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If we can’t predict the future, how can your business be ready for disruption and change? Rita McGrath, author of Seeing Around Corners, has practical advice and ideas to help you to think more strategically. Discover the blindspot most leaders have, how one hour can make a big difference in your decision making, and why asking the wrong questions can kill innovation.
About
Website: Ritamcgrath.com
Book: Seeing Around Corners
Bio: Rita McGrath is a globally recognized expert on strategy, innovation, and growth with an emphasis on corporate entrepreneurship. A long-time member of the Columbia Business School faculty, she is recognized consistently as one of the top 10 management thinkers by Thinkers50 and is a highly sought-after speaker at corporate events such as the Yale CEO Summit, the Innosight CEO Summit and at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos. McGrath has also been inducted into the Strategic Management Society “Fellows” in recognition of her impact on the field.
Transcript
This transcript is unedited.
Peter: I am here today with Rita McGrath. She is, I’m lucky enough to have her as a friend and she is also a professor, a long time Professor at Columbia Business School and most recently has written the book seeing around corners how to spot inflection points in business before they happen. And I’m delighted to have Rita on the show with us. Rita, welcome to the Bregman leadership podcast.
Rita: It’s such a thrill to be here. Peter. Thank you.
Peter: We don’t, why did you decide to write this book? Why now? Why this book?
Rita: Well, the previous book that I wrote really took on the question of what strategy is all about today. And I made the argument that we have to be prepared for a world of what I call transient advantage, which is when you have short-lived competitive advantages rather than the sustainable competitive advantage that gets featured in all the strategy textbooks. Right. and that was kind of a breakthrough and it got a lot of attention, was very well received. But the question that was on people’s minds was, well, how do you know, you know, how do you know when it’s time to move to the next advantage? How do you know when the old one needs to be retired? What’s, what’s your sense of timing? And so that question came up enough that I thought, you know, really that should be the next book, which is how do you think about the life cycle of an inflection point as it goes through your business?
Peter: That’s, that’s great. And I W and we’ll, we will explore that more in this conversation. I’m curious, let’s ground ourselves in some, some specifics around like what is an inflection point? [inaudible]
Rita: So I define an inflection point as something that changes the constraints your business has typically operated on. So if you think of most businesses right there, they’re born at a specific point in history and there are things that are possible and things that are not. And as you mature your business and you optimize it, what starts to happen as you build key performance indicators and key metrics that allow you to establish some predictability in your business. Now what an inflection point does is it changes those assumptions. It makes the previously taken for granted way you do things less valid. So a great example of that is take dollar shave club versus Procter and gamble, Gillette brand, right? Dollar Shave Club. Literally two guys in a garage, basically using Amazon web services for their computer power using youtube and Facebook to get their marketing messages out, importing, you know, relatively inexpensive blades from Korea, sending them directly to men.
Rita: You know, these are all things that would never have been possible before in the days when Gillette was such a dominant player because you had to own computers and you had to own factories and you’d have to distribute to retailers and done what dollar shave club. It’s just went completely around that took Gillette by surprise. And in the first five years that dollar shave club and Harry’s and some of these other upstarts existed, they took 16% of Gillette’s market share away, forced them to go to a direct to consumer shaving model and forced them to start cutting vices, which just unheard of.
Peter: Yeah. It’s, it’s so interesting because it’s almost like every business needs to try to disrupt itself, meaning, you know, every, every business. The, the question that an entrepreneur’s asking is, how do I take cost out of this? How do I, you know, how do I bring this to a consumer, you know, just more, more easily, more cost effectively, et cetera. And, and that’s, you know, you sort of blockbuster and Netflix as an example you use in the book also, which I really like and it’s, it’s the, I think one of the big challenges that we face, which is the willingness to disrupt or cannibalize your own very successful profitable product in order to come up with something that’s going to be less profitable for you at least per unit in order to avoid someone else coming in and doing it. But not knowing exactly when or how or whether it’s worth it is like a, it’s, it’s tough. How do you, how do you see, well, how do you, how do you time the market?
Rita: Well, I think it’s really hard and I think what the lessons of companies that have successfully done this teach us is you can’t wake up on Tuesday and decide, okay, Wednesday I’m going to be a disruptive player. You know, this is something that accumulates over time. So a poster child for this would be Nike’s investment in the direct to consumer model. So they started back in the nineties remember with Nike airpods partnering with Apple Going Digital, but they didn’t do that in their core business. They did. That kind of is a whole series of experimental options. Well here we are now 20 years later and it will just shy of a third of Nike’s. Total business now is direct to consumer and it feels, and this is one of the interesting things about inflection points when you finally look at it and you go, oh my God, there it is.
Rita: It feels as though it happened over night. But Nike literally has been laying the groundwork for this for 20 years. So my argument is when you are in that mode of constantly looking for the next thing, you’re able to make small investments that position you, I call them options. So options for the future and they position you so that when the signals start to become strong enough, now you can move, but you don’t have to move all at once. And it’s not this huge wrenching, oh my God, you know the earth is falling kind of thing. Now you can move in. It’s almost like a natural progression and I think that’s what you want to get to as a business. The ones that get in trouble are the ones that just stick to their old model. They don’t want to change this digital stuff. I don’t understand that. I just, I want to run the every day. Right. And I think one of the big blind spots that a lot of leaders have is they’re so busy everyday and you must have this senior coaching practice, right? People are so busy every day that to pick their nose up out of their email and look around and say what are the weak signals where, where are the edges of my organization? What’s going on out there? It seems like a distraction. It seems like a waste of time.
Peter: Yeah. You know, I was just thinking that as you were talking, this drive towards efficiency, which is how most executives are evaluated and, and valued and, and rewarded, right, is completely counter to what you’re saying is so necessary, which is actually like let your brain wander and look out the window and you know, shop around window shop and another store and see what they’re doing in order to be able to make smart decisions. And I remember Warren Buffett’s saying once, you know, I make like three important decisions a year. Right. And I like the rest of the time I’m just like looking and reading and watching and having conversations.
Rita: Yeah. Yeah. I was at a, I was actually at a conference with him once the Microsoft CEO Summit and and a lot of times he’ll sit next to me and he’s like, turn that thing off. And He and he showed me and he showed me his, his datebook, you know, he’s, he’s got a paper based paper book. Yeah. Let’s through it, like with page after page, after page, and it’s all blank. So the greatest investor, you know, in our time doesn’t fill up his calendar with meetings and schedules and appointments. He, he blocks you demands for time for reading, for thinking, for looking at what’s going on around him. And I think that’s very interesting when you consider how most leaders in most organizations just are so preoccupied with, with being busy,
Peter: What advice do you have for some people? I mean, I know with the advices, which is actually, you know, be a little more like buffet and actually spend a little bit more time being thoughtful. What practical advice do you have for people as to how to get there? What, what have you seen in the research or of the people who’ve been successful at it?
Rita: Sure. Well, there’s two levels. So at a completely tactical level, like I’m not going to ask you to turn your life inside out, but think about how you might use an hour a week. You know, what could you use an hour a week to do more? You know, more looking around, more, meeting with people that you don’t know that kind of thing. And what should you spend an hour a week doing less of. And I think a lot of times our, our agendas kinda like that closet at home, you know, all this stuff just kind of creeps onto it and, and we’re not thoughtful about what we decided to allocate our time to and that that’s a huge problem. So at a very tactical level, I think it’s just trying to lasso that time challenge and say, you know, if I was to really take this seriously, reallocate just one hour a week and if that’s you and you can do that, right.
Rita: So at a tactical level, that’s where I would start in terms of what you do with that hour. I, in the first part of the book, I talk a lot about practices that help you to get out to the edges of your organization. So directly coming in contact with the phenomena, empowering small teams having conversations that are diverse. And I don’t mean that in a politically correctly, I mean that in a, you know, how often do you talk to somebody who’s not part of your industry, you know, how often do you meet with people who have nothing to do with your professional life. So it’s practices like that that I think can kind of trigger your imagination. And that’s what we’re really after. So, you know, if you’re in a room with 15 carbon copies of yourself, you’re really not going to get much new information.
Peter: Right. Yeah. And, and it’s, you know, I sort of think about getting out, it’s like there’s, there’s almost two stages of that thought development, you know, one is the inspiration or the noticing. And then the other is the just stating or the contemplating. And I mean, I just, I, I literally, this morning, my wife and I, Eleanor and I were talking about where to go on vacation. And we looked at a place where we’re like, okay, maybe there, but you know, let’s talk about it again a little later. And partly, partly I judged myself for saying like, what’s the matter with me? Like, why can’t I just make a decision? But over that next hour, while I was working out, I found myself thinking about it and thinking about other places and the decision became clear to me. And, and I think we need both of that one hour cordoned off to, you know, you talk about getting out of the building and to, you know, work around those edges and have direct contact with the environment and, you know, get, get externally focused as opposed to internally focused. And then I think we need some space in our lives to, to toss, like to allow our brains to work through what it is we’re seeing and noticing and draw some conclusions about it.
Rita: Yeah. My, my colleague Bill Duggan has a, I don’t know, I don’t know if you don’t know bill, but he has a great phrase for this. He talks about strategic intuition and flash at insight. When disparate things come together and you literally see, he calls it Napoleon’s glance, you know, where you see all these different things coming together in your mind. And when I think of the great strategists, right? It’s not that they’re better spreadsheet wizards or that they’re better at, at, you know, kind of, kind of analytically looking at the world. They’re just really better pattern recognizers and I pop this is creators, you know, and end well what if this happened? And they’ve got a very broad aperture for the unexpected. So one of my students once said to me in an evaluation that turned out to be one of the most fun evaluations I ever had. The students said, Professor McGrath has this uncanny ability to connect one thing to another thing, even though they’re completely unrelated to each other.
Peter: That makes for good writing too. It
Rita: Does do, right? But I think you can see the patterns. So here’s one I’m looking at at the moment, which is we realize income inequality is a, an issue of our time. But something that nobody’s really talking about is all this money kind of concentrated at the top of the economic spectrum is money that’s not being spent. Because, you know, once you’ve got two yachts already, like seriously, what are you gonna do with it? So it’s looking for investment and there are very few in it in a low interest rate environments. They’re very few places that make a lot of sense to invest. So where does it flow into? It’s flowing to venture capital and private equity and all this cash looking for returns. So we have like $100 million funding round for an e-cigarette company. I mean please. So what you’ve got now is kind of back where we were in the 90s all this crazy money flowing around looking for places.
Rita: But I think it’s one of the unanticipated consequences of income inequality because if that same money were spread out a little more evenly, you’d have people consuming that. You’d have people sending it, you know, they’d spend it on education, they’d spend it on their kids, they’d spend it on dinner out and you know, you’d have then you’d have much more of the engine of growth that we’ve relied on historically to happen. And it seems so completely obvious to me. And yet I talk to people about it and like, oh, I never thought of connecting those things. You know, the fact that we don’t have innovation investment, that we’ve got too much money chasing crazy deals that we’ve got entrepreneurs selling off their company’s the same dollar Shave Club, you know, was acquired by Unilever for $1 billion. I mean, it’s just wild what’s going on.
Peter: And you think that’s often, that’s because people aren’t really looking around and inventing as much? Like they’re, they’re not living their lives in a particular way that give them ideas of where new market needs might be?
Rita: Well, I think what I see in the law, and I work a lot with large organizations, you see, and they’ll tell you are our investors, our CFO, those people don’t have the appetite for investing in innovation. Because we want to, you know, we want stable, steady returns and we want to keep our returns at a certain level and we don’t have either the patients or the capacity to invest in innovation. And to me that’s the beginning of a death spiral because as you’ve seen in the book, you know, you have to have the time to play. You have to be curious. Innovation requires a little slack. It requires, you know, enough profits that you can, you can feel comfortable reinvesting. And My, my poster child for this would be Kraft-Heinz at the moment. I mean 3g the head, the PE Fund that bought that company basically runs it for, you know, total efficiency.
Rita: And so if you come to work every day and people are saying to you, well, you have to justify an airplane trip to go visit a customer and you have to justify, you know a test or an experiment and if that’s the pressure you’re under every day, then making the investment in the brand, you know, that requires innovation, it’s going to be really, really a challenge. So I think, I think there’s this need to recognize that if we don’t collectively make investments in the longterm and in innovation and in the things that aren’t necessarily going to always work out the way you expect. If we don’t do that though, we’re, we’re ultimately starving the future.
Peter: Yeah. And, and you know, there’s one other element to it I’m curious to get your perspective on, which is I think, I think there’s something like if I’m willing to innovate, I’m willing to not know things. I’m willing to explore things. I’m willing to, you know, find ways in which I might be wrong about x. And so right about, and I feel like that’s atypical and I feel like it’s atypical because we have these sort of very protective egos that, you know, don’t want to, not, no, don’t want to not have an answer to something, don’t want to sort of work on something that has a degree of risk and uncertainty. And if that’s the case, I’m wondering, first of all, what you think about that and, and also whether you see some solves for it or you’ve seen some people who’ve been very successful at it and you can kind of, we could glean some advice or some, some insights from it.
Rita: Sure. So I think this need to be right is very deeply ingrained in the way a lot of people are educated and trained. You know, smart managers are right. Good students have the right answer. You know, there’s a lot of this that we get in there in our inherited background. And so I, I do see it everywhere that people really, you know, you can’t be, I tell, I keep telling people, don’t waste your breath arguing about point because you can’t know. We don’t know the data don’t exist yet. So run an experiment, construct some hypotheses. So I think a couple of things can help. One thing is to reframe the question. So instead of saying I have the right answer, it’s number 43, ask the question, is it worth spending $1,000 for us to learn? If it’s 43 or 82, you know, so what’s [inaudible]
Peter: Where or even learn more about whether it might be 43 or 82. Right, right. Cause it, we may not have a definitive answer to that question, but we might be, we might be able to get some more data on it.
Rita: Exactly. And My colleague Hal Gregerson who is at MIT has written a really good book about asking the right question, which I can, I can highly recommend to your listeners as his name is Hal Gregerson and he’s at MIT. But I think so. So the first thing is what worth it to us to learn. So you can, you can maybe not have the right answer, but you probably can understand what it’s going to cost to do an experiment, what’s what it’s going to cost to do some interviews. So you can take that really big unknown thing and sort of break it down into its constituent parts. So I think that’s one approach. The second approach is to use what I call the discovery driven mindset, which is saying, you know, this big, huge unknowable thing. What is three d printing going to mean for aircraft manufacturers? I don’t know. You know, but I could, I could, I could sort of say, well, before that becomes an issue, here are the 50 things that have to happen. First, let’s focus on the one that’s most knowable and most learnable about and start there and then we can chart ourselves a path, even if it’s not a direct path, even if it’s a bit of a wandering path, we can say, okay, based on what we learned last month, here’s the next learning challenge for this month.
Peter: Right? You know, this, this comes to this co, this, this thought that I have that I always struggle with about like knowing what’s going to happen, like predicting the future in a sense or predicting, you know, where the next inflection points going to be seeing around corners. Right? Which is the, the, you know, a big, it’s, it’s the focus of, of your writing right now. And, and I, it brought me to this like I was reading the book and and I, there was a point where you talked about lagging indicators, current indicators and leading indicators. And if you look at how do you know something is a lagging indicator, right? Something that, and you could describe each of these, but a lagging indicator or current indicator, it’s super quantifiable and you have very specific measures and you’re like, here’s how we know that this information is going to inform you of the past, but not necessarily the future.
Peter: Here’s how we know that the information is relevant to the, to the present and for a leading indicator, which is what are the indicators that will inform us of a certain direction that we’re going to be moving in or need to move in. Those are very sort of anecdotal and qualitative more than quantifiable, which I think is the challenge, right? It’s like the challenge of seeing into the future and figuring out when you know how to make a bet, when to make a bet. And, and I think you’ve talked in this conversation already very clearly about saying, make some small bets, prepare yourself to be positioned to flip a switch when you need to in order to you know, take advantage of a future that is now coming. And I’m wondering if you have other thoughts about like, both, you know, an ability to predict the future and, and an ability to see inflection points and you know, where, where magic has a role in this versus, you know, versus data.
Rita: Sure. Well, firstly, I should say that I believe you can anticipate in the future. I don’t think you can predict the future. I mean, you know, my friend overage Delaney talks about going away for three days and on vacation and he was completely isolated and he came back and the Russian did the, the, the USSR had completely broken up. And he said, you know, one of the most defining events in the 20th century, you know, happened while I was away for three days. And nobody predicted that that was going to happen. And as he said, if that could be missed you know, how can you miss other things? I remember I think it was Queen Elizabeth who was throwing the challenge to my economic colleagues at the British universities about the great recession. She said, well, how come no economist saw this coming?
Rita: Why did you not predict that? So I think prediction is really, really hard. As Yogi Berra said, it’s predicting anything is really hard, especially about the future. What I do think I do think you can do though, is you can have enough feelers up that you can begin to anticipate. And I think when we talk about missing big events in the future it’s a failure of imagination, right? It’s not connecting the dots. It’s not heading a rich enough, almost database in your head of things that could possibly be related and seeing where those could take you. For example, one recent study I read that I thought was fascinating was that basically the conclusion was if you give women access to education and access to productive careers, but, but don’t relieve them of any of the burdens of childbearing, you know, in rate wearing, wearing families that one of the predictable effects is your birth rates are going absolutely plumb it.
Rita: And these, these authors did this global study looking at different kinds of societal arrangements for or taking care of, of dependent people and [inaudible] connections with birth rates. And I thought that was just such an interesting conclusion because now you’ve got something you can work with, right? You can say, now we can start to mention it. Okay. Do Women have access to education? Do they have access, genuine access to careers? And Are we still insisting that they carry the lion’s burden of, of work? Well, if the answer to those three things is yes, one of the predictable outcomes is a much lower birth rate in regard, you know, whether you think that’s a good thing or a bad thing you know, that’s something you can kind of anticipate. And so if you say, okay, if I want to, if I want to see what the consumer population of 20 years from now is gonna look like, right.
Rita: That insight will give you some, you know, will they be in multiple children families or will they be in small families? Will they be, you know, with, with both parents working over the why, you know, you can kind of then follow along and you can start to build mental models, which can then form the basis for hypotheses. And once you’ve got a hypothesis, you got something you can test. So I can’t say to you there’s going to be, you know, 2.1 children born, grew up American family in 19, you know, 2025 or something of what I can say is directionally, this is where it’s likely likely or to landed in that. So I think it’s this idea of making a hypothesis based on what you can know something about.
Peter: Yeah. You know, you write in your book there’s a quote, the techniques described here are not about making predictions and being right. They’re about generating possibilities and opening your mind to what might happen so that as evidence gets stronger, you’re ready to take action. Absolutely. Yeah. I love that.
Rita: Yeah. I mean, for example, right now, I think we’re back in that 2006 moment. I mean, people are taking crazy risks right now and there’s just capital flowing everywhere. A lot of the old rules have been you know, know that the brakes that were put on our economic system in the post World War II era have been systematically taken away. And one thing we know is when financial sector gets to be big enough part of the economy, you’re much more vulnerable to crashes. So we’re at that moment right now, now, tomorrow, next week, five years from now. I can’t tell you timing.
Peter: So that’s different. That’s what’s so interesting, right? Because I was just having a conversation with one of my financial advisors and all one of them. It makes me sound like I have a lot of finance. I don’t, my financial advisor, but I’m, I’m, for three years I’ve been saying, I gotta get my money out of the market because everything’s so overvalued. And, and he’s vanguard, right? And he’s saying, you know, you can’t time the market. And I’m looking at it now going like, at some point something’s going to happen. And that’s the challenge of predicting a future, which is like, well, you know, given everything you’re saying, should I take my money out of the market?
Rita: Well, I can’t, I can’t tell you timing. I mean, if you hadn’t been in the market for the last three years, you’d be kicking yourself. Right. That’s the thing. So, you know, I, I mean, any investor will tell you that time trying to time the market is for, you know, for fools and people that have, I mean, I think the sensible thing to do is to have, you know, it’s just like a business strategy, right? So here’s my most preferred course of action, here’s my plan B. And if all things to hell in a hand basket, here’s, here’s my, my resilience strategy. Right, right. So I think, I think it’s just like a company, right? If a, if Xyz happens, you know, what’s my plan B, how will I respond?
Peter: You know, one of the takeaways I’m getting from this conversation is take everything less seriously. Like, no, really. It’s like, don’t be so emphatic that you’re right. Don’t drive your product so hard that, you know, it has to be successful, like mellow out, be a little more California than New York. Mellow out a little bit. Like, look for opportunities, look for what else is happening out there. Take some experiments, explore some stuff, don’t bet the farm on anything and, and like just take everything a little less seriously so that you have opportunity to branch out and explore possibilities you wouldn’t otherwise explore that if you didn’t explore might really be the thing that kills you.
Rita: I think that’s a fair thing. And I, I mean, I think there are places where you really want to take things seriously. So some of my clients are large pharmaceutical companies. You know, I want them taking their day job like super, super seriously, right when it comes to innovating around the customer experience. When it comes to things that aren’t like life and death matters, then absolutely be more playful with it. You know, think about what it’s like to be in that waiting room. I remember once working for a drug company that’s, they had a treatment to treat very severe arthritis. And they made it almost all the way to market. But there one of their last clinical trials failed and it failed. We suspect because of basically a placebo effect that what happened was these older people would be taken to the doctor every two weeks and the doctor would have, you know, feel their joints and see how the swelling had had changed and whatnot.
Rita: And in this particular trial, no drug, no drug did better than the placebo. And what we hypothesize later on was that the experience of having someone pick you up from your home, take you to a doctor’s office, you could sit in the waiting room and swap symptoms with all the other older people that were there. So got you out of being socially isolated while you’re there, the nurses asking you about, you know, how are you sleeping and how’s your diet? And you know, it wasn’t easy to do your grandson’s birthday. How lovely. You know, you’ve got this whole human social contact that’s happening. And if you think about that just as a small data point and you think about where healthcare is going, right? You could formulate a hypothesis that said, hey, the, the process of getting care, which is so fragmented and unpleasant today, you know, could be made a whole lot better and who’s gonna figure that out?
Rita: Right? So now you can start to say, well, okay, if I’m, if I’m going for a playful view of healthcare maybe that should be investing now in better digital experiences, better waiting room experiences, you know, that kind of thing. So I think the playfulness part comes when you’re really trying to think about what’s new and, and you want to expand your range of possibilities. Now when you’re delivering the critical core business function that’s gotta be copied. Absolutely right. Every single time. Well, yeah. You need to be pretty serious about that. Yeah. I don’t want to, I don’t want my airline pilots suddenly decided to experiment with a new flight path. I mean I’m doing exactly what they’re told.
Peter: Right. I guess, I guess knowing that distinction of what has to have no typos and what can be wanderings is really is really important and, and the flexibility being a person. Cause oftentimes we’re, we’re shaped as like I’m, I’m a perfectionist or I’m a wanderer. And like being the person who has the flexibility to be able to do both intentionally seems to be really important.
Rita: I think it’s, I think it’s critical and I think, you know, a lot of people, the ones that are uncomfortable with ambiguity and not having the right answers and everything, it’s not that they have to suddenly become that person. Right. But they have to understand it enough to not get in the way, you know, and to not see it as something that’s in opposition to the right way. I mean, I see an awful lot of innovations that die not because somebody meant to kill them, but because then back to questions, they’re asking the wrong questions, like what’s the ROI on this thing going to be next year? And then it gets into a budget line and then somebody is looking for the first sales and then, and the whole thing just, it’s not even ready yet. And yet we’re pushing it to be so predictable that we suck the life out of it.
Peter: I want to wrap up this conversation with the same way you wrap up your book. With just a brief conversation. You, you have the sort of key insights about what we need to do to make all this happen. And one of them, you really talk about the importance of women in leadership. And I’m wondering if you can give us just a minute on that.
Rita: Sure. So one of the things we’re learning about women’s ways of leading is that that is much more the way leaders in general need to be thinking. So it’s creating collaborative communities. It’s allowing, it’s, it’s creating the context and then allowing empowered teams to go out and grab things. It’s having nonthreatening conversations. It’s making sure you have diverse points of view in the room. And it’s not that men can’t do this, it’s just women. Now I can’t tell you whether it’s by programming or whether it’s societal expectations, but when intend to lead in a more horizontal connecting the dots kind of way, which I think frees up the organization to be able to operate more more like a network and less like a hierarchy. And I think that the, the, the research on women’s leadership suggested it seems to come more naturally to women leaders than men seem to struggle a little bit more with it.
Rita: 10. I think that’s, you know, it’s partly also men are really expected to have the right answer to be very directive, you know, be forceful. But when that’s our sort of character of a male leader whereas women are expected to be more conversational and more horizontal and to let other people’s voices be heard and so forth and so on. I do think one just numerical thing for your listeners to bear in mind is there’s incredible just piles and piles of evidence that if you get a critical mass of women in, that typically means three, at least three in a room, not one, not two, three. In a decision making situation that the quality of the decisions on, especially on creative problem solving tasks is much higher.
Peter: Rita, we’ve been talking with Rita McGrath. I’m so happy you’ve been on the podcast. Her book is seeing around corners how to spot inflection points in business before they happen. Rita, thank you so much for being on the Bregman leadership podcast.
Rita: Yeah, it’s a pleasure. Thanks so much.