Thinkers50 Curated LinkedIn Live with David Nour | Curve Benders: Your Journey from Now to Next

David Nour is CEO of the Nour Group. He is also a professor at the Goizueta Business School at Emory University. He is the champion of relationship economics which quantifies social capital as an organization’s greatest asset. He is an advocate of co-creation for innovation solutions and most recently known as the creator of the concept of curve benders.

Transcript:

Des Dearlove:
Hello, welcome to Thinkers50 radar 2021 series, brought to you with LinkedIn live. I’m Des Dearlove.

Stuart Crainer:
And I’m Stuart Crainer, and we are the founders of Thinkers50, the world’s most reliable resource for identifying, ranking, and sharing the leading management ideas of our age. Ideas that can make a real difference in the world.

Des Dearlove:
Our belief in the power of ideas has been the foundation of our work since we launched the first ever global ranking of management thinkers in 2001. And we’ve published a new Thinkers50 ranking every two years since. And it remains, I’m pleased to say, the premier ranking of its kind.

Stuart Crainer:
So we’re excited that 2021, a year in which fresh thinking and human ingenuity are more important than ever, is also a Thinkers50 year.

Des Dearlove:
Nominations are now open for both the ranking of management thinkers and our distinguished achievement awards, which the Financial Times calls the Oscars of management thinking.

Stuart Crainer:
Short list for the Thinkers50 awards will be announced during this summer, the years final on 15th and 16th of November will bring all the excitement of a new ranking and the naming of our Thinkers50 2021 award recipients.

Des Dearlove:
But we start the years over with the Thinkers50 radar class, the 30 up and coming business thinkers to watch in the coming months.

Stuart Crainer:
In this series of 30 minute webinars, we want to showcase some of those ideas, to bring you the new voices of management thinking. We want to inspire you to seize this moment to create a better future for you and your organization.

Des Dearlove:
And our guest today is David Nour, Iranian born is the CEO of the Nour Group and professor at Goizueta Business School at Emory University. Known as Nour to his friends is the champion of relationship economics, which quantifies social capital as an organization’s greatest asset. An advocate of co-creation from innovative solutions. And most recently, Nour is the creator of the concept of Curve Benders, how affirms most strategic relationships, power, non-linear growth in the future of work.

Stuart Crainer:
The format today is that we have 30 minutes. David Nour will present his ideas for about 15 minutes. And we’ll have some time for some questions. Please use the chat function to make the session as interactive as possible. So please share where you are joining us from today.

Des Dearlove:
And please post your questions as we go along. Now I’m going to hand over to you Nour, the virtual stage is yours.

David Nour:
Des and Stewart, good to be with you, thank you for having me. Thanks for the opportunity to share are some of these ideas with the Thinkers50 community. I think most audiences will agree that this past year really challenged a lot of our assumptions. And beyond the way we work it also dramatically disrupted the way we live. The way we play and the way we give or serve others. So in our brief time together, I want to give the audience a glimpse into about four years of research, in excess of about a hundred executive interviews. And really thinking about this evolution of our personal reinvention, this value of strategic relationships. And really how can, if we can’t predict our future, how can we more proactively plan for it? So very quickly about my background pre-pandemic, like many of the Thinkers50, I was traveling the world delivering content on stages and moderating board and senior leadership conversations.

And post-pandemic this is my setup. My kids jokingly asked dad, “Can you launch one of those SpaceX Falcon Heavy’s from this setup?”. And I think this is the way we’re going to have to increasingly show up more digitally. So from the lighting to the cameras to the technology, this idea of hybrid relationships is going to become fairly prevalent. A lot of our work this past year has brand us around this idea of strategy visualization, I’ll talk more about this in a second. And really bringing innovative. Specifically I’m a big fan of Alex Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur, and a lot of others who talk about ecosystems and platforms and business model innovation. And how do we bring that idea innovation sprint to our organizations. Curve Benders as you were kind of to mention early on, this is my Star Wars trilogy. So early on, I came out with a Relationship Economics that was really focused on how to be more intentional about the relationships you choose to invest in.
Most recently, Co-create is all about how two or more parties come together and create something that they wouldn’t be able to do on their own. And again, Curve Benders is at the intersection of future of work, strategic relationships, and this idea of personal reinvention through non-linear growth. I started this journey a couple years with the podcast, number of the Thinkers50 friends and Marshall Goldsmith and 100 friends have been guests. And this is my gang. So I’m blessed that we’ve got two teenage kids and a couple crazy dogs. And by the way, for our audience, this is what I do for fun. And no, I didn’t Photoshop my name on there. I don’t know what your happy place is, but I think this pandemic is really prioritized for all of us that which brings us joy, and it just cannot be work alone.

So wherever your happy place is, this is the opportunity because to disengage, because when I put in the ear plugs and the helmet, nobody is calling. Nobody wants to have a zoom meeting, and it’s a fantastic opportunity to think. So as I mentioned, this idea of relationships, I cringe to this day and I’ve been a student of it for 20 years when people call it a soft skill. Because number or one, it’s not that soft. Number two, we’ve all learned it’s not that easy. So relationship economics talks a lot about how to map, how to be intentional, how to really lay out a journey, a roadmap for your, what I believe is, your biggest asset beyond your educational foundation and professional pedigree. Your professional relationships fuel your ability to drive performance, execution and results. Co-create the notion is none of us can succeed in the future going at it alone.

So how do you bring several parties together to really capitalize on those never used, but capitalize on those relationships. And Curve Benders as said is a glimpse into forces that will disrupt us. And how do we remain relevant? So I’m blessed. I work with some marquee brands globally. And inevitably every one of these organizations, there’s a couple of common threads, common attributes. One, they have a very definitive core business. And if you think about it, it’s a proven business model. They’re led by some very competent executives that are all about steadfast leadership. They’re benefiting from flat to moderate growth. And the stewardship is all about kind of risk mitigation, and how do we drive predictable performance. The street investors, stakeholders do not like surprises. So as steady as you go and I’m a big fan of that, and that works well. And by the way, the structure is typically what’s on the right board of directors, CEO, and a C-suite. Yet we keep running into some very similar challenges that I think the audience can relate to confusing vision and direction.
How often these organizations were asking for A and we measure and compensate B. A culture that inhibits real innovation. An environment that’s resistant to real change. Pre-pandemic a lot of these organizations, weren’t a video culture. I talked to one executive who had to send 1,200 people to work from home. And they figured out over a thousand of them were still using desktop computers that were plugged into the company’s network. So the CIO has been clamoring for technology upgrade for six years, he was able to get it approved in six hours. So within 72 hours they wipe all those computers clean, they donate them. Buy about five million dollars worth of technology, because they were forced to really equip people to change and really embrace a very different kind of work. Misaligned initiatives, we see audiences that can’t understand where we’re going and what we’re doing. And of course, you’ve got a lot of uncertainty as to our why.

And yet with all those challenges, we’re hell bent on presenting death by PowerPoint. Sit there, be quiet, we’ve got 178 slides we’re going to go through in the next 30 minutes. Woo hoo, nobody says ever. And or we send out [inaudible] and emails. So again, we come in and we turn a lot of those, and this is a big part of what I want to talk about organization and future visual storytelling. I believe will increasingly become a new leadership competency because we’ve got neuroimaging data that points to the fact that our brains process visuals 60,000 times faster than we do text. So I’m often coaching a lot of executives, your audience whether it’s a board member or the analyst or the employee, all hands meetings, do not need to know everything you know. What’s the essence, what is the core message that you want to be remembered and repeated that we can really reinforce?
And what’s exciting is when you see ideas like this cascade through the organization. So it becomes the welcome message by the CEO. And they articulate visually, here’s where we’re going, here’s how we’re gaining alignment, here’s where your contribution matters. So this idea of visual storytelling, we’re big fans of, and we’re increasingly seeing it take hold in many organizations. And that really became the impetus for how do we really look at the future of work a little differently. If you or any of the audience members have ever played a dynamic sport, soccer, football rest of the world, lacrosse, hockey, most people who either play or observe will attest to the fact that 90% of these games are played without the ball. And if you observe, you’ll see that the best teams in the world, the individual players are always scanning the market asking, where should we be?
How should we collaborate? How do I put myself and my team in the best possible position when we do get opportunities? This is exactly how I think the audience should start to see our market. Very dynamic, always moving, your strategy pre-pandemic is irrelevant, the day the global economy shut down. So how will you rethink, reimagine, or reinvent key parts of your business? So we start with identifying 15 forces, very similar to Amy Webb’s work that I believe in the future of work will create headwind, tailwind, or turbulence to remain relevant, linear growth, learn, learn, learn, maybe at some point apply will no longer suffice.

I believe we all need to embrace what I call this non-linear approach to growing. How do we create micro learning opportunities, how do we learn faster, how do we learn more and immediately apply those to solve some fundamental challenges and opportunities. Whitney Johnson in her seminal work Disrupt Yourself, talked a lot about the personal S-curve.

I’ve taken that idea and I’ve added a third dimension because what I found out was, what I was learning on a motorcycle on a track led to me asking some very similar questions in my professional work. So now you have some depth in terms of the skills, the knowledge, the behaviors that you want to bring to that personal reinvention. In that journey, inevitably you go going to reach a plateau. You’re going to reach a place where you feel like your role is on autopilot or you’re bored, or you’ve are struggling to kind of get to that next level. And I’m going to take the audience back to your first physics class. If you remember shining a light through a glass of water or prism, what you saw was the light accelerated, but it also bent. So it created a refraction and an acceleration through that journey where I believe certain relationships can do the exact same thing.

At that refraction point, you basically have three opportunities. You’re either going to flat line where you’re going to need somebody to jolt some excitement into what you’re doing. You’re going to fall off and you’re going to start to, your quality of your work is going to deteriorate. Or you’re going to get that accelerated climb. We believe if you take the climb, what improves is also this idea of your personal market value from a set of foundations, to a set of what I call value accelerants and growth enablers. Your value as an individual contributor in the organization, as a manager, as a leader dramatically increases when you embrace this idea of enhancing your brand, enhancing your impact and the outcomes you create not just the output. If Curve Benders are strategic relationships, one of the questions I’m often asked is, well, where are they? Who are they? How do I meet them? Where do I find them?

So here’s a seven step journey that we talk about in the book from really developing a personal foundation of a growth digital, and an entrepreneurial mindset to really committing to your profession. To exceed existing expectations of you. To a catalyst that really creates a chemical reaction and says, you know what there’s a better version of me out there that I want to go pursue. Immersing yourself into that topic, identifying, leveraging strategic relationships. Executing with increasingly higher level of agility and innovation, and creating a connection or a relational cadence to keep your relationships up to speed. Those personal S-curves that I mentioned earlier, we believe they’re going to happen more often. They’re going to be shorter. And as you start to daisy chain them together, you’re going to accelerate in a non-linear, your growth, your personal professional growth in a non-linear fashion.

You do this consistently enough, you start to anticipate that next refraction point. You start to anticipate that next lull in your personal and professional growth. And by anticipating you can actually get ahead of the curve and really reinvent yourself more frequently, more proactively, more intentionally and more impactfully.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve read books that have been fascinating in the chapters they go through, but I’m always scratching my head of, okay, what does this author wants me to do with this idea? So I dedicated the entire final chapter, Chapter Seven to not only a timeline of one to two, three to five, six to nine, 10 plus years, but also a series of steps that are practical. They are pragmatic, and they give you an essence, a roadmap to what I believe is the best version of you. In a fascinating glimpse of insights that I gathered from over a hundred executive interviews when I asked people, “Was there a common thread in Curve Bending relationships in your past? People that didn’t just help your performance execution results, but had a profound impact in shaping the leader that you’ve become?” The common thread was they saw the best version of me, even when I couldn’t see it myself, and they molded, they nudged, they shaped, right, not just my direction, but ultimately my destination. So that’s what the entire final chapters about.

I started this discussion, this introduction with the left hand side of the image, looking at the core business, the typical [org] structure. Through these five steps, we help global clients create what we call a sandbox engine. I’ve always believed it’s very difficult for the organization of the future to really innovate from that core competency. So we take not just iteration, which is how do we do things better, but real innovation, which is how do we do new things. And disruption, which is how do we do new things that makes the old obsolete, offsite, clandestine, under the radar to really almost like a venture capital or private equity model. Make 10 bets because none of us can pick the winners knowing that aid will go nowhere, but the two that head are going to be fundamentally the future of our business.

Finally, I’m a big Gary Hamel fan. As I know you guys are as well. And I love this quote. Again, I cringe when I hear leaders talk about their annual strategic planning. This isn’t about some calendar driven process. Beyond the lives and the livelihoods that this global pandemic has obviously impacted, I believe it to be an incredible impetus to rethink, reimagine, reinvent key parts of your business. And what I tell every executive, every leader that I work with, it takes three Cs.

Number one, courage, courage to believe that the next decade of your business has to be profoundly different. Not just yourself, your team, your organization, but it also could be a very different success formula than the last decade of your existence. Number two is commitment because real innovation isn’t going to necessarily contribute to your quarterly short term results. It’s that long tail value creation. And the last is construct. Now I can’t do the first two for you, but if you bring the first two, we can certainly bring, a lot of people can help and really help you think very differently about the evolution of what you’re doing and how you’re doing it. So at a very high level, there you go. There’s a brief introduction to this idea of Relationship Economics, Co-create and Curve Benders. And I’d welcome the questions from the two of you and from our audience.

Des Dearlove:
Fantastic. Thank you. My question, you talked very much about Curve Benders in terms of as individuals. Yeah. Does that apply to organizations? Are we ready, I mean, how do you get from risk mitigation, which I think is what organizations were built on, to making organizations which are potentially Curve Benders, is it probable can work at that level?

David Nour:
It can. Des, if you think about it a second. Organizations are made of individuals and someone else asked me, is there a common thread between some of your most successful global clients over the years? And I got to tell you, we went back and analyzed the data of 100 client engagements, the only common thread we found. But if you think about industry or size or geography or revenue, or any of those. The singular threat between the most successful companies we’ve ever worked with was a visionary leader.

A single individual who had the courage to say, “There has to be a better way. There has to be a different way for us to think about our ecosystem. Think about our value creation. Think about how we engage and influence not just our existing, but next generation of customers, partners, market.” So it begins, Curve Benders impact an individual, they impact in essence a team. And we’ve seen not a massive carriers like the container ship that blocked the Suez canal this past week, but really more small teams, think of seal teams or special operations teams that go in and really solve a fundamental problem. That’s what we’ve seen the biggest innovation come from.

Stuart Crainer:
Lots of people really like the infographics you’ve got, and the images you’ve got. Jodi Joseph has done her own little experiment, and she tried a LinkedIn, she posted a LinkedIn article and it got 250 views. An infographic got 6,000 views. What interests me is when you talk about visual storytelling and talk to CEOs, what kind of response do you get from them?

David Nour:
Stewart, everybody gets it. Everybody gets that if you look at this image over my left shoulder, it just makes sense right? The challenge is any other real behavioral change in organizations, it’s a cultural shift. For a long time we’ve equated the quality of our content, the quality of our presentations, either by the weight of that presentation, or let me show you 6,000 graphs and data points that I want to convey how credible my ideas are. And increasingly we’re distracted, again we’ve got all kinds of neuroimaging data that says the average human attention span is shorter than a goldfish. It is literally seven to 10 seconds. So if you can’t grab my attention that quickly, I’m going to get distracted by what am I having for lunch today, and Des and I have something to talk about later this afternoon.

And so visually grabs you at, by the proverbial collar and says, you should pay attention to this idea. And it can also be absorbed much easily. They get it, they like it, initially we do some good work together. And then I see another presentation by the same team that is back to their 75 page slide with six point font. And I’m scratching my head like, what just happened, what, didn’t we just go through this idea of how do we present more with less. Which goes back to again a cultural shift, a leadership, visionary approach to we’re going to present data, we’re going to that information very differently.

Des Dearlove:
Okay, great. We have a question from Jodi Joseph, can you have Curve Benders in the middle and at the bottom of the hierarchy, or is it just leaders at the top? Because if it is just our leaders and you did mention having a visionary senior leader, a CEO or someone-

David Nour:
Of course.

Des Dearlove:
[crosstalk] From lower down?

David Nour:
Absolutely Jodi, it’s a great question. Curve Benders are relationships in all of our lives. So going back to a comment that was made earlier… These are Curve Benders are relationships that come into our lives and they profoundly shape, they force us to think very differently about our evolution, about our reinvention. So they demonstrate invested interest in our success. They think of a college professor that you really gravitated towards from all the professors you had. Or that one boss that really pays a particular attention to your development and takes you under his or her wings and teaches you more than just the business or the market or product services. Teaches you empathy, teaches you how to identify exceptional talent early on in your career. Those individual relationships we look back, and 20 years later, we can absolutely point to one or two people that have just had this incredible impact on us. Those are individual relationships, I call Curve Benders.

Stuart Crainer:
Dina Omar points out that the pandemic has affected and challenged kind of our life values and our career journeys. And I think there’s kind of a paradox at work here. You talk about personal reinvention, but also about collaboration. And there’s an unlikely combination in itself kind of personal reinvention suggests some sort of degree of introspection and self-awareness, whereas collaboration suggests a more external facing view of the world.

David Nour:
Great, great point. And thank you for jumping in. Absolutely. Think about it, we’ve had more alone time this past year than I think at any other point in our lives. So I think we’re reexamining in some ways who we are, what makes us tick? What brings us joy? What do I want to do more of? And by the way, what do I want to do less of? There’s actually some really interesting data that another colleague Mark Crowley shared that more people changed jobs this past January than they did previous January. Why? Because we all figured out, I don’t want to get back on that rat race, or you know what the idea of flying 300 days a year is just not that appealing to me right?

So Stuart you’re exactly right, personal reinvention has to start with that introspection has to start with that self actualization of where am I going? What am I doing? What do I enjoy doing? And what candidly sucks the life out of me that I don’t want to do anymore of? So only when you do that. And I always tell people in my coaching, you got to start by looking in the mirror. Then you can bring that best version of you to anyone else you collaborate with to anybody else you communicate with, to anybody else you want to solve a problem or make a decision with. But through that collaboration, it also helps fill in the parts of the puzzle of you know what I really like this kind of work, or I really like this kind of, again, not just output. What we do and how we do it is output. In my experience, in my work that matters a lot less than the outcomes we create. How’s the team, how’s the organization better off because of what we’re doing?

Des Dearlove:
Okay. You mentioned earlier that Relationship Economics, Co-create and now Curve Benders is your Star Wars trilogy. Let’s examine the Nour curve if you like. What’s the golden thread then let’s explain how these, how these three concepts fit together and the journey you’ve been on?

David Nour:
Sure. Thank you for asking that Des as you and Stuart were kind enough to include in my introduction. I’m originally from Iran and for those that have lived and worked abroad, and those who are joining us from abroad. In the rest of the world and I certainly didn’t get it back then when walking through the Bazaars of Iran with my dad. But the rest of the world builds relationships first from which they do business. I came to the states and I learned very quickly, not just in the states, but in a lot of kind of Western driven cultures, it’s the business part first and if and only if that part work, I may ask you about your family and your loved ones, and by the way, how you’re doing through this pandemic?

So the common thread and my curve and my journey has always been about relationships. The fundamental challenge with relationships is 20 years into my practice, no one has ever called me and said, “We’re having a relationship problem.” They call and say, “We’re losing clients or we’re losing market share, or our products are stagnant, or the board doesn’t understand our strategy.” And if you peel back that onion, inevitably, you get to some aspect, some facet of the relationship is not working. It’s not clicking. It’s not solidified, it’s not reinforced. You don’t have as good of a relationship as you think you do, or the relationships that are critical to your success that you’re leaving stagnant. So what I’ve tried to carry through, the common thread, the connective tissue if you will, between my life’s work has been the intentional, the strategic, and as such the quantifiable value of relationships within an organization and certainly external to it.

Des Dearlove:
OK, good.

Stuart Crainer:
Tell me about the sandbox engine. Explain what that is. I’m not [crosstalk]. I’m not a mechanic.

David Nour:
Stuart Crainer knows how-

Des Dearlove:
I think it’s got something to do with, we talk about ambidextrous organizations, in fact organizations aren’t very good at [crosstalk].

David Nour:
I’m telling you, Stuart Crainer knows how to poke a hornet’s nest. Stuart it is, let me start by explaining this way. It is an uncomfortable conversation because it forces leaders to admit that their much of their current innovation efforts do not work. If you think about it a second in many organizations, the current structure, the current metrics, the current compensation are all about a repeatable predictable set of outcomes. In essence, we’ve built a perfect execution box. So I jokingly call my friends who are general counsels, or CFOs, or chief risk, or chief compliance officers. I call them oncologists because their whole role is any shiny new idea, let’s dig it out and let’s kill it because it threatens that perfect execution box. So what if we took external to that structure, location, awareness, metrics, comp, all that which makes that core business really hum like a great running engine.

We took this idea of testing, this idea of experimentation, inquiry, exploration away from that core. And as I said, the clients I’ve worked with, we literally set up a separate legal entity. We set up a different location, it is under the radar. It is what I found out is, and I’m trying to, I’m not trying to hide anything from anybody. But if it’s clandestine, if it’s under the radar, it’s less likely to get poked and prodded. And we’re going to take the innovation budget from over there so we can make our quarterly funds over here, but it’s a separate part of the organization. It’s a separate organization. Whereas I said, we make 10 bets. None of us have a crystal ball. None of us can predict the winners. If we could, I’d be on the next flight to Las Vegas or Macau. What we can do is we can experiment and specifically experiment on business models.

So we’re helping several clients right now recruit a chief entrepreneur. I know Alex Osterwalder has talked about this idea as well. If the CEO is in charge of running that core business, a chief entrepreneur in essence runs the sandbox engine and we make 10 bets, some of our own doing, others investment in other startups. But in essence, we’re testing business models that could profoundly impact our business if not disrupt ours. And as long as under the radar, we get a chance to do a lot of testing to see what’s viable, what works and what doesn’t.

Des Dearlove:
Okay. So you’re talking about being under the radar, but you’re on the Thinkers50 radar, so there’s no hiding. So what has that meant to you to be on that list of the 30 most promising business thinkers this year?

David Nour:
Sure. So in full disclosure I had on only heard of Thinkers50 pre I would say 2017 when I came to London for my first day and gala. And I got to tell you, I left that first one energized by not just great thinkers you read in Harvard business review or MIT Sloan, or you watch their videos from on the Drucker Global Forum or Davos, but you sit next to them at a table. And you interact with them and you share ideas and compare perspectives. And so I left 17, incredibly energized, came back in 19, and we had yet again another fantastic gathering and Marshall Goldsmith and all that he does for that community was just a…

It is the best way I can describe it for our audience. Not only it fuels your intellectual curiosity about what these individuals are working on or working with, but it’s in many ways so enriching, because it’s very easy for all of us that we believe we’re in the ideas business to be in our cocoons and work on an idea. It is incredibly rewarding to bounce that idea off of a Amy Edmondson, off of a Roger Martin, off of a Hal Gregerson, off of a, any number of folks in that room. And they are genuinely intrigued by it and you have follow on conversations. And so it fuels me to continue to push some of these ideas and test them and hopefully come back to thinkers 15 in two Novembers from now and or this November. But every couple years to kind of say, “Hey, here’s what I’ve been working on. And here’s kind of what I’m doing.” And learn what others are doing. So it’s an incredibly rich content rich, context rich, brilliant community that I’m just proud to be associated with.

Stuart Crainer:
Brilliant. We are out of time, David Nour, I would strongly recommend his book, Curve Benders. A great book out published by Wiley, coming out on April the 27th. Thank you very much for your time Nour. Really appreciate it. I’m sure the world will be investing in their sandboxes. Our guest next week is Jenifer Clausell-Tormos, CEO Developed Diverse, an expert on harnessing technology to increase diversity in the workplace. Thank you all for joining us this week. And we hope to see you again soon. Thank you.