unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc

Economists, policy makers, and business decision makers all agree on efficiency as a goal, with more better than less and who could object? Well, it all depends, of course on how the objectives are formulated and what you are missing. That's the idea behind Roger Martin’s latest book When More Is Not Better: Overcoming America's Obsession With Economic Efficiency.Roger Martin is the former dean and current emeritus professor of strategy at the Rotman School at the University of Toronto, and the author of numerous other books, including Creating Great Choices, Getting Beyond Better And Playing To Win.Listen in as Greg and Roger chat about resiliency, acknowledging tradeoffs, overinvesting in exploitation, and how focusing too much on data analytics is malpractice.Episode Quotes:When efficiency becomes unproductive:If you push it past a point, you stop thinking about things that don't lend themselves easily to a measurement of efficiency but help make a system work better, whatever system you're looking at. Your company, your country, your town, your household. If you try to make every relationship with your partner, your children, your dog as efficient as possible, at a point it would become a miserable place, right? And it might actually fall apart because you aren't paying attention to, is this a resilient family or resilient household or resilient town.How to think about knowledge:The right way I would argue to think about knowledge is we don't build knowledge. We subtract to get knowledge. When something is a mystery, you don't even know how to think about it. So you've got to think about everything in all possibilities.Why is the business world siloed?:The reason for dividing the business world into silos is in some sense for exploitation, right? It's to understand a narrow field, as we've defined it better and better. Not to do things like explore how that field may relate to other fields, how that field maybe not a good definition of a field, or any of those things. It's exploitation, oriented in for convenience exploitation.  Show Links: Guest Profile:Roger Martin’s WebsiteRoger Martin on LinkedinRoger Martin on TwitterRoger Martin on Medium.comProfessional Profile at the Rotman School, University of Toronto His Work:When More Is Not Better: Overcoming America's Obsession with Economic Efficiency Creating Great Choices: A Leader's Guide to Integrative ThinkingGetting Beyond Better: How Social Entrepreneurship Works Playing to Win: How Strategy Really WorksFixing the Game: How Runaway Expectations Broke the Economy, and How to Get Back to RealityThe Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive AdvantageThe Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative ThinkingThe Responsibility Virus: How Control Freaks, Shrinking Violets-and The Rest Of Us-can Harness The Power Of True Partnership Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Workers have more rights than maybe they've ever harnessed as a collective, and it's shaping the way leaders lead. We're starting to see the research bear out that when we move away from leading by power, into leading with emotional intelligence, that this is actually a way to build a more successful company, a more successful team, and it's a way to be more successful as a person.Scott Shute is the Head of the Compassion and Mindfulness Programs at LinkedIn, and the author of The Full Body Yes: Change Your Work And Your World From The Inside Out.This episode focuses on mindfulness and compassion, Scott’s upbringing in rural Kansas, work as religion, and why haven't we been talking about this stuff all along.Episode Quotes:How do you define compassion:The first part is having an awareness for the other person. The second part is having a mindset of kindness towards them, or a mindset of wishing the best for them. And then the third part is the courage to take action on their behalf. Now this works for our employees, it also works for our customers. What has changed about labor to bring us to this moment:We've evolved in consciousness and our labor markets have changed. The two things have fit together. By being a good person, I can actually deliver better results for my company and be personally more fulfilled, but also help other people be personally more fulfilled. So it's a little bit of a golden age in work. The importance of feedback:One of the beauties of getting older is that we see all the mistakes and we've been through enough cycles to see what went well and what didn't go well. And as a leader, that's super helpful because then we can help guide people that are younger or have less cycles of experience. In terms of getting feedback, when we are more comfortable in our own skin, we're not so worried about what everybody else says. It's interesting because then it allows us to be more vulnerable. And in that vulnerability, it allows us to take on feedback to say, I can really hear what you're saying without getting so triggered.Show Links:Guest Profile:Scott Shute’s WebsiteScott Shute on LinkedinScott Shute on TwitterScott Shute on FacebookScott Shute on TEDxMountainViewHis Work:The Full Body Yes: Change Your Work and Your World from the Inside Out Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Think of a big decision you've made lately. The final call was most likely yours, but how did external factors weigh in? Did you talk it over with a spouse or a close friend, think about your upbringing, your economic status, or how the final outcome might affect your future and your community? So much about our social networks affects our decision making process. Matthew Jackson is a professor of economics at Stanford University, and he also wrote the book The Human Network: How Your Social Position Determines Your Power, Beliefs, And Behaviors.Matthew and Greg sit down to talk about what Matthew calls Social Economics, how social context could help solve structural problems, the friendship paradox, and borrowing contagion models from epidemiology to track how ideas travel through social networks.Episode Quotes:Why social aspects are important in economics:As we know, people don't act fully rationally. They don't have unlimited capacity for calculating and making decisions and processing information. And moreover, we're embedded in our social structures. Our networks, we listen to our friends, our acquaintances, our family. These are the people that help us make decisions.These are the people that give us information. They give us opportunities, they give us access to things. They control our norms. And if we don't have that context, we miss about 80 to 90% of what influences people's decision-making. And so bringing that social structure in, makes a huge difference in understanding why people end up making what we would think of as economists, as suboptimal decisions.What is the Friendship Paradox:If somebody has 10 friends and somebody else has one friend, then that person who has 10 friends has 10 times the influence. They get noticed a lot more by people than the person who has fewer friends. And on average, when you look at a society, that means that these people who are very, very popular are people that are influencing many more people, and that means that we end up with distorted views. How letting one person become too influential can change the future of an industry:In settings where we know that somebody is going to begin to influence prices and the forward development of an industry, we have to pay attention to that person. And that makes it feedback in a positive way.I mean, “positive” in quotes, right? Because now he can shake the industry up and down. So it's positive in some ways and negative in others. Show Links:Guest Profile:Faculty Profile at Stanford UniversityProfessional Profile at CourseraMatthew Jackson on TwitterHis work:Matthew Jackson on Google ScholarThe Human Network: How Your Social Position Determines Your Power, Beliefs, and BehaviorsSocial and Economic Networks Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

AI & machine learning have been at the center of moral debate for decades now. Scientists and lay people alike know, or assume, that there will come a day where machines will not just figure out how to accomplish goals, but will also figure out what those goals are. That is the central question of our guests latest book, The Alignment Problem.Brian Christian is a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley working with human compatible AI and the Citrus Foundation. He is also known for co-authoring Algorithms To Live By: The Computer Science Of Human Decisions. How do we make sure that our training dataset is representative? How do we make sure learning systems are learning the right things? And how can we make statistical classifiers more accurate when it comes to using algorithms for issues like probation and parole? These questions and more are all tackled in this episode.Episode Quotes:How can we aim to avoid unconscious bias in datasets?I think there's a lot of work to be done both in terms of thinking about what are the data sets that we're really using, how do they generalize to the populations of people that are really going to be affected by a technology?And also how do we articulate what we are truly trying to get this system to do? If certain mistakes are many orders of magnitude more costly than others, we have to find some way of expressing that or else by default, we're going to get a system that doesn't do anything close to what we want. Issues with statistical classifiers to think about probation, parole in US:But what you did see in terms of the difference between black and white defendants was a difference in the actual kinds of errors that it was making.So, if you look specifically at the defendants that were mispredicted, misclassified, you find that black defendants relative to white defendants are about two to one more likely to be misclassified as high-risk. White defendants, the other way around, two to one more likely to have been misclassified as lower risk than they really were.Encouraging research on the future of machine learning:My personal favorite is a paper between open AI and deep mind, where they were able to get a system to learn how to perform a backflip in this virtual world. Merely by showing users pairs of video clips of it moving randomly and saying which of these is slightly more like a backflip.And by showing people 900 such video clips and just saying which of these is slightly more like a backflip, the system was able to infer a representation of what a backflip was. That was good enough for it to then learn how to execute these beautiful gymnastically, perfect backflips, sticking the landing, et cetera. And I think that to me frankly, it's about as hopeful as I have felt about this problem space in many years, because I think there is this promise that we can develop a methodology for extracting, somehow , the norms, the preferences that we have in our head. Show Links:Guest Profile:Brian Christian WebsiteBrian Christian on TwitterAcademic Profile at Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at UC BerkeleyHis work:The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human ValuesAlgorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human DecisionsGameMaker Programming By ExampleThe Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

While many on the left are calling for radical change and the fall of capitalism, Philippe Aghion says the answer is to create better capitalism by understanding and to harness the power of creative destruction.That's the focus of his latest book, The Power Of Creative Destruction: Economic Upheaval And The Wealth Of Nations.Philippe is a French economist who is a Professor at College de France, INSEAD, and the London School of Economics.Listen as we dive into the theories behind The Power of Creative Destruction, different types of competition, legacy firms vs. small innovative firms, and the case of Korea in the 90s.Episode Quotes:2 ways competition effects innovation:More competition will make us innovate so that I can do better than you. That's the thought whereby competition spurs innovation. On the other hand, there is a discouraging effect of competition. If I am behind you and there is more competition, I have less incentive to catch up. You see, you have these two effects and that's why the relationship between competition and innovation in the aggregate, is that kind of interrupted your relationship.COVID and creative destruction in France:COVID made it clear for example, to countries like France, that much more of what we need to put in place an innovation ecosystem from basic research, all the way to industrialization, to regain control of a huge change in various sectors, where we lost this control. And it will happen a lot through creative destruction, through new firms coming in and replacing old activities.Not because you will bring back old firms that have plants in China back to France. That's not the way it will happen. It will happen very much through creative destruction.In frontier economics - even the unskilled labor gets paid more than in places where you have less sophisticated technology:They [innovative firms] in fact provide more what we call “good jobs.” You have two kinds of skills. You have the hard skills that you learn at school. But you have what we call the sub skills which are, the ability to interact with other employees of the firm or the, how you get the synergies that you have with the other assets of the firm.And those are what we call subsidiary liability. Your ability to interact, and to understand how to play as a team player. All those things are not things you learn at school. They are things that we call sub skills. Some of them you have them, or you don't have them. Some of them you acquire through training.Show Links:Guest Profile:Faculty Profile at the London School of EconomicsFaculty Profile at Paris School of EconomicsProfessional Profile at Harvard UniversityHis work:Phillippe Aghion on Google ScholarThe Power of Creative Destruction: Economic Upheaval and the Wealth of NationsThe Economics of GrowthCompetition and Growth: Reconciling Theory and EvidenceAn Agenda for a Growing Europe: The Sapir Report Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

You may not be a hot shot Instagram influencer, but you probably have more power to influence other people's decisions than you think. But on the flip side, some people wrestling with social anxieties and nerves, are overestimating how much other people think about their actions and judge them.So why are people so unaware of their actual place in other people’s worlds, and how can we find the sweet spot in which to interact with the people around us?Vanessa Bohns is a social psychologist, professor of organizational behavior at Cornell University, and the author of You Have More Influence Than You Think: How We Underestimate Our Power Of Persuasion, And Why It Matters.Today’s episode covers this core question of over vs. under confidence, where popularity fits in the persuasion mix, the invisibility cloak illusion, and the results of her library book vandalism study.Episode Quotes:Influence is more than just changing people's minds:It's also the time we ask people for things throughout the day. It's all the ways we model behavior that other people follow along and copy. It's the way we run meetings and either create space or don't. So it's all the little ways that social psychologists have studied influence for a really long time. But I think that when we're thinking of the psychological definition of influence, it's a lot broader and more subtle.Why saying no is often harder than saying yes when someone asks you to do something:Part of it is that we think saying no is the default when we go to ask someone for something. But saying no is the hard thing; saying yes is the easier thing. Yes is just yes. You might be a little annoyed, but saying no, you need to come up with the words. You risk the potential for a confrontation. Often we want to make an excuse, so we don't make the person feel bad, so we have to come up with that, what that excuse might be. And we tend to forget how hard it is to come up with a no. Why some people shout and get aggressive in arguments:Under confidence can lead you to sort of push too hard. Because you're expecting pushback or you think you're sort of shouting into the void, right? Like we also underestimate how many people are paying attention to our social media posts and things like that, so we think we can just put whatever out there.Show Links:Guest Profile:Vanessa Bohns WebsiteVanessa Bohns on LinkedinVanessa Bohns on TwitterFaculty Profile at Cornell UniversityHer work:Vanessa Bohns on Google ScholarYou Have More Influence Than You Think: How We Underestimate Our Power of Persuasion, and Why It Matters Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

It's been said that the most important invention of modern times is the corporation. And Colin Mayer agrees, saying the corporation is a “remarkable invention for bringing together the capacity and capability of mankind to work together to create phenomenal outcomes.”Colin is a professor at the Saïd School at the University of Oxford, and was also the Dean between 2006 and 2011, helping to get the school off the ground. Colin sits down with Greg to discuss why the history of the corporation is so understudied, balancing shareholders and managers within a corporation, and the benefits of family firms.Episode Quotes:Striking balance within a corporationBut then it's still very important that the company gets that balance between having the ability to control things centrally, but ensuring that that entrepreneurship, that innovation is not lost by delegating decision taking down the organization so that people have the legitimacy to pursue that innovation as well. Why some of Milton Freeman's theories about corporations don't work in modern timesBecause it basically says that the company should do whatever it can to generate profits, irrespective of the impact that it has on its employees, its societies, its environment. So long as in the process of doing that, it doesn't violate laws or it doesn't lose its reputation.And the consequence of that has been exactly what we've observed over the last 60 years as the movement towards profit gathered pace. And that is that the corporation has created a huge amount of wealth for some and in the process, intensified levels of inequality and social exclusion immensely, and had a devastating consequence on the environment.And that is exactly what you would expect from a notion of what the purpose of a business is. It will do whatever it can to generate profit, irrespective of the impact it has on others, including the natural world.Are family firms more risk averse?There's certainly evidence that,, family businesses follow a conservative approach in terms of the extent to which they are willing to sacrifice the reputation of the penny and the family., And that element in terms of being interested in the reputation of the family is potentially a source of inhibiting innovation, entrepreneurship, and experimentation. But it's equally well a mechanism for ensuring responsibility on the part of the owners of a company.So one of the interesting elements of the pandemic was, to what extent did different organizations respond by supporting those who are most vulnerable, during the onset of the pandemic and in particular, to what extent were they willing to support their employees? Well, One form of that conservatism that was demonstrated by family businesses was a strong willingness to recognize the importance of supporting their employees during that period, and really incorporating them as part of the wider family, in the organization.Show Links:Guest Profile:Faculty Profile at Saïd School at the University of OxfordProfessional Profile at The British AcademyHis work:Colin Mayer on Google ScholarProsperity: Better Business Makes the Greater GoodFirm Commitment: Why the corporation is failing us and how to restore trust in itAsset Management and Investor Protection: An International Analysis (Economics & Finance) Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

A combination of structure, constraints and trade, those are the essential ingredients of an engineering mindset. But those traits have benefits and applications to many other scenarios outside the world of engineering. So why aren't they being used?Guru Madhavan is the Senior Scholar and Director of Programs at the National Academy of Engineering, as well as the author of Applied Minds: How Engineers Think, and the upcoming Making Better Choices.Listen as Guru and Greg discuss what makes the engineering way of thinking so distinctive, the crossover between invention and innovation, and break down modular systems thinking.Episode Quotes:Why learning from and sharing information with other domains is so important There are so many examples where engineers have found themselves in frustrating circumstances where they are expected to do one thing and not allowed to contribute beyond what they're capable of. And the exact opposite, where they expect engineers to contribute a more vibrant, acceptable solution. And then you get a point solution that's useless and probably even backfires. So I think, how do you seamlessly transfer some of the generic ideas across the context is the challenge that we all as professionals have to face.When a complex system becomes maladaptiveHow organizations have achieved a level of refinement, specification justification, legitimacy in their functions, to the point that they're not able to relate to one another. And whatever action one might take, squarely conflicts with another. And therefore you have an ultimate maladaptation, maladaptive system from each of these individual adaptive systems.Why aren't there more engineers in politics?Being so outcome oriented, good or bad, sometimes could be lethal and a bit threatening for the social fabric. And I think, to be in politics you have to oppose this - it's a generic point that I'm making - you have to be smooth around the edges, not be so fixed. That's why I think it's a complicated phenomenon where engineers are professionally so astute at making sacrificial judgements when it comes to certain forms of design, but not when it comes to civic matters. That's an open puzzle.Show Links:Guest Profile:Guru Madhavan on LinkedinGuru Madhavan on TwitterProfessional Profile at National Academy of EngineerHis work:Applied Minds: How Engineers ThinkThink Like an Engineer: Inside the Minds That are Changing Our Lives Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Physical intelligence is the most primitive and essential form of cognition. We rely on it to perform basic actions (changing a light bulb) to complicated activities (navigating unknown terrain). Renowned neuroscientist, author, and mountaineer, Scott Grafton brilliantly describes the action-oriented brain's design and workings through the lens of behavioral neurology and cognitive neuroscience, demonstrating how physical intelligence is inherent in all of us.His book of the same name explains the science behind our most overlooked ability and explains the powerful connections between mind and body that help us optimize our physical potentials. This conversation offers us a clear and illuminating insight into the relationship between the mind and the body as they engage (or don't engage) in all manner of physical activity.Episode Quotes:What experience sparked your interest in studying surfaces and movements?One of the most profound experiences I had as a kid was one of my mentors who was teaching me how to do all this, he was teaching a high school class, and he made everybody hike alone for half an hour. For most people, that's the first time they'd actually ever been alone outside of, let's say, their bedroom or something like that. So they’re in the middle of nowhere, middle of the wild now going alone. Right? And it's just pure existential reality. This is how people lived, for most of evolution, just being that skilled, just moving through terrain by yourself and gaining confidence in that is really profound. And not enough of us experience that. I mean, everybody should spend just 10 minutes walking off-trail, just go to Point Reyes or wherever, whatever national park you like, just go off-trail for a bit. It's a totally different experience. Threat in the wilderness helps develop focus and attention.Just think of anybody who has to be situationally aware in a really dynamic environment of everything around them and how they train themselves to open up to that experience and certainly being in the wild by yourself kind of triggers you into that mode because it's just like, what's going on around me. Right? You just naturally kind of become vigilant to just a huge space around you. And I don't think there's any special trick to doing it, other than just doing a lot of it and being in situations where it's a natural outcome of what you're trying to do.Which sense aids in identifying the position of one's body parts in space?The sixth sense is really a tool to help you figure out your body's schema. Your body's schema is your sense of where your three-dimensional body is in space, right? It's not being able to name your finger, or telling an elbow from a wrist. It's, where am I in space? And I'm moving, so I got to keep up with that. And the sixth sense is more information coming in to help you track that and is primarily muscle. When your muscles contract, that's a big tell that my body schema is now moving, where I am in three-dimensional space, where I am is updating. Show Links:Guest ProfileScott Grafton Bio at UC Santa BarbaraScott Grafton on Google ScholarHis WorkPhysical Intelligence: The Science of How the Body and the Mind Guide Each Other Through Life Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The innovation economy begins with discovery and culminates in speculation. For the last 250 years, economic growth has been driven by a consistent process of trial and error. Drawing on his theorist-practitioner experience, Bill Janeway provides an accessible platform to discuss the dynamics of the innovation economy. In this episode, he shares some of his personal reflections from his forty years in venture capital, laying out what he calls the “Three-Player Game” concept, saying this is necessary to fuel innovation: the state, financial capitalism, and the market economy. Find out how the three-player concept is shaping financial innovations. Listen as he discusses his book Doing Capitalism In The Innovation Economy.Episode Quotes:Thoughts on how people make decisions in financial markets beyond correlationI think economics is going through a generation long. Pretty fundamental reconsideration that goes with two things. One, a major observable shift from theoretical to empirical work. Second, the existence and the learning by doing of how to deal with data at the scale, the pervasiveness, the scope, of what's now available. I think one of the most interesting things is something that economists can now not as imperialists of the rational choice theoretic. But as practitioners of data analysis with the other social sciences that are also inundated with data, the movement toward causal explanation, getting beyond correlation, recognizing that the more data you have, the greater the propensity to generate false correlation.Is the thought of financial markets being separate from the real market a completely implausible idea?You can ignore the financial markets if you do two things. One, you think of money as a veil, which simply is a kind of numéraire for indexing real transactions. Second, you assume that the market always prices financial assets in line with real economic fundamentals. The net present value of their future cash flows, and that the real-world economy’s investment decisions and real assets reflect exactly that same calculation. If you do that, make that gigantic, in my view, a self-destructive and absurd leap of faith, then you can say the financial markets don't matter. The body of empirical evidence against either of those propositions is so overwhelming.Why do the amounts invested in venture capital gets bigger and bigger even if the returns are not as big, especially even after the dot com bubble?The world of the bubble of the late 1990s was unique. People made tons of money from investing in things that had no plausible business model, no path towards positive cash flow from operations, we can come back to that mantra. You then had this ten year death of venture capital, where the buyout boom took off again. But, whereas the buyout boom which had shown the same kind of both, skew and persistence of returns. Persistence has disappeared over the last 20 years because all buyout deals are run through auctions, Winner's curse dominated. But remember that first statistical stylized fact that venture capital enormous skew in returns, it goes with persistence.How do current situations and the role of the government in investing in the next generation of entrepreneurs will shape innovation?The great thing about climate change is that it offers the potential for effective political entrepreneurs to fashion a legitimizing mission for massive investment in the next generation, the next revolutions for infrastructure jobs.Thoughts on creative destruction prompting the original growth modelAt the macro level, unused resources because of austerity, because of paralysis of the state in responding to inadequate aggregate demand is utter waste, with no redeeming feature, which actually feeds back to reduce productivity.Show Links:Guest Profile:Professional Profile on Warburg Pincus as Special Limited PartnerBill Janeway on TwitterFaculty Profile at the University of CambridgeFaculty Profile at Pembroke CollegeResearch and Expert Profile at Institute for New Economic ThinkingHis Work:Official WebsiteRecent WritingsInterviews on Print MediaRadio and Podcast InterviewsTalks and Video InterviewsDoing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.