Victoria
00:00:00.000
So again, classical examples that we all love to talk about is Nokia and, BlackBerries and Blockbusters of the world who could not really adapt in time. It's not that they don't know. So this is actually the great paradox of innovation. It's not like within the company there is no expertise or no understanding where it's going. it's usually there, and usually even within R&D department, these ideas are way ahead of the market. It's really that ability to absorb this and to scale this, and I think with what's going on with AI, this is exactly what we're going to see more and more.
Darin
00:01:38.646
Viktor, how often have you worked at a company to where leadership thinks they are above everyone else?
Viktor
00:01:46.076
Isn't that the point? Otherwise, you don't become a leader. How do you become a leader if, if you don't think that you're above everybody else? Now, I'm curious, is that an option?
Darin
00:01:57.216
I don't know. We can figure that out. We can talk about servant leadership and all that other stuff later, but let me go and set up a scenario for you. Let's say your CEO or one of the Cs went off to a leadership offsite and came back talking about burnout-proof leadership, and beyond that, this is prescient, AI transformation at scale. Okay, that's 2026 right now.
Viktor
00:02:20.265
there are two, things you called out. First one, I need a translation to English what it is, and the second one uh, I call, I call it… What's the word that I-- It's not swearing
Darin
00:02:36.337
Yeah. the first one is burnout-proof leadership. So, you know, You hear about burnout and stuff. So we're focusing on, the leader is focusing on themselves like, "Great, you know, I've been working a lot. Now I can get away from burnout proof." But now me or you, we're sitting there working two weeks later. Now we're working through lunch, we're working through dinner. Slack notifications never stop. Our deployment frequency is up, but our incidents have gone up even worse. Who's this leadership program actually protecting? On today's show, we have Dr. Victoria Mensch on with us. Victoria, how are you doing today?
Darin
00:03:14.665
the scenario I just set up is our side of taking it that in. That's the word I'm looking for. Um, Victoria's the one that actually does these offsites with these great Silicon Valley leaders that we all complain and whine about after they go to these offsites Is leadership really that dense to think they can go to an offsite and come back and it doesn't affect us negatively?
Victoria
00:03:41.630
First of all I think there's a common misconception that when we talk about leadership or leaders, we talk about executives of the company. Yes, we do have offsites for executives, but we have offsites for other people as well. The whole premise here is that leadership really is not your place in the organization, whether you're on top of the organization or at the bottom of the hierarchical ladder. So leadership is really about self-leadership. So you can be maybe not in charge of tens or hundreds of people, but you can still lead and lead in your career lead in your work lead in your company on your level
Victoria
00:04:23.628
What we do, we do what we call immersion programs. So most of our customers are actually mostly executives, mostly from outside of Silicon Valley, from traditional industries and larger companies. So when they're looking, what we say that we help them to tap into Silicon Valley innovation playbook. So there is something that Silicon Valley companies do that separates them from the rest of the world in terms of innovation. So they're the companies that can predictably, sustainably come up with new ideas and develop them to new business models and breakthrough solutions. So that's what we're talking about when we talk about these programs. Now, is this mostly for executives? No, not really. So we have people from all different levels of organizations, people who are sent by their organizations or associations who really want to learn that innovation path
Viktor
00:05:17.406
You mentioned companies send their people to that camp. Is there a common misalignment between expectations of such company and what people really come back with? I sent you for this and you're coming with that,"
Victoria
00:05:34.524
I think there could be, but mostly we're aligned on the direction. So mostly when companies comes through program r- like ours, they want to see what other companies are doing differently. So there is what we call experience-based knowledge sharing. When you're not learning from books or from frameworks or from analysts or professors, you're actually learning from people like you, m- more or less peer-to-peer exchange. So now the reason why this immersion programs really provide a lot of inspiration is to see how people think differently and work differently and on different topics. So let's say you're in a, i- more or less a traditional manufacturing company from somewhere outside the US. This is very structured. It's very hierarchical, and it's very organized in a certain way, and the reason it organized in a certain way, because it produced the best results so far. You as a company, as a manufacturing company, you figured it out, so this is actually produces results. And now there are other things that are going on outside of the manufacturing industry that can impact you especially in the technology area, and now you really, your organization organizational structure or culture is not really well suited for that. So how do you cope with that uncertainty? How do you understand how other people are coping with that uncertainty? What do you need to do to accommodate these changes and be resilient to those changes? So those are the questions that were asking. How do you actually change and introduce something different when your core is already working? So how do you introduce something that's so different while you do have a working business model and you don't want it to break?
Viktor
00:07:15.431
Is there an example of a company, it doesn't have to be from your bootcamp bootcamp or it is, that is on a larger size that actually did that, let's say, transformation to different way of working with results successfully? Because the only one I can think of, and I'm sure that there are others, is Microsoft, right? Back in the Windows days and now with Azure and all those things, right? But I cannot think of many really that successfully improved
Victoria
00:07:46.149
You take any enterprise software company, they actually reinvented themself over and over again. So if you think of something like SAP or Oracle when they started with on-premise enterprise software, and now the cloud came along, right? So were they the uh, champions of a cloud technology? No, they were not. But they adapted and introduced the products, and now they're actually leaders w- within that cloud technologies. So similar with other technologies as well. So Microsoft is a good example. Netflix is a great example. They reinvented themselves over and over again. Facebook is going through this again. Google is another one. It started as a search company, now it has so many different businesses and business units, again, in the cloud, in the mobile, in the automotive and you name it they probably do it. So it's, not unusual for company to continue to reinvent itself. But it, comes with its challenges of course.
Viktor
00:08:38.478
I was more referring to company that, not the company who continues to reinvent itself, but simply company that fell behind, right? Like, what's happening with Volkswagen right now. They're really in trouble and probably they're trying to figure out how to… I mean, it's too soon now to speak about them, right? But somebody who's really in trouble in a way.
Victoria
00:09:01.686
So again, classical examples that we all love to talk about is Nokia and, BlackBerries and Blockbusters of the world who could not really adapt in time. It's not that they don't know. So this is actually the great paradox of innovation. It's not like within the company there is no expertise or no understanding where it's going. it's usually there, and usually even within R&D department, these ideas are way ahead of the market. It's really that ability to absorb this and to scale this, and I think with what's going on with AI, this is exactly what we're going to see more and more.
Darin
00:09:39.280
I was thinking about when you were talking about traditional companies, why do they think they need to follow the Silicon Valley playbook?
Victoria
00:09:46.540
Let me give you an example. Imagine you are, Let's say a CEO of Hilton, You have everything figured out. You know how to run your hospitality business. There is nothing… you build the walls, all your competitive advantages. You have all these hotels around the world and everything that comes with it. And all of a sudden there is a company in San Francisco, somewhere in the garage, that decides to rent mattresses, and then they decide to rent their spare room for the night to strangers. And lo and behold, you actually have a competitor on your hands and within a very short period of time. We're not talking about hundreds of years. We're not talking about 50 years. We're talking about maybe a decade at most that definitely carved out a big portion of that hospitality market and disrupted it. So we have these disruptions everywhere. Let's say manufacturing, right? So yeah, you continue manufacture the way you manufactured a long time ago. But now maybe there is a robotics company that come along or a 3D printing company that comes along that really disrupts your entire business. So everything you worked on, everything you build on, it's no longer valid. So this is what we're talking about when we're talking about disruptive innovation. Let's say Uber is another example, right? So it's a mobile app company that disrupted taxi businesses all over the world. So that's the implication that we're talking about here. So that's why you're interested from a traditional company perspective. So let me tell you what I usually tell my clients when they start talking about the innovation program in Silicon Valley, that what, who do you think we want to talk to and what do you think we need to learn? let's say it's a pharma company. I say, "You know what? Whatever I do, I'll never be as knowledgeable about pharma as you are. You know everything about pharma the way it is. You're very successful in that." So what we're talking about, so how do you expand that view beyond of your subject matter expertise and see what else is going on in the world? And you can learn from companies in adjacent not even adjacent, but totally different industries. Let's say consumer products who know how to directly talk to consumers and brand to consumers and market to consumers. And similar to that, financial companies would benefit from that expertise, but this is not something that you would encounter in your normal kind of day-to-day work. You would continue build your subject matter expertise in your industry while the industry boundaries are definitely blurring, and there is this cross-pollination, thanks to technology mostly, that allows people to jump very quickly from one industry to another and disrupt, fundamentally disrupt your business.
Viktor
00:12:26.760
Are there cases where actually those traditional companies in some cases catch up that I get but that they become disruptors? And when I say bigger companies, traditional, I mean not comp- excluding companies born and living in, in San Francisco, right? Or Silicon Valley, but take a bank, take insurance, anybody, do they become ever disruptors themselves?
Victoria
00:12:54.017
for this question I would really invite you to think about the risk profile, So when we talk about all those San Francisco and Silicon Valley startups, so these are companies… So what is the definition of a startup is a temporary organization looking for a stable business model, so they really don't have not much to lose as a startup. So you're just figuring out how it is that you can function as a sustainable business. Now, for those traditional, especially large companies, they already have something that's working and working well, and their entire organization is really laser focused on that, my challenge is that you don't have to be a disruptor to be successful, but you do want to be adaptable. So that's the page from the Silicon Valley playbook that you want to look at. Your risk profile is going to be totally different, right? So you want to preserve the core business, and at the same time you want to innovate in the area that could potentially be disruptive to your business. So that's a very valid challenge that companies kind of address differently. But I would argue that as a large company, you probably… it would be hard to find an example, Viktor, that you mentioned just because the evolution of growth, and the growth path is different for a large company as compared to a startup in the beginning of their journey.
Viktor
00:14:26.253
True, but I'm guessing that now in this context, when you say large company, you refer large company that is not from Silicon Valley. 'Cause large company like Google, they're disrupting all the time and they're a large company. So I'm, I'm guessing you mean large company Elsewhere in a way,
Victoria
00:14:42.689
Yes. So Silicon Valley companies, they really mastered that art of self-disruption. So that's exactly what we're talking about. Because technology really has that disruptive impact, and most Silicon Valley companies are really technology companies, so that, art of self-disruption is very important. But they do it, if you look at the large companies, they do it in a very controlled manner. Let's say Google, if you go to Google, their search group probably does not want any disruptions, right? So this is a very fine-tuned mechanism that works as a clock, right? So but now you have other units that are independent of that, and they're working on innovation that could potentially be disruptive, yes
Viktor
00:15:36.605
Yeah, I was now, but that's not something that company, large companies outside Silicon Valley do, right? Disrupting. No, not necessarily in their existing business. It could be something completely new, kind of Google Search and then becomes You- and then comes YouTube, and then comes Waymo, right? They disrupt through new a- areas, but those outside, no matter the size, don't, right? Or at least I'm, I'm having difficulty finding example
Victoria
00:16:03.673
Yes. Less so. yes ' Viktor: Cause th-that puts them in a relatively dangerous position because you are trying to catch up, and then you catch up, and then again it happens, and eventually, statistically, if you're constantly catching up, once you will not catch up and we're finished that's why you have to monitor the situation. So one of the things that we're talking about, right? So that you have this different horizons that you monitor the what's going on, n- not necessarily in your industry, but in other industries as well, especially as it relates to technology. So what is the impact of this now within, 18 to 24 months? What's the impact in three and five years? And what's the impact out 10 years from now? And we're talking about futuristic scenarios there. There's lots of uncertainty. Nobody actually knows what's going to happen, but how do you cope with the uncertainty? That's the question.
Victoria
00:17:07.698
Yes. Yes, exactly. And those are really the signs of, time, right? So the uncertainty is there. Speaking of that coping or adapting or resilience, that the acceptance of it, that the only thing that is certain is that there will be uncertainty
Darin
00:17:25.571
And great, they paid you $50,000 to say, "There's gonna be uncertainty. Have a nice day." No, such… It would be nice if it was that simple.
Victoria
00:17:33.925
But we're still grappling. We're grappling for that control, right? we talked about burnout. This is a huge source of burnout because you think you can control something, so you exert all this energy trying to control things that are inherently cannot be controlled. So might as well accept on that personal level at least that there is uncertainty there, there will be uncertainty, you cannot control this 100%. You just have to stay open and curious and adaptable
Darin
00:18:01.475
So is this where your doctor of psychology really comes into play to where you have to tell a bunch of us, whatever leadership people and it's like, come on
Victoria
00:18:10.239
I came full circle. I actually started as a psychologist, many years ago out of high school. I really wanted to be a psychologist, and I got all my degrees, all my, master's and PhDs, and then I started working as a psychologist. Then a year in, I said, "You know what? I made a mistake. I thought I was following my passion. This is not it." So I, I made a pivot, you know, 180 degree pivot, and I went to corporate environment in Silicon Valley in a high-tech company, Silicon Valley company actually to start with. So I know what you're talking about, but now it came full circle. It's yes, it actually is full. This is what we're talking about. as we approach our career, at the end of the day, it really comes down to individual people, whether you're an executive, whether you're a mid-manager, you- whether you're individual contributor. At the end of the day you do have the control. You do have, you know, you are that steering wheel, and that comes with those psychological tactics or techniques, what have you, and awareness of that
Victoria
00:19:11.664
Most of them. Yeah, most of them are from outside of the US. China not so much, but yeah. So probably I worked with people from all over the world.
Darin
00:19:21.319
So it's interesting you bring that up because I'm thinking, I wasn't sure about Chinese, but I'm thinking Japanese, knowing how they are structured and how their business, the Toyota way, right? It's, you're used to a very structured environment, and now we're just telling people to be structured except 100X faster
Viktor
00:19:40.169
Yeah, you know, Japan is mostly still in '90s somehow. The reason why I mentioned China, because Chinese companies are probably closest to Silicon Valley companies and I'm guessing that both sides have bigger interest to know the playbook of the other than any other part of the world, right?
Victoria
00:19:59.641
Probably. As I said, I don't have that much experience with the Chinese groups. But some experience with Japanese culture and groups from Japan as well, and you're right, so there is a very structured … Because if you think of it, they really excel with manufacturing again, right? And that conveyor technology when the process is very well defined and very well designed and it goes from one step to another to another. Excelled in that, and the whole organization is really built around this very efficiently. So now we're talking about this innovation playbook, and it's not trivial how do you actually You can't just take that page and apply it. You're like, "Oh, now tomorrow we're not going to have any structure and any hierarchy." No that's not how it w- it's gonna work. So it is a process. It's a long process, and it cannot just start from the top and got pushed down, right? So it usually goes through so many different layers and so many different stages
Darin
00:20:55.069
Here's a hard question. Maybe. It may be easy for you. Let's assume for a moment 80% of all AI projects are failing right now. There's numbers out there, but then for the pilots that do make it, usually there's zero to negative P&L impact is not what we wanted as leaders. How do we set up, or how are you telling leadership now, or how are you helping them think through, "Okay, how… If we're going to do this, knowing that we're probably not going to win, what does a win look like?"
Victoria
00:21:24.690
So what we like to talk about, going back to the innovation playbook, what we'd like to talk about is that kind of acceptance of failure in a sense. And taking failure not as a failure, but as a lesson. And that's actually a lot to take for companies outside of Silicon Valley because it's really built on success and one definition of success. That's the cultural element of that, again, from traditional companies. Now, tech companies are different, and again, those startups are coming to play where the failure is really not a failure. It's a lesson and the data that can be applied. So as long as you learned from this experiment, then you cannot call it a failure. Now, you have to have the structure within the organization to actually learn from this, and you have to have the structure within the organization to not be punished if everything actually did not come to the re- expected result. And that is on leaders, right? So what are those guardrails that you put in there that will allow people to define that box within, what's the acceptance of failure? And say, if you fail with a $10 billion project, it's totally different if you failed with a, 100K project. So that's what we're talking about, right? So how do you actually set up those structures? First of all acceptance that things may not work out the way they sh- How do we learn from that? And then how do we basically not fail at $10 billion, right? you experiment and you increase that scale experiment in a controlled manner.
Darin
00:22:59.452
I'm guessing that's one of the things that some people may get wrong after leaving your… We keep calling it a class bootcamp. W- we're going to keep using all the different words. A program. Thank you. I'm guessing that's one of the common things that people get wrong, is they don't think through the, this is just an experiment. This is not how we're gonna be m- be making our revenue this year. Some people think that's what it is, but realistically, it's not going to happen.
Victoria
00:23:25.188
Yes. yeah, I just had this discussion with what a chief AI officer from one of the mid-size organizations. So this is exactly what we're talking about when we're talking about, let's say, AI pilots and what it would take to take the AI pilot to scale. And there are different reasons why you take the pilot too. For the last five years, we were just saying that you have to start with something, right? So you have to play with AI and see what's out there, and so maybe a low-hanging fruit. And so that's what all those pilots are about. Now, not all of those pilots are meant to be at scale. So some of those were really meant to be an experiment. We're just trying things out, and we're just trying to figure out what AI can do. Now to take that to scale, then there are, again, different levels. There's organizational level, there's the leadership level, and there's the technology level that you want to consider, and these levels are going to be different from companies. If you're a startup, whether you're a mid-sized company or whether you're a large company, whether you're a company, you're a large company in a he- heavily regulated industry, for example, right? So you have to consider these levels carefully, whether this kind of conditions within your company are there for a particular AI pilot to be implemented at scale
Darin
00:24:40.371
I'm biting my tongue and I almost said a bad word. and a bad word for me is a bad thing. Um, I heard you say the title Chief AI Officer. I have to admit, I almost threw up a little bit in my mouth when I heard that. Is that a real title now?
Darin
00:24:58.530
Okay. Here's my reasoning on this, the reason why I'm bringing it up. We're building yet another silo in another organization that's already overbloated That's having meetings and they've got six administrative assistants and whatever and they're actually not producing anything. It's basically just glorified R&D, right?
Victoria
00:25:16.970
It depends. So it, there is a question out there. So we're really going through uncharted territory. It's not like there's a person out there or an organization out there that figured it all out, right? So we're all learning as we go. It's one big experiment. So it's really different between the organizations. There are some organizations that will put this AI leadership under HR. There's some organizations that will put it under IT. There's some organizations that will carve it out and put it as a separate kind of unit that's supposed to work across of those organizations. But at the end of the day, the most successful ones are actually that are, going directly to CEO, and that CEO takes the ownership. Yes, there is a AI lead let's say chief AI officer that can look strategically and drive those strategic initiatives. At the end of the day, it really requires that ownership from the highest executive level to do it effectively. ' Viktor: Cause the way how my brain interprets that is, okay, we have a CEO, and that person thinks and acts upon the most important parts in a company, and then we have AI or whatever, AI something something C-person, and my brain interprets it, okay, you're not understanding this is your core business now, Otherwise, it wouldn't be not under you as a CEO in a way, right? Can you elaborate on that?
Viktor
00:26:49.091
So same thing was happening with software, let's say, right? I'm talking about l- last couple of decades when a typical bank would say, "Okay, now you can be in charge of the software of the bank, We're giving it to you because this does not really matter. We are saying it does, but it doesn't because our core business is still something else," whatever the banks do, right? I can notice at least with the banks I'm in contact with, once actually they realize that this is our core business now or one off, it's not I'm giving it to you anymore. It's kinda okay, so this is just as important or even more important than the other stuff we're doing, and this is directly under CEO. There is no software chief officer or whatever it is, right? I feel that that's almost like, uh, h- here, children, play, right? When you give it to somebody in a way
Victoria
00:27:42.296
this is totally specu- speculative, but I might, because I wasn't there when it was happening, but I suspect that's probably a similar discussion that was happening when the title of CIO just came on board, right? So all of a sudden there's this new role, right? The chief information officer that was not there before. And I suspect that probably went through the same challenge. And if you look at the role of CIOs right now in traditional companies, tech companies everywhere, there are certainly different angles to that. So there are some CIOs that are totally just technology roles, right? So they only look after kind of the IT infrastructure. And there are some CIOs that do get the seat within the business kind of environment, and they are very plugged in into what the initiatives are and what the new products are and new business models are. And they're plugged in right from the beginning so that the IT systems actually support that and sometimes can even lead that, say, "Oh, now this is what's available, what the capabilities, so you could actually empower new lines of businesses." I suspect that was a similar discussion then that the discussion that's happening now around chief AI officers
Viktor
00:28:56.583
Probably. but direction I'm going is that realistically AI is part of CTO office, right? It's technology, right? That, that's why I'm suspicious. Okay, so you keep doing whatever you're doing that has nothing to do with AI, and I'm gonna do AI. That does not feel right in a way
Victoria
00:29:14.493
So here's another kind of big point of discussion is what can you do with AI, right? So first of all, let's just say that a lot of it got oversold in the short period of time, right? So like in the short term there's definitely promises that are overpromising, impact of that. In the long term, we actually don't know. We're probably underestimating the impact of AI. But in the short term, there's definitely that. Now, You can treat this as another technology, another patch that you apply to your existing systems, or you can look at this with the, potential of it completely transform your business. So that conversation usually cannot happen within one role, because then you're way too split into two different directions and the business kind of objectives that you're, and the KPIs that you're trying to achieve. That's similar to when we were talking in the beginning of the conversation about disruptive part. So the main part of business that's working cannot really start disrupting itself. That has to be a separate, effort. And then there's somebody within the organization that will need to reconcile that, right? So the… I think that a lot of companies that put this chief AI officer role there, I think that's the intent probably have an ability to maximize the transformative impact of this technology rather than running toward maximizing the productivity of it
Darin
00:30:50.087
Or it could be me being a simple man, they're just doing it because they need somebody to put out in front of press and financial press to make everybody happy because, hey, we have AI. Check. Let me s- ask this question. When you're teaching the Burnout Proof Leadership, whose burnout are we trying to prevent? Is it primarily the leader's bandwidth, or is it more real and structural protection for h- that leader's team?
Victoria
00:31:18.117
So when I talk about burnout leadership, I mostly talk on the individual level. Again, it's coming from my personal experience with a burnout. I went through several cycles of those before I realized that it's a burnout. Now, are there systemic challenges and conditions that contribute to burnout? Of course. But, it's important from the individual perspective. That's how we started the conversation actually today. So from the individual perspective, I think it's important to understand what is it that you can control and what is it that you cannot control. So probably at the different level of organization, you have different levers of control. If you're individual contributor you have limited control over a workload your team receives, right? So now what can you control? What can you control is really how you organize your work and how you relate to that. So 'cause one of the things, being resilient to burnout is to understand that, If you don't know how to recharge your energy, if you don't know how to delegate, if you don't know how to separate the number of hours versus the value you contribute into your work, it will be very difficult to fight… not fight, but to deal with a burnout. So that's what we're talking about. What are those things that you can implement on an individual level to make yourself resilient? Now, on the organizational level, that's a different conversation, but not, again, not everyone actually has, the ability to impact those factors. Even you were talking about kind of the uh, executive suite going on offsites, right? They are under pressure as well. So it's a different kind of pressure, but there's a lot of pressure there as well. So there are a lot of things that are outside of their control, too
Darin
00:33:17.821
Coming from oil and gas, the one thing I learned back in the '90s was when things are good, things are great for the executives. When things are bad, things are even better for the executives. And when I go through that and I'm thinking… Because I've had some great C-level leaders and I've had some really rotten C-level leaders And I'm thinking about right now, the hot button topic is the AI mandates or whatever you want to call it within a company. What percentage do you think of people that come through your… I'm gonna use a different word now, course. It's not a course. So we'll just… This, this is a program. This is a drinking game, so you just come up with different ways of, how many different ways are you naming it today? So they get through this, and how many of them do you think are actually issuing these mandates downward without any truly clear business objective?
Victoria
00:34:13.101
I'm an optimist, right? So when I teach, when I speak when I put anything out there, the way I put it for myself, right? So that's, we're talking about. I'm an optimist. I think there's a North Star. I think at the end of the day, each and every leader each and every person actually knows what's the right thing to do. all of us know what a good leader is, right? So what a good manager is who are the people who helped us in our careers, who we want to work for who we want to work with. So my teach like just be that. So you don't need to read a lot of books about it or have, frameworks. Just be that. So that's the North Star, right? So when we talk about technology like AI, so I, I really believe that we're at that crossroads. Like we can turn left or we can turn right, but it's a choice, and that choice is, is not made somewhere on top. That choice actually is compounding through little choices of small micro choices of each and every one of us. that's my peach, that's my intention to the universe. So that we all have a play, we all have a role to play in this, and those are choices that we make every day
Darin
00:35:19.370
Yeah, that's nice to believe. You're optimistic. I'm o- optimistic that it's going to fail in 90% plus of these places because culturally they're not wired to be able to pull this off, especially at the speed that things are changing. If we had two years of runway, maybe. We don't have two years. We have two weeks or less of runway, otherwise we're out of business Are leaders coming in with that?
Viktor
00:35:45.123
I feel that's the major difference that for a while now, larger enterprises, more traditional enterprises had trouble to adapt to things that are coming within years, let's say, right? And now we-- now, now we are asking them to adapt to things that are coming in, in months. I'm not saying it cannot be done, but it must be a different level of challenge. Let's put it that way, right? Okay. You had trouble to adapt to what's coming five years from now. How about five months?
Darin
00:36:19.222
So here's… All right, let me try to codify it a little bit. You've had a playbook that you teach for how many years now? Round numbers. For a while. Okay, great. I'm assuming now your playbook can almost be thrown out the window Except for traditional companies that are still getting into the '90s
Victoria
00:36:37.932
I believe this playbook is pretty stable. So we're not talking about specific technologies, right? So we're really talking about the principles. So one of those principles, let's say open innovation, that you cannot do things… It's like innovation does not happen in a closed doors, right? So we really want to include as much of the ecosystem resources, and it could be from your partners, from your competitors, from universities, from the entire kind of, ecosystem around you. So that's one of the… And that's not going away. It's actually going to continue to amplify that that we want to collaborate, right? Especially now when there's this really kind of explosion of new solutions and new applications and new tools in the AI area. So that actually makes sense that when you're thinking about innovation, introducing something new you don't do it in a vacuum. So then we were talking about like CIOs and, chief AI officers, how to make sure that it's not just one-off shoot, right? So people are doing something that never actually gets back into the main business. So that all goes into that pillar. So another pillar we were talking about is failure, right? So how do you actually take risks and then the principles of accepting the failures and learning from failures. The third one is experiments, right? So bias toward action, instead of sitting and just thinking about this, trying things out and getting the data set and pivoting based on that data. So that's what we're talking about really. I believe that this playbook is, I don't wanna say like completely timeless, but it probably is independent from whatever technology is the talk of the day.
Darin
00:38:10.372
I can appreciate that, but boy, if I'm coming in and I'm paying money, I want to hear what I need to do tomorrow. And is tomorrow just suck it up, it's going to change? Is that what it boils down to most days?
Victoria
00:38:23.982
we do talk about, it's like what can you do tomorrow? What you can do 30 days after tomorrow? What can you do 60 days after tomorrow? 90 days after tomorrow? So we do go through that exercise. What is it that you can change tomorrow? And the answer is that you cannot change everything tomorrow, right? but what can you do differently tomorrow that you didn't know you could do today? So that's what we're talking about
Darin
00:38:46.008
How many leaders do you see come in? And this could be C-level or just, mid-level managers or whatever. By the way, before we go down this path, are you seeing mid-level managers disappearing in a lot of places, or are they still growing?
Victoria
00:39:00.118
I don't see them disappearing. I just think that if they are disappearing, that's probably a slower trend than the headlines make us believe. And that's again what I mentioned that, a lot of those AI promises are really oversold. I did not see yet how any more or less complex process can be completely run by AI uh, without any involvement of the human, and we don't want that, right? for that, I think that, middle managers will continue to exist for a while. So we could probably look at what's called entry-level, jobs, right? But even that, so I think what's actually happening from the jobs level, they are really getting unbundled. Talking about taking control back, what would… Actually, the invitation is to look at what is that, what is your job is comprised of, right? So there's some tasks that you would probably welcome to be automated, and there are some tasks that cannot be. And that means now that you can actually take up some other task, and you have a choice of what you can do there. But just saying that some job disappeared completely, some tasks within that job probably got automated. But the job that was created to solve a problem, that's going to continue. So maybe the problem itself is getting redirected or redefined. But it's not completely going away
Darin
00:40:35.809
I'm gonna say one statement, then we'll get to my original question. A job's purpose is to solve a problem. If it's anything else, it's not a job. It's a boondoggle. So my question earlier was, you have leaders, you have mid-managers coming in. They've got a 10-year-old, 12-year-old at home. They create an AI app over the weekend, and they come in Monday morning to their team and say, "Hey, look, my kid did this. Why is it so hard for us to ship anything in under 12 months?" How do you get them back to reality?
Darin
00:41:09.497
Yeah, but they don't wanna listen to the facts. They just saw their kid create something
Victoria
00:41:13.057
First of all, I say, "Yes, and…" I think that's the most powerful, that's the most powerful question is like a, "Yes, and…" A- and then you actually outline what it is that would make it possible, And some of those conditions are probably impossible, but yeah. That will convince them
Viktor
00:41:30.757
I feel that culture in those enterprises is usually the biggest obstacle, which if I understood right what you were saying, you probably agree. But then there is another problem that might be even harder to solve, and that's the talent, right? So let's say that we change the culture, we become better, and we are more agile, faster, what- whatever that is. But you still don't have the people who are able to pull that off, and even if you offer them infinite amount of money, they will not work for you, right? Because, you're an insurance company, and then a person would choose Google over you any time of day, right? that ever come up?
Viktor
00:42:17.513
So the question is, Once you establish, okay, we need to change this processes, culture, whatever it is, then you're probably faced with the second problem, and that's okay, but we don't have the people capable of pulling it off because people don't want to work for us, right? When I say people, I don't mean nobody wants to work. The talent, the expertise, right? How does the bank pull people from Google apart from offering them infinite amount of money, and even then it's not r-realistic, right? Is that kind of lack of very experienced people who did it or worked in a companies who did it, does that come up as an
Victoria
00:42:58.094
Absolutely. Absolutely. It's always an issue because as I said, at the end of the day, it's all about people. So one of the things, well especially when we talk about cultural changes, changes period, We all don't like changes, so this is… I think it's like a biological imperative. We don't like changes, right? So how do you actually, cope with that? So a lot of initiatives that are conceived at the top do not reach bottom because people are not involved. So to always, you know, it's a textbook rule that you want to engage people as much as possible. You want to explain and over-explain. You want to be as transparent as you can be. So that's the best rules of management, the best practices of management, and the most, successful initiatives are that. So how do you actually get into that feedback loop? How will you design this? How will you get that, input from people in different organizations? So that's the right way to do it. Now, what's the typical way to do it? Not that. So that's, when your questions, when you're asking these questions, I think a lot of them are really coming from that experience of being in this, badly run or, a failed change initiative. So yes, it is a challenge. Totally absolutely a challenge. It's a challenge to attract talent. It's a challenge to keep talent. And then the question then, like if I cannot just take a ready-made people from the market, now how do I actually make sure that the people that I have and who agreed to work with me, that they can contribute at the level that I'd like them to see, right? So and that's when we start talking about upskilling, and we start talking about, the motivational approach and all other programs that we're talking about. But I think for each and every organization, like you have to accept that you can't just take… It's like everybody will need a period of adjustment and a period of training. So coming from the employer perspective, I can tell you I cannot tell you how many people who came work for me and trained and then immediately, went to work for, other wonderful Silicon Valley employers there. What can I do about this? Like they did their best. I did my best when we were together, but obviously, the circumstances are better. I'm happy for them.
Viktor
00:45:08.290
The reason why I'm-- I brought that up is because I feel that the subjects we were talking about, chief AI officer, right? And I'm now assuming that in this specific case, it's a person who actually is supposed to come up with new models and, do funky stuff. That's not training. Training is not going to… There is no training that will allow you to actually catch up with the big guys already doing that, right? But like if you're an HR person and you should start using Claude or AI to do your work training, yeah, big plus, right? But now if you're talking about, "Hey, we were dis- we are disrupted, how do we catch up and probably overrun them?" That's not training, because who's going to give you training on something that we don't know what it is, right? So it must be-- And if my people were capable of doing that we would have it, so it-- the only solution is what? Like, Give-- offer people infinite amount of money to join you
Victoria
00:46:09.433
Well, first of all, one person cannot do this because I think you, started your, questions like chief AI officer who comes on board and supposed to, come up with all these new initiatives. First of all, it cannot be done one, one person, right? So i- it can be done as a team, with several people contributing from different functions. Now, there are always people within the organization that can actually do that. It's just they're in a, different job, their role is defined differently. You don't even know that they're capable of that. So some companies will draw on that internal pool and help them fit into that new position. And obviously some new people key roles with probably the expertise that was gained elsewhere that's necessary as well.
Darin
00:46:50.600
So you can find out more about Victoria's, wait for it, program at SV Executive Academy. That's svexecutive.academy, and all of Victoria's information is going to be down in the episode description. Victoria, thanks for being with us today