Embark on an exceptional exploration of financial leadership and sustainability with a visionary in green economy thought leadership. At just 23, they were at the helm of a multimillion-dollar venture, swiftly grasping the gravity of fiscal sustainability and the tangible application of economic theory. Our conversation takes you through an odyssey of financial accountability, from managing student union services to confronting national debt issues, painting a vivid picture of the crucial role fiscal responsibility plays in both individual enterprises and the broader economic landscape.
The journey continues as our guest delves into their childhood experiences of economic turmoil in Nigeria, the precursors to financial crises witnessed in Thailand, and how these shaped their comprehension of monetary value. Uncover the strategies to navigate through treacherous financial waters, the perils embedded within our economic systems, and the speculative investments birthed by an era of quantitative easing. The narrative shifts towards the critical integration of sustainability into corporate strategy, emphasizing the necessity for long-term commitment and the foundational resilience needed to thrive within the startup ecosystem.
We wrap up with transformative insights on crisis management and the metamorphic power it harnesses for personal and organizational evolution. Our guest elucidates on the importance of workshops in readying leadership for unforeseen challenges and dispels common misconceptions about ESG rankings. As we close the chapter, we unveil "Green Sight," a comprehensive guide for embedding sustainability into the heart of corporate governance, thanking our guest for their profound contributions to the dialogue on economic and environmental stewardship. Join us for this enlightening discourse that equips you with the insights to steer through the intricate realms of economic and environmental custodianship.
Embark on an exceptional exploration of financial leadership and sustainability with a visionary in green economy thought leadership. At just 23, they were at the helm of a multimillion-dollar venture, swiftly grasping the gravity of fiscal sustainability and the tangible application of economic theory. Our conversation takes you through an odyssey of financial accountability, from managing student union services to confronting national debt issues, painting a vivid picture of the crucial role fiscal responsibility plays in both individual enterprises and the broader economic landscape.
The journey continues as our guest delves into their childhood experiences of economic turmoil in Nigeria, the precursors to financial crises witnessed in Thailand, and how these shaped their comprehension of monetary value. Uncover the strategies to navigate through treacherous financial waters, the perils embedded within our economic systems, and the speculative investments birthed by an era of quantitative easing. The narrative shifts towards the critical integration of sustainability into corporate strategy, emphasizing the necessity for long-term commitment and the foundational resilience needed to thrive within the startup ecosystem.
We wrap up with transformative insights on crisis management and the metamorphic power it harnesses for personal and organizational evolution. Our guest elucidates on the importance of workshops in readying leadership for unforeseen challenges and dispels common misconceptions about ESG rankings. As we close the chapter, we unveil "Green Sight," a comprehensive guide for embedding sustainability into the heart of corporate governance, thanking our guest for their profound contributions to the dialogue on economic and environmental stewardship. Join us for this enlightening discourse that equips you with the insights to steer through the intricate realms of economic and environmental custodianship.
Can we have some, luiuk? Well, thank you so much for joining us today. I'm very excited to have this discussion with you. Took a look at your profile and, as I mentioned to you earlier, you have had quite an illustrious career. I think you've mentioned that. It's kind of an interesting path that unfolds. You never know where life's going to take you and how the dots will connect, but you definitely worked with some really interesting organizations.
Speaker 1:I think you've cut your teeth in the green sprain space, as you mentioned, so I'm looking forward to unpacking your thought leadership around ESG, around the green economy and around your corporate knowledge in general. I think there's a lot of challenges that corporates face in today's world. I think it's a perfect storm of challenges for any C-suite at the moment. There's a myriad of challenges across not just ESG, but tech adoption, frankenstack leadership, so I'm pretty sure you can provide a few pulls of wisdom around that. And, yeah, I'm just very grateful that you had to share your thoughts. Maybe you can give a bit of background who you are and what it is that you do currently.
Speaker 3:Well, first I want to say thank you very much for inviting me. It was one of those. Wow, this is going to be interesting. I reserve the right to ask you a few questions, boys, that's okay, excellent, good. And so I ran my first $10 million business at 23. Wow, yeah, it was kind of wow. Of course, I had no idea what I was stepping into, as you don't.
Speaker 1:It's probably called a deep end.
Speaker 3:Well, it was a deep end. At a couple of levels it was a $10 million business, and then, when I got in there, I discovered that we had a million dollars of unfunded debt.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:And that we've been running in the red for 10 years.
Speaker 1:Okay, so how you postured, the $10 million was creative.
Speaker 3:So clearly there was a little bit of a lot more was being spent than was coming in, and that was I can't say it was a trial by fire, but it was certainly one of those ones of really having to learn the fundamentals about what keeps a business float and alive like sustainability 101, in a live environment. It wasn't theory, it was we had.
Speaker 1:You know, in the business school. No, no, no, it wasn't the reality of life, yeah.
Speaker 3:It wasn't case studies or where somebody's selected a whole bunch of data and given you it nicely packaged up. It was live. There were employees to look after. There are all the people that we had that were, you know, the customers. There were the other suppliers and the other parts. We were one of the biggest businesses in the state. In fact, we're possibly the biggest business in the state. You know. We're certainly up there in the top handful.
Speaker 1:And when you say states, is this in Australia?
Speaker 3:Yes, this is in Australia. This was in Tasmania.
Speaker 1:How did you, if I may just pause you there how did you step into such a big role at such a young age? What prelude is that?
Speaker 3:Your university or I'm going to say naivety and innocence Guaranteed. So I was made treasurer of the student union and the board of management and in those days the student services were run by the students. So we had the bar, the refractory.
Speaker 1:What universities is this.
Speaker 3:This was a University of Tasmania Library, a 264 bed housing scheme, the library, the bookstore, just like. We ran it all and I think people have pretty much gone all their students. It doesn't really matter, providing they're not losing too much money.
Speaker 1:So they actually put the student body in charge of all the objects.
Speaker 3:Well, the student body developed them over the years, you see, so we're going back quite a way. So back in the day, student services didn't exist, so the student union has started providing them. So we had a board of management that actually ran the business side, and then we had the union, which ran the student politics, as it were. But basically, when you became secretary, treasurer, president, you were across both bodies, okay.
Speaker 1:So it's a learning experience.
Speaker 3:Amazing. I mean amazing learning experience because I was doing economics and law, so in the theory of it, studying it, and then I become treasurer and I look at this and I go like, but we've just gone and built this absolutely the biggest entertainment venue at the time in the state. Well, where's this money coming from? And having enough of a business background, and how are we repaying it? To find out there was absolutely no agreement with the people provided the funds on how this was going to happen.
Speaker 1:I feel like that's a common theme in today's world. No one's asking that question. When it's like the US is giving this much money to this country, I'm like where is the money coming from and who is actually paying for it?
Speaker 3:I want to loop back to that later, but please continue through the story and so, and having lived, as we were talking about earlier, some interesting places where the country level debt is, seeing what happens and doesn't happen on that one, and so one of my very earliest things was recognizing this and then going I know that I'm not the first treasurer or president to have responsibility for this, but I can't ignore it and just pretend and which led to all sorts of things, including having to have some pretty deep and direct conversations with some of the people being part of creating it and letting it run. I'm going like just because we're students doesn't make us incompetent.
Speaker 1:So you picked up high degrees of incompetence in the financial construct to manage those assets.
Speaker 3:Yeah Well, it was just people going. Well, it's not important to us, we don't care. No one's paying attention, so we're not paying attention.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Where was the money?
Speaker 3:coming from. So what was happening was, in essence, the university was underwriting things except going like, oh well, you know they're not creating too many problems and I was looking at them going, but we've still got a million dollars of unfunded debt. And if you own the debt, and you can call it.
Speaker 3:I don't want us subject to the game that gets played if you don't have a clean agreement. Much cleaner to have an agreement. That is like we do this. We commit to paying on these sorts of terms or this is how would we negotiate if we had issues? And the funniest piece was so people going. But you can't take this as a student, they can't cope. So I ran the first positive budget in over a decade. So we actually broke even for the first time in 10 years, negotiated with the university to get an agreement on how would we pay. It had that all factored in and everyone was going like Joanne, you're never going to get reelected. And I did, and to me, it was one of those absolutely amazing things that I would.
Speaker 3:I look back now on the intervening years in between was what I took out of that was that when we treat other people as adults what a shocking idea they actually act like an adult. So instead of talking to my fellow students as if they were idiots and couldn't understand a basic budget, I was like well, this is what's happening, this is where it's at. This is what I want to do, yes or no? Do we want to look like a bunch of incompetent students because we don't need to and it was like do it.
Speaker 3:So we had to do all the tough things that it took. There were some people who were let go because they hadn't been delivering their part of what was promised, which was part of why there were losses. It took changing the services and what we could provide, given how much money there was really. So all that these days they're called stakeholder management, stakeholder and the multi-stakeholder thing all that was living pet-tree-dish. We treated each other as adults and capable of finding a constructive outcome, and we did. I got voted back in again there you go.
Speaker 1:Interesting listening to you unpack this, because I've spent the last two years going down the Bitcoin rabbit hole, which has made me get to grips with Austrian economics, economics in general, the woo-woo economics that exists in the world today, the debt that exists and how money is printed and how we decoupled from the gold standard. So I've gone down all of that and, as I'm listening to you speak, it feels like you should step into some government roles and help some of the governments that are raising debt ceilings and just printing money and not asking the questions about where's the money coming from, because it seems like that is a perpetual story. That is emotion, which is no one really deep dives, and I wonder what the psychology is about. It would be interesting to hear your thoughts, but it tends to be something that I mean. It's. First of all, you're in a university.
Speaker 1:So, this should be where you're grounding and dealing with the fundamentals of economics. The fact that it took you to come in as a student to actually rectify that where were the adults in the room? Number one and then number two is why is this such a prevalent problem, and is this the reason that the world economy is, at the moment, on the brink of collapse?
Speaker 3:Oh no, Is that a battery that's going?
Speaker 1:That is a camera that is deciding to not to play along. Give me one second. Not sure why you're behaving up.
Speaker 3:It's funny.
Speaker 1:It should be.
Speaker 3:I'm impressed that it can do that all, and it's a little lonesome.
Speaker 1:You're right, let's go there, okay, hopefully it doesn't hit again. I'm not sure why. It's fully charged and good to go. Okay, sorry about that. So just I mean fantastic grounding for you, right?
Speaker 3:Entering into the real world. Absolutely the most fundamental piece of it's some way or other, we support. And look at you, we support. When someone gives you a loan, there's an implicit value exchange, not necessarily in the immediate time, but over some kind of time. And when I went to the university and I remember sitting down with the then vice chancellor, who's expecting the students to come in and basically go we need more money the last conversation that he and the treasurer expected was me going well, okay, I realize there's this thing. It's a bit of an issue because I don't want you guys to be at risk for not having a repayment plan. It's significant. Neither do I want us. So how are we going?
Speaker 1:to work one out.
Speaker 3:Interesting and because we had once we had done that, we were on adult to adult terms with them. You see, you're really not sure that this is a good idea to talk about. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's like giving us a.
Speaker 3:It's giving us a signal, yeah.
Speaker 1:It's just yeah, why it's overheating. Okay, it's fine, we just take you out of the game. You do like this.
Speaker 3:Oh, it's the stand that's having the problem.
Speaker 1:I think it's just overheating. It's like enough for one day. There we go. Okay, this is the pottery the phone decides to fall over at some point.
Speaker 3:It's okay, at which point we'll just laugh and go okay. So there's some contextual spirit. Some of Adam Smith's animal spirits are appearing.
Speaker 1:It's the central bank. The central bank's getting involved, before we say too much. Exactly Okay. So you went into the chancellor's office and surprised them with some logical thinking around financials. Yeah, okay, amazing. So that was your genesis.
Speaker 3:That was the genesis, and so by the time I went to growing up work which my first proper official corporate job was with Anderson Consulting what's now Accenture and it had turned out that I'd run a bigger practice than any of the partners. Oh really. They found that very uncomfortable to have a female be an awful lot younger and see a lot shorter. Yeah.
Speaker 3:It didn't fit their idea of where wisdom was meant to be coming from. But I'd run a 10 million dollar business back in those days was quite a significant size business and so I ended up being roped into doing a couple of executive projects to help them on their business management.
Speaker 1:So you always found that you just had an act to come in. Look at the nitty gritty restructure to turn a business into a profitable entity, exactly, okay.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you would think that that wouldn't be so difficult, but that really is right, but this is the funny thing you probably may have similar experiences. Sometimes you're just things that you just do and for whatever bundle of life reasons you've picked up the skills for and it just struck me as normal.
Speaker 1:Would you like that, if I may inquire, in your childhood with your own pocket money? Did you see the trend starting there already, or were you the kid that actually saved their money?
Speaker 3:Well, actually more of it was. So we lived in Nigeria when I was a kid and I distinctly remember being given Ten Naira, which back in the day, Ten Naira was like real, serious money. Ten Naira as a kid was like wow and yeah, that was great. And then the currency collapsed and I was most distraught because my Ten Naira did not buy anything nearly as much when I went somewhere else in the world and then the similar thing happened?
Speaker 1:Did you dive into why it collapsed? Did you scratch the surface?
Speaker 3:Oh yeah, Well, my father was an agricultural economist. So talking about economics and systems and how things interact, that was dinner conversation, so it was part and parcel of what was happening. And then where they're… the causality, yeah, and what's behind it, and then where and how does one take action to manage one's way through that? So when you have inflation or deflation or currency variations or collapses which… so when I ended up in Thailand with PricewaterhouseCoopers managing financial services, consulting there, 25 years later on, I remember referring to my mom at one stage and going mom, this is happening. And then this is happening and she's going. Well, what do you think is going to happen next? I said the currency is going to devalue lots. She goes, well, you've seen it before. And then about three weeks later, yeah, we lost 25% on the bat.
Speaker 1:So what I'm picking up? Correct me if I'm wrong here, but I suspect, because you mentioned earlier, that your dad was a scientist and it seems like he spent a lot of time unpacking the realities of life and drawing logical deductions from systems, processes, triggers, causalities, so that naturally became ingrained in your outlook on life which empowered you with this natural ability to come into complex financial ecosystems and to start understanding the intricacies and parallels or links between the different inflows and made it quite simple for you.
Speaker 3:Yeah, okay, that's interesting and it's because… I mean, do you have things in your own childhood like that, where you picked up like a knowledge set or a thinking system that you then found later on isn't as common as you thought? I just thought it was normal because that was the world I was in. It was only when I went elsewhere I realized it wasn't normal.
Speaker 1:Mine was resilience. You got months, yeah, resilience. Okay.
Speaker 1:Being because we've got a big family. Long story short, I had to go to boarding school and developed quite a thick skin early on, and I think that served me well in my adulthood with a lot of the challenges I've had to face and might never say that attitude when I take on a specific task, venture or role, so the only one that pops to mind as you ask the question is resilience. I'm sure there's something else. It wasn't financial, I can guarantee that much I didn't have that I haven't understood. Financial or economics in general was for me not of interest, or even a black art, because it just didn't make sense until I started studying Bitcoin, until I started going down that ramp and I felt like I actually can make some informed thinking and logic as to why we have, in these repetitive cycles that are unfolding.
Speaker 3:And then if you take what you're seeing on the economics and you add the resilience, in because to me that's a super powerful life skill.
Speaker 1:Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 3:So you know, when you put those two together, you know what comes up for you. What do you see happening?
Speaker 1:Well, I would say the financial part. I've become very, very careful in storing my value. I am resilient in pushing through in entrepreneurial activities. My financial side has become a low-time preference way of living versus a high-time preference way of living. But that's only recent, in the last two to three years maybe. But the resilience has been there since childhood. So that has got me through the journey of life and I'm looking forward to what the next ten years has to hold, because I think I'm going to need both financial and resilience. I'm glad I'm stacking sats.
Speaker 3:Well, and this is the pieces, these different components. One of the things I've noticed in my life is that, because we live places where the economy did change so hugely and so unpredictably, there's a certain appreciation that who we are and who we want to show up with actually had absolutely nothing to do with the economics. It had absolutely everything to do with the choice we've made in the moment. Correct, correct.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I saw a tweet from someone that I don't know about a day ago who went and attended a Berliners conference so having guys on stage giving some of these usual golden nuggets or pulls of wisdom and what stuck with me about his tweet was that one or two tweaks in his logic at a younger age would have resulted in a lot more zeros behind his name.
Speaker 1:And it kind of resonated, because we can very easily make stupid decisions that cost us dearly without even realizing it while we're going through it, and only late on in life do you realize not leveraging the what do they call it eighth wonder of the world compound interest. Well, so you know, like financial I'm talking through the financial lens now. So, yeah, I'm intrigued to understand your thinking more. And just looping back to the Thailand story, so what were the soft signals that you picked up at that point, if you can remember, that made you predict that kind of slide, and how did you manage it? Did you keep it to yourself, or was it a company-wide thing that you made available and pervaded or prepared for?
Speaker 3:Well, it was one of those weird ones. Sometimes, when you know too much, people aren't sure they want to listen.
Speaker 1:Oh yes.
Speaker 3:And so one of the signals I'd picked up was that when a country starts putting in currency controls, that is a very strong signal, because it means inflows or outflows are too big, and so currency controls came in.
Speaker 1:And for those that don't know what a currency control is, what would that typically look like?
Speaker 3:For example, most of the time if we want to send money anywhere around the world, we just go send it. Currency controls came in and were saying that we could only send this. Anything above this amount needed to be approved. So basically that was actually acts as a choke on flow Red flag. Yeah, that's definitely a in the same way in business when the finance says okay, no more coffee. Well, no more coffee. It's sort of like excellent.
Speaker 1:That's worse case scenario. Then you know you're out of there.
Speaker 3:Well, exactly this is it. There are signals that really are, ones that life experience. So that was the currency ones. Like in business, when a CFO goes okay, you're meant to be running a multi-billion dollar business, but we're only going to let you, you're going to have to get your finance guy to counter sign $10,000. That's a choke. Yeah, it's a choke, and it's a signal that there's something intrinsically not right going on.
Speaker 3:And one once then you've learned, you know, you're parsed down onto what's behind it. So that was an absolutely big one. And then the, so that was sort of like the major signal. And then there was one other one. I know that there was two that I was looking at. I'm trying to think of what the second one was, and it could have just been something as practical as credit terms were getting pushed out, payments were getting pushed out. It could just be like those two, that business cycle cash stretching a little bit, going like okay, warning signal from a business point of view. But the currency one was like, okay, looking at this. And then what happened was that? So this was the Asian financial crisis and Thailand was the country that was most heavily hit, and so we lost 25% in a couple of days, which is quite a lot.
Speaker 1:That's massive. I mean, that's disastrous for some, depending on, I think of extended your right.
Speaker 3:Well, the big challenge becomes if you've got debts denominated in another currency, or cash inflows and denominated in another currency, depending on whether it goes up or down, one's either making or losing or having to source, and that, from a lot of finance is a flow, and that just that changes. Essentially changes the pipes and what can come through and how much needs to go through. And my challenge was that I was running the financial services consulting practice and so if there was anyone who should spotting it, yeah, it was me. But then the challenge came to go to the rest of the partnership and go here are the signals, how do we prepare?
Speaker 1:And did you?
Speaker 3:Many. Actually, what the crisis happens was one of those ones. Like many crisis, slowly, slowly, slowly and then all at once.
Speaker 3:And that you know when the all at once hit. Which is where other learning from childhood became super helpful, and that was that you find the people, you find your partners to look after each other. Because when you've got that kind of thing happening, economically no one's business is stable. Most businesses will not have sat down and model what will happen if you have that kind of shock going through the system. More will now because we've got more sophisticated tools, but even then you have to be comfortable to put that scenario on the table to go what happens.
Speaker 3:I mean, I had friends who grew up in Zimbabwe which was you know and you know what happened there, and I remember sitting down with him and myself because we both dealt with massive currency shifts and inflations and things like that. You know we're going to like, oh yeah, our models are our personal financial models. All right, we're able to stick it in and go oof. Therefore, this is what else we might be wanting to do. And so I was doing that in business, and I remember distinctly upsetting some of the other partners oh, joanne, you're being difficult. I'm like no, so if I wasn't saying this, I should not be in my leadership position, because my industry is finance. Yeah.
Speaker 3:No, okay, so you know you guys are dealing with other industries. Pay attention to different issues.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you should be listening, because this is going to permeate across to you one way or another right, interesting, yeah. So what do you think humans don't want to face the bad news? It seems like a consistent trend, especially with finances right. I look at the world today.
Speaker 1:We have a systemic financial crisis that is about to hit the world. Okay, it's already started unfolding, with the defaults of various banks across the US. There's this propping up of the global financial system, you know, through Woo Woo Economics is what I like to call it, but no one is really addressing it. 2008 was disastrous. The world almost stopped. What's about to happen will make 2008 look like a sandwich in comparison.
Speaker 1:So why is it that we are avoiding the obvious? Why is it not on every major front newspaper? Why is it brushed under the carpet? Or is it brushed under the carpet, you know? Is there this consistent human trend of plain monopoly and not wanting to ever deal with the reality of the worst case scenario? We kind of want to avoid the bad news, right?
Speaker 3:I think there's a couple of pieces that come into it. I suspect those of us who've lived through the disastrous scenarios before are comfortable in looking at them, simply because we've realized we've lived through them.
Speaker 1:You think we've learned?
Speaker 3:I suspect we apply at least in our personal, in the personal.
Speaker 1:How we diversify our risk, maybe.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and then what base do I put on in my life? So one of the pieces that I personally have taken out is I try and keep my debt levels low and I know the wonderful powers of leverage, but that cuts both ways. And, having sat down and modeled what happens when you have portfolios doing a 20-30% shift which they do every couple of years and then you model out what that does to leverage and how quickly you can get wiped out, there's got to be an absolutely massive buffer to go like okay.
Speaker 1:And that's what you've seen with the banks. Right, it's a simple in my mind. Maybe I'm oversimplifying it, but my layman understanding is the banks have taken long-term leverage in the form of bonds, which are meant to be the stablest form of investment Low return, low risk. The Fed and the banks have been printing money. The central banks, okay. To combat the inflation, they have to raise the interest rates, which corners all the banks. And all of a sudden, the whole portfolio has flipped on them and, to your point, every basis point that is going up in the wrong direction is making them illiquid and basically putting them in the red and they started to shut down.
Speaker 1:So they've basically checkmated themselves for an oversimplification of a very complex scenario.
Speaker 3:Well, what's been happening is an advanced game of chicken. So that dynamic that you just described is something that people suss out, and when they started pumping the first rounds of quantitative easing in the global financial crisis, the question was well, when's the inflation going to hit? And it's like, wait a second, it's not showing up yet. And what fundamentally happened was an awful lot of that inflated denominated money. Instead of showing up in price, inflation ended up in the speculative investments. Where in earth did all the VC money come from? Yeah.
Speaker 3:In essence it's going like one level money stock market VCs. Yeah, it floated off into the 1%.
Speaker 3:That's all connected into this other world. So we didn't end up with kind of inflation when he talked about how much money was put in as a ratio. We should have seen much more inflation but we didn't. It's moved into a different shell game and that shell game has been very entertaining because lots of stuff is moving around and different people. Then a bit of money leaks back into the other economy and it's like well, there's actually all these little parallel ones playing along and I use the phrase a game of chicken, because the dynamic that you're calling out of when does the house of cards collapse? Is people going? Well, I reckon I can do another cycle. I can do another cycle of the money game. I can do another cycle of the VC game before it collapses.
Speaker 1:So this comes back down to human greed. In essence, it's the same perpetual human greed at all costs scenario, which is just daunting, right. Because, the consequences severe. Okay, let's baseline back, because I mean I could talk to you for hours and go down that rabbit hole, but I want to just pull it back to the work that you're currently doing. So you've got this clear capability that has served you well in your career helping companies and consulting companies to manage finances and to do it in a way that ensures sustainability.
Speaker 1:What is the crux of what you currently do and maybe share a bit of your current work and how you're serving industry?
Speaker 3:Well, what happened was because this is like we're saying, sometimes it's the loops of life that make the difference I was asked to help a significant fund look at what their strategy was. The finance and business brain was the one that'd been asked in the room, but they had a particular remit that had a high sustainability requirement on it, so they weren't looking for me to have any understanding of that, because I was in on the business strategy and it's funny how these two worlds are considered totally apart. And when I was working through the strategy, I was asking questions about well, okay, what's your mandate? How are you going to actually demonstrate and prove that? Because that's actually how you verify what you're actually doing for the next cycle.
Speaker 3:And I was pulling apart some of the top line statements and the CEO ended up going like, you understand the stuff more than half of our people do, but you're a business strategist, you know your money brain, not this how. And that looped me back to the dinner table conversations I'd had as a kid, because my father was a senior scientist and part of the initial research groups around what's now the Green Revolution. So the environmental and social sustainability type issues, the decision-making things that are really corporate governance. That was dinner table conversation when you're working out, not the time for some good Nigerian scam stories right now. They've been doing that for a really long time.
Speaker 1:Let me just say they're very good, they're very good.
Speaker 3:It was happening when I was a kid, so there's plenty of experience on it. But all the things that we now call ESG environment, social and governance we're all part and parcel of how do you create when we want to introduce something new into an environment in this case, my dad's case it was farms in different parts of Africa and different parts of Asia, the two primary places that he would work in. How will it create? There's two criteria that they would evaluate success on. One was economically would it actually add value into the farm? So the equivalent of the business side. The second one was the one that was how will it help the farm and the family, the community, be able to be more prosperous for longer? So doing something that was a great short-term hit, that might create one successful crop but create a damage that meant that that farm was not going to be able to prosper and have crops in subsequent season, was just an excuse. Expression of Australian bloody stupid.
Speaker 1:And you have full license of beef.
Speaker 3:Okay.
Speaker 1:So they're going to an Australian in a room. Let's go. Okay, off we go.
Speaker 3:So was that just considered absolutely stupid? That is not a sustainable farm to do things like that. So that fundamental thinking on if you're doing things and that's going to create pressures between you as the farmer and your farm workers because most farms, even if they're small family holdings, will have people that come in from other ones, or if they're bigger ones, of course, and they have direct employees that creates a huge thing. You add another $100 a year into a small farmer's income. Quite often what that would do would mean that a daughter would get put into school. There was just a little extra margin.
Speaker 1:Direct ratios between inputs and outputs for small things like even just land ownership, and what that does within an economy, right Exactly To give someone actual ownership versus a gray area, and how they could fundamentally change an entire landscape. Okay, interesting.
Speaker 3:So that awareness of there was far more to create something that's successful in the long run and I'm going like long run, a couple of years. I've been around in business long enough to go long run, actually a couple of decades. I know how long it takes to get a business really up on its feet and truly living and prosperous and profitable, so that it actually lasts.
Speaker 3:It takes a decade Easy. Yeah, it's a lot of work. So why on earth would one want to be investing time, and energy without that intention of a building it for the decade? Which means thinking about what will happen if I do this now. How will that show up over a couple of cycles?
Speaker 1:We do think very short term with our I mean, I deal with a lot of startups? I don't think we, everyone kind of wants to see this five year unicorn scale up, exits, living the dream scenario.
Speaker 3:And it's by all means. I love living the dream and the theory of it, but this is where it then gets back into and what's the real data. Nearly everyone I've ever spoken to over what's now an extended business career and you go and talk to them. You sound like, oh my God, you're an overnight success Nearly everyone. You get that little smile on the face and said, yeah, over the decade, I mean it just is. And so this idea that we In the startup space and so I know when I've been in mentoring in that space it's like, nah, if you're playing a two year game, don't waste your time. If you're playing a four year game, yeah. If you're playing a 10 year game over a 10 year game, you're also success of pretty good. And then there's nothing else because most people do not have the guts to commit to the decade.
Speaker 1:That long term thinking.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and then the thing is, the decade feels daunting because it is a decade, but it's also what separates the wanna-bees from those that actually genuinely do.
Speaker 1:Okay, agreed. I couldn't agree more and I've been hearing a lot of this in some of the contents I've been absorbing recently. You know these visionaries that are thinking long term and how that fundamentally changes the culture and ecosystem for company through that type of strategic thinking. So the work you do is centered around that.
Speaker 3:Yep. So it's centered around what do we need to do now so that our three, five, 10 year has its best chances of success? And we've deliberately worked with the construct of ESG, of environment, social and governance, because it's the most accepted construct where we're getting away from saying that the main metric is money. Yeah, finances is an absolutely critical and key metric I mean what we're talking about before but it doesn't stay alive in an action unless we go and look after these other things. And in looking after these other things, what I've seen over the years is that we identify new opportunities. We identify different ways of doing things. That allows us to either serve our customers better or find efficiencies that we wouldn't otherwise do, or tap on talents that we didn't realize we had within the organization, or collaborate in ways that the traditional competitive model is not very good at.
Speaker 3:So much more now the success is coming from is how do we create dynamics? That means you're putting something like. Take this, for example we're both putting in the time and attention for a conversation that we both find interesting and trust that the people who choose to spend the time listening to us and companionship find it interesting too. It's a collaborative creation that is bigger than any one of us sitting here alone. And this is equally true in business, when we're looking at going OK, if we're here now and this is where I literally talk about OK, you want to be a unicorn, what's the point of the horn?
Speaker 1:Oh nice, I like that.
Speaker 3:What's the point of the horn?
Speaker 1:May I take that and license it.
Speaker 3:You may. You may take it and license it and therefore, what are the iterations we're going to need? That's going to help us get towards that point, Because it isn't one that you know, those lovely diagrams that we have in PowerPoint, the straight line.
Speaker 1:The hockey stick.
Speaker 3:Oh, even better. I love the hockey stick and it's like, oh, and it's like, nah, there's be a whole bunch of like wiggles and backs and forth.
Speaker 3:You know there'll be, the moments of drama and the getting through the hockey stick is. There's so many different ways of doing that that aren't necessarily about masses of debt, like I actually think. The sooner a business is able to demonstrate that people will actually value and pay like the one If you go like this is the point of your horn the sooner you find ways that people actually will value it, the more likely you are to get there. The great thing is we've got. With the current tools that we have and the way that digitization helps us, it's so much easier to connect and actually do that than it used to be.
Speaker 3:I remember when I first went up to Thailand, I literally was, I was given my Australian would say I nick, but it was actually, with permission the laptop. Remember the bricks? Because they were so scarce back then, they just weren't done, and now my phone has more brains than my laptop and that just gives us data and access in ways that we didn't have. So what I'm working with it's usually the leadership teams that I work with, because what I've found is that if the leaders aren't the leadership team, and particularly the CEO and the chairman, or if it's a smaller organization, the main investors they're not prepared to go and stay a course. If they win. When I start talking a decade and the different sorts of swings and hours of outrageous for it, if they win on that, I know what the probability of success is about zero.
Speaker 1:Well interesting I mean Very relevant to some of the stuff I'm busy doing that I'll share more with now yeah, I do yeah. But everyone's. We're so focused on the founder or the founding team, but it's broader than that based on what you're saying.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, because the I mean it used to be about the one hero, the founder, and then people got a bit wiser and go like the team is pretty important. Then it's the culture on how are you going to swap people in and out as the organization shifts and grows? Because it's a different.
Speaker 1:The team that took you from one to 10, 10 to 50 and 50 to 100 are all fundamentally different.
Speaker 3:Exactly Very different psyches, very different life experiences and professional experiences that do it. Totally different risk profiles. And then the finance and the money journey that goes along with it, because the who's putting that in and how's that operating it's that's sort of what I've often found is the unspoken one. So a whole pile of the focus is okay. So who are we actually being, the leadership, the culture, the values? But then equally is then how are we playing the money game on that one and how?
Speaker 3:You know your phrase of resilience is so key in this one. How will it last and respond when the shit hits the fan, like we're just saying, like when we look at what could easily be coming up in the next? You know not to be a doom and gloomist, but I have seen currencies collapse more than once. I remember have you come across the phrase minceki collapse? No, okay, and it's a fabulous old-fashioned economics phrase that I learned way back in the day and I remember sort of hearing about this phrase minceki collapse and they're going oh, that's what happened when I was a kid and all the banks collapsed. So basically what it is is that when we lose trust in our finance system, we go. The does the people never run for the money. You know you want to try and pull, it's not there and think the system collapsed, you realize that the whole thing's a force.
Speaker 3:Well, it's a trust game, yeah, and it's essentially banking and finance and insurance, you know, and asset management. The finance system is a trust game and so a lot of the processes, the regulatory processes, are about how do we try and maintain enough good behavior to the greed stuff you were talking about and certainly out there. How do we maintain enough rules in it so that we can actually continue to trust that the cards aren't going to collapse? Because so, like, one of the questions I'd be working with through People Now is like so how are you actually designing the organization and the relationships so that when some kind of turmoil comes because it's pretty likely I don't know exactly which one, but the odds are some significant turmoil pretty high how on earth would we get through it or not? Or how do we close shop gracefully?
Speaker 1:Well, I think it's resilience More of it's resilience.
Speaker 1:But I want to. I think resilience is not going to work in any more, because there's a perfect storm of challenges that every business faces and every individual faces at a home environment, and the one thing that keeps coming to my mind is business continuity, or futurist thinking, or red flag, blue flag, right so soft signals that lead up to a black swan event and being able to make sure that your business continuity and strategies are intact to deal for worst case scenario 2008,. No one was prepared, even though the writing was on the wall. In retrospect it was pretty obvious on how bonds were being repackaged to show a better credit rating than they actually had and the shenanigans there no lessons learned, no accountability. All those people moved into different positions in different banks and here we are dealing with a very similar outlook that's exponentially larger. Covid again just showed how unprepared the world is at every level for black swan events. A ship getting stuck in the Suez Canal again, everything comes to a grinding halt.
Speaker 3:So in Panama Canal right now is slowed down.
Speaker 1:So the reason this resonates so much with me, this discussion, is I have just recently finished building some consulting tools that I'm using because I've now spent the last year and a half deep diving into the startup ecosystem. So my first three startup businesses completely failed was just fumbling my way through it no thoughts, ideas, no framework, no strategy, no mentorship, just raw tenacity, resilience. Let's go. I believe in this. Give me my pension money, let me go build something. And went to school on that one. The third one ran it for five and a half years, still made some schoolboy errors and ended up impacting like nine different people. Because I had to. Eventually they just left because I didn't want to retrench anyone, eventually couldn't pay anyone and the whole thing came crumbling down. Death of the ego, boom, done. Ended up going back into corporate working and scaling a startup through there.
Speaker 1:Now I've left there and I'm in a startup ecosystem, but I keep seeing the same patterns. So I'm wiser, I've cut my teeth, I've got the battle scars and I'm looking and I'm working with the startups and I'm working with the ecosystem. And whether I'm talking to a startup, a VC, an incubator, accelerator, yes, there are elements or pockets of excellence on how to do things better, but I still see the same learning curves being kind of repeated. So, whatever I've done, I've now spent the last six months building out a VC assessment tool which measures the startup against their business dimension, the market validation, future readiness and technology. Each of those has a whole list of questions underneath it which gives me these beautiful charts that show me how ready are you to be invested in measuring them against those different dimensions and scoring with weighted scores that can be tweaked to meet a VC requirement. I've done the same thing with the technology assessment and then, most importantly, the build to last assessment, which is looking at what is your ability strategically to sell, build and run, scale that to then have the skills to support that. And for the first time, I feel like I've got something that baselines the startup that you can mentor against, identify where the gaps are and have some level of methodology or data to quantify preparedness, risk and ability to scale.
Speaker 1:Because while we need that is, you can't just take a startup and a drop it into a Huawei or enterprise partner of Huawei and hope for the best. Are they ready? Can they even deal with a big corporate PWC opportunity? So, anyway, just looping back to your point, this really resonates quite a lot when it comes to identifying soft signals and making sure that you're prepared as an organization to actually deal to turn all those soft signals going to be leading to a Black Swan event and how prepared are you to deal with that? Supply chain business continuity Do you have visibility of your assets? If the world comes to a grinding halt and everyone has to stay at home for the next two years again, how ready are you to manage all your assets? So these things really resonate. I don't think everyone's learned their lesson. Covid has shone a light on it and we see a spark in digitalization strategies, so I think the work you do is really very important.
Speaker 3:I think both of these things are important, because people put so much time and energy in, and the number of people in the startup space that are, in essence, pulling out of pensions and or credit cards or family.
Speaker 1:Getting into debt, getting family into debt, On pure guts right.
Speaker 3:To have something that goes. Okay, you want to, but how do you actually manage this risk profile so that you're setting yourself up for the best chances of success? And like one of the things. So when we set up the ESG Institute, which is a separate organization, part of the gap there was going massive gap in green skills, massive gap in green leadership and most people are focusing in on the tech, but human decision making is still part of the solutioning and people go like well, how can you scale it? And it's like well, we've scaled global transformations across 50-year-old countries and been able to do that in six months.
Speaker 3:This is fundamentally not no different. These days, the tools and techniques to be able to do that kind of scaling exist in quite a different way to the way that it did in the past. But one of the pieces I want to loop back in is when you look at that ability for organizations to leap when you use the expression leap, because it's not sometimes it is as you say you have something that a huge organization goes. You've got something a little different there and that could be helpful at ours. What signals have you found that are like the soft signals for an organization or a team to be able to step into that leap.
Speaker 1:Good question. 95% of the time when I work with my startups, before I even get to them, leaping into an organization, I dive into product market fit and I'm like why are you building what you're building?
Speaker 1:And I just scratch a little bit there. It's all intuitive and there's been no real methodology applied to what are we building and why. Who are the stakeholders that we're building for? What are their task pains, gains, what can we do to relieve it? How do we test the hypothesis? Most of the people are taking their money, their pension, their family's money or VC's money and building things that aren't even market relevant. So they might have they generally have good ideas or good intent, but there's very little substance behind the why and the validation of the why. And.
Speaker 1:I think that's the first critical step. The startups that are enterprise ready have somehow majestically got that right, and that's where I would have created an incubator or an accelerator or a university that has good mentorship that has enabled them to solve that. And when they hit that product market fit, you see that rapid spike. Then it's about because it's like everyone wants to be a founder. Everyone thinks the startup journey is amazing, it's really difficult and it's really tough and will test you at every level, and that's why there's such a high failure rate, because, yes, you might get product market fit, but now, as you would know, the next set of challenges kick in, which is how do we scale this?
Speaker 1:So, you need more money to make sure that you're scaling your tech to meet the increasing demand or the regional applications, whatever it may be. To raise money to make sure you have the right skills which you scale sustainably as you grow. Okay, to ensure you don't burn out your existing teams, but also to make sure that you don't have brand reputational damage once you do get an enterprise opportunity. So I've put these assessments in place to validate a high investable RU and what are you investing money for? That tethers directly to the technology assessment, which is to say, these are the phases of what you should be leveraging from a technology perspective to hit the dream. This is what your product market fit should look like, but that's more of a consultative process with them. And these are the skills and strategies where you strong, where you weak, what you need to beef up technology and build to last. That's the biggest portion of your ask financially, so that you can do it sustainably Once they tick those three boxes and I just had it with the startup.
Speaker 1:Now we got an amazing opportunity with Changi Airport Group and we've weaved one of the startups that is ready, that has scored high across all of those dimensions, to introduce them as a differentiator into an enterprise opportunity with Huawei, which is the essence of our program, is how do we take you from startup to scale up, which is why we do what we do. Obviously, they become evangelists for our technology, but can never introduce a startup like that to an opportunity of that grand scale if they're not ready, because you're doomed to fail. So my best attempt in the last year and a half of working in this ecosystem has been centered around the sanity must prevail in how do I decode this? It's like I'm almost I like to use the term fleshing out the startup DNA and then leveraging that DNA to do protective analysis.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, to see where it goes. How do you incorporate things like part of what I've seen on the journey to overnight success? I quote definitely right, which is why I just sort of one of those ones of you know everyone who's been in the game is like yeah, absolutely so you're getting close to your decade. How are you going? Sometimes it takes two, but I saw it's a stamina game at one level.
Speaker 1:And even, even if it, even if it was within the four, five year period, the founders that I've seen that have done that. It wasn't just that four, five years, it was actually all of the stuff before that made them to start that business, to be ready at that point Exactly.
Speaker 3:So there's often quite a big run up yeah, exactly In that. And then there's the spotlight moment, and hence why the laughter is like yeah, yeah, right, and which then also for me, like one of the pieces is in. That's because there really is this journey that seems to be where is the maturity of the thinking, in that team's resilience? Because sometimes you know, there's those cycles, yeah, and just that is a tough one.
Speaker 1:So I think I've thought about that a lot and it's so interesting. I've heard different perspectives on this. I'm not sure what perspective I hold. I think the make or break comes down to the founder team and their resilience. For sure, when you coach and prepare someone that isn't resilient in principle, yes, in reality I can't say with confidence because I haven't done it to the point of someone finding unicorn status. The only unicorn I have worked with was when I was consulting to then joined. Those founders were resilient, hardcore South African alpha male resilient, but had cut their teeth in the tech space for decades before.
Speaker 3:And they'd cut themselves in some pretty tough environments before they go into the tech and found success launching other business.
Speaker 1:So they're like mentally ready. I look at the startup that we just introduced to the airport opportunity. There's very specific traits within that fund so very humble, very soft, but very focused, very dedicated and suspect. Resilient because within two years he's got 30 construction companies that he's solving for. So it's not just the resilience of the founder, that first 10 hires which I think is so critical because it becomes a core team resilience and who you surround yourself with. So I've been thinking a lot to try and answer your question, having built out the built-to-last reports and identifying the skills that are needed. And the part that I've been thinking a lot about is do I need to bake in a personality profile assessment to understand the DNA of the persona that is the founder and the first follower or followers, where the gaps are, and then, outside of just the job type, what is the personality profile that would be a best fit for their culture, to help solidify that core unit, to be resilient as a whole, to get them from the 10 to the 50. But I don't have the answer for that yet and it's a good question.
Speaker 1:I have heard I've had someone on the podcast who uses AR. You speak and answer questions and the AR is measuring 303 million markers in your voice not what you say or how you say it to pick up depression. And she mentioned and I still haven't got the papers that she was able to use the technology to listen to a founder pitch and pick up which founders would be successful and which wouldn't. But I find that a little bit difficult to believe. Just from a pitch you could identify that, because the question is centered around resilience, which is what you need for that founder's journey. I think the Americans get it because they tend to not take you seriously. If you go into a pitch and they ask you how many times have you failed and you say none, they're less likely to be confident in you than the guy that has failed. I don't know.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's a scar tissue. There was a wonderful model by a gentleman called Professor Peter Robertson who did some his research was based on. Weirdly enough, came out of the Mayo Clinic, so actually came out of the biological sciences and cybernetics as a combination. So what is the Mayo Clinic? My ignorance. It's a very sophisticated medical research institution in the US.
Speaker 3:And so going back to integrating things from Conrad Lawrence on what creates safe attachment.
Speaker 3:So it was quite a beautiful multi-dimensional one. But what I've liked about it in this space at BM's Look at Teams, is it tests quite a few dimensions on what creates stability and ability to adapt and the different perspectives. That's needed so you can see if there's gaps. And I found that one a useful, very practically useful tool for being able to go and talk with the teams on where they're at and why, and at the more sort of gentle, personal one it's almost like are they willing to talk about their moments of darkness or their periods of darkness and how they've got through them? Because it may not be that it was because they'd already had a startup success. But if they've shown that ability to come back from some of the inevitable shitty pieces that happen in life, they've got that ability to recover and keep moving rather than collapsing under the weight. I mean, when your comment there about yeah, and then your ego was destroyed, right, I mean mine's certainly been taken apart more than once.
Speaker 1:So important in retrospect. Going through it's horrible.
Speaker 3:Horrible, but I do think I'm a better human being and a more able person in helping others to succeed as a consequence of the fact that the Buddha old ego has been well bashed aside and more humble.
Speaker 1:Oh, hugely. Yeah, I think it's so good to be humbled. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's very interesting. While you were speaking, I was thinking about one of the things I'm trying to do now is get to a point where I can, in real time, pick up the soft signals and quantify and predict the Black Swan event and whether or not the resilience can be pre-looted, so that you can almost have at least a window of preparation to say with a high degree of certainty this is about a hit and this is how you need to deal with it and provide coaching, because I think that's the key as well that mentorship and coaching with the good founders and the successful founders all have strong mentors and strong advisors.
Speaker 3:Yeah, is that that bigger team?
Speaker 1:Yeah, you have to have that. Yeah, you have to lean on people to, because it's impossible to know at all. You might not be a resilient founder, but you could be a good leader, and the only reason you don't have resilience is because you haven't failed it. Do you want to fail? No, should you Maybe, but ideally that comes with a lot of pain and consequence. So if you don't have to because you have a good support structure, then maybe that is a way.
Speaker 3:I think there's a book here, maybe that is meant to be there you go, you're waiting for you to get written. There was something in what you were just saying there that in a little bit of the back of the head it was going oh, this is an interesting one because there's let's see if it can come back out because there's a space around the bigger ecosystem of support advice. And one of the founders that I was mentoring a couple of years ago was at a Chamber of Commerce Awards night last night in Australia. Which one Okay, anyhow it comes and sits down. I hadn't seen him in a while and he's been through listing in two different countries and it's just like it's going on, it's going on. And what you brought there then it was like, oh my God, sometimes you forget things that you've. It's like absolutely brilliant, I'm glad.
Speaker 3:He was saying that what you had helped him with actually was just something that was, and it's wonderful because there's a journey and often we're involved for part of a journey, not necessarily all of it to have realized that something that was part and parcel was super, super useful. But the reason why I think he's coming into mind right now is he'd been it wasn't his first rodeo and there was a level of mindfulness of how he was choosing to balance looking after his team but also making sure his family was okay.
Speaker 3:Same ports and things and that there's bigger sense of care and balance. Because, as a founding team moving through this, and as someone who's working and mentoring, and be it through the roles that we have and start ecosystems, or as advisors, or even in some cases, with some of the VC funds on, like, how can you spot the right ones? I actually think there's a very practical, very, very simple indicator is are people willing to actually go and take a couple of hours out on a regular basis or days out on a regular basis to actually consider how we would respond to a black swan? I mean it's very I mean it's so simple.
Speaker 1:I like that a lot. Actually, I never thought of that. There's something there like a like when they do cybersecurity testing, they have a red team and a blue team. So you have a black swan team and you put a team through a worst case scenario and see how they deal with it. That could be invaluable. I like that.
Speaker 3:And you can pick up different sorts of combinations of situations and events. Because when I come from Tasmania and I've always had a giggle when people talk about black swans, because the only swans we have in Tasmania are black oh really, they're black. So we have a black swan event. It's like, oh really, we got a whole bunch of those floating down on the river and it's just. I know the phrase comes from something that we didn't expect and that our worldview defined it out of possibility, and to me the black swan is like, yeah, all you have to do is change your definition of possibility and there's something new. That's here the black swans swimming on the river, they're completely there. And this willingness to actually go and say what parts of my worldview or my combination of events am I really uncomfortable looking at. So then, how do we create a structure, be it different teams or same leadership team deliberately going in there? And the most simplistic one that I found from like that really soft signal is if they're not willing to put time into exploring it.
Speaker 1:Then they're going to be a victim to it. There was another term that I heard recently, so there's black swan, but then it's something jellyfish. Watch if you've heard of it. It was like a honus, it's something jellyfish, and it was from a futurist named Craig Wing, who I interviewed a week ago.
Speaker 1:It's the second time I've sat with him. He likes to back cost, to create the perfect future, leveraging what you got. So it's more about shaping your reality. And the jellyfish analogy is centered around the. Because of the increase in ocean temperatures, there's more jellyfish and I think he referenced in a specific part of a certain country and those jellyfish are slowly but surely clogging up the filtration systems that feed a nuclear plant and is causing this catastrophe to kind of almost happen. So it's not as severe as a black swan. You've got all the signals. It's there, it's building, it's like the climate crisis. Right, it's the same thing.
Speaker 1:So it is interesting and I mean we've spoken a lot about VCs and founders. But I'd like to know and I want to come back and straw man the ESG thing as well. But you're working with corporates, so the principle applies, right, I suppose, maybe even more so I would say maybe corporates are a bit more relaxed because it's got a bit more room to flex, but you going in and you helping to prepare leadership groups for this type of contingency thinking. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So I mean, how do you approach it, what is your methodology? Where do you come in Like, how do you help structure an organization to think like this?
Speaker 3:I take it in three stages. First one is with a very senior team and it's from the outside. It looks like workshops, so what. I'm actually running it as a social test on what they're prepared to think, what combinations of things. So I've got a set of about 150 future costs.
Speaker 1:What is a future cost?
Speaker 3:This could happen.
Speaker 1:Okay, so a scenario.
Speaker 3:Yeah, but very granular type things. So it's, which then gets okay. So we're creating. Well, so these combinations come together. That combination is okay. Well, what is that? Both are happening. How are you operating? It provides a way of seeing how willing they are to even step in to explore futures that have different combinations to the standard story they've been told by their strategy team or by, you know, their favorite set of advisors, because my intention is not to go in there and repeat the standard story. That doesn't add anything it doesn't, you know to what we've been talking about. It doesn't allow us to see beyond the edges, because the interesting stuff's beyond the edges, beyond the edges on that one, and that from my point of view, from a point of view of practice, it's a test to see whether that thinking is even possible. Can they step in and do it? Because if they can't, I already know which pathway they're on.
Speaker 1:What would be a good example of a future cost scenario that you'd curve ball a specific market vertical with?
Speaker 3:Literally, we have 150. We have 150. Sometimes I, you know, I come, yeah, and it's literally go pick Every single one of those, every single one of the things that are in the set are absolutely scientifically valid as possibilities, as potentials, but most people only take one potential and look at that and then dismiss it. It's like, okay, so what? We create a workshop process, so people are taking sets of these together and then doing what you know in Oxford scenarios, processes, creating what possible futures could come out of that. And then, therefore, what would we actually do about it? Now, that second one about what would actually do about it tends to is in step two.
Speaker 1:So excuse me as I try and go through this because it's very interesting. So you've created 150 permutations of future cost events. They pick one or more. Then in real time it's like a C-suite group or a functional group within the organization and you say, okay, deal with it. And what's your next move?
Speaker 3:Exactly Okay. So what would I mean? The first one is actually usually around. What would this actually mean? It's the sense making. How do you process, how do you pull it together? You know, can you even formulate? Because this you know to like. What creates power thing is people just get so channeled into what they think should be. Often they can't even literally take on that piece of data and go. This is valid in the world here. Here's the swan. The swan's in front of you, like swans, fly in right, they're big birds, they make noises, they're very graceful, but you know they don't just go puff a smoke up here like some magician's things.
Speaker 3:You know there's two point about signals, that you know there's things that are leading in if we're willing to pay attention. So this allows. So we run this one as primarily can they make sense, can they integrate and can then they start thinking about what the implications are? That doing those three things is actually incredibly heavy cognitive load on people.
Speaker 1:And do you give them a time constraints, Of course. So what like half a day or?
Speaker 3:Usually within half, usually half a day.
Speaker 1:Okay, and they have to come up with a full, responsive strategy that they would implement.
Speaker 3:No, they just simply have to be able to integrate and be intelligent about what would need to be thought about.
Speaker 3:I've found over the years I used to do it with a super high intensity stress version before in my younger years, and then what I realized was what I was doing was I was creating a structure that triggered fear dynamic which doesn't take, make, create for deep thinking. It's not constructive. Yeah, so I've had to deliberately go like, given what I know about neuroscience, how do I design this so they stay high performing individuals with discipline on the topic, to not run away and go into panic and dramas and in there, but with a time constraint, because we, one of our resources in reality, is time, so that's, that's always part and parcel of it. So that's half day with, you know, a functional group or a leadership group, depending on scale of organization, sometimes with founder groups, which can be quite interesting. Sure, you know two on that, one that gives enough data to sit down with whoever the sponsoring executive and to go. This is how the team's capacity to respond is.
Speaker 3:And do you the 150 future class scenarios are general, or do you segment them for vertical or do you keep it general on purpose, I keep it general on purpose, because often what people talk about a black swans are simply events of somebody to what we were talking about.
Speaker 1:You don't need military relevant to your industry. It's coming from the right field Over there, yeah.
Speaker 3:And as and as like like me sitting being able to sit there and call my mom up and go. I reckon this is going to. I'm like you know. I'm no genius on this. There must have been plenty of other people, but I knew this. I had the wide, the wide vision to see the signal to incorporate it into what I did.
Speaker 3:I keep it certain industries, as sometimes there's some fun ones to go in and put in particular, but the wide signals is that often where the weak, you know the weak, where the weaknesses, and therefore creates the relevance by deliberately bringing it in. So that that's step one. Step two is going okay. So now we're, now we're getting, you know, we're widening our field of reference in here. Now, as we start pulling these scenarios, what is that? How do we? What choices are we going to make? Which ones are we going to back? Which ones do we want to not be backing, because the consequences of those ones are so horrible?
Speaker 1:And do you let them free flow? To map that out, do you give them things?
Speaker 3:Yes, structure on that one, but the core outcome, the core outcome of that process, is okay. These are the things we really need to be doubling down on, because several of these scenarios go this will be powerful and oh boy, now we thought through those. We should need to be doing something to avoid, because often people under invest in the avoidance tactics as well. Now it's a bit like when you go, you know I should be doing more exercise and then just going. Actually, if I went and set my alarm, went to bed half an hour earlier and got up half an hour earlier, you know, I would probably be able to go and get a good walk in in the morning. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:So the yeah, simple and effective yeah, simple and effective.
Speaker 3:I go for simple and effective Because I think there's a lot where we create complexity that doesn't add a lot of value. I can complexify stuff. I've got a good brain. I've got a system's brain.
Speaker 1:But the point is that, in a crisis, you want people to be high performing, as you mentioned, and to be constructive, not panic at the disco.
Speaker 3:Exactly, and when they've been through this sort of process, they're building the socialized skill with each other to operate in that way to not go into that immediate, you know, here and over crisis panic To then be. And then, because the second stage is working through well, how would you do and what would you do? That gives that whole role playing type capacity to forward, think into what would be possible, how they could respond. And then the third one is like, okay, so you know, workshops are great. So then now what are you going to do in real life?
Speaker 3:Because it's the thinking process is the first layer, the experiential process is the second and the third one is actually go create, is actually go do it. And that's the place where the commitment to see, see forward and say you know what, there's some of these things that will you know to talking about that short term, long term thing, some of these ones are you can see the slow moving object. The question is given there a slow moving object, are you going to ignore it? Or are you going to deliberately do small things progressively so that you're in the right place for said small slow moving object whatever it is positive or negative To be able to be in the right place for it, and that takes a systems thinking and a set of discipline that not many teams are prepared to commit to.
Speaker 1:Agreed. As you're talking, I'm thinking of two scenarios. So one I remember seeing COVID unfold in Asia. Being in South Africa, have you seen that crazy thing happening in Asia? You know, not worried about it, no one was preparing for it, it was an Asian thing. And then it swept the globe and boom, we know how that story ended.
Speaker 1:Then I think of the Suez Canal story, where the ship got stuck, and I remember speaking to someone I know that was running the comms for a big shipping company and a few days after it happened only then were they beginning to get like oh wait, this is actually going to impact us. I'm like are you telling me that you guys in your vertical dealing with shipping didn't quantify and then the panic was kicking in? How do we notify? Because now all these deliveries and there's this knock on effect all the way down. So that made me think quite a lot about just how, generally speaking, we in autopilot, with very little strategic or systems thinking, so I would. I mean, I find it fascinating that you're running these workshops, Do you? They say, never waste a good crisis Is part of your workshop. Outside of dealing with the crisis, figuring out how to leverage it Absolutely.
Speaker 3:Because the power of a crisis I mean, if you go back to the old etymology of it, it's that turning point side of it, and I will think back just to take it out of the theoretical and into the practical is in that moment of crisis. It's like at least I could say for myself and be curious for you, when I hit that point of having to let the ego go, suddenly a whole bunch of other stuff opened up, A whole bunch of other stuff. But it was crisis, it was really not, it was not a fun place to be. So in that space, suddenly there's a whole stack of other things that become possible because we have it's like we have to let go of that old rule or that old belief or that old construct, and therefore, what could we do instead? What would be better to preserve, what would be more powerful if we did? And so it's not so much like go out seeking crises, but I have found that they are incredibly powerful places for the next level of transformation. Interesting.
Speaker 1:I love that. That's quite profound. If prepared for properly, it could be the make or break for your entity organization Interesting. Okay.
Speaker 3:And a bit of it's the willingness in that and this is where I suspect, when some of the founding team or some of the advisors have been through their own equivalent long dark night of the soul to have had some lived experience, that all of it helps, Because otherwise, the way at least I was brought up in this the sort of school systems and the business systems it was like you're only as good as your last success.
Speaker 1:That's actually the opposite.
Speaker 3:And yet then you hit that point where that's not working anymore and then there's nothing and there's no skill and capacity to go. Well, okay, but it's this other time in my life.
Speaker 3:And just judging from the way you're smiling at it, you're going like, yeah, actually, this is actually where the space is open up. Okay, now what's possible? If you take the sewers, what happened in the sewers? And you go like, okay, it's not the first time the sewers is shut down. Thinking history and most things have a historical history very rare that something is happening for the first time.
Speaker 1:What do they say?
Speaker 3:History doesn't repeat itself, but it should as rum Exactly, and it should go like well. So, given that, how would businesses have chosen to respond differently In that one? What else opened up? What other sorts of possibilities opened up as a consequence? Lots normally different ways of relating to customers, different ways of engaging with suppliers.
Speaker 1:Moving goods. Yeah, you just needed to get some chartered flights.
Speaker 3:Exactly what are actually really key supplies, and then how would we move those around, given that yeah, why are we importing so much and not creating?
Speaker 1:where's that contingency?
Speaker 3:Exactly yeah, it opens up a whole stack more.
Speaker 1:So just to round it off, so you run these workshops, you prepare leadership teams before diving to the ESG part of it. But you give them these scenarios, you give them frameworks in which to test them against the scenarios within a time constraints. You then give them a real world application. Yep, what else?
Speaker 3:And then, like I said, the third one is okay. So what are you actually willing to do? The most pragmatic analogy I have for this one is that, you know, the first one is a bit like, you know, if we saw a leadership team as a group of artists creating something that they've not created together before, well, that's yeah. You know, the first part of any powerful artwork is like what's the conceptual vision, what is this about? It's very nebulous, but if you can't get that, then there's nothing to create. And the second one is you start, you know, if you have visual arts, you know you're starting getting this sketch, the form of what it might be, what are the different dimensions, and pulling it together, and then becomes the hard yak of actually going and creating it, of the building, and going okay, this and what next? And okay, well, this, you know, we thought that was going to be. That didn't work.
Speaker 3:Okay, but back to the unicorn point. If this is the point we're aiming for, what other pathway will help us get there? And my experience has been in that dimension. Things happen far faster than people expect, gotcha, which is not what they're anticipating, but that's half the fun. But it's that willingness to go now have to be in action. What's being done? What part of reality are we testing? Which hypothesis can we take forward? Which questions do we need to ask to find out that next bit of the pathway?
Speaker 1:Mm. Yeah it's very design thinking orientated, for sure. Yeah, okay, love it.
Speaker 3:Well, design thinking comes from art. Yeah, packaged up so that it's corporate safe Ha ha ha ha, I didn't know that.
Speaker 1:Okay, talk to me a bit about your ESG council and the work you're doing there.
Speaker 3:The ESG council was set up so that organizations, large and small, could access practical roadmaps to accelerate their journey on sustainability. We looked at it the systems thinking brain along with a couple of other colleagues from other parts of life, and so the issue with ESG is not that we don't know what to do, is that it feels so big and overwhelming. So we do. Most people do that. When it's big and overwhelming, they go let me go do something. I can understand Mm.
Speaker 3:None of us like feeling incompetent, but the reality is all these things are well built out fields, but they're just not fields that we're familiar with. So what we've done at the institute is put together roadmaps with 10 other organizations so that we can go okay, is it strategically the right decision to be an observer? You know, for some organizations that may be an authentically appropriate strategic response. Are we at the stage of being a pleasure, which means that we've seen there are some stakeholder demands for action, but we're not seeing a need to change business models, and that and therefore the appropriate response would be different based on what's you know, if you just even think of those two particular typologies there.
Speaker 3:The third one is organizations that are saying okay, for us to be viable in the future, we need to be a complier. We need to be ready for the sorts of things that are likely to be happening in terms of be it around carbon and greenhouse gas, be it around materialization, be it around in the, as, for example, in community impact in governance a whole series of elements in governance. Are we going to be fit for the future that's coming at us based on our capacity to change? Yeah, and that's from a point of view of if you're thinking about, is someone investable and the resilience going forward. Now, that's a very strong basic resilience position to be in and go like we are going to be ready for what's coming at us.
Speaker 1:Got you? Let me straw man it a bit. Yeah, lots of controversy around ESG? I think yeah, and I'm keen to get your response on some of these points I've heard because I'm by no means the expert or holder of view, just have seen people making noise, so you have some people that are calling out ESG and saying that you've got like big oil that's in the top 10, but then Tesla would be kind of weighed further down the list.
Speaker 1:How does that stack up and make any logical sense when it comes to ESG rankings? I think you also have a lot of negative perceptions around ESG versus real world KPIs and profit making, and the two don't stack up, which is why people tend to shy away from the former. So what are your thoughts around that and how do you kind of shape thinking on that?
Speaker 3:Let's parse up some of the problem spaces on that one. The first piece is that the term ESG is very loosely defined, which to me is part of the problem. So when I wrote Green Side, it was literally to be super pragmatic and go okay in environment are you looking at the following eight things? Because fundamentally very few people actually have to reason why we think someone else is greenwashing is they care about something different.
Speaker 1:Yeah, different KPIs.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and therefore you don't care about. Instead of my worldview, you're greenwashing because you're not caring about mine. That's like no, let's be clean about these. I'm caring about that, you're caring about that? Okay, different, we could be mutually respectful and I can still say I choose to, in terms of my supplier base or my customer base, have a filter that says I prefer organizations operating on a different profile.
Speaker 1:Well, those that don't know what greenwashing is.
Speaker 3:A greenwashing is when, basically, you go and pretend to be green and you're not. So these are the sorts of things where you do one token project, you go and clean up a beach and say that we're really good, but actually your production plans are producing an awful lot of waste. That's damaging. That's the level of integrity. Between the marketed statements and the reality has got a significant gap.
Speaker 3:The old fashioned thing we just call people liars or, as some of my friends in marketing would say no, they're just over marketing. I'm just going like substance is substance. So part of the thing when people are talking about Tesla or oil, I guess, is that the people who've created a particular index have their own internal weighting on what elements they're prioritizing. So that lack of transparency is actually what the issue is rather than anything else. So if you've got a super high weight on, are you an organization that has high consultation of communities? Some of the oil and gas in the mining companies are quite good on that because they've had so much shit given to them over the years for good reason they have to.
Speaker 3:So they're actually, in some levels, can be perceived to be relatively based on the scoring system. Relatively good, got you. That's not Tesla's strong point, but it's got other metrics. So when we were at Greenside and did the research that's behind Greenside, it was like well, what are the most common things, so that we can be clear on what is our actual profile against these and therefore have constructive conversations rather than dismissive conversations with each other. So that's a significant part and parcel of this whole. Is it fiction? It's like, well, we're talking about different things, so let's actually end up defining it and talk about the same things. Then we can be constructive on us.
Speaker 1:That makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 3:On that one, and it's not the he she says crap.
Speaker 1:So there's no one ESG index.
Speaker 3:Each. What's happened is people have created their own. So when we set the Institute up, it was to say let's create a transparent structure.
Speaker 1:Where weightings are applicable to verticals or you can choose your own.
Speaker 3:I mean in the same way that with a bank, they have their own credit scoring thing but there are some standard profiles that people know and acknowledges. These have high correlations to do performance, gotcha, and that keeps it clean, it keeps it non-judgmental and you as an investor or as a customer or as a supplier can go and say okay, we'd like to see your profile and it could be agreed to be released so that there's a transparency in that. And then, if I say that, okay for me and what we're doing and on the value chain we're in, it's super important to have organizations that are scoring very, very high on what they're doing in biodiversity and they're care for that. Maybe completely irrelevant to a different value chain, gotcha, but I'm not judging the other one negatively for it. I'm being clean and transparent about what my priorities are.
Speaker 1:Can people still abuse that?
Speaker 3:One of the things I found over the years. If people want to abuse shit, they will, so I make no apologies for the mere fact that we are quite creative of working our way around corners. Yeah, it is a human truth, but I do think the transparency on it make. The transparency and the level of agreement on what some of these things are does take some of the noise out of the system. Each of the elements that we've included in the core parts of the construct in the ESG's governance structure all come back to things that are independently researched to be highly correlated with high performance. So you don't have to like it, but the science does suggest that it correlates to high performance.
Speaker 3:So, like one that often gets a reaction, is this whole idea talking about pay equity so much? There's such a deep body of research across so many countries that just simply says the more equitable pay is for comparable work, the higher performing the organization tends to be, the more likely it's going to be in the top portal rather than the bottom portal. Interesting, and it's just. It's just going to be like you don't have to like it, but this is actually what the data suggests. So it costs us money. It's like well, actually you're transfer charging between one group. We're externalizing a cost to another. The more transparent we are about some of those things and the cleaner the conversation gets.
Speaker 3:So that's what you're doing and then as a business we can be clean internally, We've got a common alignment on it. And then one of the pieces that is hitting more and more for businesses we're seeing the early signs of it now in Asia is where organizations are either looking at their customer base or their supplier base and saying we don't just care about you giving us an appropriate price for this, ie the financial. We're actually looking at the other things you're doing, because that shows up on our scorecard too, and that term for that in the environment space is called scope three Gotcha.
Speaker 1:I mean that makes a lot of sense. And. I think that's smart to make it relative. Like you said, if people want a bullshit, they'll always find a way to short the system. But the principle is to drive the right behavior and align the KPRs, because more often than not it's a KPR thing.
Speaker 3:Exactly, and so when you talk about weak but strong signals, so each year we do a state of sustainability survey and then produce a report around it Our next one's coming out next week and one of the lead indicators, of course, is to what degree do you actually have a alignment? Be understanding and see KPIs align to these sorts of things in the organization, because in reality, as if you don't have those three things, there's going to be no action. Yeah 100%.
Speaker 3:Yeah, which means you might have a fantastic pledge of saying we want to be net zero. This is great, but if you're doing none of that, I know there's no motion and therefore the ability of the organization might be marketing it strongly, but they're not even going to be able to be a complier and ready for the future, much less be someone who you could say, from a business point of view, is likely to be a successful transformer, ie truly contributing into those metrics and developing capacity and therefore value creation around it, much less the more advanced players which are defining whole new business models.
Speaker 1:Seems pretty obvious, but I think if it was, you probably wouldn't need to go in and do the work that you do. So I mean just to loop back to the kind of consulting you do and mental shop. It's really just to come in and help companies align at a strategic level, at a futurist thinking level, at a strategic planning level when it comes to dealing with events and aligning their ESG KPIs with where the market or legislation is going.
Speaker 3:Well, where the market legislation and also when they start thinking through, what kind of future do they want to be creating? So it may not be market, it may not be legislation, it may be a very conscious you know what. There's that game and there's that game and we don't want to be actually the one contributing to that game. We want to be contributing to this game and that's a very conscious choice.
Speaker 1:And I suppose you can only make that choice if you understand the options and the consequence of those options, because the one on the left has a very specific picture and if everyone's going down that path. It doesn't matter how much money you're making. You can't breathe or eat money.
Speaker 3:Well, and particularly now, money is digital it's even at least in the good old days, you know, when it was paper, you could use it for something else.
Speaker 1:Maybe smoke it or something.
Speaker 3:Now it's completely digital and so you know the work with the leadership teams is around that, because I've just found over the years it's very hard if the top teams aren't pushing, you know they're not opening the pathways.
Speaker 3:And then we run a lot of programs that are around and this is when it's beyond me, is sort of the individual mentor and it's the organization's support on helping the rest of organization I, the people to be able to move forward and step into these new spaces. Because what I've found over the years is that we get so used to being put in X-box and being told this is the way we're allowed to make a decision that when, as leadership teams, start opening up, unless we consciously change the rules and make it really visible and give people the opportunity to try different things on for size, they're not gonna do anything different, they're gonna go. I got my KPI. I know what happened last year when I tried something a little different. It whacked me. I'm not moving. So that learning and development side of things becomes equally important, as the second, you know, is like you've got two legs you've got to have both of them in action to be able to move forward.
Speaker 1:So important because often that strategic thinking at the top doesn't filter to the bottom, which creates this disjointedness within an organization. And I've made that mistake in corporates where the KPI I don't align to the KPI or I don't shape the KPI to what I actually need to do, because you get an opportunity to do that, I suppose they'll always try and ground you against the North Star, so then you're pulling in different directions. I like the mention of the training and upskilling pod as well. I think that there's a huge question mark and challenge there for a lot of your learning and development professionals, hr professionals, looking at the workforce, looking at the rate of knots that everything's moving, how do you and where do you try and get their attention? Because I've set up a training and enablement division to get people to focus and complete a module to certify again.
Speaker 3:The only way it worked is when it was aligned to their KPIs 100% and I remember my sort of realizing how important this piece was was many moons ago, given it like, oh Joanne, and would you also do this kind of project? And I got like this cool da-da-da and going and doing it. But one has X amount of bandwidth and that meant that one of the other KPIs didn't Suffered, suffered and that had been agreed. There was this trade-off.
Speaker 3:But when it hit the end of year performance review, guess what I got whacked for? Yeah, and it was like. After that it was like I'm just going, like I'm noticing my own reaction on it and I'm going like I'm just you know.
Speaker 1:And you probably nailed it and did great work and everyone was like this is amazing, but wasn't your KPIs?
Speaker 3:Precisely, and even the fact was because the KPIs system hadn't been updated to match the agreement that we had, because of course you've got different bosses and multi-matrixy dimensions pulling us and the civilian on it, and nearly everywhere it was like it was so brutal.
Speaker 1:It was just Solder strain Completely.
Speaker 3:And so no one in their right mind will step off that beaten path more than once. And so if we'd really like, from a you know, again the weak signals conversation of if we're putting any strategic change through, you know, be it saying we're wanting to up our movement on ESG, for example, or we're seeing a different way, we need to be relating to our technologies and digitization, you know to pick another one. I mean, they're getting closer and closer as topics and we're not doing anything to change the way our people think, their KPIs and the conversations we had with them, leaders. Why on earth do we expect any differences in behavior?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Not happening.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we've been talking a lot about this at a corporate level. I think it matters at a government level as well, and I find most governments have lost the plot. You know, I look at. Something that really inspired me is to better understand the Chinese culture, kind of took a deep dive into how they have. They have what they call their five year strategy or five year plan of the name, and the way it works is they plan for it quite a few years in advance, where, at a regional level, they roll up what is it that we need to do? And then it starts at the bottom, it rolls up and rolls up and it rolls up and obviously at the top level it gets aligned to an overarching vision. But then, when they sign off on it, everyone down the valley chain is held accountable. That becomes your KPR for the next five years. And it's crazy because I think you know of my country, there's just no accountability, there's no KPRs. It just feels like a freefall Everyone's out to lunch. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And you can see the countries that have strong policy and strong KPR management or leapfrogging within our lifetime. You can see the leapfrog in development, in infrastructure, in societal behavior, in societal health, and that principle applies at a corporate level, at a government level, at a startup level. So, yeah, I see a lot of value in that and I think it's been a very enlightening discussion and definitely keen to learn more. You've stimulated my creative thinking on the scenario workshops that you run and I would encourage anyone that's watching this or listening to this to reach out and engage, because I think that I don't know, I haven't heard of teams doing that, and that resonates quite a lot with me to know that you are there catalyzing that type of workshop, because that would help when the popo does hit the fan, that they know exactly how to deal with it without you know, completely breaking down.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and it's. What I've found is that when we're prepared to go and face those sorts of things, they become infinitely less scarier.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and You're almost going with confidence because you kind of have tested your team, the resolve the methodology. It's like anything discipline practice rehearsal yeah.
Speaker 3:It's like if we were a sports team, we'd be out doing rehearsals, we'd be trying things out, we'd be learning different game plays.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we'd be going well if we stretch these rules. How would we need to be playing the game Mm-hmm? And the scenario type workshops allow people to do that In deliberately the safe petri dish of a workshop, rather than saying, okay, now let's go and experiment on your P&L. How many billions can we write off? Today? We don't need to, because the scenarios create that soft, predictive environment to sense, make and go. Okay. And then to the wisdom of the structures that you're developing is like where are the signals that can give us that wide angle?
Speaker 1:Mm-hmm, yeah, and the converse of not so much even the testing of it on the P&L, but being victim to it, because testing it, at least you can pull the plug and take the loss. Being victim to it could wipe out your P&L because you just were never ready. Yeah, you no longer exist. That's it. Cheers, big ears. Thanks for coming. You've been doing the plan, yeah, good Well, thank you so much. I really I do appreciate your time with us and I could sit and discuss this with you for a few more hours. I would like to at some point maybe even go into another session where we deep dive. Those scenarios Definitely intrigue me and your book is out. So quick shout out for your book and where can people source it?
Speaker 1:and what value would it add to them?
Speaker 3:So the book is Green Sight, the Sustainability Guide for Company Directors, written for the senior audience, so C-suite and boards. So what are the constructs that we're dealing with in that zone of business responsibility? Simplifying the alphabet, super sustainability. Strategically, what are your choices against those different model topologies I spoke about? And then, thirdly, a very, very practical guide on, if you want to start rolling this out, how do you go and set up your top level of accountabilities across different parts of the C-suite so you can get into action. And I wrote the book this way for a very pragmatic reason is, if it saves you six months in your journey, that six months is tremendously valuable, yeah, and that gives you access into the tool. It's available on not just bookstores nearby, but, very usefully, you can get it on Amazon and some of the other online bookstores, like Book Depository, or you can reach out to me at joanflincom on my name. Awesome, yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, thanks again and best of luck, and keep doing the good work that you're doing. I think it's important.
Speaker 3:Thank you for having me and for a brilliant conversation Awesome, thank you. Thank you, 이. Y'all probably have hard chairman summa's how-to type a celebrating] Kind of way for us вин, popcornвар, итак the.