Host Intro (Gene Kim)

I had mentioned that we have the ideal person to wrap up the day for this ultimate GenAI learning day for tech leaders. There's no better person to do this than Dr. André Martin. He was formerly VP of People Development at Google, and before that he was Chief Learning Officer at Target, Nike, Mars, and others.

So why do I think he's the ideal person? If there's ever been a time for technology leaders to be learners, it's now. At times it can be exhilarating and fun, and at other times it can be downright frustrating and even exasperating. Like Steve Yegge said, what you know is only from February — that's so totally out of date. So that's sometimes not so fun. André's going to talk about what this means for leaders. Here's André.

André Martin

Good afternoon, everybody. How are we doing? Excellent.

So I have a confession to make. I'm not a technologist, I'm an organizational psychologist. I come here every year because I know that technology will play an imperative part in the future of the companies I have worked hard to create and continue to grow. My roles have mostly been as Chief Talent or Chief Culture Officer. I have been the person holding the team who's responsible for the acceleration of careers of people like yourselves.

So today I'm going to provide a little bit of content, but we're going to bring you up on stage. What I want to do today is spend a large portion of the day asking you a simple question: where do you need to learn and grow and develop in order to be even more relevant in the future? Many of you are hopping on Mentimeter right now. Give me a hand if it popped up for you and you can see the slide. All right, then let's go.

I want to start this talk with a simple premise. The premise is this: in this day and age, on the back of the presentations we've seen, the only truth I believe in is that every company is a tech company, and therefore every leader is — or needs to become — a tech leader.

And now I want to speak to all of you because I think the people sitting in this room — the current tech leaders — have a chance to be CEO. I think you all have the opportunity to be the pipeline for CEOs for the future. If you think about my job — I did succession planning for these companies over the last 30 years. We have always looked to fill that pipeline through the functions of the individuals who have had the greatest impact on the growth of the companies that we run. Most of that came out of marketing and sales.

What's different about your jobs today is GenAI. I'm looking at stats every day that tell me there is $20 trillion of a boost to the GDP by 2030. There are 300 billion hours to be saved by everyone that works in companies. 40% increase in productivity in developed countries. Those stats outpace anything that a marketer or a salesperson could do.

But here is the important question for me: is that really what we're shooting for? Productivity's great. That's an important lever for growth. But I think the thing that you could usher in is what Michael Ioffe tells us could be the era of the greatest creativity humankind has ever known. Because you can take off the shoulders of all the coordination of work, all the places and spaces where we don't get to use our minds and our brilliance. Imagine what you open up the world to.

But here's the deal. As Michael says, we may live in the greatest era of human creativity. And I think we may — because I wonder if we won't get in our own way.

Read this for me. What's this say? Uh, no it doesn't. [Garbled-letters slide — illustrating perception/illusion.] And here's the issue we face, everybody. This idea is going to be what's going to stop us, because you will continue to be the people you have always been. You will see yourselves as the profile of the technologist that you have grown up becoming. And you and many employees in the companies that we live and work in will fail to realize the potential of what exists with the onset of GenAI. It could be a great impact and key differentiator for sustainable growth, or it could just be an optical illusion. We might never get there.

So today what I want to do is talk about this space. You're standing in this space between no longer and not yet. You are no longer the holders and builders of infrastructure, and you are not yet the future CEOs. You are no longer behind the scenes building the architecture that allows us to do work, and you are not yet holding onto and grasping this lever of growth that exists for you.

But you could. And the only way that happens is if you hold onto the idea that I hold onto, which is: right now I'm staring at a future that will demand things from us that we can't even imagine. What the future will ask of us is greatly outpacing what we excel at right now — not just in technology but across every function in companies today.

Here's some stats that kind of tell you that. 82% of employees and 90% of managers currently state they do not feel prepared for the future of work. And yet, I'm looking at the spaces I lead, and budgets are getting cut in half — which means we're not willing to invest. I look at stats that tell me 14% of people have received the necessary training they need on GenAI to use it in their jobs, and yet 86% of them would tell you they need it right now.

And here's the cool thing: I look at stats — and have for 20 years — that will tell you the people who engage in continuous learning, they're 2.9 times more likely to be promoted. They will accelerate through companies faster, just because they invest in breaking down those habits — realizing that ice cream is good, but that's not necessarily what that says — and changing the very way that they do work. And yet 60% of them are dissatisfied with the mechanisms by which they're asked to learn.

And so I've spent my day sort of looking at this idea, going: you know what? Life is the greatest classroom on earth. We are all students now. We will forever be students. You'll get out of school and you will just be entering life. And I gotta tell you, you don't need another development program the rest of your life. Everything you need, you're bumping into every single day.

So I went out and I studied people that took this idea of "let's get out of this sense of learning — which is just simply the acquisition of knowledge — and let's start talking about growth, which is the application of that knowledge to change habits, to drive innovation, to do things better and smarter than we did before." I studied with my friends from IDEO, masters of craft and mistresses of craft — your dancers, your artisans, your chefs, your professional athletes. This is what you all are. You are an artisan group.

What we found is that these individuals don't learn by sitting in training. They don't go to cutting-edge leadership development programs by the best business schools that are 14 months in seven different residencies. They learn through experimentation. They learn through exploration. They learn through free-falling, through inspiration — by being out there in the world and seeing others who are doing things better than they are doing them today.

So you have an opportunity that's going to feel very different to you. You have the opportunity to be our teachers. You are so far ahead of everybody else in every single company around what AI could do for us. You could be our teachers, you could be our instructors, our mentors, our models. You could be our masters. I could be your apprentice.

You could claim this space doing some very simple things — providing your organization inspiration doses about what's happening in this world. We know that a little bit of inspiration causes people to go out and do inspired things. It's the fuel for innovation. If you go out and get inspired, you transfer that energy into yourself and you have to put it somewhere — psychological research tells us that. You could do lunch-and-learns. You could do book clubs. You could do master classes. You could create craft circles. Imagine if you had a set of computers and you invited people to come in and play around with deepfake, play around with ChatGPT, play around with all these mechanisms — to stop being scared, stop being uneducated, and start seeing the potential value and impact that we could have. Imagine what happens when you become the teachers of an organization.

So here's the issue, though — you could also become the cobbler's kids. You could stop learning. Today I wanted to spend the next six minutes — and I might go over back there the next six minutes — asking you what you need. Because this conference that's been put on for these years wants to become something bigger and broader that helps you take and lay stake to the opportunity that you have.

So open up Mentimeter and let's talk about where you could develop. Wait until everyone has it — the code will continue to be there.

The first question I want to ask you is: which of these core capabilities will be most important for your company to invest in in the next five years? This is a ranking. I want you to take a few moments and quickly rank these from most important to least important. It's like watching a horse race, by the way. It's so much fun.

[Audience ranks capabilities live.]

150 of you have gotten in. Here's what we see: analytical thinking and problem solving — the ability for you to take on the complexity and uncertainty that we face. We see creative thinking — seeing yourselves, seeing your craft, seeing your position in the organization and what you do differently. Leadership, AI, big data, and not surprisingly technology literacy. So leadership, creative thinking, analytical thinking are things that you're looking to build. I love that.

It actually goes along with some data that was presented by Oliver Wyman. Interestingly enough, employees and companies today are looking for AI skills to be built — they're feeling unprepared. Employers looking to build organizations of the future are in a similar place as you are. They're looking for analytical thinking, creative thinking, and leadership and social influence to be the places that they invest in.

Now let's talk about you, and let's talk about leadership skills. Here are eight skills core to leadership. I want to find out — which of these do you personally need to develop to be prepared to continue to extend and have the kind of career you want to have? Take a few minutes and do that ranking.

[Audience ranks leadership skills live.]

Fun part about doing this with technologists is — you're fast. If I would've been sitting with a group of executives, it would've taken them like 30 minutes to figure this thing out. So thank you for being so proficient at what you do.

At about 139, 140 people — here's what we're seeing.

Creative thinking and innovation. Your ability to become designers, to become innovators, to really drive strategically into opportunity is super important.

Building high-potential teams and cultures. We know that work is hard right now. We know that engagement is at an all-time low. We know that people are struggling to be committed to the places that they're a part of. You can change that by building better teams.

Active listening. The job that CEOs do better than anybody else in the world is two things. One — they know that every time they open their mouth, or click on an email, or say something, they're adding legitimacy to a conversation. That's the only role they really play. They're careful about where they are and what spaces they create, because they know that's where activity lies. The second thing they do really well is they pull people together to find the best idea. And active listening is a key part of doing that.

Empathy and emotional intelligence. The ability to see people, understand and read the room — vital as you continue to go.

What we're going to do with this data is use this to think about the curriculum that will come forward, to think about how we can position the learning that we bring to you in a different way.

I want to share with you just a piece of data from here as you continue to work. World Economic Forum actually did a study about 800 companies representing about 11.2 million employees, and here were the top 10 skills that they had. Very much like you, they put in creative thinking, resilience, motivation, self-awareness, curiosity, empathy. Those are skills that they're saying: no matter where you are or what you do, these are the skills that are really important.

The last conversation — or piece of data — I want to collect from you is around this idea of quote-unquote "executive presence." As someone who's done development my whole life, I use that word, I heard that word used to describe the development that people need to do. It's sort of a catchphrase for "someone's just not ready" — they don't have executive presence. But there's been research on that, that's gone a little bit deeper. When you look at CEOs — the successful ones — there are traits that they bring. So I want you to assess yourself on which of these traits represent the biggest gap for you right now.

[Audience ranks executive presence traits live.]

It's a fight here for the lead.

When you think about C-suite executives — when you think about this time of low commitment, of high transformation, of increasing uncertainty — your ability to tell an authentic and true story, to be able to be decisive, to show confidence in the face of a moment that looks like you should be running scared — it's essential. It's not just needed at the top — it's needed all the way through organizations.

So many of you looking to create a stronger vision and purpose for yourself and your teams, being more decisive, telling better stories. Those are skills again, that are teachable. You can learn how to do those things. You can learn how to be great at those things.

So once again, my hope with this fast little survey was to open up a little bit more research that broadens the possibility of this conference, broadens the opportunity for you all to come together as a community and learn, and creates an even greater aspiration for all of you as you stay on the path I believe you should be on — which is towards the C-suite, if not the CEO.

So with that, I want to say thank you. This is research that you'll see in the slides that's based on this idea of executive presence and how it's changed over the last 20 years. You'll see many of the things that pop to the top for you also pop to the top of some of the most effective C-suite leaders in the world.

So with that, my asks are simple. I have a newsletter that's intended to help everyone Monday mornings as you go into work to be a little bit better, a little bit more inspired. It's going to get relaunched in September — look for it. Go to Wrong Fit, Right Fit — it's a book I published last year with the help of IT Revolution. It's really meant to help you create an organization that people want to be in. If you want to talk about the research — we're going to continue to do this work with you. If you want to give me more insight, feel free to reach out to me on email.

With that, I apologize for being over, and I want to welcome Gene back to the stage. Thank you for the time.