My name is beri meric, cofounder and ceo of iv. Is my pleasure to introduce all of you to alex kantrowitz. Hello, how are you today . Im doing great. Take you for having me for this. Im really excited for it, weve 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 white if you friends. Were all very, very excited to learn from you today, so true might everybody the context of a conversation today, together with alex were going to be learning how to compete in the world where no advantage is safe. This concept of always they want is something we can all benefit from. With alex started writing this book im sure he wasnt exactly expecting it to be released in the midst of a pandemic. However, in my view this topic could not be more relevant especially these days when so many of us are forced to have that day one mentality. 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 site and was going deep to the leading ceos and also working at all levels of Tech Companies, what led you to write this book and how does this fit into your overall journey . Yes. Some reported in Silicon Valley and account with the tech giants. Im of the word that comes in with a slightly different background. Instead of going to Journalism School i stated Industrial Labor relations. Sort of put that in the back of my mind but really always focused on culture, organizational behavior, how companies are led, how work is structured. Thats something ive always thought about in the background as ive covered the actual news going on in the companies. Around 2017 we started seeing the tech giant start to grow in and, in a way that was really strange for big companies. Usually the companies tend to fall apart as they get bigger, they get bureaucratic, the ossify and then they make room for new competitors and thats a typical lifecycle of companies. Instead of doing that they kept getting stronger and stronger and stronger, and as in anytime within these companies i begin to see practices that didnt fit the traditional mold i got taught in school. Very different from traditional business. In fact, i thought the operations and the way they lead and the cultures and the processes and actually the technology they use inside was just so different. You can drop 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 built gmail and, therefore, google is successful. Theres this underlying culture that is in place inside the tech giants that have led them to be so dominant and thought it would be a shame if they kept that to themselves. There was never going to be a point in time with the tech giants would say heres our manual for being successful, go ahead, rest of the world, take notes and indepth figuring out what we do well and beat us that we. They just were not going hand it over. From my perspective as as a journalist with background attached on labor relations, Organizational Culture i could find a way to write this down and then put together in the book and then give it to the rest of the common in way that would allow them to compete with the tech giants and bring it into a new form of working which i believe we all headed to in the tech giants just have a head start on. That was the idea. I found this thing going on inside these companies and my plan was to reveal it in the biggest way possible, the most impactful way possible in a way that we give the rest of us a chance to actually take part of the market share of these companies as opposed to having them take hours. Thank you so much for the personal level and a all of our members for diving into this really, interviewing everybody, and distilling the key things, put it in the book and sharing it with us today, the key learnings. Mikey take with them what what youre saying is essentially as were all familiar, as something gets bigger it gets more bureaucratic and generally becomes less innovative. You just found these big Tech Companies, they just are not fitting into that mold and you thought you do things different. Before you jump into this call, you mentioned to me that people often assume that the different Tech Companies are very different from each other, but based on your research you have found theres a lot that is quite similar between them. Could you share with us if you have to distill it into subsets of buckets, what were the key themes you found in the big hyper innovative Tech Companies that you felt to be kind of like a common practice that we could all learn from . Yes. So it begins with the mentality and thats with the title always day one always connotes. Jeff bezos, the line comes from jeff bezos and theres this moment inside amazon where he speaking to the whole company and silicates in this priesthood question, what does day to look like . Bezos goes in front of the whole company of reach the question we do with the sort of menacing way that makes entire Company Start laughing, like their into serving in seattle. You just dont ask bezos what they too looks like. He said they too is followed by paralysis followed by long painful decline followed by death. Thats why its always day one. When it first for this i was like bezos is just telling amazonian to work through nights and weekends and holidays, say goodbye to thanksgiving and christmas. You are is now and the second to take your foot off the gas pedal it day to end your toes. But actually its different. The more i report on it the more i started realizing the solidity of day one is a mentality which is these companies approach each day as it is the first. With little regard to the legacy. A lot of companies will get attached to what got them there and then do nothing but focus on that. That was the tech giants have done very well is say, theres this one business thats gotten us to the dance, we appreciate it, its been good, now its time to disrupt it ourselves, to invent ourselves anew. So we wont end up suffering the same fate of most Companies Come which is when as such without they done. Amazon is number one example of this. They start out as an online bookstore, then became a company that sold everything on the internet and again a thirdparty marketplace, a fulfillment operation, a web services provider, Academy Awardwinning movie studio, a hardware manufacturer, the worlds top voice computing platform, a grocery and now they have this experimental amazon storage which did have check it. By the way its something ill be using sin because we dont want to in person interaction and that will breed interaction. What amazon does it says listen, we have these good businesses but thats not going to take us to where we need to go. But understand in the 20s and average company on the fortune 500 would last Something Like 70 years and today its 50 years. If youre not continue in in fintech of your done. I think its built into amazon fiber but it really exists and all the tech giants. Facebook they say 1 done. Thats the same idea. They reinvented themselves from online directory to broadcast platform with a new seat and now theyre reinventing again through a through a series of much more small intimate Networks Like groups in stores and messaging and storage is part of messaging once people realize after realize that it all starts to click the google has reinvented itself over and over again. We can go into this more. I promise to be chris but ill wrap up in the second. Google theresa may to come people say google has this search function and they wrote a success where its going up in the case. Nothing but. They start out as a website. Then they became a browser extension. The google toolbar which is something people would download and use, pop out on the browser and internet exporting people would type the search is in the that account for more than 60 of google searches at a certain point of its history. City. It was a people pointed website. It was people typing in this projects tension. Then they reinvented to an actual browser with chrome and they realize microsoft was going to screw them internet explorer. They reinvented again into mobile operating system android and again that with voice assistance. Microsoft says hit refresh. Theyve gone from a Windows Company to cloud company. Applets that will in the past. Theyve gone from the manufacture of the ipod and pretty successful line of desktop and peters to now breadandbutter is the iphone. I think they are kind of in trouble if theres going to be another transformation. They will ride the iphone for his longest again and well find find out who is right once the time is up on that. Thanks so much, alex. To dive a bit deeper into this really radical point, do you feel like its just the nature of, like these Tech Companies, this applies to them that maybe testified whichever other like nontech business, or do you believe having steady avidity done, having reported on all these companies, do you believe this is a mentality that every company could have if its its leadership actually focus on that . Yeah i do believe that. First of all this whole delineation between tech company and not tech company is getting a lot more poor than it was in the past. Look at the automotive industry. An auto executive might ascend a few years ago we had no need to reinvent. We make the car. It has four doors and five seats and it runs on gas. Why would really reinvent itself . The companies that got head of things like an electric vehicles and self driving will probably stand to be much more successful in the future. The whole idea of this day one thing is not to pivot. Dont wait until its desperation time to change your business. Go ahead and start inventing the next thing before the asset is down to the core. Like Construction Companies are now using like Machine Learning and drones to do better what they build. There could be reinvention there. What were seeing now in the moment that were in is that covid is forcing companies to do this probably faster than they imagined. Heres one example. Theres a stage Building Company in ireland that knew that it wasnt good to be building stages for any long stretch of time. And just transform, reinvented itself completely now is building desks for people work at home. So why not put them to use . And now that would probably be a second business line for them once they get back up and running. It even more profitable than the first. Heres the deal. I think every company can get used to this. Sometimes it makes sense to focus on your flagship product but a really think in the back of everyones mind, if people thought of now to live in this day with mentality it would be much better off in the long term. Before we move to the other common themes in these Tech Companies that enabled us to perform and constantly reinvent, i want to ask you again when it comes to mentality, this all sounds great and this seems like we should have that, like, i should run my company that way. However, i am 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, just like in that mindset . What is the key ingredient . Are the other things we can implement so that this mentality is more commonplace in the companies we are in . Im really glad you asked the question because its much more than a mentality. It begins with a mentality. And how do you put that into action . It begins with changing the nature of the way you see work. We have gone through a few different stages of work. In the industrial economy, okay, i would say its important think were in two different buckets. When his ideal work, a work that is involved in coming up with new things and bring them to life. The other is execution were, everything involved with supporting and making sure your flagship product is working well or your preexisting products are working well. In the industrial, almost all the work we did was execution work. Someone would come up with an idea, like lets make widgets and it would be in the factory making widgets. Then we moved to the knowledge economy. All of a sudden there was this premise work when used ideas but if you think that the knowledge economy that we live in today, almost all of our time is spent on execution work. We spent a tiny portion of our lives coming up with new ideas and almost all the rest of the time supporting existing things. Lets say you run a manufacturer, you sell a product. You doing inventory management, pricing, promotion, billing, all these things. Thats everything that youre doing is just to support the existing product. What do you mean yet to come up with a new thing . Your hair is on fire on to support what exists today. I think what the tech giants do so well is they have used technology to minimize execution work and make room for idea work. It really exist in different ways. It can be using Automation Technology to help close the books, for instance. That software is available off the shelf right now. Its not something, it took a team to fill. They could also billick learning how to collaborate better like putting technology to make sure documents are accessible and messages get across the company. Once theyve made room for this idea work, thats not enough. What theyve done is they figured out now that we have our employees working on ideal work we need the system thats going to take the ideas that are bubbling up inside of our employees, it doesnt matter if youre at the highest level or lowest level, and we will find a way to bring those ideas to decisionmakers and then turn them into reality. Theres really three parts to this. Mindset, always day when we will transform, will not wait till desperate moment. Technology, how do we take her execution were, and mice it and make room for idea work. In the pipeline. How do you ideas to decisionmakers so we can bring them to life . By doing all three of those things, they have been able to reinvent themselves. I love that. Got it. First you have to have the mentality that you be actually willing to consult microsoft not get attached to legacy of what got you to the place. Then focus energy in making sure that you minimize extrusion work by automating it. The Tech Companies, i guess what they do, Building Technology the main thing, they dont just do it within their products, they also get further internal operations and then you mention this think 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 additional point you introduce. When it comes to minimizing asked you execution were, you only mention to elements of this. One is automating as much as possible. The second one is making collaboration easier so that people are not blocked from getting the ideas across the finish line. Any kind of best practices or fr any stories you like to share with us that can help us i guess accelerate how well were able to do this in our respective organizations . Yes. And i would say, i i do want to make a sound intimidating. It can be like minimizing execution work can be a simple as just saying how to make come even look at our process, like where to find ways to strip out execution work or make our processes simpler. At amazon they say invent and simplify. Find new ways to take the process that you had and simplify them. That can be manual or can be technology enabled. By doing it well they been able to create all these conventions we talked about at the top. Lets go to a couple of examples. Ill go with the highest tech example and then give a fairly lowtech example. A hightech example is inside amazon does the new program called hands off the wheel. It was initially called project yoda by some people inside amazon. The idea was that all the vendor managers come people who would work with suppliers to stock the products in fulfilling centers. If youre interested and if you want to sell tied to amazon customers you would work with the company and then figure out okay, we need this many detergent units come this many ultimate centers at this price at this time and will pay you this much. So this idea project yoda inside emerson was instead having the vendor managers do it, amazon said we would use the force. A sickly we can have Machine Learning do this well. Amazon, they have a lot of data. They can basically tells you in every zip code a lifestyle of people. They can tell you what to do, what their hobbies are. For instance, if you have zip code that really likes north face or in the winter we should start this mat of north face in our ultimate center. How does amazon could you step in todays a oneday course stuff youre about to buy is probably already in the Performance Center waiting for you to hit by before you do it and then they ship it to you so quickly. Its because i have an idea demographically we will probably sent this many units out. What amazon did was they said okay, it seems the working. I put the Machine Learning engineers on and ended up having the software essentially take over the bulk of what the vendor manager activities. Microsoft will be sending out purchase orders, software we doing inventory planning. Software to be negotiating with the vendors. It used to be the vendor manager would get on the phone and say we need 3500 detergents in this ultimate center have just log onto a computer portal, and web portal on the internet and amazon tells and how many they want. What this is done is its minimize execution work inside amazons Retail Organization and make room for idea work. What happens when it took all this Machinery Technology and set it free on these vendor managers work . You can do two things. One is you can fire people. That i think would be stupid. Two, that we have over any four. We have room for idea work to let see if we can put to use. Ill just tell, give a little background and tell one story and then i will pause. But the background is that, so you look on linkedin aboard all these vendor managers go .