One is something that we can all benefit from. When 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. So to 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, interviewing some of the leading ceos and also workers at all levels of Tech Companies. How does it fit into your overall journey. Yeah. So im a reporter here in silicon valley, and i cover the tech giants. And im a reporter that comes in with a slightly different background. Instead of going the journalism school, i studied Industrial Labor relations. And sort of put that in the back of i my mind, but really ive always focused on culture, organizational behavior, how companies are led, how work is structured. You know, thats something ive always taught9 in the thought about in the background as ive covered the actual news going on in the companies. Around 2017, obviously, we started seeing the tech giants starting to grow and dominate in a way that was really strange for big company. Usually Big Companies tend to fall apart. As they get bigger, they ossify, and then they make room for more competitors, and thats sort of the typical life cycle of companies. Instead of doing that, they just kept getting stronger and stronger and stronger. And as i was spending time with these companies, i began to see practices that didnt fit the traditional mold that i got taught in schooling very different from in school, very different from traditional businesses. Their cultures and their processes. And also the technology that they used was just so different. You can draw a line from what they do inside to their success. So its not like, you know, facebook fought into gram, therefore facebook is successful. I believe that theres this underlying culture that is in place by the tech giants thats led to them being 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 where the tech giants would say, heres our manual and go ahead. Why dont you take notes and figure out what we do well and beat us that way. They just werent going to hand that over. And i thought from my perspective as a journalist with a background that touched a little bit on labor relations, organizational culture, i could find a way to write this down and put it together in a book and give it to the rest of the economy in a way that would allow them to compete with the tech giants and actually bring them into a new form of working which i believe were all headed to, the tech giants just have a held start. So 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 would give the rest of us a chance to actually take a part of the market share of these companies as opposed to having them take ours. Absolutely. Well, thank you so much from a personal level and on behalf of all of our members for diving into it, really interviewing everybody and putting it into a book and sharing with us today the key learnings. My key takeaway from what youre saying is, essentially, were all familiar as something gets bigger, it gets more bureaucratic and generally becomes less innovative. You just found these Big Tech Companies arent fitting into that mold and they do do things differently. Before we jumped on this call, you also mentioned to me that people off assume that the different Tech Companies are very different from each other, but based on your research, youve actually found that theres a lot that is quite similar between them, how they do it. So could you share with us, if you had to distill it into a subis set of buckets, what were the key themes you found in these big, hyperinnovative companieses that you saw to be a common practice that we could all learn from in. Yeah. So it begins with a mentality, and thats what the time, always day one, sort of connotes. Bezos has theres this moment inside amazon where beltway southeast is speaking bezos is speaking to the whole company, and someone gives him this question, what does day two look like. The sort of menacing way that makes the entire Company Start laughing in seattle. You just dont ask bezos what it looks like. He says day two is stasis fold by paralysis followed by paralysis, followed by long, painful decline, followed by death. And thats why its always day one. So when i first heard this, i was like, oh, yeah, hes just telling amazonians to work through nights, weekends and holidays. Youre ours now, and the second you take your foot off the gas pedal, its day two, and youre toast. But actually its very different. The more i reported on it, this whole idea of day one is a mentality which is News Companies approach each day as if its their first. So a lot of companies will get attached to what got them there and do nothing but focus on that. And i think that was the tech giants have done very well, you know, theres one business thats gotten us to the bench, you know . We appreciate it, its been good, now its time to disrupt it ourselves, to invent ourselves anew so we wont end up, you know, suffering the same fate of most companies which when their asset run ares out, theyre done. So amazon is the number one example of this, right . They started out as an online bookstore, then became a company that sold everything on the internet, then became a third party marketplace, a fulfillment operation, a web services provider, aacademy awardwinning movie studio, a hardware manufacturer, the worlds computing platform, a grocer, and now theyre built this by the way, this is something were all going to be using pretty soon because with we dont want to have inperson interaction, and thats going to breed innovation. We can go into that later. Amazon says, okay, we have these good businesses, but thats not going to the take us where we need to go. They understand that an average company on the fortune 500 would last 70 years, and today its 15 years. If youre not continually innovating, youre done. Its built into amazons fiber, but it really exists in all the tech giants. Facebook says 1 done, right . Thats the same idea. Theyve reare invented reinvented themselves. Now theyre reinventing february to a series of much more smaller, interrelated networks. Its part of messaging, once people realize that it all starts to click. Googles reinvented itself over and over and over again. I promise to be crisp, so ill wrap up in a second, but google, its amazing. People say google has this search function, and they wrote its success its definitely not an inevitable company. It started out as a web site, then it became a browser extension. The google tool bar, which is something people would download and use, it would pop up on the browser in internet explorer, and that accounted for more than 60 of google searches at a certain point in its history. It wasnt people going to the website, it was people typing in this browser. Then they reinvented to an actual browser with chrome once they realized microsoft was going the screw them and internet explorer, they innovated again and again now with the voice system. It exists down the chain. Microsoft says hit refresh, right . Theyve gone from Windows Company to a cloud company. And apple has done it well in the past, right . Theyve gone from the manufacturer of the ipod and a pretty successful line of Desktop Computers to now, obviously, their bread and butter is the iphone. I think theyve lost the mentality inside apple, and i to think theyre kind of in trouble if theres another transformation. But theyll ride the iphone for as long as they can, and well find out whos right once the time is up on that. Thanks so much. This really critical point, do you feel like its just the nature of, like, these Tech Companies that this applies to them, but maybe it doesnt apply to other nontech or do you believe having studied everything youve done, having reported on all these companies, do you believe that this is a kind of mentality that every company could have if its leadership actually focused on that . Yeah, i do believe that. So first of all, this whole delineation between tech company and not tech company is getting a lot more blurry than it was in the past. Look at the automotive industry, right . An auto executive might have said a few years ago, oh, we have no need to reinvent, we make a car. It has four doors, five seats and runs on gas. Actually the company that have gotten ahead on things like electric vehicles and selfdriving will probably stand to be much more successful in the future. So the whole idea of the day one thing is not to pivot. Dont wait until its desperation time to change your business. Actually go ahead and start inventing the next thing befores asset is [inaudible] down to the core. Construction companies, for instance, are now learning Machine Learning and drones to be better at what they build, so there could be reinvention there. And i think 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, right . So heres one example. Theres a stagebuilding company in ireland that knew that it wasnt going to be building stages for any, you know, long stretch of time and just transformed, reinvented itself completely, and now its building desks for people working at home. And now thatll probably be a second business line for them, maybe even more profitable at first. So heres the deal. I think that every company can definitely get used to this. Sometimes you have to focus op your flagship product, but i really think in the back of everyones mind if people thought about how to live in this day one mentality, theyd be better off in the long term. And before we move to the other comments [inaudible] these Tech Companies that enable them to outperform and constantly reinvent, i want to ask you again when it comes to this mentality the, right, this all sounds great, and it seems like, yeah, like, we should have that. Like, i should run my company that way. However, im trying to understand, like, what actually enables these companies to have that mentality continuously. Is it just a matter of, like, the ceo and the Leadership Team being those kinds of people who are, like, just in that mindset, or is it Something Like, what is the key ingredient . Obviously, or Leadership Matters a lot. Are there other schemes that we can actually implement, you know, so that this mentality is more common place in the companies that were [inaudible] yeah, im really glad you asked the question because its much more than a mentality. It begins with a mentally. Then how do you put it into action. It begins with changing the nature of the way we see work. So weve gone through a few different stages of work, right . In the industrial economy, okay, so i would say its important to think of work in two different buckets. One is idea work, coming up with new things and bringing them to light. And the other is execution, thats everything involved with supporting and making sure that your flagship product is working well or your preexisting products are working well. So in the industrial economy, almost all the work we did was execution work. Like, someone would come up with an idea, and everybody would be in the factory making widgets. All of a sudden there was this promise, if you think about the knowledge economy we live in today, almost all of our time is spent on execution work, right . If like, we spend a tiny portion of our lives coming up with new ideas and almost all of the rest of the time supporting it could be lets say youre a her, you sell a product. Youre doing inventory management, pricing, promotion, bill, all these things, right . And thats everything that youre doing is just to support these products. Your hair is on fire trying to support what exists today. And you know the tech giants do so well, theyve used technology to minimize execution work and make room for idea work. And it really exists in different ways. It can be using Automation Technology to help close the books, for instance. And, by the way, that softwares available off the shelf right now. Its not something that [inaudible] people without Machine Learning skills can figure it out. And itd also be like putting technology to make sure documents are accessible if messages get across the company. And then so once you have room for this idea work, thats not enough. I think what theyve done is theyve figured out now that we have our employees working on idea work, we need a system thats going to take the ideas that are bubbling up inside whether theyre at the highest level or the lowest level, and were going to find a way to bring those ideas to Decision Makers and turn them into reality. So theres the really three parts to this. Always day one were going to transform, were not going to wait for [inaudible] technology, how do we take our execution work, minimize it, make room for idea work, and then the pipeline, right . How do we get ideas from people across the organization to Decision Makers so that we can bring them to life. By doing all three of those things well, the tech giants have been able to reinvent themselves over and over. Love that. Okay, got it. So, first, youve got to have that men mallty mentality that you be willing to constantly not get attached to your legacy and not whats got you to the bench, as you put it. Then you also focus a lot of energy on making sure that you minimize execution work by automating it. By nature, i guess, of what they do, they dont just do it within their products, they also do it for their internal operations. And then you mentioned this thing about the pipeline. So how do you go from idea to output as quickly as possible. Lets spend a couple minutes here diving a bit deeper into the additional points, when it comes to minimizing execution work, right . So you already are mentioned two 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 their ideas across the finish line. Any kind of best practices or any stories youd like to share with us that can help us, i guess, accelerate how well were able to do this in our respective organizations . Yeah. And i would say that, like, i dont want to make it sound intimidating. It can be as much as minimizing execution work can be as simple as just saying how do we look at our process, where we find ways to strip out execution work or make the process simpler. At amazon they say invest is simple, right is . Thats one of their leadership principles. Thats something they find a way to take the process use that you had and simplify that. That can be manual or technologyenabled. By doing it well, theyve been able to create all these inventions like we talked about at the top. So, okay. So lets go to a couple examples. Ill go with, like, the highest tech example, and then the ill give a fairly low tech example. Inside amazon theres been a program called hands off the wheel. It was initially called project yoda by some people. The idea was they had all these vendor managers, people who would work with suppliers to stock their products at Fulfillment Centers. So if you were interested and, you know, if you wanted to sell to amazon customers, you would work with the company and then figure out, okay, we need this many deter gent units at this many Fulfillment Centerrers at this price, and well pay you this much. Instead of having the vendor managers do it, amazon said we would use the force, right . Basically, we can have Machine Learning do this well. And amazon, you know, they have a lot of data, so they can basically tell you in every zip code the lifestyles of people. You can tell you they can tell you what they do, what their hobbies are because they order this stuff. If you have a zip code that really likes north face, you know, this amount of north faces in our Fulfillment Center. And actually how does amazon get you stuff in two days or one day . The stuff youre about to buy is probably already in the Fulfillment Center waiting for you to hit the button. Thats how they ship it is so quickly, because they kind of have an idea demographically, okay, were probably going to send this many units out. So what amazon did was, okay, this seems to be working. They put their Machine Learning engineers on it, and they ended up having the software essentially take over the bulk of the vendor manager arktivities activities. So now software will be sending out purchase orders, doing invenn story planning invep story planning, even negotiating with the vendor managers. It used to be they would get on the phone, we need 3500 at this Fulfillment Center. Now they just log on to a computer portal, web portal, and amazon tells them how many they want. So this has minimized execution work inside amazons Retail Organization and made room for idea work. What happened when they took all this Machine Learning technology and set it free on these vendor managers work. So you can to two things. One is you can fire people. That, i think, would be stupid. Two is you can say, all right, now we have what we were aiming for. We have room for idea work, and lets see if we can put it to use. And ill just tell ill give a little background and tell one story, and then ill pause. But the background is that so look on linked inn and where do linkedin. People who are shepherding your projects, steering your projects to life inside the company instead of just ordering products. So they took them from the execution work and put them on idea work. They went to a vast number of different products inside the company. Okay, heres the fun story. Theres a guy, kumar, who was the head of pricing and promotion inside amazon. This is the type of stuff that the Machine Learning actually did a pretty good job on. They figured out whats the opt