Host im excited t. We got our members from across the world joining us for this conversation. Ive been talking about it nonstop over the last few days to the point of annoying quite few friends. But were all very, very excited to learn from you today. So, to remind everybody the context of our conversation today, together with alex, were going to be learning how to compete in a world where no advantage is safe. So this concept of always day one is something we can all benefit from. When alex started writing the book im sure he wasnt exactly expecting it to be released in midst of a pandemic. However, in my view, this topic could not be more relevant especially these tase when so many of us are forced to have that day one mentality. So, help us kick off alex id love to ask you, what you found to be so important about this topic that you wanted to focus your sights on really going deep and the leading ceos and Tech Companies, what guest really ive always focuses on culture, organizational behavior, how companies are led, how work is structured. Thats something ive always thought but in the background as ive covered the actual news going on in the companies. And so around 2017 we started seeing the tech giants start to grow and dominate in the way that was really strange for Big Companies. Usually Big Companies tend to fall apart as they get bigger, they ate bureaucratic and ossify and then make room for new competitors and thats the typical life cycle of companies. But they just kept getting stronger and stronger and as i was spending time within these company is began to see practices that didnt fit the traditional mold i got taught in school. Very different from traditional businesses. And in affect thought that their precisions and the way they lead and their cultures and their processes and actually the technology they use inside was just so different, and was you can draw a line from what they do inside to their success. So its not like facebook bought instagram and therefore facebook is successful. Its not like google beth gml and theyre successful. I believe theres this underlying culture that is in place inside the tech giant that led to them to be so dominant and it would be a shame of theyve kept that to themselves. Never be a opinion in time where the tech giants would say heresary manual for being successful go. Ahead the rest of the world, take notes and end up figuring out what we do well and beat us. They werent going to hand that over. I thought from the perspective as a journalist with a background that touched on Labor Relations and Organizational Culture i could find a way to write this down and then put it together in a book and then give it to the rest of the economy in a way that would allow them to compete with the tech giants and bring them interest a new form of work chug believe were all headed to and the tech giants just have a head start on. That was the idea. Found this thing going on inside these companies and my plan was to reveal it in the biggest way possible, the most impactful way pay in a way to give the rest of us a chance to take partner market share of these companies as opposed to them take ourself. Host thank you for the personal level and behalf of our members for diving into this really, interviewing everybody, and distilling the key themes and sharing with us. My key takeway is as were all familiar, as something gets bigger, it gets more bureaucratic and becomes less innovative. You found these Big Tech Companies just arent fitting into the mold and you found they do things differently. Be jump on this calling you mentioned to me that people often assume that the different Tech Companies are very different from each other, but bases on your research cow you found theres a lot that is quite similar between them, how they do business. Could you share with us if you have to distill it into subset of buckets what were the key themes you found in the big hyperinnovatesive Tech Companies that you felt to be kind of like a common practice that we could all learn from . Guest yes. So it begins with the mentality and thats what the title always day one connoted. The line from jeff bezos and theres a moment inside amazon where he is speaking to the whole company and someone gives him this precommitted economy and then what does day two look like . And base sew re bezos reads the with with this menace i would that makes the entire Company Start laughing and then in seattle and just dont ask bezos what day two looks like are he says its stasis followed by paralysis and long painful decline followed by death and thats why thats why its always day one. So when i first heard this i was like, bezos is just telling amazonians to work flee nights and weekends and holidays and saying goodbye to thanksgiving and christmas. Youre ours now and the second you take your foot off the gas pedal its day two and youre toast. About its different. The more it reported offend the whole idea of day one is a mentality. These companies approach each day as if its their first with little regard for legacies. A lot of Companies Get attached to what got them and then do nothing put focus on that. And i think that was the tech giants have done very well is say, theres this one business that has gotten us to the dance, we appreciate it, its been good, now its time to disrupt it ourselves, to invent ourselves anu and anew and wont suffer the same fate of most companies which is when theyre asset runs out theyre don. So amazon is the number one example of this. Started out as an online book store, then became a company that sold everything on the internet, then became a thirdparty marketplace, fulfillment operation, web services provider, academy ward winning movie studio, a hardware manufacturer, the worlds top computer platform, growser and now built this experimental amazon storage which doesnt have checkout and this is something well all be using because we dont hospital to have inperson interaction and that will breed innome vacation. So amazon says, we have these good businesses but thats not go take is us to where we need to go the understand the 20s an average company on the fortune 500 would lost Something Like 70 years and toy its 15 years. If youre notes continually inventing youre done. Its built into amazons hardware but exists in all the tech giants, facebook they say, one percent, done. And thats the same idea. Theyve invent reinvented themselves from an online directie to a broadcast platform with a news feed and now reinventing again to a series of smaller intimate Networks Like groups and stories and messages and storage is part of messages once people realize that all starts to click. Google has reinvenned itself over and over again weapon can go into this a little more. I promise to be crisp but ill wrap up. So google is amazing, people say google has this search function and they wrote a success where its not been the case. Nothing but. Its not they started out as a website. Then they became a browser extension, the google tool bar which is something people would download and use, pop it on the browser and Internet Explorer and people type their searches in. That was 60 of google searches so wasnt people going to the website, it was peopling type neglect the browser extension. Then they reinvented to an annual browser with chrome when they realize microsoft would screw them in Internet Explorer and reinvented into a mobile operating system with android and now the cinderellas a voice assistant. Microsoft says hit refresh. Come from a Windows Company to a cloud company, and apple has done it well in the past. Theyve gone from the manufacturer of the ipod and pretty successful line of desk top computer and now their bread and butter this he iphone. The lowest the da one mentality inside apple and i think theyre kind of in trouble if theres another transformation. Well fine out who is right once the time is up on the iphone. Thanks, alex. To dive a bit deeper into this critical point do you feel like its just the nature of a like the Tech Companies that applies doesnt apply to nontech business or do you believe having studied everything you have done, reporting all these companies, do you believe this is a kind of mentality that every company could have if its leadership actually focused on that . Yeah issue do believe that. So first of all, this whole delenation between tech company and not tech company is getting a lot more blurry than it was in the past. Look at the automotive industry. An auto executive might have said a a few years ago, oh, we have no need to reinvent. We make a car, four doors and five seats and runs on gas. Why reinvent it. Its selling well. The companies that have got ahead ago things like electric vehicles and selfdriving will probably stand to be much more successfulful whole thing of day one thing is not to pivot. Dont way until its desperation time to change your business. And i think that what were seeing right now in the moment that were in is that covid is forcing companies to do this probably faster than they imagined. So, heres one example. Theres a stage Building Company in ireland that knew it wouldnt be building stages for any long stretch of time and just transformed. Reinvented itself completely and now is building difficults for people working at home. So, why not the woodworking skills to use and that will probably be a second business line for them. Maybe even more profitable than the first. So, heres the deal. Think that every company can definitely get used to this. Sometimes it makes sense to focus on your flagship product but in the back ohm peeves mimed if people thought about how to with the day one mentality that it would be better off in the longterm. Host before we move to the other common themes in the Tech Companies, constantly reinvent, i want to ask you again when it come thursday this mentality, this all sounds great and it seems like, yeah, like, we should have that, i should run my company that way. However, im trying to understand, like, what actually enabled these companies to have that mentality continuously. Is it just a matter of the ceo and the Leadership Team being those kinds of people where, like, just like in that mindset . Or is it Something Like what is the key grown. Are there other things we can implement so that this mentality is more common place in the companies were in. Guest im glad you asked the question. Its much more than a mentality. Begins with the mentality. Then how do you put that into action. Begins with changing the nature of the way you see work. We have gone through a few different staples of work. The industrial economy, i would say its important to think of work in two different buckets. One is idea work. All work involved in coming up with new things and bringing them to life. The other is execution work. Thats everything involved with supporting and making sure that your flagship product is working well or your preexisting products work well. In the Industrial Company almost all the work we did was execution work. Some someone come up with an idea, make widgets and then everything would make widgets and then then knowledge economy. Well use ideas and work but if you think about the knowledge economy we live today, almost all of our time is spent on execution witch spent a tiny portion of our live coming up with new ideas and then supporting existing things. Lets say you run a manufacturer, you sell a product. Youre doing inventory management, pricing, promotion, billing. And thats everything that youre doing is just to support the existing product. What do you many have to come up with a new thing . Youre hair is on fire trying support what exists today. The tech giants do so well is theyve used technology to minimize execution work. And make room for idea work. And it really exists in different ways so you it can be using Automation Technology to help close the books, for instance. Thats not enough. I think what theyve done is theyve figured out now that we have our employees working on ideal work we need a system that can take the ideas that are bubbling up inside. It doesnt matter if its at the highest level or lowest level and find a way to bring those ideas to decisionmakers and turn them into reality. Thats really three parts to that, mindset, always transform dont wait till desperate moment. Technology commodity take execution work, minimize it and make room for ideal work. In the pipeline can hardly get ideas from people across the organization to decisionmakers so that we can bring them to life . By doing all those things well i have been able to last the economy over and over and reinvent themselves i love that. First you have to have the mentality actually willing to constantly remind yourself to market attached to the legacy and what brought you to the ab then you a lot of energy and making sure that you minimize execution work by automating it. By making sure what they do Building Technology they dont just do it within their product they also do it for their internal operation and then you mentioned the thing about the pipeline. How do you go from idea to output as quickly as possible lets spend a couple minutes here diving a bit deeper into these points. When it comes to minimizing execution work, you already mentioned two elements of this, one is automating as much as possible and the second is making collaboration easier so that people are not blocked from getting there ideas across the finish line. Any kind of best practices or stories youd like to share with us that can help us i guess accelerate how well we are able to do this in our respective organizations . Yes. I would say that, i dont want to make it sound intimidating. It can be minimizing execution work can be as simple as saying how do we make a look at our process and find ways to strip out execution work or make processes simpler. At amazon they say invest in simplify. Thats one of the leadership intervals. Which is build something new and find ways to take the process that you had an simple hi that. That can be manual or technology and abeled. By doing it well they been able to create all these inventions like we talked about at the top. Lets go to a couple examples. I will go with the highest tech example and then give a fairly lowtech example. A hightech example is inside amazons been a program called hands off the wheel. It was initially called project yottabyte some people inside amazon. The idea was that they had all these vendor managers, people who would work with suppliers to stock their products and Fulfillment Centers. If you are interested, if you wanted to sell tied to amazon customers he would work with the company and then figure out, we need this many detergent centers and this money abwe will pay you this much. This idea of project yoda inside amazons instead of have the vendor managers do it amazon said we would use the force, we can have Machine Learning do this well. Amazon they have a lot of data rights so they can basically tell you every zip code the lifestyles of people. They can tell you what they do, what their hobbies are because they order stuff from amazon. For instance, if you have a zip code that really lacks your face, you can say in the winter we should stop this many north face in our Fulfillment Center. The stuff how does amazon get you stuff in two days or one day . The stuff youre probably about to buy is probably already in the Fulfillment Center waiting for you to hit buy. So amazon said this seems reworking the pop Machine Learning workers on it ended up having the Software Take over the bulk of vendor manager activities. Now software will be sending out purchase orders, software will be doing inventory planning. Software will even be negotiating with the vendors. He used to be the vendor manager would get on the phone and say, tied, we need 3500 detergents and this will help. Now they just log onto a computer portal one portal on the internet and amazon tells him how many they want. What this has done is minimize execution work inside Amazon Retail organization and make room for ideal work. What happens when they took this machinery and technology and set it free on these vendor managers work . You could do two things, ab you can say, now we have what we were aiming for, we have room for ideal work and lets see if we can put it to use. I will just give a little background for one story and then i will pause. The background is that, look on linked in and where do all these vendor managers go . They became product managers and Program Managers inside amazon. Essentially professional ab they took them from execution work and put them on ideal work and they went to a vast number of different products inside the company. Heres a fun story and i will stop. Theres a guy abthe head of pricing and promotions inside amazon, this is the type of stuff the machinery actually did a pretty good job on. It figure out whats the optimal prices these products are at. Kumar does this thing where he goes and works under jeff bezos as a technical assistant, which is somebody that just shadows him sit into every meeting that jeff bezos takes and learn how he thinks and how the company runs and see across all these different groups in the company and then do something cool. The first Technical Advisor was a guy andy jesse who now runs amazon web services. Kumar finished his stand he can go back to Price Promotions was takeover by machine. Its time to find a new project. What he does is he huddles with a group of people from the regional organization, probably they also have their tasks automated. They said lets try to figure out a way to solve the most annoying part of in person shopping with technology. They figure out that the most annoying part of shopping in real life is checking out. People hate waiting on checkout lines. You never know what type of interaction you will have one to get ready to check out. They didnt have the foresight bu