This episode is hosted by Boundaryless Conversation Podcast host Simone Cicero with co-host, Stina Heikkilä.

The following is a semi-automatically generated transcript which has not been thoroughly revised by the podcast host or by the guest. Please check with us before using any quotations from this transcript. Thank you.

Simone Cicero:
Okay, so hello everyone. I’m here today with my usual co-host Stina Heikkila

Stina Heikkila:
Hello, Hello

Simone Cicero:
And with two of the most important guests that we had in the podcast so far. One is Lisa Gansky.

Lisa Gansky:
Hi. I was taking a sip of tea. Hello!

Simone Cicero:
And Bill Fischer, Hi Bill.

Bill Fischer:
Hi, it’s a pleasure to be here. Hello.

Simone Cicero:
Thank you guys for coming up and for joining us in this episode that is supposed to be a kind of recap and a kind of moment of reflection on these theses that we have been producing this year. So as the listener may remember, basically these podcast series was pretty much related to a parallel research project that we have been carrying on in the latest few months and this project was focusing on trying to understand essentially the new foundations of platforms and ecosystems thinking. And in the process of digging into these new foundations, I think we somehow unearthed three, sorry, four major theses that captured our attention and somehow shaped our thoughts. And I will give a quick recap to these theses, so that they can provide a compass for our conversation today. So, one key emerging thesis is what we call the thesis of “pervasive marketplaces”. So on one hand, I think from the interviews that we had and from the data that we have been capturing through reports or other sources, what we see is that then the pattern, let’s say the model of organizing human activities through these marketplaces, marketplace shaped organizations is an emerging pattern that is really gaining the steam in the economy. I recall in a conversation that was actually in another podcast, Rita McGrath, saying that when you have this plummeting transaction costs, you basically see — you’re going to see — less traditional firms and more marketplace based firms. So that’s for sure something that is happening. It’s also, I think, another interesting concept to recall here is from the conversation we had with James Currier at the very start of this podcast adventure, where we basically acknowledge that the efficiencies that having an interface that organize the market and is able to generate a total amount of data that then we can use to optimize the market, in turn, it’s really a no brainer. And also basically, the assumption is we’re going to see that playing out more and more in the economy. And what we are actually seeing, from a perspective of real outcomes on the market, is that we are seeing a flourishing of what normally especially is defined as a manager of marketplaces. Marketplaces that you know, where the organizing firm increasingly manages more of the relationships between the parties and also so for example, it can in the need of producing a more consistent experience. The organizing firm can actually manage more thoughtfully and overlook, oversee more strongly, let’s say the experience and even end up in actually producing the supply side in a more B2C fashion. So that’s for sure one aspect that is emerging. The other aspect is what we normally called the transition between the user experiences as a driver of the transition of development into systemic health. So I think that largely came accelerated by the impact of the COVID outbreak and many people realize, really, how fragile and let’s say you know how brittle our industrial systems are, our industrial supply chains are, and how much essentially held to it expression also of systemic aspects and also another, just something that relate with you as an individual or your family, but also the system that to some extent contains you know, your family, your community, your organization, so, the environment, or the cities or the government or this kind of systemic integrations. And what we are seeing on this aspect is that, as new risk factors emerge, we probably can expect that the priorities of organizing will switch more towards, I would say, more towards generating a system that is more resilient. Okay, so the question, the other thesis that is emerging is our organizations are increasingly refocusing not just on user experience, but also on becoming more resilient. So, that’s the second thesis.
The third one, it’s a thesis that is, you know, basically telling us as machines become more powerful and as our data and technology infrastructure becomes more powerful. The big issue that we see is that why the machine development thesis — as Indy Johar described it in the podcast we have — is still gaining, exponential capability, exponential power, the human development thesis is being to some extent, put into question and we kind of have this situation now, where technology is growing in a way that we cannot control it anymore. And so, humans need to be able to express their specific capabilities and their specific potential in organizations and this is also something that Martin Reeves has been talking about largely in the interview we had for the podcast. So human ingenuity, human capability, reflective capabilities, we need to find a way to, you know, basically embed them and use them at best in their organizations we’re going to design. So these are three major theses that are emerging and there is a fourth one that is the last one and these are the more overarching one. That is the thesis that we need to reinvent or basically transcend and reinvent the way we organize, the shape of our organizations. And what we are seeing and then I will stop and share with you for the first the comments. What we are seeing now is that essentially there is some kind of overlap between these flourishing and pervasive marketplace opportunities that are arising in the economy. A lot of small contextual opportunities, more vertical opportunities to organize markets around new capabilities on the supply side and new demands on demand side, this is requiring organization to be much more… to be able to be nimble enough to go and explore the market and create a an entrepreneurial initiative to organize that small market. And within time, some of these small markets can be integrated in bigger ones and they can grow and replicate for example, you can replicate the city by city or niche by niche and especially created these growth engines, okay. So we kind of see a resonance between what we are seeing asked by the market and the economy to the organization and what some of the organization’s we’re working with, for example Haier — this company that we have been talking about a lot during this podcast with such an adaptive organizational model — that is able to play both at the level of the micro enterprise that can start to some venture on the market and at the level of platforms and integrate the functional solutions. Basically, there is this kind of resonance between how the market behaves and how such pioneering organizations are structuring them to be able to play at these multi-scale variety of opportunities of stages. So, here we have kind of a confirmation that our first response from the research are kind of going in the right direction. And maybe we have more open points instead on really understanding how to fit the new human development theses into that and to what extent really, the infrastactural and the supply chains layers are going to restructure to fit with this more resilient and more health driven context that seems to be emerging as a new priority for human support systems. So, that’s more or less a big, big, big, big, big picture of where we are and I will, first of all, maybe leave it to you two, to offer some first reflections.

Lisa Gansky:
Okay, so, yes, that was a big, big, big, big picture. As you said. I have a number of comments and questions. So regarding the overall theses, I think that from a marketplace perspective. I think one of the things that we’ve been playing with and exploring is this, what I’ve been calling kind of spontaneous marketplaces. That it’s almost that the materials necessary to start you know, start a fire right start up marketplace are already in existence, distributed in many parts of the world or let’s just say, practically everywhere, so that the ability for marketplaces to come to be sparked. And they’re not, what I would say, as persistent marketplaces but they can kind of come together in an impromptu or spontaneous way. And then, I think, from listening to James Currier’s discussion and further discussions that we’ve all had regarding data and the ability for data to give us insights and provoke better, more effective and efficient actions. I think that’s kind of the bridge to whether or not — including mission and desire on the part of the parties who have sparked this marketplace — but whether there’s a transfer is a question really. I may forget to raise my voice at the end, but, we see a lot of this spontaneity or impromptu marketplaces with data and visibility, do we see all of these actually manifesting as persistent marketplaces? Whereas the condition is the part of the lifecycle where we’re in that as we move from like what I’ve called “no more” to “not yet“, when we move from a kind of worldview that’s very stable, that where we’ve come from that. Entities, organizations, brands, marketplaces, realities, currencies, practices sort of stick around for a really long period of time.
If we’re living in this other kind of moment, where let’s say in the not yet the place that we see the world moving to is much more temporal and that, therefore marketplaces and organizations and roles of people careers, curiosities are sort of very temporal that they’re are contextual and temporal. And that I think if we look through the lens of “no more” if we look through the way that we’ve grown our ourselves, our careers and our communities and businesses, if we look through that lens, the idea that something is temporal especially, short lived. We have kind of a negative view of that, and that’s not successful. But I’m just wondering is part of what we’re looking at here is this kind of perpetual — with perpetual is the process of learning and innovation — such that the spontaneity of the marketplaces, the data, the learning, may or may not Transfer to something that looks, “permanent or longer term” and that success is more on the side of the learning, not necessarily the side of the persistence. And I think that for me, that idea also translates to help what shape organizations take. Because if we, if we think about, for example, how the “borsa” works, how the stock markets work, and the way that we’ve been trained to think is that companies, for example, should be around forever. And, and so, I’m just so I’m putting out this notion also of “in time” and value in time, and what’s the value that we’re capturing, and is the effort worth the value? If we’re looking from the lens of others, shareholders and currency or if we’re looking from the lens of stakeholders and community interdependence and learning, I think that, we end up in a really different place. So that was one whole kind of riff listening to you talk about in particular, the marketplaces and, and COVID, I think is a really interesting, blue dye effect. It’s like, we have this, lots of things that were invisible or were suspect, have become really bloody conspicuous because they’re breaking in front of our eyes, or they’re clearly broken, whereas before, maybe people were trying to Velcro them together. And so we have with COVID, I think, highlighted vulnerabilities and value and that in the “no more” we see a lot of our institutional biases and Institutions breaking or broken. We see a lot of the way that we’ve asked questions, breaking. But between Climate and COVID, and certainly Inequality, but if we just take climate and COVID, I think we can make a really strong case that the only way that we can solve what we’re being confronted with this century, at least for now, these are giant systemic challenges that we must solve in an interdependent way and with a very different kind of operating system, then what we’ve institutionalized and learned before. And so I think that’s one aspect of COVID that in a way it gives us It gives us a laboratory to test a lot of hypotheses because it’s like the old song, “If you make it in New York, you can make it anywhere”. The very American song. I think that, in a way COVID is testing us if you can make it with COVID then there’s a good chance that your model or your thinking will actually work in kind of the systemic challenges that are facing us and we’ll continue to do so. But I also think that it points to value that we have not really recognized or given its right place in the past. That has to do with trust and safety, has to do with understanding is critical in our ability to live safe and healthy and happy life, supply chain, what people and things do we rely on. Also, kind of a level of empathy and respect that I think pervades, maybe the normal way that we were conducting our lives. And then the obvious ones are revaluing, how we think about cities and the built environment and maybe what’s emerging as a touch less economy.
And the last bit was just regarding human potential. I was reminded of a really fabulous quote from E.O. Wilson. Well, yes, it’s a quote from EO Wilson. And I have to try to find it so I don’t screw it up. But I might not get all the words right. But it’s essentially “the real problem with humanity as we have Paleo emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology”. And I think in the conversation that you alluded to Indy and just in terms of human development, I think that that intersection kind of frames it well. And Edward O Wilson is a good one to do the framing. So, I love the bigness of what you’ve highlighted. And I’m excited to see how, one: how this continues to be scaffolding for the next 1–5 years of the work that Boundaryless does. But also, how people respond to the different pieces, because each one of these sections could be not only podcast series, but also a very invitational Whitepaper with other communities of people working on these topics.

Simone Cicero:
Definitely, definitely. So I want to highlight some of the things you said before maybe leaving the floor to Bill for further consideration but you know, I just want to align to that. What you highlight and what you try to do back into the conversation is it brings me to think about this idea of boundaries, but temporary boundaries. So, an excellent point is really that having organizations that in a world where sticking around is not so common anymore probably need to deal more with this idea of being in flux. And basically being more available to endings not to just to start. So an organization can, to some extent, need to integrate the more capability to you know, have branches off eat that born and then and then maybe die and then then maybe they evolve into something new. And also these ideas, in attaining adequacy of the institutions that we have. You said that very clearly with a quote that you mentioned to some extent, I think that we also our productive environment, our organizations are a bit slower down by the institutional architecture that we are all immersed in this kind of self-replicating and to some extent conservative institutional systems like States, Global Trade Systems and Global Institutions like the UN. I would say the very idea of the social compact between capital and labor and all the mechanisms of public services and double the mechanisms of pensions and this idea of centralized development and the specialized society, where you just work in cooperates, and then you go, and then you have your pension and you get your social services. And I think at least it’s really a resistance factor in basically transforming the productive environment into a different type of organization. So to close it before handling the reflection to Bill, I see that we are really into kind of seeing that there is a discontinuity possibly, and we don’t know yet how to manage. Basically, we don’t have the society or we don’t have the markets, ready to manage discontinuities. We kind of have an institutional agreement and an economy that is much more about continuity, as you said, and so we don’t have the structures needed to deal with that, but at an organizational level, but also I think, at the social, sociological and institutional level. Bill, I would love to know. Unless Lisa, you would like to tell something on it?

Lisa Gansky:
No, I mean, the only thing I was going to say is I don’t think we have the central nervous system to deal with it. Either as human beings the way that we’ve been educated and our expectations. I think culturally, as I should say, our cultural nervous system doesn’t support that. And if you look at indigenous communities or other examples, People contribute, and they are taking care of and then their success to find other ways right? . But I think when we’re looking at this extraction of value as a corporation, and the idea of jobs and all the things that go with all that, that’s very tied up in this 20th century idea. Yeah, well, you’re right, that there’s a discontinuity and how we move from one to the other is very much in the objects are closer than they appear and are kind of a mirror. Right? So, I think I’m really interested to hear what Bill has to say and thank you Simone that was a good summary.

Bill Fischer:
I enjoyed it not only was it a good summary, but Lisa, you did an amazing job of also wrapping up or providing an overview of what Simone started out with. If you think about the 20th century. The 20th century was very much in an era of slow S curves, long on lush middles in s curves that mark industry change. And it was there that, you know, a lot of continuity was built into what we think about as today as modern management. So when I reflect on what we think about as modern management, so much of it is about harvesting the outcomes of occasional innovation, rather than adopting a philosophy of continuous change. And I think that if you take COVID 19 as a metaphor for the sorts of changes we’ll likely see in the future. William Gibson thesis that the future is already here. I think it is, I think it’s COVID. And I think that in the future, we can see the difficulty that our institutions and organizations have adjusting to that we spent the better part of the last century taking surprises and spontaneity out of what we do. And now we’re being asked to improvise and rethink and reinvent. And we don’t have the tools for that. We’ve never invested in the tools for that. And so I think that there’s a real disconnect between what’s going to happen over the next couple of decades and our ability as a managerial class, if you will, to adjust to that, I think that’s kind of worrisome. I think that the marketplace mechanism that Simone talked about as seen repeatedly over the last year or so of research and interviews and the like, is one response to this need for a faster cadence of work. And more experimental approaches to the way we go about things. And so the temporary nature of so many of these marketplace connections, if you will, I think reflects the fact that we need to do things fast and we need to do things we’ve never done before. And so we need to test ideas and try things out. What I think is interesting is that some of the ecosystems that we’ve been looking at our efforts to try to build organizations around that use spontaneity as an advantage that are trying to make temporariness a primary way of guiding organizations rather than trying to build something that lasts.
When I was in graduate school 100 years ago, Warren Bennis wrote a book about temporary society. Turns out he was right. I mean the things he predicted then in the way in which we Organizations would conduct their business in the way in which managers would have to respond and very much in line with what we’re beginning to see today. And so, in some ways, the future was already here, as he saw it. I think for me, the most interesting question about this is, “What does it mean for human development to be able to function in these sorts of environments?” And I think that we really need to not only rethink how we organize the organizations in which we’re apart, but we need to rethink how we conduct the leadership roles within these organizations. And I think that what we’ve seen in the COVID crisis is a real failure of leadership almost on a global scale with a couple of exceptions, but almost on a global scale, where, where the old institutions and the old expertise and the old leadership styles have just failed a response. At best, they’ve hesitated. At worst, they’ve probably been responsible for the deaths of 10s of thousands of people, if not more. So I think that if that’s not a wakeup call to the sorts of changes we have to make, we’ll never have one quite that vivid or quite that loud. So let me I’m going to stop at this point and, and see what you think.

Simone Cicero:
Well, one thing that makes me reflect on what you both said, is trying to side today. I would say the enormity of this topic and also how gigantic does it look like. The amount of change that we can expect in the coming decade in terms of the flow of the organization as we know it, so and sometimes I also feel like maybe on the other hand, I also feel like maybe it’s not the case. So maybe we are over projecting some of the strengths on the expectations of change that we have towards the corporate or the firm, or more in general. I’m more inclined to think that we are not exaggerating. But on the other hand, I mean, I play the devil’s advocate with my thoughts and say, okay, maybe I really am, making it bigger than it is for real. So that that’s one, another reflection that I would like to share with you both and also to what extent we can really imagine what is coming up and how the shape of the firm and the leadership roles are going to change? Because if I think about leadership, I think about, for example, this idea of a leadership that is much more embodied, much more in present in creating entrepreneurship and creating real stuff, not maybe the traditional leadership that we may think about in the entrenched bureaucracy of the industrial organization. And I also think about the new constituents. So another maybe a question for you both is, I would really, truly expect that organizing is going to move away from the corporation and then moving back into new constituents, I don’t know, municipalities, cities, communities, and that these constituents can really take over larger parts of this economy and some extent also the economy of essentials, that it seems like it’s regaining priority in the totes of our societies in the wake of the COVID and other gigantic systemic problems that we that we see.

Lisa Gansky:
Well, those are great questions. When you were talking Simone, I had this thought of I use the metaphor of a lens a lot because I’m addicted to photography and have been most of my life and when you were talking, I was thinking in a way, like, Okay, are we exaggerating? Does it just feel really big? And I think that I was thinking about things like when you’re standing in front of the Alps or the Taj Mahal or Yosemite, the Grand Canyon and there’s no way like people will often say this the sentence of “I just have to be here because it I can’t really capture what it is. It’s beyond the ability to capture this in a two dimensional thing inside the frame”. Right? And what I would say is that, that’s how I feel about where we are. That the tools that we’re using the camera, the lens, the frame is what we keep trying to shove it into the old, “No more” models we keep trying to. And I think that, that’s a mechanism not only because, that’s where our society is just designed around those things for now. But also it’s a calming thing. It’s a way that we’ve also been trained and educated to learn as you know, this is like that. So I think that there’s an important piece here, which has to do with shifting from — and as Bill noted — the 20th century is built on a very Cartesian notion. It’s man who conquers nature, right? It’s I’m going to whip you into shape. I’m going to shape nature and shape things whether it’s mining or exploration, exploitation, extraction, scaling of organizations and manufacturing. The military itself, all of those models are very much like I’m going to create this man made structure and nature will like, forests don’t have trees planted in mines as my friend Vinay always says, “that’s a human thing driven by this notion of factories and productivity”. And all of that is a very sort of Frederick Descartes mentality. And I just think we have to model ourselves and I agree with Bill that COVID is just like it’s been given. It’s a gift to us. It’s horrifying and it disrupted everyone’s life and crushed created tragedy and in some. But I think it’s far from over and it’s also we’re just, we have to kind of think about COVID and it being kind of a coming attractions to our future, not a one-off, and that we really are going to use that as like our personal trainer for getting ourselves as a community, as a society, as a humanity, in shape for recognizing that “nature blast lasts” but also that we’re all connected and how are we going to deal with this and that’s outside the scope of what my earnings per share this quarter or whether I get re-elected or any of those sorts of things. I think that it’s calling on us as humans to reinvent a kind of a discourse of how we are going to survive and hopefully live well but not just survive together on this planet. And it’s I don’t think that we’re underestimating. The other quote I saw recently somebody put up, I don’t recall who was on Twitter a month or so ago was a Lenin quote, that was something like, “We have decades where nothing happens. And then we have weeks where decades happen”. And that’s very much how I feel.

Simone Cicero:
And I also think it was a quote from Lenin.

Lisa Gansky:
Yeah, that’s what I said. Yeah, it is. Exactly. And I have one secret thing also, which is that I’ve spent most of my life being an entrepreneur which for me is like observing systems and failure and then seeing that as an opportunity to create change that for me had a social aspect to it as well. But, as much as I like change, The Amount, The Intensity and The Pervasiveness and The Magnitude of this change reminds me of, also when I originally thought I was going to be a scientist and a doctor and things like that. And a friend of mine, who was a surgeon used to whenever he would tell me stories would say, “Oh, this patient went crazy. And they made a big fuss about this or that, but it’s only minor surgery”. And then like, three years later, Michael says to me, “Oh, he’s all freaked out. He has to have this thing and he’s really upset and it’s a surgical procedure”. And so I leaned into them and I said, “Don’t worry, it’s only minor surgery”, and he reaches down. He’s really a big guy and he reaches down and grabs me by the collar and said, “screw you Gansky, minor surgery is when we do it to somebody else”. And a little bit that’s how I feel about this, like change was cool to work on and talk about and think about and hopefully provoke in certain times. But the magnitude of this is really calling on all of us in a way that is massive and urgent and frightening, like it’s exciting and frightening all at once. So yeah, get what you asked for. Sometimes.

Stina Heikkila:
Yeah, I’m going to jump in before. I’m sure Bill also has reflections on this. But I was thinking when you were talking: it’s quite clear that we live in some sort of chaotic moment. And it’s not really clear who is going to be able to saddle that. Like, to raise to the challenge, and when we’ve been talking to, for instance, recalling the episode that we recorded with Martin Reeves, and he was talking about this ingenuity of humans and how, rather than machines we have this ability to imagine things and to think counterfactually and that sort of provides us with a strength in the current moment, I would say compared to machines or industrial processes and things like that. So what can we imagine is coming out of that in terms of organizations then? Because it’s clear that the incumbents and the big bureaucratic organizations are struggling probably the most in many senses. And so what is going to come out in terms of spaces within organizations, but also in between probably, that allows for people to use this capacity to imagine something new and to co-create to some extent? And with that reflection I wanted to hand over.

Bill Fischer:
Okay, so this is something I’m really interested in. Because I think I have a unique opportunity to sort of look at two aspects of it. On one hand, I’m part of a start-up that is using AI and machine learning to invent patentable inventions on demand. I mean, we’ve just moved from a business model of every two weeks to one where we’re putting, creating software as a service so that the clients can actually control the pace of invention at their desks. And we’ve been remarkably successful with some of the most Important inventing companies in the world. And the reason we’ve been successful is because invention is all about breadth. Breadth of perspective, and speed. And if we can combine the two, by augmenting human intelligence with machine capabilities, then we can move faster than any multi-functional team that could be put together in the same period of time. So that’s been really interesting to watch that struggle. At the same time. Simone and I, as you know, have been working on the Haier project. And what higher is doing, I think, is building ecosystems, to be able to look broader and move faster than a traditional, bureaucratic, and classically structured organization to be able to do. So here you have, on the one hand, you have a very sophisticated machine enabled Big Data enabled process. And on the other hand, you have a lot of bets on spontaneous, serendipitous collisions of people and ideas, much more human oriented on the Haier side. And yet they’re both trying to do the same thing. And I would suggest for roughly the same reasons. So I don’t think it’s either or I think there are ways of doing it. But, I think what Lisa said — Incidentally, I love Lisa’s paradigm of no more and not yet because I think, it captures emotionally the sorts of ways in which we think about moving from the present to the future — and I think that when she talks about that, what she says is most of the things that we do today are extensions of the no more: technologies and techniques and processes that we’ve developed in the world of the past, a very different world from what we’re heading into. And I think she’s right. And I think that what I see in the two organizations that I talk about is really attempts to think differently. So the break out of the old molds, they’re still pursuing the same goal of invention, which is novelty and speed. But they’re trying to accomplish it in very different non-traditional ways. And both of the organizations have struggled in the beginning at least to get credibility, because what they’ve been trying to do is so different, but what I think they represent is ambitious attempts to try to experiment with organizational design for the future. And in both cases, they are certainly the Hier case, they are asking everybody to become part of the future. They’re not leaving some people behind to harvest the cash flows of the “no more”. But they’re sort of encouraging everybody in the organization to move into the future, because if they develop new ways of working, the future will be good for everybody. So for me, there are examples of this, of people trying to break out from the inertia that the no more holds over us all. And whether they’ll be successful or not remains to be seen. But at least there’s some hope that we’ll have some models to work with going forward.

Lisa Gansky:
I have a question, Bill. That was, that was great. I didn’t actually even know about your AI company. So that’s, that’s really interesting. And I want to talk to you about that. Maybe not here. We’ll run out of time and Simone will pull the plug on me but a question for you is just: with respect to Haier — and I’ve talked to Simone and read the things that have come out of your work there that are available to read — the question I have is like, I’m familiar with the notion of ecosystem collisions and expansion and acceleration and like using the idea of a frame that you, the more diversity, the more learning, right and, and so, the question I have there.. (and that’s true for AI and for the for the collision method of ecosystem curation or wildness, depending on what flavor of farming you’re doing). But how confident are you and how confident is Haier that the ecosystem method alone can be developed or is, in fact in already being managed in a way that is expansive enough to meet the challenges of what we’re seeing in the world?

Bill Fischer:
So, I can only speak for the Haier example and Simone you know so much about this, you should jump in as well. I think very, I think it still remains to be seen exactly how this turns out. I think the organization has been sufficiently successful to date to continue to experiment on a large scale. And at some point, I think they hope to move everybody in the organization — at the moment 80, 000 people — into these types of ecosystem-facing micro enterprise market. But also, wildness and collisions. You’re absolutely right. I think it’s almost Brownian motion taking place outside of the boundaries of the organization. And then they have a system of organizational shock absorbers to mediate that type of craziness outside of the more measured pace of life in the organization. But what I think is happening, is I think they realize that they have no choice. But particularly in the Smart Home of the future, Customers living in a world of hyper connectivity are going to want more and more and more of what the organizational providers of their experience can give them. And in most cases, the organization providers are ill equipped to do that. They’ve never written recipes. They’ve never hired, written cookbooks. They’ve never tended organic farms, but yet, that’s the part of the customer experience that’s most vivid in the customer life, is their ability to check the provenance of the organic produce that they’re buying or to pair wines that they’re buying with the foods that they’re cooking. So, the organization is selling an experience that’s fundamentally different than they used to. And not only fundamentally different than they used to, but because they used to sell really a big box that kept food cold. Now, they’re also engaging in what I would call, collateral learning, they’re both learning at the same time. So that the customer’s experience is changing so fast, and their expectations are changing so fast, that there’s no way that they believe, I think, that they could keep up so they have to become radically open in order to be able to meet the quest for new ideas that the customer seems to be looking for, and the pace at which they’re doing this. And one of the things that’s happened, I think, and I don’t think this was intentional, but they have now stretched their definition of the businesses that they’re in from washing machines to laundry. So they’re doing all sorts of things within the clothing of wearable products that they would have never thought about in the past, but the customer would never have looked at them for answers either. So I guess what I’m saying is, I feel like Haier was quick to recognize that our world is changing, we’re unprepared. We need to really radically change the way we get ideas. And once they did that, they had to make it worthwhile for these new partners, these new “ecosystem partners” that they’re relying on because those partners are major contributors to the value creation process, and so the customers. So the whole balance sheet between, who is creating what and who is consuming what, is now changed. And I think what Haier is trying to do experimentally at the moment is trying to create an organization that meets those changes in a fast and effective fashion. Does that respond to you? That was a long response. I’m sorry.

Simone Cicero:
I got a couple more thoughts then on this Haier topic, because I think it’s not a question of Haier interest that is interesting here or not just the question Haier, but it’s more the question of the corporate model I would say. Lisa, in your question, I think you I can see that, you’re kind of pointing that the changes that are probably going to happen are needed. So staggering that they may make the corporate model on its own, inadequate to deal with those changes. And, but what I feel is finding and interesting about Haier is that to some extent to Haier has integrated much more than its organizational model, they’re much more than this idea of the network as organizational or IOT or smart home or whatever. But if there is one idea that is deeply entrenched and deeply integrated in the idea of organizing that Haier exploring is the idea of change. So is the idea that everything changes continuously. And it was fascinating for me to listen to Zhang Ruimin giving this presentation in January last year and saying, “We Either Evolve or We Become a Museum Exhibit”. So it is basically pointing out that that organization is on track to continuous evolution and continuous change. And in a private meeting once he said to me, “Maybe a Company will exist in the Future, but Organizations Won’t”. So, there is this idea of the organization as our integrating artefacts or like we are using to deal with as something that may so radically change in the future, that it could not exist. So the question is really about looking at thinking about the corporation, as a self-fulfilling prophecy of mechanized reward, or looking at the corporation as an accident of history. And it’s important and interesting to look at from my point of view also to the Daoist roots of Haier yet not because essentially this also helps us to frame these from a Cultural and philosophical perspective. And when I think about the question that that I asked it to Zhang Ruimin in a recent interview when I “But what is the purpose of this organization at the end of the day, because you always talk about user experience, you always talk about this kind of products and electronics, but how does these organization respond to acknowledging, the climate crisis, for example, or the social issues that that we are experiencing all over the world”. And when basically when he answered to this question, he pointed out to two very basic principles of the Daoist philosophy he quoted Lao Tzu basically, and the water allowed to in this idea of having an organization that is like water, so, as maybe some of you know, in the Daoist tradition, now, there is this idea of water as a as a universal kind of many important forces and, and you know, to be like water to some extent is to be stronger than everything, is to be able to cope with everything you should be able to be functional to everything and at the same time to be selfless as Zhang Ruimin said. So I think this is really, really an interesting and interesting way to look at the day Corporation, not as a self-fulfilling prophecy. And I’m quoting here, something that I’ve heard from Bonnita Roy, a couple of weeks ago in a podcast or when she said, basically, “that the technologies that we use, for example, to solve our complex problems kind of end up in generating these problems”. If you think about it, she was doing the example of talking about the COVID that she was doing this example of the way we manage viruses is to some extent, something that ends up in creating these incidents and possibly spreading these pandemics around. Because we kind of play with viruses, in labs and so on. So that’s the point that maybe I can throw back to Bill that I know that you want to add something. So it looks to me that Haier is especially one thing is looking at the corporation, as something that is subject to change is not necessarily a self-fulfilling prophecy of a Cartesian and mechanistic way to look at society and the human experience more in general.

Bill Fischer:
So I would like to just jump in with three points, just to clarify something I said earlier. The first is that, one of the things that I’m struck by on Haier, I think that the idea that changes continuous is an extraordinary advantage because I think people come to work, not afraid of what’s going to happen today, but really looking forward to what sort of changes they can be part of. And I’ve always been struck by the fact that when you walk through the factory, often you’ll see these posters very close, I live and die by S curve. So I always see the S curves, but they’re all about, how they’re going to jump to the next curve. And these are being joined by people on the shop floor. So my sense is that there is one of the things that makes hire specialists, they really pay attention to their culture, their culture is not the by-product of other choices, their culture is a primary choice, and they’re constantly driving that culture to be more innovative and more entrepreneurial.
The second thing is that I think that we’re seeing, ecosystem related identification when you talk to people in the ecosystem. So you talk to Haier people who are involved in ecosystems, it’s pretty clear that increasingly their primary identification is with the ecosystem. So what does that mean for the organization? If your star employees identify with their external relationships, rather than with the internal relationships, which we know works in universities, but is this a different model for the organization? Or what are what we see? Or is it that the boundaries of the organization are beginning to fade, and ultimately, on the future will belong; the primary asset will be the relationships, the capacity to create innovation because of the relationships rather than the customer relationship? And I think Simone said that earlier in the podcast, where he saw a change in the orientation of the firm from user experience towards something else, and I think this is part of what we’re seeing.
And then the third thing is Lisa, you said with reference to the what if. You said, Could it be that new that leadership of organizations will, will revert to communities or to change from the old shareholder model that govern the last couple hundred years. And I think that might in fact be the case, although the communities might not necessarily be physical or local. But they might be communities that are born out of ecosystem partnerships, which are temporary to begin with. But as you repeat the experience become more trustful. And here I’m thinking I’ve been doing some work with the Municipality of Copenhagen and their intentions to create an E-Sports ecosystem in Copenhagen and Skane. And they were always players in this region, but they didn’t think of themselves as being connected in any way. And then a connection occurred because of an activist, a woman who saw the connections. And now that in fact, they’re stronger together than they were alone. And I think that that’s a very interesting example of where people begin to have dual allegiances, one to their employer, but one to the relationships. And maybe that’ll be a change we see in the what if.

Simone Cicero:
So, it’s likely you have two directions, and then I’ll leave to you guys to maybe try to wrap up our ideas as towards a conclusion. But essentially, like you Bill, you’re saying is like we have two directions of organizing. we are much more used to this vertical direction. And now there is some horizontal direction of organizing that is happening, you know, like in the space between organizations, in the spaces between entrepreneurs, in the space between users and organizations themselves. so more like a cross boundary. So it’s really, the concept of boundary is really being questioned apparently.

Bill Fischer:
That’s, yes, that’s my, that’s you know, maybe I’ve been hanging around with you too long, but that’s the way I’m beginning to see the higher ecosystem existence. And that has real practical complications, right? Because, for example, how do you brand, a multi-partner, customer experience that where each partner feels like they have a right to recognition, and where you’re going to distribute the value captured among the partners based on that contribution. I think it changes the way they think about where their primary allegiances.

Simone Cicero:
Yeah, and also, you know, and this I offer it to maybe Lisa for a reflection. When I spoke a week, two weeks ago, a few weeks ago, I was speaking with the John Bunch that our listeners have enjoyed on the podcast, from Zappos. And we were really excited, especially talking about this, you know, to say, you know, I asked how do you guys basically define the constraint for the entrepreneurs inside the organization to create new ventures. and they refer to this triangle where there are the values of the organization, the brand, so basically the mission of the organization, serving customers, excellence, and being, essentially being sustainable. So being profitable, if you will. so these three things actually set a constraint for the organization for being part of the organization. So in the future, the question is, maybe it’s much more about setting constraints and stories, than actually setting real corporate organizations, and well defined boundaries around the entrepreneurial process.

Lisa Gansky:
Yeah, so that was amazing, guys. Thanks for that. I think that the, one question and it’s probably something to keep, maybe you know, but maybe it’s something to keep looking at is just in the world being. Like, I’m just curious about hiring process or how they find people that break the mold or don’t you know. so for example, people tend to hire people that fit into a culture as opposed to hiring people that break a culture. And there’s parts of a culture. Like when you talk about the culture, I think you’re referring to, and when I talk about it typically as well, so I’m trying to think of another word, but is like, the environment and the values that are fundamental to growing the kind of institute, you know, institutional practices, but more outcomes and people, that we want to engender. And so it’s the substrate, it’s the, you know, foundational declarative space. But the question I have is, like, if it’s this, there’s a complexity always with humans, which is basically to say that, you know, this notion of empathy or rejecting, like there’s some things that I think I’m a very open person, but even some positions or ideas can discuss me, or provoke me to a bad feeling or a judgment, you know. and so some of those things may be acceptable inside of the culture, and some of those things may not. and there’s this place in which, you know, if you take the extreme of the ecosystem, like if you’re an American company or a European company, or a Chinese company that that’s the, like this in this case, we have the Daoist philosophy that’s the fundamental frame for where the organization can go. and that’s probably you know, water metaphor side, a much more fluid frame, than one that comes from, you know, a more Anglo-Saxon orientation, with a very Cartesian kind of sense, or I should say, Occidental. But in any case, the point being that, the question I had, that we can continue in another moment is really just do the ecosystems. At what point do the ecosystems rub up against the culture, and that your need to continue to diversify the kinds of questions and people who are part of the game are also, you know, creating a problem, or provoking a change or forcing you to reify the declaratives you had around the core principles culturally. And so that was like a learning, kind of just a learning question. Because in the AI scenario, it’s in some ways more easy to control or to see when you’re at that intersection and to make a deliberate decision. But in an organization with humans, you know, two or three layers away, or two or three, not even layers, but cascading groups or teams away, it may be harder. So that was kind of just trying to understand the edge of the Haier model. But with respect to what we’ve really been talking about, and I know we want to kind of wrap up. I do think that you with Bill’s example with Copenhagen, I have actually worked there, I love working with people that are in the city at particular. And I think that they are looking at kind of models that both physical models and examples in the city in terms of infrastructure that allow for like their ski slope and things that allow for, you know, introducing circularity and making things conspicuously look and feel that they’re closer to nature and therefore they’re building something that is going to Embrace and restore a pathological change as a good thing. And so that, you know, for me, I think, one of the fundamental wraps up pieces is to say that I think that we are boundaryless. That’s our capability from a human potential perspective, and that we’ve overlaid fictions on top of that, and thatfictional kind of overlay for several centuries or so has really, let’s say, served us from the standpoint of the other fiction, the economy. But probably hasn’t served us from the non-fiction, you know, biological, natural environment. And so, this notion that, you know, from a human potential standpoint, we can have our organizations, our teams and the way that we organize for creating value and supporting societies and living life is more in this sort of spontaneity, self-organizing adaptive model. That seems very clear. And I think we have many examples, and hopefully we’ll be provoking and learning many more. Related to that, I think that there’s some combination and listening to you talk about Haier as well is that from the 20th to the 21st century, there’s this shift in the way that we think about culture for communities, I would say, as well as for companies or other kinds of organizations is this coexistence or like a virtuous cycle of success, peace and uncertainty as being connected because we’ve thus far, for me in this body and in this life have been organized around, you know, peace and success or have been fictionally anchored in certainty. And then the third thing in it, again, is just I’ll say, I think that we need to explore time and temporality with respect to value capture or creation and stakeholders. Because again, in the 20th century model, and especially if you’re looking at things like more fictions, like publicly traded companies, there’s this provocation every 90 days and a whole set of metrics that reveal and conceal things based on, you know, what is valued. And so, it creates fictional value, but it also has created a lot of other consequences. In some cases, including distrust and weakens the system instead of strengthened. So, I think that just in terms of thinking about in what period of time, you know, are we just we’re designing this in for the outcomes in what period of time? And like what I remember when I first time I was in Puglia, there’s a lot of really awesome olive trees there. I think there was like a million that were more than 2000 years old. And I remember having a conversation with one of the gentleman who owns a farm there and he was saying that the average will the peak production for oil and the quality of oil is somewhere between 400 and 600 hundred years. And that just really stuck with me because I thought that whole sort of you’re planting it not for you, you’re planting it not even for your grandchildren, your planting it for, for something that is, this confidence and this hope and trust that there’ll be a future that will continue and it sort of creates this, this trajectory. And this kind of energy towards the timeframe that is beyond where you or anyone you know is going to, you know, reap something that you consider to be a benefit. And I think that in sort of, for me is one of the fundamental aspects of what needs to shift.

Simone Cicero:
Bill, I knew that you wanted to add something at some point.

Bill Fischer:
Yes, I just wanted to, just in response to Lisa’s question. I wanted to mention that, you know, Haier has been in the process of doing this. It’s been on this transformation journey for more than 35 years, so over that period of time, the people who have absolutely hated this have left, and they built an employment brand. That’s all about taking chances, continuous change and entrepreneurship. So, you know, they’re good themselves. A huge advantage by being consistent and changing that has served the well in the way in which their labor system has the talent that they’ve assembled. And then I think that the worst mistake that could make is to hire people who want to be entrepreneurs and put them in a classical organizational structure. So, they were smart enough to say, if we’re going to hire entrepreneurs, we better change organizational structure, or else we’re going to have angry entrepreneurs and that’s probably not what we want. So I think that was a, you know, I think, so behind the facade of big dreams and daring, you know, organizational structures, there’s a lot of details and the details tend to serve to make it easier to do the sorts of changes that they want to have happen. And I think, one of those big changes is that the culture. So, talent acquisition is now done at the micro enterprise level, just to tend or so people who are together to micro enterprise who do the hiring. So pretty much of the culture of a micro enterprise is determined by the inhabitants. And I would imagine that they are closer in to overtime to their external partners than they might be of a higher environment. So, one of the roles of the platform’s in Haier is to absorb that back cultural difference and interpret the messages into the more orderly organization. I think and the other direction as well. But I think the organization can put together to make it easy to partner with outsiders. And, and share ideas, and then figure out how to bring that into the organization as a whole. But your question about, at what point do the ecosystems rub up against the culture of the organization. That’s why I think this series of shock absorbers is important. And you’re going to have it, and somehow you have to mediate it. So, I hope that helps if I’m going to provide, so in the spirit of a wrap up. I’ll do this very, very quickly. One of the things is that I’d like to, we’ve been here now for 75 minutes and the word strategy has not appeared. And I think in many ways, that’s a real takeaway, because this is not been about grand scale strategy. I think there’s tactics going on. There’s improvisation, there’s experimentation. But the days where there was a chief strategy officer who is making grand strategy, I think is over. And I think it’s, that’s part of the, you know, no more world. But many of us will be glad to leave as we move into a world where more people feel they have a stake in the outcome of what their organization does. And I think the fact that so much of what, at least at Haier, so much of what’s happening now is to create equity ownership amongst the workers in their employees, in their ecosystems. They get to make the big choices, they get to hire the labor, they get to distribute the value captured. All of those things are making big contributions towards human development. Because every one of those individuals sees themselves, if not a CEO, they see themselves as an entrepreneur. And I think that their name and their goal is, much as it is in many entrepreneurial communities is to move on to a bigger and better new idea. So, my sense is that there is a marketization taking place within Haier, that is replacing the old directed structure. And it serves to revitalize the organization. This is an organization, that’s in what’s typically regarded as all the economy industry. And yet, they’re constantly mentioned as being one of the most innovative organizations in the country, in the world. So, what we have is a contradiction right there. And I think the contradiction is served by the choices that they’ve made, to make people feel like they are really important within the organization, no matter what the role is. In many ways, so in a sense, that we’re returning to a pre-industrial revolution system, where people were the owners of the businesses that they worked in, rather than the hired hands, who showed up with a whistle blew. And according to Wilson in the medieval organizations, when we’re making progress, we’re now in pre-industrial revolution and, but I think that it’s important to keep that sort of ownership and feeling of, of individual fulfillment and power in order to engage the talent that you’re employing. And I guess my sense is that, not surprisingly, we’re moving from the no more to the non yet in fits and spurts. And sometimes we’ll get it right and sometimes we’ll get it wrong. And I think what Haier has done is to run hundreds, if not thousands of experiments in parallel. So that for every, you know, for every six or eight they get wrong, they get a couple, right. And the organization learns from that moves forward a little bit. So, for me, if you think about how entrepreneur how innovation grows on the basis of experimentation and learning. This is a good model to base organizational design on then, you know, and nothing lasts forever, but for the moment, I think it’ll get us through that chasm between no more in the end, and then not yet. So, I hope that holds together as a summary of what I’ve heard and what I thought about just now.

Simone Cicero:
Thank you. That’s great. I mean, I’m going to piggyback on this but before that, Stina, do you want to say something, you know, to add something before I wrap up a little bit?

Stina Heikkila:
And yeah, just want to say thank you to both of you. It’s been a really interesting discussion and I can I really like this idea of how we can leverage to some extent, on diversity within organizations. And it seems like with everything that we’ve talked about, this is going hopefully, in that direction. There will be more opportunities for people to have skin in the game, and actually have some level of influence on the outcomes that organizations create as well. So thank you very much, and catch up soon.

Simone Cicero:
Thank you Stina for your quick note. And yeah, I’m also going to thank you from my point of view. I think if i can stress one point that emerged during the conversation is that for sure, in the normal, there is a strategy. Sometimes we have been talking about the death of strategy. And I think I can reconnect that to the idea that as the rules changes. So as the rules, the context of an organization changes rapidly. This idea of strategy is also something you can use to win over competitions for example, is largely I would say largely limited tool, you know, in respect to what you would need to face unanswered questions that seem to constitute the basis of the not yet. Not yet for a reason, because it’s full of unanswered questions that we still need to grasp. So thank you very much both. So if you want to say hello to our listeners, that’s a good moment.

Lisa Ganksy:
Thank you everyone for listening, and i look forward to as always continued conversations with the three of you, and with the people listening and interacting with us broadly in and around Boundaryless. So thank you for the invitation.
Bill Fischer:
Yeah, and I would like to add that it was a real enjoyable afternoon. I’m glad to be part of this. Thank you for including me, Lisa, it was a great pleasure to meet you, and Stina and Simone, thank you again.

Simone Cicero:
Thank you both, thank you all, and catch up soon.