7. The Curiosity to Explore
No one knows exactly how the fire started. The regulator concluded that its source was the use of an unauthorized blowtorch to seal a duct. Regardless of the cause, at 2:02 p.m. on October 9, 2013, fire broke out at a cable chamber of the Bukit Panjang exchange. Extensive damage impacted Internet access for more than a quarter-million subscribers across all service providers, including government agencies.
As soon as the fire department declared the area safe, Singtel quickly sprang into action. A key part of the response strategy was figuring out how to divert traffic around the affected cables. The company’s intricate knowledge of how the network operated allowed it to solve that problem quickly. Then it had to fix the cables themselves. Experts estimated it could take months.
But this was Singapore, and this was Singtel, one of its crown jewels. Singtel restored more than 40 percent of the fiber connections within twenty-four hours, and repaired the damaged cables within two days. It declared full service restoration on October 14, only 120 hours and 58 minutes after the incident. Tay Soo Meng—a long-time Singtel veteran who at the time headed the network group—and his team did more than diligently attack the problem; they went days with virtually no sleep until they fixed the problem.
The local regulator fined Singtel about $4.5 million because it lacked a specific contingency plan for an outage of this scale. But the regulator acknowledged the company’s efforts to provide compensation to users and proactive and transparent response. Over the next eighteen months, Singtel implemented a comprehensive fire presentation and suppression system.
Singtel is an operating machine like few others in the world. It was spun out from government ownership in 1992 but stayed a regulated monopoly until the local industry was deregulated in 2000. Although Singtel is publicly traded, its majority owner is Temasek, the investment arm of the Singapore government. Singtel’s Group CEO at the time of deregulation was Lee Hsien Yang, the second son of Lee Kuan Yew, the founder of modern Singapore. Chua Sock Koong, who previously was deputy Group CEO and chief financial officer, became overall Singtel CEO in early 2007.
By 2010 Singtel had become Southeast Asia’s largest mobile provider. At the time Singtel reached more than 400 million subscribers through wholly owned operations in Singapore and Australia as well as its significant ownership stakes in providers in Southeast Asia and Africa. Like all mobile providers, Singtel built and operated communications networks that historically were used by consumers to make voice calls. At first, the shift from voice calls to messages and other data services was a boon for the industry. However, it created opportunities for new competitors like Skype, WhatsApp, Facebook, and others to ride over the top of the communications networks and provide competing services. The industry had nightmares of becoming a so-called dumb pipe, bearing all the costs of building expansive, expensive networks but seeing the returns go to these upstarts.
Singtel has a deep finance function, plans rigorously and thoroughly, and regularly wins awards for having the best corporate governance in Asia. Since 2010, in parallel with efforts to streamline and shift its core business from voice to data, something interesting has happened. The company has invested in dozens of startups and built several substantial new growth businesses. Senior leaders have all but given up wearing ties. Leaders have traveled to far-flung places such as Tel Aviv and Silicon Valley—not to visit Singtel operations in those geographies, but to get firsthand exposure to startups.
In short, Singtel has demonstrated the curiosity to explore.
Problems of Predictability
One of our favorite party tricks is to come into a company we’ve never met before and proclaim omniscience. We announce that, without having prepared for the meeting at all (which of course we have) or reading anything about the company, we can predict its strategy. The proclamation typically leads to puzzled glances. Then we say, “Your strategy is to continue to do precisely what you are currently doing.”
Protests ensue, as audience members describe how they’re boldly moving into this market and investing in that technology and partnering with this well-known startup company and have brought in this hot talent. All true—but generally meaningless unless the company is matching bold proclamations and piecemeal moves with the hard work of rewiring the underlying systems that determine how the company allocates resources on a day-to-day basis. After all, your strategy isn’t what you say you do; it is what you actually do, which is driven by how you spend your time and money. And over time, the day-to-day engines that drive resource allocation become optimized to do what has allowed you to succeed, only better.
But even though finely tuned operating engines bring significant benefits, they also present serious challenges in the face of disruptive change. Consider a conversation we had with a top executive at Procter & Gamble more than a decade ago. The company called us in early 2004 saying it needed help with innovation. That wasn’t at all obvious from the outside. After all, the company had just launched category-creating products like Febreze (removes malodor from room air and fabric), Swiffer (enables quick cleaning), and Crest Whitestrips (allows individuals to whiten their teeth themselves). P&G was expanding rapidly in emerging markets, and global revenues were surging. A.G. Lafley was earning acclaim for bringing the spring back in P&G’s step after the previous CEO surprisingly resigned in 1999. The company’s stock price was surging.
P&G’s leaders were worried. They peered into their development pipeline and saw a problem. Line extensions and other incremental ideas crowded the pipeline. That meant the company faced the prospect of declining growth. Not in the next year, and maybe not even in the next decade—but leaders decided P&G had to improve its ability to more systematically and reliably create ideas that had the potential to create new brands and indeed new categories.
We were talking to a top executive about what was holding the company back. “We are organized to deliver consistent, reliable results,” he told us. “And that’s exactly the problem.”
P&G’s systems prioritized predictability and reliability. In 2016, P&G increased its dividend for the sixtieth straight year. Why is pursuing predictability a problem when it comes to driving new growth? As much as we understand innovation better than ever before, success stories almost always have twists, turns, false starts, and false steps.
How Predictability Interferes with Innovation
Let’s turn from the P&G story to consider Odeo, a company founded to help consumers organize podcasts on their Apple iPods. A good idea, perhaps, until Apple built into its software the functionality Odeo was seeking to create. In desperation, company founder Ev Williams broke the company into teams of two. He asked each team to spend two weeks developing something—anything—that might allow the company to succeed.
Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone had an idea. What if, they wondered, we created a way for people to update their status? And we intentionally constrained their postings to no more than 140 characters? Yes, Twitter emerged as a side project from a company going down the drain.
Odeo’s original investors, including Charles River Ventures, had the opportunity to invest in this new idea but passed, because its commercial potential was unclear. As of the writing of this book, Twitter has 300 million active users and is worth more than $10 billion. A perfectly predictable company shuts down side projects.
Or consider the story of UK-92480. Pfizer was exploring the sexily named drug about twenty years ago. Pfizer hoped it would lower blood pressure in patients. It didn’t work. End of story, right? It turned out, however, that the drug had a side effect, one that led male patients in particular to come back and ask for more. Pfizer studied the side effect and optimized it, and the erectile dysfunction category and multibillion-dollar blockbuster Viagra were born. A perfectly predictable company shuts down failures and doesn’t study side effects.
Finally, step back to the 1920s. The mind of British scientist Alexander Fleming is brimming with ideas about ways to kill bacteria. Perhaps because his mind was so crowded, he left his lab in shambles when taking a vacation in August 1928. When he returned he found something he didn’t expect: a petri dish festering with bacteria—except for one particular part of the dish. Yes, at least one reason Fleming discovered penicillin was that he was a bit of a slob. A perfectly predictable company certainly cleans its laboratories.
The Challenge of Balance
Business leaders have two fundamental challenges. They must exploit what they currently have, and they must explore to develop what they don’t have. Predictability helps with exploitation, but it can choke off exploration. And both transformation A and transformation B require a heavy dose of exploration, because, by definition, the precise way to win along either vector can’t be completely certain. Leaders must therefore balance two things: the reliability and predictability that is core to playing today’s game with greater degrees of precision, and the curiosity that helps organizations explore and find new paths to success.
Curiosity and Decision Making
As the collective parents of seventeen children (Gilbert with eight, Johnson with five, and Anthony bringing up the rear with four), the three of us can attest that human beings are born curious. As most of us go through the educational system and workforce, however, reliability is drilled into us to the point that curiosity is buried, if not destroyed.
Standard operating procedures exist for a reason. There’s a right answer. A right way to do things. We’re taught that the best way to answer a problem is to gather data, analyze the data, and make a decision based on the results of the analysis. Roger Martin, former dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, has spent much of the past two decades exploring problem solving approaches. He argues that this rational, data-based approach traces back to Aristotle’s early writing more than two millennia ago. The basic idea is that there is a universal truth, and the right analytical approach can bring out that truth.
In many contexts, this kind of rational approach makes perfect sense. Consider the story that started this chapter. A rational approach to problem solving helped Singtel determine how to repair a potentially catastrophic problem. Extreme discipline allowed Singtel to surface and rapidly apply optimal solutions. Many of the problems a telecommunications operator faces, such as optimizing network design, running billing systems, and installing new technologies, are perfectly suited to rational, data-driven problem solving approaches.
Curiosity is critical, Martin argues, when the imperative question isn’t, “What is true?” but rather, “What is possible?” The latter question can’t be answered purely by gathering data and building intricate spreadsheets. Instead, it requires intuition and judgment.
“Think of a sommelier,” Martin says. “What is their skill set? Is it anything about the manipulation of quantities? How many people get to be a sommelier by measuring the alcohol content of wine? No, you get it by being able to make fine distinctions between wines in a blind test. It’s art, based on experience.”
There’s a fundamental difference in mindset between a corporate planner optimizing resources within an existing business, on the one hand, and a venture capitalist hoping to discover the next big thing, on the other hand. The corporate planner expects every investment to work out. He places a premium on making detailed analyses and delivering against milestones. Exceptions are highlighted and punished.
The venture capitalist, however, knows that statistically, any time she makes an investment it is unlikely to work out. Because 75 percent of venture capital investments fail to create any kind of commercial return, the mode and median return of most investment portfolios is a big fat zero. The only way to generate returns is to learn whether a particular company could be a positive outlier in as resource-efficient a way as possible. Those that look promising get further investment. Those that don’t, don’t. There’s a brutality to the process, because, after all, the venture capitalist has a portfolio of investments but the startup entrepreneur can realistically pursue only one significant idea at a time.
If you demand that every idea succeed, you will be consigned to work on incremental improvements within the confines of your current business. After all, that’s the only place where you can approach absolute certainty that customers will do what you expect, that you can deliver what you hope to, and that the components of the business model will come together in the right way.
More specifically, having the curiosity to explore impacts three key components of developing new ideas.
The Funding Component
How does a well-run business make decisions about investments related to its core? It carefully gathers data, analyzes the data, considers strategic alternatives, develops a recommendation, and builds consensus around that recommendation before finally presenting it to top brass. Decision meetings rarely decide things, because, when the process is run well, the decision has been made through a carefully orchestrated set of pre-meetings. Debates are settled by data; if leaders aren’t satisfied by what they see, they instruct their team members to go back and conduct more research, sharpen their analysis, or talk to industry experts. The decision is made, and that’s usually the end of it. Discussions then turn to execution, measuring progress against predetermined milestones, spending against budget, and so on.
Explorers recognize they can’t know the right answer, so they want to invest as little as possible in learning which of their hypotheses are right and which ones are wrong. Discussion is much more focused on critical uncertainties, optimal testing mechanisms, and emergent learning versus the sanctity of data.
The Focus Component
Chapter 6 describes how leaders need the clarity to focus on the highest-potential opportunity areas. One of the paradoxes of dual transformation is that leaders need to become less focused as they go about developing winning strategies in those areas. After all, history shows us that sustainable strategies for disruptive innovations emerge from a process of trial-and-error experimentation.
The Failure Component
A strange idea that has blossomed over the past few years is that failure is generally good. Not so—failure is bad. Who wants to have something not work out? Many types of failure are bad and should be avoided. Imagine a heart surgeon talking proudly about a patient he killed because he made a mistake during an operation. That’s not good. When something doesn’t work because you were stupid, sloppy, or hadn’t invested enough time to develop a learnable skill, that’s bad.
When people say that failure breeds innovation, they are talking about a very specific thing in a very specific circumstance. When you are in exploration mode, by definition you don’t know what the answer is ahead of time. So you figure out the best hypothesis you can and then find a way to test it. When it doesn’t work, you figure out why it didn’t work and go back to the drawing board. When this process is executed in the right way, it is indeed not a failure; it is a step on the way to success.
Chapter 6 describes how Manila Water clarified its new growth strategy by focusing on a handful of growth opportunities. Its senior leaders argued that treating new and core ideas differently helped it advance those opportunities without distracting efforts to reposition its core business. As CEO Gerry Ablaza describes it, “We set up a separate governance structure so that the programs, the capital investment, and the people decisions can be made separately from the main business or the core business. So it sets it free in a manner of speaking from the usual institutional processes that we have in place.”
Infusing Curiosity at Singtel
The trends affecting the telecommunications industry are inescapable, so Singtel, with the urging of its board chair, Simon Israel, knew it had to improve its ability to respond to change. As Group CEO Chua said in the company’s 2012 annual report, “Embracing a culture that allows innovation to flourish is important. This will require a shift in our collective mindset—away from failure aversion to one of constant experimentation.”
An uncertain future world meant that its historical disciplines had to be augmented with an injection of curiosity. Chua, Israel, and the Singtel leadership team did three things that helped bolster the organization’s ability to discover disruptive paths to success.
Create Safe Spaces for Innovation
In 2010, Singtel announced plans to invest S$200 million (about US$150 million at 2015 exchange rates) in startup companies through an investment vehicle called Singtel Innov8. Of course, part of the rationale was to generate financial returns, but an even more important purpose was to provide a vehicle to brush up against the world’s innovation energy.
In 2012, Edgar Hardless took over as the new leader of the fund. Over the next few years Innov8 expanded to become a global team that included representatives in Tel Aviv and Silicon Valley. Innov8 scoured the globe to find interesting investment opportunities that fit emerging themes around mobile advertising, big data analytics, cyber security, the internet of things, and more. By 2015, Innov8 had invested in more than fifty companies and was well established as a go-to investor in both the region and the industry.
One of Innov8’s early investments was in Viki, a video-streaming website based in Singapore that offers on-demand video of TV shows, movies, and music videos from around the world. Rakuten Group of Japan acquired that business for $200 million. In 2014, Innov8 backed Jasper, a hyped company that created a platform to help companies manage services related to the internet of things. In 2016 Cisco Systems acquired Jasper (the name refers to the operating system created by Tony Stark, otherwise known as Iron Man) for $1.4 billion.
Among Singtel’s regional associates (companies in Southeast Asia in which Singtel holds a significant, but noncontrolling, stake), Globe Telecom in the Philippines has been the most aggressive in developing a similar structure. In 2012, Globe CEO Ernest Cu backed a proposal from Minette Navarrete to create a separate investment vehicle called Kickstart Ventures, jointly owned by Singtel and the Ayala Corporation, the family-controlled conglomerate that constituted the other significant investor in Globe. One of Kickstart’s missions is to develop the entrepreneurial ecosystem in the Philippines, a country with a young, technologically savvy population. Between 2012 and 2015 Kickstart made twenty investments in early-stage companies in the Philippines. Impressed by the progress, in early 2015 Cu convinced his board to set aside $50 million to expand Kickstart’s investment activities.
Increasingly, companies have decided that this kind of corporate venture capital is critical given the pace and scale of change in the global market. This is arguably the third wave of the formation of these kinds of funds. The first came in the 1980s, as venture capital began to enter the mainstream. The second was in the late 1990s in the midst of the dot-com bubble. Interestingly, the first two waves were early signs of the market turning: companies jumped into venture capital after booms had created big returns for venture capitalists and then were left gasping for air as bubbles burst and returns stagnated.
The third wave started about a decade ago and survived the global financial crisis in 2007–2008 and the worldwide turbulence that has continued since, something that suggests this time corporate venture capital might be here to stay. If you decide to follow in Singtel’s path, you should heed the guidance of academic experts to first clarify your strategic intent. Do you want to maximize financial returns? Have a listening function that gets an early look at interesting startups? Have a more direct window into emerging technologies? Identify acquisition targets early? Then make sure you match your structure to your strategic intent. If you truly want to maximize returns, for example, hire talent comparable to what you would find in leading venture capital funds, and ensure they have the chance to earn competitive financial returns. If you want to identify acquisition targets early, ensure that you structure investments in a way that simplifies the consummation of a deal.
In 2012, two years after starting Innov8, Singtel reorganized to reflect its dual transformation agenda. It set up a special-purpose organization called Group Digital L!fe (yes, that’s an exclamation point—another countercultural element) to incubate new businesses that went beyond Singtel’s historic core. To demonstrate the importance of these efforts, it asked veteran Allen Lew to lead “GDL.” Prior to the reassignment, Lew ran the Singapore business for Singtel. He went overnight from commanding a staff of thousands delivering billions in revenues to a staff of hundreds delivering tens of millions in revenues. And most people on that staff weren’t homegrown Singtel talent. Rather, in conjunction with the new organization, Singtel announced its first big acquisition in mobile advertising: a $321 million deal to acquire Amobee, a leading digital marketing business.
In 2013 Singtel publicly committed to spend $1.6 billion over the next few years to pursue strategic acquisitions in the digital space. Reflecting on that commitment in 2015, Israel noted that the plan was big enough to demonstrate a commitment to do something significant, but not so big that it posed a fundamental risk to the company. (Indeed, in 2016 Singtel announced its intent to spend close to $2 billion, an amount that exceeded its aggregate investment in new growth from 2010 to 2015, to acquire a stake in companies that would nudge its stake in mobile operators in Thailand and India by several percentage points.)
From 2012 to 2014 Lew and his team were clearly in exploration mode, dabbling with ideas such as mobile payments, local information guides, and even a smart phone app custom-designed for the unique patois in Singapore known by locals as Singlish. Lew built a team that blended longtime Singtel staff having a passion and proclivity for innovation, young energetic hires, and experienced innovators from unrelated industries.
In late 2014, Singtel consolidated GDL’s efforts into a handful of main strategic areas, such as digital marketing (with further acquisitions added to Amobee), big data analytics, and cyber security (with an $800 million acquisition of US-based Trustwave in early 2015). With substantial investment capital still to follow, those areas were set up to be significant growth drivers for Singtel.
Furthermore, the capability to explore emerging areas such as smart, connected devices will pay dividends in the years to come. In late 2014 Lew moved on to his next assignment: taking over Optus (Singtel’s wholly owned subsidiary in Australia). In 2014 Optus had revenues of about $8 billion and almost nine thousand employees.
Expose Leaders to New Thinking
Every year, the top one hundred leaders from Singtel in Singapore and Australia gather for what is called the top management workshop (TMW). In 2011, Singtel held the three-day TMW in Beijing. On the first full day, the group broke into small teams and visited local startup companies. One of us (coauthor Scott Anthony) provided outside stimuli, leading the group through case study discussions about Procter & Gamble’s systematic approach to innovation and Netflix’s disruptive business model.
All this was in a place where Singtel had no consumer presence at all (its enterprise business, which provides connectivity and related services to businesses, had some business in China, with clear aspirations to do more). Why Beijing, then, if it was commercially irrelevant to most of the audience? It was an intentional effort to expose Singtel’s top leaders to new ways of thinking, where they could brush up against new cultures and see the surprising startup energy in what was perceived at the time by many outsiders as a staid Communist country.
Then in 2012, Singtel held TMW in Manila, with teams conducting field visits with consumers across all social strata in and around the city. In 2013, the location was New Delhi. Singtel’s board of directors joined the act as well, holding meetings in Silicon Valley, Israel, and Boston.
Group CEO Chua describes these visits as important components of strengthening her team’s understanding of local markets. “We can always get any number of speakers to come out here to speak, and give the board any amount of literature. But nothing beats going to the markets in which we operate, visiting the shops and talking to customers, or traveling to tech innovation hubs like Israel, Silicon Valley, or Boston to see what big tech companies and small startups are doing.”
In parallel, Singtel’s human resources team regularly brings in fresh thinking. Rita McGrath of Columbia University, Vijay Govindarajan of the Amos Tuck School of Business, and Linda Hill of Harvard Business School ran interactive sessions attended by hundreds of Singtel employees. In 2008, Singtel’s HR team began organizing a multiday event called the Singtel Learning Fiesta, which exposes thousands of Singtel employees to new ideas, as well as vendors that can help with everything from organizing hackathons to managing social networks. By 2015, the event had grown to more than twenty thousand “learning spaces” for 170 courses (both live and virtual) in Singapore, Australia, Malaysia, Hong Kong, the Philippines, and the United States.
These are concerted efforts to expose leaders, and the broader organization, to fresh ideas and new ways of thinking. This tactic fits one of the most persistent findings in the innovation literature: magic happens at intersections where different mindsets and skills collide. The curious organization plants itself at the intersections by taking road trips, bringing in outside speakers, and regularly rotating people between functions and roles.
Reinforce Curiosity in Routines and Rituals
Most organizations, particularly large ones that have existed for decades, often admit that curiosity isn’t in their culture. What is a culture? Borrowing from MIT’s Edgar Schein, we define a culture as a set of assumptions, often unstated, that govern the way people think and act. Those assumptions typically are about causality: we do this because we know it leads to that. Assumptions form because a group tries various ways to solve a problem that occurs frequently, and it replicates the things that work and stops the things that don’t. Over time, it becomes “the way things are done around here.”
Developing a culture that is more conducive to curiosity, therefore, requires finding ways to reinforce it in day-to-day routines and rituals so that it ultimately disappears into unstated assumptions. Members of the Singtel family, and other companies discussed in Dual Transformation, have found various ways to do that.
Understand Your Customers.
Optus has had thousands of its workers participate in what it calls “customer close ups.” Workers spend a day in a store and a day with the customer relations team. The in-store day starts by workers spending an hour as a shopper, making a purchase, and reporting what is “good, curious, and interesting.” In the next two hours, participants introduce themselves as Optus employees and shadow a sales rep. After a lunch break they put on a trainee badge and spend two hours as a store representative (with a wingman, or regular employee, of course). Finally, they end the day by having direct interactions with customers.
These kinds of immersive programs are great ways to develop deep empathy with customers and lead participants to question underlying assumptions they have about the business. The larger a company is, the wider the gap typically is between its leaders and its customers. Leaders spend an increasing amount of time looking inward, attending approval meetings, reviewing employee performance, and so on. Walking a mile in the customer’s shoes helps bridge that gap by giving people, especially leaders, firsthand exposure to what life looks like for normal customers. In particular, this kind of firsthand experience often gives leaders a deeper appreciation for key points of customer frustration.
Shape the Physical Environment.
Anyone who has worked in a range of offices knows that the physical environment matters. You can feel it when you walk into a company. Innovative environments have colors and pictures and sights and sounds and, yes, foosball tables and other forms of play. Environments that aren’t innovative have thick carpets and closed doors and dark lighting and a serious but stultifying air. The former environments help encourage innovation by pulling diverse groups of people together and reinforcing experimentation and play.
Singtel’s GDL had a special-purpose space designed on the principles of transparency and collaboration. Globe took advantage of the need to move into a new office building in 2013 to reinforce its own cultural shift by creating a bustling cafeteria, plentiful meeting rooms, and open offices that favor chance encounters.
Simplify Experiments.
A few years ago, Adobe started a program called Kickbox. Participants receive a red box that’s about the size of an encyclopedia (if you’re younger than thirty, ask your parents). When employees crack open the box, they find a range of tools designed to facilitate developing prototypes for ideas. Most critically, the box contains a prepaid $1,000 debit card that workers can spend without asking for anyone’s approval.
As of 2015 some one thousand people had received a kickbox. That’s a $1 million investment, but it is also a thousand experiments that otherwise would not have been run. Many of those experiments have gone nowhere, but some have informed new product development efforts or highlighted acquisition opportunities.
Share Rough Ideas.
Early exposure of half-baked ideas to smart people generates useful, usable feedback. It also has positive spillover effects as people in other corners of the organization can take fragments of an idea in new directions or can avoid wasting time on things that are similar but not as good. Singtel uses its top management meetings to share ideas with wide groups of people. Optus went even further in mid-2015, running a full-day session on innovation with its top four hundred people. One key component was a walk-through that allowed people to see innovation in action at the company.
Celebrate Desired Behaviors.
Our final example comes from a company not otherwise mentioned in this book, but it fits too perfectly not to share it. Tata Sons is India’s largest conglomerate, with business units ranging from tea to IT consulting to automobiles. Collective revenues across its sprawling collection of businesses exceed $100 billion. Every two years, it holds an awards ceremony to fete its innovation accomplishments. One of the most coveted awards is called Dare To Try. As the name connotes, the award goes to a team that tried something that did not work. As the summary of the 2013 ceremony notes, “Showcasing a growing culture of risk-taking and perseverance across Tata companies, the Dare To Try category at Tata Innovista saw over 240 entries. The Dare To Try category recognises and rewards most novel, daring and seriously attempted ideas that did not achieve the desired results. The award went to Tata Consultancy Services.” The number of submissions crossed three hundred in 2015.
Whenever you innovate, two good things can happen. Of course, you can create value. But you also can learn something that opens future avenues to create value. As serial innovator Thomas Alva Edison noted, “If I find 10,000 ways something won’t work, I haven’t failed. I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is often a step forward.”
Operational machines don’t become tap dancers overnight, but from 2010 to 2016 Singtel clearly strengthened its curiosity quotient. In August 2016, CEO Group Chua reported being pleased with Singtel’s progress.
Change is not new to us. Over the last three decades, we have re-invented ourselves many times over: from a statutory board, we were corporatized, then publicly listed. Today, we have moved well beyond simply being a telco offering connectivity. We have become a regional communications and ICT [infocomm technology] solutions company with a presence in some 23 countries globally. How did we get here? Each and every transformation we went through required a corporate tenacity that wasn’t afraid of change nor what the future would bring. As technologies changed, as the industry changed, as what customers wanted were changing, we responded each time with forward-looking actions. I believe this mindset of change and adaptability is what has taken us from leadership position in Singapore to the forefront in the region.
Becoming a Curious Leader
Problems of predictability don’t rest only within a company’s systems. We suspect that at this stage you are feeling vaguely uncomfortable. Making the kind of courageous decisions described in chapter 5? Well, that’s the essence of leadership. Bringing the kind of clarity to complex problems described in chapter 6? Surely you got to where you are by making tough calls and giving clear direction. Sure, what we have described before this chapter might involve a bit more art than usual, but it’s nothing you can’t handle with sufficient focus and attention.
But being curious. Fumbling. Flailing. Playing. That’s behavior you might have followed when you were younger. But that’s not what got you to the position you’re in now. And the mentors who helped you along the way are likely little help. So how can you become a more curious leader? That’s a book-worthy topic in itself, but we end this chapter by providing four specific tips.
Find an “Inverse” Mentor
When you think of a mentor, you naturally think of someone with gray hair who has seen it and done it. You turn to these mentors because they’ve stared down the problem you’re facing, and they bear the scars from their struggles and the trappings of their successes. But when you’re confronting disruptive change, you need a very different sort of mentor. You need someone who is plugged in to the disruption. Odds are high that person has less experience, at least in terms of years on the earth.
Marc Benioff, the founder and CEO of Salesforce, makes a point of developing an eclectic network. He has reverse mentors, who have grown up living with new technologies, such as Dropbox cofounder Drew Houston. “He grew up in the internet. I didn’t,” Benioff said. “So he can see things in ways that I don’t. That perspective is really important. I can’t sit in my headquarters and pretend I’m in touch.” Benioff also has inverse mentors, with completely different experience sets, such as Black Eyed Peas superstar and music entrepreneur will.i.am. In times of disruption, reverse and inverse mentors will help you see things you couldn’t otherwise see.
And yes, parents, this is your excuse to play Minecraft with your kids.
Learn to Code
In 2008, Dave Gledhill became the group executive and head of group technology and operations at DBS Bank, a leading Singapore-based bank that, as of the writing of this book, had more than S$400 billion in assets and a market capitalization of about S$50 billion (roughly US$300 billion and US $35 billion). One year later, Piyush Gupta took over as CEO and began pushing an aggressive transformation agenda, with a specific focus on embracing digital technologies.
An obviously important emerging area for any bank going digital is the smart phone, and DBS has aggressively explored mobile-only banking offerings in markets like India. Although Gledhill is a fourth-generation engineer with a degree in computing and electronics, his formal education was decades ago, well before the rise of smart phones and related apps.
“My coding days were 20 years ago, and none of this stuff existed then,” Gledhill said. “I was struggling to understand at a deep level what was happening inside the phone, which made it hard to function as a leader of technology.”
So Gledhill committed himself to develop an app. An evening event provided the inspiration. In Singapore, every car is required to have a reader with a smart card that interacts with the city-state’s smart toll system and almost every parking garage. One time Gledhill found himself at an event where the host provided complimentary parking. Unfortunately, Gledhill forgot to remove his smart card from his car, so classic Singaporean efficiency rendered the complimentary parking moot.
Gledhill wondered, what if he could create an app that provided location-based reminders, which reminded you to do a certain thing only when you were in a certain location? “How often do you find yourself saying, ‘When I get here I must remember to . . .’?” Gledhill asked himself.
He downloaded Apple’s developer kit and started watching videos from Apple University while exercising. After “teaching myself C++ all over again,” Gledhill developed a functioning version of the app, which he called, simply, Reminder. The app proudly sits on his phone’s home screen, with Gledhill noting how the icon (which resembles a shoelace knot) actually was a strand of pasta.
Gledhill didn’t pursue formally publishing the app on Apple’s store, but he considered the experience invaluable. “It has given me such a depth of awareness about how devices operate and what they are capable of,” he said. “It has made me better able to provide guidance for the digital bank at a very technical level because I really understand what is going on.”
For example, making a location-based app work requires understanding precisely where a user is located. The most reliable way to do so is via a GPS signal. However, a GPS doesn’t work indoors, so it would require a creative workaround if you were to deliver against Gledhill’s original use case. That firsthand knowledge aids Gledhill in decision making, problem solving, and discussions with vendors.
Several of Gledhill’s direct reports followed his lead and started developing their own apps. “When a leader does this,” he said, “it sets the attitude that everyone in the organization better be learning about how to be a leader in the digital space.”
Leaders seeking to bolster their capacity to lead a culture innovation should follow Gledhill’s lead. After all, it is hard to make decisions about technologies or business models with which you have no firsthand experience.
Get Out of the Building
Steve Blank teaches at Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley, but he is hardly a traditional academic. Rather, in his career Blank has actively participated in more than a dozen startups and by now has mentored hundreds more. Over the past decade he has emerged as a prominent thought leader, describing how to take a more scientific approach to the creation of new businesses. One of his mentees, Eric Ries, wrote the 2011 book The Lean Startup, which has become a must-read for almost any entrepreneur.
The epigraph in Blank’s 2013 book with Bob Dorf (The Startup Owner’s Manual) says it all: “Get out of the building!” It is hard to become more curious when the stimuli you receive is limited to the thick carpets of the executive floor or the five-star hotel you stay at on road trips. Take any excuse you can to get out of the building to do the following:
Visit a customer in her natural habitat
Spend time with a team working on a new growth venture, not in an orchestrated review but in the field
Call on an interesting startup in your area, not to sell but only to learn
Just go out and explore when you are on the road.
These activities bring to mind the famous line from spy novelist John le Carré: “A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.”
Embrace Transparency
When Alan Mulally took over as CEO of Ford in 2006, the American icon was on shaky ground. The company had a culture filled with politics and positioning. It would go on to declare a $20 billion loss in the first quarter of Mulally’s watch.
Determined to turn the company around, Mulally, an engineer by trade who had spent thirty years at Boeing, instituted weekly meetings where his team had to present reams of performance data. Charts were color coded, with the usual green (good), red (bad), and yellow (bears watching). During one of the first review meetings, Mulally found himself in a sea of green.
He stopped the meeting. Either we are trying to lose billions of dollars, or someone is not telling the whole truth, he said. One of his mantras is, “You can’t manage a secret.” Transparency is a critical component of curiosity. Look, not everything you do will work out. When you as a leader show that you are fallible, and when it becomes clear that the organization is more interested in getting to truth than in saving face or managing internal positioning, it helps release often latent organizational curiosity.
CHAPTER SUMMARY
Futurist Alan Kay once said, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” No matter how clear your focus, dual transformation will require that you have the curiosity to explore multiple paths, even when the outcome of any given one is likely failure. That runs counter to the machinery that powers most organizations, which is designed to remove variation and deliver predictable results. Singtel’s journey shows how to boost your curiosity quotient by
Creating safe spaces for exploration
Exposing leadership to new stimuli
Incorporating curiosity in day-to-day routines
Individual leaders seeking to reignite latent curiosity should find inverse mentors, learn new skills, deliberately get out of the building, and embrace transparency.