The Connected Leader - Roland Deiser

Michelle: Hello and welcome to the Get Social Connected Leader podcast where I, Michelle Carvill, interview business leaders around the practicalities of how, in this hyper connected, digital age, they are embracing digital technologies to tune in and connect and communicate.

Michelle: You can find all episodes of the podcast, together with show notes, via our website: CarvillCreative.co.uk/podcasts.

Michelle: In this episode of the Get Social Connected Leader podcast, I'm delighted to interview Roland Deiser. Roland is a Drucker Senior Fellow and leads the Center for the Future of Organization at the Drucker School of Management at Claremont Graduate University. Prior to this appointment, he served for ten years as a Senior Fellow with the Center for the Digital Future at the University of Southern California. His current work focuses on the impact of digital technologies on leadership and organization, and on organizational capabilities required in disruptive business environments. His latest books are Designing the Small Organization, and Transformers.

Michelle: Roland is also Founder and Chairman of the Executive Corporate Learning Forum, a consortium of more than 50 global corporations from 14 countries, which he developed in 2005 to shape the future of transformational learning and development in large organizations. As a keynote speaker, he has been addressing audiences in the US, Europe, Asia, and Australia. He has also been working in advisory and board positions with global Fortune 500 companies such as BASF, Bertelsmann, Credit Suisse, Cisco Systems, Deutsche Telekom, Eon, Xerox, SAP, and Siemens, as well as with emerging growth companies, primarily in the digital media convergence space.

Michelle: Roland, it's wonderful to have you here on the podcast all the way from Los Angeles.

Roland Deiser: Yes, Michelle. Thanks so much. My pleasure. It's good to be here.

Michelle: Yeah, thank you so much. We connected a while ago now when I was writing Get Social and I came across your work around social media, literacy, and leadership, and at that time when I was writing, there was nothing really else around that topic. Why was it that you started to explore that particular area?

Roland Deiser: Well, it actually really goes back almost five years before this article in McKinsey Quarterly came up, which actually put, maybe, the topic onto the table.

Roland Deiser: I was doing some advisory work with a major retail corporation, which was looking at how they could expand their portfolio of businesses, and somehow, YouTube and all these things have come up. I saw that leadership and people and organizations, more and more, needed these kind of capabilities to leverage this type of media successfully, and I thought could be even a kind of business segment for these guys to develop services and all kinds of consultancy around this digital media literacy. When people said, "Every person, in a way, is his own filmmaker," it was very much really then on filmmaking and making an effective YouTube video in order to communicate more effectively in real time and so on.

Roland Deiser: And then in discussions with a friend of mine who was the Global Head of Leadership at that time at General Electric, we developed this further into the great opportunity to interview about 30 of the top 60 executives at GE about a framework that we slowly had developed about organizational social media literacy, but it took its time, actually, matured, but that was the original thing.

Michelle: And so how is that, because that seems, even now, there are a lot of organizations that really aren't that literate in social media. It's changing. There's definitely been a shift. How is that research evolving? What were the key insights or what were you learning from the work that you were doing with these organizations?

Roland Deiser: Well, on one hand, there is this framework which we put out, almost as a kind of a normative orientation, for people to say, "What do you need to do in order to leverage social media for competitive advantage?"

Roland Deiser: But what we found interesting when we talked to executives was originally, many said, "Well, Facebook, this is something for my kids." We never thought about social media that way; we thought about social media as technology that really enables new ways and much more effective and efficient ways of collaboration and communication, and that is an engine, almost, a kind of a thrust for horizontalization of organizational structures, which means what organizations usually have to organize is a vertical command and control structure, which dates back to the Industrial Age. It's connected to 20th century management. Everybody was talking already about organization of the 21st century needs to be more flat, there is this [inaudible 00:05:30] to that world. There is also a thing that we need to be faster, more responsive, we need to engage more with customers.

Roland Deiser: And so, without social media, you needed this generally, as times become more fast, things accelerate exponentially, actually sadly, and how do you deal with that?

Roland Deiser: And then I thought this social technology is actually a technology that drives organizations towards that kind of new paradigm, so to say, because it is a hierarchy buster because everybody got this voice and if you let these voices out, you find out a lot of what is going on within your customer, within your employee. When we talk about EX, employee experience, or CX, customer experience, how do they find out where are the data? They come by people engaging in actually social technology, social media. Maybe blogs, maybe posts, maybe Wikis or whatever happens in that social media space.

Roland Deiser: I found, back then already, that it is an enabler. If you think back, process-oriented software like SAP, that streamline, for instance, the supply chain processes, really changed the way organizations worked in their supply organization. Social media changes the way organizations work in their social texture. Eventually, social texture is what creates culture and culture is, again, something that relates very much to implementing things or not implementing things. I think it is, if you leverage social technology, you have a competitive advantage against those who do not leverage it well, and that was somehow our hypotheses.

Roland Deiser: Now, if I may just continue on this, the big thing we found out, as I said before, they said, "Well, Facebook, that's something for children," people don't get it. It's very hard and by the way, I'm changing my language, I'm trying to change the language back. Not social media anymore because it has a connotation. It comes, by the way, meanwhile and maybe we'll talk about this later, also with a lot of intended consequences we see these days that were that visible 10 years ago, but today, the good, the bad, and the ugly we see now-

Michelle: Yeah, absolutely.

Roland Deiser: Of technology. So I tried rather, something like digital social network or something like that because social media is not so closely connotated and related to the Facebooks and the [crosstalk 00:08:28] and so on of this world.

Michelle: Yeah, I agree with that. I mean, I've actually written blog posts around, "Let's just stop calling it social media" because it's much more powerful and the thinking of, "Oh, it's just what children do," or it's people posting what they had for breakfast, it's less about that and it's more about the connectivity that it enables at such a pace.

Roland Deiser: I could not agree more, yes.

Michelle: Yeah. You know, I think also, and it's interesting, Roland, what you're talking about, I think also a lot of organizations think about social media as something that is very external-facing. It's how we're going to promote ourselves to the rest of the world, and yes, it can be utilized as yet for brand awareness and brand building and indeed, a lot of the paid elements are very sophisticated media channels now. They're very credible, highly targeted. There's a lot people can be doing with them.

Michelle: But the internal communications, that is something that is often missed, the internal social media, that connecting both the leadership to the employees, the employees to one another, the breaking down of silos. What have been your experiences and what you've come up against around those concepts internally?

Roland Deiser: Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned this, Michelle. I think we had a big issue ourselves when we tried to frame our whole research. How do we really define the space in which the social media takes place? We, of course, were looking at social media as organizational social media literacy, which means building the capabilities within companies and helping them to be more competitive. So there is word out, like enterprise social media and things like that, but it's not so easy.

Michelle: No.

Roland Deiser: Of course, I think the first association of people was, oh you know, this kind of Instagram, Facebook, the outside kind of, the kid's world. Then you told them enterprise social media. Okay, now we've got project management, we've got all kinds of linking employees or getting their voices heard and that type of ongoing, real time culture survey that you could do by understanding and leveraging these kind of things.

Roland Deiser: But I find myself more and more having a problem with making this difference between the inside and the outside world because what is really happening these days is that those boundaries, also when we talk about social media or social technology as boundary busting technology, these boundaries are becoming more fuzzy.

Michelle: Yeah, it is.

Roland Deiser: If you look at digital transformation, the fuzziness starts with the functions like HR, strategy. They become more fuzzy in their identity because they have different divisions and processes, like say I don't know, this was the kind of pipeline process. An agile organization today, bust these boundaries that have been between certain process elements.

Roland Deiser: The same thing goes for the boundaries of the organization. You do co-creation with customers or you do open innovation, let's say crowdsourcing ideas, or you do, I don't know, working with the startup universe and you want to tap into what's going on out there. It's not that the resources that you own within your own and that may be under your command and control are the decisive ones that make you successful. You have to have the ability to be resourceful beyond the boundaries of your organization.

Roland Deiser: Even if we talk about this, let's call it organizational or enterprise social media capability, it's something that doesn't stop at the boundary of the organization, but must include the relevant extended universe of the organization which you could call business ecosystem or extended enterprise, right?

Michelle: Yeah.

Roland Deiser: If you look at platform businesses and the new ways competition happens these days, we have to understand that the universe where the social media drives organizational performance, goes beyond the boundary of the organization.

Michelle: Yes, yeah. That is very interesting. I think also, there's an element there. It's different, isn't it? It's a whole new way of thinking about operating in business and those organizations that are just getting used to the flatter aspect and the busting of the hierarchy, to then be busting out into this more collaborative, connected ecosystem, for want of a better word, is a challenge, isn't it? It's a real shift.

Roland Deiser: Yeah. And you know, Michelle, the larger they are, they have a harder time to do that. The problem really is that starting with the certain complexity in the organizations, you become super busy with managing your own complexity, right?

Michelle: Yeah.

Roland Deiser: I don't want to name names, but it actually happens in every large organization. Nobody needs to be embarrassed. It just happens if you've got, let's say, 100, 200,000 people in 100 countries in several business divisions. If you need to orchestrate all these things, you are so busy with your own governance, with your own issues that come up all the time in that organization, that you spend much more time being busy with yourself than being busy with your customer.

Roland Deiser: This is where, of course, a lot of disruptors can come in and they typically are smaller, they're nimble, they come from outside, they have a customer focus. The large organizations have a much harder time, but it's imperative that they learn that, and there's, of course, in each and every organization these days, efforts going on to mitigate that issue. But it's a structural disadvantage that comes with size, right?

Michelle: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Roland Deiser: Another one, for instance, you won a lot of assets; automatically, you cannot leverage capital as effectively as you would own virtually almost no assets. What did I read somewhere? These kinds of trends. We move from owning resources as being competitive to being resourceful. That's a very different way to organize. You can be very small and leverage your connections you have in the world, networks and capabilities you don't have, to buy them and own them.

Roland Deiser: But again, the challenge, if you don't own them, is you can't command and control them. To partner with them, you have to influence them, you have to share certain kind of principles and that's much harder to do than just saying, "Well, I tell you to do so, so you just go ahead." For that, I have to buy you, I have to own you, and I can fire you. Organizations don't see if they fire, they lose out on talent that they might also use in the future as a resource. It helps us to actually connect, also, with these external forces.

Michelle: Yeah. There was a lovely analogy that I interviewed the CEO of Jellyfish, a big digital agency, Robin. He was saying that he sees all of his employees like the Google Data Center, and each one of them is their own little CPU. You know?

Roland Deiser: Yes!

Michelle: And I really like that because it's just kind of like, oh, that's kind of, rather than looking at it as a big lumbering collective, you can break it down and everybody's their own little operating center, and what are they bringing to keep the data center fluid and active and up to date? Again, that's a very different way of thinking, isn't it?

Roland Deiser: Yeah, I like that a lot.

Roland Deiser: We also see a trend toward micro organizations, even within companies, right? You've got all these agile teams or outside, maybe a startup, maybe a venture that you do together with some, I don't know, research or whatever happens. You deal, these days, a lot with individuals and micro organizations that get, because of that agile design, a relatively high degree of autonomy and self-organization and so on and so forth, which changes very much the role of corporate and the role of governance in large organizations because it's really a cluster of very different micro, and some of them are larger of course, organizations that very often come with very different cultures, with different operating models, different kind of things.

Roland Deiser: You have to orchestrate a portfolio. Back home, maybe you have still a huge traditional legacy system, which by the way, you probably should not throw out. After all, may be the basis of your competitive advantage, but you've got to reinvent your legacy system in a way that it's adapted to the needs of the present. And at the same time, you might have very different units that work very differently with different units. It's not only ambidexterity. I recently had a very interesting conversation with a guy, his name is Matthew Jacob, he heads of change and transformation at the board of Shell, about that it's polydexterity that you need, many, many different ways and accept them that they're different and not put them under one [inaudible 00:18:46] of organization.

Michelle: It's complex.

Roland Deiser: It's very complex.

Michelle: That's when people say, "Oh, tell me about it," and it's kind of like, "You know what, it's pretty complex." There are simplicities, but social is complex, isn't it, in the way that it presents.

Michelle: Let's think about leadership then because this is your area of leadership literacy, digital literacy in the leadership space. How is social, do you think, changing the role of leadership, and what have you seen from a positive, and potentially the pushback negative, from leaders that you've communicated with around that aspect?

Roland Deiser: Well, first of all, I think it's important to reflect on what leadership means because leadership is changing also its kind of meaning and its paradigm, how you lead and what leadership means, through this emergency of new autonomy and new ways to organize. The heroic, charismatic leader is somehow maybe replaced or become much more to a paradigm of a leader who is enabling force that brings together people, connects stuff and himself, let's just go others, and trust that it somehow works. It's a different concept of leadership.

Roland Deiser: The second thing that changes is leadership moves to the periphery, which means in order to be able to respond real time, for instance, to customers and markets, you need to be there where the action is at the market with the customer. If you give these people decision power in order to be fast and flexible, this is some kind of leadership. Many organizations say these days, "Well, our concept of leadership is changing." It's not so much the edification of C-level, C-1, C-2, C-3, and still, of course, have that a lot, but it's really everybody is somehow a leader representing also the values of his or her corporation, and to social media, of course, any posts you put up could be seen also as a brand extension of who you belong to.

Roland Deiser: Having said this, we still have, of course, more senior leaders that have stronger decision power, that have organizational design competencies that others don't, and what changes here? I see two major changes. One is the leader as the user of social media in its first person. He's using social media by tweeting, by posting on Facebook, by using ... I had a meeting way back at Facebook where they just had launched Facebook video, live video, that you utilize that as a leader. There was this example of the CEO of Walmart regularly posting on Instagram himself with the employee of the week and getting a lot of followers which was an incredible boost for the culture, people saying, "Wow, I'd like to be like that. What did you do to get a deal?" posting with him. So for the CEO, of course, it was also a way to be closer to the bases, visiting factories, or in this case, retail outlets and so on and so forth.

Roland Deiser: The leader as actor in social media is first person, and there are certain literacies you need. Actually, in the model that we published a few years ago, those are creativity, how do you distribute your message as a leader, how do you respond as a leader to what's going on in the social media world? That is a capability that leaders need to develop in the way, almost like how do I get followers? How do I get engagement? How do I get visibility?

Roland Deiser: There, what you need, obviously are things like spontaneity, you need the raw, I coined the phrase of leadership unplugged. You don't need the kind of polished, Teflon-type of marketing messages that were there in the past. They may still be there because broadcast does not go away, but social media is the engaging leader who is imperfect, invites participation, invites response, asks more questions than answers, and so on and so forth.

Michelle: Yeah, I really like that, unplugged leadership. That really summarizes it.

Roland Deiser: Yeah, without the kind of help of a big, huge kind of [crosstalk 00:23:53]-

Michelle: Yeah, the PR machine, yeah.

Roland Deiser: And sound engineers that makes you perfect, right?

Michelle: Yes.

Roland Deiser: Oh no. You become accessible and people can empathize and sympathize because you're vulnerable. That requires courage in the-

Michelle: It does!

Roland Deiser: It requires admitting, "I do not know," admitting, "I need you to help me," and reaching out. This is what, then, social media again allows you to do. Do you reach out and then you get a response? If you just tell people, "This is the way you do it," it's not a broadcast medium. Social media is an inviting medium that invites participation, and if you don't know that, well, you're not leveraging it well.

Michelle: That's right.

Roland Deiser: So that is one aspect of leadership, I think, and they need to learn that for themselves.

Roland Deiser: As important, I think there's a second aspect of leadership, is that they enable the free flow and enable the utilization of social media activity within their organization as a practice that becomes pervasive and is used in all kinds of context. Maybe if people engage in some innovation project or if they do project management, if they do meetings or whatever they do in this organization, engage with customers, how do they leverage a technology that helps build better communication, connectivity, sharing and so on and so forth?

Roland Deiser: That's more a kind of enabling role, not much related to their own usage of social media, but establishing a system and the context in which social media utilization, for everybody, can thrive.

Michelle: Absolutely. It's interesting. There's a lot of research. I did a talk last week about, it was looking at disengagement. Why do employees become disengaged? There's a big cost, isn't there, to organizations when you have a disengaged employee. I think that the study I looked at, I think it was by Ernst & Young, they put some numbers around each disengaged employee costs $10,000 in profit per employee per anum. If you've got 100,000 employees ... You've got 100 employees, it's a problem, but you got 100,000 employees, it's significant. They were saying that disengagement also is like 80% of digital transformation failed due to that employee disengagement.

Michelle: There's a lot of work still to do, isn't there, with that leader being the enabler and also, being the unplugged leader talking to the employees, being accessible and being transparent, and being visible? We're definitely-

Roland Deiser: I could not agree more. The disengagement thing, if you look at data, I don't know, have exact numbers now, but there's clear evidence that huge, huge cohorts of the workforce are disengaged in large organizations. It's not only expensive, it's also bad just for the people.

Michelle: Yes.

Roland Deiser: They just bring their empty body to the work, but their mind and their heart is somewhere else. It's a sad story also.

Roland Deiser: But see again, the engagement, what better instrument out there than creating a great kind of social architecture by using social technology to help engage engagement because it makes it visible. There's lots of stuff out there from communication, to I don't know what, where you can utilize things to get people engagement. Obviously, you need more than just a technology; you need a kind of a business that hopefully provides some ethical value to this planet and purpose and this is why we have this big discussion going on about purpose which becomes much more important the more you give autonomy to people.

Roland Deiser: If you give people autonomy and understand what their vision is and help them to find their vision and align that a little bit with what you do in an organization and have that flexibility to tap into this, then people are engaged. People aren't invested and disengaged; nobody likes to sit around and be just unhappy.

Michelle: No. I mean, again, Chris Bartley who is, again, one of the people I interviewed on the podcast, and I don't know which way the order is going to play yet so I'll be saying things. You're either going to be listening to it coming up or you'll have listened to it already.

Michelle: But he was saying, he's the Managing Director of Havas Media at Medicom, and he was saying that what they've started to do internally, because he comes from a marketing stance so he's a very ... He's a real champion for social technologies and social connectivity. What they've started doing is actually, what he said is, "What we recognize is we've got a lot of expertise within our organization that we weren't really tapping into and we weren't really showcasing. We've set an objective internally to raise the profile, the social profiles, of our experts so that we've given them film crews, we've given them time to write, we've given them assistance. We've actually set up a whole department that helps to build the profile of our own ..." It's almost like their own internal PR to help their experts or these employees become real thought leaders.

Michelle: I said, "That's amazing." He said, "People love it. It's drawing people to us. We're finding some incredible things. Of course, these great talents are now so much more invested in us because we're investing in them." And I said, "But some people would be terrified of doing that because you're doing all of this and then they could leave, you know? Or you've built them up and it's almost like creating the monster and then they go and that's all your investment." I said, "You know, how do you balance that?" He said, "It's a risk, but you've got to be prepared to take those risks."

Roland Deiser: You know, we're back almost to this extended enterprise that I mentioned before. There is this great example. There are few companies who really smartly use their alumni. If you leave, you're gone, but that's not true necessarily.

Michelle: Exactly.

Roland Deiser: Look at a McKinsey, look at GE. They're in a little bit of a pit right now, but it used to be the kind of benchmark for really, a factory of great leaders that went on to become CEOs of other companies, but they became part of the GE ecosystem where they had great relationships because they did not alienate them.

Roland Deiser: So if you have great experts, you develop them, you give them a room to grow, and they decide to leave for whatever reason, and they don't leave angry or they don't leave disgruntled but they leave, "Oh my god, I hate to leave but I've got this great opportunity, but maybe we can work together in the future in a different place."

Michelle: Exactly, exactly.

Roland Deiser: We just need different, maybe, ways to compensate, different working contracts. That's what I meant with the micro organizations, there are different ways to deal with resources than just having this organizational model: I have to own the resource, I have to control the resources, [crosstalk 00:32:16] buyer, and that's the only way I can do business.

Michelle: Yeah. So it's happening, it is happening, isn't it? It's happening. And that was exactly what he said. He said they'd leave from a good place and I'd hope that wherever they'd went onto, they'd only say great things about how we developed them, and that will only be a good thing for us. It's quite enlightened, it's quite an enlightened view.

Roland Deiser: Absolutely. And getting back to social media now, we have a technology to stay in touch with them very easily, right?

Michelle: Exactly, yeah. Exactly.

Roland Deiser: We have a technology. I did a lot of work back then, before there even was social media or anything, on communities of practice. Communities of practice where one way, that was back really in the late '80s, early '90s, where it was knowledge management and how do we establish knowledge flow within an organization, get expertise visible and make experts help each other and move stuff across boundaries and so forth? There was this concept of communities of practice.

Roland Deiser: Now, social technology brought that back in a very, very different way, knowledge management, back in a very different way. But what we have now with the networked organization and everybody's talking about the importance of understanding network dynamics, of understanding the informal because the formal, we know, but we know also that the formal is only a very small part of the equation. The bigger part in the equation in an organization is the informal dynamics.

Michelle: Absolutely.

Roland Deiser: So social technology makes that visible.

Michelle: It does.

Roland Deiser: Cisco, for instance, is doing very, very interesting work where they're utilizing organizational network analysis. A colleague of mine, Rob Cross, has done very interesting work on organizational network analysis linking them with the proprietary technology they have, actually that is now in an app; every employee has this on the phone, where they can, through the activities that they report, some minor stuff, for instance, the employee's like, "How did I feel that week? Did I achieve the objectives? What did I feel was important? Where did I feel I had barriers?" This is aggregated. Also, the collaboration kind of architecture is mirrored through that kind of technology. They have a real time intelligence system how [crosstalk 00:35:00] and they can scale this across the company of 70,000 people.

Michelle: Wow.

Roland Deiser: I find this really, really interesting. I said, in the conversation to the guy recently, "Well, this is step number one. Step number two will be that we have AI probably being able to make sense of water cooler conversations which are going on out there" because we know already that conversational analysis is possible and this will be coming really fast, so that it's very, very new ways of real time understanding of cultural issues and [crosstalk 00:35:32] in a way, which is scary as well, of course.

Michelle: It is and it's interesting, isn't it? Because if you think about a lot of that, that is exactly how some of these larger external networks, they're watching our moves, they're tracking what we go and look at on things, and they're building a story about who we are, quite an accurate story. That's all external-facing for consumers, but this is now flipping it and pushing it inwards, isn't it, and really, it's almost like all that data, all that intelligence that these external networks get, we're able to get the same internally from our own organizations to better our own organizations.

Roland Deiser: It's very true. And you know, I find very interesting that customer experience and employee experience are somehow almost merging now in a way that is a source for intelligence for organizations. Because think about when we talk about digital transformation, the use cases of certain kinds of digital applications, they're true both for customers and employees.

Michelle: Absolutely.

Roland Deiser: Employees are customers of those digital transformations at the same time, so we've got to leverage that.

Michelle: Yep, absolutely. And they are the internal customers, aren't they?

Roland Deiser: Yes.

Michelle: If you position it that way. All very interesting. It is, though. We could talk for hours.

Roland Deiser: It is really fascinating.

Michelle: It is.

Roland Deiser: And we're living in interesting times.

Michelle: It is very interesting times on many levels.

Michelle: With regards to leadership then, my view, and I put this out there now, I used to be a little reticent to say it, but I truly believe that social media technologies and maybe the media is the wrong word, social technologies, are kind of like this ... It's almost like a glue. I don't know why I keep referring to it as a glue that can almost connect all disconnection that is going on, once you identify what that disconnection is, regardless of where it sits, whether it's leader to employees or within teams. What's your view about how this will shift? Do you think people are going to get it? Do you think it's going to become an absolute skill that people say ... Because even now, there's a lot of people that will say, "I don't want to get involved. I don't want anything to do with it." Do you think that literacy is just going to be inextricably part of the future of leadership, the future of how employees engage, and indeed, even if we call them employees, the future of organizations?

Michelle: I feel it's got a big role to play. What's your view?

Roland Deiser: No, I agree. But you know, I think it definitely has a big role to play and you saying it's kind of a glue, I also totally agree. I think it's a communication technology that has already changed the world and is changing the world further, not only the good side, and we can maybe touch this a little bit as well later on.

Michelle: Yes.

Roland Deiser: But alone, just having the technology and having maybe a leader who says, "Well, enabling and I'm myself an avid user and maybe a successful user," is not enough because I believe there are some core elements that need to accompany the implementation or the use of social technology.

Roland Deiser: For instance, I think the importance of caring for each other becomes much more important in that way, so that I really have an interest in you and I somehow am able to create this as a mutual kind of thing because this caring and collaboration eventually creates social texture and social texture eventually creates the culture of an organization. This caring is, in a way, the currency because it creates trust of network performance and so on and so forth.

Roland Deiser: Now, that means you have to do other things as well. You have to instigate things like curiosity. You have to instigate things like caring for the other. And I mean caring, I mean looking beyond your own interests, being very curious and caring for what's going on in finance? Right, I care for that. What's going on with this customer? I care for that. What is my buddy next to me thinking? I care for that because all these more, let's say, almost emotional or social/emotional conditions become more important. If you don't nurture those, you might have the technology and everything, but it's not really used well.

Roland Deiser: And there are quite a few of those, right? There's creativity, there are others that need to be fostered the same way where you don't maybe immediately see the connection to social media but they are an important condition that this technology is utilized in the right way and the positive way.

Michelle: Yeah because as you say, it can be and we hear a lot, there are some good stories that come out but there is also the, as you said, the negative aspects where instead of instilling that sense of belonging and care, it can also instill a sense of well, we hear about cyber bullying and things like that, don't we?

Roland Deiser: Yeah.

Michelle: The dark side of social.

Roland Deiser: Absolutely, yeah. Today, I just read the latest note, a 14-year-old girl killed herself and she killed herself because on Instagram, she asked her followers, "Should I kill myself or not?"

Michelle: Oh!

Roland Deiser: And 70% said, "Kill yourself."

Michelle: Oh, crikey!

Roland Deiser: So it's horrible, right? And this is happening as well.

Michelle: Yeah.

Roland Deiser: We need to mitigate these unintended consequences, even up to the very large scale, where democracy and all the bubbles. I don't need to ... It's separate. It's also a very important element to look at.

Michelle: Yeah. So I suppose if we come from that place of care and connection with ourselves as well as connecting with others, then that gives it a better chance, doesn't it?

Roland Deiser: Yes. I have actually, I've come up with 13 Cs.

Michelle: Oh!

Roland Deiser: It was kind of an exercise. It came over, in a way, kind of a funny thing. I had to give a keynote and I didn't know what to talk about so I somehow suddenly had this almost intuition. "Oh, let's give it a C, like communication and creativity and connectivity and co-creation and collaboration and caring and so on and so forth," that are, in a way, ingredients for the future of a organization is somehow sustainable and future proof. There may be more even, but those Cs, I think, if you put them together, they are the enablers also of a productive use of social media.

Michelle: But I'd love to see your paper on those Cs.

Roland Deiser: It's actually more pictures in the presentation.

Michelle: Is it more pictures? Okay.

Roland Deiser: I don't know. Yeah, there's even a podcast out there about there.

Michelle: Oh, well send me-

Roland Deiser: Yeah, I'm happy to send you a link to that.

Michelle: Yes, please. Yes, please, I'll put it into the show notes as well. That'll be really useful.

Roland Deiser: That is very kind of you. Yeah, so I think this is an important element to look at.

Michelle: Yeah, and I agree. This is a big question, I suppose, for somebody as yourself that has been researching within this space and grows within the space and this topic and this body, shall we say, for such a long time. What do you think has been your, I mean, I don't think there's been one thing, but what's been your biggest learning so far would you say, Roland, around digital and social media activity within organizations? What's the biggest thing that you could think of?

Roland Deiser: Ah, well, it's a big question. See, my most recent work was on digital transformation challenges. The social media work, which was a few years ago, of course is very relevant to that because I think digital transformation and those literacies, to leverage collaboration and communication technologies effectively is very important also in those transformation processes. But of course, there's more to these digital transformation challenges and they have a lot to do with engaging with difference, engaging, for instance, with you different kind of of ways and to be able to respond with your organizational setup accordingly.

Roland Deiser: What I find is, maybe one big thing, very much the discussion is an either/or discussion. People focus either on the people aspect and the soft aspects of this, everything is mindset, and it's kind of about, "We have to find our purpose and lead and so on and so forth," the people side of it. That's a very, very important side and I agree, there is no use of technology is there is not concurrently also something happening on the people side.

Roland Deiser: On the other hand, there is very often, "Oh, let's just have the organizational structure looked at, the technology looked at." There is still a disconnect, I feel, between the hard fact and the soft fact of these transformation processes. So how can we bring them together?

Roland Deiser: Sadly, and I would say the soft, in one way, is more important because it is underrepresented, has a weaker reputation, and is not sufficiently appreciated. Reflected, for instance, in the reputation of HR. [crosstalk 00:46:42] of HR and the reputation of those who may drive these changes processes by they don't have the same kind of positional power as a strategy, an IT person, and a marketing person. How can you really bring these together?

Roland Deiser: My big thing is really the cross-functional, cross-boundary, how can you do these things well and how can you architect them? That friction is a learning opportunity that can be leveraged productively because what I see a lot is that friction is still avoided and seen as something bad. Friction is the space where change and transformation happens. Looking at how can I create spaces of productive friction with customers, with employees, between functions, between divisions, and put them in a way that I think is something that, currently, really sparks my interest a lot.

Michelle: Because it's kind of, if everybody's just, and I know this is kind of a simplistic view on that, but if everybody's just yes people or they're just folding their arms and they're not engaged and they're rolling their eyes because they know that they don't have that pad, then people move away from friction, don't they? They don't want to be involved.

Roland Deiser: Yes!

Michelle: But it's actually when you have the friction that you create some heat and that can be very productive to move things forward. It gives it almost a momentum, doesn't it? That heat gives it momentum to move forward into a different place.

Roland Deiser: That is very true, Michelle. What we see today is that the bubbles created through the algorithms that are in those social media platforms actually do the opposite. They try to avoid that. You're only talking within your own choirs or within your communities, so to say. You don't even get fed any difference anymore. I think it's very important for change and transformation to curate difference and to curate it any a way that is having this difference meeting productively for further joint learning and development, and that's not happening so much, right?

Michelle: Yeah.

Roland Deiser: That's what I meant with curiosity also. It's so important. Think and read and interact and invite things outside your own world, maybe your own industry because change comes from different industries these days, outside your own function. You may be an expert in finance, but you need to understand also people and strategy and what have you. How do you reach out beyond? It starts even ... I have to understand my customer, right?

Michelle: Yes.

Roland Deiser: Going beyond that boundary. There's a lot of this going on. The boundaries have been very much in my-

Michelle: Yeah. For me as a marketeer, that's where we start. If you don't have customers, you don't have a business! You know?

Roland Deiser: You don't have a business! Absolutely, exactly right.

Michelle: Yeah, brilliant. Okay, so this has been a joy, Roland, speaking to you. I would love to speak to you on so many things.

Roland Deiser: Likewise, Michelle. It's really a pleasure, I have to say.

Michelle: Good. It is. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to take you away from social media and the digital space, landscape, just to find out a little bit more about you. I've got some quick fire questions and some of them, a couple of them ... There's only three questions. A couple of them are quite big questions, but it's just top of the head kind of quick fire things. I'm going to fire them at you. Are you ready?

Roland Deiser: Okay.

Michelle: Okay. If you could change one thing in the world, what would it be?

Roland Deiser: You have really big questions. Yeah, well, I thought about this a little bit. I think the one thing I would really focus on and change is education. I think that the lack of education leads to a lot of issues in society these days. We have so huge challenges ahead of us with AI and also the political whatever, and that we have populists being so successful is a matter that people just don't have the necessary educational background very often to really reasoning and understanding the complexity of this planet and they are gullible for simplicity.

Roland Deiser: So education always has been a big, big variable in societies. If you want to have democracy, you have to have education, so I would focus on this a lot.

Michelle: Fantastic.

Roland Deiser: More than anything else.

Michelle: Wonderful, wonderful. What about, I know you read books avidly, so is there a book that you've read recently that's inspired you?

Roland Deiser: There's quite a few. One I just recently read because I met the author was by Roger McNamee, the book called Zucked. I don't know if you've heard about it. Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe.

Michelle: Ah, I have seen that, yes.

Roland Deiser: Yeah. He's a very interesting guy because Roger McNamee, first of all, he's a hippy. He comes up and he still has kind of long hair and a hippyish type of behavior. The Silicon Valley was pretty much also built by this kind of types. He was very early on in technology, investment banking and was a very early investor in Facebook. He was a mentor of Zuckerburg. He knew all these guys because this was the heart of the Silicon Valley with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and what have you.

Roland Deiser: About two or three years ago, he started to really become the fiercest critic of the algorithm and the business model behind Facebook because he saw all these negative things and they're not on talking terms anymore for whatever reasons, Zuckerburg and him, but he's an extremely engaging speaking and I can only recommend it. There's tons, if you go on YouTube and type in Roger McNamee, then you will find ... Because he's certainly on the circuit. The book came out a few months ago, but that is really ...

Roland Deiser: What inspired me so much that it's kind of from soulless to powerless in a way, right?

Michelle: Yes.

Roland Deiser: The conversion from somebody who was ... And he's still, he's got an investment firm together with Bono from U2 and they still have billions under management and stuff like that, but then he saw what's going on there and is critical. I like that.

Roland Deiser: Another one, may I have a second one?

Michelle: Yes, okay. I'll give you that.

Roland Deiser: Was a biography of Hannah Arendt, which was super inspiring for me. I came across that. Hannah Arendt was a political philosopher that had, actually parents and herself, even very briefly in a concentration and she immigrated. She was the woman who was very close with the largest philosophers of the early 20th century like Heidegger, she had a love affair with him, and Karl Jaspers and others. It was so incredibly inspiring, a woman. I believe it's called A Life in Dark Times. The times were inevitably dark for her as a Jewish intellectual and a woman. It was just all that and still then, living such a life and making such an impact in political philosophy I found very inspiring.

Michelle: Oh, that sounds wonderful. I will definitely have a look at that. Thank you for sharing those. Last but not least, what's the best piece of advice you have been giving to date?

Roland Deiser: Yeah, you gave me this question. It's really a hard one because there's a lot of people that shaped, in a way, what I do.

Roland Deiser: If I think back, one was really that don't try to do everything on your own, but try to focus on enabling others and enabling others by collecting them with each other in meaningful contexts, so to say, which means for instance, I've created this kind of executive network of leaders. It's really introducing them to each other and let them then go, but provide also a meaningful context around what they can engage in. For me, it created a great network and a great influence on people which is very indirect; it's not something I tell them to do, but which is something that informed a lot of the work then I did on social media, for instance, on social texture and so on and so forth.

Roland Deiser: It's more, very simple, put the others but not only the individual, the connectivity of others, enable the connectivity of others and then sit back, but then also provide them with context in which connectivity can make sense.

Michelle: Yeah. You're the perfect connector.

Roland Deiser: Yeah, in a way, yes.

Michelle: The facilitator of that wonderful connectivity, but like you say, with the context. I really like that. It's kind of a little bit how I feel about bringing all these wonderful people together on my podcast.

Roland Deiser: Yeah, there's nothing more rewarding in my opinion than connecting interesting people and maybe sometimes you're just a fly on the wall.

Michelle: Exactly, that's how I feel, you know?

Roland Deiser: Yeah, but then you also provide them some context if you connect them, right?

Michelle: Exactly, exactly.

Roland Deiser: A friend of mind, for instance, I found very interesting. He did an events series here at the LA County Museum of Art, and later on, he did it in the New York Public Library. Events like he brought together Frank Gehry, the architect, who did the Disney Hall here in Los Angeles, and [inaudible 00:58:00] who was the conductor of the very first concert that happened in this Disney Hall. At the opening, they were both here and he made a kind of a panel where [inaudible 00:58:14] talks about his approach to architecture and Frank Gehry, about his approach to music.

Michelle: Wonderful.

Roland Deiser: This was, for me, the essence of crossing boundaries, right?

Michelle: Yes.

Roland Deiser: The architect is not only about architecture; it's about music and he builds something where music will happen. The conductor needs maybe an architect to make the music really thrive.

Michelle: The acoustics. Yeah, exactly, to sound amazing.

Roland Deiser: But he's not a musician.

Michelle: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Roland Deiser: Connecting those in conversation and then stepping back but still giving them the context in which to have this discussion, I found, for instance, wonderful.

Michelle: Yeah, that is lovely. That's really wonderful. Oh, brilliant.

Michelle: I've thoroughly enjoyed our discussion. How do people find out more about the work that you're doing, Roland? How do people find more about you? I'll make sure everything's in the show notes, but is there a website they can get to?

Roland Deiser: Yeah, we have actually the Center for the Future of Organization is one thing, is my home in a way, more the academic and research way. It's FutureOrg.org where you find papers, you find also some multimedia stuff that we're putting up there, and somehow just the background of some of the stuff we're doing. That's maybe the best way to go.

Roland Deiser: I have a personal website, RolandDeiser.com. Both of them are valuable to get somehow.

Michelle: Perfect.

Roland Deiser: And then obviously, the usual LinkedIn and Twitter accounts where things happen.

Michelle: Yes, fantastic. Okay, well, I've thoroughly enjoyed that. Thank you so much for coming onto the show and sharing all your wonderful insights and experience and research with us. I'm just going to still leave it with a very big thank you.

Roland Deiser: And so did I, Michelle. I thank you very much.

Michelle: You've been listening to the Get Social Connected Leader podcast. Thank you to my guest and indeed thank you to you for tuning in. Please do feel free to share the podcast with colleagues and friends who you think will enjoy it and indeed subscribe to tune in for more episodes.

Michelle: You'll find the podcast on all the usual platforms and all episodes are also on our website, CarvillCreative.co.uk/podcasts. You'll also find some really useful digital and social resources on that site too, so be sure to check those out.

Michelle: For now, from me, Michelle Carvill, your host on the podcast, thank you so much for tuning in and goodbye.

Michelle: Oh, P.S. If you're a business leader with something to share around digital and social technologies and you're keen to be a guest on the podcast, then I'd love to hear from you. You can email me, Michelle@CarvilCreative.co.uk.