Best of 2021 | Organizational Thought Leadership | Jayshree Seth, Jeff Kavanaugh, Melanie Huet, and Thomas Kolditz

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Clips from interviews with Jayshree Seth, Jeff Kavanaugh, Melanie Huet, and Thomas Kolditz.

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Over the holidays, we took a look back at the conversations that have stood out from 2021. We were honored to speak with some amazing thought leadership practitioners, but a few really stood out, and we wanted to share them again:

Jayshree Seth, Chief Science Advocate at 3M, shares the way she is turning the scientific methods and processes used in the lab to also promote science advocacy. She talks about how to create a clear picture of goals, raise awareness, and break down the barriers and boundaries that impede scientific progress.

Jeff Kavanaugh is the Global Head of the Infosys Knowledge Institute, the research and thought leadership arm of the Infosys diversified technology and digital firm. Jeff helps us understand the idea of “Quantum Organization,” his method of doing many things at once, and challenges us to see how even small changes can bring about drastic impact.

Melanie Huet is the Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of Serta Simmons Bedding. She provides critical insights about using modern marketing tools like TikTok to elevate awareness and spark conversations, and the challenges of transforming a long-established brand into a modern must-have.

Thomas Kolditz is the author of Leadership Reckoning and Director of The Doerr Institute for New Leaders at Rice University. Thomas shares The Institute’s two-fold mission: to create a powerful and widely available leader development experience, and to improve the quality of leader development in higher education everywhere.

These were inspirational guests, with meaningful messages. We’re thrilled to be able to shine a spotlight on them once more, and wish all of you the very best in 2022!

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Transcript

Bill Sherman Over the holidays, I took some time to revisit the conversations that I had in 2021, and I selected a few of the conversations that have shaped my thinking, kept me turning ideas around and around, and I’d like to share some of those conversations with you. Thank you for listening and I look forward to more great conversations in 2022. I’m Bill Sherman and you’re listening to Leveraging Thought Leadership. Ready? Let’s begin. I think I’ll start with the intersection of science and the work that you do in the lab versus science advocacy. And one of the things your active scientist and you’ve collaborated and have 72 patents. That is a huge endeavor and a huge career defining piece on your own. Right. And now you’ve layered on to this the science advocacy of changing how the world perceives science and of all events to life. And you said something that I want to explore. You said the process you used in the lab is the same as what you do when you’re doing science advocacy. What does that mean? Explain that for me a little bit.

Jayshree Seth Yeah, I think so. What I do in the lab is to develop products that are that solve customer problems or they solve market problems or fill in the needs that have existed. And so what does it take? Essentially, it takes you understanding what the pulse of the market is. It takes you understanding what the trends are. It takes you understanding what the competitive landscape is, what are the products that are already out there? What is the customer doing? What are the jobs to be done? Where is the technology that we can offer? What are the building blocks that we need to still build in order to make this a reality? So it’s kind of like a very multifaceted approach. And that’s exactly what I took to this, because you start with a clean sheet of paper and you say, okay, what are we doing? We’re trying to advocate for science. Well, what do people think about science today? What are some of the gaps? What are some of the barriers? What are some of the boundaries? So looking at that, I exactly said, okay, there’s three things we’re going to do A, B and C. We’ll keep it simple. A, we need to raise the awareness and appreciation of science so that people acknowledge its importance and don’t have this apathy, which is very clear They do. B is about barriers and biases and boundaries, and we have to break those down. People are saying, I’m not a genius. That’s why I didn’t go into science or I’m not, you know, left brain, right brain or I’m a girl. Science is not for me because all the images I see are of nerds and geeks and evil and loner and maverick scientist, which doesn’t inspire. And C is about the context of science. It’s about championing in a context that is critical to people, humanizing it and talking it about in a way that it makes you human lives better. So you better not be, you know, unaware of this. So that’s exactly kind of what you do with the customer, right? What are the needs? What’s holding them back? What is the context in which this will become an important product? So I think the idea is the same building these tiles, what I call building the mosaic. And I talk about bringing all these tiles together and it’s not a puzzle that everything fits. Exactly. So here’s a little bit of art to applying this, right? And you pulled all these tiles together. You take a step back and you say, that’s what I’m seeing. That’s what we ought to do. That’s what we got to build. And then you go from there. So it’s exactly that approach I use, and I think that is why I got called upon for this role, because people wanted someone who could take a clean sheet of paper, have a point of view about it, actually speak to it and do that authentically. Having a point of view that was giving insights to people, which is also the process of developing products for a customer filing, for patents, coming up with new ideas. So I think those sort of came together and I think there’s another aspect to it also is all the different experiences that I’ve had in different areas, different markets, different roles, roles leading, you know, that are the leadership roles, but you’re not developing a product, for example, a role in the Asian Employee Resource Network and leading that or leading some outside projects and things like that. I’m assuming that there are all the reasons why they picked me, because I feel like when you are doing something new, you’ve got to feel like you are able to authentically come up with a plan which is similar to what you have done in these other roles. But drawing upon your experiences in all these different areas to make it uniquely valuable.

Bill Sherman Going back to Velocity, you talk about curating thought leadership with 200,000 people, I would expect. Act. And you’ve talked about helping capture some of those people who have brilliant insights and surrounding them with writers or producers and those folks so that the ideas stand in the spotlight and they move faster. Is that a fair summary of some of the work that you’re doing with the Institute?

Jeff Kavanaugh It is. And I’d like to hit the pause button just for a second and consider this discussion of duality. It’s both a discussion on thought leadership. It’s also just running the business. So what I’m talking about is actually running the business. So we sell more and do more and do a better job with our employees. So, yes. To what you’re saying. And we’ll get to that. But it’s not just the thought leadership thing. It is fundamental to the strategy of the company itself, which is why it’s interesting how things weave back and forth between, you know, do we do a good job for our employees with education and training services? And after a certain point where it works well, we then go sell that service externally. That’s kind of the world we’re in. So maybe it’s different than some others that But back to what you’re saying. There’s another concept. We call it the quantum organization. Besides being a cool name, the idea that you can do many things at once, maybe simultaneously. We found that there’s a false ultimatum. I think people have it’s either a, you know, on the one side, it’s a. Old school, you set things up, you’ve got scale efficiencies and you set up your channels in your far-flung operations and things must flow and well, you just deal with the fact there’s some delays and overhead and some bureaucracy. The other extreme is, no, no, no, we want a thousand garages in Silicon Valley all cranking out the new stuff and all. It’s unfettered craziness. And because the best stuff arrives at the surface, the trouble is how do you scale that? You know, it’s a bunch of little, little islands if you bring them together. And you have what we call micro enterprises, you know, calm, small teams, we will call it. And these are small teams. The Scrum teams or unit teams are going to launch an idea, a new process, a new unit, write something up. It’s put as many people as needed from different disciplines and do it, then you might think that’s just the whole Silicon Valley garage thing. No, no. What you also have is this central group, a small central group. Has a platform. Tools, We call it a digital runway to launch ideas. It’s really a shared digital infrastructure.

Bill Sherman Yeah, it’s just shared services so that they’re not reinventing the wheel each time on infrastructure.

Jeff Kavanaugh And the important thing is that is central because then everybody can plug into it. When good things happen, they can be shared. And you don’t have to have like, for example, if you wanted to create a blog, you don’t need to go out and build a server in a stack. You can go into medium, onto WordPress, onto whatever, and instantly stand on the shoulders of those giants. Created something. Maybe you pay them, maybe you don’t. The fact is you’ve got a platform.

Bill Sherman That problem has already been solved. Right, Right. And that’s the same for if you’ve got a micro enterprise within the larger organization. They don’t have to handle some of the questions that a startup working with either friends and family funding or, you know, seed capital has to solve on how do we turn the lights on.

Jeff Kavanaugh Right. And then you think, well, that works. But does it work at scale? Yes. Hundreds and thousands of these simultaneously take a venture capital mindset and say lots of them get little bits of funding. And even if the funding might just be you’re still on the company payroll and you get to do this thing for a while, that’s funding. And at some point the best ideas get more and more funding. They get more resources, they get promoted or formalized into a unit or a product or a function. And others say, okay, disband, do something else. And so it’s almost like at these VC stages, do you go to your next level? And it’s that combination and continually it’s amazing to me how fast we’re able to move or how fast you need to be able to move. So we decided that six weeks is the right number. Six weeks is it’s long enough to get something done. It’s also short enough that people don’t grow bored and you can make these small changes and change your habit and go because if you try for a huge change, you know, once a year, every two years, then first of all, it’s a huge change. No one likes huge change. The market probably moved past you, and yet you can’t do something every day and just lose in the churn. So every six weeks make a change and might be more functionality. It might be slightly changing something small in the org. And of course every quarter, you know, thinking about things. But we found that to be effective and you do that. The compounding effect of a series of changes that continues to improve things every six weeks over, you know, a year, you move the needle quite a bit.

Bill Sherman If you are enjoying this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, please make sure to subscribe. If you’d like to help spread the word about the podcast, please leave a five-star review and share it with your friends. We are available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and all major platforms as well as at LeveragingThoughtLeadership.com.

Bill Sherman How do you take a company that has been around in various forms for over a century, almost a century and a half now, and start bringing it into new forms of telling stories and engaging with customers and partners in new ways. Talk a little bit about that transformation.

Melanie Huet Yeah, it’s been a tremendous journey and a lot of learnings for myself personally in growth. And when you think about how to drive the transformation, a couple of things that I’ve learned in this job is one of the first things you have to do is you have to understand the culture that you’re operating in. So there’s a period of learning and listening and just understanding where you are. And during that time, it’s really important to build trust. So making sure that the people that you’re working with understand what your motivations are and they feel like they’ve been heard. And once that trust foundation is there, then you can start to bring in all the elements of a transformation. So here’s the place where we’re going to disrupt, here’s how we’re going to act differently, here’s how we’re going to behave. And I have found that specifically at this company, people are really willing to follow. As long as they understand where you’re going. So an important part is to communicate, communicate, communicate. Where are we headed? And then help them understand what is their role in delivering the transformation. And then you can actually move pretty quickly.

Bill Sherman Well, and I think this is one of the places where thought leadership connects is there’s a responsibility when you see a vision for the future to share that back and make it accessible first with your own internal team so they understand. Where are you going? How is this changing? But also how does it relate to who we’ve been before? And I want to ask you about an example of that. So I know that one of the projects that you sort of were instrumental in was recognizing there was a need in the market for young buyers looking for their first bed. Talk about that process and that transformation process within the organization and then how that led to product and also telling that story to a new audience.

Melanie Huet Yeah, that was a fun one. So we realized that the Simmons brand was virtually unused. In fact, it was just on some promotional product because we had separated Simmons from the rest several years prior because consumers get confused. Serta, Simmons, Sealy. All right.

Bill Sherman Right.

Melanie Huet And so we said, let’s do the recipe here. And that’s a little bit easier. Remember, so Simmons brand is sitting out there and we understood there was an untapped white space in the market that nobody was really going after this first purchase, this first bed for the young consumer entering the marketplace with not a lot of disposable income. And so we said, okay, this is an opportunity for us. So we were the first company to have a variety of Gen Z insights. We took those consumer insights and understood that what they wanted was a hassle free crash pad. So just a place to crash and also a place to surf and watch movies and do the other things that are part of their lifestyle. Because most of them either live in some type of bedroom or apartment or small space. And from there, I walked into the boardroom with a lot of men in their 50s to two 70s and said, We’re going to launch Simmons on TikTok’s 150 year old brand. And they’re like, What’s tick tock? And it’s going to be Gen Z and it’s going to be completely different. And I showed them the advertising and the look and feel, and I think they thought it was the craziest thing I’d ever seen. But they trusted me and off we went. And it’s been a huge success.

Bill Sherman So let’s unpack that a little bit further, because this is a wonderful example of not only having to tell a news story within the organization, but then also reach a new audience. So let’s start with the board. How do you did you prepare and present that in a way that if they’ve not encountered TikTok before, you know how did you make this accessible to them?

Melanie Huet Sure. It was part of my larger overall strategy, which is I had laid out a house of brands and said, Here’s the role of each brand in our house of brands and how we’re going to go attack the marketplace with unique and differentiated products. Because one of our issues was our products had become too similar. So I laid the groundwork of the overall strategy and then showed this this whitespace and our ability to move quickly. And from a business perspective, that was a pretty easy sell in for them. And then they just had to trust on the creative and that I mean that’s what I do on the right.

Bill Sherman But at the same time, the question of what is TikTok and do people make purchasing decisions based off of it is a hurdle for some people because if they haven’t made purchasing decisions based off of other social media, then you’ve got to leap to TikTok in that format.

Melanie Huet That’s right. Yeah. And so I did explain to them who’s on Tick Tock and what it means and how it’s one of the fastest growing platforms. And they were like, Well, I don’t understand how a bed would integrate into Tick tock. And we had a really great advertising agency, the Burns Group, which. We are still engaged with on Simmons and they came up with snooze a palooza.

Bill Sherman So that’s a great phrase.

Melanie Huet It had it was very culturally relevant because all of the concerts have been canceled and basically all of the outings and events that young people do have been canceled. So we said, you know, we know you’re here, has been canceled, but you can join snooze a palooza. And so the idea was you fall down backwards onto your bed and then you make a tech talk about being at a concert or doing something fun. And it generated 5 billion impressions. Now we have some something for 1 billion. And this thing just exploded.

Bill Sherman Let’s talk a little bit about the state of leadership education in higher ed. What is the current state today and how would you describe it? If I’m a undergrad who’s just starting, so I’m going into class of 2025 on average, what is my experience in terms of leadership education in the U.S.?

Thomas Kolditz Sure. So for the most part, as you go to your university, you will see that in the mission or the vision statement. They say that they’re there to develop leaders for society and for the world, the next generation of leaders. And then you will find they do almost nothing to accomplish that. Broadly, across the university, they may have they may have a leadership minor where academic courses are taught. They may do leadership research in the business school or elsewhere, and often they have small little competitive boutique programs with, you know, 100 or 150 students in it for a university of 10 to 20,000. But the reality is higher education is failing in that mission. And so what we want to do is create the conditions where they can self examine the intellectually honest about what they are not doing and then improve. And we’ll help them any way we can. We share everything out of the Gore Institute instruments, business models, best practices, strategies, leader development plans. Everything we do is available to anyone who wants it.

Bill Sherman So I want to double click on something you said that leadership education is failing. A term that I’ve heard you use is leader-tainment. What is leader-tainment and what is leadership reckoning?

Thomas Kolditz Okay, so leader-tainment is something that’s common across the leader development industry and what we refer to there as things that people enjoy doing that are painted as leader development or leadership related. But in fact, when you check using the proper outcome measures and metrics. It’s just entertainment. There’s no lasting benefit to it. And in many schools, there are robust programs to take students on, retreats to take them to road courses, to have them listen to leadership speakers. And pretty much none of it works. If we’re talking about increasing their capacity to lead. Some of these things are really popular. And so we wrote a book that came out in January called Leadership Reckoning. And in leadership reckoning, we paint this picture of excessive use of lead attainment and the failure of higher ed, But then that’s just the first chapter The rest of the book is here’s how you measure outcomes, here’s how you design programs, here’s how you can do this at half the cost of classroom instruction. And so it really is a blueprint for colleges and universities that want to improve. And we sent three copies each to the chief academic officer and the president of the top 200 schools in the country. And so we’ve been visited by university presidents and chancellors and had a lot of interest from higher ed because the typical reaction for most people when they read leadership bracketing is they look at what’s happening in their college or university. Is this if you’re right. And so, you know, we really feel like we’re providing a service. We don’t want to embarrass anyone. And we certainly are competing with anyone. If other universities get better than us at this, we’ll be deliriously happy. You know, we just want to have more and better leaders because we think and Mr. Gore, I think, also thinks that we’ve been disappointed by leadership in the past 5 to 10 years in terms of what it’s doing for our country. And we want to improve that.

Bill Sherman If you’re interested in organizational thought leadership, then I invite you to subscribe to the OrgTL newsletter. Each month we talk about the people who create, curate and deploy thought leadership on behalf of their organizations. Go to the website. OrgTL.com and choose join our newsletter. I’ll leave a link to the website as well as my LinkedIn profile in the show notes. Thanks for listening and I look forward to hearing what you thought of the show.