#146 - Tony Saldanha: Why 70% of Digital Transformations Fail (and How to Succeed)

0:00 There's no such thing in my mind as work-life balance. Because at the end of the day, it's all life. And you make choices about, for your own life, are you better off spending 12 hours a day in the office as opposed to uh being with your family or playing golf or whatever it is. But that's a choice you have to make. Whoa!

0:41 All right, you all welcome back. Hey, today on the necessary entrepreneur, we're joined by Tony Saldana, global thought leader on digital transformation, former VP at Procter and Gamble and co-founder of Transformit among another company I just found out, which we're going to discuss. uh Tony's the author of Why Transformations Fail and Revolutionizing Business Operations. And he's been recognized as one of the top voices in helping companies successfully navigate technically driven change and leading billion dollar initiatives. at P &G to advising entrepreneurs on how to build operations. um Todi brings unique perspective on what it really takes at a transformative scale in today's business world.

1:22 That's a lot. Welcome to the necessary entrepreneur. Thank you very much. I'm delighted to be at the necessary entrepreneur. And the reason I came here is because I wanted to find out if I qualify as a necessary person in here. You know what? um Not too often someone asks me a good question from the beginning, but as we can get into it, I'm through, we'll bob and weave through, but um that's one of the fundamental things in my 46 years that I figured out that if we put ourselves in a position that were necessary for a product, for a company, for the marketplace, you're always going to win.

2:03 So, and also then for me to have the life that I wanted and I desired, it was necessary that I go and do this. You know, that's actually funny because there's an equivalent term that I live by. It's called distinctive. um And distinctive is something unique. uh And in a lot of the work that I do, which is in IT, through transformation. It is actually. And in the area of global business services or back office shared services, which we can talk about later. The big challenge is if you don't change, then you become a commodity.

2:46 And your job could be done by uh some startup or some product company that's gonna do it in some corner of the world for a quarter of what you do. And so the game is always to stay distinctive, to be adding more value than anybody else does. That sounds like that's exactly the same as yours, the necessary. Yeah, I think, um, we just always are looking for constant improvement. Yeah. And I don't, we try not to stress ourselves out about it or become depressed about it to not grade ourselves too often, but we found it, we know from day to day, if we're getting better, we know, like, I don't have to reach the finish line every day and all my businesses, but I just need to kind of check in at the end of every day.

3:29 In the beginning of another day, like, Hey, how was yesterday? And were we any better? We take a step back and having that conversations with ourselves, selves every day. um It puts us in a good spot to compete in whatever businesses we're trying to. eh Yeah. So I think, but we use this word commodity lot. Yeah. But we're talking about commodities of humans in this conversation. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. that's, you know, at a macro level, when you kind of think about what is happening with technology, especially with, you know, artificial intelligence and everything else, um what is happening is through the use of technology, everything that's transactional, and eventually we'll get to decision-making type of capabilities of the technology, but everything that's transactional, is now becoming a commodity and it can be done by technology.

4:25 So let's take something like uh email services. When I joined Procter & Gamble three decades ago, among the services that we provided inside the company, and this was obviously way before Gmail and stuff like that, was mainframe based email where you could actually send messages from the US to you know, where I was in Asia and Japan and India and stuff like that. And then at the beginning of every morning, you'd kind of sit down at a terminal and download your email and print it and stuff like that. That was a competitive advantage, the ability to communicate through email.

5:06 Today, nobody in their right mind, other than, you know, Google and Microsoft actually have internal email. It's a commodity. You can buy it. You can get it free. And so that's an example of what is happening. And the people that used to do those email jobs in these big companies, they have to do something else. I mean, they have other forms of communication that they have to move on to. But that's really what technology does. It basically takes the stuff that's repetitive, that can actually be automated, and then it moves it to uh a commodity. And the transition that we have to make. as humans constantly.

5:47 By the way, this is not new. mean, the technology is new, digital is new. But this was exactly the same challenge we had in the first and the second and the third industrial revolutions, which is, what are you going to do when the stuff that you used to be doing, maybe weaving clothes, is now being done by machines? And then you have to move on. Do you think eventually everything becomes commoditized like everything? I actually don't think so. ah So if you kind of look to the historic cycles of, you know, how economics work and how wealth gets generated, ah there is always something which I'm sure I have no clue about that's going to be discovered in the next 10, 20, 30, 50 years.

6:35 That's going to generate the next economic cycle. So, you know, we may feel like my God, you know, the world's kind of falling apart because jobs are going away and you know, now you've got AI that can actually predict what you're going to do next and all that kind of stuff. But then if you kind of think about it, you know, when the Wright brothers first flew their aircraft, 1903. that's- oh yes. um Not too far from here, actually. And then aircraft started to be used in production to ferry people across, literally in a couple of decades after that. That was an incredible change.

7:16 And so this is the same cycle. And I think what's going to continue to happen is that we're going to discover something new. And you and I were talking about the origins of the universe, or Big Bang, or whatever, all that kind of stuff. I have no idea what that next wave is, but I'm confident that cycle will repeat itself. What would stop it from repeating humans don't exist anymore? ah That's probably the only thing I can think of as well, Grimes, that may be. um But then you have to ask yourself, and I know I'm drifting, um what about life on other planets and stuff like that? It's so many. So what do we do? Everybody wants to know you coming up in a, you know, top level corporate environment.

7:59 We wanted to know things. We wanted to make decisions based on things we know. So we're talking about like at the end of the day, there's a lot we don't know. So how do we move forward even in this environment and your new companies? What do you do thinking in 20 or 30 years, there's going to be something that we're going to learn that we don't even know. How are you confident to operate them? That's a great question because I think it kind of gets to the issue of timelines. How certain do you need to be within a given timeline? um So I'll give you an example. um So about eight years ago, towards the end of my career at Procter & Gamble, um one of the big dilemmas that I struggled with was Procter & Gamble at that point in time still was known to be among the best in the world on IT technology and shared services, global business services.

9:00 And uh my somewhat crazy dilemma was, yeah, what do I do next? Because staying where you are and becoming a commodity is not a choice. And so I had reached out and talked to 100 different enterprises CEOs, startups, venture capitalists and stuff like that, trying to figure out where is this headed, somewhat like a conversation here. um And the actual light bulb moment for me here was when I saw a tweet, and this would have been in 2015, from the police in the city of Cincinnati that said, shooting in the Avondale area, uh short sport or, captured the evidence and the perpetrator was captured.

9:58 short sport or is an AI technology that is used in, uh, now it's used globally, but at that time was used in like Paris and London and stuff like that. plate, facial technology, all that stuff. uh So this one, Shark Sporter in particular is fine-tuned using audio, so sound, to detect when a shark is fired and where in the city. Within a distance of like 10 square meters or something like that. And I was completely flabbergasted. It's like Shark Sporter, AI, sound technology, Cincinnati, not London or Paris or... or Silicon Valley or New York City or.

10:39 And so the aha moment was that, look, you know, what we do, whether it is transforming, you know, how you do finance and stuff like that, is always going to be a need. The use case of new technology to change the way we actually do that same old work is always constantly evolving. And so that led to a... whole different cycle which eventually led to the book on why digital transformations fail. So why do they fail 70 % of the time as you say? 70%, that's exactly right. um Two simple things. One is the articulation of the goal and the other is the actual process or the methodology by which they want to transform.

11:26 um So uh let me take the first one, which is the articulation of the goal. I think it's basically an issue of defining what digital transformation is. So if you're not clear about what you're trying to do, then what happens is, you start to package whatever it is that you're doing and throw in a little bit of technology in there and say, I'm working on digital transformation. So it's a little bit like the emails that you get, which says stuff like, hey, transform the way you run your business by using this you know, next generation AI tool. It's like, really?

12:08 It's a very general statement. And so the start of that is clarity on what are you trying to do? And if I may step back a little bit, because I think that needs to be put into the context of what we were just talking about, which is industrial revolutions. So we're in the midst of the fourth industrial revolution. And just like the others, you know, steam engines, internal combustion engines, electricity, uh internet. uh The fourth one is basically changing a lot of stuff, except that this technology, digital technology, actually changes every other technology, the mechanical internet of things, uh medical, genetics, you know, so on and so forth.

12:51 So digital transformation in my definition is what you need to do. to change the way you deliver your products and services and still be successful at the end of this industrial revolution. So in other words, you don't just become like the horse carriage companies that didn't make it to be an internal combustion. You got to maintain cashflow for the company to survive. You have to be relevant now. You have to be relevant now and when the industrial revolution is over, you still have to be relevant. So, necessary. Exactly. So, the only correct definition of digital transformation in my mind is the ability to actually be relevant, to be necessary in the fourth industrial revolution era when you've been successful in the third.

13:47 So how do you change, not just the technology? don't replace one set of technologies with another and say, hey, I've transformed this now. Where is the business outcome? Do you still have the same market share? Do you still have the same, not just financial, but the impact that you're making on the world and all of the other metrics of success? So can you simplify how a company does that then if they don't currently know how? Is it mindset? Is it a way that they're thinking? Is it the right person or two on their team to do? How do we go about that process to say, all right, Tony, sounds good. uh I'm a buyer. Yeah. Do it. So now what? it really does start with a lot of work to identify, you know, how you're gonna measure success.

14:31 Is it gonna be through the same Wall Street metrics, like, you know, profit share, stuff like that, social impact, you know, whatever your right metrics are. And then, which kind of gets to the second reason why digital transformations fail, then putting in place the right methodology for execution. So the challenge on the methodology, and I'll come back to then how you do this, is that most companies think of transformation projects like any other IT projects, which is you got technology, you got people, you got certain scope of work, time, money, stuff like that, and you deliver the project and you call it a success. um Digital transformation being the broader uh framework is going to be a portfolio of many different projects.

15:20 Some of them are going to be tactical, replace this technology with another. Others are going to be really mind bending, change dramatically the way you actually do stuff. There is a percentage uh formula called 70-20-10. which actually goes all the way back to Steve Schmidt and Google in the early days where they basically said, we have to actually allocate our resources along this formula 70-20-10. 70 % of our organization's got to do day-to-day stuff, 20 % continuous improvement, and 10 % is disruptive innovation.

16:02 It's like driverless cars. stuff. That the vast majority of that might not work. Might not work. Now the thing is, and by the way, Harvard and others have already proved that companies that follow a three-part strategy outperform by whatever it was, 20%, the appears that actually follow a two-part strategy, which is day-to-day work and improvement. So in other words, they miss the disruptive. So for digital transformations, now tying all of that together, the methodology is set up the right kind of goals, right? And then create a portfolio of work that you're gonna actually have to deliver so that you have the sufficiency of the portfolio to get you to those end results.

16:48 And the methodology that you have to use for the 70%, maybe traditional operations, 20%, the next group would be traditional project management. But the 10 % is really methodology that I borrowed from venture capitalist companies to the point that you are making, which is venture capitalist companies they may invest in 10 different companies. They may actually allow nine of them to fail, but then the 10th one will more than make up for everybody. That's a different methodology. Do you think, not to redirect too much, but do you think that the 70-20-10 model, if that's the way to evolve globally, to really evolve to make sure you're relevant and necessary in 20 or 30 years, is that maybe also the struggle of surviving?

17:37 Because the businesses that are entrepreneurial, that are startups, they're probably all 10%. Yes, that's exactly right. That's exactly right. That's why for large enterprises, the real competition is not another large enterprise. For Procter & Gamble, it is not always Unilever or whatever it is. uh It is the, it's the startup. And then you've got to be nimble either to actually catch up with them or to acquire them or do something. Because without that, you're not getting your 10. The idea in these huge corporations you spent your time, let's find out who the winner is and then we'll pay more for it.

18:18 That's one strategy. At some point in time, though, that becomes really expensive. Facebook has been very good at it. very good. Actually, I think Facebook, to them credit, I think they do more than just acquire those very innovative companies. A lot of large companies do that, but very few of them allow those small companies to thrive. and scale. uh done that with Instagram and many other businesses people don't Yes, yes, and they've made them success. All of the, you know, examples of matter, you know, I could give you many examples of other companies that acquire these startups and then stifle them in their corporate culture and then eventually it's like, yeah, they're dead.

19:08 You think that is it because they tried to make them assimilate? Yes, they try to fit them into their mold. Not because they're trying to be nasty or whatever it is. mean, they've obviously paid good money for them. The dilemma here is that for large company, for any company for that matter, it's the things that you do successfully that harbor the seeds of the stuff that will actually kill you eventually. Why is that? Let me give you an example. So you take a large company, know, like Procter & Gamble, uh very structured, uh very, very strategic, very deliberate, very slow in making decisions.

19:54 uh But because they're very strategic, they're incredibly successful, right? You hire a small company and then you say, you know, for us to decide to invest the next billion dollars for you to create a factory. You're to have to go through this, you know, entire rigorous process of, you know, is this worth it? And, you know, can you then drive alignment with other functions inside the company who are going to be affected by this? And that could stifle the actually thing that created the company that made you want to buy it. You got it. Yes. And so that's always the dilemma, which is, how do you acquire innovation, but then allow it to flourish, give it the freedom to flourish, but not in a way that then that starts to make the parent company become a meaningless holder of a lot of startups?

20:51 So did you come up with the idea of transformant? Did you come up with that in 2015, 16, 17, when you're like, what's going to be next? And you saw the shot spotter and you're like, wait a minute, the whole world's going to change. So then what was your idea on the framework? I'm assuming it evolved and metamorphosized. I'm sure it's not in the exact forms you thought it would be, but maybe it is. how'd that happen? Go through the process of that. Cause you hadn't been an entrepreneur. You might make an argument, the word intrapreneur. People were making that argument a lot, but it wasn't on you completely. No, it wasn't. And actually, it's funny because that's what I actually did at Procter & Gamble for my last three years there, which is I became an entrepreneur.

21:38 I created an organization which we call Next Generation Services because we're terrible at creative names there. So yes. That was our creativity on Norman Clayton anyway, but really it was modeled after Google X. So you guys know, Google X is basically that 10 X, meaning 10 times better than the status score, not 10%. Innovation factory for disruptive ideas like the driverless cars or balloon internet or uh retina uh kind of glasses that can tell you if you've got diabetes, that kind of stuff.

22:23 um So their model of how they Google now Alphabet actually goes through and identifies amongst the thousands of ideas that exist in the enterprise and outside, pick a few and then make them big. That was the shop that I set up at Procter & Gamble with a really tiny difference. Instead of working on really cool stuff like driverless cars, we worked on really boring stuff like accounting and travel and expense reports and that kind of stuff. So it was all internal work processes.

23:03 But the goal was the same, which is 10X transformation of how stuff gets done. And I'll give you a really specific example. So let's take another of those really exciting processes called travel and expense report. If uh Dave, uh your producer, wants to go from Cincinnati to New York, you probably have some agency that he would work with to say, okay, I want to make a trip, get me a hotel, get me a flight, stuff like that. uh He would collect his expenses. He'd probably make an expense report. Now, the necessary entrepreneurs are relatively small business, so you may not have an offshore location where people actually match your.

23:47 hard copies of the receipts with your bank statements, but large companies do that. Now we scan them and put them into a system and it all gives us the data we need. That's that's great now so so procter and gambler and companies like that literally had people that would do three-way matching So what does your actual picture of receipt say versus what does the system say versus? did your budget say? um Which is all fine except that when I looked at this is the equivalent of the shorts Sparta story when I looked at companies like Adobe They didn't have their employees do stuff like that So the alternative way of doing exactly the same process of travel expense report is Dave goes into a system and says, you know, three day trip to New York, the system already knows your policies of reimbursements, know, it spits out a number saying, okay, fine Dave, $3,000 or whatever the budget is.

24:43 At that point in time, the process is done, complete. Dave would have a corporate credit card. He could use that to book tickets wherever you want, right? You know, on Google or Priceline or whatever it is. Stay wherever you want. So with friends, Airbnb, you know, all within the policy that you define. Every transaction on the credit card is auto-generated and is checked for authenticity. It's like, Dave, really? You had three lunches on that day on Thursday afternoon? You know, something's going on here, type of stuff. And then, you know, So there is no procurement people involved in travel agencies. There is no people that need to check receipts with other stuff.

25:27 But you know the best part of the story. When you give Dave a target, like 3,000, he's going to underspend anywhere from 15 to 35 percent of that budget. You $2,100 in my brain. I'm like, $2,100 sounds way better than three. Yeah. And then you just eliminate a whole lot of work processes in the company. So this is really how you would reimagine boring old stuff and replace it with completely new work process. Can I just use the word efficiency? That's exactly right, yes. Finding it, building it, creating it. It's efficiency. uh But now, more and more, and this is how it relates to digital technology, what companies are finding is that um this gap between efficiency and effectiveness, uh when you actually free employees from doing the day-to-day stuff.

26:27 not in this things. That is not productive. Then then you move them up the value chain and then you actually get effectiveness. So there is a another study I think this one was from Bain that basically proved that for any given company small company large company Two-thirds of their competitive advantage, you know, they measured it based on stock price improvement But you know, whatever you could measure it based on profitability of the small company or whatever uh Two-thirds comes from their core products or services. So For Apple, it would be iPhones. For PNG, it would be Tide. One third comes from internal agility. So that's a direct link from efficiency to effectiveness.

27:10 profit to the bottom line if you fix that. There you go. Yeah. There's no cost to producing anything. No, you're just doing it better. um I went back when you were saying that to like economics 100, 200, macro, micro of the idea of opportunity cost. Yes. That a lot of times that's about what country should produce a thing and who does it better. But that same thing can happen with inside organizations, release them to do their work. Yes, yes, exactly, yes. by increasing the cycle, the agility, the speed of decision making, because for every travel expense report that isn't held up because it went to wherever Manila and then got stuck there and all that kind of stuff, ah it means minutes that the employee is then kind of thinking about what's the next product I create, or so on and so forth.

28:04 the number that you ended up putting on that you saved the business. It was probably in hundreds of millions of dollars. I am, yeah, I'm not allowed to give you the actual number, but over a three year period, we worked on about 20 ideas, you know, like the traveling expense report was like one of those. um And each of those was, uh had a size of prize of $50 million each, right? So this becomes, this adds up. Tremendous. Wow. um Boy, if you would have been incentivized based upon like a salesperson is on commissions.

28:46 Why didn't you? uh No, that's not the way we work. um That's more the way we work in entrepreneurship though. That's true. That's true. When you're building businesses. That's exactly true. Yes, no, absolutely. um That is exactly right. Um, so what, uh, since 2015, 16, 17, and the adventure here in 2025, um, share with me about those eight years versus the 30 prior. So when I left P &G and that was 2018, this entrepreneurship model essentially then became the seed of the entrepreneurship model, which is, there's got to be a lot of companies that have the same question, which is, how do we disruptively change our internal speed of operation?

29:33 And so that's what led to the book, Digital Transformations Fail, and a lot of work with different organizations, both in terms of uh literally helping them with their innovative strategy, disruptive innovation strategy. And then, know, in some cases, um you know, leadership, keynote speaking, all that kind of stuff. um And then that went on for a few years until just before COVID, I hooked up with uh my ex-boss from Procter & Gamble, person named Filippo Pasarini. um and Italian who actually came up with this whole construct of global business services.

30:16 So global business services is how do you take the back office operations of any given company, finance, accounting, HR, IT kind of stuff, and then get efficiency out of it, right? And it is now a well-established industry, about 120 billion, I think, uh growing like 20 % a year. And it includes everything from technology to... outsourcing to offshore partners to transformation and stuff like that. And so he and I used to get together over beer occasionally and kind of commiserate with each other saying, hey, all the stuff that we did about 30 years ago, people seem to be struggling with today. And, you know, at this stage in our life, rather than helping the large big four consultancies kind of pick our brains and make money, we should actually disrupt that market.

31:05 So Why don't we actually share some of these models and create the next generation of leaders? And so that's what led us to create the second company, which is called Inixia, or Inissia, which is Latin for to begin. And now that company we've gone around and I think worked with about, I think the latest number is 180 companies all the way from like Walmart downwards to help kind of drive this approach and capability. inside their organization. it's been a lot of fun. um The COVID period actually um really drove a lot of the demand for this because then while people were not in the office, they were looking out for ways to build capability, train.

31:51 And so we'd some of that mostly through training in the initial days. And now increasingly, I think it's much more advisory to help implement some of that. That's what I going to ask, is it advisory and consultant versus bringing systems to the table? yeah. Yeah, it's been a long time since I built anything in IT, uh but yes, it is certainly advisory. Would you imagine starting a career now in IT? I'm sure I would not make it, I would not be hired. um It's a very different world. um But if given half the chance, I would love to, I would join again. Because again, you have to kind of look at this industry of IT in the context of time.

32:37 um Corporate IT in its current form has existed for about what, five, six decades, right? At best. you know, three decades ago, three, four decades ago, when I first started, we were literally the back office of the back office. You know, we were actually literally located in the basement of the headquarters building at Procter and Gamble. Um, it was euphemistically called the terrace, but we all knew what we were talking about. So, um, from there to today where technology has become the really big driving force. for strategy and change in the big enterprise, that pace of change is only going to continue.

33:23 When you contrast that with, and this is not a competition, but when you contrast that with other functions on how they evolve, mean, sales existed since one caveman sold to another, or finance existed from whatever we're just will be encountered. were talking about the 15 and 1600s, right? exactly. Right. um This function of IT going from really you're hidden in the back room to now being in the boardroom within about five, six decades is incredible. And that pace of change is only going to increase. so, yeah, I think it's an exciting place. It's a place that has a lot of risks, a lot of traps, a lot of demand. You got to keep up and stuff like that.

34:04 But I find that exciting. Um, you know, the world now, everyone's talking about AI and there's different versions of it, but every time what I've recognized is once the global world is talking about something, it was already happening for an extended period of time. We just weren't talking about it, but is the pace surprising to you? It is, it always is. And I think this kind of goes back to something that Bill Gates said many years ago, which is, we tend to overestimate the capability, any capability, IT, in a 10 year horizon period and underestimate it in like the one or two year period, right?

34:46 I'm sorry, it's the other way around. The other way around. We underestimate what we can accomplish in 10 years. oh So it's exactly that same phenomena uh for me, which is that I really did think that, the world is going to change. AI is going to come on board and stuff like that. But really, I've been surprised by the pace at which it has happened. To your point, it's been around for a while. The actual mathematical formula behind AI, because it's all math, has existed for probably, you know, 100 years. uh All of those, it's basically, know, statistics and maths and, you know, probabilities and all that kind of stuff at its heart.

35:35 That's the technology. Now we have the processing ability to put it all together. There you go. So that's what changed. And then suddenly, you know, thanks to Moore's law and doubling of, you know, price performance every 18 months, that kind of stuff, that became very, very affordable. And then you had more data to play with and therefore, you know, it just keeps compounding. And it is literally that exponential effect of stuff doubles every two to three years. That is what is new. So it's the, you know, the energy. you uh know, and stuff like that. It's the computing capabilities, the data that's available, that's new. The foundation, you know, the mathematical equations.

36:17 Is the speed what takes all the energy? Is it the speed of the analyzing? Yeah, is that what it is? uh It's actually the volume of computing that's done. um So then the power necessity is gonna be exponential as well. The power necessary. Yes. So it's going to grow exponentially. Well, um it's going to grow not necessarily exponentially. It's going to grow because what happens is that, you know, these computers are also getting more efficient. So you can do the same computer. Yes. um You know, with a little less energy than the previous generation. But to your point. um yeah. Computing AI is going to continue to suck power.

36:59 Did you know to invest in Nvidia? buy it real cheap? I did not, I'm a terrible investor. um My philosophy, if you look at it in hindsight and try and extrapolate a strategy, my philosophy would be, you know, buy high and sell low. So I learned very quickly from there that I was too emotionally involved in a lot of this stuff and let me just go, you know, outsource it to somebody who knows better. Yeah, what since you still have the energy and you said given the opportunity again, you love to do it. What do you really think? Do you business plan for these companies for yourself and and for your party? I'm assuming he's in Italy probably. I don't know if he's here.

37:40 He actually spends his time between Italy and New York. What do you really think you're going to do and accomplish? What's the plan look like? What's the trajectory of three and five and seven years for these two businesses? um You know, I'm probably at the age where I try and count success, uh not necessarily by the growth of the business, you know, like dollars or whatever it is, but you know, the number of individuals, leaders, and the number of success stories. So, Filippo and I, it is exactly impact, uh but measured in a different way. uh So, impact measured by the number of companies that we worked at.

38:21 uh or impact by the leaders we've helped coach that are now in top leadership positions, that kind of stuff. So we've got a few goals along those lines. um But unlike our career, Philippo and mine at Procter & Gamble and uh many of the other people, uh there is a new factor in there, which is, we having fun? um And fun isn't like, you know, lay on the beach or play golf or whatever it is. uh Fun as in when we take on an activity, it could be a consulting gig. um You know, at some point in time, if we feel like we're not making an impact, we will just get out of it.

39:03 like, it doesn't matter if we lose money, it's not worth it. uh So I think that's the only concession to age that uh we've added. uh Did that come from just maturity and living? I think so. I really think so. Because eventually everything kind of goes back, I believe, to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, right? Which is, there was a point in time when safety and security was a question mark for me, and then financial security, and then ego was important. But I think we're at the point now where it's like, the difference that we make is much more important than all of the other stuff.

39:46 Um, so that's maturity. Would we have been better served if we understood this in our 30s? I would have liked to have known that better. I learned the construct, but I had no idea what it meant as it applied to me. maybe it evolves properly. Maybe we need these individuals in their 30s and 40s to be hard drivers. I suspect you're right. I really do because um when I compare the risk taking that I might embark on versus our two daughters who are in their early 30s, um I'm glad that they are taking the risk that they do because that's how people change and innovation happens.

40:29 How did you create an environment um as a parent because you want to see your children do well? How did you create an environment where they were comfortable embracing change and risk in their careers? How did you create an environment to support that? uh By making sure that we did stuff that they absolutely hated and they hated us now. I'm Maybe you're not. That's a maniacal laugh. don't think you're kidding. Now, well, maybe only partly true. Now, see, the fact is, as we were talking earlier, um so this three-decade career was really spread over 14 different roles and six countries.

41:10 And I think at last count, there were 12 different house relocations involved. um And um so there was a lot of change for the kids as they were growing up. And some of it uh was at really bad times, including like, know, switching schools and countries from Cincinnati to Geneva, Switzerland when they were in high school, terrible time to move. uh I wouldn't probably never do that in hindsight. uh But I think uh that was their form of adversity. uh Perhaps it was not, you know, We may not have enough money to buy something, I think it was much more, okay, why do we have to go through this kind of.

41:58 Yeah, as an adolescent. That's significant. They're not worried about money. did you think that exposing them to all those moves, all that change? Because isn't it, if humans don't like change, if you can learn to embrace it, you're probably gonna achieve a lot more in life. Whether it's education, level of friendship, all your relationships in business. Yes, no, that is absolutely true. um I do think that adversity and necessity, as they say, is the mother of invention, right? But it's hard.

42:38 comfortable to put yourself in it intentionally. Yes, even today. And that's really the downside of, as I was saying, moving up the mass law hierarchy of needs. like there's some stuff that it's like, no, it's not worth it. What comes with a quote unquote price, which is I'm sure if I forced myself through more adverse situations, I might learn a little faster. But it's like, at this age, I've got enough gray hair. I don't need any more. uh Are your hierarchy needs pretty much just about the relationships about your people now? I think they are absolutely about people. um And I think it's equally about uh seeing other people be successful.

43:26 That's the people you're with at the time though. That's the people that we are at the time, yes, yes. Hmm. So if you've touched 180 or 181 companies, is it going to be 500 or a thousand? Or at some point, do you raise the white flag and say, ah, I've had enough of this. See, the beauty I think of, um the beauty of being at this stage in life is that you do it until someday you feel like, I've had enough. um And so I think as a person, I'm a restless person. um I would rather do stuff. And by the way, that do stuff doesn't necessarily have to be technology. I mean, it could be like stripping my garage to its studs and uh redoing it, that kind of which I am.

44:15 That was my COVID project. uh So uh yes, I mean, I feel like as long as I'm learning a different skill, I'm having fun. an eternal educated mind. And uh it doesn't have to be educated as in necessarily words in a book. mean, educated could be, how do you grow better roses or whatever? 100%. I think our brain evolves learning how to grow better roses the same way it does in learning some new degree. Same process in our brains. Exactly. So um I suspect if I were to look into the globe that uh at some point in time, I might grow tired of the IT or business kind of stuff and perhaps move towards something more productive.

45:06 I don't know, maybe making better food. Yeah. We might find Tony meditating for five hours a day. Do you do any of that? What do you do for, um, for improving your own personal life? you, what do do? uh I actually like to work with my hands. uh So a lot of the stuff that I was talking about. uh I love woodworking, carpentry, uh pottering around in the yard, in the garden. uh We love travel, um as a family always have. um So that's really, I think, our main hobbies. Do you think working with your hands is it soothe your brain from all the intense pressure of the corporate environment for so many decades? It has.

45:47 I think working with my hands has been a way to just kind go into your happy place and... um Exactly, that's the meditation. um What satisfies you the most when you're working with these people? You wrote your book for a reason, you had something to say. I think um the book writing for me, just to back up a little bit, um the creative process is for me the equivalent of growing roses or building stuff at home. That's important. um And so I always liked writing as a form of creativity. um And very early on in life, uh I started to write college magazines and stuff like that.

46:33 And I had this itch at the back of my mind that when I retire, I want to write a book, except the kind of book I wanted to write was like a uh thriller or whatever it is. And uh so before I uh left P &G, I started to kind of feel around. It's like, okay, how easy or how difficult is it to get into this? And I spoke to a couple of publishers and one of them said, I'll give you a piece of advice, stay in your lane. I think it is good advice. Sometimes I hate that advice though. I know, I do, hate it because it it squashes the creativity piece. Well, in this particular case, it did.

47:14 So what it did was it, I think, channeled it. yeah, I would have made a terrible, I don't know, uh know, Dan Brown or whatever it is. No, certainly not. um But I was able to channel that same creativity to taking stuff that I know and putting it down in a way that's halfway interesting. And that was really useful. So I think it did work. Hey, thanks for tuning in. If you like these types of conversations, be sure to follow the necessary entrepreneur on your favorite platform. So you never miss out on future content. Let's dig into this staying in your lane. I haven't had this conversation with too many people because I have, sometimes I have these adverse reactions to things.

48:00 I don't like anybody in this world to stifle an idea or creativity, because I know if someone has an idea and they actually willing to see it through might be a decade. They have a way to change the world possibly and change outcomes. However, You're making an argument that there's a benefit to most people staying in their lane. Why do you think that is? You know, like most other things in life, um I'm a little careful about absolute statements or absolute philosophies. I don't necessarily think stay in your lane is good advice in general. um I think um as it applies to specific situations, um there's a lot of merit.

48:45 um So it's possible that you know, I might have said, no, forget it. You know, I really do want to become, uh you know, the next Michael Connolly or whatever it is. And, you know, and it may have very possibly uh in the ideal world, I might have spent another three or four decades and eventually become successful at that. uh And alternatively, you know, I wrote a business book, a couple of different business books. And then I, uh you know, found my passion there, which is, okay, now I can not just write, but I can teach and I can help others. And so that just took me down a different pathway.

49:28 But back to your point, um I don't know if stay in your lane is generically good advice. That's not something I would say lightly. Yeah. Why do you think they do the people who do? Why do you think that comes out of their I think it all kind of goes back to what gives you joy. uh So much as I appreciate the fact that there are people like me that are constantly restless, I also appreciate the fact that there may be people that uh find their happy place in predictability. So they want to live in the same town, they want to go out with the same friends, they want to watch the same matches, stuff like that.

50:08 uh they find contentment. And they find contentment. um And back to my Maslow's hierarchy of needs, I think if that's the fastest way to move up the hierarchy for some people, go for it. Maybe that's the eternal challenge is to know our own self. It is, isn't it? Yes, that's the most difficult. And a lot of this, think, you even with the companies that I work with, people are looking for what's the formula? What's the best-in-class approach? What's the answer? um How do you take that approach with them? And the question really is, goes back to the digital transformation thing, which is I end up spending a lot of time saying, let's sit down together and figure out what the goal is.

50:54 A lot of times, do they not know? They have an idea. I think the issue is, it tangible enough that you can measure it? Is it the right goal? Like with technology and transformation, are you confusing the technology for the outcome? And so that becomes the conversation. What you talked to, we talked about all fair before we got started a little bit about you could recognize over the years, um, there was this idea that you could recognize another P and G here. Right. And what I speak to that is, and then you said something, you're like, we kind of start, said, is it solution focused? And you said, well, we kind of start, you can put your words with the end in mind.

51:36 So have you come upon things that we couldn't take that approach with? And I asked that question because. almost everything I find in my life. You just start out with, what are you? What are you trying to do? eh What is it? eh And then usually there is a direct line from that back to where you are. that a part That's a great question. That really is a very good question because um there are absolutely things where starting with the end in mind um may not work, at least not in the way I was describing. um I'll give you a really personal example, my own career.

52:17 um So after whatever engineering MBA kind of stuff, um I had studied marketing and I thought I wanted to be either a marketing person or a finance person uh until I started looking for jobs and the only jobs I could get were an IT. I was like, okay, fine, let me do that. uh Now, uh if I had basically taken the approach of, let me start with the end in mind. It's like three decades from now. I'm gonna be known as the best marketer in the world or whatever it is I don't know how this goes back to you know stay in your own lane kind of stuff I don't know and I really mean I don't know as in I don't think this is this would have worked is I don't think it would have worked out quite as well as you know Sense and respond.

53:16 Let's see what the world needs Let me take my education and marketing and apply it to make another industry different. And so I kind of think of that as an example of sometimes you got to be clear, sometimes you got to be careful of what you wish for uh because that implies you're closing yourself up to certain possibilities and stimuli in the environment. And if that is happening, then Yeah, that's the cost of being too laser focused on that one goal.

53:57 Yeah, so we shouldn't stay on our lane. In that particular case, yes. Um, why. without using deprecation because you're a, you're a humble guy. don't know if you were your whole career. I'm sure you were hard charging and we're going to, but it seems like you've put this idea of life and living and accomplishment. seems like you put it together. Well, I bet there was, we couldn't probably calculate the amount of hours of internal thought for you to get here. Do you know why you reached the level of success, a VP level? six different countries, 14 or 12 or 14 different appointments.

54:41 That's accomplishment. What made you the person that achieved that? You know, that's always a really difficult question because, you know, I wish it was, you know, one thing or two things, two things that worked for me. And certainly to be very, very clear, the things that work for me may not work for, you know, another individual, um but kind of getting specifically into my situation. um I think a lot goes back to, you know, what we were talking about, which is uh being open to change and a certain amount of adversity as you're growing up and learning from that and becoming resilient and stuff like that.

55:30 uh I think my parents, as I grew up in India, uh they really taught us, uh me and my uh four sisters, three sisters, uh the benefits of hard work. number of hours doesn't matter. And I'm the same way, even now. It's like, I probably work more hours now than I did while I was at Procter & Gamble. And Procter & Gamble wasn't like a nine to five job. uh It was much more than that. um So I think there is that. uh I think another aspect is uh constant learning.

56:12 And again, that works for me. may or may not work for everybody else. um I like to learn new stuff and that works. Why wouldn't it work for everyone else? Cause I actually really like you as a human, but I want to disagree with that fundamentally because if everyone, whatever their spectrum of this world is, if they took that approach, I think we'd be hard pressed to say they don't have a better outcome in life. I will concede that. um No, I think I misspoke on that. I didn't mean to say that um constant learning isn't good advice for everybody. um The point I was trying to make is that it wasn't just constant learning.

56:55 think it was, and then using it to allow yourself to go try new stuff. A willingness. Constant change, yes, exactly. And it's not so much the learning as then, all right, let's take a risk and go to Japan or, you know, let's take a risk and before Procter and Gamma was like, okay, I've had enough of IT, let's go back and try something else in India. So is that kind of risk taking? But it seems like maybe it's, but is it, do more. It was always driven by, I don't know if it was so much do more as it was, you know, I want to try it.

57:35 I'm curious. I wonder what's gonna happen. That seems a fun way to do it. um Yes, but to the point that you were making, um it also comes with some amount of willingness to just take a risk, to just go, um and to fail, um because a lot of those 14 assignments uh did come with, well, I wish I did that one better in hindsight, but yeah, mean, the trajectory was good and that worked. the because I think so many people today growing up in these new generations in this world of technology, they just want to say, well, tell me what to do.

58:18 How do I get there? They see the outcome. Yeah. Right. And they said, well, just tell me. And to your point is, wow, I don't know what worked for me, what will work for anybody else. But then the question is, is there an underlying philosophy that you just have about life? Yes, yes. And I think it is, this is going to sound really, really corny, but you know, to do good and to help others to do good. One of the things I've realized is that you can do good and do well at the same time. There are companies and individuals that will do well, meaning They're extremely successful.

59:03 They're hard-nosed business people, but they're also doing a lot of good. And you've got many philanthropist billionaires in the US and in the rest of the world and stuff like that. It's very possible that some of them are. And maybe as they're getting closer towards the... em uh... you know the end of the asking themselves you know was it worth it or you know can i make a difference in another way it's possible but i think you know if we could come to that realization of the little earlier in our career that would be nicer Isn't it a balance of success, making money, um becoming financially free and independent, but at the same time not running over others to get there?

59:49 You you said the magic word balance. this really, eventually, I think that is the hardest thing for people to understand. How to maintain that balance. I mean, in life, as is with business, in your personal life, stuff like that, you constantly have to keep that balance. What's that? mean. So everyone talks about this, every word, every podcast or all the elite folks because, so who was the past from India, the lady who was the CEO of PepsiCo. So I recently saw a podcast interview with her and someone asked her this question about balance and she laughed.

1:00:37 Was it about work-life balance or balance in general? it all went together. said there's no such thing. So from her frame of mind, what it took for her to achieve that. So what do we do with this word? Um, so like with a lot of things that I do, I, I, I, I push for clarity and definition. Um, so let me take one aspect of that, which is work life balance, um, and tell you why if she was talking about work life balance, there's no such thing in my mind as work life balance. Um, because at the end of the day, it's all life and you make choices about for your own life. You know, are you better off spending 12 hours a day in the office as opposed to, you know, being with your family or playing golf or whatever it is.

1:01:26 But that's a choice you have to make. Yes. ah So that's exactly. So that becomes priorities in that context. so simplistic arrangements like, hey, you know, we got to have work life balance. You know, we're going to turn off the lights in the office after eight hours, I think are really disruptive because they actually take away that right of the human to make their own choices, right? So in that context, I would completely agree that, you know, setting that up, that definition of balance as a goal is actually incorrect. um What I was talking about was balance in the sense of what you correctly said, it's prioritization of being aware of what's priority number one, two, and three.

1:02:16 And then uh if I see that uh I have a conflict between priority number one and three, I have to be clear about where am I going to invest? so that, think, is incredibly important and obviously very difficult. But that's the balance, right, that you actually know you have a choice to make. Yes, yes. And that's why, back to your question around, you know, when people say, you know, give me the magic formula, whatever it is, it's always got to come back to, you've got to put it in the context of your own priorities, whether it's you as an individual or you as a business. Yes, yes. Yes, I do think there is a fair amount of, you know, it is hard.

1:03:01 There's no question about it. So it's. because it's uncultured. is very uncomfortable. It's uncomfortable for me. It's uncomfortable for you when we kind of face up to it and we make a lot of mistakes and stuff like that um but at the end of the day, I think anything that forces us to introspect and say I need to make a change, know, whether it's in diet or exercise or amount of hours you spend in the office or you know, whatever it is um is only good because I think it helps you understand yourself a little better and hopefully make better choices. I've seen the best things in my life start, they started with a question because I don't know if I need to change, but the important thing to do is ask myself if I need to.

1:03:47 That then you have a conversation how that aligns with your priorities. You know, this is also what the best consultants do, advisors or whatever it is. They use the Socratic method of, let me just ask questions. You know, I'm not gonna tell you what to do. I will just ask you questions. best advisor because if you're truly the proper advisor and consultant it means that you have the toolbox of whatever they need. Let me listen to them and find out what tool I need to get out versus get out the one I think I need to. Right? Yeah. And by the way, that's also the hardest approach to take for a couple of reasons. One is because, as we were saying earlier, clients, companies, individuals, they want the formula.

1:04:29 It's like, tell me what to do. That's true of us, generally, as human beings, which is, give me that magic pill that will help me do X, Z. um And the answer isn't always, I mean, sometimes the answer is yes, here is the right pill. But it isn't always the case. But I think that philosophy, I'm going to kind of zoom out a little bit into the, you know, not the macro view of the world and, you know, how we all kind of work together as professionals. Sometimes the answer is um to actually pause and challenge ourselves on, OK, wait a minute, you know, is my world view the only way to look at something?

1:05:15 um Or, you know, is it worth it for me to kind of, as you were saying, sometimes challenge myself and ask the question of, what happens if I'm wrong? I want to know actually. That's a better way to go about it. Then I have a better, a better informed mind. Yeah. In all the mistakes in the past that I've made, if I would have had more reflection in the moment, I might've found more intelligence around the decision versus going into it blinded. I may have, right? Yes. absolutely. There's no doubt about it. mean, you know, and it doesn't get any easier, by the way, um even as you get more experience, because I think that act of taking something that you're really sure about and, you know, finding that magic moment where you say, oh, wait a minute, let me pause before I say this is the right way.

1:06:10 I'm just now finding the ability or willingness to do that. Just now. After all these years. It is really hard. Me too, yes. um without losing the purpose and the foundation of the why you're trying to do the thing too. That's more benefited from the people around us. It is. And by the way, to take this in a slightly different direction back to technology, I think it's even more important that business leaders, industry leaders, government officials, you know, start to ask some different questions about technology, including AI in this particular context.

1:06:54 It's like, what if we're wrong? You know, what could go wrong? or what guardrails do we need? uh How long do we stay there? That's the question and the answer. We don't know. How long do we stay in the question? That is uh way, way, way above my mental capability. uh But isn't that? That is exactly leadership. You need somebody to step up and say, wait a minute, enough is enough. So the challenge is with something like a technology. And again, whether that's steam engines or artificial intelligence, it really doesn't matter. um We as humans have always had this uh belief that more is better.

1:07:44 More automation is better than less automation. More data is better than less data, things like that. um We've never really come up with, um I shouldn't say never, we've rarely come up against something that's useful that could also harm us. um again, uh atomic energy, nuclear bombs, that was one of way. Yes. um So that was one example where I think guardrails eventually got put into place, you know, arguably semi-effectively, but that's fine. uh I think AI is one of those where uh my fear is that that particular arms race uh is operating without any guardrails.

1:08:30 And uh so, you know, I like to use every forum I get to make the case that, know, and unfortunately I don't necessarily think it's going to come from governments. I think it's going to have to come from industry leaders, uh corporate leaders uh to voluntarily, you know, put together a board that say, you know, these are the boundaries that we believe should not be crossed. Can one bad actor with enough money though work outside of that? yeah, absolutely. um But they always will. I mean, the same with dirty bombs, atomic energy, that kind of stuff. um But you have to be aware that that is very likely going to be pursued by somebody.

1:09:16 And then you have to put in place some countermeasures to minimize the probability. Yeah. Do you think the smartest people in the world can even comprehend those countermeasures right now though? Can they? I think it's important to try. I really do. um So I'll give you an example. think... um Some of the minds that have given us chat GPT and stuff like that, know, open AI and others, they all started with the right intentions of trying to figure out how to build ethical AI. um And somewhere along the way, I think they got, yeah, exactly. uh So they got the dollar signs in their eyes and then I think they got caught up with their own success.

1:10:01 It's like, okay, more is better. um In that context, and this kind of is similar to the conversation we're having about billionaires who don't really think about the human impact until they're away. uh Later in their careers. um Unfortunately, I think a lot of the developments in AI are being driven by leaders that are still in their very early stages in their careers. Right. But I think for every leader that is in that stage, there are other really respected business people, company leaders, CEOs, um who are uh in older stages in their lives, who have enough influence to bring some of these actors together and say, okay, fine, I understand you want to do this, but let's have a conversation.

1:10:54 Instead of going to Davos and having conversations that really never lead to anything. Exactly. oh why don't we essentially have a conversation that starts to put together a body, right, to put some governance around it? I think it's really important to start because if you don't start, you don't get to the conversations that are next level, including what do you do with rogue actors and stuff like that. Does it need to happen in the open that we all see or is it okay if we don't know? I think it's inevitably going to happen, um and I hope when rather than if, ah with a few people getting together in the closed before it becomes open.

1:11:40 Can you envision how that's going to happen? Like the people and then their mind and why they do it before they become 80 years old and then say, we should do it different. Like what's it what? Because it's. It's against the thing that has driven them to build these companies and make this it's. It's against that. It's a completely different thought process. Do they have to feel like it's an existential threat to be willing to? I think it is uh They're gonna have to feel that it is an existential threat to do something like this this what we're talking about I Mean it is it is honestly an existential threat now to be very clear. I'm not an alarmist I don't think any of the AI that we have here today is um Is is is literally the self-aware AI that people are afraid of Yeah um And I know people think, okay, yeah, well, chat GPT can do this, tomorrow it can make decisions.

1:12:38 I don't believe that. I don't think that we've actually cracked the code on algorithms and computing and decision-making. I think it's going to be a totally different generation of AI. But I do think that it's a question of decades rather than centuries, which means the time to put the guardrails is now. Now, isn't right now the issue of who's the one putting the information into the AI? I think it is, in some ways, it's a self-feeding uh ecosystem. uh So what's happened is that, as Meta and others figured out, whoever owns the data uh basically is king, right?

1:13:19 And this was with personal information and social media and stuff like that. And then you had companies like OpenAI and so on and so forth that figured out that if they can crack the code on how to process it and make decisions. And then those models essentially can be the backbone of how you do everything, right? So whether it is book travel or, you know, uh write up a paper and stuff like that. And now we've actually reached the point in AI where um most data models that exist, whether it is cloud or chat GPT and stuff like that have actually absorbed most of the knowledge and by knowledge, all of these models work with text.

1:14:06 uh Text not necessarily in terms of like English words or whatever. can convert videos also into text and then they all apply mathematics, algorithms to predict the next move. But the thing is they've actually ingested as much as possible of the known knowledge, books and stuff like that. The challenge there is, so you've got that, now how do you actually create more data to train those? And now people are starting to make up stuff. uh So you can self-train. uh And that's not necessarily the best way to do that.

1:14:47 So this self-feeding system of more data, same algorithms, decision-making, I think that's going to certainly continue for a while. Until of course some smart scientist figures out the next code on decision making and that's where things start to get really dangerous. How does it have its own morals or lack of morals or its own philosophy? That's the thing. So we spent some good time here, but we have one or two more things. What do you think, what are you best at? What have you grown over these past years that you know about yourself that's not some marketing or branding? What are you best at?

1:15:29 I think I'm good at problem solving. um And this is a, you know, this is who I think I am, which may be very different from who people think I am and what I really am, so to speak. But as far as I'm concerned, I think what I like to do and I think I'm fairly good at is, you know, given a problem, trying to get deep into it, to get as many angles into it uh as I can, and then just step back and say, all right, you know, what's the best way to solve it? And whether that's how to grow tomatoes or write a book, ah that's what I've always enjoyed.

1:16:13 How valuable is that to companies? As an employee, as an advisor? I do think it is important, I mean, in all honesty. um Because at the end of the day, especially as technology takes oh away a lot of the operational stuff, what you need is really judgment. And that's what we're talking about. putting all the data together and making the decision. Yeah. As we let you plug your stuff, what you're doing to give you all this money to buy your books here at the end. ah What do you What are the types of people that you like spending the most time around?

1:16:54 You're not allowed to say your daughters. didn't say the exact specific people, types of people. I know what you mean. So it's interesting. I like to spend time with people that are in very different fields than I am. um I mean, to a certain extent. I don't want to leave out all of the people that are in technology or big companies or businesses and stuff like that. um So one of the reasons, just to back up a little bit. You know, we lived in Boston for a couple of years. uh and one of things I loved about Boston was that, you know, the conversation you had over the fence with your neighbor, uh, was very, different.

1:17:40 I mean, one neighbor was like a rocket scientist. Another one was working in chemistry. Um, and I, I loved the conversation because it is more than the conversation of how your tomatoes doing this year. Or, you know, it's like, happened to you? Yes, exactly. So, um, And so I think I really enjoy that because em for me that's fun. eternal learning. Was that because MIT is there? They have 60 something colleges in Boston. um so, they were like, I mean, these were not just people that worked in schools or colleges. There's a lot of startups there and a lot of. But that comes from the educational system.

1:18:22 You look at a place that has a significant, mean, Stanford, Silicon Valley, look what's happening there, right? And so there's things that come out of these educational institutions. Yes. And I think it brings together a certain uh archetype of person in there. um What do you hope for? You know, that's a really good question. um You know, the same as most other humans, I suspect, which is that, you know, the best we can hope for is, you know, the people that we know, the people that we love, you know, they have uh a much better life than we did.

1:19:02 uh One of the things that I think this is true for most families in India when I was growing up. and I suspect was true in the US as well, is that the next generation was better off than their parents. And I don't necessarily mean financially. That was certainly true, but better off in terms of happiness. One of the things that concerns me in the world is I see the trend where the next generations are not always, not consistently, better off. And so for me, that would be my eternal hope. It's a big one. That's a big one, yeah. But you did ask an open-ended question.

1:19:43 If you were God, what would you grant me? Yeah, give me that one. I think you've got the DNA to make some good decisions around it you had that power to always make the next generations better. I think we can do that if we accept that as our own challenge. I think it really is an individual challenge. Yeah, we're responsible. So tell us all about these books. You brought me one here in, I believe, Italian. You brought me one in Japanese and you expect me to understand what these things are. Do you speak multiple languages? I do. I speak six, I think. and read five of those.

1:20:25 um I didn't say well, but eh actually, you know, that's not a fair because, you know, growing up in India, you usually end up with at least three, maybe four. So that's really four for me. English, Hindi, Marathi. actually, Konkani, my mother tongue from Goa. So it'll maybe seven. um So, and then a little bit of French um and then I can get by speaking Japanese I cannot read. So there's a little bit of that. But the books, um yeah, I was just showing off. I'm kidding. The book, the Italian translation, Why Digital Transformation Fail um was an interesting one.

1:21:09 thought, you know, As you add it to your collection of different books there, it might stand out. um So I'm really pleased with what that book has done because I think I may have gotten lucky with that one. uh A lot of the stuff that I did in the entrepreneurship stuff that I was talking about while I was at Procter & Gamble was being at the right place at the right time. This was actually before AI became a big thing. And when I looked at the work that we did from 2015 to 18, we were working with startups that were getting excited about AI. So this was a book that was just at the right time.

1:21:53 um And then the book is all about the methodology on how to make that useful. And so that's the reason why that now is translated into like Russian and Chinese and Japanese and Italian and stuff like that. So yeah, absolutely it does. um I had no idea. For me, I would have been happy if I sold a thousand copies. I think we did a little better than that. So we were good. Yeah, it was good. The other book, uh Revolutionizing Business Operations is much more of a niche product. This is about the business of global business services.

1:22:35 um And the Japanese edition is actually one that I partnered with EY, the consulting company, uh to actually create uh a Japanese edition. And it's got a few other languages in there as well with translated copies. That one's a little different. um That one's much more about company strategy. It's a little bit about what we were saying earlier. Two thirds of competitive advantage for companies comes from their products and services. And the other third, comes in from the agility of their business operations. And so that one's a cookbook on how you might actually create that business strategy. So it's less about technology.

1:23:16 It's about how do you want to create the entire operating strategy. uh But I've had a lot of fun writing both of those. And I've been fortunate that they've been received well. So I hope uh it helps somebody. Is the third one in your mind? Not yet. I'm taking a break, right? Actually, I am in the midst of editing another book, but this is one where I've gotten together with other grey-haired people in the global business services industry, which, like I was saying, it's about four decades old. you know, like most other industries, you have to have the industry diverge and discover stuff before it converges.

1:23:59 There were no standards around emissions of automobiles in the early 1900s. Today there are. uh With global business services, what I'm doing with these other grey-haired people is starting to write a book on standards, which is, let's set aside some standards for the industry. And so it's a very different type of a book. is, as we're even wrapping up, global business services. Because we could have had a two, three hour conversation on that. What is it, if you can explain it in a layman's terms, what's global business services as the industry? Global Business Services is essentially all of the supportive operations in any given company. Procter & Gamble, Apple, a small accounting company.

1:24:41 It's all of the work in human resources, on IT to provide PCs and email, uh processing orders, uh order management, supply chain planning, stuff like that. uh For any given company, it's a means to an end. And the end could be, you know, better soap or shampoo. But the means is sometimes uh both the enabling capability, but also the bottleneck, right? And so this started, the global business services industry started uh with multinationals saying, hey, why do I need to have, you know, finance people in every country closing the books?

1:25:25 Can I just sweep that together and have a service? for the business, therefore business services. um Until uh the evolution between then, which was a back office, which is can you do this cheaper, please? Can you use people in other locations in the world? Philippines, India, exactly. To now where it's like, okay, so these are the people that know how the company operates, they know technology, they know change management. So instead of hiring a McKinsey or a Deloitte, Why don't we get them to redesign the way the company works? And that's essentially what that industry of global business services become.

1:26:06 It is, it's fast evolving. It is, yes, absolutely. This is like, literally in this particular space, four decades old. Yeah, but the speed is incredible. What's causing that? What's causing that speed? Is it companies reaching for greater efficiency and more margin? Honestly, is that it? That's it. That's it. Yeah, companies have to keep up. um You know, this has always been true, by the way, that, you know, for every hundred companies that uh are in the S &P 500, I think 40 % are going to rotate out uh within 10 years. And that's always been true. It's not like that number has changed.

1:26:46 But what has changed is that what they need to do, the amount they need to change, to survive for the other 60 % has changed dramatically. You know, you could, for example, you know, you could shut down a factory and start a new one uh literally, you know, within a couple of years now, whereas in the past, it may have been fine to let that factory go for a couple of decades. And so it's pushing companies to say, how do I become faster at internal operations, i.e. global business services? Massively uncomfortable. Does it just take a few liters to drive that? Just a few inside one company?

1:27:27 Or does it take everyone? It actually always starts with a few leaders. uh Somebody that understands this one third, two thirds, know, competitive advantage contribution equation. uh Because there are people that are product leaders and there are people that are process leaders, right? for example, I mean, Steve Jobs was a product leader. Tim Cook is much more a operations process kind of person. um But Steve was smart enough to know that that other stuff is important and you got other people to do that. hire people to do it. Yes. So, um, so it always does start with somebody realizing the importance of that one third and putting that in place.

1:28:07 But that's the start of the journey because that person that does get identified then has a massive problem of bringing the entire company along. Yeah. Yeah. Great conversation today. Yeah, go, go, go buy the books, make him a few more dollars. I'm sure he's okay financially y'all in life. And he's making an argument that altruism wins. That's, that's it. We didn't use the word, but do good. Just do, but I think, uh, you know, it's very admirable that the idea is, you know, just to, um, try to make the next generation better. I think it's just a fantastic philosophy and a way to approach still the life that you have left that you're investing here in this professional environment.

1:28:48 I sincerely hope so. mean, I think we're all trying to be a better person than we were yesterday. And that's really the intent there. But, you know, if I were to kind of summarize, what I would say is the thing that we were talking about, it's important to do well and do good at the same time. uh At the end of the day, I think that is really important. um And, you know, whether the books or any of the other stuff, helps you in doing better in your own career or in your own life? um I would hope so. uh But along with that, regardless of whether you buy the books or not, what I also hope would be that I've given people pause to say, am I doing a little bit of both at the same time?

1:29:36 That's good. So there's your next book. Maybe that is. We have to get together maybe over a beer or two or bourbon as we were saying. Yes. Yeah, that's it. That's good. All right. Thank you for the ah Tony Saldana uh website www.transformant.io not dot com and my digital transformations fail. Okay. Thank you for coming in. Enjoy your weekend. Enjoy your weekend. Yes. Thank you.