Ismail Amla, Chief Growth Officer, CAPITA Plc

Ismail Amla, is a Senior executive (Chief Growth Officer / Managing Partner / CEO / CHRO) with 20 years’ international experience in High Tech and Technology-Enabled Business Services, Software and Consulting organizations. He has managed businesses of scale with P&L responsibility for revenues of up to $7bn and teams of 15,000.

A deep experience defining innovative transformational strategies to deliver complex large-scale change across businesses, workforces and capabilities both within business services organizations and for clients across a broad range of industry sectors including financial services.

Ismail is the author  “From Incremental to Exponential: How Large Companies Can See the Future and Rethink Innovation”.

He is on the Board of Govenors for the University of East London and a Board Member for UK Sport.

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Transcript

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ismail fantastic to have you on this episode of leadership bites welcome i am very happy to be here happy friday indeed yes we've earned it i fail we have so uh listen i know who you are ismail and we've been having a little chat before and obviously i reached out to you and i've done a little intro before the podcast just to give people a line of sight but just in your own words it'd be great to hear who you are and what you do and who you work with and then we'll get into some some more stuff about you yeah well thanks for having me on the show um always fun to meet new people uh and learn new things so who am i so i'm actually um i'm currently in bolton lancashire uh and you'll know hopefully where that is which is north west of the united kingdom and that's important for me because actually this is where my folks landed as immigrants from india to work in the cotton mills right and uh i don't know whether you know now but most of the cotton mills are now in india and my parents still think he was missiles that he's been waiting on all the cotton mills and over in actually northwest india which is where he came from so um second generation um you know went to uh salford university did a computer degree uh in fact in the day where they were teaching fortran and were using these uh cards and um we're too fairly for you guy but uh one of the early uh versions of the computer science degree and then went into the um technology consulting space logica computer sciences accenture um i guess the the key things i would say is um at the time like 10 years into my career i decided i was too technology focused and needed to become more business aware to get ahead with my career and so did an mba at manchester business school and about the time that i finished my mba it became very clear that technology was going to be everything with the dot com era and then of course with the um industrial for fourth generation industrial revolution and so on so i've basically been on technology uh implementation jobs or running big p ls for accenture computer sciences i decided to leave accenture to go to a startup um and then was a ceo for the uk for that startup called capco they then sent me to america for a couple of years to new york and we stayed there for 10 and in that time um after we sold the company i joined ibm and ran ibm global business services in north america which is all the professional services that are very ibm do in north america fantastic role and then a couple years ago i moved back and you know i felt it was time to go back home and see what contribution i could personally make and as part of doing that i joined a company which actually the work that we do affects half the uk population every month so 35 million uk citizens every month and from from a board perspective the uk sports board responsibility i have of course is focused on creating an environment for athletes to prosper and succeed and at the same time create a feel-good factor for the rest of the united kingdom so here we are two years back into my united kingdom journey after my migration around the world i guess so i've got i've just got you linked up linked in up in front of me so i've got you as that board member for uk sport um i've got that board of governors for the university of east london yeah yeah as well yeah so that was interesting i actually found a friend of mine as i was coming back to the uk and said look i think i could do is getting some non-executive responsibility and he happens to be the chancellor for the university of east london shabirandiri and he said yeah you should you should come do this um it doesn't pay anything of course it's uh in a very um interesting uh sector which is being disrupted massively and of course this was before coving but higher education was disrupted massively and he said if you are good to your word and you want to come back and make an impact on society then here you are in newham uh where most of the students are first generation in their families going into higher education and most of the students here are on what would be considered as diverse in terms of any sort of demographic so yeah i've been doing that for about 18 months and that chief the chief growth office office i can't i've lost my teeth this morning chief growth officer with capita um that bring that role to life for me as well yeah i mean we decided i mean we made the name up right and we made the name up because we wanted the role to be around sales and marketing i around growth but be more transformational rather than be run a function now of course i have to run the function anyway and i'm responsible for a a quota which happens to be north of three billion pounds but what we really wanted to uh get into the organization was this growth mindset uh and so you know we we sort of played about with how we wanted to symbolically land that so for me it's about sales and marketing actually my responsibility is also around setting up a consulting business for capita and then the third part of that responsibility is helping define our market strategy okay so that's a pretty broad brush uh in in many respects and and before we get into maybe some more detail and i know there's a book that you have out that or you i think co-authored and i also want to talk about that as well is that journey that somebody goes on i always think is massively influential on your thinking and it's one of the reasons that i may or may not give greater credibility to what somebody said dependent on what i think has gone into their opinion so um it'd be great just to hear some of your journey from you know hey i came into the world and you're picking the moments that are relevant maybe to us but just some of that journey that said hey you know this is how i got here these were some of the ups the the the plateaus and the downs but you know and here i am today so it'd be great to hear that yeah yeah um i mean i think one of the one of the things as you talk about that guy that comes very clearly to me is i've never been able to predict and this this listen i'm going back 30 years now right i've never been able to predict what i'm going to be doing next year never and so as i started off my career and i was uh logical doing consulting and you know you've got these great views of what your career might look like one thing becomes very clear for me the things that made a difference was having um a level of agility in my thinking and taking advantage of any opportunity that came my way so anything that was thrown at me that i thought i could do i found interesting i put my hand up and did it and that includes living in copenhagen for a couple of years big projects out in singapore almost always never 100 ready for the role but always feeling that i'll find my way and make a success of it so the key things for me i would say is that the things that i learn along the way if you like is that um where i've taken a risk and the role has been high profile the higher the profile the bigger the risk of course the bigger the reward and in uh if i give a couple of examples when i moved for my role from when i was at computer sciences and i moved to denmark actually to be a cio for this company called east asiatic company and they used to be a client of ours[Music] you know new language new geography new role but a transformational job to roll out an infrastructure for the globe in terms of their scope so a huge opportunity to learn about all of these new things and i think that as if you go in with and for me this is why the growth mindset thing guy is so important if you go in with an idea that a the chances are you will succeed b everybody will want to help you to succeed and see nobody really fully understands the question never mind understand the answer if you go in with that objective with that sort of mindset i think you're better positioned to understand what needs doing be agile in how you go about doing it and and be very prepared to change strategy along the way so you know i've had lots of those sorts of instances where i've gone for somewhere not really know what i'm doing but it's a big opportunity to go and make a difference the other thing that i see as part of my journey guy is you know i'm a second generation indian muslim from bolton and one of my driving forces was just to want to fit in right and because i you know i am every single other that you could probably describe and yet i felt that i was as good as the oxford cambridge lads coming out and going joining accenture but actually i was very different in that sense and for a long part of my career and you know up to the point actually that i joined accenture i would say i didn't want to be known for my otherness i wanted to be known for how good i was or how good i wasn't and as i for the people that i mentor know as i keep telling them that actually isn't my choice you will be known for what how people see you and perceive you whether you like it or not you're part of that gang and one of the things that i would say is this and i wish i had come to that conclusion sooner in my career and my life actually from a personal perspective as well the sooner i got comfortable with being who i was the more authentic i felt i could be the more confident i could be and the more successful i became but it took me a long time to get there and i think you know when you don't have a role model that looks like somebody like you or has the sort of background that you have or have the sort of challenges that you've been through it's very difficult i think for somebody to tell you that actually that is what might work and so i think that's one of my one of my lessons is around how do you get to yourself and your authenticity as soon as you can in your career and then i would say the third part of my career that has defined me is this this passion around anything which is new and could change the world and so you know i just happen to be in this golden era where technology is changing the world and from the time that i worked as i said that you know i i did my degree in computer science it was just coming out and you know every job that i've been in and every project that i've been in has changed the way the world lives and works and what an incredible opportunity to look back and say that you know the world changed and i was part of that and and that has really really given me lots of energy and really really inspired me to do different things and i was reading this book just i'll just finish on this guy and give you a chance to talk to finish this book um uh malcolm gladwell you probably probably read it outliers and he was talking about you know he was taking people like steve jobs bill gates and you know how they became successful and there was always something that happened in their life that would really give them disproportionate advantage and with bill gates he actually had access to a mainframe at washington university that he could go and play on for 12 hours a day he was you know you know the the man was pretty born in bolton that wouldn't have been so accessible to him right exactly exactly right right and that was the time when mainframes were just coming on but here the 16 year old kids could go and play on that very different environment if you if you look at steve jobs he's got the story where um the the ceo of hewlett packard sent him apart to play about with to build a computer i mean you know this is something that happened that are very trigger for me what happened was and i i i think you know as i think about it of course in hindsight with my dad bought me bought me the bbc computer if you remember when they came out in the uh do you remember them listen my very one of my very first jobs was in tandy selling tandy computers and it wasn't ms-dos it was tandidos yeah yeah i'm older than i look and i know exactly what you're talking about i know so because i remember i'm looking back on that and i only thought of that after i read that book that he was this man who was doing night shifts in the cotton mill in bolton who happened to listen to his lad who said that i think i think i might like a computer who then went on and you know these things were pretty expensive and you plug them into the back of the tv to be able to work them to be able to work them and for me that's you know as i look back that was my trigger point because it allowed me to you know play with technology at quite a young age engagement it just happened yeah yeah yeah yeah so you know a few things that are thick out there let me pause there no this is listen we've got to be really careful because if i start talking you'll go i thought i was invited on a podcast so i'm going to be careful about that but i love those stories and i love those trigger points and i love those moments of if my dad just hadn't brought me that computer i mean maybe i'd have found my way but maybe i i don't know i'd have gone another way and ended up doing something else right i mean i there was another moment that i remember with my parents i um i was i was at accenture i was the partner of the level two partner huge responsibility i think i think at that time there were three hundred thousand people at accenture 180 people at level two so very senior i got call from a head hunter who said look we're doing a startup you'd be great um and i was looking at it and um you know they wanted me to go to the us and there was about 100 people working for me and i was going to move from thousands of people to 100 but they wanted me to go to the us as part of this i met the private equity guy that the front the founder and um and he said what's stopping you joining us and this guy by the way himself was an indian immigrant into the usa and he went with five dollar five dollars and he's got one of the biggest pe firms in the u.s now and i said you know the risk of moving from um from accenture to the stator safety yeah right i mean i've got the brand i call anybody if you're from accenture they'll take the call you want me to join this company called capco that nobody knows and he said oh yeah you must be really different from your dad i said what what do you mean he said well he moved to the uk with i mean on his own right with no job he didn't even know where he was going when he landed in the uk and i remember going telling that story to my dad who couldn't stop laughing because you know he shamed me into taking the job really he knew he that was a guy that knew how to pull a lever right yeah right because he was sort of saying if you really claim to be entrepreneurial and believe in your leadership skill sets so you better come and take on this challenge and that was actually a big moment for me to go from being behind the brand to go in and be in your own brand right and the people convincing people to join you to work with you to pay you to invest in you because of your own ideas and your own beliefs and what you can do um and that triggered that you know going to the startup of course was was the golden moment in my career because it also gave us the opportunity to move to new york uh all the kids moved to new york um they all three of four kids did their uh well all their secondary education and university education out there and you know from for for a bunch of bolton kids um who used to go around queen's park to then walk across central park to go to school it was a bit it was a big thing look at me now ma i think that's defined them as well actually hilarious i love it i love stuff like that and um yeah so i mean during that process what i'm hearing is that you know you've got that i mean you're curious obviously you know innovation is something that obviously means something to you having an impact you know that that's something there as well and and i love that that kind of sense of yeah i've really got to live up to my own self definition here um yeah i'm an entrepreneur but as long as it's safe doesn't really work you know and then the social impact of that as well because i think as i've got an older guy um i look around and i think about i mean i mean i'm in bolton right i mean let's let's let's be clear in bolton uh the demographic is such that most of the kids who are who are really talented will not feel they can be successful elsewhere right because they don't have the role models they don't have the networks it's just a fact of where they are and i feel that people you know who've had this sort of opportunity that i've had have this amazing opportunity to create an environment for these different groups to be able to become their real selves and in doing so contribute to uk plc in a way that we're just missing out on at the moment and so i really really feel at the moment really feeling this need to engage facilitate open doors create platforms just because of the opportunity and the platforms that i have and so the social impact and i've gotten maybe a sign of my age actually but it's becoming increasingly important to me to be able to not only go and prove what i can do and you know and try and do great things from a personal and business perspective but also think about what impact that has on the or what impact i can have on the community that i've come from and where does that come from you know is that that's partly cultural guy or that's partially you know or what actually no it's not it's just me where does that give you that and that contribution and that desire to help it's a great question and i think that um it comes a little bit from my parents again and the story here is that as we grow up my father was the only guy in his friends who spoke english so de facto he became the community relations officer and we i remember as we going up and coming home from school and going to school there was always a bunch of people in our house where there was i remember our community relations officer in bolton was this guy called raymond halliwell who became a great mate of my dad because my dad was interpreting for him all the time until a bunch of people coming in and out of our house who were different in the looking for help and i think that's where you know this idea of service was something that was very much uh implanted and then when i did my career uh uh but actually it was something as part of me realizing my authenticity i also i think came to the conclusion that that was a part of me that i wanted that i wanted to be a part of me i wanted to contribute to now i've heard you say this probably about four times now which is that comfort with self that realization of your own self that's that that's come out now three or four times and i'm um i'm very clear that when i do work with execs which is what i do which is why it's called leadership it was leadership but leadership podcast is this concept of leader of self is there is a point that it's great if you can have it on the way up but there is a that's a beautiful thing right if you get the wisdom early you know we'll all we're all about that but there is a point that technically you know your job you get to that point where you go of course every day is a school day but in essence i know the lay of the land i know how to approach it i know what i'm about so how do i develop and i'm not going to fundamentally learn more about routers or what whatever it is and i've come to this point which is this well this journey within yourself because the experience of you will make the message more engaging or palatable or trusted and but that's how i talk but everybody's trigger is different but i wonder what's got you saying that and referencing it consistently through our conversation yeah well it came um it started back in accenture where um i was given the role of human capital and diversity lead and at the time i actually resented it because here was the brown blog being given the role of the human capital and diversity the token role right and but actually looking back on it who and i it was lid after all who gave to me who was the ceo for accenture at the time it was probably the biggest gift anybody could have given to me because it forced me to think about two things one is the business case around people feeling engaged and a sense of belonging um and then the second part of that role was people strategy which is what does the workforce of the future look like and in learning and enforcing myself to think about both those things and being the uh spokesperson if you like for accenture in the uk there were 13 of us worldwide doing this role it forced me to integra intellectualize why those two things were important so it started at an intellectual angle and then the more i thought of it and more i got into it i realized that actually i was not being what i was talking about right and that was my moment of horror if you like that here you know i was sort of working and when i went to work i was somebody else and when i came home i'm somebody else and trust me this is such a waste of energy in doing that so that that was sort of the pivotal moment i think when that happened and that continued because as i went from accenture to capco one of the things that i felt we could really use to engage uh hire people and keep them who who who were hiring from a deloitte and accenture and ey people with big brands was to say to them that you're going to come to a culture where you can be yourself at work think about it so if you you know when you're going to these big firms who are world class there is such a strong culture that there's a little bit of you that you need to leave you know outside the door you walk into the office we want to create something where you can bring all of yourself to work and it became a self-reinforcing thing where we brought these brilliant people in we saw them flourish because they felt a sense of belonging the more we saw that the more we wanted to do that and so it was a couple of things there guy that sort of got me to that point but it was a fairly harrowing journey i would say to get there and you know putting the mirror up initially wasn't always easy i'm i i'm smiling because i it sounds like i'm doing a plug here but i wrote a book called living brave leadership and it's about trust accountability bravery connection and various other things and as i was writing it i had a bit of an epiphany which is bugger i'm not doing all of this as in intellectually of course i understand it and i'm even talking to people about it and asking them to role model it ah crap there was a gap between my knowledge of what was right and then the who i was being so i wasn't a bad person doing bad things but i was i was a reasonable distance away and one of the things i talk about in the book is finding a lever for change and one of mine has always been if i've got two boys and if they could see me on a live video stream and they were with their friends i mean they're eight and six but if they you know were of an age would they go oh that's my dad that is would they go god you know as in you preach this in the house but that's not what you're doing when it come push comes to shove and i thought um so if this was take your kid to work day my little boy might not be proud of his dad and that made me very emotional and it's one of the levers that i apply to myself but it's finding that lever or you have you might have the realization but what then made you do it because having the insight is one thing oh there is a gap there is a difference but then that's like saying i'm not fit yeah okay but what would make you get fit and so i wonder was there no it just was instinctive the moment i made the realization off i was off and running or did you have to go through that when you say harrowing i wonder how much of that was oh i'm actually now gonna have to do something about it yeah so you know what was that that shift from the intellectual realization to the actual activities around it yeah no i think i mean super super question because there was i'd say there's a couple of things firstly forcing myself to do things that i was telling other people to do but i wasn't doing is one example right so for example i mean even now it's hard right so this summer when all the black lives matter uh thing flared forcing myself to talk to our ceo and our head of comms and saying we need to get proactively a point of view out without our employees saying i wonder what our point of view is of the phone now that meant putting my head above the parapet recognizing that you know as a person of color i was advocating a position for people of color and i should not be ashamed of that you know that sort of thing and you know and doing it in a way where i didn't really have to do it but i knew that if i was advocating that this is how you should behave i needed to do it right so if i'm going to fulfill the promise of what how what i offer out yeah yeah i need to do it right or you know yesterday in fact we had this lunch and learn on islamophobia month and we had various people saying this is my experience and somebody asked me would you come and talk and you know my my reaction before i went to i would have said you know if you can get somebody else i'd prefer if you've got somebody else because here i am putting it all out there again right and and i did actually i i did actually do it but it's a conscious it's not my natural style but i need to do it to be able to progress the objectives of creating an environment where people feel safe and people feel that we're included in a sense of belonging so there was there's a set of activities that i don't don't come natural to me but i have to force myself to do it because i have internalized that it is the right thing for the greater good but then the other thing is um from my own personal environment when i joined capco i think it was probably the first time i jumped because i joined a ceo so i could create an environment in my image and the image i wanted to create was everybody felt a sense of belonging they could be themselves at work and so i could be myself at work it was the best time i've ever had in my life because it wasn't it didn't feel like going to work i mean you were with your mates you behaved what you know how you thought you you could and your mates would tell you when you were out of line right it was open transparent trusting and so there was an energy of actually living in that sort of space which just reinforced that this is the right thing to do if me as an employee feels so much better coming into work on a monday in a place where i belong in a place where i feel safe in a place where there's good communication why don't we create that environment for everybody because just think of the improvement in productivity and engagement that you'll get as a result of that so there was a it just felt the right thing to do and that's the big question for organizations very often you know in these in smaller startups or in those private equity based kind of places you know you can there's such a drive because such a singular focus about we know what we're here to do i mean we all know what we're here to do but we really know what we're here to do because it's tighter the timelines are shorter very often and but once you shift into uh maybe from the speedboat to the oil tanker you know when you go to that larger entity with that bigger spread and it's not 35 caffeine addicts in a room that all know each other every day you know pushing forward but we're dispersed and we've got different demographics different the reality of pushing that into a wider playing field i think that's that's where it gets really interesting so for me um and this is it's gonna sound like a trick question but it's not because i think you already you know i'm not gonna ask you a trick question but when you're in that you know lucky capita you know that large entity um do you feel that you really are able to reach as far as you'd like to and and one of the reasons that i joined capita guy to be totally transparent when i spoke with john lewis who just joined at the ceo one of his major tenants was this a business based on a purpose of creating better outcomes for all stakeholders and all stakeholders meaning not just the shareholders but everybody you know your suppliers your employees um your partners and so on because that for me was um i guess a reflection of what we're talking about here which is there's a there's a big there's a better way of doing this just than just be razor focus on delivering this product or this financial performance and so on and john john sort of communicated it to me and then i saw the proof points in um you know we appointed two employees onto the board yes first time you know in the uk 4250 forever since the 70s i think a lot of interest from across um across the uk and across the world in doing that and so you know so we are we are making steps uh in you know can you can you do it large scale and that's a great example of it you know we we implemented all sorts of procedures around how many partners that you have part of your supply chain should be small and medium enterprises what are the and you know there's no rules for that we made the rules ourselves because that was a better outcome for them what are the payment profiles we want to do for small enterprises i we want to disproportionately pay them earlier because it impacts them more than it would impact the larger organizations so right across the way we're working we're sort of rolling this out but as you can imagine with an organization with 60 or 1000 it's it's these cultural change journeys are you know they they they're multi-year shows right long-term aims and i think we're part of the journey and i really like i really like i just finished reading the uh the book from simon sinek you know the infinite game i really like that mindset which says you know in this song if you want to really run a a a business on a purpose and he called it a just cause then this is about not this is not something that you win or lose this is you you you wit you you play the game to be in the game and you're in the game for a long period of time and the results will be over a long period of time rather than quarterly results rather than we're going to win this particular deal and that's the sort of mindset that you know we've seen but we're part of the it's part of the journey guy i mean a long way to go but i like that and i like that i mean everybody wants everything tomorrow and and in a world where you know very often you can have it tomorrow um it's it's hard to hold the narrative with a lot of people saying yeah you're not wrong but actually this is the pace and that's and that maybe that comes down to the amount of trust that they have in the individuals that are doing it which is why i'm interested in somebody's story because if you tell me that i might go well you would say that because you're in a senior role but hearing the story you've started to just even share about yourself i know you're more than i did half an hour ago and i already have a sense of i think i'd trust your request to be patient more than i would have done 30 minutes ago because i know more of you so i guess that's part of that you know it's not the message well that's that has to be part of it but also it's do they trust who's delivering it and that's that's got to be a big part of it for sure yeah no i think that is and i think that increasingly and i'm sure you'll find this guy increasingly organizations if they want to get top talent i i i know i've talked to my mates at accenture or ibm and they used to get graduates and you say to them you know what are you looking for and they say i want a career path to get to partner now they're saying i don't want to be a partner i want to do great work for great reasons so give me good good gigs and so this becomes increasingly a business imperative it's not even a personal belief system although it happens to be even if i didn't believe it if i want those top talent people i'm gonna have to deliver this you're gonna have to deliver it right and and as you think about um you know as you think for example you think about how organizations are getting through covid i think the organizations that will succeed afterwards will be those who during covet treated their people well i think that will be a massive thing going forward you know did they did the organizations during covid walk the talk because it was so easy to send people home to you know um lay people off to create environments that weren't safe all sorts of things that could have happened and and now actually we get into another generation another sort of phase of where you know mental well-being is such a big issue it'd be so easy for organization not to pay attention to that and i think i think this is just another manifestation of the same thing right which is trust long-term outcomes and making sure that you know the promises you make to people are delivered even if the organizations are massive like other so just before we move on to the next phase i i reference that as delivering the promise because we we make a promise and we may have made a promise to get you here or we may be making a promise to try and get you to stay but we've got to deliver the promise and people are very sensitive to hold on that's what you said when when you tried to get me to come or that's what you're now saying to try and make me stay i'm looking at my my make-believe calendar on my watch here you know that was a month ago you said that that was two months ago you said that people are very alert so i'm also which is actually one of the reasons that i was aware of who you were anyway but it also then triggered me off was um a book from incremental to exponential i don't know if i've even said that correctly but i'd love to hear about the thinking that went into it and what it means to you and why i might want to read it and maybe i'd want to pronounce it correctly and if you could say you talk about it yeah yeah no i mean so uh there's a story here that goes back to 1992 actually so in 1992 um i did my first startup and it was a company that was set up by ibm and credit suisse so 80 owned by them 20 by employees and they did a cobalt generator basically so you drew some pictures and it turned out cobalt and i happened to be the second employee in europe this was based in north carolina this business i happened to be the second employee in europe and the cto the chief technology officer with this guy called vivek who had come out of credit suisse a massive technology brain um who had actually built this cobalt generator so um fast forward as we've gone through the and so here the cto our sales technical support sales support in europe here with cto and we rolled it out to you know lloyd's bank robbing scotland uh dansko bank in denmark and so on small startup environment lots of energy i was there for about five years and we stayed in touch me and vivek and vivek did a number of startups then he went into um academia carnegie mellon harvard and as we stayed in touch we had differing views on the world of disruption and innovation so i was having my career with csc and accenture and ibm and i was saying to him that actually the winners in this world of creating innovation is the big organizations and he was saying you're smoking something because the startups of the world is where all of the innovation will come from and you know we we had this view until at one stage in 2018 we were having this conversation and he said i agree with you actually if there's a star if there's a starting gun and you've got a brand new startup with the best talent and you've got an existing organization and they both went at it if the existing organization got a few things right they would nail it and so we then decided to basically do research on that uh and i was at ibm at the time and then moved to capita and he he's still at carnegie mellon in harvard and we came at it from the academia example and from my examples of doing big disruptive projects in the canadian railways or united states uh ministry of defense or bank of america and he was doing it from you know what he was doing with some of the government work and so on and we came up with loads of examples of actually if you nail it if you meet particular criteria as a large organization you can really nail what disruption looks like and by the way you know because of technology getting faster smaller and cheaper and the convergence of lots of exponential things happening at the same time we're about to go through a golden age of innovation so whether you like it or not the amount of change that we're going through right now is the least amount of change we'll go through for the rest of our careers and so we thought we'd write a book um and he'd be he'd been telling me this is his fifth or sixth book he's been telling me to write a book forever and uh in the end he said i'll tell you what i'll write it with you uh and and the the the best thing about the book of course is when the book was published and i gave it to my mum it was the first time she realized or recognized what i did for a living and i'm 55. right so i expected my whole life when my mom said i still don't know what you do that's hilarious well whether or not she read the book what she my son has got a book exactly that's exactly right he will be he must be doing something right he's going to be won't be reading it or understanding it probably but he's got a book that's exactly i think how my mom reacted to it she went that's lovely showed all the friends and family year in have you read it oh no but i'm so proud of you so if um who's your audience for that who who do you want we started off actually as um business leaders in large enterprises so vivec goes around i mean from from a client perspective i'm going around for example i was talking to cabinet office last week or other big organizations of how can you manage innovation and disruption the vet goes around doing the same thing as a consultant to governments and other organizations so it was it started off with this is what we've learned this is what we should pick up but what's becoming clear is that in some countries and in india for example it's just been published i think i think they are looking to use it as a academic texts for some of the nba type of um sort of demographic as well right okay i mean i know when you say he's written six books i i always i had dave ulrich on um the podcast who's the hr group and he's i think he's over 30 books and i did end up sort of i know and i just kind of went um i sense dave that you might not have a television because while i'm watching while i'm watching friends you're obviously writing a book there are just some people that are ahead of the game on those kind of things so funny somebody says six i go god damn it i've got a long way to go so um in terms of the future for you when you kind of think of i mean i feel this energy in you i feel this you know while the challenge is there i'm definitely going to get stuck into it and you know we're going to announce that you're leaving somewhere like that but you know what what are you hoping for maybe that's the question what are you hoping that the the challenges bring you and you know if i speak to you in four or five years what what what might i hear yeah well i think it starts with this view that i honestly believed about this golden age of innovation and i honestly believe it's going to be for the good so if you think about um i was reading somewhere that if you think about the first human genome project cost 3 billion dollars took 15 years and now you can get sequence the human genome for less than 500 if you thought if you think about that as the track of how accessible some of this is of you know the water salination projects um three 4g 5g available everywhere in the world so everybody becomes part of the community um the technology and all of these emerging themes coming to the fore i think it's gonna be for the good now in that environment it does mean i think that every business every industry jobs gets disrupted and in and we will create an environment which will change the way that we live and work and so as i look back in five years time when we talk again guy i want to say that i was involved in some of those things that changed the way that we lived and work and not an observer of it and i think that's the opportunity for everybody in the workforce i think even the people who think their jobs are going to be disrupted and we did some research with this with london business school you know they have a great opportunity to reskill to do one of the new jobs that are going to come around right i mean an uber driver is a new job that never exists in data science is a new job social media monitor is a new there's all sorts of things that are going to be created and i think you know it's going to be fantastic to be engaged in some of that disruption across different industries and i have a sense that you you will be so i'm looking forward to following you vicariously from from the sidelines so listen i'm alert to time and you know i i have a sense that you know i always i've said this now about three times on my podcast which is you know with with the right um the right food in front of us we could i could continue this conversation and use until you say guy you really must go now so so but i'm just going to thank you for just taking the time out to have a conversation i've hugely enjoyed it so i'm just going to ask you to stay on for a few moments while i shut everything down just on a personal note just thank you so much for making that investment really appreciated no brilliant i enjoyed it as well as you said we could have chatted for a long while yeah maybe there'll be a number two but we'll go from there yeah yeah definitely definitely[Music] foreign