Why Leaders Should Start With Execution With Nellie Wartoft

 

Nellie Wartoft, Founder and CEO of change activation platform Tigerhall, has flipped the script when managing teams. She puts execution at the start of the process, allowing her to refine business strategies like never before. Joining Adam Markel, Nellie explains how leaders should focus more on testing and iterating their operations with tight feedback loops instead of spending way too much time on the planning stage. She underlines why those on top should encourage their teams to make good mistakes that lead to profound learning opportunities. Nellie also opens up about her deep love for EDM, the importance of self-acceptance in a rapidly moving world, and the true value of the human workforce in a highly capitalist world.

 

Show Notes:

• 00:59 – EDM: The Soundtrack Of Nellie’s Life
• 11:44 – Implementing A Ready-Fire-Aim Strategy
• 17:59 – Why Leaders Should Encourage Making Good Mistakes
• 23:53 – Everything Starts From The CEO
• 31:58 – The True Value Of Human Beings
• 40:35 – Episode Wrap-Up And Closing Words

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Why Leaders Should Start With Execution With Nellie Wartoft

I’m so happy to be sitting in the seat. I have got a great guest. I’m going to share a little bit more about her. Her name is Nellie Wartoft. She’s the CEO and Founder of Tigerhall. She shares a similar drive to revolutionize how large and small enterprises approach change and transformation, something we work well to lean into pretty heavily as well. At Tigerhall, Nellie has enabled companies like AWS and Cisco to replace outdated communication methods with engaging, measurable content. I know you are going to love this conversation, so sit back and enjoy my discussion with Nellie Wartoft.

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EDM: The Soundtrack Of Nellie’s Life

Nellie, you have an impressive CV and I love reading other people’s bios. I don’t love to listen to my own or even listen to other people read mine or share that way, but I quite enjoy reading other people’s and it’s fascinating what you’ve done in the world. My first question to you is what’s not on the bio. I would love to know one thing that’s not part of your bio that you would love for people to know about you.

Thank you, Adam. Thank you for having me on the show. The one thing that is not on my bio, it’s probably not on the official bio, but my plan B was to be an EDM DJ. I am a huge EDM fan, and if it hadn’t changed in transformation, I would probably want to be a Tier B EDM DJ. That would be a good thing.

Tier B. I’ve got to lean into that. I love EDM music, but I won’t call myself any more knowledgeable than to say that. I have no idea what Tier B is. Maybe some other people reading this don’t know either. We should probably tell people what EDM is to start and then go to Tier B.

EDM is Electronic Dance Music. Think Tiesto, Avicii, and Kygo. Tier B is more of a self-deprecating comment, and I would probably not be at the Tiesto level. I would probably be one level below, like the one who’s playing everyone else’s tune.

Come on, Nellie. If we are going to create the fantasy, can we please be Tier A?

We can be Tier A. Maybe let’s aim for Tier A. Tier A tends to start a bit earlier in life, though.

Nellie, you would rock that out.

I will be a Tier A EDM DJ.

I’m clapping for you already. That was killer. I asked that question a fair amount of time. Having done more than 300 episodes of this show. I always love it because people are caught a little off guard by the question. We don’t give the question ahead of time. It’s never canned, and for my audience, that’s maybe curious, but that’s one of my favorite responses ever. I did not expect that and I love it. What is it about that music? I want to lean into that a little bit more here. I love to dance personally, I love electronic dance music. I love all dance music, but what is it about EDM that resonated with you and when did that start for you?

I have been a massive EDM fan since I was 11 or 12. Way earlier than I could go clubbing, but I love the energy of the music, like the beat. It’s like the soundtrack to my life as EDM. I listen to EDM in the morning when I wake up. I listen to EDM when I go to sleep, I listen to EDM on flights, I listen to it when I travel, I listen to it when I work out when I walk.

I know some people’s relationship with EDM is only when they work out or they do a high-energy activity, but my relationship with EDM is all on 24/7. Every part of my life is EDM-fueled. I was texting with a friend. Maybe we are planning some travel around her wedding. She’s like, “Maybe that will be a little bit intense for you, but then I remember you are Nellie, so everything you do is intense.” That love from EDM comes in as well. It’s intense, it’s high energy and that matches the life I’m living as well, probably.

Tell me about the start of the day and where EDM meets you at the beginning. I’m fascinated with that. I talk a fair amount. I speak fairly regularly about that ritual at the beginning of the day from a wellbeing standpoint, where our company works well and is often brought in to work with organizations on change. That’s something you and I are going to talk about, and we focus specifically on the change that means creating a healthier place to work for people.

That’s sometimes partly the responsibility of the business, the organization, because structurally, there are some things that aren’t unhealthy that are a part of that organization, and then there’s the whole bit about people showing up as themselves and not knowing very well, having never learned at any depth or in a meaningful way how to take care of themselves.

 

That sounds odd, but it’s a reality. Let’s say a person’s showing up to work and they are bringing their trauma with them as they will and they do or they are bringing unhealthy habits or they are not at their best because they don’t know how to take better care of themselves so that they can be more ready. That then becomes either something we look away from and potentially ignore, or we roll up our sleeves so that it becomes the way you would get involved if it were somebody you loved, and you wouldn’t stand oddly by. EDM is high energy, as you said, and it’s intense. How does that meet the morning for you at the beginning of the day? How does that serve you?

I’m a big believer that your actions influence your mindset, not the other way around, and I’m also a big believer that execution drives strategy, not the other way around. I don’t believe in creating a big round strategy and then go figure out how we execute it. I believe in executing the A/B test and figuring out what works, and then that goes into the strategy.

It’s the same for me when it comes to mindset and action. No person wakes up and goes like, “I’m super high energy going to attack the day.” I know a few people that do, but that’s a hard place to force yourself to get into. I do the opposite. I listen to EDM and then I get into that mindset from EDM music and the same with working out like I’m a huge Barry’s Bootcamp fan, for example, and partly because of EDM music that they play in the class, but that’s the other thing like you don’t have to get yourself into the mindset to then go work out. You go work out and that will then get you into the mindset.

I build much of my routine and habits around like I need to do this, and then that will get me into the mindset. The same with work or whatever it is. I pack my calendar with meetings, which gets me into a creative state of coming up with great ideas for the business. I’m not someone who can sit on a Saturday afternoon and Socrates and think about a lot of creative ideas. I need to get myself into that mindset by taking the actions that I know will get me into that state of mind. That’s what EDM does for me. It gets me into a state of mind of high energy, high excitement, creativity, and excitement about life in general.

That resonates with me personally, and I think about what I even did as part of preparing for not speaking with you, not having a show, but being in the right space. As it turns out, we are doing this on a Monday. I had a great weekend. It’s no different from when I was 10 years old, and I’m a lot more than 10 years old now, but I never want the weekend to end. I love what I do. I love work. I work all the time, but weekend is weekend or downtime is downtime. There are things that are enjoyable to do. Monday can be a bit of a slog for me. It has been.

When I was a lawyer, I used to get depressed on Sundays. It would start early in the day. It wouldn’t even be Sunday night. It used to be like it was nighttime when I was in school, and knowing Monday, it’s like going back to that right or whatever. That’s the student I was or my enthusiasm level at the time. As a lawyer, I would feel it like earlier in the day. I could feel the heaviness of things being back to that. I don’t feel that at all anymore. I know that when I wake up on Monday morning, having had a great weekend, I need a little something.

My spiritual practice or work on the mind, which is still the catalyst for everything we create, is fundamentally the hardest work I have ever known, but there’s a hack to that and music is that hack for me as well. I hopped in the shower and I turned on this old Colin Hay music that I love, that I am crazy singing out loud in the shower. It changes the energy in me that ultimately is a catalyst for better thinking. That’s what you are saying is that the cart and the horse for you are that action and the music being one of those action steps that will then change your thoughts, especially if your thoughts are not maybe the most empowering at a certain point. Am I tracking that right?

Yeah. You are tracking that right, and it sounds like it’s the same for you, like turning on the music in the shower and then you get energized by that. I know many people are like, “I don’t feel great or I’m not in the right mindset.” They start procrastinating and they don’t get things done. They allow their mindset to affect them to a greater degree instead of accepting that, “Now I don’t feel fine, but I’m going to do A, B, C and I know that that’s going to turn me into this state of mind that I need to be and to get these things done that I want to get done.

We don’t have to be helpless in the face of our thoughts. I don’t love the word hack so much. I’m not going to use it again, but it’s like a way around that. We don’t have a workaround for our thoughts. We are stuck for some length of time and they can screw up relationships, deals, and so many things.

I find that so many people are also very self-judgmental. Instead of observing how they feel and what they think, they judge themselves all the time. They then judge themselves for not being in the best aid or feeling a bit off instead of accepting themselves. I’m very big on self-acceptance. However, I feel like that’s okay. What can we do about it? Not every day has to be a 10 out of 10 day. More people would do better with a bit more self-acceptance.

It’s fine to have a bad day and then have these actions that you can take to change it if you want to or don’t change it if you don’t want to, but don’t dwell on judging yourself for emotions or feelings or thoughts that you have. There’s no point in judging yourself or how you feel because you feel the way you feel, and that’s what it is.

It’s meaningful to have options, and what I love about what you shared is that’s another way to look at it. Jensen, the CEO of Nvidia, has talked about this idea of being in proximity to opportunity, like the tree of opportunities. When the apple falls, you want to be there to catch the apple as it falls off the tree or if not, then be the first one to pick it up from the ground when it’s done.

Implementing A Ready-Fire-Aim Strategy

I’m saying even in our own company, I remember bringing that back to our leadership team and saying, “How do we create more opportunities to be in proximity to the opportunities?” That’s also an aspect of what you are saying is that when you execute it, when you said execution drive strategy, on some level, you are saying that you put yourself in the way of opportunity, in doing so, you’ll learn what works and what doesn’t work and what could be done differently. I want to get more from you on what that means and what that looks like. In your work with organizations, how do you implement this ready, fire, aim strategy?

Overall, what you were saying is, like putting yourself out there, starting to execute, like doing something is usually a big step for many people. Start doing something right and start testing it. Many get stuck in this all-or-nothing mindset where we need to do ten things or none at all. Instead of like, “Let’s start with 2 and see how those 2 go,” we can always reiterate that we can always pull back and double down.

Many transformation attempts fail because they look great on paper but start to go sideways when the rubber hits the road. Share on X

Having that feedback loop with what you are doing and being able to measure it and see what works and doesn’t work ultimately goes back into strategy. We see this happening all the time in corporations where they develop. They spend millions and billions on developing great, beautiful strategies and then it all fails when it comes down to execution in the field.

That’s why we still have the statistic of 70% to 80% of transformations fail, 70% to 80% of change fails because it’s on PowerPoint, it looks great, but then when the rubber hits the road or the plan hits the people, then things start to go sideways. That’s where many are going wrong because they spend too much time and money on that first strategy and planning phase and way too little on execution.

If you look at the dollars being spent in these areas as well, you have around $180 billion a year that is being spent on strategy consulting and then $10 billion spent on execution. 180 versus 10, and that’s where I’m in favor of flipping that a bit to do more execution, see what works, what sticks, what doesn’t work, and then be able to pivot and iterate from there.

I’m also a big advocate of feedback loops in the work that we do in change activation, having very tight, real-time short feedback loops instead of what many organizations do, which is a 90-day feedback survey or an annual NPS even worse, and seeing how it lands once a quarter, but then you’ve already lost 3 months and 3 months is a very long time when it comes to implementing a strategy. Having those tighter feedback loops around execution, knowing what lands, how that works, and what doesn’t work, and being able to then bring that back and implement strategy are crucial to succeeding in change and transformation.

That sounds like a big mindset shift that’s required to embrace that. I want to get your sense of how people meet that with you and how they respond because it feels to me like I can hear people thinking or saying, “That’s wasteful. We could burn up a lot of resources, time, energy, and money in doing something only to learn it doesn’t work. Shouldn’t we think about it first? Shouldn’t we plan ahead? Shouldn’t we be super dialed in before we start putting shovels in the ground and things like that?”

When you meet that mindset, which is clearly one that is risk averse. I was a lawyer for many years. I know that internally in companies, the legal departments are often like the department of no. There’s a classic risk aversion there and also a desire to be safe and a fear of what wasteful mistakes look like. How do you meet those objections and that mindset of risk aversion?

I would flip that and say that what is wasteful is spending all of that time and money on strategy before you come to execution. If you think of $180 billion spent on strategy and an 80% failure rate, that’s $144 billion going to waste. If that’s not a waste, then I don’t know what it is. You should still spend on strategy and planning and still do that work and put the time into it, but it’s the extreme of 90% plus going into that and very little to execution, and I believe in a 50/50. By all means, do strategy and planning. That’s also key, but start execution earlier, get feedback earlier, get data earlier and start smaller instead of going out and doing 1 big bang and based on the strategy that we took 2 years to develop and then it falls flat in 3 months. That is a waste, if anything.

It’s a bit like constructing a ladder and you climb it only to find that you put it on the wrong wall. There’s a lot of that. There’s also the sunk-cost fallacy where people start to build something or they are working on something and at some point it may even seem like it wouldn’t be a great idea but they have got so much sunk time, energy, and money sunk into that, whatever that is that they won’t pivot there. I wrote a book called Pivot some years ago. That’s also one of those wild things to see people continue to pursue something that they intuitively note will die on the vine or not work at all.

Sunk-cost is such a big fallacy, and then you also have an ego in all of this like someone owns the strategy, someone is the executive sponsor and then it has to work and they put their names on the line and their careers on the line. That’s another danger zone where you don’t want to have too much ownership and ego going into it before execution because that’s also an area where you see things going wrong.

Why Leaders Should Encourage Making Good Mistakes

It sounds like leadership has to encourage mistake making and I’d love to get your philosophy on that. When you are working with senior leaders on this, I’m assuming that in helping an organization to flip the script, it could very well be that they have been a planning organization and that’s their process. We plan and then we execute, and you are saying execute then plan and the flipping of that script’s going to require some faith, it’s going to require some people to buy in, get other people to buy in. I would think that among those things you have to deal with is how leaders encourage others to make good mistakes. Is that accurate and what does that look like conversationally or from a mindset, behavioral change standpoint?

The problem is that too many people see the world as black and white, like good or bad, right and wrong, failure or success. Whereas in reality, it’s more around what can we learn from that. How can we trade? How can we change a bit? How can we improve? That’s the mindset that more leaders need to inculcate.

I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s like going out and saying, “Failure is great or encouraging failure, encouraging mistakes. It’s more encouraging learning. Focusing on the things that will take you forward and move you forward, and focusing on things like, what have we learned from this? What is going well? What is not going well? How can we remove what is not going well and learn from that and how can we double down on what is working?”

I see it more as a gray zone iterative process rather than we are failing or we are succeeding because that is also what instills a lot of fear in people. Nobody wants to fail, nobody wants to make a mistake, and especially in large corporations, because it’s always punished and you lose your job and you need these successes to have in your pocket for the next career cycle and your promotions and so on.

The binary mindset is dangerous when it comes to driving change and transformation and you need to have more of an iterative process and that’s why the execution side is so important, and with those feedback loops and the measurement and being close to the execution as opposed to separating strategy and execution, which now tends to happen in one linear process, and I believe it’s much more of a loop. It’s a cycle.

What many organizations do is they start with a strategy, might take them a year or so or even two years and then they move into execution as the last phase. It needs to be cyclical. It needs to be that you execute that feed into strategy, you try the new strategy execution and then that execution, the data and the feedback feeds into strategy.

Change is always on. We have to be constantly transforming. When we stop changing, we are basically dead in the water. Share on X

It’s always iterative and it’s always ongoing, and that’s the mindset that more leaders need to build in their teams because change is the only constant and there’s always going to be change going on. We have moved from this mindset of change being very ad hoc and you had it as like 1 initiative, maybe every 2, 3 years. Whereas now, if we look at the last few years, there has been Gartner research around this. If you look at 2014, there was an average of 1 or 2 changes impacting every employee every year.

You had 80% of people go like, “That’s great. I can get on board. I can get behind that. That’s super.” Years later, in 2024, that number of changes was 15. Fifteen changes per employee per year. Now it’s about 30% that say, “Yeah. I’m on board.” You have this big activation gap when there’s more and more change happening and people are less and less inclined to be on board with it.

That is another mindset that needs to be changed again from leaders many times and saying that change is always on. We are always going to be iterating, we are always going to be transforming because the moment we stop changing, then we are dead in the water. It’s this always-on iterative mindset more so than a success failure mistake. That language isn’t very helpful for change.

Language is so important and it’s not semantics, but I’m sure again hearing the voice of other people that may be reading this too, they say, “Calling something learning versus calling it failure is fine from a language standpoint, and yet in actuality for stakeholders, for shareholders, for people that are strictly looking at the numbers of the bottom line, something doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. Something costs the company. Money didn’t produce enough of an ROI or any ROI.” They are not going to call it learning. They are going to call it a failure. They are going to call it a mistake.

Why do you think that is though? Anything that doesn’t deliver an ROI, we have learned that this doesn’t deliver an ROI. Why do you think so many still call it a mistake or a failure?

That’s the point where our conversation is leading, and I believe we are going back to childhood here. I will speak on behalf of our company. Frequently, I will do keynotes and things like that and I will stand on the stage and I will ask people. When we were younger and we made mistakes, what did we learn? Everybody always does the same thing.

They always use the same exact word I say when you make a mistake there and everybody gets consequences. They know this and we know this from grade school and where I’m leading or trying to get to in that conversation is to talk about the kinds of things that produce that fear in us that will make that binary or a choice between survival and death because ultimately making mistakes is dangerous to your health and when you succeed or when you get it right then you survive and maybe even thrive.

Everything Starts From The CEO

It’s that prehistoric in our amygdala and in our thinking, and so the question I want to get to with you is when that’s working in the DNA of an organization because fortunately, organizations are still made up of people. It’s not algorithmic. There won’t be any fear in an algorithm. We know that. There won’t be intergenerational trauma impacting how the algorithm responds to a situation, and I hope that that’s never the case because I don’t expect it to be, certainly not in our lifetime. People are still going to run things, people are going to be in charge, and people are going to impact other people. A lot of the ways that we impact each other are through our fear, doubt, and worry.

I wanted to get a beat on when you are speaking with these leaders and you are saying, “To get people to adopt a philosophy of continuous learning of regular feedback loops, part of that is that people have to let go of the fear that making a mistake or getting it wrong will lead to their demise, will lead to them being fired.” I’m curious how that conversation goes with you. Do you talk about perfectionism at all in any of that? I don’t know if you delve into that aspect at all.

What you mentioned around school is very true and I have a lot of issues with school and how we have taught historically. I’m not sure if this has changed. I haven’t seen it inside a school in a long time, but the way that we were brought up was very much around, like it was right or wrong. You get points in an exam, and when you do group work, it’s usually one person pulling the whole piece. For the rest of it, you are not encouraged to work together or to experiment or fail. It’s very binary again. That’s a big problem.

When it comes to corporations, I think that CEOs always underestimate their power and how much influence they have. Many CEOs think that they can do whatever CEO job they have and the rest should do what they should do, but things like leading from the front, what you reward, what you encourage, what you call out, all of these things have such a big impact.

It’s both my own realization as a CEO myself and how much weight your words carry for good and bad, and that means that you can influence and shape culture and people and value so much more than any head of culture ever can. CEOs consistently underestimate their own role and the role that they play in change and transformation especially.

I have met CEOs of companies with 10,000, 20,000, 30,000, and 40,000 employees who ask me, “Can we turn off the feedback loops in Tigerhall?” I don’t want to know what people have to say. I don’t want to know what they think because in Tigerhall, they get feedback on what is working, what isn’t working and how is this going on the ground and what people think and how they receive it. I have had CEOs ask me, “Can we turn it off because I don’t care?”

That then sets the tone. If you look at who they promote, who do they bring into their executive leadership team, what behaviors do they reward? All of that trickles through. Sometimes, you might say that, “It’s about the entire ELT, the whole leadership team and all the leaders we have in the organization.” Sure, it is, but everything starts from the CEO and that is so critical.

 

If we look at many organizations where you have a very strong founder and CEO, and are strong in the sense of having a strong identity, like Marc Benioff of Salesforce, for example, Very strong identity and influence on Salesforce. You can see that his influence on how Salesforce operates is that it would be a completely different company if he wasn’t there, and that’s true for so many other companies.

Satya Nadella is another great example of how we change the culture of Microsoft. There’s one person. One role has a very big impact. If the CEO is not on board with the type of culture that you want to create in the organization, the type of change you want to drive, the type of transformation, it’s going to be hard.

When I look at the companies that we work with. Tigerhall works primarily with large enterprises, a lot of Fortune 500 firms, and I see a very direct correlation between how the CEO behaves, what they do, what they value, and how well the transformation is going. The word transformation is treated as something separate. They have their own office, they run their own thing, whatever, and the CEO is doing their own business as usual. It’s always going to fail. That’s something that isn’t talked about enough. We talk a lot about leadership in general, but the CEO has such a big role to play in this, and they underestimate how big their role is in making it successful.

It’s amazing timing. I was on a debrief call before you and I got together for this discussion and the debrief was for a speaking engagement that I had. We always do that. We love to close the loop with that organization for two reasons. One, to find out, did we hit the brief? What could we learn? What worked, what didn’t work? What could be done differently? That’s the feedback loop.

In having that conversation, one of the interesting things that came out was the fact that they’d had a great event, spectacular in this instance because I had a bit of time, they brought me in to do both a keynote and a workshop and I had a bit of time with this group, the CEO was involved. They were seated at a table in the front for both segments, and I had participation and engagement. It was wonderful. They were thrilled with everything they had heard and the surveys that came back. It couldn’t have been better.

I said, “What did the CEO think?” We had these interactions together and I was curious and they all blankly stared at me. There were 6 people on this, my team and 6 of their folks. Everybody was waiting for somebody else to say that the CEO had said something to any number of any one of them about the event, but there was nothing.

I thought to myself, I didn’t say anything at the time to them, but in a follow-up call with a member of my team, I said, “Can you believe the fact that it’s been two weeks and this event team put on a very involved event, cost them millions of dollars to do it. Lots and lots of people from all over the globe.” I won’t say which company it was, but there were a number of regions represented, and here this events team, this production team had not heard from the CEO at all about what a great event it was or how great it went and I thought to myself, “That is remarkable.”

It was like whether it was onto the next thing or whatever that might be, and I don’t want to be judgemental because it’s possible that there’s going to be some kudos, there’s going to be some congratulations or something that they will hear about in the future or maybe in some meeting. Two weeks after the fact, and there wasn’t anybody on that call that could say that they’d heard something positive from the CEO about how that event went.

It’s like you say, what’s the influence? I get it. That person’s probably very busy. It’s a lot of moving parts. They have a lot of responsibility and lots of fish to fry. Stakeholders that they have to answer to, a board of directors, and whatnot, but what does it say? What does it mean when that CEO doesn’t understand the potential influence of their actions or their inactions in this case?

Silence is also an action. Not saying anything, I’m not highlighting it. It also means that it’s not important and that could also be used very effectively. If the CEO e doesn’t give something attention, then you know that this is not as important as the areas that the CEO gives attention to. That also signals something, but silence speaks louder or even louder than words many times.

The True Value Of Human Beings

Interesting that that came up. I’d love to talk about change in the context of the world we are living in. As you said, it’s the one constant, a paradox of sorts, that is the one thing we can count on, which is that things will change and change continuously. The velocity of change has only increased.

I see in the organizations that we work with, the ones that we don’t get to work with, frankly, a lot of the time, it’s because they are hearing things like our budgets got cut or we are in a spending freeze or we are in an exercise. Another one of those interesting euphemisms for we are laying people off. Reorganization. In other words, the umpteenth reorganization.

It’s interesting that we still have not evolved out of this cycle of fear and reaction because you and I both know, as does anybody reading this, that several years from now or whenever it’ll be, they will be hiring those people back again. They will be looking to get that talent back and wonder at that point and have us come in or we’ll have a conversation when they have a budget about why there’s limited psychological safety in that organization. Why do people not trust one another? They will wonder why and how that is impacting their bottom line.

It’s because every ten seconds, based on fear, you react this way and people know that it’s not us. It’s us or them. It’s binary, like you said. I’d love to get your take on what you are seeing in the world of change and whether you see there being a shift, whether it’s in the DNA of the CEOs taking shape, because again, demographically there’s a shift happening.

Do you think we’ll ever break free of this cycle where despite the fact that change is a constant, predictably speaking, CEOs and other senior leaders will respond in fear-based ways to changes in the marketplace or changes in the ecology that we are all living in because that’s what seems to be a very negative repeat cycle, like a vicious cycle, if you will?

Silence is also a form of action. If a leader does not pay attention to something, the entire team will consider it unimportant. Share on X

The bigger question that humanity will have to answer in the next ten years is what the value of human beings is. That’s ultimately what we are getting into because if you take everything happening now with the political climate, you take the corporate values if you like out with anything that is people related like screw DEI and layoff everyone.

Some of that sure is right and some of it might not be, but that’s very much the sentiment is not very people-centric, and then you take AI on top of that and how AI replaces much of what humans are doing. The big question that we need to grapple with, the conversation that we need to start having is what is the value of humans and where does that value come in for corporations or in a capitalist society in general?

If you look at a capitalist society, which is the one we live in, humans’ value usually comes down to productivity, results, output and a lot of ROI on capital inefficiency. If technology can do that better, even in areas that aren’t as manufacturing, for example, where it’s a process or even creativity, art, writing, when those areas are not human-led either, it leaves us with a question of what is the value of humans and do we need to repurpose that from productivity and output on capital to something else?

Corporations will always want to generate a profit and that’s the role of corporations to generate a profit for the shareholders, but what is the role that humans are going to play in that if AI and technology can do it so much better from a productivity angle already and very likely soon even from an intelligence and creativity angle?

That’s the bigger question when it comes to all of change, and the answer to that will determine what is the role employees are going to play in an organization and then what CEOs do we need to have to lead that organization or lead that group of people if there are any people left in organizations.

To me, the answer to this is almost, or I would be comfortable if everyone is in the same boat. My biggest fear is that it’s going to be 2 camps and we are going to live in 2 parallel societies where there’s going to be extreme inequality. We are going to have the AI tech lords who run Silicon Valley in the world and then you are going to have everyone else. That’s not going to be a good outcome, but if we are all in the same boat, we are all chilling on our UBI, and we have our Universal Basic Income and can do other things other than working for a corporation.

I know and one project now, for example, called U-BI, they are focused on how we can fund UBI with personal data, for example, and sell our personal data to these large AI corporations and that’s how we then fund the UBI, which is an interesting concept as well. If we are all in that boat, we are going to be fine. It is dangerous if it becomes the value of human beings like the bottom 50% of human beings, let’s say evaporates entirely, but the top 50% of human beings don’t care about that value of human beings and the bottom 50% evaporates. That’s the bigger question that we need to answer, which will then lead to the type of change that will be ongoing. What type of CEOs do we need and how are corporations tackling change in the next several years?

I won’t digress with this other than to say I have been thinking about something in a similar context, but in terms of personal GDP, the way we pay debt or how we manage to stay ahead of an upside-down balance sheet in the United States anyway is to produce the world’s greatest GDP. Continually, you have to produce more and spend more to pay the debt service on everything you’ve borrowed in everything you owe.

As long as you stay ahead of that somehow, well, then you don’t go bankrupt or you don’t lose supremacy or whatever it might be. I feel like there are so many reasons why people feel anxious and we are not going to get into this conversation, but there’s a lot of anxiety and people are always asking us why are people so anxious and burned out.

A lot of times, older demographic folks will say that the Millennials or the Gen Zs are not as resilient and we teach about resiliency. We say, “No, that’s not true.” “They are not as strong. They don’t have as thick a skin or whatever it is.” There are reasons that we sense are not being talked about, and one of them is the pressure that collectively everybody feels to continually be producing and spending. Producing on the level is more consuming more, but then having to pay for it. If you could imagine the anxiety that you feel and maybe this has happened to you in your life, everybody’s had the experience at some point of spending more than they could afford for something.

Feeling this anxiousness in your body, in your brain, and everywhere, how do I now figure out how to pay for this thing? It’s in the ether space. It’s a part of how we sense what it means to be alive that you have to be on all the time. Being on all the time on some level means being productive, even though we know that that’s not the case, and being productive means that somehow or another, you are producing enough to survive to stay ahead of it.

That would produce anxiety for anybody. It’s understandable in that regard and certainly given, as you say, where technology may displace and replace. There’s even more understandable anxiety about where’s that going to leave human beings and that divide between the people that have been able and are able to continue to consume more and produce more and therefore be ahead of the curve and those that couldn’t, can’t possibly consume enough and produce enough and that they are somehow the divide is wider and they are falling below the line of what matters is disturbing to say the least.  I’m not sure we are leaving anybody with anything.

Leaving on a high note.

Episode Wrap-Up And Closing Words

It’s something we have to consider because the one thing that we all have that nobody can take from us, it’s a birthright, is that choice to determine how we feel. We think about things and, ultimately, what that means to us. The Nelson Mandela example is great because everybody knows he was imprisoned for 27 years in a tiny little cell, and then is released and becomes a leader of a magnitude that is rarely seen in the history of humanity. Remarkable.

Yet, during the 27 years that he was in prison, though he was a prisoner, he maintained the one basic freedom that we all have that no one can ever take from us, and that’s the ability to think. His thoughts and ultimately how he was able to manage his thoughts over an agonizingly excruciatingly long period of imprisonment, physical imprisonment meant that he was able to, at that point in time, leave and lead.

 

That, to me, is a profound lesson that despite everything that you and I have talked about and even that, “Where’s this all leading? Where’s this all heading?” Ultimately, we are in charge of them and have control of the one most important thing in our lives, which is our thinking process. I have no doubt that with the right thinking, we will find our equilibrium even in the midst of what is this sea of constant change. Do you agree with that?

Yeah. Humans have figured it out before, and hopefully, we will figure it out again.

I think it’s the one thing Darwin said that everybody thinks he said that it’s survival of the fittest, but that’s not what he said. It’s not the fittest that survives. It’s not the most intelligent of the species that survive. It’s the most adaptable to changes in the environment. That’s what determines our ability to survive and to thrive.

I enjoyed the conversation. There’ll be more information about you, your work and the organization, and how you support organizations in the midst of that change. I love so much of what you shared. It’s got me thinking about a number of different things, including that question, “What is the value of humans?” That is going to be an ongoing question, and I’m going to noodle on that more than a little bit from here. Nellie, thank you again for your insights and your outsights.

Thank you for having me on the show, and lemme know when you have the answers to the value of human beings. I’d love to discuss that here. Thank you so much.

To be continued.

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I so love that conversation with Nellie. We started out talking about EDM and ended up with the conversation being about the value of humans going forward in the next hundreds of years. What will the value of human beings be? What is the role of employees? What will the role of employees look like in organizations, given everything that’s happening in the AI tech universe?

We talked about CEOs and their power and the influence that CEOs have that maybe many of them don’t even realize. I love that throughline. We talked about change and flipping the script on the way that many change management processes go. Many times, it’s a plan. It’s organizing a set of KPIs and outcomes and then executing on those things. What Nellie was sharing with us was that often, those great plans, the best-laid plans, go nowhere because the execution is lacking, or they never take place at all or fail so lacking.

She, in her organization and her philosophy, they flip the script and they start with execution, and that is not to be wasteful, but simply to learn to understand how you learn from the feedback that you get, the things that work, the things that don’t work, the things that you learn could be done differently. A continuous feedback loop is opposed to a binary structure where there’s success and there’s failure and everybody’s trying to stay on the side of success and avoid the side of failure.

I loved that conversation, loved what she shared, and some tremendous, valuable insights. I recommend looking into the work that Nellie does further and more information about that. We’d love to hear from you. If you love this episode as much as I did, please share it with friends, family members, colleagues, and let us know your feedback. You can go to my AdamMarkel.com/podcast to leave a comment.

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If you’d like to track your own resilience, get a snapshot in time, how resilient you are feeling and what that looks like mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually speaking, even, then you can go to RankMyResilience.com, and three minutes or less later, you’ll have those answers for yourself. It’s confidential and completely without charge. It’s something we love to do and happy to support and hope that you’ll take advantage of it. I would say thank you again for being a part of this community. Ciao.

 

Important Links

• Tigerhall
• Nellie Wartoft on LinkedIn
• Pivot
• Resilient Leader Assessment™

 

About Nellie Wartoft

Nellie Wartoft is a Swedish technology entrepreneur reshaping enterprise change activation with Tigerhall, the platform she launched in 2019 to drive large-scale transformation engagement for global businesses. Backed by over $10M from investors like Sequoia Capital and Monk’s Hill Ventures, Tigerhall powers transformation for Fortune 500 giants across 32 countries, with teams in 12 markets.