The CEO Who Hid His Blindness for 45 Years - What AI Taught Him About Leadership

For 45 years, Mike Hobday sat in boardrooms at IBM, Barclays, Prudential and Atos - running transformation programmes worth millions, presenting on stage in front of hundreds of people - and never told a single person in that room he couldn't read the screen behind him. Not glasses. Not correctable. Partially sighted since birth. He kept it hidden until he was sixty. In this episode, Mike and I talk about what that secret cost him, what it taught him about carrying something private inside a career built on performance, and why he now believes AI is doing to every leader what his eyesight once did to him - exposing exactly what you've spent years learning to hide. This is The Power Within."

In this episode of The Power Within, I sit down with Mike Hobday - former IBM General Manager, former CEO of an AI company, transformation leader and executive coach - to explore why so many AI pilots stall, why agentic AI changes more than workflows, and why leaders need a clear North Star before people can follow them into the future.

But the conversation also becomes deeply personal.

Mike shares that he has been partially sighted since birth and kept it private at work until he was 60 - a remarkable story about vulnerability, confidence, identity and the masks people wear in professional life.

This is not just a conversation about AI.

It is a conversation about fear, leadership, trust and the human story people need when everything is changing.

Tune in for an inspiring conversation that will leave you equipped with the tools to lead with confidence, overcome obstacles and unlock The Power Within

email us at: info@motivuscoaching.com

Subscribe, share and leave a review to help others discover the show

Transcript

Opening And A Chance Meeting

Keith 0:00

Welcome to the Power Within, the podcast that uncovers the real stories and strategies behind leadership and personal growth. I'm Keith Power, and in each episode I sit down with inspiring individuals who faced challenges, built resilience, and discovered what it takes to lead with impact. Through their journeys, we'll explore the mindsets and tools that drive meaningful success. If you're ready to grow, lead and unlock your true potential, you're in the right place. I'm joined by Mike Hobday, an international CEO, senior advisor at HFS Research, former IBM General Manager, AI and Transformation Leader, Board Advisor, and Executive Coach. As we explore more stories of resilience, growth, and the power of determination. Sometimes the most interesting conversations begin in the most unexpected places. I met today's guest in an almost empty Indian restaurant just off Whitehall in London in the autumn of 2024. We were the only two customers in the restaurant, and somehow, as these things sometimes happen, a conversation began. And we've kept in touch ever since. He has led at the highest levels of technology, automation, and enterprise transformation. He was previously CEO of Antwerps, a company focused on intelligent automation and cognitive machine reading. And before that, he held senior roles across IBM, Atos, PWC, Barclays, and Prudential. But this conversation is not simply about technology. It's about what happens to leaders when the world changes faster than their assumptions. It's about AI, judgment, transformation, identity, automation, but it's also about humanity. Today we'll explore what transformation really demands, why AI is forcing leaders to think differently, what gets lost when organizations chase technology without purpose, and what Mike has learned about his own power within. Mike, welcome to The Power Within. Mike Hobday, welcome to The Power Within. But before we get into what I wanted to talk about, which was AI, transformation and leadership, I must start with the rather unusual way that you and I met in an almost empty restaurant off Whitehall in London where we were the only two customers. You looked a little stressed and we struck up a conversation. So what do you remember of that moment? And are you someone who generally believes in serendipity, or do you think we create these moments by being open to conversation? Wow, yes, well, I do remember it. At the time, and this I guess is 2024, I was uh CEO of a global AI company called Antworks. And one of the things about being CEO, particularly of a mid-size kind of growth company, is it's a very lonely place. And all of the issues of leadership, which basically means whether it's an HR problem, a client problem, or a shareholder problem, all come up to you. So it wasn't uncommon to see me being pretty stressed. And one of the one of the behaviours associated with that, um, you know, when I'm in London, I stay either at the flat or um in a hotel, is often the only place I could go when I got time on my own and turn my phone off was actually to a restaurant in the evening. And I absolutely remember going to uh I think it's called the Citar restaurant at the end of the Strand. That's right. And uh we were the only people in that lovely place. The food was amazing. It really, really good. The Tali I strongly recommend. With only you and I in the restaurant, there was no chance we were going to escape without a conversation, so I'm glad that we did because I wouldn't have been here if uh if we hadn't uh serendipity. You mentioned Antwerps, but you worked uh across IBM, advising HFS research and earlier roles across

Building A Career With The 50% Rule

Mike 4:30

financial services and consulting. From the outside, at least, it looks like a career that's built around transformation, but from the inside, what do you think has really connected the chapters of your career? Okay, well, it's probably worth just going back to those early days and saying, Well, I left school and went straight to work. I didn't go to university uh immediately, joined a Barclays Bank as a statement stuffer, someone who took a statement out of a pile of statements and then put them in a brown envelope before, because it's long enough ago that they hadn't actually invented machines that did that, so I had to do that. So it really was starting at the back end of Birmingham in a small branch, and my career progressed quite slowly, but somewhere around five years into my career, someone in Barclays decided that they'd seen something in me which I absolutely had not that suggested that I should be put forward for the accelerated program normally reserved for graduates. And uh in a selection process I was placed, and um I was amazed as anyone that I would be selected. And then then what happened was someone who had got no expectations of a career found themselves in a program over four years with a new job every year, everything from looking after the car makers of Europe um and and credit analysis to being PA to the marketing director, and uh that's that whole thing sort of created in me the idea that you know a career is is almost like one large experiment. Try as much as you possibly can because everything I did apart from being an analyst uh was a credit analyst. Uh, I was really good at it, seemed to me, and everyone was very happy. So, in a way, kind of, I became a transformational beast because you know I wanted to do a job for a year or two, and then I was looking for the next one. Not because I was looking to develop my career, but because I wanted a new experience. And one of the things that I hold as a and this is a real, it's not it's not a sound bite, but is is the 50% rule. So when I'm looking to move to my next role because you know, for risk, risk mitigation purposes, I like to think that my skills give me pretty certain that I can actually deliver 50% of the job without any trouble. And the other 50% is something I've never done before. And and my new employer knows I haven't done it, that's not to be fair. There's no point of taking a job which is incrementally different from the one you're at. You've got to keep making steps. And so if you look across my career, it's there's no big career plan, it's just a huge experiment over something like 40 years. It seems to me like rather than you choosing a career around transformation, transformation kind of found you. And the one commonality I find with myself, I left school at 16 as well, straight into work, and I ended up in London by the time I was 18. But you started out in Birmingham. I didn't know that, by the way. And uh Brummy. Uh yeah, Brummy. Yeah, you don't have the accent, that's for sure. And and I'm not sure that we try to put our accents out, but they do soften over time, just to ensure we're understood, right? Yeah, exactly. They're very important, actually. And uh it's very important to talk in the language of the people you're communicating to. Not necessarily physical language, but in a style that's uh uh that's um that fits. It fits. I spent some time working Malaysia, which I'm sure being in Singapore, you go there often. And it's very easy to think that because Malaysians largely speak English, that they speak the same English. This is not true. I'm married to a Malaysian Chinese and she has some very unique ways of speaking, and in some ways I'd say her English, as is the case of most Singaporean and Malaysians, is better than mine because they've learned English and learned how to use it properly and grammatically correctly. Whereas we just communicate. I want to go back though, you mentioned someone in uh Barclays Bank four years in, saw something in you that you didn't, um, and that's another thing that aligns with my own experience. So as you moved up the ranks, so to speak, in your career, did you take that on board in looking for young um undeveloped talents yourself? Did you give back in a sense? Because I tried to do that most of my career and I looked for the outliers, those that didn't come through that graduate program, the direct route. I sometimes found that the best diamonds were rough-hewn coal when I first met them. So did you carry that through into your career as well, Mike? Definitely, and it didn't have to be young people, it could be people who were lost. But let's start with young is uh I remember when I was uh general manager at IBM, I have a kind of principle, is um I asked people to help me in whatever my mission is at the time who were best able to support that, uh you know, recognizing talent, not necessarily high hierarchical position. So I hope he won't mind mentioning his name, but to Dipier Rimmel, I remember meeting, I think he was about 17 at the time, and he was an intern in a different part of IBM. I was with others and we met in a bar outside of IBM's, and he was saying kind of a bit bored with what he was doing. And I said, Well, I'm looking for an an EA, and uh so he tried I think it was the next week he was then appointed my EA, which was an unusual thing to have in IBM actually. And and basically um he then got exposed. I mean, someone with incredible energy would be running off, it would take issues and problems and data discovery head on, and I think he still does that today. So that that's an example, and I think there's another example of finding someone whose name I won't mention, but when I was at um Prudential and I was head of transformation at the PRU, this is the Red PRU in the UK, and I'd arrived and we've got a big program with Boston Consulting Group and um and Accenture, and we were doing a new target operating model for the PRU, and uh a huge amount of money, millions was being spent on these external engagements. And and after I arrived, I went round trying to find out you know what was going on. I found that there was this chap who'd uh really had been sidelined because he was probably in his late 50s, early 60s, or something. But what I found out was when Accenture were trying to find out how the systems worked, this was the person they went to. So all that was really happening was that the architectural challenges that were being unearthed were being presented to the board actually came from this individual. So we took Accenture out and I appointed him a business architect, and he had a very enjoyable uh final parts career. And you saved a fortune as well. And I

AI Hype Meets Organisational Reality

Keith 12:15

saved a fortune as well. So AI is uh it's now in every boardroom conversation, but you've been working around automation, cognitive technologies, and transformation long before the current wave of excitement. What do you think leaders are still getting wrong about AI? Probably everything. It's um we're living in a time which is very similar to the immediately pre-internet era when suddenly the internet was there and everyone's trying to work it out and appointing chief internet officers, and there was a whole swirl of development of new companies, and some went on to be enormous companies like Google, and many disappeared. And I think we're in a similar sort of state. Without wanting to spin the whole conversation into a into the detail of AI, I think the you know what we're seeing is a a lot of pilots, a lot of proof of concepts, um which 80% of them aren't going anywhere, largely because uh they're being focused on back office, middle office, procurement uh productivity plays. What we're seeing is the implementations in the kind of front office are working because it's usually customer contact, almost chatbot related. But that's a view of last year. And I think this year people are getting serious, and we've obviously seen the um emergence of agentic AI. And I think although there's a lot of resistance, there is a true understanding that we are on the verge of a massive change in the way organizations are structured. The challenge that CEOs um face is the threat of not doing anything is huge. The challenge of trans transforming an organization, which means pretty much all over a period of time changing everything, is huge, and it's very, very difficult for these large enterprises, which are a bit like you know, if I think of the big banks, a bit like dinosaurs, they've been around forever, they've got a whole load of legacy and systems, and often 50 or 60,000 people, and it's very difficult to transform into a mammal. Whereas if you're starting from a blank sheet with AI first, uh you're going to have a tremendous advantage. And so it's it's a it's a real challenge, and um there's plenty of opportunity to succeed. The thing is, don't stand still, experiment, uh firm up on your future architecture, and above all, look after your people. I I just did a piece on LinkedIn this morning. I mentioned your name and I mentioned this, and it was uh basically asking the question of where it might go wrong, and it is uh in that it uncovers the gaps in leadership, not the technology, but the leadership and the human organization around that. How how do you see that? Do you see the technology as the biggest challenge, or do you see the organizational behavior and the leadership responses to lead in that as a bigger challenge? Well, if we're talking about enterprise and you know the large companies that we think of today, then uh one of the big issues the CEO faces is uh you know internal resistance. Because I mean we've seen it with um Standard Chartered's announcement, I think was it 2,000 or so jobs or you know, and uh maybe even more. Accenture laid off a lot of people. Um there was an announcement by Next a retailer here in the UK that entry-level jobs are being wiped out, and then I think you know, twice as number of applicants per retail job here in the UK than they were doing in the same period last year. So so what that tells you is you know that people are very anxious because no one's really explaining to them how their world is going to change, and not everyone's they're not getting a sense of, well, is my job safe? And my view as an ex-CEO going through often quite challenging situations in in turnaround situations is you have to communicate. And I think the problem that CEOs have today is in most cases, and not all, they're unable to articulate the North Star what direction is my business going in, and setting a con what that which would allow them obviously to then set a mission for their executive team, but above all to present a story or a narrative to their staff which sets out how the organization is likely to change. Uh, and I recall, you know, again, when I was at the PRU, there was a the CEO of Mark Wood, and I you know often think about this myself as when when I'm in senior roles, you know, set out uh he was transforming the PRU from a uh a service where staff went and actually knocked on doors to get premiums back in the day to a an online direct sales force, right? And so he created a story that said this is what the PRU is going to be like in three years' time, and these are the sorts of challenges we're going to face, and made it very clear that not everybody would be on the bus at the end of that journey, but that they would be looked after. And and every quarter he would come together with his leadership team and talk about how far they'd got, what had happened, what challenges they'd faced in the context of the story. And that it was called the Thousand Day Story. And and I think, in a way, I'm not suggesting every CEO needs to go off and write one, but they but that context of setting a direction for the company, which says, in this AI agentic world, I see us landing somewhere in here, and that may mean that they're only you know the company's 50% of uh this current workforce. Well, explaining who would they who might they be and how how how might people be leaving the organization and what support they might be getting, etc. is is is powerful. And of course, uh others will say, well, we're going to you know run with this AI, and actually we're going to outcompete our competitors, and actually we're going to see growth, and no one's going to leave, but you need to have a story. You're preparing people, whichever direction, if the direction is that they're going to be leaving, that's at least you're managing that expectation. But if they stay in, you're also preparing them to say, This is the type of uh skill set that we're looking for, this is where you should be focusing your efforts, this is where we're gonna get the growth from. So the excited ones will stay and prepare themselves. Yeah. And and put in place learning and time for learning so that people can adopt skills, whether they choose to stay or leave. Yeah. Well, there's an old adage, isn't it? You know, what what a CEO is being being questioned about, you know, I think we should train our people, but I and it's a uh if if we train our people, they might leave. If we don't, and the response was, well, if we don't train them, they might stay. Yeah. The worst, of course. But uh I I want to pursue this this leadership part in the broader sense, not just uh the the C-suite. I don't think that AI only changes work. As I said, I think it exposes leadership. From your perspective, what does AI reveal about leaders in this new environment? It's not so much the AI, it's this it's the challenge of the change. Whatever the change. Whatever the change, right? So, but this one's a bit more existential in the sense that, right, with with so much change going on and with the economic geopolitical environment, all businesses are under huge pressure. Now, if you're a listed company or you're owned by PE, you're under pressure not just to paint a picture for the future, but to deliver the growth this year. And so that there's a lot of pressure on businesses to completely focus on the numbers I need to deliver this year. And and therefore, then they haven't got the time to put aside to invest in their own personal development, developing their understanding of AI and agentics and all the rest, right? Um, but actually putting a team aside to actually design the business of the future. And and that's a you know, it's a it's it's a double whammy with the Iraq war, Iran war, and and AI and agentics, and now this, you know, the geopolitics is bought in this idea of sovereignty. So, you know, what happens if if someone tries to switch me off? Do I have the systems in place and the ability to switch out so I can keep business continuity? I d I think it's a a pretty awful time to be a CEO, actually. Oh, sure. But do you think you're seeing, in your experience at least, leaders becoming more imaginative because of AI or more anxious? That's interesting, isn't it? I don't see anxiousness, right? Because CEOs, well you know, though though I was stressed in the CETAR, of course. Know uh don't tend to expose because the the one thing about being a CEO is kind of like you know, everyone's got to believe you know where you're going. Yes, that's a prerequisite. So genuinely I see people being very confident, perhaps overconfident, because they aren't necessarily as educated in the future of AI than you know some of their hyperscaler, you know, um uh organizations, they feel a bit overwhelmed. And I did a um so I think kind of like where yeah, I did a little uh characterization on LinkedIn, and I and I had the tortoise and the hare, and it was a bit like the hare was the hyperscalers running off, developing this incredible stuff, and and the tortoise is the enterprise, and and I think what businesses need to focus on and CEOs need to be clear about is how far do I need to go to compete in my marketplace without worrying too much about what's happening in SpaceX or in anthropic headquarters, because you need to get to first base before continuing your journey, if that makes sense. And understanding what that step is and meaning for your organization

Why Enterprise Procurement Slows Innovation

Speaker 23:20

is going to be important. So let's go back to Antwerp's, where you were CEO when I first met you. It operates in a space where the promise is powerful, helping organizations read, process, and use information more intelligently. But enterprise transformation is really as neat as the sales deck suggest. What did lead in Antworks teach you about the gap between technological promise and organizational reality, i.e., the wheels hit in the tarmac? At the time in Antworks, I went back two and a half years, our solution was market leading. So we could take an 800-page commercial insurance policy contract, which is very, very complicated, and use machine learning, natural language processing, and later on, some later on generative AI to extract a lot of complex data with near 100% accuracy and proven because we were sampling the data. Now, at the time, that seemed very far-fetched to your average buyer in enterprise, even though we had clients and proof points and all the rest, it was incredibly difficult to get large enterprises to buy in to uh our solution. And that was partly because, well, when originally it was we we we don't believe it's possible, and then of course, then Gen AI came along, and there suddenly seemed to be thousands of products and offers and solutions, just as there are today in AI, and you and they really don't know what to buy. And so what happens is the um you know when we're talking about a world that needs to move very quickly, the procurement cycle in most enterprises is about 13 months long. Yeah, at least. And that's very difficult to operate in. The key here is about making choices, and uh particularly large organizations, regulated companies, for often well, definitely for a lot of good reasons, have a very thorough procurement process. It doesn't protect them from make it seems to me from making mistakes. So getting the balance right, and particularly as we're now in a very fast-moving environment, uh you know, it's one that you know chief procurement officers and CEOs need to look at and say, maybe I need to create environments where I can try things out which don't put my business at risk, but be willing to try more, experiment more. But I think these enterprise level um organizations, they are, and I worked for them for many years, they are into not long-term planning, but next year's planning. And I'll give an example. I was talking to uh a leader from a big organization here in this region, loves what I was offering, which was leadership development. However, this was in um beginning of April. I can't talk to you about this until October because our budgets are committed to December, and that's when we'd be looking at 2027. So opportunities can come along, be um outrageously successful in reality, not just on paper, but they they just don't have the mindset or the time scale focus in order to take advantage of that. So, was that your biggest challenge then in getting enterprise to buy into Antworks? Was it just that you had lots of choice, or was it also the way they do business? It is the way business is done in enterprise, particularly because we were working primarily in financial services. The procurement functions are very powerful. Yeah. You know, signing processes are complex. Laborious. So I think that you know, if I were launching my career in software CEO today, I'd I'd be looking at you know providing my product in a way that was free, essentially, at the point of purchase, and the clients got time to experiment with it, and and then you've got some sort of uh solution. Um monetization comes later, basically. Yeah, exactly. I think that's the only way you can do it. But I mean that in itself doesn't overcome the issues of security and all of the rest that banks are looking rightly to put in place. So it's a tough old world. I think people think that software vendors have an easy time and and especially turn out to be millionaires, you know, and uh some do and some you know struggle and some are burnt completely. But we talked about uh the impact and the effect on mostly entry-level workers. But what's coming next, given this clash that we've just discussed about the long-term thinking, the processes within enterprise, companies will be burnt and gone. Big enterprises who are not able to transform and adapt and speed up their own processes, they will die. No question. We will see, in my opinion, some big failures in the next two to three years. Companies that have been on the tips of our tongues for 50 plus years and they they don't transform enough, they'd be gone. Which takes me to many companies announce transformations, they do announce them a lot every week. Fewer actually transform. In your experience, Mike, what separates those organizations that genuinely change from those that simply rebrand old behavior with a new language? I'd like to focus on what's happening now and and just give you a stat. So if you're an organization that is not adopting AI in any meaningful way, versus a company which is uh you know a leading adopter, there are 14 times the number of layoffs in the non-adopter than there are with the adopter of AI. Wow. Now, if that is a and then and that leans into what you were saying, which is the organizations which are moving as you know quickly into developing agentic AI solutions with hybrid workforces or let's call it AI first is the fashionable phrase, right? But you will be in a growth position, and where's that growth coming from? It's coming from the organizations that aren't moving that quickly. And that doesn't that really sound like the Kodak story, really. Yeah, yeah. Great. So I think I think you're exactly right. So you would no organization, no CEO can afford to sit still. You can't, but they also're dead. So it You're dead. Yeah, in your opinion, then, with the the people you've dealt with, is there a moment when you can tell whether an executive team is serious or that they're just performative seriousness, talk in the talk but not actually real about transformation? Do you know, do you see that in behaviour? You have to go to source, right? So, and I it and I don't want to repeat myself, but the you know, the CEO needs a vision which his executive team, obviously supported by the board, have a you know, have a shared responsibility for and and have signed up for. Doesn't that sound like the cabinet? And so when everyone else is everyone else talking to their teams and talking to the external market and talking to shareholders with the same language, with a determination to succeed and you know, an active planning and evidence in early projects that they know what they're doing, then you know that that's that's the that's the flag that says this is a company to invest in, I think. And um again, I'll just pick up on that story with Mark Wood because I think it's a really you know it's it's it's worth a write-up at some point if it hasn't already been done, is um he put together uh in insurance a management team that had nobody who'd got, I think there was only one person who'd got insurance experience. So he decided that the industry was in stuck in the middle stage and decided that he would bring people in with uh with talent in their particular responsibility, and he was the one who was going to guide them all, and um he did that very effectively. But in relation to the transformation and the thousand-day planned story that I was talking about earlier, he appointed one member of the management team to run the transformation every quarter, and then there would be a ceremony where the book of transformation was handed over. Now that meant that it wasn't at the responsibility of a transformation director or a transformator on the on the management board to uh you know do transformation for everybody else, is everybody knew that they had to transform their own department and they'd be overseeing every transformation of everybody else's in the when their quarter came around. And that bound everybody together. I thought it was a fantastic law. That does sound like you'll

Seeing Leadership Through Hidden Vulnerability

Speaker 34:00

make a great case study. I I'd like to pivot a little now to and ask you about something personal that you shared with me before we recorded, and only because you said you now want this to be out there, um you've been, and I didn't know this, of course, you've been partially sighted since birth, not something corrected by glasses, and yet you told no one at work until you were 60. Can you take me inside that decision and not just the practical side of the decision and working with it, but the identity side of carrying something so significant privately for so long? Yeah, actually, it's kind of well just to put it into context, my my life, you know, Price Water, House Coopers in IBM, Atos, all of that, you know, very much driven by PowerPoint, often presenting on stage with PowerPoint, and and I can never read never read any PowerPoint. Uh if it was presented to me on a screen, yeah, I never read it. Can't read it, no chance. Or if someone's putting up something up on a TV screen, can't read it, it's just that bad. And hence I've never driven a car because I can't read a registration break. You know, if it were three if it was 10 feet away from me, I couldn't read it. So it's is that that's the extent of it. I don't want people to know about it because I might not keep my job. I mean it was I mean, I think it's something that you know, perhaps in the environment today, um and over the last 10-15 years, we're much more comfortable about, and um, and and certainly I'm too old to worry about it now, and I've got enough experience. So there would be occasions when I felt really disadvantaged. So when when asked a question about what was on the screen, or do you know there used to be an adage that if you if you've got text on the screen, you don't talk about it. Yeah, yeah. Do you know the thing? Yes, the text on it is talk about something else, you know, which I've always found incredibly incredibly annoying. There's no plan, it's just it became the way of my life, right? And um and and we're going back to my neat teenage years, I was absolutely appalling at sport, and it was just that people thought I was really useless at sport. It's odd-shaped balls, suddenly land out of my hands, and suddenly everyone's running towards me, sort of thing. There's always been this kind of veneer of protection, and I'd have techniques, and it's partly because the condition, at least for the first 10-15 years of my life, actually didn't show up when an optician looked in my eyes, and uh, I remember my parents being very concerned because I couldn't read until the age of eight. I failed my something called the 11 Plus in the house. You're older than I thought, then, Mike. Thanks very much. Well, to do the 11 plus, uh, because my brother was the last one in my family to do that, and I didn't do it, so I thought you were younger than me. There we go, anyway. It's it's just a wig. So so but but but the optician uh thought the only reason I was pretending I couldn't read the um the letters on the chart was because I wanted to wear glasses or something. So so it's all been a thing, and and my wife often says to me that you'd think with your eyesight there'd be some other sense that would be more advantaged, so like listening to people, but she says there's no evidence that you listen better than that. I don't think is a wife on earth for things act for one possible second, right? But uh what did it cost you to keep that hidden? And when you finally did tell people, what changed, if anything? I think there were times when people looked at Mike and said, This, you know, he he he he's not as good or something, right? So I'm sure there was there there's been some pain along the way, but I I was it was just how I was, and and I've got no regrets in that. Most people that I know wouldn't know even today. Only once in my career has a a and it was a young lady when I was at IBM probably 10 years ago, uh, was doing a presentation and she actually printed out the presentation for me and and said, I know I can't read it. And that is one person in 45 years of work. That's uh but that's a level of awareness. That's a level of awareness in that in that lady, and one other thing I was thinking along these lines though, sometimes people, as you did, carry on silently at work. In an AI-driven transformation, people may not say, I'm frightened, or I feel exposed, or I'm worried about my value disappearing. They may, just like you about your eyesight, go quiet, resist, or perform confidence. How should leaders handle the emotional and identity side of change? I was at a conference on Friday about the power of love in uh in leadership, which I I still think about. And um and one of the things I said when I was on the panel was I remembered when I was CEO of Atos, Atos had acquired KPMG, and I don't know, there might be 800 people in the organisation. We knew we were going to have to do some, you know, let's say resource action, they used to call it in those days, and I was going to have to change the organizations. There's going to be quite a lot of change. And it occurred to me as I walked through the office every day on the way into my very nice office. It wasn't, you know, the decisions I was taking uh impacted everybody in the room and and who were working outside um in client offices, but but also the three or four people in their family that I wasn't seeing. And so the that that responsibility sat very heavily on me, and um it's something I always think about as a leader that especially at senior levels when you're deciding strategy or making decisions which you haven't got all of the information that you would ideally like, and it's a bit ambiguous that you've got to make a call and make a call quickly, and you do that um as best you can for those families. Now, coming back to uh the emotional side, for me it's all always about being available as best you can, depending on how big the organization is, spending a lot of time with uh with teams and uh helping people and actually encouraging a leadership team to help. So I'll give you an example. When I took over a CEO of Antworks, uh it was right in the middle of COVID. And um, we had an organization that was very hierarchical, very vertically integrated, and communication was very poor. So without going through everything that I did, one of the things I did was to create a virtual, because we were all in lockdown, uh cooler meeting, and people could volunteer to come and have coffee with Mike, and then they would do from the US or India or wherever they were, and and and we would they we could talk about whatever they wanted to talk about, and and some of those people who came to those meetings, very brave indeed, were were very young, very, very young. And so listen, I think, is the question, and uh and uh you know show empathy. We've talked about your career and it's mostly been around high-level CEO operations and technology transformation, but now in addition to your board advisory, you're an executive coach. So, how has coaching changed the way you understand people now, especially in leadership roles? It's more mentoring than I do at the moment, although I think I'm going to be doing a lot more coaching coming up. I'm going to see it happening with a with a particular senior advisor role that I've got. But the uh the mentoring more is about listening, and this is typically for uh for ladies who are in uh senior positions in middle management looking to get to more senior positions. So work with a team called Solaris, fantastic organization for women of colour who have achieved a lot in their career but want to get through the glass ceiling. And that's really interesting, and and I recognize it some of some of my own traits and some which are I think you know understandable in their circumstances, that you know there's a desire to minimize risk and a feeling that you know a need to work twice as hard as everyone else. And and and again, I the great thing is being able to share your experience and saying, look, if you don't take risk, take on new opportunities which you're you you do feel a degree of discomfort. Comfort from, then you're never going to grow and you're never going to show the potential that organizations are looking for. And I learn more about as well, at least as much about myself in that process as the ladies do. And I enjoy it very much. And I think I'm in my fifth year, and it's an incredibly successful organization supporting firms like HSBC, Bank of England, and so forth. I mean it's um it's tremendous. And uh I I get a lot you know buzz out of doing

Your AI Starting Point And Takeaways

Speaker 44:35

it. So let's make this very practical then. If a CEO or business leader or senior executive came to you and said, Mike, I know AI matters, but I don't know where to start, and I don't want to get this wrong, what practical advice would you give them to being so honest? So experiment is the first thing and learn. I mean, if they're starting from a standing start, if a standing start now, it's a little bit late, but um I would hope most would be playing with anthropic and uh and would have used uh chat GPT and all the rest, right? And and uh and would be experiencing AI in their personal lives. So the qu you know, so I think it's called the the Sunday Monday gap. On Sunday, I've got all this AI around me and it's changing my life, and I go to work on Monday and it's just the same. So what they have to do is start thinking about a vision for their organization, really influenced on what's happened in their personal lives, because that's what's coming, and then education, rapid education. I mean, if if they're if they they're not sure what to do, then there are you know many courses, MIT and others that you can join to to get yourself up the scale, or or get an advisor in, and um and and there are many people who've got a lot of experience, who've got a background in technology and AI, and can can help in you know the the the board understand the art of the possible but the the key here is the first step is how do I enhance my organization with these uh skills that I'm using on a Sunday? If I enabled my people to have these technologies available to them, would they be productive? If I made them available to my customers, would my customers be able to access the information in my organization more quickly? Now, it's more than that because they need to think about you know the architecture and how they spread AI across the organization in a structured, coordinated way where you don't get AI sprawl, which is where you get lots of little bits of AI in Lancona. It's not cohesive. But back to your earlier point experiment, try, look, find out, lots available. You mentioned MIT, but Harvard as well. It's not all paid. There's an there are free resources online from very reputable academic organizations around. Yeah, so jump in is they've got a put uh uh you know there's there's lots of there's lots available, um, but get in there fast. Yeah, as you said, it's never too late, but uh I have a friend, he always says about anything you're changing, there's only two times to do something today and too late. So if you haven't done it, do it. Good one. Let's get on to some fun, some rapid fire questions. I've enjoyed this, you know. So a few rules, quick fire, short answers, instinctive answers, don't think too long. I'll cut you out, otherwise, if you do that later. So one leadership quality AI will make more important, not less important. Reality. The most overused word in transformation was digital, now agentic. Okay. One thing leaders should stop pretending about AI. That they know everything. Good one. One thing technology can never replace. Love. I love that. A mistake that taught you more than success did. I think what I'd do is I'd say I worked for two really bad managers in my time, and I won't mention them, but what I saw in what they had failed to achieve and the trouble that they caused, I learned more from working for a bad manager than I did from working for some of the greatest. I think it's a privilege to work for a bad manager for exactly the reason you've given to know what doesn't work, because uh, in the human condition we learn faster from those mistakes. So, a book, a thinker, or an idea that shaped you? Elvis Costello. I love him. Music has shaped my life, right? And I think that's partly because maybe my sights and everything else, but I love music. I buy a lot of vinyl, it's my escape, and that and the art that goes with it, uh, I've often used in not not so much music, but art that album put me into. Uh I've used in presentations and work and stuff like that. So yeah, I think I'd pick that. I'm lucky enough to have seen him here in Singapore live and unplugged just with five different guitars. I was also even luckier to go to the VIP party afterwards and spend time with him. And uh he was sharing on his BlackBerry then a video of his twins. So that will date you. And the twins were toddlers at the time, running around his kitchen, an immense talent, and only David Bowie comes above him for me in terms of um influence on my life. What does the power within mean to you in one sentence, Mike? Resilience. This is the tough one, but I'm gonna force you to say one word, one word that best describes the future of work. Uncertain. Absolutely, and on that uncertain note, we don't close everything cleanly. Mike Hobday, thank you very much for taking the time in your early morning. It's been a delight, and I hope you can see I'm not as stressed as I was. Not at all. You look so chill now. Today's conversation with Mike is a reminder that transformation is never only about technology, it's about judgment, courage, curiosity, and a willingness to keep learning when the world no longer rewards old assumptions. AI may be changing the tools of work, but it's also asking deeper questions of leadership. Are we able to stay curious when we feel uncertain? Can we create clarity when the future is moving quickly? Technology without losing our humanity? Is it possible to transform organizations without forgetting the people inside them? Mike's career reminds us that the leaders who thrive are not necessarily those who have all the answers. They're the ones willing to keep evolving. Mike, thank you for joining me on The Power Within. And if this conversation resonates with you, please like, subscribe, and share it with someone navigating change, transformation, or the future of work. Until next time, this is the Power Within.