John Hagel

Location
United States
Areas of Expertise
Communities
Purpose
Artificial Intelligence

Expert Bio

John Hagel III is a globally recognized management consultant, author, speaker, and entrepreneur with over 40 years of experience at the intersection of business strategy, digital transformation, and organizational change. A former partner at Deloitte, John founded and chaired the Deloitte Center for the Edge, a Silicon Valley-based think tank dedicated to identifying emerging business opportunities ahead of the mainstream executive agenda. Prior to Deloitte, he served as a principal and Strategy Practice leader at McKinsey & Company, where he also founded their E-Commerce Practice, and held the role of Senior Vice President of Strategy at Atari, Inc., in addition to founding two Silicon Valley startups. John is the author of several best-selling business books, including The Power of Pull, Net Gain, Net Worth, Out of the Box, and The Only Sustainable Edge, and his most recent title, The Journey Beyond Fear, published by McGraw Hill, explores the psychology of navigating change in an increasingly complex world. Through his new venture, Beyond Our Edge, LLC, he partners with organizations and individuals seeking to anticipate the future and drive exponential impact. A faculty member at Singularity University and a Board of Trustees member at the Santa Fe Institute, John is a leading voice on digital disruption, complex adaptive systems, and business transformation. He has been widely quoted in The Economist, Fortune, Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, and the Financial Times, has won two Harvard Business Review best article awards, and has been recognized as a top industry thought leader by the World Economic Forum and BusinessWeek.

Sessions

Building Successful Movements for Change

Machine Learning, Community, Social Media, Policy and Legislation, Lifelong Learning

This session will help those who see the need for broader change in our economy and society to learn how they can help movements for change achieve greater impact. Based on extensive study of successful movements for change throughout history and in different parts of the world, it appears that three elements need to come together to drive change: inspiring opportunity-based narratives, cellular forms of organization, and focus on leverage points that can drive significant impact with modest effort. If these three elements are effectively woven together, participants can drive rapid and widespread change.

Participants will understand why most movements today are achieving only modest impact, learn about the elements that can help movements achieve greater impact, see how these elements can be applied in movements, and hear case studies of movements in the past that have adopted this new approach.

Expanding Return on Attention

Machine Learning, Social Media, Policy and Legislation, Value Creation, Digital Transformation

In a more and more competitive global economy, we are all challenged in gaining and retaining the attention of customers and other stakeholders. While organizations tend to focus on short-term metrics like return on sales to assess performance, those are lagging indicators, telling us how we've done in the past.

The organizations that will thrive in the future will expand their horizons to focus more on return on attention. Return on attention has many levels, but it requires understanding the evolving unmet needs of customers and other stakeholders and what can help them to achieve much greater impact in ways that are meaningful to them. Within this broader perspective that looks ahead, organizations can then focus on ways to help customers and other stakeholders to achieve that impact and significantly increase return on attention, both for those they are serving and for themselves.

Participants will:

- Learn how limiting their current performance metrics are

- Understand the importance of many different levels of return on attention

- Explore how technology can help to measure return on attention

- Hear case studies of institutions that have begun to adopt this new approach

How Technology Can Restore Our Humanity

Machine Learning, Exponentials, Policy and Legislation, Human Potential, Digital Transformation

This session will focus on how technology can create far more rewarding work for everyone. In a world of exponential technology change, many people are worried that AI and robots will take away more and more jobs and leave people unemployed.

The reality is that most work today consists of routine tasks that are highly standardized. This work can be done much more effectively by technology. The opportunity that it creates is to redefine work for humans so that we can all create much more value by working in tandem with the machines. Work for humans can now focus on addressing unseen opportunities to deliver more value to our customers and other stakeholders. This is work that all humans can embrace and find fulfilling. And it is work that can help all organizations unleash exponential value.

Participants will:

- Shift their perspective on technology and work

- Realize there is significant potential to be unleashed

- Understand how to unleash that potential

- Hear case studies of institutions that have begun to adopt this new approach

Leading for Exponential Impact

Exponential Organizations, Disruption, Change Management, Lifelong Learning, Digital Transformation

This session will focus on the untapped potential for leaders to pursue exponential growth in a rapidly changing world. It will focus on three pillars:

- Zoom out/zoom in – a very different approach to strategy adopted by some of the most successful technology companies that focus on two horizons – 10-20 years and 6-12 months. It is a powerful catalyst for leaders to reframe their perspective, scan the horizon and prioritize their short-term initiatives

- Leveraged growth – rather than narrowly focusing on make vs. buy as the two options to drive growth, this focuses on a third option – driving growth by connecting with and mobilizing a growing number of third parties to add value to customers and capturing some of that value for the company

- Learning platforms – these are very different platforms from the ones everyone talks about today. The primary design goal of these platforms is to help all participants to learn faster by creating new knowledge (not just sharing existing knowledge) through action that is pursued collaboratively.

While each of these approaches is powerful in its own right – the true exponential potential can only be unleashed when all three approaches are brought together. This will require a fundamental shift in leadership. The talk is relevant for all institutional leaders.

Participants will:

- Understand why existing approaches to leadership are so challenged

- Learn about emerging leadership approaches that can create far more value with far less resource see the role that emotions play, both as potential obstacles, but also as potential drivers of more impact

- Hear case studies that illustrate the potential of these new leadership approaches

Mastering New Approaches to Learning

Machine Learning, Accelerating Change, Policy and Legislation, Lifelong Learning, Digital Transformation

A world of mounting performance pressure and exponentially expanding opportunity requires us to find ways to learn faster. In this context, the most powerful and necessary form of learning is learning in the form of creating new knowledge, not sharing existing knowledge. It's a form of learning that everyone needs to master, not just people in research labs or innovation centers.

This form of learning requires different ways of organizing within our institutions, but it also has profound implications for how we connect beyond our institutions. It will lead to a very different form of ecosystem – a dynamic ecosystem – where the focus is on building relationships that help all participants to learn faster. These ecosystems can scale much more rapidly when they are supported by learning platforms where the primary design goal is to help all participants to come together in ways that will help them to create new knowledge faster and achieve greater impact.

Participants will see that there is a very different form of learning that needs to be embraced, realize that this form of learning requires different ways of connecting with others, understand how relationships can evolve to accelerate this form of learning, and hear case studies of institutions that have begun to adopt this new approach.

Organizing for Impact

Machine Learning, Exponential Organizations, Policy and Legislation, Change Management, Digital Transformation

This session focuses on the need to re-think how we organize all our institutions to achieve much greater impact. Our institutions today are largely organized into hierarchical, command and control structures that are designed to pursue scalable efficiency. In a world that is rapidly changing, this form of organization is becoming increasingly inefficient.

We need to organize to pursue scalable learning, where everyone in the organization is focused on learning in the form of creating new knowledge so they can deliver more and more value to their customers and other stakeholders. This form of learning requires people to come together into impact groups - small groups of 3-15 people where participants can build deep, trust-based relationships around a shared commitment to accelerate learning and increase impact. These groups then need to be connected into growing networks that can scale the learning and impact.

Participants will see the significant limitations of current approaches to organizing, learn about new approaches to organizing that can deliver greater impact, discover ways to implement these new approaches, and hear case studies of institutions that have begun to adopt this new approach.

The Imperative and Challenges of Corporate Transformation

Uncertainty, Disruption, Policy and Legislation, Change Management, Digital Transformation

This session describes the forces that are generating mounting performance pressure on the global business landscape and the imperative that it creates for different approaches to the business. To effectively respond to these pressures, institutions will need to do three things: redefine strategy, re-frame innovation and rethink transformation.

In redefining strategy, companies will need to abandon the five year plan and adopt a zoom-out, zoom in approach that focuses on two very different time horizons in parallel: 10 – 20 years and 6 – 12 months.

They will also need to re-frame the challenge of innovation, moving beyond product and process innovation to a higher level of innovation that re-imagines the rationale for large institutions.

If they take that challenge on, they will also have to address the challenge of large-scale organizational transformation and adopt a very different approach from the conventional top down, big bang approaches to transformation. The most promising approach to transformation is to scale an edge until it becomes the new core of the institution.

Participants will:

- See that transformation will be much broader than most people imagine

- Understand why corporate transformation encounters such strong resistance

- Discover pragmatic approaches that can make tangible progress quickly

- Hear case studies that illustrate the potential of these approaches to transformation

The Power of Pull

Machine Learning, Social Media, Policy and Legislation, Value Creation, Digital Transformation

This session will focus on how the forces reshaping our global economy require a fundamentally different approach to marketing. Our large institutions today are all driven by a "push" based approach to marketing – we seek to reach out to promising prospects and intercept their attention with advertisements that will motivate them to buy our products and services. This approach to marketing is becoming more and more challenging because more and more options are competing for the scarce attention of customers.

In this changing economy, our institutions need to master the power of pull. They need to find ways to motivate promising prospects to seek them out and to then unleash word of mouth so that more and more prospects will seek them out.

Participants will:

- Confront the growing challenges of traditional push-based marketing approaches

- See the platforms and tools that can help unleash the power of pull

- Learn about the approaches that can magnify the power of pull

- Hear case studies that illustrate the potential of pull-based marketing approaches

Unbundling the Corporation

Machine Learning, Disruption , Policy and Legislation, Change Management, Digital Transformation

This session will help leaders of businesses to anticipate a fundamental restructuring of these businesses. Today, virtually all companies have a bundle of three very different business types within their corporation:

- Infrastructure management businesses – scale intensive, routine processing activities like operating a large factory, managing a logistics operation and/or operating a data center

- Product and service businesses – designing and deploying innovative products and services that meet specific customer segment needs

- Customer relationship businesses – connecting with, and developing a deeper understanding of, the needs of customers

These three business types have very different needs and requirements for success, yet they are tightly bundled together within a single corporation. In a world of intensifying competition, leaders of companies are going to have to choose which of these three business types to pursue and ultimately shed the other two business types.

Participants will:

- See that these three business types have conflicting needs and requirements for success

- Understand the competitive forces that will make the bundle of these three business types more and more challenging

- Learn about a framework for making the appropriate choice of which business type to pursue

- Hear case studies that illustrate the potential that can be achieved through unbundling

The Journey Beyond Fear

Successful Leadership, Mental Health, Positive Psychology, Leadership, Change Management, Organizational Culture

This session will expand the horizons of institutional leaders by drawing their attention to the role of emotions in shaping their own choices and actions, as well as the choices and actions of the people with whom they work. In a world of mounting performance pressure, more and more people are experiencing fear. While this is very understandable, it is also a very limiting emotion.

Leaders need to find ways to help people move beyond the fear and cultivate emotions that will help them to achieve impact that is much more meaningful to them. This session will focus on three key pillars in the journey beyond fear:

- Crafting opportunity-based narratives

- Drawing out and strengthening the passion of the explorer

- Amplifying impact with learning platforms

Participants will:

- Realize how important emotions are in driving performance

- Recognize the profound limitations of the emotion of fear

- Understand the tools that can help them move beyond fear

- Hear case studies of how these tools have been applied

Alternative Strategies for an Exponential World

This session will focus on how long-term trends are re-shaping our approach to strategy and the new forms of strategy that can lead to exponential impact. In particular, it will focus on three new forms of strategy that have significant potential for impact:

Shaping strategies – Focus on restructuring global markets and industries to create new positions of advantage that will be difficult to challenge

Zoom out/zoom in – Focus on two time horizons in parallel – zoom out is 10-20 years and zoom in is 6-12 months

Leveraged growth – Focus on ways to generate more value for your customers by mobilizing the resources and capabilities of a growing number of third parties

Participants will:

Understand why existing approaches to strategy are becoming less and less effective

Learn about new approaches to strategy that are becoming more feasible and powerful

Hear case studies of organizations that have already pursued these new approaches to strategy and the impact they have achieved

Artificial Intelligence – The Missed Opportunity

This session will explore a white space that has yet to be fully addressed in the realm of artificial intelligence. Most of the applications of artificial intelligence today are focused on sharing existing knowledge and doing current activities faster and cheaper. The untapped opportunity in AI involves helping people to master a new form of learning – learning in the form of creating new knowledge and practices rather than simply sharing existing knowledge and practices. Many of the tools in AI are uniquely positioned to support this new form of learning. Participants will understand the new tools and capabilities of AI that are not yet being actively embraced, see why this new form of learning is becoming so essential in a rapidly changing world, and hear case studies of early initiatives that demonstrate the untapped potential of AI.

Exploring new forms of ecosystems

This session will explore new forms of business ecosystems that have the potential to transform markets and industries. Everyone today is talking about ecosystems, but the ecosystems that have emerged so far are static ecosystems – they focus on connecting existing resources and capabilities. Digital technology and business practices are evolving to support a very different form of ecosystem – dynamic ecosystems. The primary design goal of dynamic ecosystems is to create a network of relationships that will help all participants to learn faster and significantly increase the value that they can deliver.

Participants will:

- Understand why existing ecosystems have evolved the way they have

- See how new forms of ecosystems can create and deliver far more value than conventional ecosystems

- Hear case studies of early efforts to develop these new forms of ecosystems and the impact that they have achieved

Expert Bio

Sessions

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