604: How Design Thinking Rebuilt IBM and Reached 400,000 Employees

No matter how large your organization is, whether it's a thousand people or whether it's 400,000 people, your change office is not going to be able to get to everybody day one. So we always made it a rule that we were going to work with teams that wanted to work with us and wanted to win. And when there is no vision, the people perish. We choose to go to the moon. If today were the last day of my life, what I want to do, what I am about to do today, is change will not come if we wait for some other person or if we wait for some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. Welcome to the Strategy Skills Podcast where strategy partners teach you the tools and techniques to solve mankind's greatest problems. Welcome to the Strategy Skills Podcast. I'm your host, Chris Sapanova and this episode is sponsored by strategytraining.com. You can access the key insights and practical action steps from today's discussion at firmsconsulting.com/action so you can make the most of the discussion. And we also prepared some gifts for you. First, you can get access to Episode 1 of how to build consulting practice, Level 1, at firmsconsulting.com/build. It is F-I-R-M-S consulting.com/build. You can also get the overall approach used and well managed strategy studies at firmsconsulting.com/overallapproach. And you can get McKinsey and BCG Minindraisma, which is a resume that got offers from both of those terms at firmsconsulting.com/rezimavdf. Today we have with us Phil Gilbert, who had a very, very interesting career and I'm really looking forward to having this discussion, but he is best known for leading IBM's 21st Center transformation as the General Manager of Design and he's also a author of the book Irresistible Change. Phil, welcome. Thank you, Chris. I'm looking forward to our conversation today. So maybe let's start with what some of the key experiences that most influenced you and your philosophy on change. Oh, well, you have to go back to when I was growing up, I grew up in a city called Oklahoma City. And we were one of the two school districts that had to be taken over by the federal courts in the early 1970s and implement busing to achieve the integration goals that our society had at the time because Oklahoma City, as a city, wasn't conforming. And that was my first experience with real upheaval. And I really, I thrived in it. And I thought it was fantastic. I think it achieved its goals. And it's a, I don't want to get into political discussions per se. But that was my first embrace of, wow, societies can change and can change relatively quickly and started thinking even back then of how that happened and how a person could make that happen. And in my own career, then going forward, I was very early in the personal computer industry in the early 1980s and was fortunate enough to work with some of the pioneers in our tech industry today. So my first startup and then as a part of that got exposed in the late 80s, 1990s to people like David Kelly who founded the firm IDO and introduced the world to what we now call design thinking, which was a framework for how you could really solve, we could problems at scale. So those are just a couple of episodes that kind of inform my outlook on change. And if you think back on your time working with the founder of IDO, what are some of the key things that we did state with you? You know, at the time in my, in my company, I was struggling with how to scale quality. My firm was fairly small at the time in the late 80s, had about 30 people. And I felt like, I felt like our approach to listening to sales objections and then delivering software that overcame those objections and made people want to use it because if you're a small vendor, people have to want to do business with you. Nobody was forcing them to buy my product. And when I came across design as it relates to software in my case, and then ultimately to what became design thinking for non-designers to have a framework to kind of bring that design mindset to their problem solving skills, that blew my mind. And then I realized that was the first time I really felt like I had an approach to scaling quality that I had never really come across before. And that's how I look at design thinking and that's what I took away from, you know, David's and many other people's work at the time was, this is a way to scale critical thinking skills in a very big way. And how did your background as a startup found, how did it influence you in terms of your project IBM? Well, one thing it gave me a very short temper. In fact, what led to my role at IBM was me after about three months feeling I was not built for this. I had never thought I was built for a big company to begin with, but I had kind of made a commitment to be there to myself and to my team for a year to help with the integration of the company. My company had been bought by IBM in 2010 and I was going to take about a year to integrate us into the company and I was going to stay for that and help the team through it. And after three months, I was like, I'm out, I'm out. And I flew to New York and had a dinner with the senior vice president who was the senior vice president over the division that had bought my company. And I told, Zoom with Robert LeBlanc and I told Robert, you know, I look around and I see people that I don't, I'm not those people. And I see your processes and practices good on you if they help you. That's great. But they're not for me. And he said something that changed my career. So that was the, that was the startup person kind of venting. And he said something that really changed everything, which is he said, you, you're looking around at people that exist and you're looking at processes that exist. But we know we need to change. We don't necessarily know how. So if you have a, if you have something to contribute to that, then let's talk about that. And that was real, that really reframed the question and that really kind of brought out not the startup part of me, but the entrepreneurial part of me was like, wow, well, there's an opportunity here, you know, if I could work at IBM scale, but, but do it with modern practices, that could be really fun. And so at that, that night, Robert said, well, why don't you take over the, the relatively small division that you were bought into? My company had about 200, 250 people. The division that bought us that had about 1200, which was nothing to IBM. My VM at the time had 400,000 people roughly. But it was a big sandbox to actually, you know, hey, if you think you can change things, go change them there. And his specific words were, go make that group. My company's name was Lombardi software. And he said, go make that group look more like Lombardi and less like IBM. And that was a real interesting challenge. So that was where the two worlds came together. My startup sense was, I'm out of here. My entrepreneurial sense was, hmm, it could be fun working at this scale. And then the challenge was, you got a 1200 person unit that was steeped in the old ways, steeped with the old people. And I had a remit to go change it. Such a great opportunity and doesn't often happen in a situation like this. So a lot of respect to the guy you met in New York. So what happens next? Well, what comes next? You know, over the course, it took us about 500 days, about a year and a half, a little bit more than that, from the middle of 2010 to the end of 2011. And I have to tell you, Chris, that I'm not kidding here. There were many days when I thought I had gone too far. And I was expecting an email that morning in my inbox from Robert, who's saying, enough. Stop. We're done. We're done with this experiment. And that never happened. He had my back the entire time. And over the course of that year and a half, we took a very kind of a ridiculous portfolio of products. We took 44 products, many of which, most of which, were actually competing with one another in the marketplace. And they had overlapping capabilities and features and customers didn't know which one to buy. Sales people didn't know which one to sell. We took 44 products down to four. We grew, we almost doubled the revenues of the operation. And we took massive market share from competitors. And oh, also, we went from 1200 people to 700 people. Those were the outcomes that we achieved. And when that occurred at the, by the end of 2011, that was kind of the results for the calendar year. And Jenny Ramedi had just become the new CEO. And in her first, in her first leadership team meeting, Robert was on her leadership team. In her first leadership team meeting, she essentially laid out the problems in front of IBM, which was clients aren't buying our products. They don't like our products. It's hard to do business with IBM. And our employee engagement scores are in the gutter. And what are we going to do? And Robert, at that meeting, said essentially, I know this guy in Austin, Texas. And so I connected with Jenny. And I told her essentially the same story I told you. Obviously, a little bit more data behind it. And Jenny said essentially the same thing Robert said a year and a half earlier, which was, all right. So what you did there, can you do everywhere? Incredible. So before we go to the next step, which is also very, very exciting to explore, can you give us a little more details on how did you actually achieve the incredible results in such a short time? Because often there are few key levers that really made a huge difference. Yeah. So in our case, you know, the issue, one of the big issues with IBM at the time was that we had missed a couple of pretty big technological shifts. You know, when our company was purchased, when my company was bought by IBM, one of the products that we were just about to release, we were seven or eight weeks away from the launch of the iPad. And we were building an iPad app. In fact, we had hopes of being on stage at the launch. When we got bought, that was the first thing that IBM killed. Because one of the executives in charge of our acquisition said business to business SaaS is not going to be a thing. Obviously, that was wrong. It was obvious even then. IBM, even at the time, had missed the cloud and the rise of the cloud. And the reason was is we weren't out in the marketplace listening. We were telling. We were telling. So the first thing that had to happen was we had to develop a, you know, you can call it a scalable curiosity. You can call it empathy. There's any number of words we can use. But it's the practices that are embodied in most any version of design thinking that you look at it. So the first thing we did is we started rolling out design thinking across all of the product teams so that we inculcated a more of a human centered or customer centered or client centered client first again, whatever words you want to put on it because they all have their own baggage. But we had to get, we had to get better listening and understanding our users and not so wrapped around the axle of telling them about the technology that we thought they should have. So that was that that was kind of the big thing. Now if you unpack underneath that, what that means is we not only inculcated a culture of design thinking among all of our engineers and product managers, it also meant that we had to bring on board scale designers. We brought on board about 50 or 60 of them. And we actually about 20 or 30 designers. And then we brought on board another 20 or 30 product managers that were of this mindset as well. And at the same time, we started ruthlessly into vifing products. And then we created essentially a sales desk that dealt with all of the customer feedback and pushback as we deprecated products that they were using. And so it was this combination of we instituted new practices in the way teams were building products. We ruthlessly pruned the portfolio so that it was clear what product was going to answer what need. And then we worked, we spent a lot of time and effort and money and my own bandwidth in listening to customers that were using the deprecated products, understanding which parts of those products were not in the other in the in the remaining portfolio that we needed to move over. And also making sure that they were provisioned into the future and they were supported into the future in the proper manner. So even that was a very human centered design point of how we pruned our product line. Those were the three major efforts that we undertook. And they all worked together. They all communicated with one another because we had to know you know, on the deprecated product side and on the new product development side, we had to be understanding and hearing from customers what did they really need from the things we were deprecating. And what frankly they didn't need and in fact, as it turned out and the reason we were able to grow so much is once we provided our customers with that level of clarity and that level of support, they were actually happy that their lives were simpler than they were before. Of course. And what kind of approach did you use to speak to customers? Was it a survey? Did you speak to them one and one over the phone? Mostly one on one and over the phone. And the way that we did it, one of the problems I see large organizations make is they tend to want to scale something out way before it needs to be scaled out. So for example, let's talk about our sales force with this and the sales force in that group was several hundred strong. The typical approach would be okay, write all of this stuff about all of these product changes we're making and then hold massive training sessions for all of your sales force. We were talking about a thousand customers worldwide, something like that. IBM's a B2B company, it's not a B2C company, we're not talking about millions and millions, we're talking about hundreds or thousands. With the thousand customers, I was like, you know what, there's no reason for all of our sales force to learn all of these moving parts. I took a small number, I think it was two or three of our really smart technical presellers and sales people. I put them essentially on a desk, I mean it wasn't the physical desk, but think of it, I put them on a desk and they were the ones that had all of the information and the global sales force was simply told we're making a lot of changes. Here's kind of the introduction to the changes, but as your customer is ready for the conversation, we'll set up a video conference with you and them and the expert. And that way we didn't have to scale out all of these changes all the time. We had a very few people that had to be in the loop on everything and then they would interact and you know, they can interact, a team can interact with many customers in a day in that way. You still have your global person was sitting in the room with them at the time and person was a big deal. But the video conference was with the experts that could actually walk them through the specific provisioning. So again, it was a very different approach to what IBM would have done before when they had this level of turmoil in a particular product line. Definitely. And as you were speaking with customers, what were some of the most surprising findings? Well, the most surprising finding for our salespeople because they were petrified, you know, some of them would have sold, we had one that was a major financial institution that had just spent over a million dollars on a product that we were going to deprecate now a month later. You can imagine the sales team was petrified. Well, that was one that I took myself and I went with them and I talked to the customers. and when I was done, they were like, you're simplifying the product portfolio and you're going to start building the product with us in the room. Like, that's good. We're a little upset that we just spent a million, but you've just told us that you're going to provision us into the new product when it's released, so we're good. I think the biggest surprise was to the legacy IBMers that our customers, if you just work with them, if you just listen to them and if you respond it honestly to them and actually delivered something that met their concerns, they're going to stick with you. They were great. So let's talk about what happens next. Yeah. Well, as I said, I was running that organization. And we, those levers I talked about, which was, you know, tried to introduce design thinking practices, bringing some new product management, bringing some new designers. Yes, we did all that, but that created a lot of turmoil. It was pretty apparent that power was shifting. People who had power had different levels of power tomorrow than they had yesterday. And some people who maybe not even were at IBM yesterday have more power than I used to have or whatever. Anyway, whenever that happens, whenever change happens, the thing people are really, the thing people really fret about is, I'm losing power. I'm worried I'm losing power. I'm losing influence. I'm losing something. That's the emotional feeling of change. It's not change in and of itself. It's that I'm losing something. Well, when I ran that small organization, I could just deal with people and say, yes, that's the way it is. And if you don't like it, you can leave or you can do whatever you want to do, but this is the direction we're going. And to be honest, I, because I had done it before in organizations and my two previous startups, it came kind of naturally to me. I wouldn't say it was totally intuitive, but it was, it came naturally. Well, when Jenny said, whatever you did there, can we do everywhere? The reason I said, I have no idea, which is what I said in the moment. I said, I have no idea, but let's give it a go. It was because I didn't, none of those 400,000 people reported to me. And my somewhat intuitive practices could no longer be intuitive. Like there had to be a formula for how we got there. 400,000 people is going to take a while. That's a different kettle of fish. And so I had to go away and kind of figure out how I was going to pull off what I ended up calling the magic trick, which was how do you get 400,000 people to do something when not a single one of them owes you anything. And it struck me after a week or two of kind of thinking about this, that this is the same problem that a startup has. So now we're going back to I'm a startup guy. And in a startup, nobody needs to buy your product. Nobody's, nobody's forcing anybody to buy your product. You've got to make a product that is so good that people want to buy it. In fact, it has to be so good that if you're selling to a business, they're going to add a new vendor. And anybody who's listening who is part of a big organization knows that bringing on a new vendor to a new cut to a big organization is like, oh, I don't want to deal with procurement. It has to be really, really good. And that that's what struck me is that. And that's the animating factor of the book that I wrote. Irresistible change was, I need to build a product which incorporates the change agenda. And the product has to be so good that the users will clamor for it, will want it. And that changed everything. Once you start going down that path, you start realizing a few things. Oh, this should not be mandated. And by the way, most transformation efforts fail, one of the key drivers of failure is a mandate. Immediately puts people into a defensive posture. If you're telling me to do something, I just immediately am going to recoil from it. Well, with a product mindset and a startup mindset, I didn't, we didn't mandate ever. Every single team that came in was opt-in. They opted to buy our product. And I can talk about, I'm literally talking about buying our product. But the second part of that was who is the, what's the market? Well, the market is IBM. We started thinking about, oh, the market is IBM. It's everybody inside IBM. But because we are, because the reason that we're doing this is not because we want to make people into design thinkers. Organizations don't care about design thinkers. Organizations don't care about AI. Organizations don't care about return to office. Organizations, I'm talking about the entity care about outcomes. And so, I realize that individuals don't contribute outcomes. They influence outcomes, but it's teams that actually deliver outcomes. And so now all of a sudden we had our user. And that was, that was the big idea. Was we're going to build a product that's going to incorporate the change agenda, which includes design and design thinking and agile. But it's going to include a lot of other stuff too if we're really going to change. And we're going to market it inside IBM to our teams and our teams, the teams that want it can come by it. How did you deal with people fighting for power? You know, we kind of didn't. So, we always made it a rule that we were going to work with teams that wanted to work with us and wanted to win using these new methods. And in the first year, it was just seven. In the second year, we started charging for admission into the program. And we expanded to 25. In the third year, we expanded to about 75. And then after that, about 300. And then it was kind of done. At IBM, at any given time, there's about 3,000 teams we think working on stuff. And so, because of that, we had demand in the second year, we only had capacity to work with about 25 teams. We had demand from about 75. And so, we went through a, just like a startup wood with a sales pipeline, we went through a pretty rigorous grooming exercise of, you know, who are these teams? Who do they report up through? Do we have support there? Is the team really bought in or are they just trying to get on this shiny new thing that the CEO is talking about? So, we did some due diligence and we really worked with teams that authentically wanted to work with. So, we didn't have, we didn't have the, by and large, we didn't have issues with, with jerks or with people that wanted to grab power because we had vetted them and because we were in a position where there was more demand than we could satisfy. Now, over the course of the years, there were a couple of situations where we did have to deal with that, but by then we had a reputation among the senior leadership that I could go to them and talk to them about somebody who was misbehaving and they would deal with it. Makes a lot of sense. So, as you were going through this huge effort of transforming the organization, what do you recall were the most challenging moments for you personally? And how did you deal with them? Well, there were a couple of things, you know, when you're in the midst of all of this change, just keeping people aligned around the agenda was hard. One of the first things that I stumbled in was fairly early after I had been put in this role and I was out in one of the larger IBM offices, areas, technology centers with that had thousands of people and I was speaking in front of all those people and talking to them about about what we were getting ready to do and the changes of blah, blah, blah and as you do. And I and on my speaking style is fairly informal. I typically just say what I feel and I had always pretty much been effective at that. Well that afternoon I was sitting in a small table discussion with some of the managers at that site and they were essentially talking back to me of my talk and of course how great it was because they knew I was somebody who they should say their talk was great too at the time. And what they said was a complete rubbish. It was almost antithetical to what I meant. And that was my first lesson in somebody who has been given a powerful platform. I didn't necessarily have power at that time at IBM but I had been given a powerful platform and I had spoken words blah, blah, blah and people in the audience heard what they wanted to hear and now started saying oh Phil this person with this powerful platform said this we're going to go do it and they're going to misinterpret what I said and they're going to go off and I realized that the the bow wave if you will from miscommunication from the top of an organization that was the first time I really I mean I'd seen it before and I had seen wait a minute the CEO said this or the so and so said this that's not what they meant and you see all this horrible execution follow that was the first time that it ever happened to me where something I had said had been really misconstrued three or four levels down the organization and it was going to go spin off work efforts that were completely unrelated if not even harmful to the change agenda. And so I realized real quickly that I needed to learn how to communicate better in that setting with that platform and I ended up enrolling in a high end media training seminar in New York and going through a couple of days of real intensive vetting and replaying with my team I actually took my whole leadership team there to it and that was a that was a real that was a real moment for me of understanding the power I had and that my words had and the power to be misconstrued and that I kind of needed to learn some new tricks. I felt like I was learning some new tricks in terms of how to scale a program at a large organization but I had to learn some new personal tricks of how to communicate and that led to by the way one of the biggest breakthroughs of the program which I talk about in the book which is this notion of branding and I realized that when we use words and you know consultants do this all the time people in business do this all the time but we label our transformation efforts oftentimes with with the thing that we've selected as the to be transformed around. This is an agile transformation this is a design transformation this is an AI transformation and what I learned from that from that episode is that when you use words like that everybody has already defined those words and their meaning for themselves and that's a bad thing because now the job of aligning people around a common change agenda is not simply presenting a new concept and aligning people around it it's you have to change minds you have to change beliefs in many cases and that's hard so I came up with this notion that we needed to I needed neutral words that I could use that I could define that everybody could look simply look up the definition of on the internet if you will and go oh that's what he means like there's no ambiguity there so we one of those neutral words is I decided to brand the program because the program while it was a design and design thinking program just like AI transformations they are AI transformations if you limit yourself to just that thing you're not going to make much of an impact because the existing systems and processes and tools of the organization also need to be changed to incorporate that thing HR career ladders the career ladders for all of your people need to be changed in an AI initiative the tooling if you're moving to an agile world or a design oriented human centered world some of the tooling is going to have to change that the teams use the methods like design think whatever it might be there there are things around the thing that have to change and the values of the organization itself has to change a little bit there are values around AI that have to be thoughtfully inserted into people's belief systems that's not AI well all of this came to me kind of as a result of that episode and we therefore we we named our program something neutral we we use the word hallmark I talk about it in the book but and then hallmark not only became this thing about design it also became this thing about values how do we behave with each other empathy how do we practice empathy with ourselves how do we practice empathy with our clients it became about tooling it became about the HR systems that had to change it became about front end and back end developers again things that we don't need to go into detail but the point is hallmark became something much bigger than design it was also focused on generating outcomes that were differentiated in the marketplace it had a business purpose and because nobody knew what hallmark was whatever we said it was is what it was and it got us communicating much more thoughtfully about the intentions behind the program as opposed to did you do a journey map this week or some other tactical thing so that was one of the big ones for me of where I stumbled and hopefully recovered and then as a result also came up with I think a tactic that was very differentiating and helped us succeed in the end. So you and during that immediate training what were some key things you could learn you could shave without listening that they could pick up and start implementing. You know if I were an expert I would go into more detail that the thing I took away it was a it was an amazing course it was a very as I recall it was a very expensive course for IBM to put me through but it had real real ex journalists you were in a you're in New York and in a studio and they would pick one of your topics and they had done a ton of research on it and they were interviewing you with essentially trying to get you to stumble and they did most often and you learn and the big thing I took out of it was whatever you're asked and as you talk about something you need to bring it back to your platform like don't let somebody take you to some other place you have a message that you're trying to get across and if somebody's out there trying to divert you from that message you need to you need to have certain strategies that can bring your answer back to your platform and in a sense you need to learn how to not answer the asked question but it's not quite that cynical it's more about bringing it back to your platform so that your message is what's getting across and not somebody else's message and also having some level of grace in doing that. Of course and can you give an example of bringing something back to your platform just for someone who is not complete to show how to do that? You know again I'm not an expert in this but since you asked about my book irresistible change that's my platform and that's what I keep wanting to talk about. You know I it really is just about you asked a you asked a question about some place I stumbled and I told you that anecdote but then I did bring it back to you know I wrote about it in my book and then I talked about the branding effort and the branding is chapter two of the book. So I think that's an example of I could have gone anywhere. with any particular anecdote of where I stumbled, there was certainly more than one. But that was a good one because it did highlight, it was a personal growth moment, but it led to a breakthrough in our program. And that's really what I am here to talk about. Because I think change has been mismanaged for too long. And I wrote this book, you know, John Cotter's, I'm a huge fan of John Cotter's book, "Leading Change." And it's one of the great books, business books of all time. But over the years, I ran into so many people who also thought John Cotter's book on "Leading Change" was fantastic. And they were failing at transformation. And yet they were using all of Cotter's words, and they were looking at his eight obstacles. They were saying, "I have quick wins. I've had four quick wins over the last two years, none of them have stuck." And so I'll ask them very specific questions about what were the teams like, very tactical things. And I just over and over and over again, people think they're following this strategy, but their execution faltered. And they didn't really understand, for example, quick wins. You know, in my book, I talk about how I ended up defining a win. I really thought about what is a win for a program? It's not the same thing as having a team be successful. And that's a lot of people get that wrong. And you can read Cotter, and you can think it's just about the team's success. And it's not. It's something different. It's a win that helps your program grow. That's what a win is. And so a part of it is a team's success, but it's not everything. So I wrote this book to be the operating manual that sits right next to Cotter's book on the bookshelf. There's no strategy in my book. There's a very little strategy in my book. It is, this is what we did. These are the decisions that we had to make. This was the situation. This was the decision that we made. And here was the outcome. And I feel like I haven't seen that book written before. So that's kind of why I wanted to get it out there and give people an operating manual for how to execute change. Steve Jobs said famously when he went back to Apple and got asked as to why he was cutting so many so many products. He was talking about what went wrong. And he said, well, what went wrong is we had ourselves a set of people who thought that the idea was 90% of the value. But in reality, execution is 90% of the value. And that's what this book hopes to be is the execution underneath Cotter's strategy. 100%. Execution is so hard and so few people are able to do it. I'll be in the third we need to put in the work. A lot more people would be able to do it and they just put in the work. Yeah. I want to spend few minutes getting your input on how people should think about the AI. I think AI is just a tool. I'm actually I guess that would put me in the Optimus camp. I don't think it's going to kill us. I think it's just another tool. And the value and AI transformations that is not being seen today, you know, study after study. Now there's multiple studies showing that some 95% of efforts are failing. And I think it's because again, people are thinking that AI is the thing when in fact culture is the thing. Culture is what delivers outcomes. And it's the we came up with a formula for culture and outcomes at IBM. And I thought about because I really do believe that you can give it's like teams. If you give a great team a mission, they're going to achieve it. And they're going to achieve it almost with any tool set. It's the middle 80% of teams. That's where scale comes from is how do we help those folks? And I think that it's the overall culture is really what drives more outcomes than anything. Culture eats strategy for breakfast blah, blah, blah. We started to think about, okay, if we're going to change a culture, we need new outcomes at IBM. That's why change exists. We need new outcomes. We broke down, you believe culture goes outcomes, I started thinking about what defines a culture? What does an archaeologist do to understand a culture? And spent time noodling on that and ultimately came up with this formula of it's the people, their skills and their mindsets. It's the practices that those people in their units, teams do and use the tools and practices and methods. And it's the places that they do it in. And those three things, you have to change all three if you want to affect outcomes. And AI is no different. AI fits squarely in that practices place. And the skills place for people, people have to know how to use it. But there are going to be an inordinate amount of things around the introduction of AI that is going to actually change a team's outcome. So much of the AI that's being measured today, first of all, it's being measured simply because it can be measured. I have no idea what it means for 30% of my code base is AI generated. That's a useless metric. I don't know what that means, but we can measure it and so people start measuring it. But what's more interesting is how have your outcomes been different when using AI? How have your market outcomes been different? And I don't, I see very few companies that are focused on that question. And I see very few companies focused on, well, if AI is important, how do our, how does it impact the team's workflow? Of course, individuals can use it to generate emails, to generate code, to do better research, to get ready for a meeting. But I don't think that too many folks are working on how does the team's behaviors change in this new world of AI and how do we measure those changes right straight through to differentiated outcomes from what would have happened without the AI? There are a few companies that I think are starting to do it pretty well. JP Morgan, there's been a recent case study that Harvard did on JP Morgan that's pretty interesting and they've approached this very much more as a cultural question than as just a tool in question. And I think, you know, that's how I think companies need to start thinking about AI. There's been way too much hype about its potential, I think, way too much hype about the morality of of it all. It's just another tool. And it's a very transformative one. But if you look back on the companies that thrived from the change, you know, from our shift to the internet, I think it's going to be something like that. Phil and in the last few minutes, for someone who will read your book, what are the key things you want them to take away? You know, I think there are a lot of interesting lessons in it. Probably, at the end, I talk about how you know you're done. And I offer a framework that we came up with, which are based on anybody's experience with any product or service ever. And they're called the Universal Experiences. And they're basically the nine contexts in which we interact and engage with the products and services that we use. I'll give you an example. One of them is Discover. And so if I'm walking into a Walmart and I'm looking for Tylenol, I'm in Discover mode. I'm trying to find it. Right? That happens over and over. Sometimes discovery just happens once when you, you know, buy a new car. It lasts for a long time. You go discover again for a long time. But these are nine contexts. I don't bring them up to so much proselytize the nine contexts themselves. But in each of these contexts for a company of any scale whatsoever, the for a customer to experience that thing, requires a lot of people. And too many transformation efforts focus solely on the product or the service. And they don't really take into account the holistic system of an enterprise or an organization that is actually required to deliver a touch point to an end user. And until you can evaluate the touch point and know that every single part of the organization that contributed to that touch point, the salespeople, the support people, the product marketing, all of the parts of the organization that have contributed to that experience until all of those have undergone your change, you can't expect a different outcome. Now I say all that to say this, transformations take time. And the reason that, you know, I talk a lot in the book about this notion of an adoption mindset, too many change programs stop at the product team or if not there, if it's a broader application, they stop at the enablement of the change. And they don't track the change all the way through the adoption of that thing, which takes weeks, months, sometimes quarters for a new thing to actually be adopted in the real world with all of the real systems around it that are contributing to it. And so companies don't tend not to have the fortitude to kind of see that through. And they start measuring, they start measuring change based on enablement metrics. How many people took the training class? The only metric that matters is how many people adopted the change. And that's, you know, if there is a takeaway, it is that the result in the marketplace requires so much of the organization to be a part of it that you need to be able to see this change through all the way through adoption. It doesn't stop with somebody going to a training. And it certainly doesn't stop on the day you announce it. You know, one of my biggest pet peeves are reorgs. Reorgs are done to achieve some new outcome, right? Something's not working right. And so we need a reorg. Information's not passing fast enough up. And so we want to thin out our executive ranks. Or the set of products belong better over here because they'll be closer to their users and these people that are selling it have affinities with one another. Whatever it is. And a reorg typically is worked on for months and months and months and months by consultants and executives. And it's announced. And then everybody kind of goes done. And that's just the beginning. But very few companies view that as the beginning. And they don't track that in this case reorg. They don't track it all the way through to did the information actually start flowing better. Did the sales people actually start using their leverage to bring it to cross sell or upsell these new products. And did we actually see a change in the market results down the road. I see very few companies that have that. I call it the adoption mindset as opposed to the enable, enable mindset. And that's what the closing bit of the book is really about is making sure that you can trace and in result in the marketplace a new outcome all the way back through every part of the organization that touched it and seeing that they have in fact adopted the new changes. Phil and the last very quick question. If you couldn't still one belief into every listener's heart mind what would it be? One belief in every person's heart. You know it's that future is going to be fun. The future is going to be fun. If we constantly, constantly have a healthy disrespect for the status quo. Phil thank you so much. I really appreciate you being here. Such an incredible conversation. And there's just such a depth of wisdom there that we could have spoke for many many many hours on this topic. Where can our listeners learn more about you by your book and you can you want to share? Yeah two things you can go to Gilbert.com that's the easiest place to learn anything about me. And you can also learn about the book there. It's available everywhere that books and ebooks are so and by the way get to them because you're going to want one for the office, one for home and you probably want one for your daughter cat. Your colleagues. So you're on the same team. We only have so much time in the day. That's right Chris. Thank you very much. Our guest today again was Phil Gilbert, but not for leading IBM's 21st century transformation as the general manager of design and author of the book Irisistable Change. And you can access the key insights and practical action steps from this discussion at firmsconvulting.com/action. This is just something new that we are introducing to make sure that everyone can benefit fully from this very important discussion. And this episode is sponsored by strategytraining.com and you can download some gifts from us. You can get the overall approach used in Wall-Managed Strategy Studies at firmsconvulting.com, Foblitzlashograwelle Approach. You can get McKinsey, BCG, Minin, Razima, which is a Razima that led to offers from both of those firms. And you can get it at firmsconvulting.com, Foblitzlash, Razima, PDF, take a look, see if you can adjust your resume at every level. However senior UI it's always good to have a good Razima. And you can also get episode one of how to build a consulting practice level one. You can get access to it at firmsconvulting.com, Foblitzlash Build. And lastly you can get copy of one of our books that we co-authored with some of the listeners of this podcast, some of our clients. And you can get it at firmsconvulting.com, Foblitzlash Gift and it is called Nine Leaders in Action. Thank you so much for tuning in. Such an incredible discussion and I'm looking forward to connecting with you all next time. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Strategy Skills podcast. Stay up to date on all of our latest training by signing up for our email updates on firmsconvulting.com. We look forward to helping you develop your strategy, critical thinking, decision making and communication skills next time here on the Strategy Skills podcast. [Music]