation project a year. So you're looking at producing 6,000 projects a year as a minimum, and these are not necessarily big, expensive projects, these are just your updates every year to keep pace with the rate of technological change, and this needs to be not just customer service or product or tech, but needs to be compliant.
Speaker 2:Every element of the business is constantly upgrading itself, right, because that's also what's happening. Different parts of the business upgrade faster than others and it's creating bottlenecks and capability. And so so 6,000 people, 6,000 projects a year, every year. That must be intelligently organized into an innovation ecosystem, and so what I try to communicate is if it's 5,000, 6,000, doesn't really matter, but it shouldn't be 500. It shouldn't be 50 projects a year. You're off by orders of magnitude and how much rate of change. So you know if you imagine running over five years, right, we have two banks, exactly the same, both 30,000 people. One uses leader-pronounced, one doesn't right that Bank A is going to be producing 6,000 projects a year over five years. That's 30,000 projects. Bank B is producing, let's say, five projects a year, that's 2,500 projects.
Speaker 1:So, if I can, pause you there, you bang on the money. So in South Africa and this would be a good use case for you to look at there was a leader that was heading up a bank, michael Jordan, who became quite famous in South Africa and he was heading up at that time First National Bank, I believe, and First National Bank won multiple awards globally as rated as back up in South Africa, as the most innovative, progressive bank in the world that introduced innovations left, right and center that the world haven't seen.
Speaker 1:And I would get it wrong if I try to mention that some of the key innovations, I think, like ATPs and stuff like that came from this bank. And what happened was he introduced an innovation culture. He created an overarching mission statement and got his vertical heads to create mission statements and incentivized every person in the bank to shoot for the stars and innovate because who understands the bank better than the people that work in it? And got them to all think about how they could innovate within their respective job vertical discipline to make the bank better. And he would give a one million round prize, which was a lot of money there's still a lot of money now in South African terms. The winning team would get a million round. How much is that in? Roughly, that would be divide that by 14 to get to SGD, so a million round divided by 18 to get to USD, that's pretty big. So 67 to 80K, yeah, so that's a lot, and this is going back 10, 15 years ago.
Speaker 1:Anyway, what happened with FNB is, all of a sudden, you started seeing a bank. Do you want to guess who? The biggest retailer for our phones in South Africa was? For what? For our phones it was.
Speaker 2:FNB.
Speaker 1:Why? Right, because they started innovating left and right Right. All of a sudden, outside of just the innovations that were improving processes or blockages, or the inability to have digital banking, the inability to move away from having a human to human banking experience to a mobile phone, to a internet version, was being solved by the people in the bank through innovations. From this innovation culture that was implemented and, long story short, all of a sudden they had an e-commerce platform and they created a loyalty program where you earn e-bucks. These e-bucks had a value and you could stop buying things with these e-bucks. All of a sudden, their e-commerce platform is making them so much money moving things like cell phones, moving all sorts of different retail products.
Speaker 1:The point of my story being that 100% agree with the statement that you made is, if you put the two banks up and they were, for the next 80, 10 years, the leading bank every other bank was way behind. It was catching. They had leapfrogged the entire industry globally. I'd encourage you. I'll send you some details on Michael Jordan and the F&B story, but I studied it as well when I went into innovation, when I was in business school, with one of the things that I studied quite closely to understand it. So, yeah, I concur, I think that if you can empower and this is the work that you do, right. So, coming back to leaderpreneur, maybe kind of crystallize what it is that you created in birth because it enables these banks, the corporates, to unlock this innovation. Maybe just crystallize it for us.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think at the heart of the idea is actually the leaderpreneur itself as a differentiated identity. It gives someone the possibility. I kind of would ultimately summarize it as the idea of being a manager is an industry 3.0 idea 200 years ago they weren't managers.
Speaker 2:They're people kind of performing management tasks, but they didn't see themselves as a manager. They didn't define themselves as a manager. So, as we move into industry 4.0, I think leaderpreneur is talent 4.0, and it has a new vision for what it means to be a talent. It's not just about managing things in the management bureaucracy. It's about the capacity to be an autonomous digital innovator. So you're producing innovation when you are involved in digital innovation, but through that you're accessing the wider world of technology, right and data and then being autonomous. And this is really key because industry 3.0 organizations are organized around the management bureaucracy.
Speaker 2:You have the cascade classic organizational hierarchy right From the top gets cascaded down, and so what that then creates is a situation where people will keep doing their business as usual, their BAU, and will wait to be told what to do. And if you try and do things on your own, you will often get yourself into trouble, because you're not supposed to be doing that. You're supposed to be doing this, right. Just keep hitting the nail on the head with the hammer. That's it. Keep doing the same thing over and over again.
Speaker 2:But what that then creates is disengagement, and it also creates an issue that people don't know what the problem is, but so they're often relying on their managers and seniors to tell them what the problem is. But they don't know what the problem is because they're not on the front line. They don't know right, and so you get this kind of ridiculous situation where the people who know what the problem is can't earn a power to do it, and the people who don't know what the problem is are being forced to make decisions about what they think the problem is because they have to look good right, and I don't think that really serves everybody well. So that word autonomous is really critical in basically saying you are empowered to go figure out for yourself what we need to go do. You are a free agent in this networked environment, the ecosystem, and go find the right problems to focus on, justify it.
Speaker 1:How does your platform or methodology enable this? I think. Paint that picture, because that was probably the most creative way. I've seen someone do it, yeah right.
Speaker 2:I think what we kind of believe in at Leaderpreneurs the first step towards building a better world is to care, and I think this is actually it's a whole technology, it's a whole landscape of engaging the heart to care about the right thing. And so the way we enable it as a platform is we enable Leaderpreneurs to go through a journey we call it stratocution to combine strategy and execution to be able to deliver innovation. And so what that means in practical terms is you're going to go through five phases.
Speaker 2:You're going to care about the reality you're in, which means to look at emotionally, engage, look around you. Where is the suffering? Where is the exciting opportunities? What's going on? Pay attention and lock into something that you want to focus on, create exciting ideas. What could we do to make things better? You're now moving from the heart language to the head language. Right, but your head thinking is relevant and you are engaged because your heart cares. Then the third step, so that's more of the entrepreneurial energy. You're shifting towards the lead phase and in this particular moment, you are now switching to leadership mode, which is action, which is about spirit, which is about saying let's make things happen. That famous Gandhi quote, be it the change you want to see in the world. This is really critical because you need to lead yourself forward into action and your stakeholders. It's not okay.
Speaker 2:I presented the PowerPoint and I'll pass it on and these guys, someone will figure it out. You're the Leaderpreneur. You materialize the better world, materialize your opportunity. And then the deliver phase is then about achieving the result you wanted to achieve. And then the review phase is about, and so that's using management skills, and that's really important because it's about achieving goals and in a measurable manner, and being able to demonstrate that with a measurable ROI and then, at the end of the review phase, you're reflecting on what you've done and deciding what to do next and then you repeat another care-creating delivery. So what we do is Leaderpreneur. So these five steps and we can go into why this is, if you want to, but these are like. This is my magical combination. This is a very, the capacity to engage different parts of the human and the head, heart, spirit combination, the way materializes it. If you follow those steps, you will always succeed.
Speaker 1:Now just repeat the steps again. Just to summarize it.
Speaker 2:Care create, lead, deliver, review. Care about building a better world. Create exciting ideas, lead inspiring, change, over-impressive results, Review and reflect on what you've learned. So that's what we're doing next. Love that it's actually. It's called a cybernetic cycle, and it kind of allows for self-correction and then. So what we then basically do is we serve that journey through a digital game-like experience.
Speaker 2:So let's say you are a Leaderpreneur, you would log into our digital platform called Cosmos and I would say all right, lou Ellen, welcome. You are now at stage one. You need to do stage one for the care phase. You need to complete these tasks and then go do those tasks. It might be okay.
Speaker 2:Create problem statement, create an idea, find stakeholders to support your idea, set a smart goal, create evaluation for your project Things like this. But it serves you as a sequence of levels, so you're getting this experience of going through level one, level two, and that gives you a sense of progression. And what's really critical about that is also that you do two things. One, you always know what to do now and what to do next. You're never lost. You just complete the next step, the next level, so to say. And then the second element is because you're putting this data into our platform. It's a bit that your peers are able to also read it and review it, and you are upgrading your innovation stats. So when you're in the game, you'll have your own avatar and as you're this avatar, which you know, as you start to data, fire your innovation capability, and so what I think that that for me means is I was really inspired. I think we're both passionate about rugby, right and and sorry about that, we'll come follow yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, I've always seen nothing to be sorry for man. You guys are so good in there. It's just so impressive that power and discipline and capabilities.
Speaker 1:Yeah, a lot of what you've been discussing today has come through in that team, right, I believe at every level. You know we talked about leader preneurs. You could see a Khaleesi story. Look at Russi, look at everyone in that team. Anyway, a dark grace, that's not like a I kind of want to jump into that.
Speaker 1:That's just. I think that has been the secret source that has made such a majestic experience for the sprint box. I really believe that every single one of those people in that team are leader preneurs and they work together as a collective for bigger vision. That is outside of image of play rugby, because for South Africa it's a very unifying sport and nation building experience and I think what makes this one particularly special is that obviously the team has as gravitated the slogan for the whole, the slogan for them is stronger together, which is not just about rugby.
Speaker 1:I think that they, they, they, they're trying to shape South African vision and a lot of the the road show post the World Cup, when they had been going round, obviously, as they do a tour.
Speaker 1:But I see that the players are even going back to their primary schools.
Speaker 1:They go in that far back, they get involved, the players who really go back into the communities from where they came from and inspire.
Speaker 1:Because I don't know if you know this, when we won, I think, the 1995 World Cup or when they were doing that tour, siakalisi was just a small impoverished, that kid that was standing there for one of those tours and he got to meet I think it was Francois Pinna and I'm not completely wrong but he, he, I think he was given boots from one of the players and fast forward, you know, not that long, and look at how easy he's writing the nation and leading, leading from the heart. So I think that that secret source is really can be testament to the individual, but not just Siakalisi, Even the Russia, the coach, you know, I think he has a bigger vision and has been taking a lot of criticism in his career building up to this point, even when he selected Siakalisi as a captain because of racial divides, and, and, and, and, and. In many respects they democratized rugby in South Africa. So yeah, good stuff it was a good book.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you said a nice phrase there which I think is, you know, really worth paying attention to, is leading from the heart and it's not managing from the head. You're leading from the heart.
Speaker 2:It's in the language of the differentiator there. Right, because the leadership capacity to inspire comes from the heart. It's asked to have that quality of true care. It's not about being clever, right, it's about really tapping into the passion and courage of the heart to to feel and connect, empathize at a very human like level. And I think what's also very important about that quality is anyone can do it, anyone can do it. It's not a question of money, it's not a question of even potentially talent or anything like that. You, just we all have the human capacity to care and that's why that we also have within us the capacity to lead. And part of the leader printer concept is to re-evaluate. You know, sometimes people like oh, I can't be a leader, I'm not good enough, smart enough, my genetics aren't good, whatever rubbish reasons they say.
Speaker 1:Right. Or they think that the leaders are the people that are swimming in the ivory tower. Yeah, you know, forgetting that every single one of us is actually supposed to be a leader in our own respect. Yeah Well, I mean, you want to lead your own life?
Speaker 2:Yeah Right you want to lead your own life, and I think that's where that ability to, to, to see it as a skill set. Like, I'm a driver, I can drive cars, I can cook. Am I the world's best driver? The world's best driver and cook? Absolutely I am. Everyone else is an idiot. But but yeah, no, serious, no, I'm not right, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not competent. I can cook a good meal, I can get safely made to be right. And and then, in a similar way, do I have to be the world's best leader? No, I don't. Do I have to be the world's best entrepreneur? No, I don't Right. And I think the leader printer offer model offers that capacity to someone. So you can have solid leadership skills, solid management skills, solid financial, and you have those five. These five form a potent capability right. Allow you to then be, to be good, as in your, to be good at being able to innovate specifically as well. I'm saying that.
Speaker 1:So To, to, to kind of get into a point now. So you created this amazing philosophy and platform your clients. You work with big banks, big corporates. What is your go to market strategy and how can people engage with you and and and? What can you offer them to summit or to summit?
Speaker 2:all that, I think what we offer is the opportunity to do two things really. One is to address the issue of how do you keep upgrading your talent? Right, the rate of change is accelerating you mentioned some of the breakthrough technologies at the beginning of this conversation, right? And it's only going to keep accelerating. So people are really really busy doing their existing day jobs, so they're going to need to keep upskilling in some structured manner, not just this year, but every year. So, by being a leader prenat and having leader prenat work with you, we are, every year, going to keep upgrading your talent. So we're going to fix that problem for you, right, we're going to make sure they have the right skill set and the right mindset, and it's going to happen every year in a structured manner and, again, at scale, because we're looking at the larger numbers.
Speaker 2:If you're a larger organization, you've got hundreds, thousands of talent. How do you make sure they're all upgrading at the same time? So, the same language, the same standards right, that all has to be integrated and it has to be digitalized as well, right? Oh, that was what we were talking about the rugby players, right? So it's quickly segway to that. But every professional rugby players have chips in their shirts and their tracks or their data every game of your training session, right? So if you imagine the data profile you build of a player over weeks, months and years, it's really accurate. We don't have this in organizations. We have maybe one Excel spreadsheet that says they went to a workshop.
Speaker 1:What was it, kprs, that you established? And have one meeting before you decide whether or not you get a bonus. Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly it's not like really looking at the intricacies of the daily job and how much are they moving to a dial, outside of just hitting the nail with netitivity? Yeah, it's not a data driven approach. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So what we then do is we can then fix that as a solution. And then also, the second element is focusing that talent on actually doing talented things, and that's producing the innovation projects the organization needs to keep up an industry 4.0 and even potentially get ahead. And so that's where it's not going to fix all your innovation needs, but it's going to provide you with a run rate of innovation on that basic idea of one need to print out produces one project to get, and that's where we kind of provide that new idea of a standard of what talent looks like. I don't believe that talent 4.0 is about getting an MBA. Talent 4.0. I think it's about being able to deploy an innovation project. If you ask me, would I rather have someone who's got an MBA from Harvard or someone who has definitely delivered innovation projects? And I can see a whole innovation profile on my digital platform, see the stats, the peer respect she's earned. I'm going to go with the lady with these deployed innovation project because I know she's done it. She's done it.
Speaker 1:She's actually proven it Right and you'll only get better at a moin spied by it.
Speaker 2:Great point. Exactly and that I think is an also key is because it either provide a career path and an ecosystem where you can be different kinds of leader printers. One year you can come along, do your own project, but the next year you're coming along, you're more like an innovation coach. And then the next year you come along and you're more like the general, the sort of strategic transformation leader who's innovating at scale and leading large groups of other leader printers to deliver impact on the critical score car priorities, and so you can kind of find your role in this innovation ecosystem, and I think that's ultimately really what it's about recognizing it's about the professionalization of innovation.
Speaker 2:So that is not just about oh, I'm just doing a bit of innovation on the side of my spare time, or innovation is just for the innovation guys this is certainly mags in the cool corner office. It's about saying innovation is a part of our culture. We should all be innovating, and the standards of which we do that is the leader printer standard.
Speaker 1:Amazing.
Speaker 1:Love it If anyone wants to find out more. Where can they go? What's, what is the domain? Because I think you know I really do respect the work that you're doing, Love the framework that you put in place and well done. I think it's such important work to humanity. I know you're coming from a very altruistic, pure place with us. It comes through quite clearly for me and real respect for you for that. So how can we link people up that want to learn more, organizations that want to engage with you? Where can they go?
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for your kind words, and yeah, you know, I've learned to build more confidence in sharing the altruism which is sincere, but it is sincere, you know, and I think that goes back to the story I shared before, where now I was given the wonderful opportunity to my parents and grandparents to come from a case of what many would consider privileged, and I've seen it as something to use to then serve, and so really it's an active service. I do my best. Probably you can always be better, but it really comes through that way and I think that's that's what it means to be a leader printer is to have that sense of service and duty in your heart to build the better world, not just for yourself but for the people you care about. And that's the gift. And if you, if you, and that's sort of that's what that's. The ultimate differentiate, I think, between a leader printer and a manager is that leader printers have that first step of care in their heart. They have the heart, intelligence, have the heart, technology, and that's what sort of engages them to to create. The more you care, the more you will create, and so people think that's exciting, inspiring.
Speaker 2:You can visit us on our fantastic new website. We've just launched it, really thrilled and proud of it. I think it's very, really cool. Go have a check, check it out. We ask great animation effects. It's leader, print outcom. How do you spell that? L E A D? Then there's an A in the middle and then there's print out P R E N E U R dot com. I think even if you write L E leader, it will still pop up because it's getting more popular now, so you can find us.
Speaker 1:Well, jonas, this will be the first of many discussions between you and I'm afraid and I do sincerely mean that you are afraid for me. I hope in the next discussion you skimmed over your journeys as you moved on trains across different nations and I suspect there's some source stories in there. I want to deep dive into you. I don't know how much of a chicken show the podcast, but I really want to unpack a few more of your journeys and adventures and experiences. I think that you, you hold a wealth of experience and love and, yeah, thank you for being you, thank you for the amazing work you do and, yeah, I appreciate you. I'd rather get good stuff or the best. And, yeah, please go check out his websites and start generating your leader print years.
Speaker 2:Yeah, let's go, let's go out there and build up at a world, right, that's. That's. That's the call I think, and you know there is. Maybe leave it on her sort of a vision for what I aspire to achieve. The leader Pranayar is one percent of humanity for a thousand years. Boom, let's do that. And maybe we get that, maybe we don't, but it's going to be a lot of fun trying to do it and I think it's about standing for something we have to say. This matters because if you're not building the better world, who is? And it doesn't mean that you are kind of trapped in that, but you have an opportunity to step into reality, to address this lostness that we feel in the world today and we're so caught in this sort of sense of either total nihilism and everything's meaningless or hyperconsumption, where your values, defined by how shiny your handbags, slash watches.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:It's nice to have nice handbags. It's also nice to evaluate that maybe life can be a little bit meaningless. But in the here and now we are here and this matters and we should stand for what we care for and we should fight to build the better world. And I'm not trying to say you have to change the entire world. I'm just trying to say focus on making your world a little bit better. And that's the spirit of being a mutiprner. Amen, brother.
Speaker 1:Good. Thank you, Jonas. All the best Welcome. All right, and that was awesome, that was awesome.
Speaker 2:That was awesome.