Adam Outland: Today's guest is Terence Mauri, a global expert
on the future of leadership, AI and disruption. He is the
founder of the future trends think tank, Hack Future Lab, and
also an acclaimed author. Mauri spearheads a movement for
leaders to rethink leadership in a post AI world. His newest book
is called The Upside of Disruption. It's out right now.
Terence, great to meet you.
Terence Mauri: Thank you so much, Adam for inviting me.
Adam Outland: Absolutely. Well, listen, there's so many amazing
present things to ask you about in terms of your work and the
work you're doing this moment. But one of the things I always
love hearing about from people who have generated a lot of
success in life in their different paths, is their their
roots and their beginnings.
Terence Mauri: You know, the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard
said that life is best lived forwards, but is best understood
backwards. And I can really relate to that. I had my whole
life and career mapped out in a very linear way. But as as
another famous philosopher, Mike Tyson, once said, you can have
the best laid plans until somebody punches you in the
mouth, and this is what happened to me. So I had a successful
career management consultancy. Things were going well. I was
making good progress. One day, I walked into a store, it was in
the middle of the day, and a car driver lost control and drove a
car into the store. He mounted the car. It was actually a
terrible accident. Nobody lost their lives that day, but many
people were injured, including myself. I woke up under the car
in the store with the wheel of the car still going, burning my
legs. It was one of those kind of accidents where your life
flashes past. You spent a number of weeks in hospital, and you
know when you have time to think when you're out of the building,
that's when you you get to reflect at a deeper level. And
you know, for me, I really sort of it was a reawakening. I
connected with, reconnected, actually, with, you know, my
values, legacy, who I was, who I who I was becoming. And I
realized there was a gap. There was a gap between who I wanted
to become and what I was doing right now in the world of
management consultancy, which is a very transactional world, a
very profitable world, but I wanted to pivot to a
transformational world, a world where actually, I could bring my
life and my values to life in a visceral way and visible way as
well. So that happened about 20 years ago, and since then, I've
been on a mission, a higher mission, to inspire leaders
around the world ranging from NGO and non for profit to S, p5
100, to harness the upside of disruption. What I mean by that
is, you know, sort of turning disruption. It could be career
disruption, technology, disruption, industry,
disruption, life, disruption, whatever the disruption is, big
or small, life changing or professional. How do we turn
that into a tailwind or a platform for focus, laser light,
focus and strategic courage and a more sustainable values driven
life.
Adam Outland: There's a lot of risk in going out and doing
something on your own, so I guess what kind of process did
you go through?
Terence Mauri: I think it's such a great question. It's what I
call a catalytic question, and it's a question that we should
all be thinking about, because our relationship with risk is
often not a good one. Our appetite for risk taking is
often squeezed out of us like a lemon from an early age. By the
age we leave college, you know, we're risk averse, and then
we've got this paradox of companies now demanding that
we're all courageous risk takers, and it's there's a big
rhetoric to reality gap there. And for me, I think that
accident reconfigured my relationship with risk, that you
know life is inherently risky. You can you can die at any
moment. Basically the worst thing we can do is actually not
take any risk, because being addicted to certainty can make
us feel comfortable. But if that certainty is also causing a
stagnation or inertia, we're not learning anymore. We're not
moving anymore. We're accept accepting a status quo that's
not healthy or does not giving us happiness. Well, that's not a
good place to be, and we know that if you look at different
statistics around the world, whether it's the game. Develop
engagement survey. I mean, that hasn't changed for decades. Now,
majority of the global workforce disengaged, but still go to
work, but have mentally quit the job, right? You know, life is
short, like we're lucky. We get about 960, months to live, which
is just 80 years of age. And when you think of it that way,
when I frame it that way, it's not to make people feel scared.
It's this idea that it's never been easier to waste time and
waste energy, because this is the age of abundance. Also, we
have technology that's incredible, but technology can
make the trivial seem urgent. Think about when you look at
your day, reacting to emails all the day, everything seems
exciting and urgent. Probably less than 5% is actually
important. So I think for me, what it did was a couple of
things. Number one, it was a great reawakening, and it helped
me to reconnect with the idea that not taking a risk is a risk
sometimes. Number two, that actually the world will always
be uncertain, will always be volatile, and risk and reward
always come together, wrapped together. We forget that risk
and will reward travel in that same elevator, and sometimes we
forget that actually, you know this idea that we always
overestimate the risk of trying something new could be a new way
of working. It could be taking a career break. It could be
applying for a new job and a new sector, whatever it is, we
always overestimate the risk of doing something new, and we
always underestimate the risk of standing still.
Adam Outland: I love that. You founded a Hack Future Lab, which
is focused on future trends as a think tank. How do you define
disruption?
Terence Mauri: Disruption, for me, is a secular and structural
here to stay, inflection point. But there's different types of
disruptors out there. If we look at mega trends, for example,
we've got optimizer reality that's moving from doing AI to
being AI. That means, for example, five to five we're
moving from IT spending as a percentage of global GDP, moving
from five to 10% over the next seven years to optimize reality.
That's a big here to stay, disruption that will impact and
reshape and redefine value creation, but also redefine
completely new industries and companies. Another example would
be decarbonization, the whole the whole transition to the
green economy around the world. So these are big bang
disruptions, but if we take it down to a more granular level,
you know, disruption can also be a family disruption. It could be
a divorce, a sudden death. Could be a career type disruption. But
actually, how we deal with them? I think it's this kind of point
of view that asking this question, how do I turn these
disruptors into platforms, into tailwinds? You know, how do we
turn these into upside.
Adam Outland: It's a great skill to have for anyone, but in
particular for leaders, I feel like to be able to recognize
that every obstacle has inside of itself the key to its own
solution.
Terence Mauri: I think so. I think constraints are often
opportunities in disguise. You know, for example, Hermes, the
global luxury company, one of the big constraints facing, you
know, the fashion industry is this, you know, the idea that
they're not sustainable business models. They waste a lot of a
lot of money. They've got high carbon dioxide emissions. So for
Hermes, what they've done is turn that constraint into upside
by creating new strategic partnerships with biotech
companies. They develop and kind of produce mycelium, which is a
non leather based form of leather. It's kind of like a
mushroom based type of leather, alternative to leather. And the
big, the kind of big, audacious goal at Hermes now is that at
least half its global revenues will be mycelium based leather
by 2030 now, that wouldn't have happened without turning a
disruption into a tailwind.
Adam Outland: So you know, one of the big disruptors that we
keep hearing that's AI. So how are you seeing leaders react to
AI? And how can we best harness this trend without getting
caught up in it?
Terence Mauri: I think it's helpful to take a historical
perspective first of all. So we go back to 1956 Professor Marvin
Minsky, for example. He was one of the pioneers of AI. And
originally it was going to be called Applied Statistics, but
that wasn't sexy enough. I think there are three kind of time
horizons to be aware of. So the first one was excitement phase.
It took chat GBT two months to reach 100 100 million users. It
took the cell phone 16 years to reach 100 million users. And so
the excitement phase, I think, has happened over the last
couple of years, especially, we've seen over a trillion
dollars of CapEx going. To AI infrastructure, over two $50
billion of VC money as well. That's going up exponentially.
So at that excitement phase, we've now moved to the
experimental phase, for example, T Mobile and open aI have just
formed a partnership for a sort of proactive AI decision in
making model that will be able to proactively help solve
customers pain points. You know, three phases. Number one,
excitement phase, exuberance. Excitement. Number two is the
experimental phase that I believe we're in right now. The
next phase, the next horizon, which we'll be entering over the
next 18 months, is the embedded phase, and that's where, you
know, actually AI eventually will be just become invisible.
Every great technology, if it's truly great, should be
invisible. It'll be embedded in our cell phones, in our
toothbrushes, in our TVs. A trillion sensor economy
connected together, amplifying intelligence, cross pollination,
helping tackle some of the world's biggest existential
challenges, from climate change to healthcare. And we're at the
embryonic stage of that. But you it doesn't take much imagination
to to think about where we're going with this over the next
couple of years, that the the sort of cost of production, the
cost of knowledge production, is going to reach zero in the next
15 years. It would take you a lifetime to read 8 billion
words. Now imagine that you know the fastest AI today can can do
that in the blink of an eye, and again, we can start to see the
exponential opportunity of this platform. But I want to say as
well that we have to be careful of artificial idiocy. Am I
investing in warm AI or cold AI? So warm AI is humanity first AI?
It's a humanity first future enabled by AI. It maximizes,
elevates what makes us more human, and it protects Well,
being, loneliness, democracy, truth and transparency. That's
warm. Ai, the bad news is right now, most governments, most
organizations, are not investing in warm. Ai, they're investing
in cold. AI, cold. AI is machine first future enabled by AI. It
elevates division, disinformation, truth decay, it
erodes well being. And so that's the difference. Are we investing
in a warm tech future or a cold tech future?
Adam Outland: For so many of our listeners that are business
owners themselves. You talk about the return on
intelligence, what are some things leaders can do to prepare
their organizations for AI and adopt it effectively?
Terence Mauri: What a great question. I think, the question
every leader, every manager, should be thinking about right
now, which is to use AI in the right way and an inclusive way,
sustainable way, in a way that sharpens the growth and talent
agenda. We should be thinking about ROI, which is not just
return on investment, but this new human centric KBI, key
behavior indicator, which is return on intelligence, return
on imagination. Imagine a cognitively enabled enterprise
where your talent gets to solve the biggest problems, the
biggest challenges that it faces. That means 10x
productivity, 10x engagement, 10x execution. We know that
that's not the reality for most organizations right now. I just
had an article published a few weeks ago in Fast Company called
the rise of bore out, which is the opposite of burnout. Bore
out is cognitive or emotional under load. It's boredom at
work, and it's at record levels. And so if AI is just doing parts
of the job which we're already doing, and what we're left with
is other boring parts of the job that's not return on
intelligence. And so that's a big question. We should be using
AI to speak to insight, speak to innovation, speed to decision,
velocity for creating new scenarios, new you know, new
products, new services, new platforms, testing out
hypotheses. You know, it's a generative tool. The clue is in
the name, but my worry is that many C suite are just looking at
AI to automate, to make cost savings and to just focus on a
very narrow metric, which is shareholder return.
Adam Outland: Sure. This is just maybe a quick question for
you. Is a form of disruption, to disrupt technology by being more
in person?
Terence Mauri: Yes, I think so. I really think so. Because, as I
said, when the cost of this technology is coming to zero and
everybody has access to the same tools, the same technologies,
it's more difficult to stand out. Ironically, everyone's got
access. Everyone can set up the great website, the great.
Podcast, the great YouTube channel, but how do you stand
out? The value of that goes down. This is one of the
ironies, and I think a lot of people don't think about that.
And it's there's a reason why naught point naught. 1% of
people make money on Spotify or tick tock or YouTube, and that
number is even going down more. We've got to be so careful. I
call it the curse of sameness. Write about it a lot in the new
book, The upside disruption. So yes, ironically, sharpening your
human edge, your in person edge, is going to be the superpower
that differentiates you. Gives you that distinctive quality in
the sea of sameness and sea of commoditization that we're in,
and that's why making the effort to go to these in person events,
speaking at them, contributing to them, panels. This is a part,
an important part, of the human edge. Yes, use the tools around
us. You'd be stupid not to. But don't think that it's going to
be easy just doing it that way. Yes, there'll be a percentage
that managed to do it. But my fear is that when everything
come comes to zero cost. Everyone has access to the same
incredible tools. Well, actually it's much more difficult to
stand out and so that in person, human edge, the that social
skills, emotional intelligence, conversational listening, being
fully present. These going to be important. Human skills, human
skills, Courage skills, these are the skills that we need to
nurture and sharpen for the next generation.
Adam Outland: What walls have you encountered in building
something? I love allowing our listeners insight that when you
choose to take a risk, that it doesn't necessarily mean a
pathway paved in gold, it comes with a lot of potholes.
Terence Mauri: I love that question because disruption is
about humility. And what I mean by humility is the ability to
the capacity, the awareness to know your blind spots, to be
aware of the blind spots that you're blind to, but also
understanding that failure and setback and obstacle is one half
of of success. And as Ryan Holiday says so eloquently, you
know, the obstacle is the way, disruption is the way. And you
know, I'm a self confessed failure pioneer. Yeah, I failed
multiple times in order to get where I am today, multiple
setbacks, multiple rejections, book rejections, client
rejections. You know, 30% of what I do is keynotes
conferences around the world. But you know often you're
you're, you know, when you're chosen, you're, you've been
chosen out of like maybe five or six or eight other great
speakers. So you get rejected a lot. You know, 90% of the time
it's a rejection. Now I could choose two ways to respond to
that. I could say, one, I'm going to give up because I'm
good. You know, my ratio of rejection is so high, so I'm
just not going to do that. Or two, recognize that actually
anything worthwhile in life requires resilience, requires
persistence, requires grit, and that's been the big lesson for
me. I'm here because I've overcome probably more failures
than the average person, and that's been painful, but I've
made pain part of the process and understand that if I'm not
hurting, I'm not growing.
Adam Outland: You know I just want to spend one more minute on
this; people, and their relationship to risk is that
they don't understand that a lot of life can be, a little bit
like a game of baseball, and that if you're batting 20 to 30%
it's good batting average.
Terence Mauri: Yeah.
Adam Outland: Most of life, we're not trained to embrace
rejection or misses or missed swings that way we're treated.
We treat it as an ultimate failure, which then generally
means I'm not good enough.
Terence Mauri: Yes.
Adam Outland: For you, where did this light switch flip? Or where
do you? Where could you trace it back to say, this is the moment
where I kind of changed my relationship to failure?
Terence Mauri: I think it goes back to that life disruption,
life or death moment, life flashing past you, which you
realize you can have your whole life that mapped out that linear
way become obsessed with success and avoidance of failure, and
that's not real life. You know, being stripped down and being
made very vulnerable, nearly losing my life, actually was the
wake up call to me that, you know, we've life is about. Life
is risk. And actually the biggest regret, one of the
things to help our listeners and viewers today is when you get to
the end of your life, and I hope it's a long life, 8090, years of
age, or 100 the number one regret, according to research,
is a lack of courage. That when you look back, the biggest
regret you'll have in your lives, when you look back at
your 90 years will be the amount of times that you didn't you
didn't step up. The lack of courage, the courage to think
bit bolder, the courage to say no, the courage to walk away
from something that wasn't working for you, to courage to
start over. This is our number one regret at the end of our
lives, and we can use this knowledge in advance of getting
to 90 years of age to our advantage and do what you know.
Steve, Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos used to do very well, which is
regret minimization. To get to imagine that you're 70 years old
and say, what would I regret most not doing when I look back?
Is it not having kids? Is it not starting that business? Is it
not, you know, yeah, hitting that C level in my company.
Whatever it is, success is very personal. But just remember, you
know, at the end of our lives, the number one regret is a lack
of courage. And actually, one half of courage is the ability
to embrace failure and recognize that that is a stepping stone to
where you want to be. It's not necessary. And of course, there
are different types of failures as well. By the way, productive
failures, intelligent failures, stupid failures. So we have to
be careful here as well and understand the nuances. But the
one thing to take away is we need to reframe our relationship
with productive failure and recognize that it's also an
important part of success.
Adam Outland: What do you think when you are spending time as an
entrepreneur mentor for MIT, or you're you know, you're speaking
at some universities and engaging with this next
generation that's coming out, what do you see there? Do you
see a group of young women and men that are have that new
definition of failure? Or do you feel we need to be able to
manufacture somehow, for some of these people, maybe not a life
threatening situation, but something that that shakes them
up in how they perceive what we're discussing?
Terence Mauri: What I love about Generation Alpha is this
incredible vision aspirational, and I think it's very nuanced,
the culturally context and culture demographics, whether
it's Africa or North America or Europe, there's a different risk
appetite out there depending on geography, and so that's that's
a big deal. But the good news is, it can be unlearned and
relearned as well, for sure. And what I love about my work at MIT
is every year we host MIT solve, and the purpose of MIT solve is
to create a generation of solvers. We post Grand
Challenges, global challenges that the world faces, for
example, climate change, lack of literacy, healthcare challenges,
and we give people anywhere in the world, the opportunity to
pitch tech based solutions to those global challenges, and one
of those examples recently was for people with Alzheimer's.
There was a young student called Emma Yang. Her grandmother was
diagnosed with Alzheimer's, or dementia. It's a terrible
disease. One in seven people will get it in their lifetime.
And you know, being a very an introvert and a mathematician,
she framed this as a hypothesis, and she created an app called
Timeless. The purpose of the app timeless is to help people with
dementia stay reconnected to their memories, reconnected to
their families through geo tagging, facial recognition
gamification, received over a million dollars of wealth of
investment since she since inception. This is a great
example of generations solve. This is a great example of what
can happen when the cost you imagine, the costs of doing this
10 years ago, would have been prohibited. It would cost
millions of dollars to set up an app and test it, scale it. Now,
you can do all of this. You can go from idea to iteration to
implementation within hours or days, and obviously that's
accelerated even more with AI. So for me, this is not the age
of disruption, by the way. This is the age of wonder, the age of
possibility, and the only limit is our imagination.
Adam Outland: Yeah, I was at a longevity dinner, and it was
very interesting to hear people talk about how quickly and
exponentially medical and health disruption is occurring, and
that the key takeaway from this speaker was that if you can live
10 more years, you'll solve most of your problems that you'll
have in the future, and probably add another 20 to your life.
Terence Mauri: It's so exciting, isn't it? Ray Kurzweil,
Singularity University has written a book recently where he
really deep dives into this as well. And you know, I was in
Doha big you know, future of tech, future of AI Summit, and
you know, just some of the stats, you know, the facts and
insights coming out are so exciting. This idea that, you
know, we've now got, you know, chips that are the it can be
scaled to DNA, and they can hold billions of transistors. That's
actually happening. It's not, it's not science fiction. So
science fiction has become science flag. And I think you're
right. If we can hold on for at least another time, 10 years,
it's going to be one hell of a ride.
Adam Outland: And stay tuned. We'll continue this conversation
with Terence in Episode 479 of The Action Catalyst.