Lawrie Philpott: Today’s Leadership Listening guest is Chris Outram. Chairman Emeritus of OC&C strategy consultants, and Chris is the O in OC&C, and Chris has had over 30 years of strategy consulting at board level in the US and also in Europe, corporate strategy, divisional performance, mergers and acquisitions and organizational advice are all part of his offer in the world of strategy.

Sparing Chris’s blushes, he’s one of the high priests of strategy consulting. Who is also Chairman of the Champions of Change for United World Schools. A charity dedicated to getting out of school children around the world into school. So, Chris, welcome and let’s get into Leadership Listening. 

Your Early Life Education University. Couple of three minutes on that.

Chris Outram: Well, thank you very much. It’s a little bit complicated, largely because my parents were in the Royal Air Force and therefore they traveled a lot and we traveled a lot. My brother, who was five years older than myself and myself were stuffed into a boarding school in Lincolnshire.

It was a good school, but it was pretty unexciting. So when I read an advert put up by our local council advertising a scholarship to a place called Atlantic College, which was an international six form college whose claim to fame was a combined academia with physical exercise. I thought this was rather good news and given that it was in a castle on the coast of Wales and the Bristol Channel it was also spectacular in terms of its location.

So I went there spent a couple of wonderful years. But it did mean I spent three years in my sixth form, not two. But it did allow me to not only do the three science A levels that I was doing, but I added economics to that which was an increasing passion and I managed to do that A level in four months.

And actually got the highest grade out of all my A levels in something I did in four months. I then went to university, but that was a bit complicated as well. because my parents wanted me to do engineering like my brother. But of course I didn’t want to do that at all. I really wanted to do economics.

So I looked around the UK and found the only university that would allow me to simultaneously read two degrees. One in mechanical engineering and one in industrial economics. So I went there. I believe to say it was a very good investment. In the sense that I came out and this sounds a little bit self-aggrandizing, which I apologize for. I got a double first on the economics prize and the engineering prize, so it worked out pretty well. I then went on to my first job, which was a very good job with the Mobil oil company which was quite a peach of a job in those days. But sadly, in the six month induction period, we fell out badly about where they were going to put me.

They wanted me to build a computer model of the Coryton Refinery, and the last thing I wanted to do in the world was spend 18 months building a computer model of the Coryton Refinery, So we parted ways. I joined Air Products, became a management accountant, which was terrific. Then joined a company called CCL Systems, which was a small company, a subsidiary of big company. I won’t go into detail of that.

At that stage, I got the call to go to INSEAD. And when I say call, it was a call in the sense that I’d applied to INSEAD business school every year since I left university. And in this final year they said, if you don’t come this year, we’re going to rip up your application form.

So I went. Which is where I discovered strategy consulting. I joined the Boston Consulting Group where I spent a couple of years. I then went to one of our clients as head of strategy. They were based in the Netherlands. That was fabulous experience. But they were on their fourth CEO in 18 months.

And I decided this wasn’t going the right way. So I came back to the UK. It was a recession in 1981, so I had to go back into consulting, which in principle I didn’t want to do. So I did it with Booz Allen and Hamilton. I didn’t like it after a year, so I determined that either they would fire me at some stage or make me a partner and one way or the other, I would wait for one of those two events. Luckily, in 1981 they did make me a partner. So I immediately left and started up OC&C strategy Consultants as one of the world’s only specialist strategy consultancies. And we don’t do anything different. We just do the high-end stuff.

And it seems to have gone all right, Lawrie, I have to say. We’ve now got 700 consultants worldwide, over 900 employees, 15 offices in 11 countries and we will do this year somewhere over 200 million quid. So going okay, so far.

Lawrie Philpott: Pretty impressive. And when do you say high-end strategy? How is high-end strategy defined?

Chris Outram: In principle, um, This is going to sound a little bit again, self-aggrandizement, corporately. We only employ extraordinarily talented people, so if you’ve got a first class degree, that’s okay, but it’s not enough. You’ve got to have done something outside your degree arena, being president of the Union, or captain of the rowing or something, which shows you’ve got breadth.

And these people can be employed on the most complex strategy work, and that work tends to be for big companies with many divisions and operating in many different countries. So it tends to be that we work mostly for the larger companies in the world. More recently we’ve added private equity to that list of client groups.

And those are the sort of companies that have got complex strategy, which we’re really good at. And so that’s what I mean by high end.

Lawrie Philpott: If we look at times gone by then naturally the pace of the world has been increasing steadily. I think it’s fair to say it’s about to enter a phase where it accelerates enormously quickly and against that background, if we look at strategy, how’s it changed over the last 10 years and what do you think it’s gonna look like as we go forward with this greater rapidity?

Chris Outram: Yes. Well, I have to say, you are absolutely right when I joined strategy consulting with BCG back in 1977 strategy was all about really big things.

Did you go left or did you go right? As opposed to minor changes of direction. And it was very new and the tools with which we did it were really fundamental. You know, there weren’t any laptops in those days. We didn’t have fax, there was no email and frankly, we were doing everything on calculators and telex which makes my mind boggle nowadays as to how we got anything done.

But anyway. The big changes are that there’s a huge amount of data in the world now. And the second thing, that data is readily available within seconds, if not minutes. So suddenly if a company does something, their competitor will know about it within hours or days. So everything has moved more rapidly, which means that if you’ve got me onto definition of strategy, I would say strategy is all about competitive differentiation.

There’s lots of other things you could say it’s about, but I don’t believe that. I think it’s all about competitive differentiation. Competitive differentiation is just increasingly difficult to establish nowadays, but it needs to be done. Secondly, the thing that as therefore change is the speed of reaction of your competitors, as I’ve just mentioned. And secondly the implication is that your strategy and longevity is relatively short. And you need to admit that and have processes, which we’ll talk about a little bit later, which will deal with the fact that strategy is relatively short-lived or can be.

And then the final thing, which I think is changed is the team issues. Around talents and capabilities. Again, in when I started strategy, strategy was a board issue generally, but really it was devolved to the CEO and actually the CEO devolved it to his top management team. And frankly that’s changed. It is now that the CEO needs to own the strategy. It isn’t just, that he needs to manage the process of getting it. It needs to be his, because as we know, CEOs are now relatively shortlived as well. And if the strategy isn’t good, the board takes a judgment that maybe they need to get somebody who can bring a good strategy to the company.

So the committee team starts with the CEO, frankly, downwards. And the other observation I would make, and it’s one that’s always been true. But limited by the technology available is, the devil is in the detail. You can’t just wave your arms around and say, my strategy is X. You really need to go into a lot of detail about yourself, your competitors, the sources of competitive advantage, which require you to do stunningly detailed work, country by country in terms of the cost of both your competitors, but also yourself and what both of you can do about it. And so the devil is in the detail, and that funnily enough hasn’t changed. A lot of other things have changed, but the fact that the devil’s in the detail hasn’t changed.

Lawrie Philpott: That’s terrific. Chris, when I’m having conversations with clients these days, my reckoning is, you can look forward a year, you can look forward two years, but almost certainly in my book no more than three years. So how does your work in the strategy field look from a time horizon as it presently stands and what’s gonna happen as life gets so much faster from a strategy point of view?

Chris Outram: The world is indeed a lot more complicated than it used to be. And secondly the speed with which you can get information and process it is again accelerating quite rapidly. However the markets and we are talking the stock markets, investor markets generally, still have roughly the same timescale expectations. They still want to see long-term performance. They want to see growing profits. They want to see general growth over and above the stability.

And that means that you still need to look to the long term to make sure that your strategy makes long term sense. However, given the fact that things are moving very quickly, I think what that means is that you need to respond with processes that deal with the fact that things change.

And in my opinion, what that means is that the CEO, as I’ve said already needs to own the strategy. And it’s not somebody else’s strategy, it’s his strategy and the board strategy. And I think it would be wise for the CEO every six months to get together two groups of people. One probably not his immediate reports, but perhaps people who report to them to get together in a two day workshop and just review what strategy is and how it’s working and is there any major change, and that’s particularly important competitively. Is there any competitor that’s broke ranks and is doing something different and more successfully? And if so, why? What is it that’s changed and should we be worried about that change? Can we emulate that change or is there nothing we can do about it?

So that’s something one should do, I think every six months, and the result of that process will be either, oh, everything’s all right, it’s a slight blip all the way through to, oh my goodness me, there has been a fundamental change competitively or in the markets, and we need to change our strategy. We need to repeat the strategy process.

So that’s one thing I would do. The second group that I would have every six months is probably the head of group HR, but as long as you trust them, some HR at that level is just a process job. But what I’m talking about is somebody who really knows the leadership of the company, two or three levels down, who’s doing well, who’s not doing well, why aren’t they doing well, et cetera, et cetera.

And I would also not just review the strategy. I would also review the team implementing that strategy. And again, if changes need to be made that would be entirely appropriate to make those changes. So, yes, things are moving fast, but I think you can put in process things which will help you manage those changes.

Lawrie Philpott: And I’m interested as well, Chris, in what happens when strategy goes wrong? Is it more a case of poor analysis or is it weak commitment or is it just poor execution?

Chris Outram: Yeah. So I saw your question and the three, um, things, poor analysis, poor commitment, or poor execution, and I thought about those really, really hard and the first one, poor analysis I would have to expand and say poor analysis and design.We came across poor analysis and design mostly in very large companies that had its own strategy department. Now that sounds a bit strange, you would expect big companies to have their own strategy department and that would serve them well, our experience is that that’s not the case.

Strategy shouldn’t be done on a weekly basis. So having a department actually employed to do strategy. I’m not sure what they do after having defined strategy in a three month or four month process. And secondly, our experience is that, not all the time, but quite often strategy departments are not staffed by the brightest, most dynamic and wonderful individuals, largely because CEOs quite rightly put them in charge of businesses but they tend to be employing, possibly, people at the end of their career or perhaps don’t know what to do with them at the moment, et cetera. So let’s put them in the strategy department for a year or two, et cetera, et cetera. And you haven’t got cutting edge thinkers. And therefore poor analysis and design we can come across and it tends to be in big companies with those sort of less than perfect strategy departments.

Lawrie Philpott: Interesting. Just to pause here, Chris, on the notion that the chief execs that I’ve dealt with, in the ideal sense, need to be visionaries, need to be analysts, and need to be implementers.

And of course, if you can find one that has 33% of each of those. You are in luck. Very often they’re dominant in one of those three things, visionary, analyst, implementer. What do you see through the strategy lens against that triptych?

Chris Outram: Well, I agree with you, Lawrie, that the combination of those three things is ideal.

It is very difficult to find people who are, you know, one third, one third, one third and what you can do is probably replace the first of those three from time to time and just do great analysis and great thinking and subcontract that you can’t subcontract the other two frankly. Those are the core, in my opinion of a good CEO. What you need in terms of the first one is that the CEO recognizes his weakness and knows how to fix it. Goes out to the right people, gets the right advice from the right people, et cetera, et cetera. But the other two, you can’t subcontract, as I said, they’re critical to the job of the CEO.

Lawrie Philpott: And it’s often saying…

Chris Outram: So let me just, to complete this question. because you also talked about weak commitment and weak execution as being one of the downfalls of strategy. I have to say, my view here is that these are two sides of the same coin. That if you’ve got poor commitment, you get poor execution almost by definition and if you’ve got poor execution, you’ve definitely got poor commitment again, almost by definition. And, you know, I touched on this, and this is a bit of self publicity, on a book that I wrote must be 10 years ago, called Making Your Strategy Work, where I interviewed 65 chief executives and came up with a whole list of issues, which meant that strategy didn’t quite work out.

And there are nine of them. I’m going to very briefly read those nine and you can always edit this out if you feel it’s not appropriate. But the first one was short-termism. IE you only look a year ahead rather than three to five years ahead because there, as I said earlier, there is a reason to look three to five years out even though you’ve got to be very responsive in the short term. Second is excessive introspection. And what I mean by that is not spending enough time worrying about competitors and what their source of advantage is. And that leads you down very bad roads. Overconfidence, clearly not very sensible. Shortsightedness that we’re really not seeing the limitations of what we’ve got.

Tolerance of mediocrity. You know, it is horrible to have to say to somebody, I’m terribly sorry your time with the company really has come to an end and you’ve done a great job, but I need something slightly different. That’s very difficult and many people do fail on that and tolerate people for too long.

Loss of focus. IE oh, we could do this because it’s very close to our existing business. Yes. But on the other hand it’s a dangerous way to go. And you mentioned United World Schools and where we build a school in a very remote place serving 100 to 120 in private school with children, a lot of people have said to us, oh, well once you have got that school, you can also help with the community health and all sorts of things.

Like I always said, no, we are good at education. That’s where we really make a difference. There must be other people good at health if they wish to use our infrastructure. That’s great. It’s available, but we are not going into health. And that’s an example of focus issues. And during these interviews I had to add two or three new ones to my original list, which was the, the list of six I’ve just mentioned.

One of which is Inconsistency and disbelief in the top team. So you’ve got to have the commitment of the top team. They’ve got to understand the strategy, they’ve got to understand why it has been chosen by the CEO and they’ve got to believe in it. And if they don’t, they’re never going to implement it properly.

Lawrie Philpott: It’s an expression I use these days, Chris, which is that teams need to get match fit. Rather like a tennis player or whatever and quite often. They’re not match fit and not doing the stuff that they need to in order to become match fit.

Chris Outram: No, I agree entirely. If you don’t have belief across your top management team, you will not get the result you want.

And the next one is around that result, which is I think companies are very poor at stating their real purpose. You know and the purpose for a corporation could be all sorts of things. It could be a set of values, it could be a set of goals, either financial or influencing other things. And they’re very poor at establishing what success looks like. And I think more time could be spent on that. And then as we have been talking about already, I don’t need to repeat it in great detail. Lack of pace. Once you decide to do something, you should do it as fast as reasonable. And sometimes as fast as unreasonable.

Lawrie Philpott: So an interesting clutch there, and I particularly like the mediocrity one, Chris, because there’s a wonderful saying by Somerset Mugham, which is only the mediocre are always at their best. So have a thought about that. 

Chris Outram: Indeed. Indeed.

Lawrie Philpott: If we are thinking about uncomfortable truths because I think there’s a sort of fair piece of understanding that people are naturally shy of change. The ‘as is’ position is quite attractive and so on, but what uncomfortable truths the clients need to hear somewhat more often?

Chris Outram: I think the two big ones, if I was a board, the two things that I probably don’t hear enough about, you know, board meetings you have, how’s the company doing financially?

Then you have a whole series of topics like, should we go into China, or what are we going to do about X et cetera. And I think the two things that I would like boards to spend a bit more time on when they meet is number one, whether the strategy is working. They ought to be able to talk to the CEO about whether it’s working, why it’s working, and if it’s not working somewhere, why? Because that’s really critical in my opinion, because the board can’t deal with many short term topics. That’s the role of the CEO. But they should be focused on whether the strategy is working or not. And I very seldom see that on the board agenda. The second thing is whether the team that the CEO has put in place is actually working or not.

And that, as I said, requires a very insightful head of HR who understands the top team and can say yes. By and large, it’s working pretty well. However, Jack in Indonesia seems to be struggling in this way and that way, and you know, we need to think about how to help with that. So, in my opinion, Lawrie, I think boards should insist on hearing about both.

Of these topics at a quarterly board meeting and there are lots of topics on their agenda, which frankly I can’t do much about.  Because they really are theremit of the CEO and that’s something I think I would spend a bit of time talking to boards about.

Lawrie Philpott: Okay. And if ownership of strategy is important, Chris, are you seeing much evidence along the way that boards and executive teams are reluctant to move away from a strategy that isn’t working?

Chris Outram: Yes. On these two topics, both the strategy, which is maybe not working, and people who may not be working out both of those very uncomfortable in terms of how do you then deal with them.

But I think, you know. If a board is a representative of the shareholders, which it is. Then the boards should be willing to pick up this sort of responsibility of saying to the CEO. It really isn’t working. You’ve gotta fix it and if it isn’t fixed in a period of time, we’ll have to make our own judgment.

Or, you know, if you’re not dealing with Jack in Indonesia in a sensible way, either reinforcing his skills or replacing him. Then, you know, that’s what the boards are for, frankly. 

Lawrie Philpott: Mm-hmm. Holding everything to account.

Chris Outram: Absolutely.

Lawrie Philpott: We’ve got the advent now of artificial intelligence, which is many things to many people in many different types of organization and is going to show itself a lot more as time passes.

How does strategy sit relative to the onset of this complex artificial intelligence perspective? 

Chris Outram: The AI issue, of course, is really critical and there’s absolutely no doubt that it will affect our work and the work of development of strategy generally, but for our work most of our strategy is for big companies, multi-business, multi geography, multi-product complex organizations.

And if we look at the sequence in which AI will impact those things, I think the first thing, and it’s already happening, and we have groups of people doing AI type work. It’s in the area of research, market research, market data, competitive data, et cetera, et cetera. You can connect globally a huge amount of information and process it very, very quickly indeed, it all needs checking, but at least you get a template very, very quickly. The next area where I think AI will have an impact, but it probably will take 12, 18 months, is in the arena of what I call hypotheses. Strategy work that we do is all hypothesis based, namely because you can’t look at every single opportunity.

It would take months if not years to do that, you have to have a hypothesis and then test the hypothesis around competitive advantage market attractiveness et cetera, et cetera, and where necessary change it and then come up with a new hypothesis. I think AI will ultimately begin to have an impact on that process.

But it’s a little way off firstly, because I’m not sure that we are that good at taking different inputs of that nature. And secondly, I think because it’s so complex, hypothesis creation. it may take a little while to build the AI models that will actually do it. And the third area where, and I think this is definitely beyond a couple of years ,is actually for AI to come up with recommended complex solutions. Because the solutions that we come up with are, I believe, quite complicated. Even though the final report is very short and very clear, the information behind that, is hugely complicated around cost structures competitive capabilities and action, organization changes even down to how do individuals CEOs work?

I mean, how does the competitor CEO work and what does that mean? And that will, I think when you add all that up, that is very complex. I think that will take a little while for AI to make a real impact. If indeed it ever does. You know we’ll just have to see. I think many say that AI will probably impact faster than that. I think that, I don’t agree. I believe that the fact is good, that good strategy is a result of very complex, multifaceted thinking is going to remain the case for some time. Even though frankly, once you’ve done all this work for six months, you’ve got the strategy into a 30 page presentation.

The CEO needs to make it into a two sentence strategy. That he can talk to somebody about in the lift. But this, the simplicity of it being down to two sentences can only be done as a result of a massive amount of complicated work.

Lawrie Philpott: Are you always looking, Chris, for first mover advantage, or is the follower a better thing to look out for and how do you work out which one you need to be?

Chris Outram: Yes. Well, it, it’s an interesting one. Most of our clients are in businesses, frankly, which I’ve been in for quite some time and going back in history to try and find out whether they were the first mover or not can be quite complicated.

I think what I would say is there is definitely an advantage in being first mover. And if you can come across something  before everybody else does, of course that has an advantage. I think more importantly is defining competitive advantage. And hopefully building barriers around that competitive advantage that are difficult for competitors to take apart.

I mean, the most obvious one is in mining. If you buy a mine, which has got a unique mineral in you got the quintessential competitor advantage. But very few businesses are quite like that and it’s more subtle. You may have the biggest factory with the lowest cost, which is a great advantage.

But if design comes along and is superior and unfortunately, you can’t make it in your low cost factory. That’s a relatively short-lived competitive advantage. So actually understanding competitive advantage is the fundamental, in my opinion, of good strategy work.

Lawrie Philpott: And of course Charlie Munger, who was Warren Buffett’s number two spoke fondly of organizations having a moat. Do you want to say a little bit about moats and whether that’s still relevant in your thinking, Chris?

Chris Outram: Well define for me quickly what you believe a moat is.

Lawrie Philpott: Well my reckoning of a moat is that defensive, if you like, capability which is of a certain timeframe, a certain technological complexity or whatever, which means that anybody who wanted to attack you is gonna have to deal with the moat. So organizations then having a consciousness of the moat and what kind of qualities and quantities the moat has, which gives them that defensive ability.

Chris Outram:Yes. I think, I think we’re on the same page. I think competitive advantage is what I would call a moat. Namely if you genuinely can demonstrate that you have an advantage over your competitors and they are going to find it difficult to replicate. Then that is a true competitive advantage.

And the longer you can sustain that, the better. And it can, as I say, be a low cost factory. It could be access to raw materials, which others don’t have. It could be relationships with distributors and marketers, marketeers in the countries in which you are operating and that they love you to death and they don’t love the competitors.

Or it could be that you are just good at design. And updating that design over a period of time and a number of companies are capable of doing that. So having a moat or a competitive advantage is critical to strategy. Knowing what that is and how to sustain it is all about the longevity of the strategy and how, quickly you have to replace that strategy in the event that the competitive advantage is fragile.

Lawrie Philpott: And if we look at strategic risks in this volatile day and age, Chris, what are the risks that boards systematically underweight today?

Chris Outram: Well, I think the last 15 months have demonstrated perhaps the biggest one, which most people did not expect, which is geo geopolitical uncertainty.

Uh, Mr. Trump has managed to pull up most geopolitical plants by their roots and frankly, it’s knowing how to interpret that, is absolutely critical. And even the last week. We’ve seen a tariff regime where we thought we knew what it looked like, suddenly disappear, and a totally new tariff regime be put in place and who knows how long that will last. And so, geopolitical uncertainty is now top of the list of things that I think boards and CEOs need to worry about and react to. But it’s not the only one. I think the others that I would mention, I’ve also mentioned already, is one competitors.

I am not sure that most boards spend enough time worrying about competitors, what they’re doing, and whether they’re doing better than us. And if so, why can we emulate that? Can we undermine it? Whatever it is. But competitors is a really critical issue. People we’ve mentioned a number of times already, getting the right team with the right talents, capabilities, and motivation is absolutely critical and is sometimes underweight in those discussions at board level. 

The real meaning of competitive advantage, you know, I’m not sure if you walked into many boardrooms and said, okay, what is the competitive advantage of your business? They would really be able to give you a credible and detailed answer.

And then the final one, we mentioned a number of times, speed, the ability to act at pace. Those things. Again, I think, all of those are slightly underweight. They, in most discussions, not all discussions by the way, but many discussions underweight those issues.

Lawrie Philpott: And if we look then specifically at the world where we first met financial and professional services, seems to me that down in the lower end of those kind of organizations in particular than technology and artificial intelligence and so on, is going to have its most prolific effect and commoditize, if you like, work that goes on particularly at the bottom end of those organizations. So are clients underestimating that impact and how quickly it’s gonna take effect?

Chris Outram: Uh, yeah, probably is the answer. And I agree with you entirely, Lawrie. I think some of the more mechanical processes at the low end of the professional services arena or products will definitely migrate very rapidly to AI solutions of one sort or another. We’re both being close to audit products, you know, audit in principle is a very simple process. You check some numbers and then you check how those numbers have being put together and then check whether the answers have come up. Uh, makes sense. And some of that, I could imagine quite a lot of that is prone to AI substitution in some way, shape or form. So I think the smart professional services companies are already thinking two years ahead and saying, what is our organization gonna look like?

Lawrie Philpott: And if I look way back in time, Chris, at people who we’re like Alvin Toffler, futurologists, people who wrote about the future. Fascinating to look back and see which ones of them got it right. But do firms like OC&C then have people inside who are under the heading Futurologist, you know, blue Sky Thinkers, whatever you wanna say about that or is it just an analytic process for whatever strategic client comes along? 

Chris Outram: The simple question is answered by simple answer, which is no, we don’t have futurologists in the organization.

And largely because a futurologist needs to be connected with the world in a way that we aren’t necessarily connected to the world because they need lots of different inputs, et cetera, et cetera. Do we listen to Futurologists? Yes. A lot. And, you know, there are a futurologists who’ve got a lot of facts on their side, and there are futurologists who just wave their arms around a lot.

We like the ones with facts behind them and we listen very, very hard to their rationale for why the world’s changing and the data behind that in terms of what that change will do for the strategy of our client. So futurology is important but it’s the fact-based futurology, which is much more important.

I mean, a good example of this is the debate in the states at the moment about climate change. Where the futurologists that are in vogue are arm waivers and don’t have any facts as far as one can see. Whereas all those people who have got facts about temperature changes and ice, glassiers melting, et cetera, are being ignored. We prefer the ones with data. 

Lawrie Philpott: Interesting. Chris, because I was watching a Davos conversation recently between the head of Google AI and the head of Anthropic AI and interestingly for two very significant heavy weights the final part of their conversation had them in complete agreement, and the complete agreement was that we genuinely really wish this, all this that we were doing, was going slower because society and business will just not be able to keep up with the pace of what we are bringing to the world.

We have to have that pace because of our shareholders. We have to have that pace because we’re competing against the Chinese. So heavyweight advice from them about a world that is going to not be ready for what’s coming.

Chris Outram: Oh, well, I totally sympathized with their point of view that but we always knew that this was coming.

If I go back 20, 30 years, we all knew the graphs of increasing innovation, increasing speeds of things, you know, just everything was a massively upwards pointing graph, which says, oh my god, so much is going to change and I think that is what is happening and it will accelerate and whether society can absorb that in the right way. I very much doubt. And therefore, sadly, it depends on leadership, both corporate leadership, but also political leadership as to how you interpret the choices that you have and how best you balance those choices with the best possible outcome, even though you can’t guarantee that outcome.

Lawrie Philpott: And is finally, as we come to the end of our conversation, Chris, do you think leadership is keeping up with things these days or are you a bit more disappointed with it?Hopeful for it in the future? Whatever.

Chris Outram: Well, I think you’d have to differentiate political leadership from corporate leadership because the geopolitical, as we’ve said earlier, the geopolitical landscape is changing. Stunningly fast, frankly, and unpredictably fast. And I’m not capable at this stage of really saying that that will improve or get worse.

Corporate leadership, I have to say, I believe that the processes that put good leaders at the top of corporations are somewhat more robust than some of the political processes. So I’m much more optimistic that corporations will be able to deal with complexity than the political environment can deal with that.

Lawrie Philpott: Good stuff. Well, we always close, Chris, with two headlines. Your pet hate. And your secret passion, what have you got on offer?

Chris Outram: I did think about this a little bit, because you did warn me slightly. I think my pet hate is a rather strange one, which is my pet hate is grumpy, impolite people.

And it’s a pet hate because nobody needs to be grumpy or impolite. You can actually have much more constructive and enjoyable interactions with people by just thinking hard about how you are coming across and what outcome is likely to be the result of how you’re behaving. So that’s my pet hate. Pet passions, secret passions. Well the first one will come as, well, maybe it won’t come as a surprise, but it might come as a surprise. And the answer is ice cream. I love ice cream. And, and the second one is family. I love Stephanie. I love my daughters. I love their partners. I love their grandchildren. And the grandchildren bit of it combines so well with the first of my secret passions, ice cream, that I’m able to fulfill both, a pleasurable interaction with my grandchildren with an indulgence of my secret passion. 

Lawrie Philpott: Fabulous. Thank you, Chris, and thank you for a very, very interesting tour de raison of the the world of strategy.

I hope listeners will really value what they’ve heard and if they’ve got things to say, then they can contact us by email on podcast@leadershiplistening.com 

But for now, thank you, Chris, for your time today. Bye for now.

Chris Outram: Thank you, Lawrie. I’ve really enjoyed this us.