Hi, I'm Julian Birkinshaw. I'm the, the person you've been watching the videos of in this last week, and I'm just going to give you a little bit of a, a round up of what the course has been about and what we've achieved this week. Congratulations all of you who who made it through the videos for the week. We've been monitoring all of the, the discussion threads, and there have been some fascinating discussions about male versus female leaders, about the, the whole phenomenon of leadership versus management which one, which one of those sort of models do we, do we actually think is the appropriate one. And of course it's going to be a blend of the two, and lots of interesting side threads in the discussion forum but what I want to spend this, this next four, four or five minutes doing is just giving you my additional thoughts on the two discussion questions that were asked because obviously that's where the, the, the, the meat of the the comments are made. The first one, if you recall, was about we want our organizations to be more innovative, we want them to be more engaging. What are the obstacles that are getting in the way of doing that? And there's some kind of very obvious, sort of usual suspects here, there's all this stuff about big traditional organizations, are very silent and very risk of is that they're kind of rule-based. they, they've, they've got too much process, and of course all that is true but of course we've also gotta look at both the broader context as well as the underlying almost psychological issues and, and a couple of the, the points in the discussion really picked up on that one. One group of people were talking all about the fact that it doesn't matter what you want to do as an organization, you're so hemmed in by the expectations of the stock market, by the pressures for short-term results and I think that's a very valid point. It's often the case that many of the private companies are actually the ones that are more innovative, and then the other angle, all most from below, is the fact that lots of the issues here come down to mindset and deep beliefs. It comes down to the trust between employers and employees. It comes down to this issue of what have a couple of you talked about in terms of fear, the fact that an awful lot of employees are actually fearful of trying new things and actually kind of putting their head above the power pet for fear that it's going to be chopped off as it were. So, what's, I think is important here is to bear in mind that the full range of kind of very superficial as well as very deep obstacles. We will discuss a lot more of these as the course progresses, and I will post online also, something I wrote a couple of years ago with Gary Hamel on this exact issue, looking at some of those big blockers, so that was the first discussion. The second discussion, if you recall was about, you know, what does a world with too much information, too much knowledge look like, and these are deliberately provocative questions. You can argue that in fact, you could never have too much knowledge, and I think one the articles I posted all ready gave you some of my thoughts on this. It was something about what, what we call analysis paralysis, the risk that we get so trapped in kind of going through information that we actually kind of forget what it was we were doing in the first place, and that's certainly true if you are around customers being very flighty and hopping from one opportunity to the next. Two points made in the discussion which I just want to kind of embellish on here, you know? One is this issue around trustworthy sources, you know, in a world of too much information, it's very difficult to know who to trust because an awful lot of the stuff we get on the internet is by people who you don't even know who they are, and very often they're recycling old stuff, and often there's an awful lot of opinion. And, and I think that really illuminates the fact that in the future we're going to have be very thoughtful about the right sort of filters that we create, that help us figure out not just, you know, what's out there, that we're going to find useful, but which information is actually true. There's lots of data out there that paradoxically, people will often trust an unknown source, more than they'll trust government in terms of giving them information which, which they can believe, so that's going to become a big issue in the future, the verification of the sort of the integrity of the sources out there. That's important. Then, the second point that was raised in the discussion forum, which I hadn't picked up on so much is this issue kind of specialists versus generalists, the fact that, that increasingly, of course, people are given very narrow analytical roles, specialist roles within the, the world of kind of, of making sense of data and pulling it together and coming up with insights around it. And I think that cautions us all to, to remember that it doesn't matter how specialist your role is, you've got to be able to see the big picture as well, because your ability to kind of analyze data within a box, is only useful if you can then also contextualize and understand it. So it goes back to this point that that I raised in one of the articles in, in the side readings, which is this notion that, that we, we've got to be more able to apply our sort of our whole brains to problems. We've got to be more analytical and data-driven, but we've also got to be more prepared to rely a little bit on emotion, or emotional intelligence, if you like, and intuition, to try to understand what this sort of information is useful for. So that's a couple of thoughts. Lots more we could say on this, and please feel free to carry on these discussions and please start on week two materials and, and a week from now I'm going to sit down and make a, a similar sort of comment around what happened in that next week. So enjoy the next part of the course.
