Nurturing our Disruptive Nature
Charlene Li, analyst and best-selling author, shares her perspectives on business disruption, personal bravery, and having the courage to discover the future.
Episode Notes
Disruption and change have been with us forever. But disruption and change at work, in business, in organizations—somehow it seems harder. It's unpredictable, it's uncertain, and it's stressful. And we often back away from it as a result.
In her conversation with Jesse, Charlene Li reflects on a career spent empowering everyone—from frontline workers to CEOs—to embrace and move forward in the face of disruptive change. She discusses her experience growing up in Michigan as a woman of color, and how it led her to embrace her own disruptive nature. She describes the structural attributes and convictions that allowed organizations like Adobe, Amazon, and Southern New Hampshire University to see the needs of their future customers - and overcome deeply entrenched barriers and elements of the status quo to serve them. And she offers a poignant look at why organizations in every industry must embrace Diversity and Inclusion now if they are to reach their potential for growth and impact.
Guest Bio
For the past two decades, Charlene Li has been helping people see the future. She’s the New York Times bestselling author of six books, including her newest release,The Disruption Mindset: Why Some Businesses Transform While Others Fail, and Open Leadership, as well as co-author of the critically-acclaimed book, Groundswell. She founded and ran Altimeter Group, a disruptive industry analyst firm, and has been a respected advisor to Fortune 500 companies.
Named one of the Top 50 Leadership Innovators by Inc., and one of the most creative people in business by Fast Company, Charlene has appeared at events ranging from TED and the World Business Forum to SxSW. She has appeared on 60 Minutes and PBS NewsHour, and is frequently quoted by The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, USA Today, and The Associated Press
Useful Links
+ Episode Transcript
Charlene Li [00:00:03] One of my favorite exercises when entrepreneurs come to me would be entrepreneurs come to me like, what's the next best thing to be developing? You're an analyst, tell me or take out your crystal ball and tell me what should we be investing in? Go follow a working parent around for a day, ideally a woman, and see what problems they come up against. Solve any of those problems. You got a billion dollar company. These are the intractable, hard problems. And I'm on all these investor lists and I see tons of great ideas, but, if you're trying to create big change, then just look around you. There's change opportunities everywhere.
Jesse Purewal [00:00:50] From Qualtrics industries. This is Breakthrough Builders, a series of conversations with people whose passions, perspectives, instincts and ideas fuels some of the world's most amazing products, brands and experiences.
Jesse Purewal [00:01:06] Hey, it's Jesse. You know, disruption and change have been with us as humans forever, their natural forces. But disruption and change at work, in business, in organizations, somehow it seems harder. It's unpredictable, it's uncertain and it's stressful. And as the last year has taught us, we can be resilient and adapt to big changes in big ways. But there are lots of little things day to day things, personal and interpersonal things that we can do to contend with change and embrace disruption in our lives and in our careers as well. To go deeper on this topic, I wanted to talk to Charlene Li. Charlene is the founder of Altimeter, an analyst firm and a source of thought leadership on disruptive technologies and strategies. Charlene's a profoundly empathetic leader who I believe brings a signature blend of optimistic wisdom and practical guidance to all that she does.
Jesse Purewal [00:01:56] In addition to being a founder and leader, Charlene's the writer of four books on disruption, digital transformation and leadership. And she's a wife, a mother of two and a woman of color who grew up in Detroit, Michigan at another, very challenging time in the world,.
Charlene Li [00:02:13] You have to realize this is back in the 60s and 70s. And as an Asian-American, the daughter of immigrants, there were very, very few people who looked like me. In fact, in my neighborhood, we were the only family of color. And so being an outsider in so many ways made me a disruptor. Just by showing up in the room, I was disrupting things. So I got very used to being the only in the room. And I think that really prepared me to feel comfortable being the outsider. I feel comfortable having a dissenting point of view,.
Jesse Purewal [00:02:46] Charlene, for the past few decades, helping people see into the future. I've seen that you write that. Tell me how you do that and what that means.
Charlene Li [00:02:53] Well, I have been a long time analysts and as an analyst, my job is to look at the current trends and literally predict what the future is going to look like. I help people see their future and there's a big difference in that work. And it's enabling people to look past the barriers and the cocoon that forms around them because of their current situation. To break through that and see what the possibilities are,.
Jesse Purewal [00:03:19] Are the barriers you're helping people break through most often ones that are associated with their company's operating processes or culture or mores. Are they more personal boundaries? Where do you start?
Charlene Li [00:03:29] It's both when you can look beyond the company and see what's possible out there. It's looking at the possibilities rather than the barriers. That's one thing. And having the stories and examples outside are fantastic, but we oftentimes hold ourselves back. It's our beliefs that are holding us back and our collective beliefs as an organization that hold us back to achieving these bigger things.
Jesse Purewal [00:03:52] And Charlene, what's true about your origin story or your personal history that led you down a path of first being just interested and galvanized by the idea of helping people see their own futures? And what allowed you to pursue it?
Charlene Li [00:04:06] Again as a child growing up as a adult, I've always been driven by this optimism that things can always be better. I remember as a child driving all the time growing up in Detroit that we would drive everywhere for hours. And I just wanted my parents to just turn around and just talk with me instead of facing forward and drive a car. So I imagine that I could tell my little dashboard armchair on the side was this little computer or something. We didn't even have computers back then. But I could tell a car, just take us there and my parents could then talk to me. And so I've always been intrigued by the possibility of how we could make things better. The crazier the idea, the more intriguing it sounded. Like, how could we actually do that?
Jesse Purewal [00:04:54] Charlene, on the topic of disruption, it's one you think a lot about it's one you write a lot about you study it, you do research on it, you really help define it for lots of leaders that we both know. Tell me about why disruption and transformation are topics that you find so fascinating in particular,.
Charlene Li [00:05:10] By my nature, my strength is to go make things better and by definition, that means disrupting the status quo. So and I really love the idea that things can always be better. There are always problems that we can solve. So my my whole purpose is to help leaders thrive with disruption rather than just survive it. Again, that eternal optimism that we could always do better. What else can we do to make things better?
Jesse Purewal [00:05:38] I love that you put the human at the center of it. I think so often the writing is about the organization or the company or the category. It's really distinctive and I think more powerful in some ways that you go down to that. n of one, what unlocks does that create for people who have maybe worked their way through the disruption or transformation literature and then they find their way to you and it's a little more human. How does that impact and affect your work in the way you think?
Charlene Li [00:06:07] Well, I think the reason why disruption happens, the feeling of disruption is what gets in the way of us moving forward. Intellectually, we can think about all the business reasons to make this happen, all the technology reasons. I mean, all that is fantastic work. But when the push comes to shove, your body gives that edge and you're feeling awful. Guess what we do? We back away from it. That is just our human nature. And so one of the things I study is why do some organizations do this just so much better than anybody else. I mean, they're like the Energizer Bunny of disruption. They just keep going, whereas the rest of us are exhausted after just doing one disruptive change. And the key is they take care of those human relationships. They anticipate them. They actually do something that's counterintuitive. They put in a lot of order, a lot of structure, so that it's very clear how those relationships will work. So they remove the really difficult part of disruption, which is we feel completely discombobulated and they don't. They have structure in order to be able to feel like they're united and aligned on the change they want to create. So they're not trying to figure out all the crazy things that have to get done. And to personalize those is focusing on the change of hard work, of change itself.
Jesse Purewal [00:07:25] So in that response I'm hearing you explicitly say, don't lean into or create chaos in order to disrupt disruption is going to happen anyway. So tell me a little bit more about what structures turn out to be the most important to have in place or most important, to begin investing and creating if you don't have already in order to contend with disruption well?
Charlene Li [00:07:46] Sure, yeah. There is the sense that disruption equals chaos. And I am a huge believer in governance. It's a nasty, dirty word in most organizations. I love governance because if you have good governance, meaning good structure and process and policies that are focused on change, not reducing the change, but creating the foundation for change, then things go great. It's good governance, not bad governance that is there. And we just have so few examples of that because most processes are there to stop you from doing something rather than enabling you to do something. So when I think about the structure that's needed, think about what it is that can get you closer to your customer, closer to understanding just who they are, what are they doing, and then allowing that to bubble up through the organization. We think that the people who really hear the customer voice is marketing. It's not as if people at the front lines, the people in sales who are in customer service, but it's so distributed, there's no way for that to gain any sort of traction inside an organization. But I think if you have good processes to be able to bundle those things out, use artificial intelligence that is so widely available now to understand that voice of the customer, you have a winning combination there.
Jesse Purewal [00:09:08] OK, Charlene, let me come back on the technology point. Before we go there, I want to go all the way maybe back in time or at different philosophical level for a sec. So at some level, disruption's been around forever. I mean, literally, it's been around forever. One tribe goes in and invades where the other sitting on the savanna and they're rooted out and all the way up through all these conflicts we've had throughout time. And is it just that in the context of organizations that we somehow believe that because we created them and built them ourselves, that we should be able to hide from disruption and therefore business disruption somehow feels unnatural? Like why is it that this particular brand of disruption that lives in the capitalist structures of the pursuit of business objectives happens to be so visceral and so difficult to deal with.
Charlene Li [00:10:02] Because, we have been taught that if you are going to have a disruption, it's a bad thing that any sort of change is bad. I mean, we live in a Six Sigma world. I mean, the idea of really good management and good business processes is that everything runs perfectly smoothly. And if things change from that, you're a bad manager, you're a bad leader. But the reality is, if you stay in the same place where you are, it's not necessarily a good thing. It's good to things execute well. But the bad side of that is that things, petrify, that you never change, that you're never open to anything because things are perfect now. And the the biggest mistake, I think, that organizations and leaders and businesses have bought into is that things are perfect, that we aspire to things being perfect. Versus excellence. Those are two very different concepts, perfect means, there's an ideal of perfection, and we have to aim for it. Excellence means no matter what the situation is, we are going to be the best we can possibly be. Understanding that that circumstance could always possibly change. One allows for growth and one does not.
Jesse Purewal [00:11:13] So if I go back to your Detroit roots, I think about the assembly line, perhaps the platonic form of efficiency, right? Never shall a thing go wrong, lest everything stop. On the other end of that spectrum is nature disruption happening all the time. And I'm starting to think about, is there a Western centricity to being able to fail to contend with disruption if you go into different parts of the world and different business practices and folks who maybe grew up under a different ethos, do you find different cultures or societies are better able than we in the West are sometimes able to deal with disruption? Or is this globally experienced in the same way no matter where you are?
Charlene Li [00:11:53] You know, what's interesting is I talk about disruption all over the world. I mean, constantly, and I get the exact same questions no matter where I am. And it's fascinating that the leaders, the cultures, the organizations, the individuals all grappling with the same issue, which is why I believe this is a human issue, that we crave order while at the same time we crave change. Change is exciting. It creates adrenalin, but there's that bad side of it, which is chaos. We love order, too, but there's a bad side of which is atrophy. We need both. And so how do we get good at both? Because right now in business, we put a premium on order and we fear disruption. You need both to really thrive.
Jesse Purewal [00:12:37] Yeah. So your research, we go a little bit into your research. You've revealed three elements of organizations that are able to successfully drive and contend with disruptive transformation. The first of those is a strategy inspired by future customers to make Big Gulp decisions that on its own sounds really foreboding. But you've told these great stories in your books and we can let folks look them up of things like Facebook, looking to a new vanguard of customers or Adobe pivoting to the Creative Suite and Creative Cloud. So there are examples of it's gone well. How can a leader or a leadership team develop that personal confidence and then inspire that confidence in the people around them to bet not just on the changing future, but on that customer that might not exist?
Charlene Li [00:13:26] If we focus on the current customer of today, what happens is we're focusing on the customer today and assuming that they never change versus thinking and really deeply trying to understand, where is the market going? Where is that future customer? Understanding deeply, what is it that they say think, feel, and do, developing empathy for them and then aligning your entire organization around that person. When you do that, that gives you the impetus to invest today to make those hard choices today, to go after that future. And people will say to me, yeah, but it's not going to be profitable. How am I going to justify this to court to my shareholders? Well, that's what Adobe did. They knew that they were going to lose money for two years, and yet they stuck to it because they so strongly believed that this future customer was there and they went to the Wall Street and explained their vision for this and Wall Street believe them. So, yeah, Wall Street is always pretty smart if you tell them this is our strategic plan and we're going to lose money and invest in it for the next quarter and the next year for the next two years is what Adobe told them. We're going to lose money for two years because they could tell the story of the future customer. They were going to do this. And it was not an easy decision. It was really hard. And they got pushback from everybody. And yet the senior management absolutely believe this is the path to move forward with.
Jesse Purewal [00:14:51] Strikes me, there are a lot of people in the Adobes, the Amazons, others of the world, who maybe have developed conviction from really strong leaders around them to say, let's follow the path. How can a leader scale that? How have you seen the best leaders be able to scale themselves as contenders with disruption or savants in terms of being able to move towards that that future?
Charlene Li [00:15:16] Well, let's take Amazon, for example. They have 14 leadership principles that they run the company on. And when you interview, they pick one of those 14 and ask you, how have you exemplified this principle in your previous leadership skills? And you don't have to have a title of leader. You are considered a leader just by being an employee of the company. So those principles lay the foundation for how they will work. And then they have processes like the press release from the future, a one page press release that explains what this new service and product will do. And then they have a six page FAQ that answers every potential question about how this product works. And they will go through dozens of revisions, 50 revisions of this document until it is approved. Prime was written with that, AWS was written with that process. Everything goes through that process. And it's a way to align the entire organization around, this is how we create change.
Jesse Purewal [00:16:18] Bill Carr, who was the VP of digital media at Amazon, was on the show a couple of weeks back and he talked about that. And he said, if you had seen the PR FAQ doc for Amazon Prime Version 1.0 is like you would have run for the hills like no way. But the iteration and the commitment that you talked about is exactly what made it work. And so the good news there, I think, for leaders is you don't have to have the vision suddenly write it down and say there is the path. You can iterate your way to this understanding of a future customer and a future state.
Charlene Li [00:16:54] Yes. And here's the thing. Even when you set it down to have the contingency plans, to have the scenarios worked out. So because, you know, this is my objective, but the path may not always be straight. I don't have the perfect map, so I may have to take detours along the way. Or if this doesn't work out, it's actually adjacent to that. It's actually a little bit to the left. Not quite there. Right. So that is what a strong, resilient, disruptive organization does, is that they anticipate that the journey ahead is going to be tough. They know that it's going to be a really hard road, but it's worth going on because this future customer is so compelling. I like to say that you have to fall in love with your future customer, because when you're in love, you want to do nothing but to be with that thing that you love. You would do everything possible to serve them well and you will forgive any you know, that any transgressions or mistakes that you made along the way will be we will be forgiven. So you can make mistakes. You can stumble your way along that journey, but you will keep advancing towards the thing that you love.
Jesse Purewal [00:18:02] I love that. Thank you for personalizing that so much. I want to talk to you about how you help leaders achieve breakthroughs in these kind of incremental and then more monumental ways. I've read that, for example, one of your favorite techniques for getting teams started on the path is to go through this thought experiment of imagine that your business is not in the business that you're in today and what would you do? Can you just talk to me a little bit about what the experience is like when you run that with with folks and how you use that tactic to unlock new thinking.
Charlene Li [00:18:35] Sure. It gets them out of their current status quo. Imagine you're startup. Imagine that you're an alien from outer space. Imagine that you're the competitor. Imagine that you're an up and coming challenger and divide these different roles, any role way you want to take. But how would they see the opportunity? How would they see this future customer and how would they advance towards that customer? When you have all those strategies and you come back and say, which of these could we actually do? Add on all the assets that we have, because oftentimes these big, huge company companies go, oh, we can't compete against the startups in the space. I'm like, what do you mean? The startups have an idea. They have clarity of who the future customer is and that's about it. They don't have capital, they don't have talent, they don't have a brand. The list goes on and on about intrinsic values and assets that you have as an incumbent. The one thing that you have going against you are your current customers because they blind you from the future. These beautiful, profitable current customers are the ones that keep you from being able to see your future customers.
Jesse Purewal [00:19:47] So we talked about Energizer bunnies of disruption. We hit on Adobe, on Amazon. Are there companies outside tech, because I imagine when you talk to leaders about disruption, many of them are thinking about tech as the disruptor and maybe a legacy industry somewhere else in GDP that's being disrupted. Who have you seen really nail it as it relates to making room for disruption, welcoming it, contending with it and kind of coming out the other side, a more thriving version?
Charlene Li [00:20:19] Yeah, my one of my favorite examples is nowhere near tech. It is Southern New Hampshire University. And guess where this university is, right? In Southern New Hampshire. It's it has 3,000 students on campus. And when Paul LeBlanc took over as president, he was looking to go, OK, yeah, we got a pretty nice business here. But what's this group over here heading off in the corner? And another building is the online group. If you took a look at them and he goes, wow, there's something here, potentially this is something that we could potentially serve many disenfranchized learners, people who are coming back from the military, people who have been raising the kids and want to reenter the workforce or want to make a career change your nontraditional college or university student. Maybe we could serve them with this online tool. And he had gotten to know, Clay Christiansen, interestingly, because they used to play pickup basketball together and so he was hearing these ideas of disrupting things. So he goes, maybe I could disrupt education. So they they grew their online education space now to the largest provider of online degrees from an accredited university as a nonprofit. They are going to serve over a 150,000 students with revenues of over a billion dollars this year. And in especially in this time and space, that is become even more valuable, that competency of being able to learn at your convenience and time because of everything that we have to do now with distance learning, they had been doing this for 25 years, so they know how to do this.
Jesse Purewal [00:21:54] Charlene, my next question is in reference to what you cite in your work as critical success factors two and three for driving disruptive transformation. And those are. 1) Leadership creating a movement of disruptors and 2) having or building a culture that thrives with disruption. You mentioned these earlier in the discussion as well. If I'm not a CEO or a founder or if I'm not on the board of the company, if I'm a team member somewhere in the organization, how can I be a leader in the groundswell of that movement and help create the wave versus either jump on it or get crushed by it?
Charlene Li [00:22:31] Yeah, that's a great question. I get this question from so many people. You know, I'm just a fill in the blank. I have literally heard that phase. I'm just a blank. I can't change anything from every single role inside an organization, including the CEO and board members, like, oh, my culture is so intractable I can't change it. And I'm looking at them like you are the CEO. Come on, you're the CEO. You can change this. If you had a path forward, could you see what that future is going to look like? They just know what's there, doesn't work. But how do I get there? What's the path? How do I see my way through it? It's really foggy because your your is clouded by your current status quo. I can't see the break through it. So this is the hardest thing is what change could I actually look at and find? One of my favorite exercises when entrepreneurs come to me would be entrepreneurs come to me like, what's the next best thing to be developing? You're an analyst. Tell me your take out your crystal ball and tell me what should we be investing in? And I go,there are so many problems in the world. I'll tell you this. Go follow a working parent around for a day, ideally a woman, and see what problems they come up against. Solve any of those problems, you got a billion dollar company. Guaranteed. Because, you know, these are the intractable, hard problems. And I'm on all these investor lists and I see tons of great ideas. But they're this big, they're tiny because they deal with something that they think they could potentially deal with. And that's a great first step. But if you're trying to create big change, then just look around you, there's change opportunities everywhere.
Jesse Purewal [00:24:12] Let me return to the point you made about the CEO of the board member coming to you saying, I don't know if I can change this. And this might be a sensitive question, but to what extent is that a referendum on that person's courage, on that person's belief, about his or her own capabilities or willingness to drive change, to say that they might be locked even in that role?
Charlene Li [00:24:34] Well, I think it's something that almost every leader who is running a fairly large organization and I'm usually thinking of over 100 people, that culture is perceived to be the hardest thing to change. I can change the strategy. I can change things and the investment and where money flows, I mean, I can control that. As a CEO, what's really hard to control and change are the hearts and minds of people, how they think, what they believe and culture feels like it's an intractable force of nature that is really hard to deal with. And so when I talk to organizations that have gone through a huge culture change, I asked, what is it that you were able to do? And it comes down to two things. They were able to change your beliefs and they're able to change their behaviors. I'll give you a belief that holds many people back. We talked about this before earlier. Things have to be perfect. You know we can't make a mistake. Failure is not accepted. Well, guess what happens when you have that belief in people? People won't take any chances. They won't do anything outside of this one small, very little, clearly defined box. And even when the lights go out and say, go out there and take risks, we've got to innovate, they'll looking around on both sides of them like you go first. I'm not going to be the one to take the ball. You've done nothing to reassure me that if this risk I'm taking is not going to work out, that I'll be OK. So I don't know if it's so much a lack of courage versus the reality of the systems that we have built and layered on top of each other to reinforce these not great beliefs anymore in our in our organizations. They're very unhuman. They do not take into account the way that we actually want to work with each other.
Jesse Purewal [00:26:19] Well, as a parent, it's interesting. I can reflect on, as the journey goes, the penchant for risk taking and the natural curiosity of what's behind this rock or what's over on the other side of this cliff that does start to erode over time. And some of it's in a protectionist sense. Right, we want to continue to thrive and live. And, you know, it's it's a tough planet to live on unless you kind of know how to measure your risks. How do we cultivate more of an understanding of risk in our personal lives and then applying it in the workplace to business decisions?
Charlene Li [00:26:54] I think it's a very interesting way of how people deal with failures. Do you see it as a step back or do you see it as a way, a way to like, wow, I didn't know I couldn't do that. And you learn from it. One of my favorite quotes is experience is what you get when you don't get what you want.
Jesse Purewal [00:27:12] So it's actually a huge gift in some ways when you don't succeed. One of the things I've always said to my children is that ,and they're grown now, they're in college and they're still making their way through life, is you know, whenever something doesn't go their way, they don't get that good grade. They get a very mediocre grade like C's or something. Well, what did you learn about this? Was a response always, because when they could see that they could make mistakes in that the consequence of getting a C wasn't, I can't believe you didn't study hard enough. You should have studied more, was what what did you learn? And they go through that process to say, oh, I could have been more clear what the assignment was. I could have worked earlier or whatever it is. So I am so grateful that they had those early failures so that they could learn from them and build on those and become much more resilient. Have that grit that we often talk about. I feel like, you know, we talk about disruption and failures and growth and things as if you want it to be an easy button, give me the easy button, let me push it and it'll just happen. And I think the reality is that it is dirty, it is messy, it is painful, but that is how we get better at it. And unless we're ready to embrace that difficult journey, we're never going to go on it.
Jesse Purewal [00:28:38] Charlene, you talked about at the top your purpose being to help leaders not just contend with but thrive in disruption in addition to having your own purpose. I've found that you've been very helpful, at least to me, in thinking through my own. How do you counsel people to go about reflecting on and articulating, getting, you know, getting to their their purpose, something that defines who they really are so that there is that gravity, that centering mechanism as all of the change and growth and disruption is happening in the world?
Charlene Li [00:29:13] Oh, I've dealt with this very personally this past year. I had I was at a cocktail party almost a year ago now, and a woman comes up to me and she says, you know, not the usual place. And she's like, hey, what's your name, where you're from? And then she goes, Oh, hey, Charlene, saw my name tag. So how do you serve the world? And I thought that was so beautiful because even though I had this purpose, it wasn't at the forefront of my mind, it wasn't what I thought about every single day. And ever since that meeting and it has is something I wake up to every single morning. How will I serve the world today? I again, for my kids, I always said that they had to be to I wish that they would be two things. First of all, I wish that they would be happy and I wish that they would be contributing members of society in whichever way that would be. But they look outside of themselves and say, how can I have an impact on the world and one is going into computer science and business and the other one's writing music that is really serving her purpose and having an impact on people during these dark times. So how are we serving the world? How are we going to make a difference in some way in people's lives? And having that purpose gives you the psychic income that is that will sustain you through so many things.
Jesse Purewal [00:30:30] I want to ask you about the future of thought leadership, Charlene, because you are a thought leader. You're obviously an adroit writer and speaker and author and thinker. What do you think? Good thought. Leadership looks like five years out. Ten years out. Peter Thiel famously said we wanted flying cars, instead, we got 140 characters. I'm hoping we're not moving more to the 140 character version of thought leadership, but in some ways thought leadership and thinking has got caught in the crosshairs of things like content strategy and one to one personalization and some of the social media networks that we all use. So how do we get more to flying cars in our versions of thought leadership so that people can really reflect on and understand how to thrive in this world of disruption?
Charlene Li [00:31:20] First of all, they have to be your thoughts and they have to be leading things. And again, leading is about creating change. So the there's a discipline around putting your thoughts on paper or recording or a video. And the idea here is that you're ready to create a particular change in someone to do something. And that is what good leadership is. It's not about you. It's not about your ideas. It's about them. It's about your audience that you are writing to. I have always believed that good thought leadership, like any good product or service, starts with a design thinking approach. What is the pain point? What is the problem that you are trying to solve? If it can be really clear about who that person is and who you're writing to, your audience, that just makes like half of the work is done that you're solving and talking about the right problem. A lot of what passes for thought leadership right now is is is that surface level of analysis. I have seen very impactful short pieces, but they took a long time because it took that person really thinking and going down a different level. And so this is this is something that anybody can do. And people often say, how can I be a thought leader? Everything has been said already. I go. But they haven't been said by you. And the you talking to a particular person that you identify with, that you want to help you putting your perspective and your story to tell at this point and make it point to this audience in a new and different way is what really matters here, your thoughts and your leadership to create that change?
Jesse Purewal [00:33:03] I love the phrase they haven't heard you say it. And in saying that, I know you're not talking about regurgitating someone else's point, that you're talking about an authenticity of one's own voice. So let me personalize this just a little bit to help people in our audience who might be a little stuck on this point. You write in Open Leadership about growing up Chinese American. You're now a mother of two. You're an MBA, woman in business. And you've spoken about you've written about these the identity blend here and how it's important to allow this blend and to celebrate that blend, because it's a form of authenticity, the whole-self view. So how would you counsel people, particularly earlier in their careers, to develop a comfort with this whole self orientation in light of what we've been talking about, in terms of understanding risk?
Charlene Li [00:33:57] You know, it's one of the hardest things that if you are the only of whatever segment our identity that is in the room, whether it's real or perceived, you're using all of your energy just to belong. You just you just trying to be part of the tribe there, and the last thing you're going to do if you're not 100 percent comfortable is to raise your hand and go like I want to stick out like a sore thumb now and disagree with all of you. That just doesn't happen. And I just you know, I've been doing some writing recently about this disruption gender gap in that women see perceive themselves as less disruptive than men, even when they have all the same levels and characteristics of being a disruptive leader. Exact same levels, whole step lower across the board. So when I when I talk to people about this identity, it is one of the most personal, difficult things and journeys that you have to go on is to say who am I, what do I stand for, how will I show up? What part of me will I let be seen? How much of me do I want to be known? And we all do some sort of checking at the door and women and people of color and especially intersectionality of women of color do a lot more checking of the door. We do this what we call code switching. So we go from one way of how we live to another way depending on the situation, and it's constantly fluid. And sometimes we lose track, which is where the authenticity issue comes into play. So my my sense here is the more that we can put ourselves into environments and situations where we don't have to code switch as much, we can truly live our full selves. Those are the places where we're going to thrive. And it's incumbent on us as leaders of these organizations to understand when code switching is happening and to remove the need for that so that people can be a culture add rather than a culture fit. Two very different ideas we hire for culture adds not for culture fit. That's the right way to drive a culture, not to keep it the same, but to say how much richer and more diverse could it be and how do we include and how everyone feel like they belong inside of that culture.
Jesse Purewal [00:36:12] Yeah, by definition, you'll never get to disruption if all you do is fit. I mean, if you're incrementality is zero, by definition, you won't get there.
Charlene Li [00:36:23] Yet, but we've always had team members who are just a little bit off right they're just a little bit different. But do they, the key thing is, do they have the same values? Do they look at the world the same way? Do they agree to work together in the same way? Are they going to work on these relationships? And can their difference be a richness that adds to us that gives that level that punch of change, that's going to make us think and work and and believe in a different way than we did in the past. And that can be a huge culture add to us.
Jesse Purewal [00:36:52] All right, Charlene, last question for the builders listening here. If they wanted to know what is the most important piece of advice they should take from you, given the world as you've seen it, experienced it, and helped to build it, what would that advice be?
Charlene Li [00:37:07] I would say look out 18 months from now. Don't try to look out three years, five years and say, what can I build over the next 18 months? Because you're spending this would be a career, maybe your new product, a new business, a new project and working on whatever it is. Don't try to boil the ocean here. And in terms of career, this is something the best piece of advice that I learned at Harvard Business School was to think of my career at 18 month chunks, the six months you're going to be moving very rapidly towards mastery and then you get six months to enjoy that mastery and then you will be bored. So you've got to have a plan for that 18 month. You put that plan into action so that you have that new opportunity to come and take you along the way. That is what has kept me going for over 20 years as an analyst in that I keep thinking to the future. I'm executing like crazy for today, but I'm looking at that place, where am I going to continue my growth edge? And so it's been everything from taking on new assignments and new coverage areas to starting a company to selling a company to, again, just all this virtual stuff that I'm doing now to get my thought leadership out there with live streaming and podcasting. A Clubhouse is a new place that I'm experimenting with. Just fascinating for that's so much fun. But that's where that edge is found. And don't overthink it. Just don't overthink it and experiment a lot because that is where you have you don't know what's going to work. So you got to try a lot of different things.
Jesse Purewal [00:38:45] Well, Charlene, thank you for your time today and thank you for living the example of self disruption, all the new things you're trying and building and creating and being a part of. Hopefully the madness will lift sooner rather than later and we can be back together again. But in the meantime, thank you so much for sharing all that you did today. Thank you so much for having me.
Jesse Purewal [00:39:16] Thanks so much for listening to Breakthrough Builders. You can subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed the show, I'd be grateful if you could spread the word by leaving a rating and a review. It really does help other listeners find us. And please tell your friends. Breakthrough Builders is a production of the Industries Team at Qualtrics. The show is written and hosted by me, Jesse Purewal. Mastering by Nate Crenshaw. Post-production and music by Clean Cuts Audio. Part of the Three Seas Collective. Design by Baron Santiago and Vansuka Chidavijak. Website by Gregory Hedon and photography by Christy Hemm Klok. Special thanks to the entire Breakthrourgh Builders crew at Qualtrics, including Ali Rohani, Jeremy Smith, John Johnson and Kylan Lundeen.