Latest / The Action Catalyst / The Upside of Disruption, with Terence Mauri (AI, Technology, Leadership, Futurism)
Transcript
- 0:34Adam Outland: Today's guest is Terence Mauri, a global expert
- 0:38on the future of leadership, AI and disruption. He is the
- 0:41founder of the future trends think tank, Hack Future Lab, and
- 0:46also an acclaimed author. Mauri spearheads a movement for
- 0:49leaders to rethink leadership in a post AI world. His newest book
- 0:53is called The Upside of Disruption. It's out right now.
- 0:57Terence, great to meet you.
- 0:58Terence Mauri: Thank you so much, Adam for inviting me.
- 1:01Adam Outland: Absolutely. Well, listen, there's so many amazing
- 1:04present things to ask you about in terms of your work and the
- 1:07work you're doing this moment. But one of the things I always
- 1:10love hearing about from people who have generated a lot of
- 1:14success in life in their different paths, is their their
- 1:18roots and their beginnings.
- 1:19Terence Mauri: You know, the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard
- 1:22said that life is best lived forwards, but is best understood
- 1:26backwards. And I can really relate to that. I had my whole
- 1:29life and career mapped out in a very linear way. But as as
- 1:33another famous philosopher, Mike Tyson, once said, you can have
- 1:36the best laid plans until somebody punches you in the
- 1:40mouth, and this is what happened to me. So I had a successful
- 1:42career management consultancy. Things were going well. I was
- 1:46making good progress. One day, I walked into a store, it was in
- 1:51the middle of the day, and a car driver lost control and drove a
- 1:54car into the store. He mounted the car. It was actually a
- 1:57terrible accident. Nobody lost their lives that day, but many
- 2:01people were injured, including myself. I woke up under the car
- 2:05in the store with the wheel of the car still going, burning my
- 2:10legs. It was one of those kind of accidents where your life
- 2:14flashes past. You spent a number of weeks in hospital, and you
- 2:19know when you have time to think when you're out of the building,
- 2:22that's when you you get to reflect at a deeper level. And
- 2:26you know, for me, I really sort of it was a reawakening. I
- 2:28connected with, reconnected, actually, with, you know, my
- 2:31values, legacy, who I was, who I who I was becoming. And I
- 2:36realized there was a gap. There was a gap between who I wanted
- 2:39to become and what I was doing right now in the world of
- 2:42management consultancy, which is a very transactional world, a
- 2:45very profitable world, but I wanted to pivot to a
- 2:48transformational world, a world where actually, I could bring my
- 2:52life and my values to life in a visceral way and visible way as
- 2:56well. So that happened about 20 years ago, and since then, I've
- 3:01been on a mission, a higher mission, to inspire leaders
- 3:06around the world ranging from NGO and non for profit to S, p5
- 3:10100, to harness the upside of disruption. What I mean by that
- 3:16is, you know, sort of turning disruption. It could be career
- 3:19disruption, technology, disruption, industry,
- 3:22disruption, life, disruption, whatever the disruption is, big
- 3:25or small, life changing or professional. How do we turn
- 3:30that into a tailwind or a platform for focus, laser light,
- 3:36focus and strategic courage and a more sustainable values driven
- 3:42life.
- 3:43Adam Outland: There's a lot of risk in going out and doing
- 3:47something on your own, so I guess what kind of process did
- 3:51you go through?
- 3:53Terence Mauri: I think it's such a great question. It's what I
- 3:56call a catalytic question, and it's a question that we should
- 3:59all be thinking about, because our relationship with risk is
- 4:03often not a good one. Our appetite for risk taking is
- 4:07often squeezed out of us like a lemon from an early age. By the
- 4:11age we leave college, you know, we're risk averse, and then
- 4:15we've got this paradox of companies now demanding that
- 4:18we're all courageous risk takers, and it's there's a big
- 4:22rhetoric to reality gap there. And for me, I think that
- 4:25accident reconfigured my relationship with risk, that you
- 4:29know life is inherently risky. You can you can die at any
- 4:32moment. Basically the worst thing we can do is actually not
- 4:36take any risk, because being addicted to certainty can make
- 4:39us feel comfortable. But if that certainty is also causing a
- 4:43stagnation or inertia, we're not learning anymore. We're not
- 4:47moving anymore. We're accept accepting a status quo that's
- 4:51not healthy or does not giving us happiness. Well, that's not a
- 4:54good place to be, and we know that if you look at different
- 4:57statistics around the world, whether it's the game. Develop
- 5:00engagement survey. I mean, that hasn't changed for decades. Now,
- 5:04majority of the global workforce disengaged, but still go to
- 5:08work, but have mentally quit the job, right? You know, life is
- 5:10short, like we're lucky. We get about 960, months to live, which
- 5:14is just 80 years of age. And when you think of it that way,
- 5:16when I frame it that way, it's not to make people feel scared.
- 5:20It's this idea that it's never been easier to waste time and
- 5:24waste energy, because this is the age of abundance. Also, we
- 5:28have technology that's incredible, but technology can
- 5:31make the trivial seem urgent. Think about when you look at
- 5:35your day, reacting to emails all the day, everything seems
- 5:38exciting and urgent. Probably less than 5% is actually
- 5:41important. So I think for me, what it did was a couple of
- 5:45things. Number one, it was a great reawakening, and it helped
- 5:49me to reconnect with the idea that not taking a risk is a risk
- 5:54sometimes. Number two, that actually the world will always
- 5:59be uncertain, will always be volatile, and risk and reward
- 6:03always come together, wrapped together. We forget that risk
- 6:07and will reward travel in that same elevator, and sometimes we
- 6:11forget that actually, you know this idea that we always
- 6:14overestimate the risk of trying something new could be a new way
- 6:19of working. It could be taking a career break. It could be
- 6:22applying for a new job and a new sector, whatever it is, we
- 6:25always overestimate the risk of doing something new, and we
- 6:28always underestimate the risk of standing still.
- 6:32Adam Outland: I love that. You founded a Hack Future Lab, which
- 6:36is focused on future trends as a think tank. How do you define
- 6:40disruption?
- 6:41Terence Mauri: Disruption, for me, is a secular and structural
- 6:45here to stay, inflection point. But there's different types of
- 6:49disruptors out there. If we look at mega trends, for example,
- 6:51we've got optimizer reality that's moving from doing AI to
- 6:55being AI. That means, for example, five to five we're
- 6:59moving from IT spending as a percentage of global GDP, moving
- 7:03from five to 10% over the next seven years to optimize reality.
- 7:08That's a big here to stay, disruption that will impact and
- 7:11reshape and redefine value creation, but also redefine
- 7:16completely new industries and companies. Another example would
- 7:20be decarbonization, the whole the whole transition to the
- 7:24green economy around the world. So these are big bang
- 7:28disruptions, but if we take it down to a more granular level,
- 7:32you know, disruption can also be a family disruption. It could be
- 7:36a divorce, a sudden death. Could be a career type disruption. But
- 7:41actually, how we deal with them? I think it's this kind of point
- 7:46of view that asking this question, how do I turn these
- 7:49disruptors into platforms, into tailwinds? You know, how do we
- 7:53turn these into upside.
- 7:56Adam Outland: It's a great skill to have for anyone, but in
- 7:59particular for leaders, I feel like to be able to recognize
- 8:03that every obstacle has inside of itself the key to its own
- 8:06solution.
- 8:07Terence Mauri: I think so. I think constraints are often
- 8:10opportunities in disguise. You know, for example, Hermes, the
- 8:14global luxury company, one of the big constraints facing, you
- 8:19know, the fashion industry is this, you know, the idea that
- 8:23they're not sustainable business models. They waste a lot of a
- 8:27lot of money. They've got high carbon dioxide emissions. So for
- 8:31Hermes, what they've done is turn that constraint into upside
- 8:35by creating new strategic partnerships with biotech
- 8:38companies. They develop and kind of produce mycelium, which is a
- 8:44non leather based form of leather. It's kind of like a
- 8:47mushroom based type of leather, alternative to leather. And the
- 8:52big, the kind of big, audacious goal at Hermes now is that at
- 8:56least half its global revenues will be mycelium based leather
- 9:00by 2030 now, that wouldn't have happened without turning a
- 9:04disruption into a tailwind.
- 9:07Adam Outland: So you know, one of the big disruptors that we
- 9:10keep hearing that's AI. So how are you seeing leaders react to
- 9:15AI? And how can we best harness this trend without getting
- 9:20caught up in it?
- 9:21Terence Mauri: I think it's helpful to take a historical
- 9:23perspective first of all. So we go back to 1956 Professor Marvin
- 9:28Minsky, for example. He was one of the pioneers of AI. And
- 9:33originally it was going to be called Applied Statistics, but
- 9:36that wasn't sexy enough. I think there are three kind of time
- 9:40horizons to be aware of. So the first one was excitement phase.
- 9:44It took chat GBT two months to reach 100 100 million users. It
- 9:49took the cell phone 16 years to reach 100 million users. And so
- 9:54the excitement phase, I think, has happened over the last
- 9:56couple of years, especially, we've seen over a trillion
- 9:58dollars of CapEx going. To AI infrastructure, over two $50
- 10:02billion of VC money as well. That's going up exponentially.
- 10:06So at that excitement phase, we've now moved to the
- 10:09experimental phase, for example, T Mobile and open aI have just
- 10:14formed a partnership for a sort of proactive AI decision in
- 10:19making model that will be able to proactively help solve
- 10:23customers pain points. You know, three phases. Number one,
- 10:27excitement phase, exuberance. Excitement. Number two is the
- 10:31experimental phase that I believe we're in right now. The
- 10:35next phase, the next horizon, which we'll be entering over the
- 10:38next 18 months, is the embedded phase, and that's where, you
- 10:42know, actually AI eventually will be just become invisible.
- 10:45Every great technology, if it's truly great, should be
- 10:48invisible. It'll be embedded in our cell phones, in our
- 10:53toothbrushes, in our TVs. A trillion sensor economy
- 10:58connected together, amplifying intelligence, cross pollination,
- 11:04helping tackle some of the world's biggest existential
- 11:07challenges, from climate change to healthcare. And we're at the
- 11:10embryonic stage of that. But you it doesn't take much imagination
- 11:13to to think about where we're going with this over the next
- 11:17couple of years, that the the sort of cost of production, the
- 11:21cost of knowledge production, is going to reach zero in the next
- 11:2515 years. It would take you a lifetime to read 8 billion
- 11:30words. Now imagine that you know the fastest AI today can can do
- 11:35that in the blink of an eye, and again, we can start to see the
- 11:38exponential opportunity of this platform. But I want to say as
- 11:43well that we have to be careful of artificial idiocy. Am I
- 11:47investing in warm AI or cold AI? So warm AI is humanity first AI?
- 11:56It's a humanity first future enabled by AI. It maximizes,
- 12:02elevates what makes us more human, and it protects Well,
- 12:05being, loneliness, democracy, truth and transparency. That's
- 12:08warm. Ai, the bad news is right now, most governments, most
- 12:12organizations, are not investing in warm. Ai, they're investing
- 12:15in cold. AI, cold. AI is machine first future enabled by AI. It
- 12:22elevates division, disinformation, truth decay, it
- 12:27erodes well being. And so that's the difference. Are we investing
- 12:31in a warm tech future or a cold tech future?
- 12:37Adam Outland: For so many of our listeners that are business
- 12:40owners themselves. You talk about the return on
- 12:43intelligence, what are some things leaders can do to prepare
- 12:47their organizations for AI and adopt it effectively?
- 12:51Terence Mauri: What a great question. I think, the question
- 12:53every leader, every manager, should be thinking about right
- 12:56now, which is to use AI in the right way and an inclusive way,
- 13:01sustainable way, in a way that sharpens the growth and talent
- 13:04agenda. We should be thinking about ROI, which is not just
- 13:09return on investment, but this new human centric KBI, key
- 13:14behavior indicator, which is return on intelligence, return
- 13:19on imagination. Imagine a cognitively enabled enterprise
- 13:23where your talent gets to solve the biggest problems, the
- 13:26biggest challenges that it faces. That means 10x
- 13:31productivity, 10x engagement, 10x execution. We know that
- 13:36that's not the reality for most organizations right now. I just
- 13:39had an article published a few weeks ago in Fast Company called
- 13:42the rise of bore out, which is the opposite of burnout. Bore
- 13:46out is cognitive or emotional under load. It's boredom at
- 13:50work, and it's at record levels. And so if AI is just doing parts
- 13:54of the job which we're already doing, and what we're left with
- 13:57is other boring parts of the job that's not return on
- 14:00intelligence. And so that's a big question. We should be using
- 14:04AI to speak to insight, speak to innovation, speed to decision,
- 14:09velocity for creating new scenarios, new you know, new
- 14:13products, new services, new platforms, testing out
- 14:16hypotheses. You know, it's a generative tool. The clue is in
- 14:20the name, but my worry is that many C suite are just looking at
- 14:24AI to automate, to make cost savings and to just focus on a
- 14:30very narrow metric, which is shareholder return.
- 14:35Adam Outland: Sure. This is just maybe a quick question for
- 14:37you. Is a form of disruption, to disrupt technology by being more
- 14:42in person?
- 14:43Terence Mauri: Yes, I think so. I really think so. Because, as I
- 14:46said, when the cost of this technology is coming to zero and
- 14:50everybody has access to the same tools, the same technologies,
- 14:53it's more difficult to stand out. Ironically, everyone's got
- 14:57access. Everyone can set up the great website, the great.
- 14:59Podcast, the great YouTube channel, but how do you stand
- 15:02out? The value of that goes down. This is one of the
- 15:05ironies, and I think a lot of people don't think about that.
- 15:08And it's there's a reason why naught point naught. 1% of
- 15:11people make money on Spotify or tick tock or YouTube, and that
- 15:15number is even going down more. We've got to be so careful. I
- 15:18call it the curse of sameness. Write about it a lot in the new
- 15:21book, The upside disruption. So yes, ironically, sharpening your
- 15:25human edge, your in person edge, is going to be the superpower
- 15:30that differentiates you. Gives you that distinctive quality in
- 15:34the sea of sameness and sea of commoditization that we're in,
- 15:37and that's why making the effort to go to these in person events,
- 15:41speaking at them, contributing to them, panels. This is a part,
- 15:46an important part, of the human edge. Yes, use the tools around
- 15:49us. You'd be stupid not to. But don't think that it's going to
- 15:53be easy just doing it that way. Yes, there'll be a percentage
- 15:56that managed to do it. But my fear is that when everything
- 16:00come comes to zero cost. Everyone has access to the same
- 16:04incredible tools. Well, actually it's much more difficult to
- 16:07stand out and so that in person, human edge, the that social
- 16:12skills, emotional intelligence, conversational listening, being
- 16:16fully present. These going to be important. Human skills, human
- 16:20skills, Courage skills, these are the skills that we need to
- 16:23nurture and sharpen for the next generation.
- 16:27Adam Outland: What walls have you encountered in building
- 16:30something? I love allowing our listeners insight that when you
- 16:34choose to take a risk, that it doesn't necessarily mean a
- 16:38pathway paved in gold, it comes with a lot of potholes.
- 16:41Terence Mauri: I love that question because disruption is
- 16:44about humility. And what I mean by humility is the ability to
- 16:48the capacity, the awareness to know your blind spots, to be
- 16:54aware of the blind spots that you're blind to, but also
- 16:57understanding that failure and setback and obstacle is one half
- 17:01of of success. And as Ryan Holiday says so eloquently, you
- 17:07know, the obstacle is the way, disruption is the way. And you
- 17:10know, I'm a self confessed failure pioneer. Yeah, I failed
- 17:13multiple times in order to get where I am today, multiple
- 17:17setbacks, multiple rejections, book rejections, client
- 17:21rejections. You know, 30% of what I do is keynotes
- 17:25conferences around the world. But you know often you're
- 17:28you're, you know, when you're chosen, you're, you've been
- 17:30chosen out of like maybe five or six or eight other great
- 17:34speakers. So you get rejected a lot. You know, 90% of the time
- 17:38it's a rejection. Now I could choose two ways to respond to
- 17:41that. I could say, one, I'm going to give up because I'm
- 17:44good. You know, my ratio of rejection is so high, so I'm
- 17:47just not going to do that. Or two, recognize that actually
- 17:51anything worthwhile in life requires resilience, requires
- 17:55persistence, requires grit, and that's been the big lesson for
- 17:58me. I'm here because I've overcome probably more failures
- 18:02than the average person, and that's been painful, but I've
- 18:06made pain part of the process and understand that if I'm not
- 18:10hurting, I'm not growing.
- 18:13Adam Outland: You know I just want to spend one more minute on
- 18:15this; people, and their relationship to risk is that
- 18:18they don't understand that a lot of life can be, a little bit
- 18:21like a game of baseball, and that if you're batting 20 to 30%
- 18:25it's good batting average.
- 18:27Terence Mauri: Yeah.
- 18:27Adam Outland: Most of life, we're not trained to embrace
- 18:30rejection or misses or missed swings that way we're treated.
- 18:34We treat it as an ultimate failure, which then generally
- 18:38means I'm not good enough.
- 18:40Terence Mauri: Yes.
- 18:41Adam Outland: For you, where did this light switch flip? Or where
- 18:44do you? Where could you trace it back to say, this is the moment
- 18:46where I kind of changed my relationship to failure?
- 18:49Terence Mauri: I think it goes back to that life disruption,
- 18:52life or death moment, life flashing past you, which you
- 18:55realize you can have your whole life that mapped out that linear
- 18:59way become obsessed with success and avoidance of failure, and
- 19:03that's not real life. You know, being stripped down and being
- 19:06made very vulnerable, nearly losing my life, actually was the
- 19:10wake up call to me that, you know, we've life is about. Life
- 19:13is risk. And actually the biggest regret, one of the
- 19:17things to help our listeners and viewers today is when you get to
- 19:20the end of your life, and I hope it's a long life, 8090, years of
- 19:24age, or 100 the number one regret, according to research,
- 19:28is a lack of courage. That when you look back, the biggest
- 19:32regret you'll have in your lives, when you look back at
- 19:34your 90 years will be the amount of times that you didn't you
- 19:38didn't step up. The lack of courage, the courage to think
- 19:41bit bolder, the courage to say no, the courage to walk away
- 19:46from something that wasn't working for you, to courage to
- 19:48start over. This is our number one regret at the end of our
- 19:52lives, and we can use this knowledge in advance of getting
- 19:55to 90 years of age to our advantage and do what you know.
- 19:59Steve, Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos used to do very well, which is
- 20:03regret minimization. To get to imagine that you're 70 years old
- 20:06and say, what would I regret most not doing when I look back?
- 20:10Is it not having kids? Is it not starting that business? Is it
- 20:14not, you know, yeah, hitting that C level in my company.
- 20:17Whatever it is, success is very personal. But just remember, you
- 20:22know, at the end of our lives, the number one regret is a lack
- 20:25of courage. And actually, one half of courage is the ability
- 20:29to embrace failure and recognize that that is a stepping stone to
- 20:34where you want to be. It's not necessary. And of course, there
- 20:38are different types of failures as well. By the way, productive
- 20:41failures, intelligent failures, stupid failures. So we have to
- 20:45be careful here as well and understand the nuances. But the
- 20:48one thing to take away is we need to reframe our relationship
- 20:52with productive failure and recognize that it's also an
- 20:56important part of success.
- 20:59Adam Outland: What do you think when you are spending time as an
- 21:02entrepreneur mentor for MIT, or you're you know, you're speaking
- 21:05at some universities and engaging with this next
- 21:08generation that's coming out, what do you see there? Do you
- 21:11see a group of young women and men that are have that new
- 21:16definition of failure? Or do you feel we need to be able to
- 21:19manufacture somehow, for some of these people, maybe not a life
- 21:22threatening situation, but something that that shakes them
- 21:26up in how they perceive what we're discussing?
- 21:30Terence Mauri: What I love about Generation Alpha is this
- 21:34incredible vision aspirational, and I think it's very nuanced,
- 21:39the culturally context and culture demographics, whether
- 21:46it's Africa or North America or Europe, there's a different risk
- 21:50appetite out there depending on geography, and so that's that's
- 21:54a big deal. But the good news is, it can be unlearned and
- 21:58relearned as well, for sure. And what I love about my work at MIT
- 22:02is every year we host MIT solve, and the purpose of MIT solve is
- 22:07to create a generation of solvers. We post Grand
- 22:11Challenges, global challenges that the world faces, for
- 22:14example, climate change, lack of literacy, healthcare challenges,
- 22:18and we give people anywhere in the world, the opportunity to
- 22:21pitch tech based solutions to those global challenges, and one
- 22:26of those examples recently was for people with Alzheimer's.
- 22:30There was a young student called Emma Yang. Her grandmother was
- 22:34diagnosed with Alzheimer's, or dementia. It's a terrible
- 22:37disease. One in seven people will get it in their lifetime.
- 22:41And you know, being a very an introvert and a mathematician,
- 22:46she framed this as a hypothesis, and she created an app called
- 22:50Timeless. The purpose of the app timeless is to help people with
- 22:54dementia stay reconnected to their memories, reconnected to
- 22:57their families through geo tagging, facial recognition
- 23:01gamification, received over a million dollars of wealth of
- 23:05investment since she since inception. This is a great
- 23:09example of generations solve. This is a great example of what
- 23:12can happen when the cost you imagine, the costs of doing this
- 23:1710 years ago, would have been prohibited. It would cost
- 23:20millions of dollars to set up an app and test it, scale it. Now,
- 23:24you can do all of this. You can go from idea to iteration to
- 23:28implementation within hours or days, and obviously that's
- 23:32accelerated even more with AI. So for me, this is not the age
- 23:36of disruption, by the way. This is the age of wonder, the age of
- 23:40possibility, and the only limit is our imagination.
- 23:43Adam Outland: Yeah, I was at a longevity dinner, and it was
- 23:47very interesting to hear people talk about how quickly and
- 23:51exponentially medical and health disruption is occurring, and
- 23:55that the key takeaway from this speaker was that if you can live
- 24:0010 more years, you'll solve most of your problems that you'll
- 24:03have in the future, and probably add another 20 to your life.
- 24:06Terence Mauri: It's so exciting, isn't it? Ray Kurzweil,
- 24:08Singularity University has written a book recently where he
- 24:11really deep dives into this as well. And you know, I was in
- 24:14Doha big you know, future of tech, future of AI Summit, and
- 24:19you know, just some of the stats, you know, the facts and
- 24:21insights coming out are so exciting. This idea that, you
- 24:25know, we've now got, you know, chips that are the it can be
- 24:29scaled to DNA, and they can hold billions of transistors. That's
- 24:33actually happening. It's not, it's not science fiction. So
- 24:35science fiction has become science flag. And I think you're
- 24:38right. If we can hold on for at least another time, 10 years,
- 24:41it's going to be one hell of a ride.
- 24:46Adam Outland: And stay tuned. We'll continue this conversation
- 24:49with Terence in Episode 479 of The Action Catalyst.