00:00All right, let's start off first with this idea. I know everyone's talking about return to all.
00:03We've been talking about it forever. Some of us in a nevertheless office, by the way.
00:06But it gets to this idea also of making a work environment that people want to come back to.
00:11And I felt like during the kind of the internet boom, it was all about having, you know, foosball tables and, you know, some snacks and things like that.
00:17But it gets a lot deeper than that because it's not only getting people to come in, but staying there and also being productive.
00:23Absolutely. And I'm the biggest fan of everybody being back in the office.
00:27But it's typically not for the reasons that most management talks about.
00:31The team based collaboration is actually quite effective anywhere.
00:35Yes, you need some in person time. You also need remote tools are fine, too.
00:40But what physical places give us are the are the ability to support the things around work that actually make work better.
00:48And that's what I think a lot of executives are missing is they're putting the burden on the employee via mandates.
00:56Instead of shouldering the burden of creating spaces and places that actually add value to people's lives and that actually accelerate the outcomes that they're trying to see in the marketplace.
01:07I am curious. When you joined IBM, you kind of came through an acquisition.
01:10Yes, you bought your company and they kind of left you off to your own to kind of do what you want with Lombardi software.
01:15Right. Was that on your own?
01:17And then I guess at some point someone decided that whatever the heck he was doing over there should be applied to the broader company.
01:23But IBM is was a behemoth, still is a behemoth.
01:26So what was that process like of running essentially a smaller company within a company to now trying to apply that design aesthetic, if you will, to the entire company?
01:35It's a great question. And it's really the premise of the whole book.
01:38And that was the magic trick that we had to pull off in the small part of IBM that I was running after the acquisition.
01:44I was running it. And so people kind of did what the leader said to do.
01:50When the CEO at the time, Jenny Rometty, asked me, whatever you did there, let's do it everywhere.
01:55I had to figure out a way to get 400000 people to do something, none of whom reported to me.
02:00And that's when I really came up with this notion that that's actually the exact same problem that a startup has with a new product.
02:10And so we should package change as a product.
02:13It shouldn't be mandated, but the burden should be on my leadership team to make something so valuable to every team in the organization that they would choose to come in.
02:23And that's what we did.
02:24So where do you think a lot of those startups go wrong?
02:28Or you think about, you know, now we're actually starting to see M&A come back.
02:31And when you combine cultures, it is difficult.
02:34So where's the easiest place to potentially trip up, so to speak?
02:38Well, you certainly need the support of the executives in the organization.
02:43And the organization has to have a certain willingness to change.
02:48But I think, again, where most startup people get frustrated is they look around and they see the systems and the people that are in place.
02:55And they fight that instead of trying to show and lead the organization into new areas that the organization willingly comes to.
03:05And that's what we were able to do at IBM.
03:07We started with just a very few teams in the first year.
03:10But by the second year, we already had more demand of teams that wanted to come in to our program than we could actually even support.
03:16And Phil, I'd love to bring in AI to this conversation because it feels like it's a central part of every conversation.
03:23So what we're talking about, both when it comes to actual physical spaces in offices and then sort of combining culture, I wonder what role AI plays there, if any.
03:32Well, it's certainly another tool.
03:34But I think one of the problems with the transformation efforts that are going on around AI and why we're seeing so many of them fail, just like every other transformation, so many of them fail, is that people are too focused on the technology and not enough on the systems and people and processes around the technology that also have to change.
03:52We tend to get blinkered when we say we're doing an AI-first implementation.
03:57We tend to get blinkered around the AI as the only thing that we're inserting, the only thing that we're changing.
04:02When, in fact, all of the HR systems need to change.
04:05The career ladders for all people need to change.
04:08The tooling around the teams.
04:11But do you think CEOs and other executives are doing a good job in articulating that?
04:14Because, I mean, that makes sense, but I feel like that's not what we hear from them, at least not publicly.
04:17No.
04:18No.
04:18No.
04:19People are still getting too focused on the tech, on the tool.
04:22Just like we did with Agile, just like we've done with every single transformative method or technology in the past.
04:27We get too focused on that thing and not focused enough on the systems around the thing.
04:33And in our work at IBM, I will tell you that at least 50% of the work of my team was nothing to do with design or design thinking.
04:41It was with everything else that would then reinforce it going forward.
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