Greg Satell: One Revolution Away From Understanding Power

Greg Satell is a popular speaker and adviser, as well as the author of the new book, CASCADES: HOW TO CREATE A MOVEMENT THAT DRIVES TRANSFORMATIONAL CHANGE. His earlier book, MAPPING INNOVATION, was selected as one of the best business titles of 2017 by 800-CEO-READ. Greg’s transformational work has been covered in Harvard Business Review, Barron’s, Forbes, Inc, and Fast Company. A global citizen, Greg spent 15 years living and working in Eastern Europe where, among other things, he managed a leading news organization during Ukraine’s Orange Revolution.

An accomplished entrepreneur, executive, and one of the foremost experts on tech innovation today, Greg speaks to audiences around the world and works with leading organizations to better compete in today’s disruptive marketplace. He was recently named by Innovation Excellence as #2 on its global list of “Top 40 Innovation Bloggers” and by IDG as one of “10 Digital Transformation Influencers to Follow Today.” Greg helps successful organizations overcome disruption and blaze a path to a better future.

Transcript provided by YouTube (unedited)

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[Music]
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welcome to the one away show presented by b debbie missions i am brian wish and
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i am your host and thanks so much for being here on this show i sit down with compelling
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entrepreneurs authors and rising leaders to talk through their most transformative relationships experiences
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and epiphanies curated with entrepreneurial leaders in mind we’ll dig into these finite moments
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in people’s lives and understand how they helped set their path forward
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greg setel is a popular speaker and advisor as well as the author of the new
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book cascades how to create a movement that drives transformational change his
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earlier book mapping innovation was selected as one of the best business titles of 2017 by 800 ceo reed
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gregg’s transformational work has been covered in the harvard business review barons forbes inc and fast company a
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global citizen greg spent 15 years living and working in eastern europe among other things where he managed a
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leading news organization during ukraine’s orange revolution an accomplished entrepreneur executive
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and one of the foremost experts of tech innovation today greg speaks to audiences around the world and works
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with leading organizations to better compete in today’s disruptive marketplace he was recently named by innovation
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excellent as number two on its global list of top 40 innovation bloggers greg helps successful organizations overcome
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disruption and blaze a better path forward for the future [Music]
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greg welcome to the one away show thanks so much for having me brian yeah it’s uh great to meet you i so enjoyed
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our conversation before we kicked off the recording craig what is the one away moment that you want to
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share with us today my one away moment was in 2004 i found myself in kiev ukraine and
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i was running a major news organization during the orange revolution and it was
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just one of those one of those rare moments where the universe kind of opens up and and gives
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you a little bit of a glimpse and you say gee the the world doesn’t really
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work the way i thought it did i like most people i thought that there was a
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certain power structure and and things were were kind of controlled and here
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it was that nobody with any conventional form of power had any ability to
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shape events in any way i mean nobody really knew what was going on or what would happen
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next there was just this mysterious force that
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nobody could describe but nobody could deny that was moving things along
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and what amazed me was how thousands of and thousands of people uh
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who’d ordinarily be doing very different things would all the sudden stop what they were doing
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and start doing the same thing in almost perfect unison and
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we changed the country and we changed the world and it seemed like very organic and i said
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and i said how did that happen and that was what sort of launched me on my
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journey to learn more about movements and transformation
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and change and of course what i found was it wasn’t nearly as random or spontaneous as i had originally
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believed or as i’d experienced it to be and eventually i became friendly with
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one of the people who helped architect and engineer not only that
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revolution but the one in georgia and the one in serbia before it which collectively are known
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as the color revolutions yeah wow well what a global perspective
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not not something that i hear every day on the show so i’m thrilled to dive in uh with this you said something i’m
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wrong i’ll lean into you said you were an environment in kiev and ukraine where there were people with no power and and
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couldn’t create change were you one of those people with no power who who felt
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like you couldn’t create change and if so what did that feel like i don’t know it was a bit different for me because i
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was a foreigner right so in some sense you know people saw me as you know an outsider
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but in my role leading a major news organization i was certainly
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more than an innocent bystander and of course there was because we were an american-owned business
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uh the founder and and me were obviously both american
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of course a lot of people there were some people thought that you know
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we were behind it right that we were part of some conspiracy but i i
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certainly i guess you couldn’t call me powerless but it wasn’t me driving it right
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when i was amazed that all of the people you’d expect to know
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what was going on the journalists i would speak with in the newsroom every day the other
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business leaders the political leaders i would talk to from time to time
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nobody had any idea what was going on or what would happen next
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and and today i even had a conversation today
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this generation what we’re missing we need our nelson mandela we need our
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gandhi we need our king but there wasn’t any of them either there was no visible leadership there
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was no uh there was a presidential cabinet but if you look at the successful movements today
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it’s very rare that there’s some great charismatic leader and when there is there’s serious questions about how
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effective they are so it wasn’t me in particular that felt powerless
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it was i think the more salient point and and what intrigued me was
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the people who were supposed to have power all of a sudden seem powerless
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wow your ability right to observe in in kind of your boots on the ground with that
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external perspective i mean i’m sure you’re extremely present to
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what was going on on the ground floor now what i want to ask well i i what i
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can tell you is you’re giving me too much credit i didn’t have any id either right i mean
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you’re just in a flow of events when you’re in them i mean in some ways you’ll have less visibility right just
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so i understand and the audience understands you were able as you reflect on that you you’ve realized that you
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didn’t really even have an idea then what was going on oh i knew then i didn’t have an idea i mean nobody had an id nobody knew what
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was going on what really kicked it for me was it two years later so it was 2006
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by this point i was in silicon valley i was doing a publishing course at stanford
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and everybody was talking about social networks and we had a a massive digital
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business in ukraine and i said wow this social network stuff is something i
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should really learn about so i started researching network science
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and what i found was an almost perfect mathematical explanation for almost
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everything that happened during the orange revolution and scientists had it
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even had a name for it and because of some breakthroughs in the late 90s we now know exactly
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how these things work and uh and these things are called a cascade a network cascade or a viral cascade
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and so that’s where the name of my last book comes from is called uh cascades
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got it makes so much sense now to your point can you just back to
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ukraine i really wanna set the foundation here and it’s cool you’ve had this journey though that’s giving you so much context
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and interest in what you’ve experienced back to ukraine what were those current
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power structures that that were in place perhaps that maybe shouldn’t have been in place like what’s the historical
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context there ukraine of course had a a history as a communist country right and then became
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democratic so you had a government which was very corrupt you had
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uh an oligarchic structure uh these were people who had gotten uh
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you know state assets and had amassed a a large amount of
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wealth you had uh other governments the russian government the united states government
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the eu um you had the media we as as a as a
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major news organization all of these things had power you had
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the police the army i mean uh these are all institutions that wield institutional
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power nobody really seemed to be able to shape events
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and that’s what nobody was driving the bus so to speak um
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things just seemed to take on a a a life of of their own and it was uh
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it was only later as i started researching these things and i researched network science and
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started writing about it i met my friend sir jaw who
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who helped engineer these things and and i and i learned that there was an
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actual way to do this not through traditional power structures and that’s
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uh and that’s what i work with organizations today is to harness many of those same forces to catalyze
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transformation and change within their own organizations and industries
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super interesting so you’re living in a sense of society that not a lot of it changed all things to be
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changed no one really knew what was going on nobody wanted change no one wanted change stagnant
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and it sounds like there was a bubbling effect yeah like boiling water where
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no it’s like someone flipping a switch well okay like then that’s where i woke up i remember i i tell this story in my
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book so i wake up it’s early one saturday morning and my fiancee who’s not ordinarily an
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early riser i was surprised to find that she was not only already awake
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but fully dressed and heading out the door and you know
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as you start going through your head like what did i do i see i seem to be in trouble and i
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don’t know why and so i got up i sort of meekly asked her you know uh
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where are you going and she said oh i’m going out to a demonstration and i said but i thought
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you didn’t care about politics and she said yeah you know i didn’t but it’s enough already and we have to do something and just like that all of a
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sudden everybody we knew they were all going out to political demonstrations on a regular basis
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and this is this is what led to the events we now know as an the orange revolution and when i was
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doing my research into network science i found that there’s a name for that it’s called
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an instantaneous phase transition and we’ve known about that for
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decades there’s a even a theorem that that predicts it called the uh eredish renii theorem
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so all of these things which seem so strange it turned out they have both
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a mathematical explanation and i learned from my friends her job
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a tactical explanation as well what i find so fascinating is how you
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really dig into maybe what creates these revolutions and the scientific and the math behind it but
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then also just what you observed three meetings for john you know can you maybe you said he was able to help that
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fine in a way or you know explain what was going on well so so they that’s really an interesting story as well
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because you know they learned through failure um there was a guy
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decades ago who wrote all this stuff down and figured it out his name is gene sharp
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he was just a terrible writer just like horrible like the most he he didn’t
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really have a good ability to communicate which is why his work although is his world famous is not
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as even most activists don’t really know about it but he he basically in
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invented these principles of non-violent struggle with respect to sir job
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he was just an activist he was a student activist at first when
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in 1992 he was protesting with other students against the war in bosnia
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the problem with the student protests is then the summer came and everybody went home and that was pretty much the end of
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that movement sort of similar to occupy and even called that his occupy moment
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and then in 96 they there was a falsified election there was issues with
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the local elections and they had a huge protest
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and eventually got that overturned but in the end they lost unity and then in
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1998 they he and four friends they met in a cafe
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and they said listen we have to do something about milosevic who i don’t know if you
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remember that name but he was you know he was like a saddam hussein or kim jong-un i
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mean he was the strong man dictator of serbia and they said listen we know we can
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mobilize people and get them to the polls and we know that if we get them to the polls we can
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win the election and we know if we win the election milosevic is going to try and steal it
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so that’s what we’re going to plan for and that was the start of the
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movement in serbia which was the first of the color revolutions so there was five of
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them the next day uh six of their friends joined them they became the 11 founders a year later they’d maybe grown
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to two 300 people and anybody who looked at serbia in 1999 would have to conclude
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that you know milosevic was going to be dictator for life
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a year after that uh they got people to the polls they had the election milosevic tried to steal it and that’s
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what started the bulldozer revolution he was taken from power in less than a year he was on
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the his way to the hague where he would die in a prison cell so that’s what’s possible and they had a
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they built a model but what’s what was interesting when gene sharp’s right-hand man a guy named
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bob helvey who’s a former uh army colonel when he went to go do
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training for them they were sort of like wow we didn’t know there was names for all this stuff they sort of had figured
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most of it out on on their own and and he helped advise them but one of the
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really interesting things in my research they all sort of start off that way except for the civil rights movement
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which studied gandhi deeply there was a start and then a failure or series of failures
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in which they learned and eventually hit they all ended up hitting on the same principles
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i mean that’s what that’s what’s amazing about when you start researching movements is the successful ones all
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look end up looking very much alike wow so
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this is fascinating historical context it’s uh my godfather serbian and heard some
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stories growing up at the serbian church but i don’t recall this in great detail um but it
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seems like it all these ingredients made for in a rise an upper uprise from the
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people and you’re kind of talking about some of these ingredients that were part of the stew that led to led to this
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immediately can you share i mean more into the science of creating
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movements and creating uprisings and disruption what’s like what is that process when
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you look at the civil rights movement when you look at what happened in ukraine and serbia you know sounds like
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there’s a common thread here and uh yeah there’s a lot of them first every change effort starts with a grievance there’s
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something or a series of things people don’t like and they want them different right so that’s the first challenge
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you have to transform that sense of grievance to a a vision of tomorrow
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how do you want it to look different and that vision should always be aspirational then uh in in our
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organizational work sometimes we find the opposite where somebody has a vision
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but they haven’t figured out what the grievance is so you know they’re they want to create an initiative around
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design thinking or agile and they haven’t articulated what the problem
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they’re trying to solve is so it’s difficult for people to see relevance so you need both those things
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the grievance and the vision then you want to create you want to create something i call in
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the book a keystone change and uh you all i’m leaving something out here you
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always want to start with the majority it’s really really important whether
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that is three people in a room of five you can always expand the majority out
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it’s uh once you’re in the minority you’ll get an immediate pushback which is why you tend to see these types of
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movements uh the political movements or social movements you tend to see them start off in in
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college campuses not always but sometimes uh tea party movements
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in a very similar way would start started out in cafes very small cafes
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and sort of the mantra for my book is small groups loosely connected united by a shared purpose the first thing you
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want to do is create some sort of keystone change and this is
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not the vision but it’s a uh so the the example i use in the book is is gandhi
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salt march so it has a clear and tangible goal which the vision does not it involves multiple stakeholders
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and it leads the way to future change um so with it with respect to civil rights for
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example the vision was a blessed community the keystone change was voting rights
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right often it takes a while to identify the keystone change
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marriage equality for the lgbtq movement it took a long time for them to settle
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on that so and and then also you need to be explicit about your values a great
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example in anti-apartheid people used to accuse nelson mandela of being
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a communist and an extremist and all sorts of things and he used to say whenever he was confronted with these accusations he
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used to say nobody needs to guess what i believe because it was all written down in 1955.
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it was called the freedom charter even today it’s a very important document almost like like the declaration of
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independence to us or the constitution is to us the freedom charter is still an important document in south africa but
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he was explicit it’s important to be explicit about values because values are constraints
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right and because they were explicit about you know freedom for all south africans he
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couldn’t subjugate white south africans because that would be against the freedom charter and everything he’d been
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fighting for it also signaled to other people who had the same values that around the world this is something
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we can get behind so it’s important to be explicit about your values and you can see more recent
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movements have really gotten into trouble because they weren’t explicit about their values
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and and didn’t create constraints for themselves then there’s in terms of planning
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there’s two tools called the spectrum of allies and pillars of support but basically much like a general maps the
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terrain upon which the military battle will be fought these tools help map the terrain upon which the battle for change
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will be fought so you want to identify in terms of constituencies who are your most active
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supporters who are your passive supporters who’s neutral who’s active uh
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actively uh passively against you and actively against you and then you also we were talking before about
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who had the power in ukraine you also want to map out which institutions
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have uh power to actually enact change so for instance if you want to change
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education right there’s all sorts of constituencies you have parents you have
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teachers you have students you have people in the community you have you know all people who for one reason or
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another are interested in education and you need to mobilize them but then you
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have institutions you have school boards you have teachers unions you have the
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parent teachers associations those are institutions so you want to mobilize those constituencies
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to influence those institutions so you always want to be mobilizing somebody to influence
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something and it’s really important that you make distinctions about those two different types of stakeholders that
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those are constituencies that are targets for mobilization and institutions that are targets for
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influence and that’s how you design your tactics you’re always mobilizing somebody to influence
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something and that’s that’s sort of what gets down to tactical design then you have uh scaling up where we
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call weaving and network that’s usually about uh giving people co-optable resources where
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they can take ownership of the movement if you think about you know tedx right
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you’ve got thousands of people around the world working millions of
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hours to promote the ted brand why because they’re co-opting it for their
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own purposes if you can create a co-optable resource you can really scale
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and uh and you do that through networks and then finally surviving victory which
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uh one of the most interesting things i found in my research is that the victory
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phase is often the most dangerous phase because those people who you know hate your idea
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and want to kill it any way they can they don’t just leave and give up once you’ve won that
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initial victory in fact they’re doubling we you know they’re redoubling their their efforts and we can see that right
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now in this country so it’s really important to go back to that sense of shared values um and that is basically
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i just save you 20 bucks that’s a that’s a book there you go i mean i mean
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i mean fascinating right it’s like what gets people mobilized what are the institutions and stakeholders involved
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how do you get people to protest take action and organize a group of people i loved
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what you said about starting with the majority and kind of working from there and kind of you hit that central nerve
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with someone and rallied people around it and um it’s fascinating easy to learn hard to
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master but what i what i was amazed when when i first and you can go to the
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center for applied non-violent action and strategies you can go to their website and you can download handbooks
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that will tell you how to do this they have a canvas guidebook that will but
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when when i started first going through his materials their materials and then
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really getting to know sir john over the years we’ve become friends the extent to which
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everything had been worked out when i if you go and you look for the god the guidebook for non-violent
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struggles you have the feeling that you’re you’re reading some sort of brand book from proper proctor and
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gamble or something like that i mean that’s the extent to they teach you how to plan each thing
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right and and how to do reverse planning and almost like a corporation it’s really
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absolutely incredible and i think that’s why in political and social
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movements that’s why so many of them fail and i’ve i was talking
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to a black lives matter activist and he said you know it’s pretty easy to get people to to go march
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it’s very difficult to get people to sit down and do strategy and that sense of
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professionalism about that realization that the righteousness of your cause
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won’t save you and we find the same thing when we’re working with
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corporations where they’re big on kickoff meetings big on vicious vision statements but they don’t
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actually sit down and work out a chain strategy and most of all
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anticipate you know one of the things we we constantly ask how would an evil person
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undermine the change that you seek how would an evil not a nice decent responsible person how would an
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evil person go about undermining you and you have to think about that from the very beginning because it’s going to
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happen because any time you ask people to change what they think or do
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somebody is not going to like it and they’re going to work to undermine you in ways that are dishonest and
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underhanded and deceptive and once you can internalize that you’re ready to move forward also with a really
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great awareness and perception for people to understand what would undermine their efforts before they
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start them so they can kind of have the watch outs in place then you can anticipate and start building and start
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building strategies and i i go back to that moment in the cafe
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um they they said when we we can mobilize people and get them to
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the polls and we can win the election and milosevic is going to try and steal
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it and they didn’t say he’s going to try and steal it so it’s not worth doing he said
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he’s going to try and steal it and that’s going to be our chance that’s what we’re going to plan for because
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that’s what happened before they had experienced it they weren’t prepared and they said next time
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that’s what we’re going to prepare for that’s what we’re going to plan for they were so i can send you a strategy
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they even had a strategy for arrests so that every time the regime arrested
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one of their activists it weakened the regime and strengthened them they turned
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wow everything to their advantage and that once you understand the extent
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to which that’s possible you understand any change is possible right
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uh especially in in a in a country that was that repressive that the leader was
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willing to go to war just to stay in power the level i mean just the level of detail i’m planning to do this well and
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effectively it takes a lot of forethought yeah yeah but it’s but once you
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understand that it’s possible i mean when i first when when i first
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started talking and learning about this because i had experienced it and like i said when i experienced it
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nobody knew what was going on nobody it was just it all seemed so spontaneous
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and and by chance and random and you know like a wave at a stadium but i
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found out later that you know this was a repeatable process and once you understand that
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it’s actually possible to not engineer it so much but put the
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wheels in motion to nurture it like a gardener would an organism then
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you say you know that’s really really powerful yeah greg what’s fascinating just as i’m
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listening about your work is it it doesn’t just apply your work doesn’t just apply at a countrywide level or an
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electoral level it applies across organizations it cro that applies across companies applies
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across that maybe perhaps a small like creating a movement within your own family like to create effective change and lasting
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change like the the uh well in a family you can really see
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how the you know start with the majority right well so right exactly right you can see it’s
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what you’re what you’re talking about is change on the biggest levels but you can it can be applied down to the smallest
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levels you might absolutely one of the things we always say i always say is is whenever you feel the need to persuade
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somebody you’re probably on the wrong track because anybody who’s ever been married
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or had kids knows how hard it can be to persuade even a single person of
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something they don’t want to be persuaded of if you think you’re going to persuade hundreds or thousands or
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millions but you’re right it’s often uh and i and i love your point that you know it all starts at the
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lowest level right so with that like those under underpinnings
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how do you spot a change or cascade before it happens like what what are those key
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aspects oh that’s interesting um it’s really interesting because the successful ones often start off very
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much like the unsuccessful ones i mean usually almost all of them have their early
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failures um you know gandhi had his himalayan uh
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what he calls himalayan miscalculus they all sort of had these early missteps i
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talked about serbia where there was you know 92 and then a failure in 96 and
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then a failure you want to look for
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small groups that are becoming loosely connected and united by that shared purpose and that
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shared purpose one of the most powerful things we do in when we’re working with organizations
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and and this is something i think everybody can apply in their everyday life is we get people to switch shift
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from differentiating values which makes them passionate about something
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to shared values which helps bring people in so if you look at something like agile
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development where um i you know anybody who’s ever seen
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somebody come back from an agile workshop or scrum workshop you know they always want to talk about the agile
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manifesto because that’s what makes people within that community love it to
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people outside the community it seems you know almost crazy so you want to shift to
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shared values it’s it’s the same thing the lgbtq movement did for years they
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were spinning their wheels with you know we’re here we’re queer we want to be accepted for our difference
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right um when they shifted and every time they got even a little bit ahead they got
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hammered with defensive marriage and family values and blah blah blah
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and then they shifted and they said we want the same things you want we want to live in committed
33:09
relationships we want to raise happy families and in record time they changed people’s
33:16
views i mean it changed in less than 10 years from most people against to most
33:23
people for and and this is something that we can apply in our daily lives where we want
33:29
to talk what we’re passionate about and we want to talk about when we want to give the proof points the facts the
33:35
evidence blah blah blah where what we want to start with and that’s that’s generally not going to
33:42
be effective what’s going to be effective is when you talk about shared values
33:49
if people feel that that you share their values they’ll be willing to listen to you
33:56
if they don’t feel that you they share your values then it won’t matter
34:02
what facts and evidence you put before them they’re not going to be on board and that i think is is is
34:10
through this whole journey is what and that was the mistake we made in 2004 and five which is why there had
34:17
to be another revolution almost 10 years later is we thought that we could
34:24
overturn an election and go home and it and that turned out very very badly and the second time they were much
34:32
smarter and it wasn’t just about an election it was about embracing
34:38
certain values yeah and that’s why the second revolution is
34:43
and just think about it because it’s in the news now right ukraine is willing to go to war
34:52
with a much bigger much more powerful country a war they will almost surely
34:58
lose because of those values that’s how powerful a sense of shared
35:03
values is you can align on a values level i think your everything you’re speaking is so
35:09
right like when you can align at that core level not just around shared vision they’re on
35:14
the shared values that will make people march towards the shared vision absolutely right drive that effect of
35:21
change and that’s also how you ladder up to a shared identity hmm
35:27
tomorrow got it yep so you got to find the people with the shared values because you can do that you can probably
35:33
influence them on that vision and identity to get there because they’re already aligned with the other core level and i think
35:40
well we all share values with each other i mean they’re not 100 percent the same
35:46
values but we can usually find even with people we don’t like
35:51
we can usually find some values that you share it doesn’t mean you have to share all your values so if you look at for
35:58
instance the civil rights movement we think we remember martin luther king and we forget that martin luther king was
36:05
really only one of what was known as the big six of civil rights and they all ran
36:12
very different organizations had very different networks focused on different constituencies different institutions
36:19
and they had different values but they were able to come together and collaborate on the values they shared
36:27
and the world is a much much better place because of it oh man greg this is one of the most i
36:34
mean i talked to i think some interesting people but the specificity and then just the historical
36:41
context that you have is it’s on it’s just blown me away it’s been a very powerful conversation i want to just
36:46
give you a compliment on thanks for that i really appreciate it on friday afternoon this is like a tuesday morning
36:53
conversation but we’re having it on the end of the week but i’m like beyond like
36:58
it’s just incredible because some of the insights you’re sharing from all your learnings something i’m curious about for you greg is if you’ve taken the give
37:05
this body of knowledge you’ve seen change at all levels for you personally like within your own
37:11
life how have you created you know your own cascade your own movement so to speak
37:16
and around the things you care about that’s a great question and and i
37:22
one of the things that i tell people about the way the world has changed the
37:28
way the use of power has changed moses naim the name of his book escapes me at
37:34
this point but when mark zuckerberg did his book club moses his book was the the
37:40
first one the theme of the book is that power is easier to get but harder to use and keep
37:47
and the very nature of power has changed right i mean power is the
37:54
ability to shape events and what’s changed is back when the
37:59
world was more hierarchical power came from the top and went down but power no
38:05
longer emanates from the top it emanates from the center one of the most counter-intuitive intuitive things about
38:12
network mass is that you move to the center by connecting out we think that you move to
38:19
the center by trying to connect to the center but a network is an organic thing
38:24
it’s constantly developing and growing and the center nodes by definition are
38:29
well populated but as you’re connecting out you’re slightly shifting
38:36
the center and that’s how you make yourself central by connecting yes to the center but also
38:43
out everybody yeah define out out as in
38:48
i get what you’re saying but maybe give it some tangible context so look at microsoft
38:53
right where they used to connect to intel and major corporations and central nodes
39:02
these days in silicon valley unless you’re connecting to startup ecosystems you’re not going to make it as a major
39:08
player there’s a wonderful book by a friend of mine anna lee saxenian called regional advantage i think the early 80s
39:15
is when she wrote it because boston used to be the center of inter of information technology companies like digital and
39:22
data general and wang and all these you’ve probably only never even heard of these companies but those were the big
39:29
technology companies back in the 60s and 70s and even in the 80s the reason why
39:36
silicon valley and the book tells a story in in wonderful detail and holds
39:42
up even today is because silicon valley was set up as networks
39:47
where the boston-based companies were much more hierarchical so in the boston companies if you went
39:55
and if you left the company you were dead to them they never wanted to see you again if you left the company in in
40:01
silicon valley your former company would almost always be a either a supplier or a customer
40:09
and those that ability to constantly connect out to those merging nodes
40:16
that’s what made silicon valley silicon valley so that’s what i mean when connecting
40:22
out not just to the obvious one not to the obvious central node that everybody is connected to
40:28
right but connecting out to those emerging nodes got it and so i mean to your point
40:35
though it’s not just about connecting out and building maybe new relationships to bring
40:41
back to the center but it’s about relationships that may leave the center also staying connected to those nodes so
40:48
both obviously you want to stay connected to the center as as well
40:53
right but it’s connecting out and there’s an interesting balance that needs to be made
41:00
because we are tribal by nature right and that’s good right
41:06
we’ve gotten this bad juju around silos but silos are good so those are centers of excellence we like
41:13
to be in a team we like to we like to be around people we have trust that we have strong bonds with we’re able to do
41:20
things with we’ve built up bonds of trust with but we need to balance that
41:26
with keeping nodes open and letting letting new ideas and new people in
41:33
there’s a great paper by brian uzi uh and and some others from
41:40
northwestern kellogg business school and they they went through 50 years of
41:45
broadway musicals to try and figure out what made some hits and some flops and they went
41:52
through all the usual stuff like the marketing budget and the production budget and the track record of the
41:59
director and all sorts of stuff and what they found was the most important factor to whether it would be
42:05
a hit or a flop was the social networks of the cast and
42:11
crew of the the networks of the castle group if nobody had ever worked together before
42:17
results tended to be very poor both from a critical and a financial perspective
42:24
and as people knew you know had more and more people had worked together before and had some
42:30
level of familiarity and working relationship with each other the results got better and better but only up to a
42:37
point and then it started going downhill because if everybody knew each
42:43
other and everybody’d worked together before new ideas weren’t coming in and it
42:48
killed the creativity so you always need that balance of good strong ties of bonds of trust
42:56
but also this constantly connecting out to new blood yeah
43:02
beyond beyond interesting um you’re pulling from so many sources
43:09
right and like it’s you can see why i got interested enough to spend 15 years
43:14
writing a book that nobody wanted to publish for a long time yeah yeah no i i
43:19
uh it makes so much sense to me and i mean it’s no surprise to me you know um yeah
43:25
i’m sure you know having to wait to write the book right made it that much richer and better because he had more time to
43:31
to think about it yeah yeah yeah i i mean in in in the end i think it was good that i
43:37
got to write another book first and i i think it’s a better certainly a better book for it yeah for sure so greg as
43:44
we’re closing out you’ve developed this rich body of knowledge you write i think beautifully from some of the things i’ve
43:50
read you’ve built in kind of a it seems like a practice around this helping people describe what you do how you take
43:57
this body of knowledge and bring it to the world to help other people what’s that look like for you
44:02
we do a couple of things i mean professionally the way i earn my living is we work with organizations to overcome
44:10
resistance to change rather than sit and say hey let’s let’s create this change
44:15
initiative you know let’s do whatever it is and then six months later it sputters
44:21
and you move on to the next change initiative that is also going to sputter we help them sit down and plan it out
44:29
and figure out how this change is going to happen from day one and then the plan change changes over
44:36
time but they’ve started that process for the beginning
44:41
thinking ahead of the snafus and one the interesting thing is when people go through our workshops
44:47
very often we hear you know we thought you were going to tell us how to make change easy but
44:53
instead you showed us how hard it is it’s going to be which is great because now we know what
44:59
we’re dealing with so that’s what i do professionally personally i’m going to give a quick plug here for something we
45:06
do on clubhouse that we love i run a club called change agents and every
45:11
wednesday at 5 00 p.m eastern we have sessions we call what’s your
45:17
idea for change where we bring people in they talk they talk a little bit about
45:23
their idea for change there’s a format that that we have where they present
45:29
this very clearly and very succinct and they get advice from an expert panel
45:34
me and four of my colleagues but we also bring in outside experts so for instance there
45:40
was this one gentleman in kurdistan who wanted to help entrepreneurs
45:47
because it’s very hard to import and export because customs is such a problem we paired him up with a friend of mine
45:54
who runs an innovation program an entrepreneurship program in
46:00
kurdistan in iraq in erbil in another city in kurdistan and they’re just
46:05
opening in baghdad we have helped we’ve brought in medical professionals to help people
46:10
with medic we’ve brought in education professionals to help people with education initiatives any all sorts of
46:17
initiatives most of them very early stage we bring people in and we
46:24
help give them guidance advice in many cases
46:29
actual uh connections to people who have resources to help them
46:36
super neat i mean you’re yeah it’s very cool yeah yeah no i mean it’s the application to your work is vast right
46:42
it seems like you picked a few lanes and helping other people interested in the species you’re interested in as well kind of
46:48
create work around it and greg this is so cool i mean um you know people you
46:53
hear a lot of people talk about creating movements rather they kind of help create change but the organization we’re
47:01
purely focused on doing that and it sounds like a scalable way with some process and
47:07
you know but the custom applications to it is just what a fulfilling a lot of work an interesting line of work i’m
47:14
sure that never gets old uh so thank you for thanks for your time today and yours well thanks for having
47:19
me i really enjoyed the conversation great well greg where where can people get your book where can people hire you
47:24
where can people hire you to talk speak right all the things so uh my website is just gregsatel.com
47:32
you can always find me in linkedin or in clubhouse my books are of course are on amazon and my my blog is at
47:40
digitaltonto.com awesome well greg what a pleasure thank you for everything
47:47
if you enjoyed this episode as much as i did i hope you leave a review on the platform of your choice and share it
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47:59
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48:06
next show [Music]

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This post was previously published on ARCBOUND.COM.

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