246 - Alain Bejjani on Leading Through Disruption, AI, and the New Realities

Speaker A: Stability was the new name of the game. Today we're going into a phase where disruption is the new name of the game. Every leader today wakes up every morning with a new form of disruption that he or she have to face. We cannot take any more stability for granted. Alain Bajani is a globally recognized business leader, investor and strategist with more than

Speaker B: two decades of experience driving cross border growth across the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia.

Speaker A: He is the author of Next, a leadership book that explores what it takes leading through the new realities, continual change, AI transformation, talentism and sustainability.

Speaker B: There's no way for me to find a shortcut or trying to avoid them. They are coming to me. What shall I do? Shall I suffer? Shall I embrace them? What shall I do differently as a leader? Hi everybody and welcome back to a new episode of the World Class Leader show. Today I'm very happy, very, very happy because I have a returning guest who is a great individual, a great leader, great siob is also a great friend. So is Alain Bejani. Hi Alain.

Speaker A: Hi. Thank you for having me again. Such a pleasure.

Speaker B: It's such a pleasure. Because Alain, you were on the show actually early days. So when we started in 2021, I think you were a year 21, 2022. So you know, it looked like yesterday, but actually it was already four or five years. And in the current world, and that's what we're gonna talk today, the kind of reality, the new reality that we're facing four or five years ago, it's already a different era. So but we'll have a time to talk about that. So if you don't know, um, Alan, I mean you were gonna see all information on the show notes, but Alain Bijani is a former CEO of Majid Al. Ah, Futahim. You were a CEO there for eight years if I'm not mistaken. But now he's also an investor in, is also a book author. So he just wrote his first book called Next and we'll have time to talk about it. I think you can see his book on his back. Um, and his book is Leading through the New Realities will be part of the conversation we'll be having today. So Alain, by the way, thank you because you are in London for promoting the book and we took this chance to dispose in person. But before talking about the book, I would like to start with your story because to me it makes a lot of sense, especially right now in a world of. In time of recording. We're living in a world of war where there is War in many countries in the Middle East. And your country is unfortunately again very much affected, which is Lebanon. But I want to start with the past because you said it, uh, which to me is fascinating. You know, that while you were a boy and a lot of, you know, people at your age were at the beach, you were sitting with your father, his office while there was a war. There were, you know, bombarding bombs, you know, all of that that we are unfortunately much aware of. And he was still working in the office. You know, he kept going to work while the city was being bombed. So what did you see him do that shaped everything about how you lead? What was the lessons that you learned from the sadly great experience that you, you went through.

Speaker A: So thank you for having me again. As I said, it's a pleasure to come back. And uh, you know there is this thing about uh, about being raised during wartime. Uh, it's a curse in so many ways, but also it's a blessing.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: Now that I reflect on a bit more on uh, on the past and basically what shaped me and in the context of uh, of writing next, uh, leading through the new realities, uh, uh, you reflect on actually what got you to where you are. And there are some things that I'm sure everyone, you, everyone that's maybe watching us now had lived through their lives. Uh, it doesn't have to be as disruptive and as uh, uh, bad as war. But actually that shaped their personality, their character, the leaders they became. And I think for me growing up in a war torn Beirut in Lebanon was that experience. And also I think the biggest influence was my father. Yes, my father work ethics. And there was this thing about it I used to love, uh, when I was uh, when I was a young boy, a young teenager to go with him to work. So when you're growing up in war, he has a lot of time where there's no school.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: Because of security. Of course. So the school is closed or you have holidays or whatever. And every time I had no school or I had holidays, I used to accompany my father to work. And my father was a retailer, so he had stores and he had an office, kind of a central office and stores. So I used to go with him from one store to the other. Check what happened, which, how can we get there? This road is blocked, that other road is open. What do you do with supply chain? How do you get your uh, merchandise or your goods, uh, through because of war related matters? How do you pay? The banks are closed. The banks are open. How do you make transfers? So everything that we take for granted today day. How do you secure electricity? Uh, how actually you make sure that your, uh, your, uh, stores are safe. So I still remember, uh, our stores had actually a very high wall in front of them that was made of sandbags because you want the customer to feel safe. You just don't want the sharp nail coming in or you don't want, uh, a bullet coming in. So everyone had these very high walls made of sandbags because they stop. They're very. Sandbags are very good at stopping. Yes, uh, projectiles. So when you think about dc, how can you even operate in this kind of environment? But actually the one thing you learn is that war does not stop life. And the most, I would say, resilient form of life is business. So the first lesson I've learned is that war does not stop business. It just changes the way you go about business. And it actually forges you as a leader because you build businesses that are primarily driven by redundancy and resilience, not by efficiency and optimization. I think this for me is one of the biggest lessons that I came back and applied as a CEO of a large group like Masjid Al futaim, I mean 110 nationalities, 17 markets, 50,000 people, billions of dollars in turnover, and you naturally try to build things around efficiency and around optimization. You want to optimize everything you do. You want to maximize your profitability, you want things to flow down to the bottom line. But actually, when you are at war, when you are in a disrupted environment, what you learn is the importance of business going, uh, redundancy. Today we think about redundancy in the context of, let's say, business continuity and business continuity. Let's say if we have a fire in the head office, what do we do? If the servers are down, what do we do? Uh, but you don't think about it in the context if the global Internet is down. This is what happened during COVID for example. We don't think about it in the context of if you have war that, uh, comes. We might think about if you have war related now to supply chain. So what do you do? How do you create options and different routes or other. Other matters? So you learn that actually the real value in a business is not driven by efficiency, it's actually driven by redundancy and the resilience of the business, whether the business model or actually your financial equation and your ability to keep, to keep going and doing that profitably.

Speaker B: How fi are play? I mean, uh, especially, I mean now in the context of War, of course, fiori is the first word that comes to mind.

Speaker A: Absolutely.

Speaker B: But then also, you went through. And we'll come back a little bit later. In terms of the experience, you know, as a CEO in a global retail company in Dubai, there was a different fear. There was Covid, but it's still different than the war. How does fear play into what you just said? I mean, business keeping the redundancy is about optimizing what you're working on. So it's the best antidote in a moment of war. But still you're living every day with fear.

Speaker A: Yes. Fear becomes second nature because you cannot disassociate from fear. Yeah. You encounter fear in everything you do.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: So you don't stop at fear anymore. And this is why I said life is so strong. It keeps going. And business is. Is one of the strongest way of. Of. Of keep going. You actually become fearful of what may happen, but you make sure it does not stop you, because when it stops, you, life stops. So basically, you know, you're taking risk. It's become kind of, you know, embedded in you, and you actually keep going despite the fear. So when you are afar, you talk about war and you talk about fear rightfully because it is there. Uh, when you are in it, you don't feel it in the same way you live it. And you have this life, I would say, power in you to actually keep going. And you say, despite fear, I'm going to keep going. You don't stop at it anymore. You just find ways around it. And this is why life is so strong and keeps going. I'm sure people today in Kyiv, for example, in Ukraine, they live through that and they keep going. I mean, that's a country that has developed a bit of. It became today kind of a leading tech, I mean, defense tech giant.

Speaker B: Absolutely.

Speaker A: During war. Uh, if you think now we're going through the Iran, uh, war in the Middle East. Okay. And it has affected every part of the Middle east, whether it's the uae, the Gulf in general, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, elsewhere. Lebanon is at war again, on and so forth. So you see that how life keeps going. And I think for me, one of the biggest lessons that I, um, believe is relevant to today's word is that a lot of the leadership lessons and the business lessons that came from a western culture, as valid as they are, are today. Today, they fall short of what a business leader need in order to keep going. We've seen it with COVID but also we've seen it with war in Europe starting February, um, uh, 2023 with the Ukraine war. Now we're seeing it with the Iran war and the disruption of the global supply chain related to the energy markets and so on and so forth and the ripple effect they have. Your ability to keep going is so important. So, uh, building businesses about efficiency is a good thing, but is not enough. And I think leaders that have designed businesses rightfully okay around that, primarily in the Western world, because one thing was taken for granted is that we will not go through war anymore. And we actually, it worked for more than eight, for about 80 years plus. The, the word was stable. Stability was the new name of the game. Today we're going into a phase where disruption is the new name of the game. And this is why I wrote next leading through the new realities. Because one of the new realities that every leader has to face is disruption and volatility. You've seen it with COVID you've seen it with the tariff wars, you've seen it with the Ukraine war and supply chain. You've seen it now with the Iran war and uh, basically the energy issues and the ripple effect of that. Every leader today wakes up every morning with a new form of disruption that he or she have to face. So we cannot take any more stability for granted. And in the coming 10 years, we are most likely going to go through more disruption. We don't know where they're going to come from. I mean, no one would have thought that actually this thing in Iraq and the Middle east would have happened. Okay. No one would have thought in 2020 or 2021 that Russia is going to try to invade Ukraine. No one would have thought that the tariff wars are going to take the shape they took. And tomorrow we might wake up on something new. We know that Taiwan is something that's on the table, more or less. I don't know if it's going to happen. Uh, you have other places in the world. I mean, who would have thought that Greenland would become a defense requirement from the US or other things. So we have so many possibilities that we can think about and so many other possibilities that we can simply not even fathom today. But we as leaders have to basically be prepared for the unthinkable.

Speaker B: And talking about being prepared and going through disruption, if we walk just quickly backwards to your eight years experience as a CEO of, uh, what started like a shopping mall, then it became a conglomerate, you know, a multi billion enterprise, you went through disruption. At the same time, you have been able as a CEO to really grow and scale an entire Business. And I remember you did in different occasions you always talked about principles.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: For you, principles, it's more about than leadership style. It's more about, you know, shifting or making change in organization. What are the principles that you apply consistently that you know, allow you, enable you to deliver that level of growth, but also going through disruption. Because you said Covid. Covid was a massive disruption inside of

Speaker A: that moment in time, global scale.

Speaker B: Yes, absolutely.

Speaker A: Well look, I think that one of the things that I've learned uh, during my life, whether in war torn Beirut or afterwards, leading, leading Masjid Al Futaim in Dubai, is that principled leadership is actually what serves you most in the most difficult times. Because when things are fine, when business is fine, when everyone is happy, anyone can steer a ship, it's actually when, when disruption hits. And when disruption hits, you realize a number of things you have to deal with situation that in most cases you haven't thought of. I always give this example because it was really something that I lived uh, uh, it was very dear to me. Something that I've lived basically, uh, through and through, which is uh, with the start of COVID we did not know how long it will take. Will it take a week? Will it take a month? Will take two years? Will it take 10 years? We didn't know. Especially in March. Again, if we go back to March 2020 to April 2020. I mean this was a time where everything was unheard of. The world was shutting down, businesses were shutting down, you didn't know what's going to happen. And we made a very conscious decision to say we're going to live up to our values as a company. One of our values was togetherness. Togetherness with our customers, togetherness with our people, togetherness with our stakeholders. So we made the conscious decision. We said we will not fire people during COVID because of COVID Of course you'll always do consequence management based on performance. But we are not going to fire people in businesses that had shut down. In some of our business that had shot. They had to shut down during COVID because killing people, livelihoods was at that point in time tantamount to killing them. They can't find another job, they have no income. I mean this is, it can be worse. So this was simply, this was a very simple decision that we took because we were very principled. It was a very easy decision to take. But of course in order to be able to make those decisions, you need to be prepared. Resilience is not something that you work on in hard times. Resilience are things that you work on in difficult times that actually reveal themselves in hard times. You have to be prepared for that. One of the big lessons for me as a leader was that we've always had a policy of having a number of months of positive cash flow ahead of us. So always making sure that you have multi year cash ability that is there. So if the business had to shut down for a year or two or three, we had the possibility to keep things going. So these are, this is financial discipline is very important. You do it during good time because you want to show your credit is how credit, whether you are the bond markets, etc. How disciplined you are in your financial approach. You have, you have decisions to make. You say, okay, do I, do I do more growth or do I actually build buffers?

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: And of course there are always arbitrage decisions that you have to make. And we've always aired on the cautious side by saying as important as it is to grow, we also need to make sure that you have enough buffers to go through difficult times. What these difficult times are we do not know.

Speaker B: That is a, that is a.

Speaker A: And that. And the reward during good times for that was basically it improved our credit worthiness. So we got into these uh, into these different uh, crisis prepared to actually withhold whatever mattered to us. And that was our employee, our employees livelihood. Make sure that actually during those difficult times we stood by our customers. We did not increase prices, we did not say we have a bit of eroding margins because of supply chain disruption and so on and so forth. We're going to pass that through on the country. This is a time where the customer needs you to stand by them. And of course the reward is that the customer is going to stay with you for a longer time and your relationship with the customer is a lifetime one. Exactly. So being true, showing people that you are really trustworthy is something that actually happens. When people can easily understand you making the opposite decision. When you have legitimately the right to make the opposite decision and you say no, I'm not going to make that decision, although it might be better on the short term, I'm choosing with you the long term.

Speaker B: Which is an important point Alain, because one of the things I see in my line of work very, very often is this interesting paradox of dealing with results in the short term. So that is the short term events, um, that is prevailing, but then at the same time building a future as a legacy for the organization. So I think you describe, how can you do both if you're really leading through principle which is a great experience and story your from what you have done in the Dubai. But now it's interesting because you said one of the principle was not letting people go stay together. You know that is that uh, that is important point of uh, is one of the principle that you use and that seems uh, to be very successful. But now speaking about the new realities that you bring into the book, one of the new realities clearly is AI. And we were discussing before recording our AI will disrupt is already destroyed. It will disrupt entirely the entire workforce and people relationship with work. So don't you find interesting how you lived with a specific principle of we stay together when now there is a force that was in place in 2020 of course, but now it's driving the future work in a very completely different direction.

Speaker A: Yeah, well look, I think there is a number of things here that we have to unpack. One, the ability of having it today while building a tomorrow.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: And I want to be clear about that. I'm not advocating that people should actually sacrifice today to get to tomorrow. You need to have it today. You need as a CEO to be able to have this helicopter view about short termism and long termism. The problem is that when you lose to long term for the short term, sometimes you have to consciously make the long term decision at the expense of the short term.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: And I know this is something that most, I would say capital markets, uh, and most shareholders do not always appreciate as much. But I think when they are well explained and when they are well communicated, people, people can see it makes sense. I mean I give you an example, uh, I mean a very famous example and we took Jeff Bezos and Amazon. I mean the guy lost money for nearly two decades and investors followed and he built value like no tomorrow.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: So there are examples of that and I think every leader has to think about today, but also build tomorrow. On the other topic of saying okay, now we are facing a new disruption and next my book uh, is leading through the new realities because these new realities are four One is disruption and volatility as we we talked about it. Two is AI.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Three is sustainability which is now a bit on the back foot post Covid, but actually it's still there. We still have a planet to save and the planet that's getting warmer. Although we have some good news there. I think also technology will help, will have. And the other reality is talentism. How do we deal with talent? So talking about AI which is in my opinion the strongest one now and the one that is the most present. Again, going back to principle is very important. But here, principles, you'll have to apply them in different ways. One is, there is, uh, I would say an undisputed fact, and I expect that this will become even more clear in the coming months, that AI is one, basically an enabler for us as human beings, but also, to a large extent, is a, is a, is a competition. Most of our people, most of us in what we do, we're going to be crowded out by AI. You cannot compete with AI. AI can make you better, but also in a lot of things, AI can take your job.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: Okay. And AI will take jobs. Of course it will create other jobs. I don't think it will create as many jobs as will take. But the, the relationship to work, relationship to life is going to change. I think the disruption we, we're going through is beyond any disruption we've ever had. Not in the past 50 years. Okay. In the past millennia.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: That's one.

Speaker B: Two.

Speaker A: I personally deeply believe that, uh, we are at a point in time where AI is going to make us better as human beings, uh, because it will create for us so much more value with us doing less. And this is what I call the decoupling between growth and headcounts. In the past, headcount led to growth. In most cases, you needed more work, more people to work, you needed to expand. But you didn't want these expansions to be dilutive. You also want them to be value accretive.

Speaker B: And when, what is the right balance?

Speaker A: And what is the right balance? And, uh, every CEO, every leader has sit set in budget meetings and discussing headcount budgets and what is the right balance and how do we do and so on and so forth going forward. I'm sure that today, I mean, people that are listening to us are all thinking about how can I benefit more from the AI revolution, what AI, uh, agents can do, the jobs that my people are doing, Should I keep people, should I not keep people? And so on and so forth. So it will not make sense for companies to just say, you know what? I'm going to keep people. I don't care about what AI brings simply because you're going to just be left on the, on the curbside. Okay? Uh, your customer experience is going to be deeply affected. The new realities are going to affect you, and you'll very quickly realize that you're not competitive. So the point here is, how do we, how do we succeed in this transition? I think on a personal level, AI is going to help us live longer. I hope that most of our uh, uh, viewers today will live more than 120. Uh, some say 140, others say more. Others say we're going to get to kind of at a point where velocity, we're going to have certain uh, longevity velocity, which is basically the every year you live will give you another year or a decade more or whatever that is. Looking forward to it because of the great progress that we're going to see in health care. I think that's a fact and it's becoming more and more a fact on a daily basis. I also think that we're going to be able to do more with less. Generally that's a good thing. The problem is that the social impact of people basically being out of jobs and not being able to be employed anymore. I think as leaders we have to think and as policymakers we have to think deeply about our ability to actually help our people transition. And the answer to that for me is very simple, is one of course universal basic income. I mean that or a form of that where people will receive uh, uh, a fair share of the AI upside that's going to be created. So today, if you're running a company today and you use AI better, you will actually gain profitability and you will of course cut jobs. Uh, this will, you will want this to flow to the, to the bottom line, which is great. Uh, and the bottom line will benefit your shareholders. So basically you're going to have thousands of people or hundreds of people that will have no jobs and you have few other, few people that will make more money. AI the way it currently is, is moving towards a reality where few will make much more than most of the others. This will create a lot of uncertainty, and not just uncertainty, but actually social unrest. I think going forward we will have to find a way to reinvest some of those uh, gains into helping people transition. But the transition is not only going to be financial, it's also going to be helping people rethink their relationship to work for us. Self actualization, a sense of fulfillment, our sense of purpose is deeply linked to us earning a living. And this is no one's fault. This is how human beings have been, have been raised for uh, thousands of years. We used to have to earn before earning a living. We needed to survive, so we needed to go and hunt in order to be able to eat. If you don't eat, you don't survive. And on the way you need to make sure you don't die by an accident. Or a beast killing you or whatever.

Speaker B: Also, to be fair, life at the moment is at the. Yeah, skyrocketing.

Speaker A: So. So with time pressure, with time, with technology evolving, we started to earn a living. We were not anymore in survival mode as much, but we need to earn a living.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: And earning a living, of course, you have inflation and you have cost. Cost of living that. That increases. And then with time, we started now to have actually tools or machines that now can do the job in our stead. And here, what we have to preserve with in the human beings is actually the judgment and the role we play in a team. So the job is going to be taken over by a machine, but the role we play in a team is something that only the humans will be able to do, or at least for the foreseeable future. And I think AI is going to help us also become superhumans. We become smarter, more powerful and wiser by our ability to unlock cerebral capabilities that today we cannot unlock. That will come because of chips that we will be able to implement in our brains or in our bodies. That will help us to live healthier, but also to live better. I mean, I think, for example, neuralink now actually doing a human trial to cure, for example, uh, blindness, but also our ability to actually use our brain in different ways. So we will benefit from AI on an individual level. I think the biggest challenge that society is going to face, I think yesterday as well, the Pope, I mean, issued a declaration about how we need to disarm AI so it does not become harmful to human beings, is how are we going to succeed in this transition? Give people a new sense of purpose that is primarily driven by what you are, not by who you are. Any job that you have is by nature. By nature is transient, is temporary. What really matters is who you are as an individual, what you love, what you like to do. If you want to go and pursue an education, go do things that you love, not an education. That thing you think is going to lead you to a job. Because most likely the job may not be there in the way you think about it today. If you want to. Actually, if you love poetry, go for poetry. If you love art, go for art. If you love English, study English. If you love skiing, be a skier. We are going to live lives that actually allow us to do what we love more than we currently can.

Speaker B: Yeah. So on this point, um, that to me is such a. Such an important point. I would also add a couple of things. One, I would also add what you stand for. So what is important to You. So it's not just about, in my opinion at least, passion or a talent that you feel you have and you want to pursue is what you stand for as an individual because that will shape your identity. I think at the moment, in my experience, most of leaders have lost their identity in terms of what they stand for. It's not clear you can see them around. I mean, I work with a lot of CEOs and sometimes what you stand for is your, you know, why you're here, what's important to you that goes beyond, you know, driving productivity next three years, what you stand for as a leader, because that is going back to the principle. So love that I'm interesting to. There are a lot of CEOs here that are listening to this show. Alain, uh, as you, as you are, as most of them probably are, even probably at a smaller scale than you based on, because you have, uh, an incredible experience. ATS in a global company. Most of CEOs right now, they're thinking, okay, these are new realities. I like to embrace them, I like to capture them. I like to get the most out of it because I. There is, as you said before, there's no way for me to find a shortcut or to trying to avoid them. They are coming to me as a major, major right, as a major headwinds to me and say, what shall I do? Shall I suffer it? Shall I going back to my survival mechanism? Or shall I embrace them? What shall I do? What shall I do differently as a leader? Um, so I know it's a very difficult question. I'm not asking you to answer one of the most fundamental question that all leaders, they will be asking themselves for next five, 10 years. But what's your view in terms of how CEO should react to all of this?

Speaker A: Well, look, I think we live at a time where we have more questions than answers. Uh, and the reason why we have more questions than answer is very simple, is because we do not know what is the extent of the technology that is now disrupting our lives. So if you try to understand what AI can do or cannot do, there's a lot of secrecy around AI. I mean, you and I and most people would see basically the LLMs that are coming out. And we are in awe of what for example, Claude now can do or the new suite of product that uh, Google has launched on Gemini or ChatGPT or others. But AI is much more than that. And there is so much competition between very few people, very few countries, primarily China and the US that both the US operators And China are very secretive about what they are doing. So the public is not really well informed about two things. One is what AI can really do and robotics, and especially humanoid, humanoid robotics, that we're going to see more and more in our daily lives, in my view, in the coming, within the coming year. And on the other side, what is the extent of policy decisions that are going to shape, okay, how AI integrates into life and how much it takes over? I have, I always give an example that actually I think makes a lot of sense in that context. In the 80s there has been a great progress on cloning. I don't know if you remember that.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Uh, but uh, we suddenly got to a point where biotech was able to clone, uh, to clone organisms. And the first living organism, I would say, or living species that we cloned actually was a sheep called Dolly in here in the uk. And once that happened and uh, that ship was cloned, uh, there was immediate legislation that says cloning is unethical and is banned because we could also clone individuals.

Speaker B: There was a lot of fear.

Speaker A: Exactly. And that was simply stopped. So at that point in time there was a very clear a policy responds to it and that's it. And cloning was not anymore a conversation. Now we all see that everyone is embracing AI and wants more of it. And if the, the ripple effects of it is so profound in society, but also so profound on who controls the word, on politics, on business and, and et cetera, et cetera. So no one wants to stop AI. Everyone wants to keep AI going, but everyone wants to be the master of AI or basically master AI as much as, as possible in order to get the superiority on others. So we're still at a point in time where the policy response is unclear. There is actually no policy response. If you see what is the. What. What are the positions of the United States, for example, and China, which is the two leaders on AI Today there is no clear response. Everyone will tell you we want responsible AI. Uh, we know that we need to put some guardrails. Where are these guardrails and how are you going about it?

Speaker B: You write a policy today and probably in three weeks changes exactly. Needs to be changed.

Speaker A: So there isn't a clear response there. So that's one. To the extent of the technology is not understood by everyone. But I think what can we, what we can safely say today is AI either today or in a few months or in a year time or more is going to be able to do everything we do as human beings. And even better so in my opinion, as leaders, we have to be prepared for that. And this is why one of the most important behavioral traits that leaders have and should have going forward is adaptability. We should embrace this new future. We should adapt to it, we should not resist it, on the contrary. And we should act in a principled way in order to help our people to transition during this period of time. And I think help them, um, transition is extremely important because the value that people have to their companies, to their businesses, to their society is not what they already know, is their ability to learn.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: And here what we are going to have to learn is not only like how it used to be pre covered, which is digitization and reskilling, upskilling. There's no reskilling, upskilling in the context of AI. AI is taking over from you. It's not you knowing how to use AI. Of course you're going to be able to use AI, but using is going to be easier and easier. Look at using AI today compared to what it was two, two years ago or three years ago. It's simply becoming more conversational. AI, uh, is going to be like a human being you're talking to and just have a conversation. But that human being is smarter, faster, and basically has a huge reasoning capabilities. If you look at AI capabilities today from an IQ point of view, you see that today average AI IQ, some people would say is about 140 to 160. If you look at university students, average IQ is about 110. So, uh, you can safely say that in today's world, AI is already smarter than human beings.

Speaker B: Definitely is.

Speaker A: So the reality is this is happening. What we need to do is to two things. One is to adapt to digital reality, adapt our businesses, adapt our people. But adapting our people in this context is helping them keep going in life with a new sense of purpose, a renewed sense of purpose that may not always be driven or linked to their occupational activity.

Speaker B: Yeah. So we are not defined by our work or our title, but we're defined

Speaker A: by our purpose, by who we are, by the role we play on the team, by the role we play in society, society, by the role we play in our families, by the role we play among, among human beings. Not by the fact that you're a CFO or a CEO or a head of a team or a head of a plant, uh, or whatever that is that may be.

Speaker B: You also said something very provocative, which I love. I think it's worth bringing up given that you were talking about leadership. You said there is the leadership Supply does not yet match the demand.

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker B: So what does it mean? Is it about the point you made before about adaptability? So there are not enough leaders that are able to be adaptable or there is something else.

Speaker A: As human beings, we, we always live life incrementally. We can only imagine life incrementally because that's how we've lived it. We don't know life differently.

Speaker B: I call it left to right thinking, which is not necessarily.

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, you have left right thinking, but I think in the context of both, you live life incrementally. So life is actually a succession of experiences. And usually these experiences are. There is usually kind of a, uh, silver lining in all of that. And they're not very disruptive because change in the past was once in a lifetime, then it becomes once every decade.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: And then, uh, change became transformation in companies and transformation would be every five or six years or more. Now change is actually a daily habit, is a daily new thing. So. And it's leapfrogging. It's not any more incremental change, but leapfrogging. So our ability to change and to adapt requires a lot of leadership. If you think about the leaders that we currently are and the leaders that you, you just mentioned, CEOs that are kind of, you're wondering what is their sense of purpose. It's all they're worried about is a bit more productivity here, a bit more performance there. Exactly. Shareholder management or stakeholder management, and so on and so forth. But in reality, in reality, our ability to basically adapt and our ability to foresee the future and adapt to it requires a lot of leadership because it requires a lot of courage. It requires you to accept the fact that the business model that you have been fighting for is actually disrupted or near death. It requires you to accept that universities today are obsolete and do not produce the youth that are ready for tomorrow's world. I mean, if I go to, and I do spend a lot of time in talks in universities, universities, students today, okay, they are being trained. They learn the way we used to learn. The only difference, they use tablet. Honestly, there's not, no profound differences between both. They're still being trained for jobs that are not going to exist in two, three, four, five years. They're simply not going to exist. But universities haven't changed. So we are in a world where the supply of leadership is not yet adapted to the new leadership required. Now, what is the new leadership required is not clear, but one thing is clear, is it has to be a highly adaptable Leadership and a leadership that actually is willing to live a life that has nothing, that does not resemble with the life that we have been living today. So our relationship to work has to change. People disrupting themselves is something that's very important. And thinking about how can I, how can I today lead, let's say a thousand people company with 15 people? Because in most, in most likely in the coming 24 to 36 months, you, that company has a thousand people, today is going to have 15 people.

Speaker B: But don't you feel like that is a failure of our educational system? Not being able to supply the level of leaders able to be adaptable? Because what you are describing, which by the way I fully agree on, what is required is primarily an experiential leadership, meaning leadership happens through experience, continuous experience of disruption. Like what you went through, for example. You are a great example of leaders that learn from disruption, again from experience, not right from education. That for me, for example is the biggest gap, um, from education system and the reality, because the education system in my opinion was not designed at that time in the 70s, 80s for the level of disruption that we are just describing right now. And I don't think they are ready to catch up. Anyways, my point is it needs to go through education or it needs to go through experience. So people, they need to be in the role, they need to be in the role of leader to really experiencing and testing and try and see what works, what does in order to build the muscle of becoming adaptable.

Speaker A: I agree. But at the end of the day, uh, you just have to live life based on the hands that you've been, that you have been uh, dealt. So you can't restart your life. This is where you are. You were born in an environment and you've grown in that environment. And this is, you are a product of your experiences.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: So you can't change. And this is why leadership is more difficult. This is why I wrote this book next Leading to the New Realities. Because people need to understand that actually what's required from them is very different from what they have been doing. And here I want to say two things. We're primarily uh, dealing now and I think a western audience, I think the Western model as we know it, okay. Is a model that actually brought great, in my opinion, it had brought great progress to the world.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: Fantastic progress to the world. But this model is now kind of nearing its limits and it needs to reinvent itself. Um, a model based on where the world is always stable and where inflation is always a 2 to 3% thing that you have to deal with and interest rates are low and basically supply chain will never be disrupted and everyone love each other and there are no wars. Is actually now a word that actually feels like a word from a different time and it's not adapted to uh, our times. Allow me to give you an example. If I go to Japan and you go to a school in Japan.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: Okay. Schools in Japan. In the first few years at school, what do, what do kids learn first? They have no grades. What they learn is respect. What they learn is teamwork. What they learn is for example, I mean a great example. Okay. Kids in Japan, they actually clean their school after class.

Speaker B: Yeah. There's some famous stories about that.

Speaker A: Yeah. So what do they learn is that they learn respect, they learn the importance of life values.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: And they don't get grades so they don't start to compete. M From the age of five in our education system, you start to compete. From the day you open your eyes, you are programmed that you are here to compete. And for you to win, you have to be better than others.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: What kids in Japan learn for you to actually win, you have to live life respectfully. You have to respect others. You have live with others, not to live against others. When you go to a school in Japan, they have a nutritionist and people are not, I, uh, mean people aren't allowed to prepare any meal that has any processed food in it. They eat things that are healthy. They move. What we do in the Western world is actually the opposite of that. So as much as we brought the Western world has brought a lot of pluses to the world. I think we're now starting to see a bit of the limit limitations that we have and we need to reinvent our future. And it's the same in the context of business. Business has been developed based on your ability to maximize growth and to deliver an upended okay, indefinite quarters of growth. That was fine for a certain time. Now you need to actually live the word differently and you lead. I think the biggest value that leaders have is to find in them the ability to unlearn and to learn new things.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: Life is not going to change. We have to change. And I think awareness is 50% of the solution.

Speaker B: I have a last question for you, uh, Alain. I mean this conversation can go for forever given that you and I so much love this topic and this conversation. And my question for you is, I mean you've wrote that disruption is not the opposite of direction. Direction is the condition under which direction becomes the only thing that matters. That's very interesting statement. Now if SEO listening to this, in the middle of their own disruption right now, where do they start? What is the best way for them to start rethinking?

Speaker A: I invite every CEO, every leader to take a step back and rethink. Disruption is reality. When you abandon direction because of disruption, you're just going nowhere. Disruption is not going anywhere. We live in a world where the rules are being rewritten, but the new rules are still not conceived. You're going to have disruption after disruption until there is a new world order that is clearly there. And it does not look like we're gonna have that new world order anytime soon. And that's gonna, and that is going to manifest itself in very different ways. It's going to manifest itself in the geopolitics. It will affect business, whether it is supply chain, whether it is, uh, rare earth or all kind of materials, whether it is tariff, whether it's a trade flows. It's going to, it's going to manifest, uh, itself in new policy restrictions and more nationalism versus global cooperation compared to what it used to be. It's going to manifest itself in society with the AI. Uh, the downside, the societal downside of AI and other stuff and talentism. So if you lose direction because of disruption, you're simply going to fail. What you need to do as a leader, in my opinion, is always to have a North Star and do not lose direction because of disruption. Disruption is going to be there. How you deal with disruption, your ability to be ready for that is actually going, going to be, and this is what I call adaptability is going to be the most defining factor of future success. Otherwise, if you say, you know what, there is disruption. So I forget where I'm going and I'm going to just deal with this today. You will wake up tomorrow with a new one. And you might end up, let's say you want to go to Rome. You might end up in Angola. Uh, yes.

Speaker B: And there's not necessarily a great, great things. So in one word, a few words really. And why people should buy your new book that is here next, Leading through the new realities. Why this book by now, by the way, is by the time that you're gonna watch this episode, the book will be available in all Amazon and all stores. Why this book now?

Speaker A: Well, I start the book with that. I start the book. I mean, sorry, when you, you open the book, the first thing I write

Speaker B: is called why now?

Speaker A: Why this? Why now? Okay. And the reason why I wrote I wrote, uh, Next is because I think we are growing. We are going through a time of profound disruption, as we said. I think that leadership, the leadership rules as we knew it, are not valid going forward. Leadership, uh, is of course, extremely important. I think the word demands, uh, much more leadership, and business demands much more leadership on us than before. I still remember a theme of the World Economic Forum, uh, meeting, uh, In Davos in 20, I think 17 or 18. And that was responsive and responsible leadership. And I think today we need responsive and responsible leadership more than any time before. We cannot kick the can, and we have to respond to what actually the real world really needs, and that's on us as leaders. Whether you're leading a team, whether you're leading a business, whether you're leading change, whether you're leading a government, you have to deal with that. I don't think we are dealing with that as much. And I wanted to basically write my experience and my thoughts about what I think is going to help us navigate through the next decade. So this is why I think next, for any CEO, any leader who actually is reflecting on how to win going forward, I hope that Next will be a worthy read for them.

Speaker B: It will definitely be. I mean, my book is in a similar camp on recreating or shifting the leadership identity due to the context shifting every single day. So these are the books, in my opinion, they are needed right now in the market.

Speaker A: And I think also these are going to be, I mean, some of the last books written by humans. I mean, very soon, very soon, AI will write better books.

Speaker B: And that's also, I mean, we can be some of the last. That's what you're saying. So we'll be remembered as one of the latest authors. But I think it's important, I think what you said before, that really landed with me. It's a moment of questions, it's not a moment of answers. But if you don't ask the right question to yourself, to your team, well, imagine what kind of answer you're gonna get.

Speaker A: You know, uh, Andrea, it's like when you raise your kids, you raise your kids to what you don't know what life is gonna give them. When. If you tell your kids, you should behave this way, you should behave that way, you have to be polite, you have to eat well, you have to live healthy, you have to work out, you have to be respectful. And, uh, your kid asks you, but why? You can't tell him you're gonna face this problem or that obstacle in life. You can't tell him. You're going to find love, or you're going to divorce, or you're going to go through a very difficult financial situation, or you're going to have tough time at work, or you're going to have a colleague that will bully you, or you're going to have whatever. You raise your kids to deal with life, but you don't know what's awaiting them. You just want them to be in the best shape possible. I think we, uh, are at a similar time. We do not know what life has for us, but what we know is how can we the best prepared to be able to deal with what life will throw at us in the coming decade.

Speaker B: On that note, Alain, thank you so much for being on the show. As always, it's been an amazing conversation saying, good luck with the book. I'm sure it will be incredible successful.

Speaker A: Thank you very much. And it's a pleasure to be back to your podcast. And I hope that, uh, we'll also have a third one, uh, maybe in a couple of years and reflect on what we said today and where we will be then.

Speaker B: That would be definitely interesting. So thank you very much everybody for watching this episode.