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Intro

Hi, and welcome to Decoding AQ, helping you to learn the tools, mindsets, and actions to thrive in an ever-changing world.

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Ross  

Hi and welcome to the next episode of Decoding AQ. I have with me today, Doug Guthrie, welcome.

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Doug  

Thank you for having me, Ross.

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Ross  

Well, it's interesting when I reached out and looked at your career, and you describe it, as research and writing about three particular topics. Organizational Development, and in that sort of covering Leadership, Culture and Social Responsibility, but then the Chinese Economy and the Reforms alongside Strategic Economic Development of cities in the US and Economy, so I imagine a career filled with incredible experiences and insights. So I can't wait to dig into some of those.

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Doug  

Well, thank you for saying that. I mean, it's been a little bit of an itinerant career. Because, when you're growing up, you always imagine “I'm going to do this”. And then some other opportunity presents itself and you start to figure out how all these things fit together. So it's been a little bit like that.

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Ross  

Interesting, isn't it? The sort of career paths that we end up having, how much by design and how much by opportunity, and saying yes. And when I was reading through a career history and portfolio, read like multiple lives, Doug. From five years at Apple, and Apple University out in China, to Dean of George Washington School of Business, faculty positions at NYU, professor at Kellogg, School of Management and visiting professor in just about every institute of merit. So I'm looking forward to being educated in school today. And currently, you're the professor at a global leadership in China and an Executive Director at Thunderbird School of Global Management. So just tell me a little bit about that story of like you said, of your design to new opportunities and how you've navigated your multiple life, background of careers.

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Doug  

Well, let me just start by saying, life is an opportunity. And there are lots of opportunities out there, and you don't know where you're going to go or what you're going to do. But you got to work hard and create your opportunities. I'll just go very quickly through a couple of things I am. And I'll tell you something that I've just coming terms to terms with and this late stage in my career. And it's something I've known all my life, but I just have never been that open or honest about it, because it's a little weird for an academic.

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So when I was a kid, well from throughout my whole life, but when I was a kid, I struggled with dyslexia. And it was very hard for me and school was just so difficult, but I worked really hard. And I had this thing that went along with this lecture that I had an audio graphic memory, so I can remember things and memorize things. When I got to college, I was terrified, am I gonna be able to read all this stuff? And the first Chinese class I ever took, it was pictographic language with lots of memorization over audio, and I was just like, “This is me, like this is my life. This is my future.”

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Ross

I found my home.

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Doug

This is like one of these places that the world has opened up to me, and I was like, “Oh, I guess I'm going to be a China scholar.” And so I went deep, and I became a China scholar, I studied the language literature spent time in Asia. And it just yeah, it felt like my home. I also realized you can't make much money reading Tang Dynasty poetry. So I realized I had to go back to graduate school and study economics. And so I went to the Sociology Department at the University of California, Berkeley and studied Economic Sociology, and just built a career around that. And then, I became fascinated with how to transform the world through business. And so beyond just being a China scholar, I wanted to interact with business people. And so I just kind of sought my path through that and did executive education. I was the head of executive education at NYU Stern School of Business for a while.

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And as you mentioned, I spent time at a bunch of different business schools. I sort of strangely randomly became a Dean, which I didn't think was going to happen, but it did. And that was interesting. And then when that didn't work out after about three years, I got a call from Apple, and was lucky and blessed to be able to go work for Apple in China. And as a China scholar, that was just an amazing opportunity. And then I eventually had to get my family back to the US. And so I came back and that my wife took a job at the University of Michigan School of Law. And so we sort of landed there. And then I got a call from the Thunderbird School of Global Management. And the Dean and President at Thunderbird and ASU are just amazing people. And so I decided to continue my work there. And so it's just been an interesting sort of itinerant journey. But rather than being frustrated with it, I've just tried to be open to it.

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Ross  

And your experience, I guess of traditional learning institutions of universities, be that NYU, Berkeley, and Apple. I met I don't know whether you crossed paths with him at all or not, but a chap, Alan Greenberg. I think he did a stint at Apple in and around their education side, particularly in Asia as well. And I'm fascinated where education comes from maybe unexpected areas, a tech company, now looking at what's their impact on the world. And through education and learning and a big part of that. What was different between that environment of say, a tech corporate company in the education side, and maybe the traditional institutions? What are some of your sort of observations or learnings from that?

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Doug  

Well, in my own case, the leap was not so far. So a good tip or logic is a sort of stay on one side of the spectrum, and business schools and educating young MBA’s. And then within business schools, there are these organizations called Executive Education Businesses. And as I mentioned, when I was at NYU, I ran one of those businesses. And then when I was a Dean, I built some of those businesses. And so it's very common for corporations to want to do leadership development and training for their high potentials. And all the people who want they want to be leaders. And I happen to be, my main area of research is China, but I happen to be in a management department and a professor of leadership and management.

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And so when Apple called me, I had not only studied but also worked with a lot of these corporate universities. And so I knew what they were doing. So it didn't seem that strange to me. What was special about Apple was, and I gather this happen when Steve Jobs was sort of thinking about Apple blowing up and becoming, a global leader for the world. This is post iPhone time, and just realizing what could happen here. And like when you go from being a 10,000 person, organization to being 150,000 person organization, you have to think about like, what do you do to train leaders in the culture of the company. And so Steve went out and recruited an individual who I knew, who was a guy named Joel Pedolny at the time was the Dean of the Yale School of Management. And together, they built this place called Apple University. And Apple University's main functions are leadership development, and sort of training leaders in understanding the culture of Apple.

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And so it was, on the one hand it was a very, sort of natural thing for me, because I've worked with corporate universities before but on the other hand, also show because these individuals really focus on a deep set of thoughts on what leadership means and how organizational culture works. When I went to work for Apple, the one thing that was interesting for me is because I went to represent Apple University in China. I was very interested in the China questions. And so I got to do a lot of work on sort of risk analysis and thinking about how the company was developing in the global economy, particularly with respect to China, in both political issues and consumer behaviors. So that was a lot of fun for me.

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Ross  

And when that comes to sort of practical challenges of how to nurture high potential and leaders of the future, together with current leaders, being the best leaders, they could be. What were some of the most challenging environments or the challenging topics that were really covered in that area? Because I guess, not only is there political and cultural differences, but you've got an organization that is pioneering and creating a lot of new ways that society and economies exist and function. So what were some of the topics and areas that might have been, might be unexpected to someone who's never been in that environment, around their special sauce of what leadership looks like for Apple?

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Doug

Well, let me just frame this for how I approached it. And so I can't speak generally for Apple University, but I'll tell you like, what my job was, and I was in that job for about five years. And it was, it was a very meaningful job. It meant a lot to me to be a part of a really important company, and a company that thinks deeply about these questions of leadership development. But before I had arrived at Apple, as I mentioned, Ross, I've been in executive education in a number of different institutions. And so I learned all of the off-the-shelf. Here's how we think about leadership. And here's this case. And here's that, I mean this is how leadership development is taught in executive education institutions.

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And I won't say I was frustrated, but I was a little tired. I was just sort of like, is this how we're going to do this? And the problem is, what happens is leadership they’ll take it all to the business first for C-suite and they give you their high potentials, and then put them in a classroom. And then you do these cases, and you hope that these cases mean something for them. Now, one thing that was special about Apple University is they always made the cases very specific to Apple.

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So but then the question was, okay, so given that we know how to do this, what's missing? And what was missing for me was two things. One, was we needed to make leadership, leadership development actionable. And two, we needed to go deeper. And what I mean by deeper is leadership development tends to focus on a pyramid going down, C-suite, C-suite minus one, C-suite minus two. But then the problem is, you have all of these people who are at the bottom of the pyramid, and they are your future leaders, you just don't know it yet.

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And so when I went to Apple, my focus was much more on experiential learning, rather than doing off the shelf, stuff that had to do with leadership development. Instead, I wanted to really get people focused on; one, strategic issues that were very real and live for the company, and two, things that were outside of their comfort zone. Now, being outside of your comfort zone might seem obvious, but to some people, it seems strange, because when you're in a company like Apple, people are pushed very deeply into their functional area of expertise, and that's how they get rewarded. So the problem is, you become an expert in some very narrow, functional area of expertise, but over time, your brain muscles on leadership and sort of broader thinking…

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Ross

You get blinkers.

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Doug

I just wanted to change that, I want to change that. So I kind of changed what we did. And in China, we focused very much on taking people out of their comfort zones, and into a lot of different things that have to do with strategic issues that are core for the company. And just forcing them to do it. We got a lot of complaints, or a lot of people saying like, this isn't my job, why am I doing this, I thought I was just coming to this class, just to be with Professor Guthrie and learn something and then go back to work. And now he's making us do a project on market entry in China or government relations in China, what does this have to do? But over time, you get great results, not only do you get, you realize how talented your people are, but you also need to develop leaders.

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Ross  

And I guess that approach, outside of Apple or any organization that is trying to cultivate this culture of not just learning in a principle but learning that, as you said, is actionable aligned to the needs, but also goes far enough in its reach. And I think that's one of the challenges that we see is that this situation of education and learning where we go to an institute, we get some knowledge and then we go and deploy it for some value generation for the company ourselves. 

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And now this cycle of how long certain learning, certain knowledge has value, and how we need to continually learn especially if we're going to have careers that are full of new things out of the niches, out of what was a comfort zone before. Having it in more situational environments, more experiential environments, it can sound great in theory, how does that work in reality and in practice, if organizations have sort of drink from that, chalice and say, “Yes, I like the theory of that,” how might they start practically to build some of those things into their learning processes?

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Doug  

So it's a great question, Ross. First thing, that is the most important thing that I learned in this process of building this is, you have to put people in positions where they're engaged with key issues of the company that are real. And this is again, not to disparage all of the business school professors that I've worked with over the years that use cases and abstract cases or good analogies for what we do. What I have found inside of companies is that when you take a team of high potentials, and you go to the business leaders, and you say, “What is the major problem that you're facing right now?” And then you design a program around strategic thinking and strategic learning of actionable teams that are focused on this specific business problem. And they have to know that it's real. So they have to know like, by the way, at the end, you're going to be reporting out to your VP. And that VP, may or may not send your project up to the executive team. And then people start to think like, Okay, and they know it's just one example that I had, and I can't give too many details around it. But we have one strategic project, where I was working with one of the teams in China, for Apple. And I went to the business leaders, and I said, “What is the major pain point?” And they told me, and so we developed a group of teams, and we had the teams working around this issue. And I was trying to teach them not just how to go out and do research on a topic, but also how to lead through this topic, how to actually think about networks and reaching out to people, and figuring out what the, and then in the beginning, people again, were very resistant. They're like, “why is this my job? This is not my job.” And then I would say, “Well, if you want to be the VP of Marketing in China, this is your job. This will be your job, you can't say this isn't my job.” And so one of these teams did an amazing project. And it involved video and a movie, and like they did incredible stuff. And as it went up through the company, the interesting feedback we heard was, this is amazing work. What consulting team did this, who did you hire? And I was like, “Okay, guys, thank you for that. But shame on you. Like, this is your team. And like, these are your future leaders. And we are under utilizing these people, because we haven't pushed them hard enough. But, this isn't McKinsey, this is your team.”

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Ross  

So make it real, and engage them in something in a way that that challenge they have a not just a connection with but a strategic imperative to approach it differently. And one of the things that I'm fascinated and I'd love your view, Doug on is the notion of leadership in an exponential world, where there's more things that are uncertain, or more volatile, and more complex, we're living in this VUCA world, and especially when we have, a global political economy underneath that is how is this new phase, is there a new phase of leadership to navigate this speed of change, this globalization, this continual almost like you've got to sprint just to keep up kind of sense? How can leaders effectively survive in that environment that potentially has this uncertainty, this level of vulnerability and pieces. What advice can you give around that?

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Doug  

Well, so I have no direct advice with the leaders who are in the fire cauldron today, but I do have advice for them about how to develop organizations. And this is related to a concept that I started to develop when I was at Apple, but I also have a couple of colleagues in my organization on global leadership, where we think deeply about this issue, and it's what we call everyday leadership. And everyday leadership has a couple of different components. But let me give you two.

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The first is that we typically think of leadership as being for people at the top of the pyramid, to let the VP’s or let the business leaders, let the senior directors, let them handle it. They're the leaders. In my opinion, this is a mistake. Because if you don't work very aggressively from the beginning to develop leaders at the bottom of the pyramid, so we typically think of leadership as a structural position within the organization. Once I become a senior director, I'm the leader, once I become a VP, I'm a leader.

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Instead, we should be thinking about training people from the beginning, the minute they walk in the door, we want you to get deep into your functional area of expertise. But we also want you to think about advancement in your career because you're a leader now. And that relates to the second point of this Ross, which is that, in our theory of everyday leadership, we like to think of leadership is it's there for the taking today.

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Leadership is not about the structural position you're in, it's about how you act in the organization every day that influences people, that shapes the direction of the organization, that takes into account where the organization wants to go. And we've all had this, I mean, those of us who have been in leadership positions, we've all had this experience where your leadership team might have one or a few really good leaders. But there are many people in the organization that are much lower level structural positions, who are great leaders, like they are the people who are thinking deeply about the organization and its culture and how to advance the interests of what the team wants.

And so I believe that that is the biggest opportunity for organizations is like get away from C-suite leadership and think about bottom of the pyramid leadership and think about encouraging people that leadership isn't about the structural position you're in, it's about how you want to influence the direction of the organization from your position. And I'm very passionate about that.

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Ross  

I love that concept of giving permission, that leadership to unlearn this structure we've had in the past that it's linked to levels of authority, and hierarchy, to think about it as giving permission to for everyone in everyday leadership. And it reminds me of a recent book, Keith Ferrazzi, wrote about Leading Without Authority, I don't think I've come across it or Keith's work. But I had one of his early copies. And I really, that resonates with me a lot, Doug, in terms of this reality that all of us with the right mindset can shift into leadership attributes, and it's a decision and choice, right? And creating the right environment for that to thrive is the responsibility of the culture and the decision makers within the business. But it shouldn't be abdicated from everyone, we should all be able to contribute and influence that right.

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And I love these kinds of conversations that gets where people are passionate. And it's just those few mavericks, those few people that can create a sea of change. Whether it goes as far as holocracy, and a complete flat organization where everyone has the authority to make decisions, to ship product to do whatever it may be, to the traditional thoughts of we've got siloed decision making based on unique expertise and knowledge.

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How do you see technology playing a role in leadership, because I could envisage a future not too far away, Doug, were on a board, on a certain level within an organization, we haven't just got a human being or a human being representing some data. But the data representing itself through AI interfaces through, “Ah, I'm not going to speak to Doug the human. I'll speak to Doug, the digital AI who's gone off and done that research and can converse with us.” Do you see a similar kind of future? And if so, how would leadership evolve when the challenges of we see this complex decision making and taking what information to make what decision as a human domain, that how do we play well and be augmented by technology and things in the leadership for people who are coming at it now?

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Doug  

So it's a wonderful question. And I guess what I will say, and this relates to what I was, the story I was just telling you about Apple, but I'm a big believer. All companies need people that are excellent in their functional area of expertise. We need people who are going deep, whether they're engineers, or data analysts, or whoever, to really think carefully about what they're doing and be excellent and brilliant at what they do. But I also am a big believer in liberal arts education. I believe in critical thinking, I believe we need humans. And so like, no matter what the AIO, the AI algorithms say, we still need leaders to like look at that, interpret it, see what's coming in the future that they might not have seen before. 

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And so I think leadership, just to go back to my Apple example. And I wasn't the only person that did this at Apple University. But I definitely did it in my courses to China, like sometimes I bring engineers in and say, “Well, today, your leadership classes, we're going to be talking about US China relations, and the global political economy.” And people go up in arms, like, “I'm very busy, why do I need to talk about this, like, I have things to get done, you're wasting my time. Why are we doing this?” And I would say, “Well, actually, the company needs you to do this. And if you really want to be a leader, you need to do this,” because I'm sorry when you get to be a VP of Operations, or R&D at any level in any company, you don't get to say, I'm not interested. You have to say that I want to unpack this. I want to understand it.

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And so getting back to your question, Ross. Data, I love data, and data and AI, they're bringing us amazing things. But I still think we need people with creative minds, who are thinking about themselves as leaders to disentangle, what it is that we're seeing, what do we need to think about? And how do we creatively see the future through what all of these different parts of the data are suggesting to us?

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Ross  

I agree, Doug, in this world of where we're the architects and the designers. And technology is I've talked about it being inert until we give it a purpose. And so whilst it’s great to be able to diagnose to do certain things that actually humans are acting more like robots than the robots are, in terms of their types of tasks and things that they do, to be able to dream, again, to be able to imagine something that doesn't exist. And I think it's gonna be this poetic dance, right? Between the same way we would look at each individual and their level of influence, and their level of how they frame something, how are they making decisions? What are they cutting off? What are they saying no to?

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And I think, leaders this view for me is and I think it was an Apple, maybe I've got my analogies and stories mixed up in my mind. But Steve Jobs talked about the projects he was most proud of. And it was the 10 projects they killed, the ones that they, he said no to. And I think that's often forgotten about and looked at of leadership's role is to what do we say no to? Because we've got an abundance of opportunity and abundance of what we can do. But from a social perspective, what should we do? From an economic perspective, what's going to be seven generations time the best legacy to leave? These are the deep work and deep thinking that we should create the space for.

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And I think technology can do a couple of things, in my view, create more space for deep thinking, and to reach those that can't be reached through traditional methods. So where we can have great, a few people have had the huge honor to be in a room with Doug, and go through a program. But throughout the rest of the 150,000 people that Apple might not get that opportunity. But I think technology can help reach those that might not get access to ways of thinking, to ways of exploring their potential.

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And I'd like to finish off as we come to the end piece in terms of we have the power to design the types of organizations, the types of structures, the types of education platforms that we want for the future. In your current role at Thunderbird School, what are you doing and what is the structure that you are thinking, and I got no doubt you're thinking very deeply about this. But what's coming next? What are some of those things that you talk about, yes, it's got to be real for the organization, it's got to be actionable. But where are the things that we need to be ready for on the horizon that are coming down the pipe from an education perspective around leadership? Because it's an area I'm super passionate about. And it's why I started a lot of these podcasts was for me to learn, meet great people and see the experiences and what do they see coming forward? So what are the things you're working on? And what's coming down the line for leadership education, and how that functions?

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Doug  

So thank you for that Ross. And I'll try to be succinct and hope it all knits together. But let me just say four key things. I mean, this is actually, in my opinion, a really exciting time for leadership education. I've been in this business for a long time, and I care about it and have done it from the executive side, and the business schools. And I've done a lot of consulting and coaching. And then I've also been on the corporate side and the corporate university. And all of those things have been great. But I would say four things that are critical.

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The first is, I really do believe in experiential education. And again, this is not to criticize all of my colleagues who have written cases and teach from cases I think case study, research is great. But I think putting people in the line of fire with what's important for their organizations at this moment. And even if they're not a part of an organization, putting them sometimes when I…

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Ross

Go wear the clothes.

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Doug  

Yeah, I’ve approached people and it's the same thing. Let's work on a project that is something that you care about, let's just do it, right? And so putting people in this moment in which they're at a central point of what is the key strategic set of issues of vision, alignment, motivation, and introspection, that we need to think about what you're doing. And so I think experiential stuff is critical, and I love it. The second and third are related, but they're sort of opposite sides of the spectrum. Obviously, I'm a China guy. And I think a lot about the global economy. And it's one of the reasons I love Thunderbird. Because, Thunderbird is the school that just thinks very deeply about the global political economy. And we have an amazing Dean who thinks about that issue broadly. And I just think in today's world, you can't get away from the global, you just can't. And so it's just so important to train leaders to be able to think beyond their functional area of expertise, or their local area of expertise. And think broadly and analytically about it.

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The second may seem like a contradiction. Or the third may seem like a contradiction with the second, but I think it's equally important to be able to translate the global into local. And so when I think about for example, going back to the Thunderbird case, this is a school that thinks very deeply about the global political economy, and thinking about management and across cultures. But, it also sits in a place where Taiwan's largest chip manufacturer is moving into the Phoenix area, and it's making global local right now. And so the extent to which we as leaders can be thinking about like, “Yeah, we're all about global and thinking broadly. But we're also about local and thinking about local economic development that helps our areas.” And so those two things go together. But it's hard sometimes to get leaders to think about both of those.

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And then the fourth, we've already talked about, but I'll just say again, I'm such a big believer in this idea of everyday leadership. We always like to say, when we end our classes on this, we'd like to say, everyone, every day, a leader. Just walk out of this classroom today, and do not wait for your next promotion, or your next appointment or for some leader to anoint you a leader, walk out of this room today and be a leader, even if you have no formal authority or structural authority. Just walk out and start influencing people, that's leadership. And so those are my passion.

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Ross  

I love that. Make it experiential, have this ability to have this sort of paradoxical mindset of zoom out and zoom in from global to then how do we translate that to local and the impact we can have on economies. And the final piece everyday leadership and just, I feel myself standing differently listening to that in terms of, what is leadership and you influencing? First of all, we have to influence ourselves and influence the story of what our future self looks like. And by doing that in our thinking, I think can be incredibly powerful. And I think that's a beautiful gift, Doug in sharing that thought process that will have ripple effects that we can't even imagine, we can't foresee where this might affect somebody. And that's the beauty of thought is that it can exist in the mind but then when we communicate it, it gives it permission to grow and develop from it.

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And coming from a family where both my parents were teachers, education is in my heart. I love what that can do for society and do it in a sustainable way that we think about planet, society, economics, the full gambit of what we do as a responsible individual. If someone wants to get in touch with either you, with the management company at Thunderbird School, where do they go, Doug? And how do they best get in touch if they want to take it further with some of the concepts and thoughts, perhaps within their organizations that they like your way of thinking. How would they engage with you, Doug?

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Doug  

So I can always be reached at Doug.Guthrie@thunderbird.asu.edu I with some partners have also a small company that is called On Global Leadership. And if you just go to one word ongloballeadership.com, we write about these issues all the time. And, we're always thrilled to engage with people. And so either one of those methods or look forward to hearing from anybody who wants to talk about these issues further.

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Ross  

Thanks, Doug. It's been a real pleasure. And it's my happy place is having conversations with thoughtful people that care about what they're doing. And very active in creating the type of world that I'd like to live in. And I put you in that place. And it's been a real eye opener, and I'm looking forward to my dog walk in a minute to just let it all percolate in my mind. So thank you for that, Doug.

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Doug  

Thank you so much for having me.

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Voiceover  

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Outro

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