Wear your Heart on your Sleeve with Rich Corbridge

+ Notes

Rich Corbridge is the Chief Information Officer at Boots; a massive health retailer and pharmacy chain. With over 2,500 stores across six countries, 55,000 employees and revenues of £6.5Bn, it’s a pretty big deal. Rich’s job is to harness the power of technology to support business change and transformation.

He is not your traditional, stereotypical technology leader. Not at all. His are stories of passion, of courage … of people.

He shares how a story was so powerful, it inspired him to announce a £1Million innovation programme - in front of a massive audience of leaders - without asking permission

He explains how the temptation of cool technology nearly scuppered a massive transformation programme… and how good old fashioned TLC saved the day

+ Transcript

katz kiely 0:15
Welcome to humans Leading Humans towards the future of work for people, a smorgasbord of snackable stories to help you be a more effective leader. Happy New Year, Happy New Year to you, I wonder what 2022 is going to bring for you. Anyway, wherever you are, whatever you're doing, thank you, as always, for continuing to dedicate your half hour chunks of your one precious life to listen. And this episode, I can promise you is going to be an absolute cracker. And I know that you trust me on that one now.

So today's guest is Rich Corbridge, who is the Chief Information Officer of Boots. Now, you probably know by now you should, you'll know what imaginal leaders are. And if you don't know what an imaginal leader is, check the link below. But basically, they are leaders like me, and I'm guessing you or if not, you should be who can't help themselves. But to care about the people that they work with and for. They've got the seeds of a better, more human centered future of work in their very DNA. So Rich is 100% imaginal, I worked with him, I'm guessing four or five years ago when he was in a massive transformation program at the Irish Health Service. So for those of you who are listening to this in the UK is the equivalent of the NHS. So it's really complex national body. And What's lovely about him is he understands that just because you don't listen to people doesn't mean that they're not talking, that they don't have an opinion, that they don't have feelings. So we ran a program with Rich, which was a perfect manifestation in many ways of the beep way. We found change agents, different counties, different jobs, we listened to their insights, we brought people from across this incredibly complex organization at this massive time of change, to co create solutions to the challenges and the opportunities that emerged through conversations and through communications, which you can imagine, it's a change resistant organization. And because of his leadership, we made sure people felt they were part of it. Anyway, I absolutely loved working with Rich and I can't wait to find out what stories he decides to share, because I know that there are myriad to choose from. And I suppose I should mention that. I actually come from our stock in case you didn't know listener. So actually just spending time being part of that transformation in the old country was just like the icing on the cake. But thinking out loud, as we're talking, I'm thinking that I've had a lot of conversations serendipitously over the last few weeks, who have been in an international organization, and they've moved to public organization, and then it moved to a corporation. And guess what, it doesn't make one iota of difference where you're leading people are just the same in all of them. Your job as a leader is to create an environment where people feel safe and respected. So they thrive and so they're not so change resistant. And yet so many organizations get stuck in this rut of only looking for people who have done that job before in a similar company. They've worked in finance. They've worked in pharmaceuticals, they've worked in the public sector. It's nonsense, guys, just look beyond your walls, look for people who've got passion, and courage and that foster collaboration. Anyway, that was one of my little rants. Before I introduce you to the wonderful Rich, I want to say a massive, massive thank you to all of you who have sent me feedback and suggestions for what you'd like to see more of, who they'd like to see interviewed, how I can improve the show. Your feedback is really really, really important to me, it energizes me so please go over to Katzkiely.com, get in touch with me that way or just mail me katz@wearebeep.com. Enough of me rambling, meet Rich Corbridge.

Rich Corbridge, I have I really honestly, I am delighted to invite you to be a guest or to have you as a guest on Humans Leading Humans. So dear listeners,I normally at this point, talk about how I met, how I came across. A wonderful chap called Clive in Dublin introduced me to this guy called Rich, who was doing extraordinary things to change the equivalent of the NHS in Ireland. So what was your first memory of meeting me, Richard?

Rich Corbridge 5:53
I think it was, how do we create a culture around innovation where people across the whole of the health service in Ireland have ways to bring innovative ideas forward? And how do they talk to us? How do we talk to them about innovation? How do we inspire a change in that space? So that's sort of came into a very typical Irish public service room and blew everybody away in your typical way.

katz kiely 6:23
And the thing that really, I remember leaving that meeting and thinking, do you know what, there are so many leaders who expect to be able to do change, and think they're doing it for all the right reasons. And when I say have you actually asked them, they don't want to hear, but you really wanted to hear? You lik were like, oh ... So Rich, tell the listeners, what's your story? How did you get to be the CTO of Boots?

Rich Corbridge 6:50
Frankly, where to start? So firstly, I guess Boots is a big organization, it's 2500 stores, 65,000 people, 175 years old. An organization that has healthcare at the heart of it. After leaving Ireland, I moved back to the UK for all sorts of reasons, not least of which, looking after parents, looking after sort of friendships and relationships that were just proving too difficult to do long distance from Ireland, which was a sad day, because I thoroughly enjoyed my time in Ireland as CIO. Came back to the UK, ended up as the CIO of a big hospital in the north, in Leeds, which is the biggest training hospital in the NHS. After 12 months there, a good friend of mine said, Boots are looking for an innovation director, and they don't know where to look, will you go and have a chat with them about what that means. So off I went from the north down to the Midlands to Nottingham, had a few conversations, and found myself months later being offered the job of innovation direct. So joined Boots, had some fun for a little while setting up how to balance innovation with risk, where to do change, how to make change happen in a big organization, and then the pandemic hit, or the first part of the pandemic. And my boss said would you take a step into the pharmacy team and help them work out how to turn all the things we do in a bricks and mortar pharmacy into an online service? So how pharmacists behind a video and how do we do physiotherapy over video? And how do we do a whole bunch of things for patients that they still need, even though they're locked down at home. And then in the summer of the first year of the pandemic, our CIO, Greg decided as an American, he wanted to get back to the States, left and my boss, the MD of Bootstrap said, do you want to be the CIO of Boots ? And come and join the exec can become a leader of this organization, rather than trying to influence change from one step away from that space. And it has been amazing. All sorts of cool things I've learned about myself and about being a CIO, not least of which is that not doing a CIO role for a little while it was making me miserable. And being a CIO is clearly the sort of DNA that I want. And I wouldn't ever do a job that wasn't CIO again.

katz kiely 9:09
So can I just step back for a second? So how did you end up, because the change dear listeners, that Rich drove in Ireland across the the equivalent of the NHS was extraordinary. He was using social media, it was brave. It was courageous leadership. So where did you I mean, where where did you come from before that? How did you get the courage to be able to drive so much change so quickly, and get people to come along with you?

Rich Corbridge 9:37
So my role before Ireland was the an organization called the National Institute of Health Research. So it's, it's the thing that makes clinical research happen in the NHS. And I'd taken on a role there for just in the four years actually trying to change the speed of which trials, clinical trials were started. And we tried everything. We tried really hard the different ways of inspiring people to be part of a trial which try different technologies to speed up that one. And then when I came to Ireland, one of the things, a really good friend of mine said is, being a CIO, in any large organization, and particularly in healthcare means you have to be prepared to be famous, you have to be prepared to wear your heart on your sleeve, and really go for what you believe in. And there's so many different parts of the Irish healthcare system that were very, very easy to believe in. It's an extraordinary healthcare system, once you access it. It's troubled by access issues in every part of the healthcare that it tries to deliver. But once you're inside, once you found out how to get health care, you are in a situation where you're gonna get exceptional care. And it's an organization that's tied itself in knots, with its structures, and its governance, and lots of people who've been there very, very, very long periods of time. And therefore, trying to create change was almost how many fronts can we fight this war on because, you know, you mentioned social media and say, that's brave, but frankly, social media as a thing that we use has been here a bloody long time, and therefore, it wasn't brave. It was just let's do this. Let's not wait for approval, let's find a way to get the minister interested, let's think of new ways to even create policy. One really fun thing we did in Ireland was, we decided that we wanted to write a digital maternity policy. So rather than spend three months writing it, and six months passing it and all the other things that go with it, we actually decided that in 124 hour period, we would visit every one of the 17 maternity hospitals, would gather everything that they thought was wrong with technology, we'd be back in the base in Dublin, a team would write that down, and then turn that into what are the things that would need to be changed. We delivered that to the then Minister for Health and got it through the door in 24 hours, and stuff like that was done. There is a bit of PR exercise in there isn't there is a bit of how do you create a new connection. How do you collaborate with different people? How do you get people to truly see that you are being transparent in what you're doing? And I think that was a is almost a leap of faith really to invest yourself in the answer and what needs to be done in in how to get there. And that really was a big part of of me in that role is thrown yourself into it, becoming part of the answer to all the different parts that were needed resolving.

katz kiely 12:33
And, you know, I've got to say that that project still, you know, it stays warm in my heart because actually working with those people, it was just a lovely, lovely program to be involved with. So I past you there Create framework, I wonder whether you might tell innocence, what sprung to your mind, before you tell your stories, what strikes sprung to your mind about the framework and how useful it is.

Rich Corbridge 12:59
For me, the use of it is is something to lean against is how I put it. In the way that you can have something to fall back on to believe in to prompt you down the right route. But also the openness of it or the I found, the ability to find different points to connect into, means that it's something that you can apply to lots of different ways of working, lost different moments in time, lots of different problems that occur. And being able to do that, really, truly I know, it's almost crass using the name, the human centric part of it. But it does give you something that allows you to flatten the landscape so you can talk to everybody in the same way, bringing that same trust and transparency that you want into the whole thing, the whole way of working and particularly for me with digital change. And I think that's the other part to it as it's very particularly being something we can use when we're trying to create a new customer value proposition culture where everything starts with our customer or patient. Everything is about delivering a new value to them. That's a single proposition of brands as a single proposition of where we're going to get.

katz kiely 14:18
Amazing, amazing, amazing. Thank you for that. Okay, so story number one.

Rich Corbridge 14:24
Story time. Okay, so, story number one is an island story. And it's something that means a lot to me to this day. So we, a bunch of the eHealth Island team are presenting at a big conference. The lady that came on ahead of us in the conference was the lady from the States who had been doing some research into epilepsy. And it became aparant reason she'd been doing some research into epilepsy and how to diagnose epilepsy in children through genomic sequencing, was because our daughter had very, very severe epilepsy to the point where different treatments have not worked for many, many years and she was almost in a catatonic state because of how severe her epilepsy was. And this lady is a lady called Tracy Salazar Dixon. She took the stage and told her story. And over and over and over around, and nobody would nobody wanted to start by speaking. At the time, you'd got the Minister for Health in the room, you'd got every major leader of any research house in Ireland, you got a huge swathe of the health service executive in there. And I was on next and was often the case we'd agonized over what we were going to say to this group, we were going to launch something called the Lighthouse projects, which was a 5 million EUR investment into five specific areas to bring digital healthcare to the forefront and change them. And as Tracy finished, I literally tore up the script, went over and announced without checking in with anybody that we would create an epilepsy lighthouse project, that would enable us to create an electronic health record, that would allow us to sequence the genome of every child under the age of five with suspected epilepsy opt in. So a parent carer could opt in their child, sequence the genome and find the right type of epilepsy, and therefore target the right drug. Without sequencing the genome, largely the way that epilepsy is tracked is you just keep trying until you find the right one. So 6, nearly 7 million EUR was spent the year before and 65 kids died on diagnosed with epilepsy the year before. The year that we launched the Epilepsy Lighthouse, we delivered everything in year in under 1 million euro. And the year after that nobody died under the age of six with undiagnosed epilepsy. And the drug bill was astronomically low. And we did that because we can cared, we did that because Tracy inspired us. Her whole story inspired us. And it's it's something I tell this story, I'm not frequently enough that I find myself thinking now actually, because it was unbelievably inspirational, the way she told her story. And with immediate effect, she inspired a bunch of people to move heaven and earth to deliver something that Ireland hadn't been able to deliver before, which was an EHR and electronic health record that parents could view that was patient facing that held really specific data that was really needed to be kept secure. It was just an amazing experience to bring a team to bear on that for all all the different parts of the health service and academia, labs, technologists that were involved, even going into patient groups. And actually, you'd think that you are offering something here that's going to be amazingly beneficial, but actually being really mindful and careful of everybody's opinion mattering. From the point of view of sequencing the genome having that DNA information stored. Yes, it's done for all the right reasons, but people suspicion more so in Ireland, and in many places of a government body holding such specific information was quite significant. And we had to overcome that as well. So that would be my first story in that space. And just to add, no, it was something that mattered so much to us now. And even to this day, I'm still involved with the people that set that up the people that are now moving into more trials to use technology to enable Irish citizens to come forward and be part of clinical trials. And you think about the last two years of COVID and where we've been without clinical trials, without being able to move quickly through clinical research, we would be, I wouldn't say standing up down, although as we sit here now it feels like we are but you know what I mean? We wouldn't have we wouldn't have vaccines.

katz kiely 18:43
Yeah, I think the scientists community has actually collaborated globally. Well, the politicians have done whatever politicians do. So there were a number of things that kind of leapt out at me as you were talking. One of them is about Dan Ariely, in a recent episode was talking about bureaucracy, and how it blocks innovation, how the actually, you're losing value all of the time, if you have to go through layers, because bureaucracy is built upon a lack of trust. And that trust, he was talking about the fact that really, it really worries him that actually there is so little trust in all of our institutions. So it's lovely that you two things, one of them that you kind of stood up there ripped apart your script and just said what was in your heart and what you knew was the right thing to do. Your boss must have given you an extraordinary amount of autonomy, or you must be very courageous. What was the balance there?

Rich Corbridge 19:43
At that point in time, both both Leo and Tony were in the audience, and you knew that they would back in. We'd already had the conversations about how do we pick five areas that were going to invest in and just go after. So that was known then anyway, but at the same time, kind of had described as courage because actually, it just felt like you couldn't not do it, I could see from the conversations that there was a way to stop this from happening in Ireland, because of its size, because of the way care is delivered, maybe uniquely, Ireland was placed to eradicate the need for any child to die, because they haven't had the type of epilepsy they've got diagnosed appropriately. So it wasn't, it was a bat, I took that nobody would challenge me when I did it. But it also felt like, you're not going to lose this one, it was one of those moments where you thought, you know, no matter what happens, nobody's going to say you can't do this. And at least in trying, we're going to try a lot of other things that will benefit other parts of clinical care and clinical delivery. And in fact, analogy and innovation and how data can be used. So it was a risk, which I felt strong in taking.

katz kiely 21:01
And it feels like just about every public sector organization I've ever worked with, apart from the one that you were working with at that time. I was so blocked by a lack of ability to be able to go actually, this just feels right. It feels right. It feels like it's something I need to do. So I'm just going to do it. And boger it, sorry listeners. Okay, so what's your story number two?

Rich Corbridge 21:28
From something you just mentioned Dan's episode as well, because when I first joined boots, I was innovation director. And I joined with a sort of grand ideas of how we were going to try and inspire people to bring innovation stories to the front, how are we going to as a huge, rather governance hungry organization, how were we going to start to work with startups, etc. And the organization wanted to put a process in place to manage innovation. So a bit like you said there with Dan and the bureaucracy and the trust levels of where do we go. And it was one of those moments of trying to balance what the organization needed, or felt it needed, which was a well labeled branded process that would grade innovation ideas would be the gateway to investment, would see things go from idea to life to minimum viable products up to full solutions, balanced with how do we facilitate any one of the 65,000 people who work here, while the 12 million people that come as customers each week to come up with a bright idea that can change, can change everything. And it was one of those moments where had we had something like the Create framework, something to lean against, to be able to get right, both what the organization needed a governance bureaucracy level, whether the creativity that needed to be put in place to do new different things was huge. And what we did was really pushing different doors to try. So one of the most common problems in the pharmacy, as you queue up, you see the pharmacist for the thing that you want, you know, you want because you've always had that and they go, sorry, but until you see a GP, you can't have it. So one of the ideas was we need to put a GP and everyone at the consultation rooms in a booth. This is before pandemic before primary care, and really moved on to a video and can do it in that way. So we just did it. One of the innovation ideas was literally video link in the consultation rooms. And a customer who's queued up as a patient to move to a different room, see the GP, step back into the queue and get the things that they want. What was great about that was that was an initial idea. Two or three people sat in a room solves a problem for Boots, because actually, if you've queued up, you get to the front, you get to see a GP go away. You're probably not going to come back to Boots, you probably might go, you may go back to it's more likely you're going to go to the next pharmacy that you walk past after you've been to see the GP. So that was problem one. Problem two was how do we speed up the delivery of healthcare? Because if you've queued up and you can be bothered to queue up and you've been told you can't have it, that probably means you're quite desperate for whatever that thing is you need. So how do we speed up the ability to deliver healthcare? But also how do we use the fact that we've got consultation rooms, technologies now there, you can have a really good established route to deliver healthcare over a video link. So we tried it. We went live in a couple of sites in Liverpool Street Station, actually in London was the main site that went live in and it was initially a roaring success. And then COVID came and people weren't travelling anymore and people weren't in train stations and actually, healthcare became a whole different subject plus, everybody moved online as far as being able to get a primary care appointment. So it's less innovative now, to see it there as a solution but online doctor and our ability to offer as many health care services as we can online is now still there. As part of not just our business, but every community healthcare business in the UK, so a really challenging time to balance that process hunger, of a big corporate, with the ideas of doing something quick doing something different doing something in a very clear idea type way and driving that forward.

katz kiely 25:23
How did you manage to kind of get the powers the beep to let you empower you and give you the autonomy to actually work in that way?

Rich Corbridge 25:34
So I think a lot of it was around that culture of creating a minimum viable product first, where ensuring that the investment is appropriate to test and learn and test to learn, test and learn. The partner we picked to do that MVP initially was one that build trust really quickly with Boots on the exec as well. So we were really careful in who we partnered with and how we did it, the ability to decide where to do it as well, the realization that transport hubs and, and the ability to capture the audience, that kind of scenario was there. I think another big part, though, was that commodity price for doing that. So this is a private GP appointments in the UK, you can see a GP for free, but you may wait some time before you can see that GP for free. This was a low price point that would allow you to decide what you want to pay for the convenience of being able to do that instantly, rather than ring up and wait to then get the health care need that you've just spent time queuing. So you obviously needed it right now. So all the different persuasions or cases really rather than persuasions were made on how do we keep this in brand by keeping the commodity price right by putting it in the right places in the transport. By keeping the appeal of it being about patient power and your choice. We're not saying don't go to your NHS GP, what we're saying is there's wanting that room there and if you want to pay a small price, then you can do it now, or absolutely will facilitate you to go and see your NHS GP and do it in a traditional way.

katz kiely 27:12
Brilliant. So that doesn't stop when we if we ever get back to some sort of normalcy. What's your story number three?

Rich Corbridge 27:21
Number three is is interesting that you say about sort of customer experience there. So Mar Tech is a bit of a marketing technology has become a bit of a cool thing in the last 12 months. And it's something that's fascinated me in particular, in the last 12 months, we've gone down a road, where as an organization, we've got some tech that's like 35 years old and just about survives, and we've got some tech and Mar Tech in particular is the newest brightest thing that we could possibly do. So we partnered with a number of organizations, implemented a load of new stuff into dot com, into our app into our customer journeys, which turns everything into personalized journeys, and counts. What it is with Mar Tech is the reason it's a story is it's a failure initially, that we may just be on the verge of pulling from the grasp or failure. So we stood up all the technology, how to implement it, where to go brilliant, brilliant collaboration between IT, digital and marketing as teams, and where they're literally on the verge of going live. And suddenly this dawning realization that data that drives all this cool stuff is really really difficult to move, to move around to make it be readable by the different systems to get it into the right place. So this project that should have been live four or five months ago starts to go into delay, starts to be overspent starts to become what could have been a poster child for a failed program. And, you know, in 30 odd years of being a CIO, you, you try desperately not to have too many times when IT is the failure but at this point, we're looking down the barrel of IT failure, that's cost money that hasn't delivered benefit. So grasping people change around data really turning round a phenomenal data team that wasn't even focused at looking at the mar tech side of stuff and applying them to the work that needed to be done, has put us in a place where we've delivered in time for Christmas, personalized journeys, banners that are there for you cats, rather than our woman who shops out boots. Just so much cool technology, but it's dead easy to get excited about the cool technology. But the story is not about that. The story is about a bunch of people who worked in data and analytics in our organization who, who felt I'm gonna use this word but use it advisedly, someone unloved by the organization, they were working for WVA , they were no longer working for Boots. They didn't feel that they were influencing the change of Boots, they didn't feel that they were part of everything that our brand means to them as people who've worked in our organization, or people who look at how customers interact. So we gave them the opportunity to become part of Boots again, they never were not. But the symbols are being part of Boots again, being part of my team, being part of my briefings, being part of the leadership of IT at Boots, the data, people move back into that space. And lo and behold, the inspiration that they felt by that to work really, really hard single mindedly to achieve as much as they possibly could, in this specific marketing space was phenomenal. And, you know, the change in how they walked around the office, the change in how they came together, the change in how they talked about work through probably 10 days effort in reality of just giving them some TLC, showing them how the collaboration they brought helped with us, being able to sit down with each of the different parts of the team and explain where we wanted to get to, suddenly, we took a project that don't get me wrong, it was still late, and it still spent more money than it should have. But it's still delivered before Christmas, which wasn't where we were heading towards it still gave customers and patients, personalized routes at a digital level all the way into our organization. I've led a lot of individual projects that will always stay with me being my heart and my mind. But that one at the moment, yes, is very recent and could have been quite wrong. But it's something that I think it shows how leading people, not projects is so important, even when it's really cool new technology that we're doing.

katz kiely 31:40
And I've worked on a fair amount of a one particular global program with a big pharmaceutical company, and they bought the stacks, and they were talking about personalization. And they were taught, you know, their ambition was great. But nobody was really using the technology. And so what we did was step back and go, hang on a second by you bringing in this big centralized platform, without people feeling like they're a part of that decision, then people are feeling really resentful. You're bringing something at them rather than doing something with them. They can't see what's in it for them. But they just have to use it. Well, that's not working, is it? So why don't we step back and think about how we can actually make sure that we're listening to where people are and how it's affecting their life. Yeah, and just to get in early senior needed to to stop and realize that the project depended on how those people felt. Like, come on, guys. This is not about the tech, this is about the people. And the other thing that you know, I really am fascinated by and struggle with a bit is that we understand marketing, we understand communications, we can we know how to get the right message, the right people in the right way to drive behavior change. And yet, how often do you see people using that insight with their employees?

Rich Corbridge 33:04
Yeah. It's interesting that we have this concept of CVP customer value proposition, which only now in the last few weeks, are seeing been turned into a colleague value proposition. So in tight inside the organization, how do you create value? As a single proposition for people who work here? How do we proceed, particularly at the moment people to stay working here and not go work somewhere else? How do we attract new talent talent here and not go somewhere else, because you know that this war on talent piece that's there, the great resignation, or whatever else that you want to badge up, it's not just a media spin, it's definitely happening. Our turnover is huge. And our retention is not as good as it should be. And we need to find every trick in the book, to make it something that's every colleague feels the value of what they do in our organization, and that what that data team now feel, because when their mom goes on boost.com This Christmas, and as an aside, that's offering to their mom, the things that she wants to buy, they're going home and saying I did that I was part of the team that put that in place. And that's just such a lovely story.

katz kiely 34:10
It is and as you say, you know, this is a commercial proposition. If you don't look after your people, if you don't make your people feel they're part of something that they're part of the community. They'll go somewhere else where they do. Brilliant, Rich, I've absolutely loved talking to you that comes as no surprise whatsoever. Thank you for your three stories and your wisdom. So in time honored ritual, what would you like to call your episode of Humans Leading Humans?

Rich Corbridge 34:38
Oh, really? Really? I think it is. It's difficult because the Humans Leading Humans been a part of it, but I think there is something about heart on your sleeve leadership, which can come under criticism, as much as it can be a positive but my experience and I've been told by other leaders to be more careful All about heart on my sleeve. But I wear my heart on my sleeve when I am leading.

katz kiely 35:02
Rich, you keep doing that. It works. Thank you so much for your time and your energy.

Brilliant, brilliant, Rich, really, really? So what did I take away from that? So I think the thing that's really bubbling up for me is that the reason that this podcast is about collecting real words and all authentic personal stories from leaders, is because stories have a phenomenal power. Data does not change the way that people feel and act but stories can. I'm just thinking about the story that you told there about, you know, that courage of tearing up his script. And the fact that that story, gave him and the other people in the room the courage to make an announcement without having to ask for permission. And I'm wondering listener, could you do that? If you knew in your tummy that what you were about to do was the right thing to do? Could you do that? And then I suppose the next question is, do the people in your team feel that you've got their back in order for them to have the autonomy to do that? And if not, why not? Because if you know that something is the right thing to do. Why are you not doing it? No. And I suppose the other thing that really resonated with me and I seen this time, and again, don't get caught up in this, oh, shiny thing syndrome, it doesn't matter how clever the tech is. It doesn't matter how many sophisticated things it's capable of doing. If people don't see what's in it for them. If you don't get them on board, if you don't get them excited. If you don't give them an opportunity to be able to tell a story about how proud they are of being part of that change. Your transformation program will fall flat on its face. It doesn't matter how beautiful the tech is, or how much money you spend on it. Believe me on this. And actually, if you stop to think about it, it's common sense. You have been listening to Humans Leading Humans towards a future of work that works for people. This podcast is brought to you in partnership with the Marketing Society. If you are a senior marketing leader, and do you need the know how and the networks to succeed and you're not already ready, a member of that brilliant tribe, jump over to their website and become part of the tribe I would absolutely 100% recommend it. There's some amazing people and some inspiration in there. You don't want to be missing. Thank you to the fantastic super Terranea for the magical sting of stings goes away our beep to find out more about the Create framework and how we support companies by building cultures of connection and collaboration and on leashing the problem solving potential of humans. If you loved this episode, and I certainly did, please pass it on to your friends. share it on social give it to your friends who you think might need a shot of inspiration or motivation or energization thank you so much for joining me. If there's a senior leader you'd like me to interview don't forget mail me katz@wearebeep.com. Please subscribe. The links are in the note. Be inspired, be imaginal, be more human. And I look forward to seeing you at the next episode.

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