So the question then becomes, "How do you make yourself valuable in the future?"
How do you make sure that you continue to be smart?
That is the voice of futurist and
number-one best-selling author Mike Walsh and he'll be our guest on today's
Super U Podcast
telling us, "Hey we love what you're doing here. Are you doing more of that today?"
What I'm telling you here today, I'm not suggesting we get rid of "face-to-face"
Digital leaders are made not born.
Well I'm super excited for today's guest. He is a good
friend. We ran into each other at the airport of all places which is kind of
crazy when I get into his story as we get into questions because he is all
over the world. He travels 300 days a year. He is Mike Walsh! He's a global
futurist who is the CEO of his company Tomorrow, which helps business leaders in
Fortune 500 companies thrive in this era of disruptive technology change
And Mike has given over 1,000 speeches over the last 10 years so I couldn't be more
excited! It'll be a little longer than our normal format because of my excitement
and we'll dig into it and there's a lot that we're gonna go over but it's great
to have you here Mike! Welcome!
It's great to be on your show, Erik. It's good to see you.
I think if it wasn't serendipity it would have taken us forever to get
together so I'm glad.
And it's perfect timing because you have a new book out
"Algorithmic Leader" and tell me about that what is an algorithmic leader?
Where do I start? I mean, maybe the subtitle will help people the book
subtitle is "How to be smart when machines are smarter than you." And what I
really want to do is write a hopeful, optimistic, and practical book for
leaders of all kinds to know what to do next in this time when people are saying
that "Robots are coming for our jobs, that automation is going to destroy
industries, and well that we should lock up our children because the super
intelligences are coming."
And then I've listened to you a lot obviously and I've
seen you out there and you mentioned that "Hey, don't really talk about
millennials per se but look at the next generation; Gen Z." And why is that?
Why do you stress that to a lot of audiences?
I tell that to people because we often
talk about Millennials like they're the future but the reality is is that
Millennials are the present. I mean they've won the present. They own
the present. They've got everyone worrying about them now but by 2030
they're gonna be as old as and as miserable as the rest of us. So, we should
really think about who's going to inherit that
world of 2030? And for me, it's the kids of today. It's the eight-year-olds.
I mean these are the terrifying people and any of you
that have young kids, and I know you do, it's amazing when you have to just
look at the way they use technology. The way they make decisions. The way they
communicate and consume content. They are as different to the Millennials as the
Millennials are to us.
That's well said and so I look at you and I go you if you
you could see Mike, go Google him. But go out there and Google him just like my kids
would say. He looks like a futurist. He's got the voice but most importantly
he understands where we're moving to. What the future looks like. Before we get
in that which we certainly are going to do that
I did read in your bio some very interesting things. So, Mike is a
global nomad. So that means he is traveling the world 300 days a year.
He has homes in London, Sydney, and also in Hong Kong. Now a lot of our listeners
out there are digital nomads or want to become global nomads.
So, is there any tips or advice on how you can do that?
Be sure that you want to.
Because I think traveling continuously is not always as glamorous as it might seem.
And requires a lot of logistics and good running shoes in that you need to
be in constant motion and you need to understand the way airports work, the way
tax systems work, you have to understand your own health. It's incredibly
complex but if you can pull it off, it's incredibly rewarding because
you lose that sense of permanency. You don't feel that the world
is made up of discrete countries and cities because you literally wake up in
one city and you fall asleep in another. You're in constant motion.
Have you ever woken up and not know where you are? All the time, yeah, all the time. Yeah all the time.
But fortunately one of the super powers
you have to develop is the ability to sleep anywhere and under any
circumstances. So, I'm lucky I don't get jet lag. I can pretty much
instantly adjust. I'll probably catch up to me one day I'll just wake up one day
I look like Yoda. I think most Chinese people do at
some point. Being half Chinese, I'll inherit that. But I think the most
important thing and most challenging thing about being a global nomad is
actually your social network.
When you're not part of anywhere
people stop including you in their plans so you actually have to be very
proactive about developing a network around the world, so you've got people to
see and to keep tabs on you and that you know you keep the journey interesting as
opposed to just you know sitting in drab hotels and writing the minibar watching Netflix.
And you've mentioned this before I believe is that you look at the future
and everyone has this mindset that it's scientists, it's technology, but in fact
you say it's more anthropology
Absolutely. I mean, when you ask you to
think about the future they tend to think of gadgets and they'll
have a view about whether to buy the iPhone this year or it's worth upgrading
to the new Playstation or the Xbox or what life might be like when they have
5G speeds rather than 4G. These are all actually relatively unimportant shifts to the world.
They don't lead to necessarily massive transformations.
The future really arrives in all those small decisions that we make as human beings
and the second and third-order unintended consequences of those
decisions. They shape societies, they shape our organizations, they shape us as
leaders, they're very human, they're very analog. And you discover those things in
you know, a street market in Brazil or in India or in Mexico City or the places
where you would least expect to find the future.
As we you look at your book
"Algorithmic Leader", people out there want to know are we gonna still have jobs?
Are robots gonna take over the world or are we gonna still have jobs?
If you think about where we've come as a civilization, there's always new technologies. There
are new tools and it changes the way we do things and there's a period of
adjustment and then people evolve, adapt, and move on. Even in the last
computer revolution, it wasn't that computers took jobs away from people.
People with computers took jobs away from people who refused or unable to use them.
And what tends to happen whether it's the introduction of automation in
manufacturing or the Industrial Revolution or the ATM is that new
technology will come in. It changes the value that human beings create which
means we need to redraw the lines of what a job is and I think we're in that
moment now. I don't think I will destroy work but it will mean that certain types
of work really shouldn't be done by people anymore and that's routine,
transactional, easily definable work and whether you talk to a bank or an
insurance company, the leaders of those companies will tell you today they are
making massive investments in robotic process automation. So, very simple
routine tasks will be done by machines. So, the question then becomes,
"How do you make yourself valuable in the future? How do you make sure that you continue to be smart?"
And you talk about computational learning so everyone with kids out there
today, what should we teaching our kids in school? Because I was just
talking the superintendent, the top superintendents in the United States.
it's just at a meeting with them and they said, "Look everything we're teaching
right now is gonna be obsolete so we're trying to teach them a different way to learn."
Talk a little bit about computational learning. What it is?
And what does that mean?
So I mean the example you gave about your kids is a
perfect example of this. Why do you need to teach kids to remember facts
when their memory is Google? Why do you need to teach kids how to
do arithmetic or remembering things when you know they can get Alexa to set a timer?
So, what you actually need to teach kids is how to approach a problem. How to
separate its strategy from its execution. So, how do you break it down into small
pieces and then look at it again in a creative way? And go, "Okay, now I need to
develop a strategy for solving this. I can use technology as part of that.
I can use computation for the heavy lifting." And if you
scale that up that's exactly what those kids will be doing when they join a
company and they're working logistics or
marketing. It's, "How do you creatively break a problem down?" Use first
principles to kind of analyze it and then think of a smart way to tackle it.
Actually, a good way of teaching kids that is Minecraft.
You know, Minecraft teaches kids a lot of the basics of logic and how to
approach problem-solving but when we get older we need to be even more advanced.
You know, one of the differences between a traditional leader and a new
generation one is the difference between someone who's deterministic and
probabilistic. We teach people to be deterministic like if something happens
do this. if you want to do a marketing strategy, you should copy these
companies who did this. But in the probabilistic world it's different.
In probability you can be 70% right and I think people struggle with that because
if you think about our time on the savanna, if a tiger is chasing you,
You can't be probabilistic about it. It's like that Tiger is not going to eat me; 70% chance.
You just run, right? Teenage girls understand this though I
mean they don't have friends they have frenemies so they can understand
that their girlfriend is 70% their friend and 30% not. So, we have to
teach leaders to see the world in the same way. That as new information
arrives, they can update their mental model but it's very different than just
seeing the world it's black and white.
Is there any ask that you have for the audience?
Or how can we find out more about you?
You know, I would really love to connect with the audience.
So please follow me on Twitter. On Instagram.
Both of my hashtags on both is @mikewalsh so I'm easy to find. I've got a brand new
book out as you all know. Please go and buy it on Amazon. It's also available on
audible. I went and did the task of locking myself in a studio in London for
three days and read the thing myself which turns out it was harder than I thought.
But that means you can listen to my dulcet tones for six hours which I'm sure
is a wonderful incentive.
Yeah, well, it's a great voice I mean I
may have you read my books so that would be wonderful!
That's it for today's Super U Podcast
I could not have been more excited to have Mike Walsh in here. Again, that's Mike
and then W-A-L-S-H. Also, make sure you check out algorithmicleader.com
Again, that's Mike Walsh! Good friend but most importantly great
person. Amazing stuff! Check out his stuff, check out his books, check out all of his
stuff on YouTube. You will not be disappointed.