The future’s here and Brody’s here to help
In 2009, Canadian entrepreneur and venture capitalist Leonard Brody started looking at why companies were failing at innovation.
As corporates struggled to reinvent themselves after the global financial crisis, he found their fundamental approach was wrong. Back then, innovation meant talking about business models or technology, Brody says. ‘‘The problem with that was, at a fundamental level, that actually had nothing to do with innovation at all.’’ It turned out that the biggest component in innovation was people, he says.
‘‘It was human behaviour and human adaptation that was really driving the changes that we were living through. It was not technology.’’
Brody says the world changed in 2009 as people moved from a time when they talked about, and raced to keep up with, the future to a moment when the future arrived.
‘‘That moment is literally a moment when we are rewriting this planet from the ground up.
‘‘We are literally pressing the reset button on the operating system of Earth.’’
A partnership between Brody and New York’s Forbes magazine, The Great Rewrite, has tried to break this down and the results will be published in a book next year.
It covers sectors from healthcare and government, to retail and media, aiming to canvas the ‘‘industries being rewritten as a result of the biggest behavioural shift in history’’.
‘‘This will be a moment in 500 years when your great, great, great grandchildren will read about as probably one of the most pivotal moments in humanity and how we adapt to it,’’ Brody told a Fairfax sales conference in Auckland.
Brody’s pedigree is strong. Not only has he built large companies (including United States citizen journalism site NowPublic), but he is the person behind some of the world’s biggest brands, and who the world’s wealthiest families and royalty turn to to build and think about innovation.
His list of clients include Facebook, Pepsi and Warner Brothers. Brody works with these companies internally to build systems and structures rather than helicoptering in as a consultant.
The rewrite, he says, is about systemic change in that whatever someone or something does in their industry has ripple effects wider than were often unintended.
And innovation really just means doing things better.
The rewrite is not a survival guide for the next 10 years, it is a framework for how to tackle it, Brody says.
How do you take people along with you on the rewrite internally and externally along with you at the fast pace of change?
‘‘Organisations need to change at the bottom and the top.
‘‘Part of being dragged along is being able to compensate people success or failure. Companies haven’t yet figured out how to compensate people on failure and that’s a critical component of being able to advance.
‘‘You have to create a new committee - and smart companies are starting to do this now - which is the futures committee or some equivalent.
‘‘Their job is to hold the board and officers accountable for a direct vision of what this company looks like in a decade. It’s almost like you’re creating your own intelligence division - an organisation whose job it is to know what
"I believe there are two kinds of people in the world. There are entrepreneurs and there are workers. And the world needs both." Entrepreneur and venture capitalist Leonard Brody
they don’t know.
‘‘There is also the bottom up. If you keep hiring the same kinds of people, you’ll get the same kinds of result.
‘‘And I think you have to start putting a quota in place.’’
What does entrepreneur mean to you and how do you know if someone is one?
‘‘I think entrepreneurship has crossed into this genre where it’s like superhero status. Where it’s kind of the thing that you aspire to be whereas 30 years ago you aspire to be a CEO or a songwriter.
‘‘But I’m not a big believer that you can train someone to be an entrepreneur. I think that you can train someone to work with entrepreneurs, and you can train entrepreneurs to become better managers.
‘‘I believe there are two kinds of people in the world. There are entrepreneurs and there are workers. And the world needs both.’’