How Organizations Can Thrive in a World of Disruption with Kian Gohar

63. How Organizations Can Thrive in a World of Disruption with Kian Gohar

“We’re going towards an economy with fewer centralized platforms, which means that people will be able to connect, transact, and communicate more directly with one another.”

—Kian Gohar

Geolab

Podcast Transcription

Michael Kurland: Oh. Hello. I’m Michael Kurland, CEO, and co-founder of Branded Group, an award-winning facility, maintenance, and construction management company that services multi-site commercial properties such as retail, restaurants, health care facilities, and educational institutions. Welcome to the Be a Better Podcast. Each week I interview thought leaders from a variety of industries who will share their stories and the lessons they learn as they strive to be better for their clients, partners, employees, and their community. Are you ready to be better? Hello and welcome to another episode of the Be Better podcast. I’m your host, Michael Kurland, joining me today. Kian Gohar is the bestselling author of Competing in the New World of Work and the founder of Geo Lab. Kian, welcome to the show. Tell the audience a little bit more about yourself and what you do.

Kian Gohar: Thanks so much for having me, Michael. It’s a real pleasure to be here with your audience and your community. I am a futurist by training, and what that means is I help individuals and organizations think about what the future might be for their organizations and industries and design different ways to help them get there. My firm GeoLab is an innovation, research, and leadership training firm, so we develop models for what the future may look like, and then we help organizations and their executive teams lean into that and develop high performing teams that they can grow quickly in a world of uncertainty and opportunity.

Michael Kurland: Yeah. I’ve never had a futurist on the show before and I am excited to have you on here. I think that we have a lot to talk about today. I’d like to start with your background. Tell the audience a little bit about how you got to where you’re at. You know, start a little bit with pure action sports, and then let’s talk about XPRIZE because that is exciting stuff right there.

Kian Gohar: Yeah, well, I’ll start with this, Michael. I’ve never had a job that I’ve applied for and I’ve been an entrepreneur my whole life, which means every job or opportunity I’ve created has been something that I’ve created from scratch. And so that’s just in my DNA. I’ve been an innovator my entire life, first as an entrepreneur, a venture capitalist, and then in terms of the firm that I run now, helping people and executive teams learn about the future and become better at it. And so that’s just a little context for my background. I was in venture capital early on in my career and decided that I wanted to be on the other side of the table and operate a business. And so I joined a very early stage company called Pure Action Sports in South Florida back in 2005, which was disrupting the world of kitesurfing equipment. And that was a very staid industry. And we developed a business model that was very, very revolutionary for the time. You know this is 17 years ago. We went on the cloud and we were working remotely. We had a very distributed sales force and we were going direct to the consumer. So all the things that we’ve known for the last ten plus years of the consumer Internet age we were doing back in 2005, and I did that for five years. And it was a wonderful opportunity to meet people from literally all walks of life, all beaches across the world, and get my hands wet and dirty in a fast-growing business, which I loved. And after five years of that, I wanted to double down on some of the things that I’m very passionate about. I’m a very mission-driven individual. And so I wanted to marry the experience I had as an entrepreneur and build businesses while trying to solve big problems for the world. And I had moved back to Los Angeles, where I’m originally from, and I was looking for the next business to build. And I ended up meeting the founder of the X-Prize Foundation, a gentleman by the name of Peter Diamandis. And Peter and I met and we instantly got along like a house on fire. And Peter said to me, Don’t go build another business. Why don’t you come and help build a business with me here at the XPRIZE? So maybe I can tell you a little bit about the XPRIZE Foundation. It is a technology nonprofit based in L.A. that tries to solve the world’s grand challenges using an incentive competition model. What that means is they put together competitions and they raise money like $10 million. And whoever can solve for X ends up winning that prize. And the most well-known X Prize was the first one, which was a $10 million competition to build a spaceship. It was launched in 1996, and up until that point, it was only governments like NASA’s agencies that had gone to outer space. And Peter wanted to open up the space frontier to private aviation. And so launched a competition that was $10 million. Eight years later, it was won by a company that ultimately became Virgin Galactic. And the winning of that first X Prize in 2004 has opened up the space frontier to private travel, which is now, as you can imagine, a very busy space with lots of different competitors from SpaceX to Blue Origin and others. And so the X Prize Foundation catalyzed this launch. And for many years, the foundation built up other competitions to solve problems for education and health care, and environments and tried to crowdsource the world’s genius to solve these problems. And so I was an executive director of the X Prize, and I started a new initiative to help take all these understanding of technology and innovation and disruption and help corporations around the world to better understand how to do that using AI and very these these advanced technologies coming down to tech labs. So I did that for the better part of the last decade and again, it was a fascinating experience personally and professionally, and career-wise, to marry people who are passionate about impact and passionate about technology and passionate about entrepreneurship. And so that’s a little bit about my journey over the last two decades until I started my innovation advisory firm.

Michael Kurland: Wow. That’s a lot to unpack. That’s awesome. Got a couple of questions for you. First and foremost, are you a kitesurfer?

Kian Gohar: I am not anymore. I will say that I am a complete klutz and kite surfing was not the most well-suited activity for my athletic genes. I did have an injury while snowkiting, which is kite surfing on snow on flatlands. And it’s a lot of fun, but it also hurts if you crash in that crash pretty bad on a patch of ice and break some things that I can’t mention on air. And I decided, you know, for my sanity and physical safety, it’s better if I stay away from extreme sports. And so I’m very passionate about the people I met in that industry, and they’re just full of heart. And it was just a real pleasure. And if you had asked me at any time in my life if I would work at a kitesurfing company, I would have never believed you.

Michael Kurland: Yeah, that I’ve seen out here in California, in Newport, when it’s really busy and you’ll catch some kite surfers out there. And I’m like, I would not do that. You catch in like 20 feet of air up that wave.

Kian Gohar: And you but you can also just ride back and forth. And we were ahead of our time in terms of developing technology to make it a lot safer. And as a result, what we did up here was action sports. We had a brand called Best Kiteboarding and we were able to lower the price point for people to get into the sport and make it a lot safer. And for a few years in the mid-2000, kite surfing was the fastest growing sport in the world. And that was something that was a function of the work that we did, pure action sports. And you know, fast forward ten years later and you see how these new technologies are being deployed in that world. And it’s even safer now. It’s easier and it’s still really fun. And I’ll be honest with you, Michael, and he’s on my skates up in the air on any beach around the world. I just have an instant grin on my face because I just have really good memories of helping build that business.

Michael Kurland: That’s awesome. And the other thing that I wanted to ask, so you said you’ve never had a job you’ve applied for. Have you always just marched to the tune of your drummer? Just kind of like doing your own thing? ZIG When everyone else was zagging.

Kian Gohar: I think my mother would say that has been the case since I’ve been seven years old. And let me clarify. I have applied for a lot of jobs and there’s never gotten any of them. And so as a result of not getting them, I just have to create my path. And so there was no option. And I’ll just tell you a funny story. A dear friend of mine is a corporate recruiter and I was speaking with her a couple of years ago and I was sharing the story with her. And I said, you know, I’ve never been recruited for a job. And she said to me, Keon, why would they recruit you? And I said, What do you mean, I’m qualified? I’ve got all these credentials, and I’ve got a lot of experience. And she says, Keon, you’re a unicorn. When people come to recruit and try to find somebody, they’re not looking for a unicorn. That can be a jack of all trades. They’re looking for a very specific function and your skills are just much broader than that. And so that made a lot of sense to me. And so because of just the way I’ve been, I’ve always had to find my opportunities. And that means networking heavily to understand who is doing what and then approaching them, developing relationships with them, and seeing if there’s stuff that we can create together and collaborate on. And as a result of that, I’ve created new jobs and new roles, and new businesses within my career. And that’s just how I’ve been, because I’ve never fit into a box and I’m okay with that now, you know, mid-career. Yeah. Admit age and knowing that I don’t fit into a box.

Michael Kurland: I think fitting into a book, fitting into a box is boring. And I think being a unicorn is way more fun than just personal, personal experience as well. So before we move on, I got to ask you one more question. Well, we talked about, you know, the X-Prize space launch that became Virgin Galactic. But what was the favorite, you know, prize X Prize that you worked on that didn’t get as much hype as launching in space? There’s got to be some cool stuff that you’ve seen in your time.

Kian Gohar: There’s one that’s still alive and it’s very hard to do. So back in 2017, I was working with a major Japanese airline. Working would not be the right word. I was having a conversation with them and I was helping them think about how these new technologies of automation and I can disrupt every industry. And they said to me, Kian, you know, we are an airline company. We transport people from place to place. B We’re not going to disrupt it. We’re always going to have a business. And I said to them, Well, have you considered the world of virtual reality? Because virtual reality allows you to experience things and go places where you physically can’t necessarily go to. And so if somebody is flying from Tokyo to Paris to go to the Louver Museum, what if they’re able to go visit a museum in virtual reality? Is that going to be potentially disruptive to your business? And the executives of this major Japanese airline, their jaws dropped, just dropped. And they said, oh, my God, we need to figure out how to think about this world of new user experiences that might disrupt our business. So as a result of that, they work with us as a Japanese airline. And we launched a $10 million competition to create a robotic avatar. And the idea for this robotic avatar came from the early stages of early 2011, there was a massive Japanese tsunami that led to the destruction of the nuclear plant next to it in Japan. And there was a very difficult time to clean up that nuclear plant. And so the idea was, can we create a robotic avatar that is controlled by a human in a remote environment? And so the avatar is like a physical robot. It’s not autonomous. But this robotic avatar would be controlled by a human from a remote environment. And the avatar would have to go into danger zones or areas that have been destroyed or areas that are very difficult to reach and be able to, for example, do these skills of lifting a small child and bringing it to safety or bringing some medicine to an elderly patient that can’t be removed for whatever reason. And so this idea to create a brand new interface of how we communicate with each other, not just virtually in VR or even right now we are on the teleconference, but rather can you morph your body into a robotic avatar suit and be able to control that from the other side of the planet and accomplish a certain task? And so this competition is still alive. It’ll be awarded soon. And I’m proud to have pushed this corporation that sponsored this X-Prize, to push the boundaries of what robots and humans can do to live in this new bionic age.

Michael Kurland: That’s awesome. And the first thing that came to my mind was, you know, defusing a bomb, right? I’m sure you could probably do that. I mean, I know they have robots that do it now, but if you could have a human, do it and take away some of that area.

Kian Gohar: Well well, exactly. So the cool thing is that we’re entering a new world where humans are living side by side with robots. And so it’s called the bionic age. And it’s not that I don’t believe in this fear factor of robots taking over our jobs or taking over our planet, even though I’ve seen some pretty cool robots. I also know they’re massive limitations. Yes, exactly. And so the real value here is is is helping augment our way to get things done better. And so robots, you know, they can right now diffuse some bombs. But we don’t ever want humans to be diffusing bombs. Right. Because that’s very dangerous. Right. So how can we think about taking the skills that we have as a human to be able to then use a robot remotely to diffuse it? And that’s being used now. And so I’m pretty excited about this particular prize because I think it’s just going to change our perception of time and space and how we as humans can interact with each other. So this is like really far-out stuff, but I love it.

Michael Kurland: Yeah. No, I mean, it’s the way the world’s going, right? I’ve seen the videos. I’m sure some of the audience has seen the videos on YouTube of the robot that can’t miss a three-point shot. And the robot that was like, you know, it’s like a tactical army robot that would just shoot and ducking and rolling. And I was like, oh, man, that scared me a little bit.

Kian Gohar: Well, yes. And that’s, you know, a lot of propaganda and marketing this morning. I’m here in Silicon Valley today, and I was at SRII, which is the Stanford Research Institute International. And they develop a lot of these humanoid robots for the government, also for corporations, and research organizations. And, you know, they were showing us some of these robots. And the reality is that their battery lives are so, so short. Like, you know, they have 18 minutes of battery life before the humanoid robot just totally drops down. And so, you know, these things that we see on YouTube in terms of robots doing all these cool tricks, that is very much in a controlled environment. And it’s still very hard to translate that into a fully three-dimensional world. But, you know, fast forward ten years, I think there’s going to be a lot more that we see side by side with humans.

Michael Kurland: Yeah. Totally. So awesome. I think that’s been fun to talk about thus far, but let’s get into the meat and potatoes here. So you wrote a book, a Wall Street Journal best-selling book called Competing in the New World of Work. And yet, as we spoke pre-show, you spent pretty much the time of the pandemic, not huddled inside, like a lot of us. But you were working with Harvard on a major research project. Right. So. So let’s talk about that. Let’s tell the audience about that. Like where this research project came from, how it spawned into the book, and everything you learned. Because this is fascinating.

Kian Gohar: Yeah. So, you know, for the better part of the last decade, as I mentioned, I’ve been helping organizations think about the future. And we have these exponential technologies that are disrupting every industry from A.I. to automation to robotics to 3D printing, etc. And about 2015, and 2016, I concluded that the best way for us to compete in the world of exponential technology is to double down on those characteristics which give humans a competitive advantage over technology. And those areas are collaboration, problem-solving, empathy, innovation, and creativity. And so I started focusing a lot of my research away from looking at the world of exponential technology and on the world of exponential teams. And what does it mean to create a team that can accomplish anything? And they don’t understand the word impossible. And so I spent the last four years helping change behaviors at some of the most well-known companies in the world, some of the fastest-growing startups in the world and helping them develop these high-performing teams and what it means to thrive and win. And in March 2020 we all were given a shock by the system. And I have a bunch of clients and nobody knows how to work remotely from home. And my dear friend Keith Frazee, who I’ve known for over a decade, and we’ve collaborated a lot before, and he’s like the world’s top executive coach for Fortune 50 companies. He called me up and he said, we gotta figure this out. And so we’ve got to help our clients. And so we started having a series of town halls on Zoom, and we would invite specific functions like one town hall for CFOs, one town hall for chief HR officers, one town hall for chief learning officers, and one town hall for CTOs. And we were trying to crowdsource in real-time during March, April, and May of 2020, when everybody was in lockdown to help them with best practices from their peers as to how to survive and thrive. And we thought that was going to be a two-month research project and it turned into a two-year research project. And in the summer of 2020, we realized that the world of work was never going to be the same again. So we reached out to Harvard and we said, Let’s explore how the world of business is changing right now, and let’s do a research project together. And they were very gracious and funded it. And for the next 18 months, we interviewed over 2000 executives and entrepreneurs, leaders, and change-makers from over 300 companies across the world to better understand what they were doing in real-time to change their leadership teams and thrive in this world of uncertainty. And on the back of that is the book that just got published two months ago, competing in the new world of work. And it’s been very successful because every company or organization is trying to figure out what it means now to lead in this post-pandemic environment where we have to think about resilience and hybrid work world and remote world and retention. And so all the research we did for the last two years has become very handy. We’re proud of that. I would say that if you had asked me two years ago if I would turn this into a book, I wouldn’t have believed it because I thought it was just a two-month research project. But so that’s how it all became a thing. And, you know, in the book we took all these 2000 interviews and we pattern matched them into four key categories that we believe every team can excel at to be able to thrive in a world that’s constantly changing. And we call this muscle radical adaptability. And these four things underpin that are going to sound fairly common or some basic to your audience and most audiences. But doing them in practice on a repeated basis is hard to do. So let me tell you what these four are. One is foresight, the ability to be able to look around corners and better predict what the future may bring. And this is a skill that most teams and most companies don’t have internally. But I can teach that to organizations based on the last ten years of me being a futurist through a very system. The process to figure out what are the likely situations for their organization that they might face. That’s the first one. The second one is agility. How do you run a very agile team and experiment? Now, in the early days of the crisis, you remember. We don’t know what’s going to happen next. And so it was common to put your team together and say, Johnny, you go do this, Melissa, you do this. Tommy, do this. Let’s reconvene tomorrow and figure out what to do next. That is a form of crisis management, but it doesn’t happen on a day-to-day basis in the real practice of the world. And so we wanted to figure out what are the best practices from that crisis, agile management so that you can experiment consistently and be able to figure out how you find the right fit in this new world. Now, doing all these experiments is exhausting, and I know the last two years have been tiring for a lot of teams. And here’s the third one that teams have to be good at, which is resilience. And what we mean by that is how do you make sure that your team is capable of elevating and lifting everybody to make sure that they’re crossing the finish line together? Because we come to resilience every day through work with different levels of it. Some people have more financial resilience. Some people have more social resilience. So how do you make sure as a leader that your team is fully resilient? And the fourth thing that we double down on, we think every team has to be good at is this notion of collaboration and inclusion. And we learned in the pandemic that collaboration isn’t about where you work, but how you work and how you show up to work, and how you create teams that are crowdsourcing solutions to your problems and bringing in voices from different backgrounds to solve that. And so these are the four things that we understood that every team has to be good at to thrive in this post-pandemic world.

Michael Kurland: Yeah, that is a lot again to unpack. And it, as you said, it’s kind of I want to say basic but basic words, basic thoughts. Right. But you put all four of those things together. If you’re not doing one of them, then I’m sure it’s a problem. Right. And that’s where I mean, I wrote them down over here with this radical adaptability. And I can tell you from my point of view, what made us have success during the pandemic and over the eight years that we’ve been in business is foresight, right? We’ve never had the mentality of we’ve always done it this way. So we’re going to keep doing this because it’s worked, right? We’ve learned in the beginning, that we service the cannabis industry for brick and mortar. And when it first came out, it was like, Oh, it’s taboo. Oh, don’t touch the cannabis industry. We were like, You know what? This is here to stay. And we’re going to service it because we think that it’s going to help us get a new revenue stream in the door. Now, we’re one of the top servicers of the cannabis industry in the space. So if we had said, hey, we won’t do that because we don’t know if the money is going to go because it’s not federally legal or, you know, whatever the same issues are still dealing with. And we may have lost out on millions of dollars. Right. So I think.

Kian Gohar: Can I ask you a question on that, Michael? So what would? Sure, of course, you know, having this idea that you know, this is a new industry that is emerging and now you want to provide services to that. What do you think was the key to deciding to go down that path? Besides the business model? You had to take a leap of faith, and I’d love to learn from you. Like, what was that leap of faith from a leadership perspective that said, I’m going to go after my hunch and not be restrained by old ways of thinking.

Michael Kurland: So it’s kind of funny because we’ll circle back to the ZIG when everyone else is zagging, right? So my industry at that time, I was in my mid-thirties when I started talking to these cannabis retailers and you know, it still was, it was just getting approved on a state level. But take out the fact that federally it’s still not approved. It wasn’t at the time. It was still taboo. And a lot of our to certain people. Right. And a lot of our competitors were run by older people that it was way more taboo than it was to someone of my age range. And I said, you know, I think a lot of these people are going to say no because they’re worried about how it’s going to look on the outside if they’re going to get paid. Right. And what you know, what how they feel about it possibly in terms of their thought process, if it’s, you know, wrong, quote, unquote. And I was like, I think this is a real opportunity for us to establish ourselves as someone that’s going to be at the forefront. And I was right. So I don’t know if we are the top cannabis facility management company in America, but I can guesstimate we’re probably in the top 10% of facility management companies handling cannabis retailers.

Kian Gohar: I love how you leaned into the taboo, and that, I think is an excellent lesson that we share in our book Competing in a New World of Work and this chapter on foresight. And one of the things that we suggest for companies and organizations and teams of any size for them to learn this practice of foresight is to find the edges of a domain. Find the areas where there might be a little bit of risk or taboo, and research that, because more than likely, those are the areas that are going to be at the forefront of that industry in three, five or ten years. And what’s taboo now won’t necessarily be taboo in three or five years. And so I love how you brought up that example. And so I always tell people, if you’re trying to figure out where the edges of your organization or your business are going to go, go find the most interesting edges, most interesting taboos, or the most interesting researchers in your particular space. And follow them on LinkedIn, follow them on Twitter, read periodicals that are the edges of those domains and are kind of talking about like really edgy taboo kinds of things, because that’s where the mainstream ultimately comes from and that’s where the as a business owner, as the opportunity is to think about how can I identify the leading edges of something now before my competitors get into it? And so I love how you did that and leaned into what you thought was taboo because that ended up becoming the mainstream.

Michael Kurland: Yeah. Thanks. I guess I got the foresight box checked. So tell me, where do you think we are going with all these four radical things for tenants of radical adaptability? Where do you think we’re going in the next five, or ten years?

Kian Gohar: I think we have learned in the pandemic it just basically reassessed all of our assumptions about how we live, how we work, how we learn, how we socialize, etc. And it has changed our expectations of how we want to live and we want to live more purposefully. When we live we stop being friends with some people. We have doubled down on some things that we care about in the last two years. And I think it’s been a huge inflection point in the world and more than likely we still won’t see all the after-effects of the pandemic world and the pandemic economy and this grand social experiment are on for a couple more years until the other shoe drops. But I’m pretty confident that we are going into a world where people want to be heard, people want to be included, and people want to be involved in decision-making. And when I say people, I mean not only just, you know, the general population, but employees at companies and organizations, because we have realized that the best ideas oftentimes are within our organizations. But in the past, we’ve always been so focused on, you know, who’s sitting next to you in the office or who you want into the hallway or if you’re the CEO. Who do you invite into the boardroom? And the reality is that we have all these digital tools now to change how we collaborate, and how we communicate. So rather than trying to repaint the old car that we have with what we call work, why not use the spaceship that we have that’s sitting in the garage with all these digital tools, allowing us to collaborate with people from on the other side of the planet in a very effective way. So all this to say is, I think the world is becoming flatter in terms of communication and collaboration, and work. And that is, I think, a beautiful thing. At the same time, we’re also seeing some challenges in the world being divided in terms of regions of, you know, certain spheres of influence and how some countries will collaborate and not the others. But I’m optimistic that this will be ultimately an era of abundance for people who think about not just returning to the ways they used to think, but rather incorporating all these innovations for the last that we’ve learned in the last two years and learning into maximizing inclusion, maximizing collaboration, maximizing innovation, using all the digital tools. I’m excited.

Michael Kurland: Yeah. I like what you said about inclusion. I manage the excuse me, I manage the sales team still for the branded group, and I’m not out on the road. I’m not pounding the phones, I’m not sending emails every day. So when it comes to deciding what software we want to use or what, you know, technology, what new, new cutting edge thing do we want to try? I rely on my team and I let them make the call. I mean, within reason. If it’s like $1,000,000, no, we’re not going to do that. But we’ll try something if it’s something that they feel strongly about and they just switched the platform from one company to another. And it was just based purely on what they wanted. I didn’t have anything to do with it other than greenlighting them because they came to me and said, we want to go from this product to this product, and it’s because it does these seven things differently. So I love the inclusion. I love the collaboration.

Kian Gohar: Yeah. It’s as you know, you did a great job on that because you leaned into the people who know the most about the problem that they’re trying to solve and they’re closest to it. And so one of the things that I think is also a huge trend over this next decade is we’re moving towards an economy where we’re going to have fewer centralized platforms. And what I mean by that is people will have the ability to interact with each other, transact with each other, more peer to peer and directly. And because these democratized technologies, like AI and blockchain, like these things that allow us to have more empowerment in our lives. And so people want to be included. They want to use that. The costs of technology for these things are very low. And when the costs are very low, everybody has access to it. And so everybody can be an influencer or can have a YouTube channel or can, you know, create the next best sort of invention. And so we’re seeing, I think, a world where people want maximum inclusion, maximum belonging, maximum opportunity to be able to solve problems. And that, I think, as a meta macro trend is beautiful for the world.

Michael Kurland: Definitely. Well, Kian, it has been great having you on the show. It’s been a great conversation. Let the audience know how they can get a hold of you.

Kian Gohar: Thank you so much, Michael. It’s been a real joy for me to have this conversation with you as well. You can follow me on Twitter or on Instagram both @fromthekgb, which happens to be the world’s worst Twitter handle at this point. But I’ve had it for plus years that it’s just my initials. And so, again, it’s @fromthekgb and I’m on LinkedIn as well. And if you want to check out the book, you can go to leadersguide.org again leadersguide.org And it’ll take you to this book of computing and the new world of work. Thank you so much, Michael, for having me. It’s been a real joy.

Michael Kurland: Yeah. Thank you. And the audience, go pick up that book. And until next time. Oh. Thank you for tuning in. I hope that today’s episode inspired you to become a purpose-driven leader in your career or your community. There’s no doubt that when we lead with purpose, we can change lives. If you enjoyed today’s show, I’d be grateful if you would take a moment to rate us on your preferred listening platform. To learn more about Branded Group’s be better experience and how we provide industry-leading on-demand, facility maintenance, construction management, and special project implementation. Visit us at www.branded-group.com. Be sure to follow us on social media and you can also reach out to me directly on LinkedIn. Until next time, be better.