David Yakobovitch
What I’ll often do when I do workshops is I’ll ask my team that’s in there, that the group I’m working with, I’d like you to take a piece of paper and draw a line down the middle of it. On the left-hand side I want you to write at the top of the page: “best boss ever, best manager ever”, and on the right-hand side write “worst boss ever, worst manager ever”, whatever you want to call it.
Then I ask them to list underneath that: why was this leader so great? What made you love them? What was it about them that was unique, or different, or special? That made you willingly follow them and want to run through brick walls. And then, what was it about the other one that made you hate them, abhor them?, whatever it might be. And after they write down all the things, I say: “Now, next to each one, I want you to write either IQ or EQ”. Is this an Intelligence Quotient competence issue or is this an Emotional Quotient empathy connection issue? In all the classes I’ve been doing this. I just did it with a group at Wharton. It’s 10 to 1 or higher EQ to IQ.
David Yakobovitch
This is HumAIn, a weekly podcast focused on bridging the gap between humans and machines in this age of acceleration. My name is David Yakobovitch. And on this podcast I interview experts in sociology, psychology, artificial intelligence, researchers on consumer facing products and consumer facing companies to help audiences better understand AI and it’s many capabilities. If you like the show, remember to subscribe and leave a review.
Hey listeners, this is David Yakobovitch, from the HumAIn podcast. If you want to anticipate the market, learn about the future of business or hear from one of the top 50 business leaders of our time, this episode is for you. What insights have Sergei Brin and Steve Jobs shared with John Spence? What can John’s new Ted talk on adaptable intelligence teach us? How is AI being implemented with small farmers and Monsanto? Learn how to stay ahead of the market and to be part of the future of business with autonomous systems, tune in now.
Welcome back everyone to the HumAIn podcast, where we’re bridging the gap of humans and machines in the fourth industrial revolution. I’m your host, David Yakobovitch, and today I am honored to have a colleague I’ve known for more than a quick minute. John Spence¹ is one of the top business experts in the world. He’s an author, he’s a keynote, he’s a speaker, works in workshops and executive coaching with The Fortune’s 500 list traveling the world. John, thanks for being with us today.
John Spence
It’s my honor, David, truly.
David Yakobovitch
Thank you so much. For all of our listeners here today on the podcast, I originally met John when I was an undergrad student at the university of Florida and it was my first foray in business, being involved in a case competition class. John was one of the keynotes for the week talking to us about thought leadership, the future of business, always thinking about the big picture. That inspired me too, in that case competition class to fly to Singapore to compete for Prudential, and our team actually placed in the top eight, which was very exciting.
Of course, fast forward a few years, businesses are always evolving and the future of business. Is a topic at hand. John, I know you do a lot in that space. Could you share some of your thought leadership on what’s going on with businesses?
John Spence
I was at Wharton actually last week. Every year I go, it’s my 19th year for the Securities Industry Institute and I get executives from all the top financial firms in America, mostly vice-president, director of global, director level or above. And we’re talking about how technology is impacting not only the financial industry, but every industry that they serve. A couple of years ago I attended a thing called the Abundance 360 with Peter Diamandis, and we had Sergei Brin, Larry Page, Jeff Bezos, on and on and on and on, they’re speaking.
And the fun thing there was, oftentimes you go to a conference and people are talking about what they heard from other people. It was fun to sit and listen to the actual folks who were doing the work. We had Dr. Craig Venter there who’s widely recognized as the first person to decode the human genome.
And we identified several major trends that are impacting business. And that was: computer speed, which leads of course, to big data. Artificial intelligence, robotics, virtual reality, augmented reality, synthetic medicine, genetic decoding and recoding. And when I was at Wharton last week with the financial folks, it’s amazing. I’ve been teaching the future of business there for about five years. The first two years I taught it, Bitcoin and blockchain did not exist.
Now, when you go to them, most of the firms that I work with are all now moving to blockchain and they’re competing with, which everybody does, Amazon for banking. Amazon just came out with a new bank card and their partner is Goldman Sachs. And they pick Goldman because they’ve never been in the credit card business and they want it to be innovative and ahead of the curve. So we’re seeing all kinds of interesting things in all those fields.
David Yakobovitch
Blockchain is such a fascinating field. Being in New York and in the tech ecosystem, probably the most central place in the world, in the United States, particularly for blockchain is Brooklyn. Consensys Labs is based here. There are so many startups and what’s very interesting is machine learning and AI on the blockchain. I was listening to a presentation the other week and then was from the startup, that’s basically taking Github and version control for code, but moving it to the blockchain. So, it’s so fascinating how the industry is maturing quite quickly.
John Spence
What’s interesting too, most of the folks I deal with are very senior level people. Who’ve been in the business for 20 years and this is radical for them. It is challenging. I talked to a couple of senior executives about Bitcoin and I forget which one, one of them just, I want to call it a nice coin or something, just a week or two ago had a big anomaly spike, and some of the other ones were going down. And literally the folks go “I have the younger people at my firm teach me about this, because I don’t know what’s happening”.
David Yakobovitch
Technology moves so fast in myself now being in the big data industry since 2010, I’ve seen a lot of that change. I got started in Fortran and Coldwell on mainframes and started to move into the cloud and learn what this thing called Python is and all these algorithms and the complexity of those algorithms. So it’s evolving. And you mentioned a lot of industries that are taking off virtual reality, augmented reality, AI and FinTech. 2019 has shaped up to have a lot of trends and the trends seem to be no longer these industries, but this is how they integrate together, the seamless experiences.
John Spence
It’s fascinating. Monsanto is one of my clients, and then I also work with several other organizations in the food production, farming, space from cattle to chickens, to grain. I was recently talking with the president of Monsanto and he was up in front of a large group of agriculture folks. And he said: “We are no longer a seed and fertilizer company. We are a big data company”. He said: We use computerized systems, algorithms, drones, and what are called farm bots to go out and test the fields to go plant by plant and look if this one needs more fertilizer or this one needs some more nitrogen.
This one has good aeration, this one is too dry. Farm bought specifically, puts the water or fertilizer or pesticide per plant as it goes through the farm completely autonomous. And then they collect all that data and they use that to tell the farmer how to get more yield, a higher yield on his property or her property.
It’s interesting because they said: After we do this for a couple of years they’re not going to switch, not because we have the best seeds and fertilizer, but because we have all the data on their farm and they depend on us in order to figure out exactly how to get the maximum yield from their crops.
Then I’ve got another client in Australia, a land power that makes huge harvesters, two interesting things there. One is they’ve sort of started, or I’m seeing it started in the agriculture field, Uber for harvesters. One of the big harvesters can cost a couple million bucks and depending on how large your field is, you might need six, seven or eight if you want to get everything out of the field before a storm comes or something like that. So rather than a farmer spending $6 million to get three art, they just pick it up the phone, call it, or actually get on the app. They order the harvesters, the harvesters are brought to the field and they’re all autonomous.
Nobody drives them. At this point they have oftentimes have somebody sit in it, but it’s all controlled by drones, GPS. And autonomous harvesters that have harvested things from basically an autonomous field where big data has replaced seeds and fertilizer. And that’s in an industry we think of as fairly pedestrian and older farming’s probably about as old as you could get.
David Yakobovitch
I spoke with my other guests on the HumAIn podcast, her name’s Kristen Kehrer. And we talk about a data driven culture, how we’re becoming so data swamped and how can you monetize that data? And that seems to be monetized from the examples you’ve shared with autonomous systems, whether it’s drones, whether it’s on a farm or if it’s delivering groceries, It seems that’s where the industry is moving and quite quickly. Five years ago people thought we would not get there until 20, 30 or beyond, but it looks like we’re almost at 2020. And where are the live in production with these autonomous systems
John Spence
It’s interesting. I’ve been teaching strategy for about 20 years all over the world, doing major strategic planning, consulting, retreats and events for large companies. And I have a very clear… David, my career has been built on the idea of making complex things simple. So, after Many years in books and on and on and on, I boiled strategy down to this idea. All strategy is just valued differentiation, multiplied by disciplined execution.
In other words, you have to bring something that’s unique and compelling to the marketplace that your target customer wants to buy, they’re happy to pay for it. That you’re is difficult, if not impossible, for your competition to copy and that you can execute on flawlessly and consistently. And other than a for most industries, other than maybe IP or location, which is very rare, there’s only four things that meet those criteria: the quality of the people in your company, the relationships you have with your customers, the strength of your brand, and then here’s number four: This just hit the list in a couple of, maybe in the last five years, the data you have collected on your customers in the industry with the caveat of how well you deploy that data, how well you mine it. So one of the major sustainable differentiations for companies in the world now is their data and their ability to analyze the data effectively and use that as a competitive advantage.
David Yakobovitch
That competitive advantage could be translated as the word momentum. Let me explain why I would see that as momentum in the startup space. Looking at the business model Canvas, Steve Blank often talks about five things that startups need. If we’re focused on that niche which is your team, your business model, the funding, the technology, IP, and the momentum. Whether we’re working from your frameworks or startup frameworks, it seems that taking this data and finding the right direction to move is that competitive advantage
John Spence
I’ll give you a quick example. I coached some senior executives in the auto automotive space, and owned car dealerships. I sat down with one of the executives yesterday. He was recently at an owner’s meeting for people in dealerships for Cadillac. And he said: Google has created this new tool that just came out, I can’t remember the name of the tool, that tracks how many people search for a car versus how many people buy that car nationwide.
And you can compare brands against each other, SUV versus full-size and on and on and on. He showed it to me and he said: Do you realize that this is insanely valuable to my dealership, because I know how to spend my marketing budget, how to upsell people, how to get more appointments. And on and on all the things they focus on. And he said: This existed in Google and we never knew the data was there. Now we have data that will allow us to significantly increase our competitive advantage in the marketplace.
David Yakobovitch
Most companies are afraid of data, afraid of the autonomous systems being rolled out. But the moment I’m hearing right now is if you can captivate this data with insights, then you can actually grow your business even as autonomous systems are being implemented.
John Spence
Well, they got hand in glove. Your business is going to change through automation, through AI, through big data. There’s no escaping that and it has to, but it’s your ability to see the trends in the data, to see the patterns, mind the data correctly, and then be able to staff, investing and create strategies, very fast strategies, that take advantage of that technology before your competitors do.
David Yakobovitch
Let’s say you are a large company today. You’re Warner Media and you just moved into Hudson Yards in Manhattan, or you’re Disney and you’re building your new 70 storey skyscraper in lower Manhattan for your tech center. And you’re a big company and you think you move fast, but you can always move faster. How should you begin to think about data if you’re not early adapted to driven culture?
John Spence
Well, you and I chatted with this a little bit before the podcast started. I just did a Ted talk, and the Ted talk was about what it takes to be a great leader of the future. So folks who lead these companies, I get to work shoulder to shoulder with many of them. Years ago when we looked at leadership it was heavily weighted towards IQ. Are you brilliant? Are you smart? Did you graduate from one of the top colleges? Do you have amazing analytical skills? Are you basically wild? What I would say towering competence or wild? Wildly competent, amazing at what you do.
Then came along EQ. It’s interesting, I work with a large engineering firm and what I’ll often do when I do workshops is I’ll ask my team that’s in there, that the group I’m working with, I’d like you to take a piece of paper and draw a line down the middle of it. On the left-hand side I want you to write at the top of the page: “best boss ever, best manager ever”, and on the right-hand side write “worst boss ever, worst manager ever”, whatever you want to call it.
Then I ask them to list underneath that: why was this leader so great? What made you love them? What was it about them that was unique, or different, or special? That made you willingly follow them and want to run through brick walls. And then, what was it about the other one that made you hate them, abhor them?, whatever it might be. And after they write down all the things, I say: “Now, next to each one, I want you to write either IQ or EQ”. Is this an Intelligence Quotient competence issue or is this an Emotional Quotient empathy connection issue? In all the classes I’ve been doing this. I just did it with a group at Wharton. It’s 10 to 1 or higher EQ to IQ.
Even in a major engineering company like Qualcomm, or something like that, you’re going to see people that understand that leadership is more effective. Gotta have a level of competence. But EQ, that connection, which by the way, is one of the things that technology will never be able to do. AI doesn’t have EQ, it doesn’t make that personal human connection with empathy and concern and genuine appreciation. So that EQ thing is one of the things that will buffer people from having their jobs removed, not compressed, but removed. But now, there’s a brand new quotient that’s been discovered just in the last several months, called AQ, and AQ is your adaptability or your Agility Quotient.
That’s your ability to take new information, quickly discard old information that doesn’t work, change your frame of reference, be innovative, move quickly and be extremely intellectually agile. And from everything I’m seeing in the future, which reads the next four or five years, it’s actually gonna flip around, and it’s going to be AQ the most important quotient. EQ is the second most important quotient, and as long as you have a baseline of IQ, you’re fine. So going all the way back to your question, is the only way those big companies are going to do well is if their entire leadership team, their entire executive team has a very, very high AQ.
David Yakobovitch
Leadership teams are often thinking about digital transformation, as I need to re-skill and up-skill my workforce. We have to learn the greatest, newest, shiny technology object and this tech stack because if we have tech savvy employees, then we’ll crush the market and we’ll beat the competition. However, what I’m hearing right now is that it’s more than just this, the data and tech. This is how I solve those business problems, and this is how I can adapt to the market conditions.
John Spence
Actually, I just read a book today. A colleague of mine in Russia, has asked me to write the forward to his book, called the Trinity of Business. He’s used a biological model to create his theory. It’s going to be, it won’t be out for probably another year, but I read it almost… your audience may not know it, but Peter Drucker is probably the most revered management thinker of all times, and I believe this book is close. In one of the things he says is: all the technology, all the leadership, all the business models, all the strategies are focused on one thing only, to satisfy your customer.
If your technology is whiz bang, but it doesn’t truly add value to your customer, then there’s a new word we have for you, it’s called bankruptcy. So it all comes down. All this technology, big data, everything comes down to can you take all of that and create real value for your customers? Value that they’re willing to spend $5, $50 or $50 million on, because it satisfies a problem they have, and that’s the solution to running a successful business.
David Yakobovitch
That’s right, and needs to satisfy a real problem. One startup in Silicon Valley did just the opposite, they were called Theranos. So you may have heard that story.
John Spence
About a little bit about it.
David Yakobovitch
A lot of us have. The next one, their company, a drop of blood test to know your whole medical profile. It’s the thing that anyone would want to invest in. But the challenge there was, it sounds like they had, that perhaps some of that IQ and EQ from the business success to grow a vision, but the technology was missing there. So you do need both sides.
John Spence
Well, it’s fascinating, David. I’m pretty involved in the startup scene here in Gainesville, Florida, which has a great startup ecosystem. Truly among the best in the country and Jim Collins and other great leadership thinkers talks about the three wheels of the hedgehog concept. And the hedgehog concept says: the Fox has many ways to attack, the hedgehog has one way to defend, who wins every time is the hedgehog. His hedgehog concept said there’s three circles that overlap. Circle number one is something that I’m really, really good at.
I have extremely high technical expertise in, is my favorite phrase, towering competence. The second circle is passionate about, I really loved this idea, I’m excited about it, It is my purpose. And the third circle is that it has a strong economic driver in the marketplace. And I see a lot of entrepreneurs with the first two circles. Really good at something that they love to do. Unfortunately, no one wants to buy it. And that’s called a hobby, not a company.
David Yakobovitch
You see a lot of those technologies on the shelf that take 10 years till they find the right market fit. Because the tech is sure, 10 X or a hundred X better than what’s on the market, but it just doesn’t have the right business model and market awareness, if you will.
John Spence
There’s a lot of people that think they’re the next Steve Jobs. I got to work with Wozniak and Jobs, a little bit more with Wozniak. And the thing about Steve that was unique is he actually was one of the only people that could anticipate technology that the customer wanted, that they didn’t even know they wanted.
A lot of other entrepreneurs think they can do that. It’s exceedingly rare to have someone who’s that in tuned, and part of the reason was, and it’s been widely reported, is he was the customer. He was trying to sell to people like him. So he looked at something and said: I love this, Let’s build it. I hate this, throw it away. Except for maybe Phil Knight at Nike and maybe one or two other companies, I can’t think of a company that could anticipate the market design before they even understood it was possible.
David Yakobovitch
Anticipating the market desires is where it’s at. While I was in Gainesville, for our listeners, I participated in startup weekend and all these hackathons and one of my fun ,non fame to claims, is building Apple AirPods eight years before it hit the market. But our team didn’t know how to monetize it. And so, great, we made Apple AirPods, but you didn’t make a billion dollars on it.
John Spence
I never told the story of the third guy at Apple, that sold his shares to those guys for like $500, because he didn’t think it was going to go anywhere. And if he had stayed, he would be like the third richest man in the world, but that was never going to happen.
David Yakobovitch
It happens with every company and one thing you’re mentioning is anticipating the needs of the market. But another attention I’d like us to change towards is anticipating the market overall. Of course that’s a very hard thing to do. Even Ray Dalio talks about anticipating the market and making sure you hedge yourself from different directions of the market. Right now, at least in the USA, it seems that the market might be slowing. Hiring might be slowing. Europe may be having challenges. China might be investing income to stabilize the market. I’d like to hear from you, as a business leader in these uncertain times, whether some good decisions you can do to hedge yourself.
John Spence
Well, it’s fascinating because, and I bring it back to the things I’m comfortable with, and one of the things I’m comfortable with, I believe this is your ability for pattern recognition. I talk about this a lot as a strategic thinker: there’s five things that go into being a good strategic thinker.
You’ve got to have a good base of knowledge. You’ve got to be reading, studying, really keeping up with the times, being a serious student. Number two though, is all of the answers aren’t in the books. Number two is you’ve got to go at going out and experimenting and trying new things and going to other industries, looking at things that are completely unrelated to what you do.
There’s an idea called the adjacent news. And the adjacent news is when you take this business acumen that you’ve had for years, that you’re studying inside and out. And you meet it with an idea that’s completely alien. You put the two together, they like each other, they go on a date, they get married and then you have a little baby idea. That baby idea is ,basically, your flash of insight. That is your strategic inflection point. Then the next thing is how to build the model around that, and last but not least, how to execute on it.
And all of that comes down to the key idea of being able to recognize patterns. Having studied this for a while, I realized that most people that are at the very top of what they do around the world are good because they’re taking in information, adjacent news, all those things all the time, and they can connect the dots before anybody else in the marketplace can.
The hard part now, David, is the information comes so fast and there’s so much of it and we’re a global community. It used to be, I’ve been in business since 1989, was my first job working for the Rockefellers. Things have changed completely. Thet technology didn’t really exist that much. Then all I had to worry about basically was American markets.
I’ve got my small firm. It’s myself, my wife, one assistant and a part-time bookkeeper. And we have, literally, clients in 20 countries right now, out of Gainesville, Florida. Which, again, allows me to see some patterns before other people do, because I have a wide exposure to all those things. And it’s fascinating to me when I go and talk to executives of companies, how narrow-minded on their own market, their own product and their own technology they are, which is the thing that will kill you. In your own career or as a business, not casting a wide enough net to understand how everything impacts everything. And we used to say that a lot in the past, but today everything impacts everything.
David Yakobovitch
We truly are a global world. And the adjacent ideas that you just described resonates with me. One story I heard once is that titanium being used in the airplane industry was once assessed by an engineer who worked for a hospital. And he said: why could this not be implemented in medicine? It could. And that’s how new materials were created for safer hip replacements and more sterile tools that is that adjacent industries. And you have to be around that innovation.
John Spence
You’ve got to be courageous enough to try to think innovative enough and intellectually to say. Well, I’ll give you an example. The car dealership I worked with yesterday, we looked at all the things. It’s a very competitive market. The last car I bought, I bought fully online. I didn’t talk to anybody. I didn’t go to a dealership. I didn’t do anything. I click click, click. I emailed my bank, they did the transfer. They did everything. I signed electronically. I was in a different city, when I came home my car was gone and the new car was sitting in the driveway.
I didn’t have to interact with a car dealer at all. So they were saying that the only way we could do this is to have a world-class customer experience. The only date way we’ll get someone to walk in the dealership is it has to be a truly world-class customer experience. And I said: Then have you taken your entire staff to the Ritz Carlton to see how they do it there? Do you bring in somebody from Hilton or from the best restaurant in your town and have them teach customer service?
He’s like: why would you do that? I said: Because what you’re describing is you are in the customer service business, even though it was the same guy that said: I have this amazing new data, I can get people into the dealership. It doesn’t do any good if they walk in there and they aren’t ¡WOW!, delighted, excited, and it’s not a great shopping, buying and owning experience. And that’s all the hospitality industry, not the car business.
David Yakobovitch
This world-class experience you’re talking about is a combination of humans and machines. Now there are companies coming out that they’re trying to automate coffee shops and automate making hamburgers and automation is occurring everywhere. And, at the end of the day, businesses are about both, making money and doing the right thing. And it puts us at a very interesting inflection point about where is automation appropriate to create that world-class experience without having too much of a threat of eliminating jobs,Without repurposing them?
John Spence
Well, this is an interesting discussion, one that I had at the Abundance 360, I’ve had it at a few other major conferences I’ve attended. As a quote, unquote, I don’t hate the word, but it’s awkward to say: thought leader, but I supposedly am. And I was at Wharton last week, what happens when this…it’s my strong belief that the technology’s going to outrun our ability for, or the ability for many people to keep up with it.
Great example: We have about 3 million over the road truck drivers in America. Autonomous trucks are already starting to come online. Probably within 10 years you’ll see a lot of autonomous trucks on the road. I’m a 45 year old truck driver. Don’t have the strongest education base, maybe as other people. All I’ve done is drive trucks for 20 years, and all of a sudden my entire industry goes away. And that’s not just going to happen in that industry. It’s going to happen in many, many, many, many industries.
Of course, new jobs will be created, but what do we do about that? I’m going to use rough numbers for that. I’m making up a billion and a half people, 2 billion people in the world that are not educated enough to quickly catch up with the technology. And this is way out there, but it’s my belief.We’re probably going to have a three generation gap. Where we have to go back and use education systems for younger people to catch up because the older people aren’t going to catch up, in my opinion, which leads us to the idea of universal basic income.
And I won’t go too far on that, but it’s every time I’ve been in a group of CEOs from major companies, we have this discussion on Wharton and other major universities. I teach at a poll in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore. It’s a very challenging question to say: what are we going to do when we have a whole bunch of people for a span of time that are basically unemployable?
David Yakobovitch
Especially as the world population is declining. That’s something new that came out of the world, health organization. What’s so fascinating about universal basic income is I agree with your statement. My mentor, one of them, has sold multiple AI startups, and he does not see any other way around it. I spoke with another AI advisor, the same principle keeps occurring, that without universal basic income the quality of life will decrease. Now, the consideration though, is how do you maintain the quality of life of being human in these new autonomous states while maintaining that curiosity, ambition and drive to be successful? I was just going to say the reason I share that question is that the results out of Denmark came out that the people who’ve been receiving 2000 to 3000 euros per month, it did remove the stress of needing to have the paycheck to have food on the table. But it did nothing to get them employed, It did nothing to help them be more involved in the community.
John Spence
So let me hit on two key ideas. I’ll hit one first, then we’ll talk about universal basic income. One, I read a lot of theory and I read a lot of research, but then I get to actually go see how it works in companies and this really hit me, especially with the younger people, your age, coming into the marketplace or in the marketplace. There’s three things now that they look for: stability, dignity and purpose. Stability: Can I be sure that I’ll have a job that I can make enough money to pay my bills? That my entire industry isn’t getting wiped out? Dignity or respect, can I be treated as an individual, and my voice will be heard and people will respect my diversity, my ideas, and what I bring to the table?
On the last one is: I want to have a sense of purpose. I want to do something that is meaningful, where I make a difference in the world. Let’s take those three and set them aside. The theory and some of the actual outcome of universal basic income has been, some people take that, but then they go start a side job. They create an entrepreneur or they create a small company. They do something to make additional money: Hey, the two or $3,000 a month, It’s nice.
But let me see if I can go out and make another $2000 or 3000 and 4000. So they’re entrepreneurial or they pursue a passion for painting, art music, something that is fulfilling a personal purpose to them, something that matches their values. Or they go volunteer in their community. They volunteer to help elderly people, people with Alzheimer’s, things like that. So it isn’t just people that are going to take the money and sit in their apartment all day long.
Although there’ll be plenty of people that just go to buy alcohol, or whatever, or sit and play video games for days and never leave their place. There’s also going to be a majority of people that say: No, no. Now that I’ve got stability, I want to create dignity for myself and I want to do something meaningful and purposeful for my community and the world. And to me, at least, that’s that is got to be a major factor in making universal basic income actually work.
David Yakobovitch
Making them work is exactly what you’re saying. It’s having this curiosity, and then what is the right business model to make that work? Because a lot of people are coming from this below the line, thinking of fear and being replaced.
One good model that I’ve seen out of San Francisco is a bootcamp company called Lambda School. What Lambda School does now, is they say: Go to our bootcamp for six months and we’ll pay you $2,000 a month. To go to the bootcamp for each month of the six months, and then you owe us nothing, except an income share agreement based on what you make after your program for a certain period of time. So, there’s several different ways to look at that, UBI, Universal Basic Income model. The thought process is how soon is it going to become imminent that we need to implement?
John Spence
I can’t make that guess.
David Yakobovitch
Anticipating the market.
John Spence
Well, it’s sooner rather than later. We’re already seeing some of the impacts. And the thing I said is it’s accelerating, as you said earlier, faster than we expected. My future business class at Wharton and other places for companies. Two things, I tell them I will not get a standing ovation from this, most people will leave crying. Because interestingly enough, to me, very few people keep up on these things. When I start explaining well… for example, I always have to check the speed of the fastest computer in the world the day I teach the class, because it changed so fast when I taught it last time.
The fastest supercomputer in the world did 200,000 trillion operations or computations per second, 200,000 trillion CPS. That’s a two with 17 zeros behind it. I know Moore’s law, we’re not sure how much longer it can last, because of it’s getting so small that technology, we just don’t have the ability to go and be smaller on silicone, but then you step up with quantum computing and that takes that 217,000 trillion operations or computations per second and multiplies it by a thousand.
What happens when we have computers that can do that sort of.., and they’re attached to the cloud. So they have access to basically all information available in the world. It’s and you and I both know it’s what’s called the Technological Singularity. Which every time I bring it off, my wife tells me to shut up!
David Yakobovitch
Speaking of singularity, the technology world is it seems to be moving into two different pathways. One is seamlessly connected all the time and streaming, and we can call that the new 5g and 6g technologies. The second one is the remote nature of being disconnected, being on the edge of having access to that technology without the internet, drones that could fly in the mountains in Nepal and still know where they’re going, even without the satellite connection. The reason I shared this is thinking of trends. Do you see either one emerging or any other trends that have been fascinating for you this year?
John Spence
Things that are most fascinating are people who are looking at major technologies and figuring out how to use them in industries, like the agriculture example I gave you, that I would not have thought of as a major tech cutting edge technological industry. The farmer of the future to keep on the thing, doesn’t have to leave their house.
They could track their cattle, the feed, how their crops are doing, how their chickens are doing, on and on and on all, from a computer screen with a joystick driving tractors around or moving, if they need to, farm bots do it drones over the field, satellite imagery, GPS, and you look farmers, farmers are not farmers anymore, they’re major of corporations with lots of consolidation in that industry. And then I started to look at other industries I’m involved with and they’re starting to apply technology in exceedingly innovative and creative ways that I never would have been able to anticipate. So even with somebody like me, who’s keeping up with technology from a business standpoint every week, I learn something new and go, how in the world did they think of that? So, we’re going to see a lot of applications that are at this point in time, almost inconceivable, because some, because again, that adjacent news someone sees an idea and another technology and they adapt it to something that was unforeseen.
The other side of that is I’m involved with a couple of global movements for cleaning plastic about the ocean. And I am so excited to see clean energy cleaning up the oceans, using that technology to actually make a dent in it and make a difference. And it gives me some hope that we’re going to be able to keep the planet semi clean and a technology that isn’t going to kill the atmosphere, and be able to bring back coral reefs and such like that using this amazing technology to rebuild some of the stuff we destroyed.
David Yakobovitch
When I used to be in Florida, I would actually go on some of the outings with the Billfish Foundation, which you’ve had involvement over the years there. And it’s great to see the work being done. As you’re talking about restoration of coral reefs, a new research came out this year that’s showing how you can implant these reefs in the great barrier reef, and they’re actually holding and they’re surviving. There’s new biodegradable bacteria that’s degrading the plastics which are coming out now. So, with the world population, it seems, reaching a state stability point.
We could be moving in a direction of stability for this planet, but wow. Now that’s so out there, these are really big concepts, questions that you have to think about for the future of business and maybe a final question here for today on the future of business. You had the privilege and honor to connect with some of the world’s great, in many different businesses. From what you’ve then from what you’re seeing and how the market’s changing. Is there any advice you’d like to share with our listeners today on how they could be part of that future of business and to think like the great leader?
John Spence
It’s something I harp on all the time. It’s committing yourself to lifelong learning. It’s fascinating me, I just did the research again to make sure I had my numbers right. The average American reads 4 books per year and that’s fiction and non-fiction combined, and it’s heavily weighted towards fiction. If you were to read one business self-help innovation book, something out of your thing about robotics or AI or the fourth industrial revolution.
If you read one every two months, six a year, you’d be in the top 1% in the United States. If you’re to read 12 books a year, you’d be in the top 1% in the world. So the thing I push with every executive I work with, is you’ve got to set time aside to learn and grow and get on a plane and go see a different factory, be at a different company, get out of your industry because this stuff is moving fast. And if you aren’t constantly bringing in information through videos and blogs and books and on and on and on, you will be left. You will get blindsided. Because you will not realize what’s coming at you.
And again, when I mentioned this stuff in some of my corporate retreats at some of the colleges I teach at where I do executive education, I will ask some of the questions Like: I did one a couple of years ago in the financial industry, that’d be seven years ago. How many have ever heard of Moore’s law? 200 people in the room, two people raised their hands, and I said: That’s okay, because it’s going to take your job away from you within 10 years. And they’re like, ‘Well now you go to Australia, we’ve got like 30% robo-advisors and it’s getting bigger and bigger and bigger in America’.
Five years ago, these folks didn’t even know about computer speed, AI, Moore’s law or things like that. Because they just weren’t taking the time to keep themselves updated with information and new ideas that were outside of their scope to allow them to connect the dots, which is the only way that you’re going to be successful moving forward. It’s the AQ.
David Yakobovitch
It’s all about the AQ, it’s about that adaptability, it’s about being a lifelong learner, and both of us are. It’s such a pleasure for you to be here on the HumAIn Podcast, talking about humans and machines working together in this fourth industrial revolution. Hi, John. Thanks so much for taking the time with us today.
John Spence
Thank you, David. It was a real joy. I appreciate it.
David Yakobovitch
That’s it, for this episode of HumAIn. I’m David Yakobovitch and if you enjoyed the show, don’t forget to click and subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you are listening to this. Thanks so much for listening and I’ll talk to you in the next one.
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