Poets & Thinkers
Poets & Thinkers explores the humanistic future of business leadership through deep, unscripted conversations with visionary minds – from best-selling authors and inspiring artists to leading academic experts and seasoned executives.
Hosted by tech executive, advisor, and Princeton entrepreneurship & design fellow Ben Lehnert, this podcast challenges conventional MBA wisdom, blending creative leadership, liberal arts, and innovation to reimagine what it means to lead in the AI era.
If you believe leadership is both an art and a responsibility, this is your space to listen, reflect, and evolve.
Poets & Thinkers
Rewriting All Layers Of The Stack – Leading with agency when everyone is uncomfortable with Meg Bear
What if the discomfort leaders feel right now, at the beginning of the AI age, isn’t a problem to solve, but the exact place where transformation happens? In this episode of Poets & Thinkers, we explore the future of organizational leadership and human potential with Meg Bear, a seasoned tech executive turned “future inventor” who brings a unique perspective as a fifth-generation Bay Area native and first-generation college graduate. From her advisory work with CEOs and boards to her mission of creating abundant futures that value our shared humanity, Meg offers a compelling vision for navigating unprecedented change.
Meg takes us on a journey through her unconventional life and career path – from engineering leadership at Oracle and president of SAP’s HCM (Human Capital Management) business to her current work helping organizations harness human ingenuity. She reveals why the traditional business leadership playbook – built on certainty and past experience – is not only obsolete but counterproductive in our current moment.
Drawing from her background as a cultural outsider who learned to navigate different worlds, Meg explains how the skills of adaptation and cross-cultural communication that immigrants develop are exactly what all leaders need now.
Throughout our conversation, Meg challenges the narrative that change is simply happening to us, instead advocating for agency in shaping the future we want to live in. She argues that we’re at a unique moment where discomfort is hitting “all layers of the stack” – from the board room and the c-suite to the ICs – and that this discomfort is not only natural but necessary for growth. Her vision for leadership emphasizes curiosity over certainty, collective intelligence over individual expertise, and the courage to embrace vulnerability as a pathway to learning.
In this transformative discussion, we explore:
- Why the space between what you can’t control and what you can impact is bigger than you think
- How traditional business leadership models based on certainty are failing in uncertain times
- Why emotions are data that reveal deeper fears about changing definitions of competence
- The need for psychologically safe spaces where experienced leaders can express confusion
- How untapped human ingenuity could be unlocked through more inclusive value creation in organizations of the future
- Why our “messy bits” are actually our greatest sources of strength and adaptability
This episode is an invitation for leaders to move beyond fear-based reactions to inevitable change, and instead embrace the agency we have to invent futures that serve our shared humanity.
Resources Mentioned
- Reid Hoffman on GenAI as the cognitive industrial revolution: https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/gen-ai-a-cognitive-industrial-revolution
- The myth of exponential hypergrowth: https://longform.asmartbear.com/exponential-growth/
- Inventing the future: https://www.megbear.com/post/inventing-the-future
- Meg’s 2025 word of the year: https://www.megbear.com/pos
Get in touch: ben@poetsandthinkers.co
Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/poetsandthinkerspodcast/
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Subscribe to Poets & Thinkers on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4N4jnNEJraemvlHIyUZdww?si=2195345fa6d249fd
Does it feel safer? Or are you really putting yourself out there and are just uncomfortable but doing it anyway?
Speaker 2:It's probably a little bit of both, and I love how you interviewed me. Now Welcome to Poets and Thinkers, the podcast where we explore the future of humanistic business leadership. I'm your host, ben, and today I'm speaking with Meg Baer. Meg is the kind of leader who inspires both with her exceptional expertise and her deep sense of humanity. As the former president of SAP SuccessFactors, meg is one of the world's experts on large-scale organizational management and HR. Experts on large-scale organizational management and HR. Over the years, her work, writing and out-of-the-box thinking has been an inspiration for me when it comes to imagining the future of organizational and people leadership. It was also in collaboration with Meg and her team at SAP that I first encountered the broad research around how to unleash the human ingenuity that's locked in companies across industries based on outdated management approaches and a lack of courageous leadership.
Speaker 2:Now that the emergence of AI challenges the very definition of what a company is and how it operates, business leaders are struggling to find answers on how to lead into the future. So it's exciting to hear Meg challenge the narrative that change is simply happening to us. Instead, she advocates developing our sense of agency in shaping the future we want to live in. She argues that we are at a unique moment where discomfort is hitting quote all layers of the stack, from the boardroom and the C-suite to the ICs, and that this discomfort is not only natural but necessary for growth. There's an entire new playbook being written and companies will have to be redesigned to ensure sustainable business success in the AI future. Meg's vision for leadership emphasizes curiosity over certainty, collective intelligence over individual expertise and the courage to embrace vulnerability as a pathway to learning.
Speaker 2:If you like the show, make sure you like, subscribe and share this podcast. So let's get started. Meg, it's so good to have you. You know, speaking of meaningful conversations, you've always been someone that has inspired me as a human, as a leader, someone that I've learned a lot from. But let me start with just where does this podcast find you?
Speaker 1:I am in the Bay Area, and I am actually a fifth generation Bay Area native, so this is my home, if you will. But the other thing that's sort of different about me is that I'm first generation in my family to go to college. So while I'm from the Bay Area, not only am I first in tech, but I'm really the first in anything that's not a blue collar job, and so I have been kind of an outsider my whole life, while also being more deeply connected to this place than most people, and so it's an interesting dichotomy.
Speaker 2:I have so many questions. I'm also today in Silicon Valley I'm actually in Palo Alto as we're recording this and just had some really interesting conversations, because before Silicon Valley was Silicon Valley right, it was not that and a lot of the architecture still kind of points to that. How has that shaped you?
Speaker 1:So you know, I had a very non-traditional childhood. My parents were divorced. Probably, I think, I was around six months old. I have lived in multiple contexts for a variety of reasons and I've had a really complicated history. I'm going to write a memoir someday and I just like to encourage everyone to know that it is a comedy, not a tragedy, but it is a complicated story.
Speaker 1:I would say that early on I spent a lot of time trying to hide the fact that I didn't really fit in, that I didn't really belong. And what's fascinating is it never really occurred to me that the difference for me was gender. I didn't come to that understanding until much later. For me, the difference was class, for sure, and age. I graduated high school 16. I started really young.
Speaker 1:I was constantly trying to fit in and I think, just like anyone, when you go on your life journey, you realize that is helpful to a point and then becomes not helpful at all because fitting in isn't actually what the world needs.
Speaker 1:Your full differences to the table, because that's where the interesting stuff happens. And so in my own journey in trying to fit in, one of the things that I developed early was the real kind of trying to understand where others were coming from, trying to get good at understanding language and nuance and cultural differences. But I didn't internalize them as cultural differences until much later, when I started working with other cultures and what I find is that I have skills that are typically true in immigrants people that come from a different background and have a different life starting point and then come into a different culture and environment. And what you find especially in tech, where there's need for innovation and different ways of thinking especially in tech, where there's need for innovation and different ways of thinking the ability to pull from multiple sources creates different insights and also gives you different ways to bring those insights so that others can understand them. Because you learn how to communicate cross culture, you learn how to understand what people know and then how to bring your idea forward.
Speaker 2:In that and I think that is the true gift of being an outsider that I didn't fully appreciate until probably quite recently- For me personally, being both an immigrant into the United States and in tech, and having worked with people from all parts of the world and leading them, building teams, which brings me to one of my first big questions I had for you. You have been and I already briefly touched on that you've been an executive, a leader in big tech companies, from Oracle to SAP, where we met. You've been an investor, a board member, and you work with startups as well. I'm, first and foremost, interested in your assessment of where we are today, in both the tech world, but also, because it's so intertwined at this point in time, also in the world in general, especially given the perspective you just shared from your own life journey so far.
Speaker 1:I'm actually an optimist.
Speaker 1:I really do like to look at the world in the frame of possibilities, so that's my natural state anyway, but I recognize that this is the most interesting time I feel like my whole life has been building up to this moment.
Speaker 1:I'm sure you feel somewhat similar and a lot of people do In observing change. You know, I started out my career in tech and I was an engineering leader and it was all about like platform change and architecture change and technology change. And then I got further in my career and it became more about market change and opportunity in the spaces of innovation. And now I'm reflecting and rethinking everything as it relates and it's not just this like sort of surface area AI is going to take all the jobs and you know, the world is coming to an end and shitification is going to be the future, and all the world is coming to an end and shitification is going to be the future, and all of that I mean all of that is our inputs. But what I truly believe is that we're at a moment where that is the first time that we're hitting all layers of the stack right Investors, board members, executive teams, technology teams, people at home, people in the office, people not in the office but working like. All of these places are uncomfortable right.
Speaker 1:Uncomfortable because everybody can see a lot of stuff is happening. No one can fully get their arms around what that means for them, and there is the intersection of fear and interest, enthusiasm and, you know, anxiety. I like to think about like uncomfortable is the place where we grow the most. Uncomfortable is the place where interesting things happen. And you know, I'm here for it, right, I really, really am here for it. But I also feel like in being here for it, I have a very unique point of view that it is on us to find a path that really values and amplifies and grows the human parts of all of this. What is next? Because without our humanity, we will create unnecessary suffering, because all of the things that are good create, but it is. You know, we have agency to think about how this future happens and we don't have to be completely lifting our hands and saying, oh well, it's all just going to happen to me.
Speaker 1:We need to take that agency and make something happen for us.
Speaker 2:Yes, yeah, I love that. You know the agency part especially. I was just starting to kind of sketch out another one of my newsletter articles because I started to realize how we talk so much about agents in the context of AI and technology but so little about agency right, yes, agency right, yes. The flip side of that there is this narrative of this is just all happening to us and there's no way for us to stop it or change it or influence it. But in fact it is right. We made this technology the same way we made all the other technology over centuries before.
Speaker 2:So I love that aspect of agency and really changing the lens. How do we use all of this for the good of humanity, to empower humans? And that still means change and discomfort, but it's a very different change and discomfort than the one where just things just happen to you, which is one of those things you might not actually know because I think we never talked about. But your organization that you led was one of the first times where I encountered a focus on human ingenuity. I was so fascinated by figuring out what it takes to get an organization to really embrace and foster and drive human ingenuity, especially in HR, which is not typically how HR is understood in the context of companies. So I'd love to hear a little bit more on your thoughts on leadership, business leadership, hr and this perspective that you just shared about how do we shape organizations for the future now that all of this stuff is changing?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so a couple of analog kind of correlations is changing. Yeah, so, a couple of analog kind of correlations. So one of the things I observed working in a big company and I have to really be careful because it's like fingernails on a chalkboard for me but when people would say upper management decided, did, said whatever, and I get it that there is a context in business, no matter where you work and no matter how big your organization is, there is a context that might not feel aligned with either your personal values or your personal objectives, right, and so, whether you're in, my biggest experience is, of course, you're in engineering and you think you want to have more investment in an area that you care about, but the people in charge of growing the business and finance know that the investors won't, you know, will not value or support that kind of investment. Right, that's like a really sort of obvious, and so it becomes this sort of like nebulous.
Speaker 1:Someone else, this upper management, is making these decisions and I as an individual have no again, no agency, no control, and therefore I am yielding all of my capability to just say you know, it's out of my control, and so I don't want to dismiss that.
Speaker 1:There are a lot of things that we cannot control, and there human development and human capability is that the space between what you can't control and what you can have an impact on is often limited by your own definition of what value you can bring, and I think this is so important to really ground on this as we think about all of the stuff we can't control, like whether AI is, you know, taking over our jobs or our privacy, or our creativity or our art, or all of these things. You know, yes, there is a sphere of things that you can't control, but the space that you can is bigger than you tend to believe, and so when I think about the function of HR, the role of parts of the organization that are supposed to be facilitating the agenda of talent and people towards the goals of the organization.
Speaker 1:I believe two things. I believe that the space that that group needs to be part of is bigger than the space that they've typically given themselves control over, and I also believe that the path between that is not selling their agenda, but investing more in understanding the overall business and customer need, and then asking themselves how can they serve in that space. And so I think that's the trick for everything right Understanding more your stakeholders and the context under which you're part of something bigger than yourself, and then asking yourself what can I do differently to have a bigger impact towards that. And so that takes that requires both curiosity, and it also requires intellectual humility, because most of us have an idea of what the answer is already, without truly comprehending what the need is of our stakeholders. And so I think that's the piece in the middle, and it's both cultural, but it's also individual. Each of us can work on this.
Speaker 1:And again back to agency. To me, that matters. Nobody can do that for me. I can do that for myself and it's worth it for me to do that. It's worth it for me to pay attention and understand what's changing. Why is it changing? How do I need to show up differently? How do I need to exploit both my unique capability and the opportunity in service of something bigger than myself?
Speaker 2:Yeah, one of the reasons I started this particular podcast is because I believe that over the next 10, 15 years and forward, companies and what we define as a company will look very differently.
Speaker 2:Because you touched on it very early everything is changing across the whole stack. Right, and yes, in fact, a lot of things that we do manually today, humans do manually today, will be automated. But also because, since the industrial revolution, certainly, we've built organizations and companies around this idea of making humans work like machines. Right, it's all about predictability, output, high output, management, all of that. And so there's a really existential question about what does a company look like in the future and what do humans actually do in a company of the future, especially when all of these predictable, consistent, high output tasks can be done by machines better, because that's actually what machines are really good at. So, in the light of all of that, and going back to what you just said, how do you think leadership in the future of these organizations, people inside these organizations, will look like, so that we can create this environment that you just described so well? So what's your, what's your take on that?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think to me I am most curious and most maybe a little bit concerned about the leadership side of this question, and I think so.
Speaker 1:The challenge in leadership is not it's pretty nuanced but to me, to be really good in this kind of middle space, this messy middle space where nothing is clear and opportunity is a little bit of everywhere and threat is a little bit of everywhere, to be good at that, you really need more curiosity and maybe less certainty.
Speaker 1:Fortunately, back to the upper, management says like, culturally, the definition of leader for most of us in our heads is you need to know right. Your past experience is going to be what you lean on to know the answer, to mobilize your team. And this creates an interesting dichotomy, because it is unknowable and we're all learning at the same time. So leadership becomes much more about harnessing collective intelligence, exhibiting good judgment, having modeling, curiosity, modeling, you know, sort of flexibility in both emotional flexibility and executional flexibility, and being willing to give up some of the things you know to be best practice. Right, because there is no best practice. Anybody that says they have it first off there probably never has been best practice but, there always has been things as leaders that worked for us right.
Speaker 1:So I brought in this person and I always worked with that person and I always had a. I brought in this person and I always worked with that person and I always had a team structure that looked like this and I always mobilized work in this way and that created my success.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But the problem is, is the things that are going to create your success in, you know, going forward are definitionally going to be different, and so the vulnerability, the emotional vulnerability for leaders is exponentially higher. And it's not all on them, it's the entire organization. The entire organization expects them to know. So now you have your own ego challenges plus organizational pressure against something that's, like definition, definitionally impossible, right.
Speaker 1:So I think that what leaders need to build is confidence in something different, confidence not in their playbooks, but confidence in their ability to piece together things they've experienced in the past in new ways. Right that their agility should be where their confidence comes from, but that's not what we've built, and we've been, you know again, across our entire, like our education system. So forget the world of work. Think about. We've built a generation of students that are great test takers, that are really good at doing something that they don't need to be doing anymore because machines are way better at remembering facts and spewing them back out again, right.
Speaker 1:And so these needs of independent thought tests don't build independent thought, at least not today. And so again, we've we've now taken like an entire pathway of what's the definition of success? How do you get into elite schools? How do you get out of elite schools? What do you do next of success? How do you get into elite schools? How do you get out of elite schools? What do you do next? It's following patterns, and following patterns is the opposite of winning in this day and age, and so I really do believe that what leadership is going to need is very different, and it is about culture, and it is about understanding collective wisdom, and it is about giving up a little bit of certainty and ego in service of learning, and that, I think, is going to be really interesting to watch.
Speaker 1:And I think you're going to see a lot more of the Jamie Dimons, you know, like spewing out the frustration, which, again, I actually found really charming, I have to say. But the frustration, if you hear it in his voice, is really not about come back to the office, although that's how he's channeling it. It's about how do I lead in a time where people are not behaving in the pattern that I'm used to leading.
Speaker 2:Yes, I think a lot, of, a lot of that frustration isn't probably also, you know, really insecurity, not knowing how to lead in this in this very, very quickly changing environment. And I'm very biased, obviously, as a trained designer, but I think a lot about, you know, the creative act, the creative process and the confidence that you build through discomfort. Actually Right, because a lot of the training is you need to learn to trust the creative process and the confidence that you build through discomfort actually right, because a lot of the training is you need to learn to trust the creative process and your ability to figure it out, even though you don't yet see how it's going to figure out a boat. Right, but I think you know you mentioned also critical thinking, if I can paraphrase that as such a core skill to develop going forward, because the playbook is no longer the playbook, right, and it goes not just a little bit off to the side but it's almost like a 180 because of how drastic the changes are and the requirements are. And I love how you also talked about both the responsibility of the leader to, on the one hand, I guess, model the I don't know, but we can figure it out, you know, through the collective intelligence basically cultivated inside organizations, that people are looking to the leader as the person that has all the answers, rather than having the collective confidence to say no, we actually hold probably a lot of the answers or fracture you know parts of the answer that we will arrive at. So that's a yeah, really, really powerful, I think, perspective and realization.
Speaker 2:One of the conversations I've had for this, for this podcast, I interviewed John Danner, who is a Berkeley professor, wall Street Journal bestselling author. He wrote a book called the Other F Word, which is about failure, and so he interviewed people across the ranks on fear, fear of failure, and how that's really probably the biggest holdback in organizations toward innovation and continuous evolution. When I hear you talk about this, it certainly reminds me of, at the end of the day, it is both very simple and very profound what's kind of underneath all of that right, and that is that kind of fundamental fear of I don't know. I don't know the answer, I don't know where to go. Right, yeah.
Speaker 1:And I, I do think so. I'm coming to learn that the majority of the challenges are really about fear. So I love that you, you bring this up and I I don't think it's misplaced fear. I do think that in the past, opportunity and, you know, definition of competence came from expertise and knowing things, and so it is. It is a structural change that needs to happen. It's not that people are, you know, definitionally not wanting to show vulnerability, but there has been a real penalty for doing it. Yes, and I think that a professional penalty, and especially in a certain type of leader you know somebody that's been very successful and has had a long, storied career.
Speaker 1:And I would just add one other little nugget and that is one of the things that I've been investigating a lot lately in myself and in others is this concept of emotions as data. And so when you see an emotional reaction which that's, I love, the Jamie Dimon one, because it's recent and it's clearly an emotional reaction it's useful to pull the thread and ask yourself what is the real thing under here, because emotion is a way that we express something bigger, and I really believe that a big part of that emotion is exactly what you put your finger on. It is fear, and it is fear of what happens to me when what I'm good at is not valued.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:And what I'm not good at is expected and that discomfort, like you're going to see a variety of reactions to it and I think there's going to have cultural elements and industry elements and you know personal scars from middle school elements to all of this, all of us.
Speaker 1:But at the end of the day, I think this is the nugget, like, if we think about ourselves as evolutionary beings, if we think about how we adapt and evolve and I do believe we adapt and evolve well, I strongly believe that if we want to kind of learn and understand more, we should always pull the thread when are we seeing emotional reaction and what's underneath that? And then if we really want to be like help the world, we need to figure out a better way to scaffold between where we are and where we need to be, and here I think we can all help.
Speaker 1:It is not good for someone who is experiencing fear and an emotion which shows up as anger or frustration or whatever. It is not good to double down on what they're not. It is always best for all of us. We all learn better when we're in a space of psychological safety.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And when we feel comfortable expressing vulnerability, and so I think we need more spaces for experienced people to develop together, to be able to express insecurity and fear and to build some skill around the idea of how to transition from knowing to being curious.
Speaker 1:I truly believe this is a space where there's opportunity for new people to come in and, whether that's an HR partner, or whether that's a career coach, or whether that is, you know, some sort of leader within the organization, a chief of staff, a president, a COO, whatever, whatever that needs to be express our complete confusion and things we don't know, and all of the things that are broken within us to a safe space that can help us brainstorm and learn and adapt and build new skills, because without that, we're going to have a whole lot of negative vibe out there that needs a place to go, and so I really feel like this energy of fear needs to be transitioned to an energy of learning, and in order to do that, you need true psychological safety.
Speaker 1:If we can do anything like kindness and more hugs, telling people it's going to be okay, their jobs will go away, we got to quit telling them it's going to be fine, there is going to be more jobs Also. Their jobs are going away, but we believe in them. They can do it. It's not going to be done alone. It's going to be done in groups and collectively and we're all going to make it. We're going to get there, and I think that's why my optimism is really aligned to. We need to show up for each other more, not less, in this moment.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I share that optimism because I truly believe, you know, we were born creative. I think the reason why this topic of human ingenuity resonated so much with me was because it's inherently human. We can, in fact, create and we can figure things out, but it actually starts with, as you said, with that acknowledgement of reality, being honest with ourselves, first and foremost, about what are these underlying emotions, and then channeling that into a creative act. And I really mean that in terms of coming up with new ideas that make the world, the organization, the tiny little thing that we do on a daily basis, a little bit better for ourselves or for others around us. And you know, that part, I think, is really interesting because we're training it out of people.
Speaker 2:Being also immersed myself now in higher education, it's one of those things where you realize how much our education system needs to also evolve in order to foster what we're born with, which is the creativity and the ability to imagine and create worlds we want to live in, instead of training it out of us in service of producing predictable outcomes, as you said earlier, starting with tests and test results and all that kind of stuff, which is probably a good segue into what you are up to these days. I read one of your blog posts which is titled Inventing the Future. I mean, everything you just said is sort of packed into that headline the optimism, the willingness to create a better future for us to live in. So maybe tell me first and foremost about the future that you certainly envision, and then I have some follow up questions for you on that too.
Speaker 1:Well, first off, thank you for asking me. This is something that I've been sort of evolving towards for a while and realized that. So I just recently took a sabbatical, took some time off and goofed off. I actually recommend that highly.
Speaker 1:But in that space I realized that this is a really important moment. This is an important moment again that I think warrants more scaffolding, and it warrants it across a larger dimension. And so when I ask myself, what role do I want to play in that, what is my purpose in that? And that's where I came to the you know, if not me, then who kind of moment where I said the thing that needs to happen is something that I deeply care about. And so, while I don't you know what I love, I'm kind of motivated this way in general, like I love having like a directional outcome that is bigger than how I understand how to achieve it, that requires me to grow into it, that gives me a lot of space for learning and curiosity and then also has a real sort of activation underneath it, bigger than myself. And so this is where I landed on inventing the future, and what I mean by that, and what a well-invented future would look like in my mind is certainly one that leans on this things that we've been talking about, that the definition of success is adaptability and growth, not achieving a milestone. That the opportunity for contribution is expanded across all of the dimensions not held within a small elite class, and that the value creation of this future is realized by a larger percentage of the population than just an elite class.
Speaker 1:In other words, I really believe deeply that if we are in this cognitive industrial revolution that Reid Hoffman is saying, then it's about what do we bring in your poets and thinkers right, like, how do we take what is unique and amazing about each of us and how do we put that towards the purpose of the future and recognizing that that has to encompass all of the hierarchy of needs right?
Speaker 1:You can't just go out and be generous to the most creative and the most innovative. You really have to think about how do we create economic stability, how do we create opportunity, how do we channel the passion and the skill and the strength of more brains into the future state of what we're doing? How do we get the right kinds of capabilities into our overall society to help people thrive? I believe again we're coming back to the beginning. You know I come from a working class family. I have done very menial jobs in my lifetime. I have worked with people and lived next to people of a variety of backgrounds and I deeply recognize that there is a massive amount of untapped potential in the world, and so how we unlock more potential without compromising the need for economic growth and GDP growth and all of those other things.
Speaker 1:Right Like, how do we take this away from a zero sum winner-all kind of mindset and turn this into the power that we all need to bring our gifts forward Again? This is not just about economic success. This is about human kindness and human capacity being fully realized, and that can be big and small.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that's so well articulated and also I think just the challenge kind of that was in that last sentence of economic growth by itself is meaningless, right, and it's certainly not the highest order bit, because we've seen how to be taken to the extreme, where that has gotten us as humanity and the planet that we live on, so even challenging that notion and pushing us as a collective to at least start seriously thinking about what other options there are, instead of saying, well, that's just it, right, that's the best we've come up with so far. I think that is exactly, certainly the reason for me to have these conversations, because the answers will not be going to one of the things you said very earlier will not be in one of our minds, right, it will be the collective conversation of people from all sorts of different places, perspectives, upbringings and geographies, and so I that very much. So resonates what I love about what you wrote, which already comes through, I think, just in talking to you, and I certainly have experienced you in the most positive way as a force of nature, and I think you even write this on your website and I'll link to some really great writing from you in the show notes. But what you wrote, I want to read back and then see if you want to react to that and that is.
Speaker 2:I'm not interested in incremental change. I want to see quadratic hyper growth. I will invent a future that is and that is. I'm not interested in incremental change. I want to see quadratic hyper growth. I will invent a future that is abundant, expansive and one that values our shared humanity. Even the messy bits, which I thought was just so well written and put and so to the point, and when I read it it's like this is you, in a nutshell, the way I've experienced you. So I don't know if you want to react to that, but if you want to expand a little bit on that, I think it would be great, because I think that is the kind of energy that is so needed.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So two things underneath that. If you pop the link under the quadratic hypergrowth, this is the math that proves that when we talk about exponential growth, it's not true. So that's the nerd in me. That when we talk about exponential growth, it's not true. So that's the nerd in me. So, while I might not personally be that savvy in math, I value it when other people are, so I thought that was fun.
Speaker 1:But, setting that aside, the part that is deeply me is the messy bits part. I have long believed, and the longer I'm on the planet, the more I believe it, because you start to shed a lot of the things that don't serve you as you progress. It is the parts of ourselves that we might be slightly embarrassed about. So we started this conversation, you know, with you talking about being introverted and not a native speaker. Those are things that you hold as a perspective about yourself and how you think that might hold you back, and yet it's exactly that messy bit that makes you amazing in having conversations that are much deeper, that have a lot more richness to them, that make you more thoughtful in how you communicate.
Speaker 1:This is the truth for all of us. So just take anything that you're bad at, embarrassed about, confused about yourself, why you're not as good as others, whatever. Go deeper with that and say what have you learned to do? To either adapt around that create scaffolding for yourself so that that doesn't hold you back. How is it? How is it challenged you? Because it's in the challenge that you develop real adaptability skills. It doesn't matter what the challenge is. It's the adaptability skill.
Speaker 1:that is the renewable resource here, and so if you quit high like again, it doesn't mean that you like go around and tell everybody all the things you're bad at. I think I'm the only one that likes to do that but it does mean that recognizing being bad at things is not only just part of the human condition. It's a necessary thing to develop skill.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Be uncomfortable and therefore learn to grow past it. And so this is why, like, we have to really honor our own messiness, because it's underneath that messiness that the fullness of who we are and what we can bring to the table is forged in that fire, and that's that's what matters.
Speaker 2:So maybe last last question before we wrap. So you're set to invent a future and I think we need you to invent a future. What does the next step in inventing a future look like for you? Is there anything you can want to share? Talk about.
Speaker 1:Sure, yeah. So what I've been doing now and it's both sort of feeding my curiosity and offering my give back I've been doing a lot of independent advisory work, a little bit of keynote speaking and things like that, but a lot of work with CEOs, companies, starting from usually some specific part of the opportunity they're trying to address go to market portfolio, trying to address go-to-market portfolio, understanding potential investments or divestitures or how to execute on something that might be an adjacency but not part of the core competency of the group. So sort of taking and applying pragmatically, applying specifics that help just be a good thought partner, supporter, sort of someone who can bring both expertise and adaptability. Thinking to that, what that's giving to me is an opportunity to look at things from different lenses and different seats and it creates for me a better picture of what you know some of these amazing leaders are doing to sort of survive and adapt in this moment, which hopefully then creates that flywheel of pattern recognition, which is the thing that I'm actually good at to help give more ideas of how do we structurally help Because I'm super motivated to help right now, today how do we help our top leadership teams be able to survive, what's expected of them going forward with confidence, but also with some intellectual humility and so like, really the more that I can kind of come up with and share ideas and practices that people can do that are both, you know, pragmatic and also strategic.
Speaker 1:I think that's going to be a place where you can get the highest return on investment, both for, like, where I spend my time, but also there's there's a whole like. These people support big organizations who are having a whole lot of stuff going to happen.
Speaker 1:So the more we can work on that leadership tier to move past fear and towards opportunity, I feel like the better the current world of work will be and probably, hopefully, the smarter I will be over time in observing and understanding these patterns. What are things that pragmatically work? Because at the end of the day it's it's really going to be a lot about culture, Like how do we, how do we build the right kind of cultures so that companies and individuals can adjust and adapt in the next five years, Cause it's going to be a lot.
Speaker 2:It's going to be a bumpy ride, yeah, and everyone who gets a chance to work with you I speak from experience will be the better for it. So thank you for sharing that and thank you for coming on this podcast. I think I have a feeling and, if you're up for it, we need to do a second one at one point and just check in, because there's so much I would love to talk to you about.
Speaker 1:Well then, I would spend time with you anytime, anyplace, anywhere.
Speaker 2:All right, that's a wrap for this week's show. Thank you for listening to Poets and Thinkers. If you liked this episode, make sure you hit follow and subscribe to get the latest episodes wherever you listen to your podcast.
