Digital Transformation is something that is currently affecting every country, every industry and pretty much every company. Millions of words, countless conferences and thousands of hours of audio and video have been dedicated to it. Despite this there seems to be very little attention paid to one of its most critical elements, having the right skills and talent available within the business to survive and thrive in our digital future.
One of the best books I’ve read on Digital Transformation recently is Digital Darwinism by Tom Goodwin, and I’m delighted to welcome him to the show as my guest this week Tom is Head of Innovation at Zenith and the most followed marketing influencers on LinkedIn. It was brilliant to get his view on talent and digital transformation.
In the interview we discuss:
- The importance of asking good questions and listening
- What is Digital Darwinism and what should companies be doing to survive and thrive
- Why talent is so important to digital transformation and why so few companies talk about it
- Is recruiting fit for purpose?
- Why companies need to think and act differently about hiring
Tom also talks about the future of jobs and his view on where technology is taking us in the next couple of years.
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
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Matt Alder [00:01:01]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 172 of the Recruiting Future podcast. Digital transformation is something that’s currently affecting every country, every industry and pretty much every company. Millions of words, countless conferences, and thousands of hours of audio and video have been dedicated to it. Despite this, there seems to be very little attention being paid to one of its most critical elements, having the right skills and talent available within your business to survive and thrive in our digital future. One of the best books I’ve read recently on digital transformation is Digital Darwinism by Tom Goodwin, and I’m delighted to welcome him to the show as my guest this week. Tom is Head of Innovation at Zenith and also the world’s most followed marketing influencer on LinkedIn. It was brilliant to get his view on talent for digital transformation. Enjoy the interview. Hi Tom and welcome to the podcast.
Tom Goodwin [00:02:05]:
Thanks for having me on.
Matt Alder [00:02:07]:
My absolute pleasure. Could you just introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Tom Goodwin [00:02:12]:
That’s a very hard question. So I’m Tom Goodwin. I’m the sort of EVP Head of Innovation for Zenith Media in the us which is already quite a vague title. But in short, I work for a very large advertising network around the world and it’s my job to try to get us to think differently about the future, embrace technology more enthusiastically, and produce things that are both meaningful and probably haven’t been done before. And at the same time I also write pieces. So as I get sort of launched into technology and I meet interesting people, I also have a great opportunity to write articles about my findings or my thoughts. So I’ve recently written a book as well.
Matt Alder [00:02:58]:
I think I first came across you on LinkedIn where you’ve sort of built a very big following and I think every few days you kind of pop up with an interesting insight. How did you sort of build LinkedIn as a platform for yourself? What did you Kind of do to sort of launch yourself and build that big an audience.
Tom Goodwin [00:03:20]:
I’m not sure. I know I’m supposed to have a really clever and helpful answer to people and some sort of seven step program, but I don’t really know how it happened other than I’ve been using it to provoke debate. And by that I mean this is a really interesting time in the world and it’s much more useful to have good questions and to listen than it is to use these platforms for broadcasting. And I think over the years of writing articles for places like TechCrunch or being on TV shows like I sometimes do, or speaking at conferences, and somehow it sort of led to something that feels a bit like momentum. And I think people do sort of welcome. Well, some people welcome the kind of style of my kind of questions and debates. I also had some kind of quote that went around the world as well. So I had a viral quote to do with Facebook and Uber and Alibaba, which sort of went somewhat viral. So I think that’s led to some people following me. But I. I can’t say this in a way which is particularly helpful to people because I don’t know how replicable it is.
Matt Alder [00:04:24]:
Now, I wasn’t actually to ask you about your viral quote because that’s what everyone asks you about, but now you’ve mentioned it, I’ve seen that quote used so many times in recruiting and HR conferences and it’s never attributed to you. Can you just sort of tell people what the quote is and how do you feel about the, you know, the people who are sort of claiming it as theirs?
Tom Goodwin [00:04:48]:
So I think this quote starts in like, Facebook is the world’s largest media owner, but doesn’t own any, but doesn’t make any content. Airbnb is the world’s largest accommodation provider, but doesn’t own any sort of space. Alibaba is the world’s largest retailer, doesn’t have any inventory. And then Uber is the world’s largest transportation company that doesn’t own any vehicles. It’s been quite an emotional ride, actually, because I think when it first went viral, it went viral under some else’s name. And then I got quite angry about it, to be honest. Not because I wanted the fame, but because it just felt wrong. And it just seemed like it was sort of disingenuous that people were passing off as their own. And then slowly the sort of focus has come onto me as the author and that feels quite nice and it’s quite commercially useful. So it’s nice to be able to write a book because people know that you’re the person that said that. And then now I’m becoming just more comfortable with the idea that actually, you know, all knowledge is somewhat gathered from other people. And, you know, to create a purely new thought is almost impossible. And the nature of the world is that we can’t keep on holding on to things. Something that’s quite strange, actually. I know I’m sort of drifting off here, but when you. There’s this horrible expression, thought leader, which I don’t really like, and some people call me one, which makes me feel uncomfortable. But there are times when you see things that are written and you think, you know, maybe this person’s reflecting on my point of view, or they’re certainly joining a type of conversation, which I feel like I started. And then the first reaction is awful because you think, oh, this person’s plagiarizing my viewpoint. And then you kind of think, well, I guess, you know, if you are. If you are lucky enough to have an audience of people that sometimes listen to you, and then people gather behind what you’ve said, and then they reflect that in their own work. You know, to some extent, that’s the goal of all this. So I should be a lot more happy about it.
Matt Alder [00:06:42]:
Absolutely. Absolutely. So moving on to the book Digital Darwinism. What’s the book about and who’s it for?
Tom Goodwin [00:06:51]:
The book is about the changing world and the degree to which we need to get really enthusiastic about technology and really optimistic about the possibilities it creates, at the same time as realizing that a lot of the dynamics that have made us successful until now are either not particularly helpful in the future or even detrimental to our future plans. So it’s time to sort of politely shake people up and try to get people enthusiastic and to get people to change. And I’m not one of these people that goes around saying everything’s different now. I’m not someone that says that the pace of change is faster and, you know you’re going to be dead unless you change everything. But I think everyone needs to have a mature and thoughtful process where they establish the degree to which, if they’d set up their business today, they would have set it up in a very different way. And if they do accept that their business is not quite right for this moment, I’d like to then sort of guide them through a process where they can rethink it and change it for the better.
Matt Alder [00:07:56]:
I think it’s a really interesting book, and I kind of read it last year and really sort of enjoyed some of your, you know, some of your observations and, and your examples. And I suppose by Darwinism, we’re sort of talking about survival of the fittest. And it’s probably very difficult to summarize the entire book in one answer, but how should companies be thinking, what should they be doing if they want to survive the sort of radical transformation that digital technology is driving at the moment?
Tom Goodwin [00:08:28]:
That’s a great question, actually. Interestingly, yesterday I was in another country and I was talking to a very large software company, and part of the briefing process to me was two things. One is you need to get everyone to go about their jobs in a radically different way, and we need to try and change the culture. But two, we need to understand, is what they said to me. We need to understand that our company has made great decisions and our leadership has been incredibly smart, and we can be really proud of everything we’ve done at the same time. And I think that tension is really interesting. I think there is this presumption somehow that if you have to change right now, that someone has made mistakes or that people have been stupid or that people have misled the company. And the reality is that a company like BMW or Mercedes or Toyota or Ford actually have been full of extremely smart people working very hard, doing their best to deal with change. And then a company like Tesla comes along, which fundamentally changes a lot of the dynamics in their industry. And it’s not right to not change because you’re too proud to, because you’ve actually been doing a great job, because you do have to change. But it’s also not right to assume that within the spirit of change there is this sense of blame or mistake or regret. And I think that’s the really important sort of tension to get across, is don’t be too proud to change and don’t assume that blame is attached to this recognition that you need to pivot.
Matt Alder [00:09:58]:
Now, one of the things I find really interesting in all the discussion about digital transformation and companies having to change and customer expectations changing or whatever it might be, there seems to be very little discussion about the kind of the role of talent and corporate culture within that. Why do you think that is? And how important is having the right talent to companies when it comes to transforming what they do?
Tom Goodwin [00:10:30]:
I think, I mean, it’s a. It’s a very astute observation, and I completely agree. I think we’ve entered an environment where change is often broadcast by companies as part of their. Almost their corporate marketing or their sort of messaging to the financial markets to try and show the world that they get it. And I think therefore, they tend to change in a way which is somewhat superficial and external and doesn’t cut through departments and is somewhat sort of tangible. And it’s always rooted in technology. So if you’re a large retailer, the best way to show Wall street that you get change is to have a drone delivery service. And it doesn’t actually have to exist. You just need to announce your intentions or to do something with data and facial recognition or to announce some sort of blockchain initiative. It always comes down to sort of technology, because technology, it appears, is the most pure way to sort of sit signal that you understand the future and you’re all future y. And I think that’s kind of nonsense. And actually the real way to change is way, way, way more fundamental. And it’s to do with recruitment and retention and training and culture. But the very hard thing about that is two things. One is it’s extremely difficult and takes a really long time and is very awkward and problematic. And two is that you can’t really see that I don’t think your stock price is going to go up by 12% on the day that you announce a new training initiative or that you’re going to recruit people in different ways. So I think it’s that sort of double punch of timely, difficult, expensive and not particularly demonstrable which makes it very challenging.
Matt Alder [00:12:16]:
And there’s kind of a lot of soul searching going on in the HR industry and in the recruiting industry at the moment about, you know, how the industry can change and, you know, how a lot of the practices and the way that things work haven’t, you know, haven’t really adapted decades. And how can technology help from your perspective of sort of sitting outside the industry, but probably, you know, seeing a lot of what, you know, goes on in terms of people within businesses, you know, do you think recruiting is fit for purpose in its current, current state?
Tom Goodwin [00:12:53]:
I mean this really politely and I’m not trying to sound like I’m highly tweetable, but I think, like, it’s unbelievably important that recruitment is done properly. And it’s never recognized how important all of these roles are and it really needs to be. And at the same time, I think it’s done extremely badly. I think most recruitment is based on the principles of risk avoidance and sort of plausible deniability. And we look for aspects like previous experience and we look for degrees and we look for all these very defendable and robust boxes that we tick. And I think For a while that’s been okay because we knew that the type of talent that we needed was found within the logic of following these processes. And actually now the talent we need the most probably doesn’t fit into these categories. It’s actually, and I know this sounds a little bit cliched, but it’s probably a 22 year old that’s already sold two businesses and kind of gone bankrupt. Or it’s some someone that became an Instagram influencer even though they didn’t really want to be and they didn’t go to university because they had more than enough money. Or it’s someone that’s 47 years old and actually spent 20 years being an editor of a newspaper and now they’ve decided that they want to try something radically different. I think our future and our success depends on people who are actually quite odd and they’re oddly shaped and they have weird talents and they might have strange ways of thinking and they’re difficult, but actually they’re going to be essential for our success. And without wanting to sort of link too tritely into the notion of Darwinism, like, you know, Darwinism was based on mutations and errors and oddities being essential for the progress of species. And I think as an industry recruitment tends to be based on removing the probability of anything strange or mutations happening.
Matt Alder [00:14:50]:
And that’s a fundamental problem for many organizations. These, you know, the problems they have with talent are quite sort of fundamental in terms of getting, getting the people with the skills they need into the jobs. Do you think the companies that are going to be, you know, most successful moving forward are the ones who kind of solve that particular problem or the ones who can attract the best talent. Do you think that’s sort of critical for future success?
Tom Goodwin [00:15:19]:
I think the obvious answer is yes and then a bell goes off and I win a prize. I think we need to be, we need to aware how, we need to be aware of how different everyone’s jobs are. So in all reality, if you’re recruiting for a 10,000 person software company, your brief is going to be very different to if you’re recruiting for a 20,000 people QSR restaurant or for university department. So everyone needs to kind of find their own way to handle this because if you’re training fast food workers, you don’t really want people that are full of dissent or you don’t want neuro atypical people that are in your team because you know to some extent you are based on repetition and not challenging things. So every company needs to find their own approach into this. But I would say that the world right now is full of lots and lots of companies that talk about the need to embrace diversity and they talk about the need to employ people that are different and they talk about the need to have mature hires or whatever it is. And I don’t really see much evidence that this is actually what companies want. Like, I feel like they like saying the words and they like having a part of the process which responds to that. But I don’t think in their heart of hearts people are ready for this yet. And I think that really, really has to change. And obviously this is key for recruitment, but it’s also key for retention. Now there are lots and lots of companies out there will talk about how they like people to work from home, or they want people to be curious, or they want people to be entrepreneurial. And quite often when people behave in that way, it’s actually not welcomed, like to be truly entrepreneurial, to be truly challenging, to have side gigs, to be quite difficult with your time, to be quite robust in your opinions, to agree to disagree and then do something anyway, you know, to test and learn. Lots of these things are said in PowerPoint presentations, but when you actually find people who behave that way, they’re so deemed to be somewhat problematic to the future of the company.
Matt Alder [00:17:28]:
And when it comes to the, if you like, the future of work itself, there’s. There’s obviously massive debates going on about the role of automation, the future role of robots, the loss of jobs, all those kind of things. What’s your view in that particular debate?
Tom Goodwin [00:17:48]:
I think no one ever makes the press by saying that things are not changing that fast and that broadly speaking, things are similar. You only tend to get notice if you say something outlandish. Now, I know enough about these technologies and how fast their progression to knowing that we should all be massively aware of it and we should all be deeply curious about it, but we shouldn’t get paranoid with the timescale on which it’s going to happen, because I think the reality is it’s still way cheaper to employ people to make pizzas than it is to have robots. The reality is that human beings are far better drivers than robots are at the moment and that’s not going to change anytime soon. So we need to be aware of it and we need to future proof our own careers. But I’d rather we just got better at knowing when’s the right time to make a phone call, when’s the right time to send an email, or figuring out how to create agendas for meetings and making sure that we invite the right people. I think we should probably. I know this sounds quite dismissive to your question, but we should probably focus more on the really important things that are happening now, rather than get distracted by this sort of future conversation. I mean, one final thing on the robots is, you know, there will be lots and lots of things which robots do well, but there are also going to be things that they do terribly. And generally speaking, the best combination is to have robots undertake the stuff that people are bad at, which then allows people to spend much more time doing the things that they’re really good at, which tends to be the things that are actually most valuable and most rare and most well rewarded.
Matt Alder [00:19:22]:
I definitely agree with you on that kind of focusing on the present. I think particularly in my industry, there’s so much focus on what’s going to happen next that people, people aren’t sort of concentrating on the current big thing before they embrace the next big thing. But to completely contradict myself with the next question, because I kind of ask this to everyone. What should we be? What’s going to happen? What’s going to happen next? What’s on your radar for the next sort of one to two years? What can we expect in terms of change and technology?
Tom Goodwin [00:19:58]:
Well, again, I think the reality is we’ve had video conferencing for a long time and people don’t really tend to use it. And we’ve had voip for a long time and people don’t tend to use it well. So I think there’s a seductiveness in assuming that technology is going to come along really quickly and change everything. And actually the problem is that people don’t tend to adopt it that quickly, and we don’t necessarily know how to use it or what the etiquette or meaning behind that technology is. So we’re not necessarily on the edge of a massive change. There are things which are interesting for us to look at. So one in particular is that many of the advantages that companies once had to do with their assets and size and expertise and purchasing power are not really as advantageous anymore. And that means that quite often smaller companies can come into a space and sort of undermine a lot of the experience that those bigger companies have had. So you can look at things like Netflix or Dollar Shave Club or Casper as examples of that. So I do think smallness is going to be particularly interesting to look at in the future. And that does cut out a lot of inefficiency, and it cuts out a lot of bureaucracy and a lot of politics. I also think our use of technology as a way to empower people to do their jobs better is interesting. Like myself in my role, I’ve reached a point where I’m sufficiently confident and obnoxious that I tend to do my job how I want to, and I tend to do it from wherever I want. But generally speaking, the world is still rooted in office is rather like a factory line production system where we want people that are very similar, much like cogs in a machine, and we want people to all work together in the same place at the same time, much like a machine. And I think we need to be aware that the real value comes from ideas and imagination and creativity and solving problems in new ways. And increasingly, especially for the next generation, that’s very unlikely to happen at your desk between nine and six with other people in the room at the same time. It’s actually much more likely to happen as you’re a graphic design conference, or when you’re walking around an art gallery at the weekend, or when you’ve just had a really good night’s sleep and you’ve looked at a sort of spider that’s coming through your window or something. So I think we need to start embracing that creativity a little bit more.
Matt Alder [00:22:22]:
So finally, where can people find you and where can they find the book?
Tom Goodwin [00:22:27]:
So the book, I think you can get it from most big sellers. I think the sort of Amazon, some Waterstones and W.H. smiths of the world will sell it as will Kogan page, which is my publisher on social media. I’m quite lively on LinkedIn, so that’s probably one of the better places to connect with me or follow me. I think I’m tomfgoodwin on that and I’m also on Twitter as well. But increasingly people tell me that my face turns up into their feed all the time and they find it quite annoying. So. So hopefully I haven’t just inspired lots of people to get frustrated by me.
Matt Alder [00:23:02]:
Tom, thank you very much for talking to me.
Tom Goodwin [00:23:04]:
My absolute pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Matt Alder [00:23:07]:
My thanks to Tom Goodwin. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts or via your podcasting app of choice. The show also has its own dedicated app, which you can find by searching for Recruiting Future in your App Store. If you’re a Spotify user, you can also find the show there. You can find all the past episodes@www.rfpodcast.com on that site, you can subscribe to the mailing list and also find out more about working with me. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next week and I hope you’ll join me.
