Gary Hamel, Author of Leading the Revolution, on Courage, Compassion, and Change

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: Hi! I'm Shannon Lucas, one of the co-ceos of catalyst constellations which is dedicated to empowering catalyst to create bold, powerful change in the world.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: This is our podcast move, fast, break, shit burnout. Where we speak with catalyst executives about ways to successfully lead transformation in large organizations. And today I am so thrilled and honored to have with us. Gary Hamill. Thank you, aiden, for the intro and welcome Gary.

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Gary Hamel: Thank you so much, Shannon. Pleasure to be here.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: So thrilled. All right, a little bit of background for those who aren't familiar with you. Gary is one of the world's most influential and iconoclastic business thinkers. He's worked with leading companies across the globe and is a dynamic and sought after management speaker. He's been on the faculty of the London Business School for more than 30 years, and is director of the Management lab.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: Fortune Magazine, describes Hamill as the world's leading expert on business strategy, and the Financial Times calls him a management innovator without Peer Hamill has been ranked by the Wall Street Journal as the world's most influential business thinker, and is a fellow of the Strategic Management Society and of the World Economic Forum. So you can see why I'm thrilled to have Gary here with us today. And Gary, we love to start off with a question about

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: how do you relate to the concept of catalyst? And if that resonates with you, can you share some career highlights that sort of demonstrate your catalytic nature.

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Gary Hamel: You know. I think it's a super useful and quite powerful idea the notion of being a catalyst.

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Gary Hamel: You know. I've spent a lot of time in my career, thinking about what makes somebody a leader.

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Gary Hamel: and for sure, having subordinates does not make you a leader, and if I can riff on this for a moment. What has happened over the last several decades is we basically started talking about anybody who has a managerial role as a leader, which I think completely denigrates the idea of leadership, because being in an administrative role does not make you

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Gary Hamel: for sure a leader. And so my definition for a very long time about, you know. How do I know a leader? And in essence you only know a leader after the fact. But somebody's actually stepped up and led something. I think it's hard to predict a priority who might have that capability. But for me the definition has always been an individual who makes a catalytic contribution to collective accomplishment.

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Gary Hamel: And I've been using that for 20 years, I suppose, as a definition. And so you know, somebody who, who, working with others, not through others. Others. People are not instruments, but working with others, makes things happen that would not otherwise happen.

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Gary Hamel: and we can come back and say, what are the capabilities, the traits? How do you develop that capacity to, as it were.

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Gary Hamel: punch more than your weight, cast a bigger shadow. Make a bigger difference than your resources or position might indicate. But I think that is the essence of leadership. And to be honest, most of the leadership development that happens in business schools and training programs, and so on, really doesn't go at that at all. So I'm super glad you guys are making that idea.

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Gary Hamel: bringing it to life and giving people great examples of it. You know, when I wrote leading the Revolution, which was now 25 years ago, a large section of the book was devoted to people in, as you call them, you know, internal rebels, or I think Theresa Amaboli at Harvard called them tempered Radicals, so we can use different words. But people who, you know, unbidden and without any particular internal power, created new

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Gary Hamel: 1 billion dollar businesses and had enormous impact on the way their organizations work. And I kind of having interviewed a lot of those people. This is now again a quarter of a century ago, but laid out my sense of what it takes to do that, I would say. You know, over time my attention has shifted, because.

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Gary Hamel: even though I immensely value those people, and I think we're now we have ways of finding them and and empowering them and using them, using technology and using large scale collaboration. That would have been impossible a couple of decades ago, having said that life is still more difficult for those people in most organizations than it should be, and you know you shouldn't have to have, you know the patience of Job, or the courage of Richard the Lionhearted to make a difference.

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Gary Hamel: and so in so many ways, and I'm sure you've seen this Shannon. The system works against these people. It shuts them down, it flushes them out. It, you know. It throws up barriers in their way, and you could argue, and I've heard many executives. Well, you know, that's fine. It should be really difficult, because we want to find out like who has the guts and the courage and will persevere.

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Gary Hamel: Yeah, okay. Like, you know, we need to have some ways of separating out wheat from chaff and good ideas from rubbish for sure. But the way our organizations are constructed, the values that are there, the skills that you need to kind of so-called get ahead so many of those things unnecessarily frustrate people of goodwill and capability who simply want to make their organization better.

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Gary Hamel: So I think the idea is very powerful. I think we can talk about what it takes for somebody to make a catalytic difference. But it's important for me, anyway, that our organizations make life a little easier for people whose emotional equity is invested in the future for people who can see a better way, who want to make a bigger difference rather than endlessly frustrating them.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: It's a perfect segue, because my next question was really about that. It's like, you know, you've talked about how the future belongs to the bold, not the bureaucratic. And so I guess the question is for the organizations, for the people, the leaders who are listening. How? What would you say to them about how to make it easier for those internal change agents, the people that we call catalysts.

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Gary Hamel: Well, I think some of it is what you've done in your work with your colleagues, you know. I think you can train people to some extent to be successful change makers, and you know.

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Gary Hamel: probably more informally than you have, Shannon. But again, throughout all my career, the tens of thousands of people I've interacted with. I've always been very curious. Why, some people, you know, most of them obviously clever and smart. But you know, whatever whatever their gifts. Some people are able to make a bigger difference.

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Gary Hamel: And as I looked at that, and I'd be very interested in kind of

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Gary Hamel: correlating this with your own experience.

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Gary Hamel: There are 4 things that for me have always stood out.

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Gary Hamel: One is, they have a certain kind of courage. They're not foolhardy.

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Gary Hamel: but they certainly don't put kind of their career first.st They're much more interested in impact than they are in promotion, but they are also in the thrall of a truly noble and worthwhile problem.

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Gary Hamel: And and that their courage comes from the nobility of the problem they're trying to solve.

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Gary Hamel: And they have the the guts to take on problems that are much bigger than they are.

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Gary Hamel: for which they may be quite unqualified in some kinds of ways.

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Gary Hamel: And

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Gary Hamel: when you're up against a problem that is, you know, sizable beyond your resources, it forces you to think differently. It forces you to rely on others. But I think that's the starting point. And I think that large organizations breed.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: You know what I've called add ambition, deficit disorder, because.

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Gary Hamel: Very seldom do people in the kind of a managerialist mindset. Very seldom do they want to commit themselves to goals where, where the path is still unlit

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Gary Hamel: where you cannot say convincingly how you're going to get there, because in most organizations, the 1st moment you say, well, we should do X. People say, like, well, like like how and if you're like, Well, I'm not exactly sure, like nobody's done this before. We're going to have to figure it out. It's like, Oh, my gosh! Like like. No, no, that's so. I think that's number one.

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Gary Hamel: I would say, number 2 is a contrarian mindset.

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Gary Hamel: if you see a problem that is kind of substantial but also persistent, and you know, hasn't really been addressed. You know it's only going to be solved by kind of orthogonal thinking that you're going to have to come at this from a different angle, and you know I've tried to live that out in my own career with more or less success. But what you're always asking is. Well, what aren't people talking about.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: Yes.

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Gary Hamel: Or what isn't on the agenda, or what are the assumptions? Everyone is simply taking for granted, or what are the ideas, the conceptual lenses, the principles that come from other fields or other disciplines that might be useful to us here.

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Gary Hamel: But you have to train yourself how to step outside the frame. How to you know who is the famous

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Gary Hamel: Buddhist monk who said, You know a beginner's mind right.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: Hmm.

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Gary Hamel: And that does not come

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Gary Hamel: naturally again. If you're kind of an expert and you figure you should know more than everybody else, or you're caught inside of some kind of a field or a discipline, and you can't escape that. You'll never find a breakthrough solution.

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Gary Hamel: So, by the way, we can come back. I can give you people that have inspired me in this way. I'm kind of 1st of all just saying what I think the core is.

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Gary Hamel: I think the 3rd thing for me is compassion.

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Gary Hamel: you know I think we live in a in a very cynical world, and and maybe rightfully so all of us are manipulated every day in constant ways. We're lied to by, you know all of the companies around us who tell us how wonderful they are, how great their products are, and you know, and so on. And every time you call a call center, it says we're on. We're experiencing unusually long wait times when the truth is, they just don't want to hire more people. I mean, we just live up to our eyeballs in bullshit all the time.

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Gary Hamel: And so when anybody comes to us and says, Hey, I need your help, or you know, would you? Would you? Would you

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Gary Hamel: partner with me on this, the 1st question we always ask is like, Yeah, well, like, what's your angle?

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: Right.

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Gary Hamel: You know, like, How do? How does this work for you?

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Gary Hamel: And and we just assume? And you know, often rightfully, so.

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Gary Hamel: that most people are operating out of a very, you know, narrow self-interest.

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Gary Hamel: And so when and it doesn't come easy. But when people see

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Gary Hamel: around you that you are in it for them

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Gary Hamel: that you are willing to sacrifice some of your income future time whatever to help them.

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Gary Hamel: That breaks down a lot of barriers.

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Gary Hamel: and people are willing to work with you. To let you fail sometimes, and let you screw up to give you some grace if they believe you really do have a kind of higher calling.

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Gary Hamel: So that is kind of a magical superpower. I think if you're trying to get things done.

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Gary Hamel: and then I would say, the last thing which would be, I'm sure, obvious to you, and many of your listeners is you have to have a kind of community building orientation.

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Gary Hamel: you know you don't do anything substantial by yourself. And so this ability to find people who share your interests, to to bring people together in productive ways to inspire them.

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Gary Hamel: That, to me is enormously important. And again, now, with technology and new kinds of tools, you can, we can bring people together much more readily, and you can. You can find the inherent change makers who are out there, and so on. But so for me, those are the 4 things. You have to have that kind of courageous heart, a contrarian mind like kind of a compassionate soul. And then this community spirit.

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Gary Hamel: And I think when you see those things come together in somebody.

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Gary Hamel: you can be sure they are going to surprise you by what they're able to accomplish.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: Amazing. Yes, I feel very sane. The community building part just to sort of pick up on that last thread. It's so interesting because I have a follow up question about the emotional labor like how hard all of this is, like everything that you just said is true, and the level of self-awareness, self-management like you said, the sacrifices that you have to put can easily lead to burnout and energy depletion. And what we see with this community is.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: they'll come into our sessions, and they'll be so depleted, and they'll be like, I just don't have another hour to give anyone, and by the end of that hour just the like spark. The frictionlessness of being together is such a great energy booster.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: But I want to take it up a little bit and say, this is like, it's such a great definition of the sort of the attributes, the how and why of these people? What questions would you recommend the C-suite ask themselves to see if they are actually supporting or finding engaging these people.

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Gary Hamel: Well, I think you can ask those questions at several different levels. I guess the most basic level would be.

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Gary Hamel: do you recognize such a person when you come across them.

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Gary Hamel: Do you naturally want to help them rather than you know? Throw barriers in their way? Are you mentoring people, you know, like that? Does your career development, promotion system, and so on.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: Kind of reward those people or not.

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Gary Hamel: And you know, because and I don't. I don't want to

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Gary Hamel: overstate this, but by definition, people who have that kind of catalytic capability

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Gary Hamel: are going to be by definition, are going to be regarded by many as troublemakers.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: Totally.

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Gary Hamel: And and, by the way, sometimes

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Gary Hamel: these catalysts do themselves harm because they are too impatient because they don't recognize the realities around them because they believe things are easier than maybe they really are. Or, as you said, they don't understand the full context, and so it can be quite easy to become very impatient and a little bit of an asshole. Everybody else just doesn't get it. So you know, they can sometimes be their own worst enemies right?

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: Yeah.

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Gary Hamel: So. But but one of the questions as a leader is, would you do you know such people? Are you hunting for them? Do you have kind of an inherent screen that lets you say, hey, that person has taken some career risks right? That person really cares deeply about our customers and our stakeholders, and whether we're succeeding or not, that person seems to have things that motivate them. Besides the next promotion.

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Gary Hamel: That's right.

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Gary Hamel: There's just a set of things you can be alert to as a leader, where? Because I will tell you as a leader, your success depends largely on your ability to find those people, and and to help them motivate them, and and sometimes to kind of get them slightly refocused on things that that maybe can add more value. But

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Gary Hamel: if if you know, if you're not aware of those talents and those capabilities, and if all you're judging is, you know, technical expertise, you know, are they totally aligned with what they're doing? Are they really on my team or not? Are they giving 110% of what I think they should be getting. Then you're gonna miss, miss. Those people.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: It's fascinating in one organization. When we did one of these catalyst programs and we helped them identify these sometimes hidden talents, 60% of the people that we identified, the C-suite said were hidden according to them.

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Gary Hamel: Hang on!

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: Interesting thing is, after they go through the phase that you were just talking about like getting their super frustrated. Often one of 2 things happens which is in another company. They're like, Oh, my God! We can't believe that she's a catalyst, because she was playing so small in her little box.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: and when they stop to think about it, they're like, well, she did write a book, and she does run 2 nonprofits. She had just taken that energy out of this system and put it into other places, or they end up being like the kids who are on the performance plan because they don't have the self-awareness to play well enough, but all they really want to do is help. But the managers and leaders haven't been taught how to provide them the help and give them the context.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: I want to go back to what you said, though, because there's another really interesting thing in your work where you're like alignment is anti-innovation. And it's interesting because I think there's a fine line there. And I'd love your thoughts about it. You also talk about like you know, strategic planning versus strategic intent. And one of the things we try and help catalysts understand is, if you are not in alignment and serving a part of the direction that the organization is headed. You're going to be ejected from the system, or you're going to burn out.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: And I think, conversely, organizations are understanding. We're not going to do traditional 1, 3, 5 year strategic planning in the way that we used to. We have to pivot to having strategic intent as a as a guidepost for people I'd love to just hear your thoughts about like how do we? What's the intersection of alignment, strategic, intent, and catalyst for maximum impact.

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Gary Hamel: Well, the reality is by a lot of data and surveys most organizations don't have anything that you would really call a strategy.

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Gary Hamel: They have a set of plans and objectives that tend to be very incremental, very extrapolative from whatever they're doing now. I mean the question I like to ask leaders, so-called leaders. But the executive team, whoever those people might be, is. And I ask them individually, what are the 3 or 4 ways your organization is going to have to reinvent itself to intercept the future.

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Gary Hamel: And it's quite interesting if you ask that question and then you ask it of multiple. You know you ask it of a dozen or 20 people across the senior level.

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Gary Hamel: and then to ask yourself, okay, did the answers, is there anything in those answers that would surprise competitors.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: Hmm.

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Gary Hamel: Or is it like, whatever is, you know? Hey, yeah, we're really focused on AI. No shit. Okay. Well, that's

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Gary Hamel: who would have guessed so a. Is there anything that that surprises?

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Gary Hamel: Number 2? Is there any sort of consensus.

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Gary Hamel: Or does everybody have their own particular perspective? And they're kind of there's a there's an ongoing low, level war in the team about, you know a versus B north versus South?

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Gary Hamel: That that confuses everybody else in the organization and see. Can you tell me what you're doing in the next 30 days, if that's really where you're headed in terms of partnerships, who you're hiring, how you're redirecting resources and so on.

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Gary Hamel: And as you would expect, Shannon. When I've done this in many different organizations, there is not much there that is truly novel or surprising. There is not a very deep consensus, and often, you know there's not.

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Gary Hamel: you know, they're not really putting their money, you know, where their intentions are. So that's a different, maybe conversation than we're having today. But I do think this question of how do you build a deeply shared point of view about where you're going?

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Gary Hamel: And I certainly believe that can no longer be created by a few people at the top. They don't have. They're not close enough to technology, to the marketplace, to what's changing in the world, however capable those people are, they don't have enough bandwidth. They themselves cannot generate a rich enough array of new strategic options to have some chance of finding what really, really might be. The high payoff moves.

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Gary Hamel: So you know, strategic planning is is like an oxymoron. It's something that is, you know, it's it's typically 95% planning and maybe 5% strategy

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Gary Hamel: in terms of alignment.

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Gary Hamel: That is a tricky thing. Because, you know, obviously, if you have everybody pulling in different directions. You're not going to get very far.

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Gary Hamel: having said that perfect alignment is stasis.

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Gary Hamel: And so, even if you have quite a clear overall intent, you need people in the organization who are constantly kind of stepping outside that a bit and going like, yeah, maybe. But what about this over here? Or what if we missed this? And and those people have to have enough a way of getting resources and experimenting with things and trying things? You know.

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Gary Hamel: when you go back historically. And there are some very interesting researchers that have done this. And you look at companies that have made kind of really interesting and successful strategic pivots.

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Gary Hamel: Most of those started out as somebody 3 or 4 levels down. Who said, Gee, what about this? And they get a little bit of energy, and they get a little bit of success. And then people go like, Yeah, I mean, if you look at how Amazon got into cloud computing, that's how it happened. You know. How does a retailer get into cloud computing? For heaven's sakes.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: Yup!

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Gary Hamel: So you have to create the space for that unexpected to happen.

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Gary Hamel: and even once you have broad alignment. You will almost never have

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Gary Hamel: alignment on the means. You may have alignment on broad direction, but the means are something that have to be invented or the specific ways you get there have to be invented. So alignment as a general directional orientation is very important. When you start to try to overprescribe the what

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Gary Hamel: and detail everything about the how. Then you are inevitably going to miss the future because there's a lot of signals and things happening that you simply can't see at the top.

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Gary Hamel: So you know, I created this little cartoon where you have a bunch of lovely people with their briefcases and backpacks running off a cliff.

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Gary Hamel: and a couple of senior leaders are saying, well, it's great. Everybody's moving in the same direction, you know.

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Gary Hamel: and I look at you know, company after company that is missed.

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Gary Hamel: you know, I think, about Intel, which missed every major shift in semiconductors for 20 years.

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Gary Hamel: you know. They missed Gpus. They missed communication chips. They missed mobile chips for mobile devices. They missed the idea of creating foundries that build somebody else's chips, and

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Gary Hamel: I will tell you all of those ideas were there in the organization every single one. Or you look at Microsoft under the last 10 years of Balmer and Bill Gates, where they relate to literally every single opportunity.

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Gary Hamel: And then Satna Nadella comes, who is a, I think, an amazing leader. But his most important contribution was to blow up the windows division and say, like, like, maybe we need to think beyond the PC, so yeah, alignment is

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Gary Hamel: one important thing, but it's easy to over overrate it. And I think what is also happening. I mean one of the things that often kind of scares the crap out of me, and I can't tell you the number of times I've heard this, when when some CEO executives, we need to be one company like Fill. In the name of the company, we need to be one blank right, one bank one whatever like what the heck does that mean? One whatever? And again.

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Gary Hamel: I think, as the world has become

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Gary Hamel: much more complex and moving much faster.

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Gary Hamel: The ability to be in control in a traditional sense has kind of become impossible.

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Gary Hamel: And this is very odd, conundum or paradox.

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Gary Hamel: that as the world has become less predictable, where you need

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Gary Hamel: more experimentation, more improvisation, more people trying to do new things. Our organizations have become more centralized.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: Hmm.

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Gary Hamel: And and with, you know, more policy and more homogenization, and so on, and I can only speculate, and I will label this as speculation, but

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Gary Hamel: I have the sense that if your mindset as a leader is, I need to know.

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Gary Hamel: I need. You know, if something goes wrong in this organization. I'm on the line. I need everybody coloring inside the lines, right? I need to know that we're not about to do something stupid.

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Gary Hamel: And if you believe that control comes from oversight

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Gary Hamel: and from policy, and so on.

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Gary Hamel: then you will just in kind of a hopeless attempt to maintain the illusion of control you just put in, you know.

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Gary Hamel: More more top down, mandates, more Cxos, more policies, more reporting, and so on. And I don't think you can win that. But I think in a way, you are trying to make the or you're trying to risk proof. The organization.

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Gary Hamel: For your own kind of emotional equanimity. Right?

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Gary Hamel: And and the frank thing is, there are many other ways of getting control.

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Gary Hamel: you know, as as I was in my long career at London Business School, which is now more than 40 years.

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Gary Hamel: Nobody's ever told me what to teach.

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Gary Hamel: They never tell me which cases to use right? They don't. They don't tell me, Gary, we want you to spend half the time on cases half the time lecturing, or we want this much. Q. And a. Nobody ever tells me that. But at the end of every term all of your students give you a grade, just as I give them a grade.

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Gary Hamel: They rate what I did, and everybody, every other student, every faculty member, can see that. So you know.

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Gary Hamel: I'm going to figure out how to do a good job for my students. And I, you know, and you cannot program that because people do it in different ways, and I think but what what many leaders want to do is they want to program that

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Gary Hamel: rather than saying, No, no, let's let this person figure it out. By the way.

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Gary Hamel: if they don't figure it out, they're gone right. We're not gonna like.

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Gary Hamel: So you you have a strange thing where you have a huge amount of control which is incredibly infantilizing

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Gary Hamel: kind of turns people. It makes people very passive, and people will will collude with leaders

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Gary Hamel: in shifting accountability up. Because, by the way, if I'm just passive and like well, this is what they asked me to do. This is the way you have to get this thing done. This is the policy, or this is what my boss wants to do. Now. I have taken all accountability off my shoulders and and and delegated it up.

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Gary Hamel: That's kind of a pretty comfortable thing to do like.

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Gary Hamel: and instead of no, no care, you figure this thing out, and if you screw it up. You're gone. And so

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Gary Hamel: you know. So you end up with a lot of control and a lot of mediocrity, which is a really bad combination. So I think you know, leaders are going to just have to admit. Hey, we're in a world where the old ways of getting control don't work anymore. They're stultifying and paralytic and don't work. So we got to train people and give them the skills they need to make smart decisions. We need to give them reward systems where they really are accountable. And

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Gary Hamel: if you're not adding value, you're not here. We need to make them more accountable to customers and peers, because they're the ones in the best position to judge their work

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Gary Hamel: and and then make the performance of everybody entirely transparent across the organization. So there's no place for mediocrity to hide. That is a completely different way of thinking about control than policy rules, mandates, and you know.

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Gary Hamel: so we'll get there. But

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Gary Hamel: you know often before you see a real paradigm shift we're going to double and triple and quadruple down on what we're already doing and what we're familiar with before we go like, Oh, crap! That really doesn't work anymore.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: Yeah, it feels with the work that we're doing and what we see. It feels like the pace of change and the magnitude of change is accelerating that process of getting there, because the leaders just can't have all the answers right? But I think you so much is interesting. There.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: we talk a lot about the balance of accountability and empowerment in the customers that we work with. But underneath that you've been talking about like underneath the accountability and empowerment is.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: what am I going to test? You're like? I don't come in with an agenda for the classes. They don't give you an agenda. You're figuring it out. And there's a certain amount of risk in there. And a lot of companies now are like, Oh, we need to fail fast. We need to have an experimentation mindset, and all of that stuff.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: You had mentioned the word transparency as you were talking in it. But I think that's 1 of the places where the leaders, even the most forward thinking leaders, are forgetting is like, what are the guardrails? Because there's some failures that will be unacceptable if you leak our IP. You're fired right, but we still want you. You need to do the risk taking to be able to respond to what's in front of you. So I'm wondering as you've worked or seen other organizations like, how do you? And that's obviously particularly more important. The more catalyst

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: you get, the more risk taking your profile is, and so it becomes even more important to have clarity around that.

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Gary Hamel: Well, I do think you know, like everything there, there are conundrums and paradoxes here.

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Gary Hamel: I do need people to take risks every day, but I don't want them

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Gary Hamel: to take, you know. Bet the company risks or sink the company risks, you know. When I spent time, many years ago, I spent time with the lovely people at Wl. Gore, the Material Science Company and

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Gary Hamel: They had a a concept of of holding the company below the waterline.

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Gary Hamel: And so the youngest, newest employee, you get oriented right from the beginning. That, hey? You know, we innovate by taking risks by trying things, and it took them a decade to figure out, how do you put gore-tex and running shoes and have it like not break down right? And a lot of time and a lot of trial and error.

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Gary Hamel: But don't do something that will get us into legal trouble. Don't do something that will let down a customer. Don't do something that is a large financial risk. And so

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Gary Hamel: you know, you, you have to just like everybody needs to be accountable for revenue growth for P. And L, everyone needs to be accountable for risk

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Gary Hamel: and and and have the tools, the skills, and so on. To know. Okay, that probably like that, not much could go wrong here, or that could go very wrong. If you look at what happened in the financial crisis. 2,008 9 in most of these banks we had separated out risk management from

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Gary Hamel: responsibility for revenue growth, so that all these people shoveling these toxic products out the door, the Cdos and you know, and credit default swaps, and so on. Collateralized debt obligations. And so they were entirely rewarded on revenue.

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Gary Hamel: They had no responsibility for the company's balance sheet or for the risks they were taking. And there was some other group completely outgunned. Right, that was trying to hold the reins on the horses, who, you know. Try holding reins on horses that get millions of dollars a year when they take unconscionable risks, like good luck with that. So yeah. So

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Gary Hamel: to be willing to trust people

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Gary Hamel: to take risks. You have to know those people understand what risks are, and how to recognize existential risks from trivial risks, and unfortunately, what we end up with often

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Gary Hamel: is you know, we just hamstrung everybody.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: Right.

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Gary Hamel: So you know, as I say, the stupidest thing in the world is when you go into an organization where you find, you know frontline employees who cannot, you know, requisition an office chair for $500,000 without getting somebody's permission. You know this person. They just started a family like, do you think like they bought a house or they bought a car. And you're telling them like somebody is, they don't have the wisdom to make that decision and

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Gary Hamel: and you do see exceptions. You know I see it, Nucor, the very successful Us. Steel company where frontline employees can spend $50,000. I mean, like, you guys are smart. You know what to do. And other companies that I've written about, where where the sums are much larger than that so?

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Gary Hamel: But you don't.

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Gary Hamel: You don't do that unless you have trust in people's competence.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: Right.

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Gary Hamel: And you know it's ironic to me, Shannon, that in

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Gary Hamel: I would bet you that in fewer than 1% of large companies

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Gary Hamel: have we trained every single frontline people how to think about, risk.

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Gary Hamel: how to think about the P. And L. Financial literacy return on investment and so on. And so if you haven't given people the competence, you're not going to have much confidence.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: It's so spot on.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: Yeah. I mean, just personally, like starting to work on my Mba. After I had spent a decade in the business world. And I was like, how did I get this, you know? And yeah, I want to go back to 1 point we were talking about earlier and sort of refocus on the catalyst. Everything that we've been talking about about creating change and the stuff that you lay out in your book. It's great to have a plan and tools and all of this stuff. It's a

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: lot of emotional labor, and like for the people listening, the catalysts want nothing more than to help your organization, but they are, no matter what, going to be confronted with resistance, and having to use the compassion to lean in, etc.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: and also just the name of our book. Move fast, break shit. Burnout is our default state as a catalyst when we're lacking awareness, and when we don't have some of the tools. So I'm wondering if you have advice to our listeners at all levels about how to make sure to minimize the burnout. We say a burnt out catalyst creates no change at all, which helps people shift like I might not do self-care for self-care reasons, but I will to be able to drive change. So any advice for.

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Gary Hamel: Well.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: Energetic, personal.

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Gary Hamel: 1st of all, you know, these are all matters of degree.

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Gary Hamel: If if you want to do something difficult and you want to change things. You are going to be burned out like there is no easy path here. Yeah. And that's the path you're looking for, like, do something else right?

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Gary Hamel: Now, you know there are way better and worse ways of making a difference, and there are ways of getting a lot of leverage, you know, that aren't simply spinning your wheels and hurling yourself up against, you know a wall repeatedly, but like make no mistake. It's difficult, and given the way our companies are constructed, you will fail more often than you succeed.

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Gary Hamel: And you know I've tried to do. I've done things in my career where I felt we're very catalytic, and we've succeeded. And I've tried doing things where I ran into a brick wall, or I just you know I couldn't make it happen.

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Gary Hamel: So.

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Gary Hamel: You just have to live with that. And and you know where I come back to on that Shannon is.

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Gary Hamel: Life is too short to work on inconsequential problems.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: S.

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Gary Hamel: So can I make a difference or not? I don't know. But like, why would I want to work on something that's trivial or not going to make a difference. Right?

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Gary Hamel: So you just start there and go like, yeah. And I'm gonna they're going to be scars. And there's going to be like times where we don't succeed, number one having said that.

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Gary Hamel: and you probably have way more to say about this than I do. But I think that

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Gary Hamel: what gives you leverage, I think, is

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Gary Hamel: several things, and some of them I talked about. But I think one of them is

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Gary Hamel: When people around you and more senior people

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Gary Hamel: believe that you really do care about the company and what it does, and its stakeholders and its success.

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Gary Hamel: And and that that this is not

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Gary Hamel: a hobby horse. This is not a pet project. This is not just, you know, hey? Gary's the guy who knows a lot about X, and therefore thinks the only thing that's important is X, right? So you know.

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Gary Hamel: you know, if if they can immediately pigeonhole me and say, well, of course, he'd want to do that, because that fits like who Gary is. Right? Okay, fine. So so kind of number one, they have to believe that that

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Gary Hamel: you really are fighting this battle. Because and and to do that, you have to have impeccable data.

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Gary Hamel: This is not like some emotional thing, and you know, I mean the same time I talk about having a noble quest. You have to be able to tell people why, that's important in dollars and cents terms and interpret the value of what you're doing

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Gary Hamel: in the way that makes sense to every constituency you're trying to engage, whether it's peers, whether it's outsiders whether it's senior executives. But, damn it, you have to have done your homework. You have to have the financial analysis. You need to make this inescapably logical to people. And so you got to get the left brain right brain kind of working together on that. And, you know, be kind of really clear on kind of where there's a burning platform.

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Gary Hamel: I would say, second, 3, rd

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Gary Hamel: Recognize that whatever insights you have have come because of your own journey, and not everybody else has been on that journey.

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Gary Hamel: So don't assume they're unenlightened. They're stupid, they're, you know, reactionary. Whatever recognize. What is it going to take for them

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Gary Hamel: to let go of things that have been important to them, that they've believed, that have been validated by their own careers and success, and maybe think in a different way. And so how do you construct

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Gary Hamel: a set of experiences and learning for them that will nudge them in the right direction? And certainly one of the things I found, despite what I just said about, you know, data and analysis is which I think is important.

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Gary Hamel: But whatever understanding you're trying to cultivate in people. You have to ultimately move it from intellect to viscera.

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Gary Hamel: Right? And that happens, I think, only experientially. It does not happen because I laid out. You know senior people are very good at taking any business case and pulling it apart and telling you why you missed this assumption. Why this may not happen, and you know you go so ultimately.

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Gary Hamel: you have to ask, what do these people need to see? What do they need to experience? What do they need to believe? So I haven't done this in a long time. But when I was a young guy trying to make these difficult things happen.

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Gary Hamel: we would build really detailed learning maps. Okay, here's what. Here's what we think they are. Right. Now, here's what they believe. Here's the mindset. Here's a set of steps we could take them through. We're going to go visit this thing. We're going to look at this thing. We're going to talk to these people. We're going to put them in these that slowly moves them along a trajectory not to manipulate them, but just recognize.

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Gary Hamel: you know, it's going to take a while.

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Gary Hamel: So I think, be very sensitive

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Gary Hamel: to the learning and patient with the learning that has to happen in those around you.

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Gary Hamel: and do a lot of reverse mentoring, you know, in a gentle, non arrogant way.

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Gary Hamel: I think the other thing is, as I say, being very creative. In how you find the fellow travelers.

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Gary Hamel: You know I because I'm often quite well connected at the top of organizations, I'll you know, be in conversations with young people, and so on, or these, you know, internal rebels, or whatever. And they say, Gary, can you help us get the ear of the CEO, or can you kind of help us short circuit something. And I usually say no.

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Gary Hamel: because well, for 2 reasons. 1st of all, you have to be willing to admit that 95% of people's great ideas are crap.

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Gary Hamel: I mean, I live in the middle of Silicon Valley right out of a thousand startups. How many are going to make any real difference. Not very many, right, you know. Most of them are going to end up as like the juicerator, or something that like well, it was a dumb idea, right like who backed that. So

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Gary Hamel: there's a logical reasons. Ceos and senior leaders just say, I'm not interested, not going to do that, because on average, that's going to be the right thing to say. So don't go waste their time. Don't try to pitch. So what I say to young people particularly.

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Gary Hamel: Go sideways before you go up.

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Gary Hamel: If you can find 3 or 4 peers that are willing to spend a Saturday like working through an idea. Writing a white paper building a demo, you know, bringing data together. You know. Do that.

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Gary Hamel: And better yet, run an experiment and collect some real data, even if it is, you know, a very kind of

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Gary Hamel: quick and dirty experiment, you know. I remember Scott Cook, I guess. Now, maybe emeritus chairman of intuit. But you know, built into it into an amazing company.

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Gary Hamel: You know. At 1 point, he said, we're not going to make any more decisions by persuasion by power, by position, by Powerpoint, we're only going to make them with data.

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Gary Hamel: So if you want us to do something, go do an experiment and bring us some data and like, don't try to convince me from your brilliant logic, or, you know, go like, try something. So I think that is, you know. That's what you have to do, and and resist the urge to go. Ask permission, but see if there are people around you, you know, who who will will work with you on something, and you know my experience has been

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Gary Hamel: that it's much harder for a senior leader to say No to something. When half a dozen people come in

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Gary Hamel: and say, Hey, we've worked on this. This is the idea. This is what we tried. This is what we learned. Can you help us get this to the next step.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: That's right.

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Gary Hamel: So now, and I've seen super powerful ways of doing this. You know, one of the

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Gary Hamel: one of the most amazing catalysts I've ever met, and if you've never talked to this person they would be a great addition is Helen Bevan. She's British. She works for Britain's National Health Service.

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Gary Hamel: which is one of the largest, most bureaucratic organizations in the world. I think they have 1.7 more or less 1 million employees, and and it's a complete disaster. I mean, it needs overhaul in the most fundamental.

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Gary Hamel: you know, root and branch kinds of ways is bankrupting the country, and it seems

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Gary Hamel: it seems impossible to change it.

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Gary Hamel: which is a slightly different conversation, but as kind of a mid-level catalyst. At least when she started out

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Gary Hamel: she wasn't dissuaded by any of those things, by the complexity, by the size, by whatever.

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Gary Hamel: And she had had an experience working with some young young doctors who were already burned out earlier in their careers and said, We're spending all this time fighting the system, doing all this paperwork can't get anything done. Nobody listens to us, and it all comes at the expense of our patients.

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Gary Hamel: So she started a little thing called Change Day, which was kind of a grand title, but literally Shannon, without anybody's permission

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Gary Hamel: without anybody's permission. They put up a little. And this is now a decade ago. And so I don't know what technology they're using.

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Gary Hamel: They had a little website and a little form where you could fill out and make a little pledge on what you would do within your job to make it better for patients.

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Gary Hamel: And so they ran this little 90 day experiment, and their hope, which was quite ambitious, was to get 65,000 pledges out of more than a million people, and it was all word of mouth and using people's kind of social media and whatever. And hey, would you go and just look at this, and if you can think of something, make a pledge.

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Gary Hamel: Well, at the end of 90 days they had 180,000 pledges.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: Wow!

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Gary Hamel: The next year they did it. They had 800,000,

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Gary Hamel: and this ended up being talked about by President Obama. The idea spread to many other countries, and did it change Nhs fundamentally? No. But did it make a difference to millions of patients? Yes, and

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Gary Hamel: what was interesting about this is.

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Gary Hamel: she could have spent her entire life trying to fight the system.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: Totally.

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Gary Hamel: And work up against all these layers and get permissions. And hey, you know whatever. And instead she went sideways.

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Gary Hamel: And now technology allows us to do that. And now, when they think, and now she's become one of the most.

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Gary Hamel: I think, is maybe one of the smartest people in the world I know on large scale change, and built a whole online school for healthcare radicals, and so on, and so on. But and now, when they think about change.

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Gary Hamel: They use social network analysis, and they can find across the organization people who have large spheres of influence.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: Yeah.

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Gary Hamel: Distinct from positional power and anything they want to do, they start with those people. Does this make sense to you? Would you be willing to get on board. Would you help to amplify this and whatever?

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Gary Hamel: But but the idea of trying to drive change working down through the hierarchy like you'll die before that ever makes a difference, I think. And yet organizations are still trying to do that. And they, you know, I don't think I'll live long enough, but I would love to live long enough where we we never put the words cascade and change in the same paragraph.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: Gary, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with us today. I would love to talk with Helen. She sounds amazing and just deeper, deeply grateful for all the wisdom that you're putting out into the world. Thank you.

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Gary Hamel: Thank you so much, and for your work as well, Shannon, and for for giving some some courage and some support to people who are trying to change big, difficult things. And

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Gary Hamel: but you know, like, if if you care about where we are and our planet and the people around you like, what else are you going to do? It is really the only choice you have.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: 100%. We need empowered.

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Gary Hamel: Why you can whine, or you can do something. I mean so. But but don't believe you're going to find psychological safety doing this. That is, that's not going to happen.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: That is not going to happen, but you need to still put your own oxygen mask on first.st

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Gary Hamel: That is also that is also true. That is also true.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: Series hopefully is part of that for catalyst. So thank you.

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Gary Hamel: All right, good enough, and I'm happy to connect you with with Helen, and she will connect you with a lot of other people who are doing extraordinary things.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: Amazing.

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Gary Hamel: All right.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: And to our listening audience. Thank you so much for joining this conversation. If you'd like to learn more about how to create bold, powerful change in the world. Be sure to check out our book, move fast, break ship, burnout, or go to the website. catalystconstellations.com. If you enjoyed this episode as much as I did, please rate it on itunes, stitcher, spotify wherever you listen to your podcasts and of course. If you have other catalysts in your life. Hit the share button and send a link their way. Thanks again.