a16z Podcast - Systems Leadership for Disruptors and Incumbents
Episode Date: July 24, 2021There's been a false dichotomy in technology and management lore over the past decade, between "brain" and "brawn", digital and physical, independence and interdependence, software culture versus indu...strial culture… or so observes Stanford Graduate School of Business lecturer, former big-company executive, and startup founder Robert Siegel in his new book, The Brains and Brawn Company: How leading organizations blend the best of digital and physical.Whether you're an early startup or a Fortune 500 company, we live in an increasingly complex world -- which means embracing digitization is not enough. But logistics, supply chains, and infrastructure are messy, ugly, and hard. So today's leaders have to think completely differently, in terms of ecosystems; and they're often in the position of having to influence but not have control. So when and how do they assert power in an ecosystem? When do they try to shape it? When do they sit back? What to do if their channel partner suddenly changes? When do you want to stay frenemies and when do you wanna be enemies? These are just some of the hard questions companies today have to wrestle with... All boiling down to when and where to partner, when to go it alone?So in this hallway-style discussion among Siegel and fellow Stanford b-school lecturers Jeffrey Immelt (former CEO of GE) and a16z general partner Jeff Jordan -- in conversation with host Sonal Chokshi -- the group wrestles with these questions, spinning through several different company examples such as Instacart and Stripe to Apple and Android/Google to Disney, Peloton, and others. But we talk too much about the outliers; we need to also talk more about the tools, and mindsets, that leaders of all kinds -- not just the once-in-a-generation leaders! -- can use. After all, argues Siegel, "Incumbents are not doomed and disruptors are not ordained." The views expressed here are those of the AH Capital Management, L.L.C. (“a16z”) personnel quoted and are not the views of a16z or its affiliates. Certain information contained in here has been obtained from third-party sources, including from portfolio companies of funds managed by a16z. While taken from sources believed to be reliable, a16z has not independently verified such information and makes no representations about the enduring accuracy of the information or its appropriateness for a given situation. In addition, this content may include third-party advertisements; a16z has not reviewed such advertisements and does not endorse any advertising content contained therein.This content is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. You should consult your own advisers as to those matters. References to any securities or digital assets are for illustrative purposes only, and do not constitute an investment recommendation or offer to provide investment advisory services. Furthermore, this content is not directed at nor intended for use by any investors or prospective investors, and may not under any circumstances be relied upon when making a decision to invest in any fund managed by a16z. (An offering to invest in an a16z fund will be made only by the private placement memorandum, subscription agreement, and other relevant documentation of any such fund and should be read in their entirety.) Any investments or portfolio companies mentioned, referred to, or described are not representative of all investments in vehicles managed by a16z, and there can be no assurance that the investments will be profitable or that other investments made in the future will have similar characteristics or results. A list of investments made by funds managed by Andreessen Horowitz (excluding investments for which the issuer has not provided permission for a16z to disclose publicly as well as unannounced investments in publicly traded digital assets) is available at https://a16z.com/investments/.Charts and graphs provided within are for informational purposes solely and should not be relied upon when making any investment decision. Past performance is not indicative of future results. The content speaks only as of the date indicated. Any projections, estimates, forecasts, targets, prospects, and/or opinions expressed in these materials are subject to change without notice and may differ or be contrary to opinions expressed by others. Please see https://a16z.com/disclosures for additional important information.
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Hi, everyone. Welcome to the A6 and Z podcast. I'm Sonal, and I'm excited for us to be back after a bit of a
hiatus here. We have some new and exciting things coming to this feed, so stay tuned for more.
But today, we have a new episode for you, one of our special book launch episodes, the first
podcast on the new book coming out next week, called The Brains and Braun Company,
how leading organizations blend the best of digital and physical. It's by Robert.
Segal, who's a lecture at Stanford Graduate School of Business, former startup founder and entrepreneur,
and former exec at GE, Intel and other companies. Fun fact, he was also the lead researcher
for Andy Groves' Only the Paranoid Survive, which is sort of a theme here. And joining us are
also Jeffrey Immelt, former CEO of GE, aka General Electric. And finally, we have A6 and Z general
partner, Jeff Jordan. The conversation that follows is a hallway style combo.
between the three of them, as all of them teach on business management at Stanford Business School,
and I joined to ask questions from the book. And just for quick context, the brain and the brawn,
in the title of the book, actually argue for key qualities that companies have to have to succeed,
whether you're a startup or an incumbent, including things like leveraging size and scale and more.
In our conversation, which covers the theme of systems leadership, we focus mainly on logistics,
ecosystems and partnerships because it's so top of mind for so many companies.
And we also include examples of various companies briefly throughout, from Instacart and
Stripe to Apple and Android, Google, to Disney and Peloton and more.
On that note, as a reminder, nothing in here is investment advice.
Please see A6NZ.com slash disclosures for more information.
But we begin with the three of them jamming briefly on mindset shifts and the difference
between influence and control.
The first voice you'll hear is Robert, followed by Jeffrey Immeltz,
and then Jeff Jordan's voice will come in after theirs.
So I think there's been a false dichotomy in Silicon Valley over the last decade.
And we saw it in two of the courses that I teach at the Graduate School of Business Systems
Leadership, which I teach with Jeff Immelt and Industrial's Dilemma,
where we saw that companies, no matter what you make, every product and service is going
to need to blend the capabilities and competencies of organizations that do digital
and do physical. And students talk about the economic rents and the profit pools that might be
aggregating to the companies here in Silicon Valley. And yet, the leaders of the next two decades
are going to be living in an increasingly complex world, where things are manufactured,
how they're manufactured, how the products create ongoing relationships with customers because
they're connected. Incumbents are not doomed and disruptors are not ordained. And so incumbents need to
understand how software is changing and impacting connected products. But by the same token,
and software companies need to understand what it's like to actually have to deal with
hard things like logistics and supply chain, which are messy and ugly and hard. You have to think
completely differently. And the notion of digitization, it's necessary, but it's not sufficient.
Yeah. Rob and I have taught this course together for four years, and we always teach at least
one class with the manufacturing CEO. And the students look at him or her, like they've landed
from Mars. They don't know what milling machines are and things like that. We're raising
a generation of people who are completely fixated on one world, but have no affinities for the
physical world. And yet, a lot of their future is going to be wrapped up with that.
There's almost this notion of, oh, well, I can make something somewhere else, but I'll take the
high margin software stuff. But if you're going to design great products, you really need to
understand how your customers use your products, how the channel uses your products, what happens
when you layer software and design it into a product from the beginning. I think that the surprise
that people realize they have to see the whole system. They have to understand kind of the secondary
and tertiary effects of what happens when everything's connected. You know, a lot of the companies I work
with are what my partner, Alex Rampel calls Oto-O, which is online to offline. eBay was you'd buy
something online, but there was offline fulfillment. Airbnb has the same thing. Chef has the same thing.
Obviously, start with brains, the online part, but there's an enormous amount of brawn involved
in delivering the actual physical service.
And the challenge that a lot of the companies I work with have
is they don't actually control the logistics.
They have to influence the logistics and enable the logistics to be successful.
Instacart only works if the groceries actually show up at your door,
but it's not an Instacart employee.
It's Instacart driven by some very intelligent software
that optimizes the experience and enables them to do the magic act
of getting groceries in front of you within two hours
from the time you order it online.
But when I was at the Disney store,
we put the apparel into the store.
Now the community of users
is executing on the transaction.
You know, I think the last 40 years of strategy
was about the or,
which was pick your business, stay focused.
It was more about what you couldn't do
or shouldn't do.
Strategy today, and a key part of the system's leadership
is about the end.
You know, it's about doing this and that.
One of the CEOs we had this year
was to see a Peloton. At every turn, his VCs told him, don't backward integrate. Don't be an
installation. Don't get into content. Yet he did them all. So I think we're in the Ann generation.
Whether you're a legacy company or you're a startup, that's what you have to be thinking about,
either as part of an ecosystem or do it yourself. And I think that's a key point because very
few companies can do it all themselves. In fact, people will hold up Tesla and Apple and say,
look, they're doing everything. That's great if you're Steve,
Jobs, Tim Cook or Elon, but most companies can't do it.
So you're going to end up doing some level of partnering with other people.
And so the question leaders need to ask themselves, what are the things they need to bring
in house that they need to own because it's kind of part of that core competency?
But where can they more effectively partner with others to still deliver that great
experience to customers?
And when Jeff Jordan talked about kind of being able to influence other parts of the
ecosystem, that's actually a key thing that leaders need to figure out to do if they don't
control the resources and the assets.
I would put Apple in that bucket.
One is they don't do any of the manufacturing.
All they do is design it in California and then it's fulfilled globally.
And secondly, the App Store is full of third-party developers who Apple enables and takes a high cut of their sales.
They're orchestrating multiple ecosystems.
I would push back on that.
Apple controls more things than most companies, right?
Look at the store.
Everything's got to get approved and compare it to Google Play and compare it with the open nature of that, which is more open than the Apple Store.
look at Apple designing its own silicon.
Look at how they actually make people have green bubbles in iMessage.
85% of the planet uses Android, and Apple does everything they can to make sure that people
who use Android have a horrible experience.
Apple's trying very, very hard to control things much more so than most companies can.
And so I think one of the things leaders need to ask themselves is, do I have that level
of control the way Apple can?
And if not, how do I deliver a great experience to my customers?
I think you guys are both right.
And in your book, you have this really great matrix.
the two-by-two, which talks about this idea of ecosystems.
And this is exactly where I want to focus for a bit of ecosystems and partnerships.
I mean, Jeff is absolutely right.
Apple does, in fact, sit counter to many narratives at the heart of interdependent ecosystems.
But to your point, Robert, it's actually about how much influence and power they have.
Like, many of those players are actually more subservient in that ecosystem than they are really
in control.
And that's a really important distinction.
And you're absolutely right when you talk about the idea of that.
them owning most of that, as does Tesla.
That's like, what, 80% vertically integrated?
So along those lines, let's give more texture to this exact debate,
because I bet you a lot of people who are listening are at the very heart of these questions.
So do you want to actually quickly give that two-by-two matrix that you have in your book?
Absolutely.
So the matrix is actually based upon some research that was done by Professor Robert Bergelman,
who was a colleague of the three of ours at the Graduate School of Business.
And what this really gets into is you look at relationships and strategic partnering.
and the two variables that matter are dependence and influence.
And when you look at two organizations, is somebody dependent?
You know, they've got higher or low dependence on another organization and their influence
is higher low.
And in the case of someone like Apple, if you're a supplier to Apple, you're generally
highly dependent upon Apple and your influence is probably pretty low.
And that's a horrible place to be because Apple can do whatever they want to you.
If you've got like a company where that's low dependence and low influence, it's kind
of almost strategic and difference.
The flip side of the Apple situation is if they have high dependence,
and low influence, which is what they have on a lot of their suppliers, they're strategically
dominant. That's a great place to be. But the best quadrant to be, I would argue, is where both
parties actually need each other and want each other, where there's high dependence and high
influence. And that's where you get strategic interdependence. And that's where you can actually
do things better together than you could apart. In the book, one of the things I talk about is like
how Instacart, they've actually got a very complex foresighted market, if you think about it.
They've got the grocery stores that they get the groceries from. They've got their customers, the
buyers who use the app to order the groceries. You've got the shoppers who actually then go out
and pick the goods. And then you actually have the CPG companies who can now actually really
understand at a holistic level where products are selling, how they're selling, and why.
And the team at Instacart has done a really good job of trying to understand where they have
high dependence and where they have low dependence, where they have high influence and
low influence, develop some really important strategic partnerships and relationships.
I mean, it's fascinating. CPG companies have monster advertising budgets and they largely, I mean,
Who is it, Watermaker said, I waste half my advertising.
I don't know which half it is.
It turns out in CPG, they don't know how any of it performs.
Instacart gives them a unique ability, actionable ROI-based advertising.
It's basically performance marketing for the CPG players because Insacart can tell you,
if they got an offer, did they buy it?
What did they buy the next time?
Did they influence the long-term behavior?
And so the CPG players basically got AdWords for consumer products, and they love it.
And that's the way leaders need to be thinking when you can't do everything yourself,
you want to actually be as strategically dominant as possible and or be strategically interdependent
and avoid being strategically subordinate.
So you describe those four sides of the Instacart marketplaces, you know, the customers slash buyers,
the shoppers, the grocery stores slash retailers, the CPGs or the consumer package goods
companies, which pretty much supply the shelves with all the kinds of things we eat and use.
If you think about a person who has the experience of going to a grocery store,
or let's say a shopper who goes to the grocery store,
the ability to easily get what someone has ordered is pretty critical.
Like, that's something many people saw during the pandemic.
I just want to kind of drive home the picture of how that system comes together.
I think we see that in a couple of different ways as customers.
If I'm a customer of Instacart and I want to get a particular type of lemonade
or a particular type of cookie, I want to make sure that the shopper can actually get it quickly.
And logistics, which historically has been a very back-end thing, becomes kind of a front-end thing, right?
That's where you get the system-level nature of digital plus physical blending together,
where you really have to understand how all of these things will fit.
And exactly to your point, to make that work, you've got to make sure that you're partnering
with all the right people, that the shoppers in the stores can get things quickly and easily
to get it as you quickly and easily, that the person who's doing it at Target can actually do that for you as well.
By the way, there was a very big outstanding question, could they ever do?
do it profitably. And the Instacart team, they figured out how to use software to drive efficiencies
in the brawn in the stores. It was 10,000 innovations that took a penny each out of the thing.
So an example for me would just be checkout. Simple example. Checkout used to be the Instacart
shopper who didn't have a deal with the store. It would go wait in line with everyone else
and, you know, take 20 minutes to get to the front of the line and pay. Then they did deals with
the stores and they got a dedicated shopping lane. The next step is, why do you have to go through
the checkout at all? They're scanning each item as they pull them off of the shelf. Why don't you
calculate the cost of the basket there obviate the need to re-checkout? Because that's essentially
what you're doing. And each of those steps took meaningful chunks of time off of the service,
but taking time off of the service, making the shopper more efficient can make it a better price for the
consumer. And so it's this constant rolling optimization using the digital expertise to have the
physical improvement. Change happens slowly and then all at once. So in order to understand
Instacart, you need to understand Webvan and all the progress. So this has been like a 20-year
startup process. There are no bad ideas in venture, just bad timing. It turned out Webvan didn't
have smartphones. So how can their shoppers be smart? But I would argue that that is a
fundamental blind spot of this place, the dismissiveness that comes from, you know, how we talk about
older industries. Oh, you're wrong. Exactly. This is when they look at us and say, okay, boomer.
And I'm like, no, dude, I'm like OG Gen X. And you're not even smart enough to do the math to figure
out that I'm Gen X. I was just going to say that. So I totally agree that timing is everything.
But the other key point, though, here is in the micro, not just on this macro scale of time.
One of the points you made, Robert, in your book, about that matrix is how actually Instacart started at sort of the least, like there wasn't that much power because of how they started, which a lot of startups do.
You can actually change where you are in that matrix quadrant-wise as you evolve as a company.
Because a company has more success. They have the ability to have more influence on their partners, right?
What might have started as a subordinate relationship can become a dominant relationship.
So you kind of have to see that constant movement, not only as your role changes in an industry,
but also how other players might start to pay attention to what's happening, especially as you show them the success.
Another great example of this is government becomes more important.
You might become dominant over some players, but then all of a sudden you might become
subordinate again to others who suddenly come into your ecosystem.
I mean, there's some business models that the long-term evil plan is to go from subordinate to dominant.
At Open Table, early on, we had to beg restaurants to use this because we didn't have a diner network.
And the only value prop was operational efficiency, essentially.
My partner Chris Dixon calls it, come for the tools, stay for the network.
In a city over time, as we build out a selection of restaurants using it for operational efficiency,
all of a sudden it develops utility for the diner.
And the diner can do lead gen and book restaurants digitally, which they love.
then that means open table suddenly is pushing revenue into the restaurants that use the service
and taking revenue from the restaurants who aren't using the service because of the convenience of the app.
And the power dynamic went from 100% restaurants to 99% open table over time.
I'll tell you, in 2006, Jobs was launching the iPhone and needed content.
And the two most desirable properties were 30 Rock and Saturday Night Live, both of which GE,
NBC owned. So we actually asked for the $9 price point. And that was the one moment where we had
power versus subsequent 20 years where that power has dissipated to everybody else.
It reminds me of Disney days way back when I worked at Disney in the 90s. The studios were furious
that cable television had been built on top of their content, just repackaging their content
and all of the value move from the studios into the HBOs of the world.
And I remember Barry Diller at Sun Valley one year saying,
we're never going to let that happen again.
It's not going to go.
And he was on stage with Mark, Drison, who said,
Barry, it's already happened.
The barn doors open.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
What's also really poignant about those examples, though,
and this kind of goes to a point that Robert brought up earlier
and brings up in his book,
is this idea that incumbents don't have to be the submissives
and startups don't have to be the dominance. Sometimes these things can also evolve as we talked
about, but they can also flip. And one interesting example that comes to mind for me when you guys
are just talking about these two examples is how for years people talked about how the content
companies were so slow to come to streaming. And then they had efforts like Hulu and they tried
these things. They weren't as successful as Netflix. But then all of a sudden, Disney, like the oldest
company in the lot, they were so slow to come to streaming. And now at Disney Plus, they
are freaking rocking it. And it's a great example of how, frankly, everyone always said content is
king. And for a while, we were like, no, no, technology is king. And honestly, like, you look at all
these apps, they're not that great. They're not as usable as Netflix. You know, they're not as
reliable or consistent on the buffering side. It doesn't matter. They have the content we won. And
they're kind of dominating right now, at least on many views. So what's interesting to I would argue
Netflix showed the way on that, right? Oh, no question. So it can be fleeting. When I look at the whole
fintech revolution and all the great companies are being created. You do sit back sometimes and say,
why can't J.P. Morgan do this or Coleman Sachs or somebody who has a deep domain, you know.
I was having the same thought as the person at eBay who bought PayPal and managed it early,
how in the world did Stripe win the consumer in that world? PayPal did not provide developers
with a high quality service, did not innovate in the consumer side because they wanted their payment
mark versus just accepting any payment. By the way, Goldman has over 10,000 computer engineers.
And then finally came out with Marcus a couple weeks ago. And getting PayPal and all the other
financial players just got caught flat-footed. Good leaders actually know where the pressure
points are and try to kind of get the power as quickly as they can. I tell my students and my friends,
I think most of us underestimated badly the way that technology would create, and almost
every industry, really. I wish in 1999, I had spent a year or two in Silicon Valley before I became
COG. Jeff, can I ask you a quick aside on that because you brought it up. I think it's so compelling
that you said that. Honest question, the problem with a lot of the big companies that try to innovate
isn't that they don't know these things are coming. So in many ways, it's not as if you and others
would not have known how important technology was, it seems a challenge is really how to bring
it in. And of course, it goes to the classic innovators dilemma, all those classic frames.
And because it's not like people don't know that this is happening. And in fact, the book opens
with Robert is tired of hearing companies say they must embrace digital transformation, you know?
Yeah, look, I think it's more profound paranoia for sure. But I think it's also, what was the next
generation of talent? What did they look like? How do they want to be paid? And this notion that
you just have to be willing to do whatever it takes to win. You know, markets rule, right?
Like, I was one of the early guys with Hulu, but Comcast said, if you keep growing Hulu,
this is before they owned NBC, we're going to pull the plug on all your content.
And instead of saying, hey, screw you, we're going to do it anyhow.
We said, okay, guys, whatever you say, we're going to hold back Hulu and let Netflix kill us, right?
So you have to almost run it inside a corporate structure, but you have to give it enough autonomy
to have its own currency, have its own culture, and that's hard to do.
And that's one of the things we try to flag in the classes, was NBC just structurally challenged to make Hulu bigger than Netflix?
Or is there going to be a new generation of legacy players that actually figure out how to be some of these next generation leaders?
Yeah, you know, Hulu was a challenge because one, you needed the breadth of content.
And so you needed multiple studios.
And I remember talking to Jason Kilar before he took the job.
He said, hey, I'm thinking of doing a CEO gig where I have three studios at control.
my destiny. That does not sound like a stable proposition.
Yeah, that's hard. The Hulu mentioned is also incredibly ironic because of the recent news
that Jason who went to Warner, now Warner is bringing in discovery. I forgot the gentleman
who runs that. Do you guys remember his name?
David Sassel? Yes, thank you. So it's kind of ironic because we're now seeing another
turn in another direction. But that was really helpful to hear Jeffrey. I'm really glad you
shared that context. Can we talk more specifically now about what are the questions that companies
have to have. What I'm really hearing is that there's this huge spectrum of where and this two by two
of where companies can go. They can themselves evolve. The environment can evolve. They wrestle with
these questions. When do they assert their power in an ecosystem? When do they try to shape? When do they
sit back? What to do if their channel partner suddenly changes? When do you want to stay frenemies and
when do you want to be enemies? These are like the existential questions that companies have. Can you
I share some more specifics or examples from your own work or observations here that might help
our listeners navigate some of these?
All right, let me give a couple of ways that leaders can think about it, and then we'll
get into a specific example.
A couple of really good tools that leaders can use is to draw both an influence map and a
heat map in their industry.
And in an influence map, you basically lay out everybody in your ecosystem and understand
who's really driving who.
When if you see that picture holistically, you understand who's really applying for.
pressure and who's under pressure. And very few leaders in my experience really understand that
80,000 foot view of how everybody are interacting with each other. The second thing you can do is you can
layer on top of that what we'll call a heat map, which is like who's under stress and why.
And if you can understand who's under stress and why, you can probably anticipate some of their
likely reactions, rational and irrational. So to your question, someone, you asked us, what's the point
that you do this or do that? There is no recipe. It's kind of one of those constant things you have to be
doing as a leader, is kind of going back, whether it's every two weeks, four weeks, six
weeks, eight weeks, and asking yourself, is the world today as you think it is, or has it
changed? And also, then, how will you know? In the book, one of the things I look at is Android,
because I find that just a fascinating study about shaping your ecosystem, here you've got a
company in Google and Alphabet that owns Android that basically they don't own. It's open source.
Anybody can do it whatever they want. And then they've got this complex ecosystem where
You've got handset makers, you've got carriers, you've got application developers, you've got
governments, you've got suppliers and components.
And so the leadership of Android has actually a pretty advanced view of all of the players
that they need to kind of shape and understand, you know, what's the market like in India
and how do they make sure that Android can be suitable for that market?
How do they develop something like Pixel as a phone?
It's got very small market segment share.
But yet, by the same token, Pixel kind of shows best practices for blending.
hardware and software. And then Google gives those learnings away to companies so they can make
their phones and handsets better. They have to think through of what happens when technology
gets embedded in things like automobiles and smart speakers. Your interface to those devices
might be voice. The Android team may not control the app that controls the voice. How do they
work well with them? And so if you kind of go back to that notion of understanding influence maps
and heat maps, think of that as kind of that constant rhythm that you as a leader need to be doing.
And by the way, how has that changed over time as Android got bigger and bigger and now has almost
85% market segment share on a global basis?
Back when I was at Disney, I started in the strategic planning group working ironically for Meg
Wibben.
And one of the tasks I was responsible with was building the annual five-year plan.
And it was a shitload of work.
I don't know if Disney still does a five-year plan.
Of all the like 40 portfolio companies I support, not one does anything longer than an annual
budget. And that's just largely for financial planning and performance management purposes.
It's kind of like day or week. You are constantly revising based on new assumptions,
new information. So that is a difference. Another difference is I think in the industrial
economy, you get the three beer companies and the four petroleum companies and things like that.
Technology is winner-take-all against your direct competitors, not your ecosystem. So you've got to
play a whole lot more offense than defense. And it's trying to figure out, okay, I would
rather go down in flames trying to win than settling for a middling outcome. It may not be
still true on the planning horizon, but it's pretty starkly different. Yeah. Rod's point was do a real
thorough kind of who makes the money in an industry. What are the dynamics of the industry and who
makes the money? And then Jeff said some people just have a killer instinct for markets. You know who
they are, and they say, look, I don't care what it takes. I'm going to do it all. But it's always
helpful to show both sides of the story. We always teach a healthcare class every year, because
healthcare is a really complicated ecosystem. It's also a place where the legacy players have
really won so far in a big way, because they know how to use complexity and scale to their advantage.
You know, the leading healthcare IT company is a company called Epic. It's old technology. They're like
the main leaders in electronic medical records, EMRs.
Yeah, they do it town by town.
They have huge barriers to entry.
So you sit back at all these great companies, Google and Microsoft,
they're bit players in healthcare.
They really haven't penetrated at all because the incumbents know how to use scale
and incumbency and all the things that go with their legacy to their advantage
and not a disadvantage.
Also regulatory capture.
Jeff Immelt is fond of saying in our class,
government is your new business partner.
And so again, I want to come back to systems.
Blending brains and brawn, you need to understand
government's going to get more and more involved
as software continues to get layered into everything.
And if you only think of just the software,
you won't see the whole picture of what's happening.
And so which is government?
Brains are brawned.
I would argue it's a little bit of both, Jeff.
I'd say mainly brawn.
I was going to go with neither, but that's...
All right, but let me see if I can convince you
of a different point of view.
If you look at ecosystems, right, all of a sudden, government is a part of your ecosystem that you need to know how to manage.
And to me, that's a brawny tendency because that's about how you shape it, how you influence dependence, et cetera.
The best example I gave on that, interestingly enough, is Bernard Tyson, when he was alive, the former CEO of Kaiser Permanente.
In the book, we talk about radical empathy almost.
Bernard had empathy for all his doctors, his nurses, his patients, you know, the communities in which he operated.
but he actually talked about empathy for government, which I found really interesting because he said when he would talk to people in Washington, whether they were Democrats or Republicans, even though he had his own political views, he knew that he had to understand that they were trying to represent the interests of the people that they represented to the best of their abilities. And he had to kind of put himself in their shoes. Similarly, if you're dealing with a more authoritarian government that's got a capitalist nature, what are they trying to accomplish and why? You better make sure that you understand that if you're going to figure
how to lead your company in an increasingly connected world.
It makes me think of the whole debate that plays out right now between, you know,
stockholders and stakeholders and sort of the rise of ESG and all these other trends that are
coming out. But I do want to pull a couple more threads. So let me just go back for a moment to
this idea of follow the money. But one of the anecdotes that struck me is, you know, we talked
about Stripe earlier. And Alex Rampel tells a story of how when you first met the Collison brothers,
Patrick was sort of laying out this market that did not even exist.
Like there was no money. And they made this point, well, this customer doesn't actually exist
yet, but it's going to exist, which I think is one counter to that.
No, I think you're right. Jeff talked about, you know, the people who understand markets.
And Patrick Collison may be the smartest guest I've ever had in a class ever, right? So it's
almost like he's 18 Sigma to the right of the mean. And I almost think that Patrick Hollison
doesn't count. Yeah, I kind of agree. And so those are outliers. The question is the rest of
us mere mortals, how can we be successful and contribute to our companies and our teams? And so the ways
of thinking and the tools become ways that we can hopefully be effective in our jobs. It's interesting
the healthcare example, because even big companies banding together, like Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway.
And JP Morgan. Oh, right. J.P. Morgan. They did that effort. And we actually talked about this
in our podcast. It disbanded after like two years. I think anybody that knew healthcare, the day that
announced, yawned fundamentally, right?
You've got to see health care from the bottom up, not from the top down.
You know, I'm not saying it should be this way.
It's just the way it is.
There's a really complex ecosystem that you have to align.
You know, I could keep going on and on and on, because it is the classic case of brains and
Bron.
It's a classic case of digital innovation, biotechnical innovation that has to be delivered
through a government system with one doctor and one patient at one time.
But it's fascinating because, again, if you're talking about,
talk about this timing effect. And we talked about the web van Instacart example and the enabling
factors of smartphones. And while I would never overinflate a COVID pandemic effect, there is an
acceleration that comes from laying this digital infrastructure now where you can bypass these sort
of hardwired physical silos through soft systems like software. Along those lines straight, there's a
great example of a company, an API economy company. You see this modular ecosystem of all these
different players that has found a way to become like this digital layer, this digital supply
chain connecting everything everywhere. And yet they too struggled with whether to partner or
collaborate. Absolutely. So it used to be so hard to be able to take credit cards,
whether you were building a website or an app. And the Collison brothers made it so easy
for developers to drop in a few lines of code. You could then suddenly something that used
to take a month to get a merchant account set up, now took five minutes.
And so what Stripe enabled people to do and companies to do was to serve their customers
better and more quickly.
And that kind of got the ball rolling.
And what was hard for them in the early days was actually getting banks to pay attention to
them because they were this small startup.
But pretty soon they had 100,000 developers who had designed in the Stripe APIs.
So the scale they were able to get to, which was so frictionless, suddenly everyone had to pay
attention to them.
And then the challenge that Stripe faced was, you know, how quickly should they focus on
the core business and growing it. They called it growing the GDP of the internet versus going
into adjacent areas. And that became the real systems leader challenge now that we've unlocked
these doors because of APIs. How much do we just kind of stay focused on what's in front of us
versus getting into other areas and where do we figure out what do we want to do and where do we
want to partner? You described the case of what happened when they had this question about whether
to sell their service for Shopify or not. Right. So the question they were confronting in the case is
should they do a private label version of their product?
And they wanted everyone to have a Stripe account,
but Shopify needed certain things for its business and for its customer base.
They realized that by partnering with Shopify,
Stripe would actually grow so much larger
because they would be kind of a product and service provider
than trying to kind of have this religious mindset of,
we've got to have everybody has to have a Stripe account.
And so they had an assumption about how they should run their business,
but they were willing to rethink it.
Back to something that both Jeffs talked about earlier,
It's that notion of new data will come in in a world that's constantly evolving and software accelerates that.
Leaders need to step back and say, is there something that I need to do to take advantage of this new opportunity?
And am I better off by doing that by partnering than trying to do it on my own?
Right.
And you quote Christina Cordova, who we've actually had on this podcast as well.
She's brilliant, too, talking about those very questions.
When we talk about this spectrum from brain to brunt, independence to interdependence, you know, disruptor versus incumbent,
Startup versus Fortune 500.
You describe in your book,
technology culture versus industrial culture.
When do people know they're overdoing things?
When are they under on their partnerships
and when are they going alone?
Because some of the competencies between digital and physical are different,
most companies are going to need to partner more rather than less,
especially in the early days.
So for example, Target or even Home Depot on the retail side,
they needed to own their e-commerce interface with the customers,
and the data science teams, they needed to bring them in-house to understand how
what was happening e-commerce, how that shaped, how they not only laid out their
stores, but how they built their infrastructure for logistics.
That doesn't necessarily mean that they're going to build their own data centers and have
their own cloud, right?
The last thing I'll say is we talk about Tesla and Apple, but you can't, like, say,
okay, Elon can do it, so therefore we should do everything.
It's probably going to be one of those every century leaders that's going to
going to do it. The more systematic way to think about it is, what do you need to control because it's
the basis of competitive advantage? Where do you have the competencies in house? If you don't have
the competencies in house, can you like, you know, partner with somebody near term, but make sure
you're building it up long term inside of the organization? And what's your transition plan from when
you're going to partner outside and when you're going to bring it inside? I think talent is destiny
and a lot of the systems leadership. Let's see your Peloton and you say, look, I want to deliver the bikes
and install them.
That's a good aspiration.
You can debate that in a board meeting or things like that.
But if you decide to do that, you go to Bentonville and you recruit Walmart's best logistics
people and put them in place, right?
And that's what Jeff did in Amazon.
If your system's leader, the human resource aspect is really critical.
And you can build capability, but you have to be dedicated to talent.
And where companies get in trouble is they have the aspiration.
but they don't have the people that can pull it off.
Oh my God, I'm so glad you brought this up, Jeff.
We had Jeff Lawson, CEO of Twelio, on the podcast when he launched his book.
And one of the points he made, which I thought was really great,
is about how developers are creatives within organizations.
Every company now has developers and to really treat the talent like first-class citizens
where they're not just like getting specs thrown over the wall to build,
but actually I have a seat at the table early on to shape it.
It was a really key message in that podcast if you want to check that out.
And I really loved your line about talent is down.
destiny. That is such a powerful way to think about this entire question. Do you have any thoughts on
some lessons learned on this question of build versus buy? This, I'll take it. And they kind of
follow up on what Jeff Lawson from Twilio said, which is when it's an ERP system or CRM system
or some statement of record in the back room, you should buy that all day long, right? That's a
no-brainer. You know, everybody can do it better than we could, et cetera, et cetera. When it touches the
customer, right? When it's differentiating your product, touching the customer, determining your
market share, you know, you really have to be a builder at that point, whether you hire your
own developers or you take an equity stake of a company or you acquire a company. So I tended to
think about it sort of as a front room versus backroom. If it's just a way to kind of make yourself
more efficient, let's tap into the world that's out there. But where it really has to do with
differentiating the customer experience. That's something I want to own. He actually said what you're saying,
and I love that you're both saying it from different vantage points. He said that in a world where the
software you use is your source of competitive differentiation, the act of building is the act of
listening to your customer. I agree. You want to own the critical aspects of the business and not
dedicate your very scarce and valuable technology resources to the non-critical aspects. I mean,
Why spend a bunch of your hard, higher, expensive engineers' time rebuilding something that is very well built, unless it's a source of competitive advantage?
So let's talk now about what this means for how leaders think.
We've talked about it from the specific components of systems, the modularity, the partnerships and not partnering the digital physical blending.
What are the competencies?
How does a systems leader really navigate this world?
Like, how do they really survive and thrive?
And to your point, Robert in the book, break this dichotomy between brain versus brawn and
this kind of insularity sometimes that even some of the tech folks may have around software.
This really goes to the heart of this whole control versus influence question that we also
talked about. It's a very new set of competencies. But first, to kick us off, what is a systems leader?
That's actually great. That's where I was going to start. So a systems leader is somebody who
kind of blends the knowledge and competencies of both kind of what it takes to be successful and
the digital world and what it takes to be successful in the physical world and takes the best of both
and puts them together. A systems leader needs to simultaneously know how to manage both for the long
term and the short term, how to manage people as well as be competent in key technologies that
are coming and shaping our world like artificial intelligence and additive manufacturing,
etc. They need to be able to know how to manage internally inside of the organization and externally.
It's the ability to see what happens when different parts interact with each other inside of the company,
what happens when different functions do things?
If sales creates a new type of, you know, they sell something to a customer, what does that do to your manufacturing and your supply chain?
Similarly, even if you're in the finance group of your company, you need to understand what's happening outside of the four walls of your company to understand what might be shaping the numbers.
So the first thing about systems leaders is really understanding kind of this duality of what happens when things interact with each other.
When Jeff and I have done the class, we've talked about how there are four key attributes that systems leaders have that are,
strong. The first is they have the ability to operate at intersections. They understand how to take
businesses that have innovative business models and innovative technology. That becomes a force multiplier
when you can combine both of those things. They understand how to have a platform that can operate
globally, but they can also be customized locally. I think the second thing that systems leaders really
can do is they can manage context. You know, Jeff talks about truth equals facts plus context. And that's just
one of those lines that Jeff taught me that really lands strongly. It's the ability to help your
team understand. Yeah, we have the facts about what's happening in our business, but it's the
context with which we understand it that defines how the world sees truth. And great systems leaders,
they own their narrative, they're storytellers. They know how to talk about that and give context
to the people around them. The third thing I think that systems leaders have is what we'll call a
product manager's mindset. Do you know what customers want? Do you know how the product can be built?
and do you understand what the sales organization needs to separate customers from their money?
Can you, you know, figure out how to kind of track the details of where things are at the product
from inception to ramp to even sunset?
And do you have the ability to influence resources inside of an organization even if you don't control those resources?
Because great product managers are responsible for everything and often they own nothing.
And the last thing, a mindset issue is I would say that going risk on during times of disruption.
because you know that when you come out the other side, the world's going to look very different.
And a great systems leader knows that in those times of volatility, you actually have to actually
play offense and not defense. So those are, I think, the four key things of what systems
need you need to do. Operated intersections, manage context, have a product manager's mindset,
and go risk on during times of disruption. That's fantastic summary. Jeff Emmett,
can you just explain that phrase that truth equals facts plus context?
So we live in a world without nuance, but most of leadership is nuance, right?
So let's take China.
Here's the facts about China.
It's been a hard place to do business.
Intellectual property theft has been a real concern.
It's been difficult to penetrate the market.
It's outsourced low-cost labor for a long time.
Those are facts.
What's the context?
It's the world's biggest car market.
It's going to be the biggest consumer of aviation products.
It's going to be the biggest consumer of health care products.
If you believe in climate change, it's going to be fixed there before the U.S.
They're going to influence the rest of the world.
That's the context.
So what's the truth?
Is the truth that we're at war with China, that they're the enemy, things like that.
So I think it's always important in a world without nuance to understand the nuance.
I throw the example of China, but I could go down almost any other example.
And really, it's not a Republican or Democrat.
I love my country.
I'm an American, true and true.
but no American government is going to protect you from China.
If you're going to live a world in the business world, you better learn how to do business there.
I love that you talked about nuance.
You know, you're the one in this room who's led like one of the world's oldest companies,
very long, stable entity.
Like, how do you think about systems leadership question?
You know, so I ran a conglomerate, one of the last of its kind,
and you're trained to look horizontally when you run like a multi-business structure.
So you're trying to find common themes and common platforms and things you can do together
that add value and scale to investors and customers.
The early form of systems leadership would be a company like GE financing its own products
and creating a GE capital, for instance.
So I always kind of was trained to do it and think about it in that context.
Now, the era that we live in, of kind of continuous disruption.
So you have to add this context of ecosystems and partnering and,
all the other things in this book.
I think Rob captured what we've worked on the last four years,
what we try to bring in the classroom.
I would add to it that most legacy companies have been built vertically.
You know, one business by functional leaders.
The world today is more of a horizontal world
where change is happening rapidly
and you've got to be able to look outside your own industry
or outside your own function to be effective.
And a lot of our classes just teaching students not to be a free.
of it to actually embrace it.
That's fantastic.
I love what you said.
I never thought of it as a conglomerate.
And I think it's really interesting you say that because in the world we're in today,
I often think to myself that the future of the firm is conglomerates.
Like, people are in denial that we live in this ecosystem this way.
Look, I'm one of these guys that looked at PayPal and eBay together as being stronger.
I love May.
I love John Donahoe.
I love Jeff.
I've known all the players.
But I look at it and say, shit, that's too bad.
actually made a lot of sense.
Oh, it did actually.
I agree with you, Jeff, completely.
It was funny.
John reached out when the activists were making his life miserable
and I asked to meet on a Saturday.
And I sat down and he goes,
listen, I'm getting all this pressure to separate them.
You're the person who managed them both.
What do you think?
And I was making the pitch.
Keep them together.
Keep them together.
In my view, everything ends up being a system.
And if you don't understand it and recognize it,
it will manage you.
What I loved about eBay was it was a self-contained system.
eBay was as close to a perfect economy as anything I've ever encountered.
And by way, I've talked to a number of economists, including the dean of the Stanford Business School,
who did research on eBay with respect to competition theory.
You change the pricing incentives.
It changes the quantity.
It changes the velocity.
Everything was connected.
And so my journey as a manager is there are other.
systems that you need to pay attention to, not just the objective system of your business,
but, you know, partnership ecosystems, the employee ecosystem. You make one change here and way over
there, things blow up. But how do you reconcile? This is a really hard question. I don't expect you
have an easy pat answer. But how do you reconcile this conflict, this kind of recurring theme that
you can't predict what's going to happen? The entire point of second and third order effects is
that they are not predictable. They often emerge bottom up versus top down. At the same time,
Robert, you've talked about frameworks for thinking about how to map things and have these heat maps
and you can certainly, you know, identify signals. I guess what my question is, how do you prepare
without over-preparing and preparing for the wrong things? You know, it's a great question. I think
the best leaders that we studied didn't presume to know the answer. What they did was they had ways
of running their companies and doing their jobs that allowed them to be ready to take advantage
of opportunities and challenges when they proposed themselves. The great leaders all talked about
the future of work. They were all aware of the fact that the organization was going to be changing
and they had to be thinking about what jobs in their company were going to be going away.
How did they think about retraining their staff to keep people effective? How was technology going
to be impacting everything from the front end to the back end? And they didn't just say,
okay, I'm going to let the tech team handle it.
They had an opinion on it.
They were also, we talk in the class about being aware of one's own bias.
The great leaders that we studied actually had people outside of the organizations that
they worked with.
Katrina Lake, now the chairman of Stitchvix, had this great line.
She would ask her staff every year or two, if you were hiring for your job today,
would you hire yourself?
And I always love that question because it kind of stops you in your tracks.
Like, had you kept yourself current with what's going on?
The last thing I'll say, this is something that Jeff Immelt taught me when I worked for him
at GE.
He talks about leader, know thyself.
And in my case, get me in front of the classroom.
I'm running up and down the aisles.
I'm having fun, tons of energy.
My passion's also my greatest development need because it can get me in trouble if I can't keep
it in line.
And so I think one of the things that leaders need to be able to do is to understand, like,
what are their strengths in development needs?
Can they look back at their past and say, when were they successful?
When were they lucky and when were they the right person for the job?
So I don't think that there's a panacea.
Like, don't try to predict the future because whatever you predict is going to be wrong.
But when a global pandemic hits, do you have the tools to know what to do at a moment in time?
I remember reading Jeff's comment on Leader Know Thyself.
I actually came to believe it wholeheartedly.
The way I've always framed it is everyone in the building knows your strength and weaknesses when you're the leader.
You might as well join the party because if you have the awareness of it, you know, there's a good chance.
you can do something about it. I did a blog post called leaving it on the field, using a sports
analogy about trying to managing a hypergrowth business. How do you scale yourself as an executive
and a leader? And almost all of it is self-awareness. And systems leadership in particular,
because you cannot be aware of that whole worldview if it's all internally, kind of narcissistically
focused versus outwardly ecosystem focused. Yeah, I know. It's a system. So if you know what you're
strong at and you know what you're not strong at, you recruit for it. You get the right partner.
You get the right complimentary, completely.
But you need to understand, like, your teammates, I'll stick with a sports analogy,
your teammates are going to have their strengths and their superpowers.
You've got to have to make sure that you understand a bit about their superpowers
so that you can blend the team together to make it work.
And I think that's the real role of a leader.
You become kind of that coach.
You become the general manager to put the best team on the court, the best team on the field to win.
Well, that's a great note to end on team.
Thank you, Robert, author of the new book, The Brains and Braun Company.
how leading organizations blend the best of digital and physical.
And thank you, Jeffrey Immelt, and Jeff Jordan.
Thank you all for joining the A6 and Z podcast.
Thank you.
Thank you for having us.
Thanks very much.
It's a real honor and a privilege.