OTAN Outreach and Technical Assistance Network. So we are here today to talk about OTAN curriculum offers. So first, before we get started, I do have a link here to this. So I actually don't have slides today. I'm actually using a Canvas course for all the materials that we're going to talk about. You can, if you click on this link or open up this link in a browser, then you'll get a copy of this Canvas course. So the link, it's a bit.ly, a bit.ly link, slash, and then capital TDLS, lowercase offers. And if you're not familiar with bit.ly, after the slash, you have to type it exactly as you see it. I noticed I could value behind the euro. Yeah, they're not case-sensitive. But bit.ly actually is case-sensitive, so. It didn't, they went away. See if they're happy. OK. I'll get it, I got it. Yeah, OK, OK. OK, so again, now everyone's given it. Yeah, so this Canvas course is publicly, it's freely available and you can come back to it after today. So I put all my information in the Canvas course. But what we're going to talk about is, first, so hopefully by now you know about OTAN. But I want to talk about OTAN to something in particular about this session and OTAN. And then we'll do a quick entrance ticket and, looks fine in front of the camera. Then what I want to do today is I want to keep it very kind of informal. Like I don't have a very formal presentation schedule. I'd rather it be sort of a conversation. But I want to give you a sense about what curriculum offers we have available. Then I want to give you some time to take a look at some of them. My hope is that you will find one of them today, that you want to be interested in exploring further. When you go back to your agency, maybe try it out in your classroom, maybe share it with your colleagues at your agency. We have these freely available for the field. And so we want you to take advantage of them, right? That's the goal here. And then kind of as we go along here, you know, if you have questions about things or want to, you know, if you notice, go ahead, we'll kind of leave it for discussion in that way. And again, the Canvas course is going to be available after we leave today. So, Karen, how are we doing on the online? Hi to all the online folks, how are we doing with online? Yeah, I just did the Bentley. And I thought I reason cannot with that. We didn't come here. Oh, let me do that. OK, that's the problem. Hold on a second. Let me just go to Canvas first. Let's sit here. So you made this course public, and then you just share it. Yeah, right. So Canvas, right. So normally Canvas, yeah, normally Canvas, you know, subscription based. But if you have a Canvas account and a subscription, you can actually change your course setting to a public course. So that makes it freely available for people who don't have Canvas licenses to join your course. The only caveat to that is that it's nowhere near the full, you know, the full souped up version of Canvas that you get via a subscription. So it's very basic. So I can't do I'm not going to show you any videos like Studio, Canvas Studio videos or anything like that. We can't actually open up discussion forum for in the Canvas course. So we just keep it super, super, super simple here. So OK, OK. And so online folks welcome. I know folks are just coming into the session here. So Karen has put the link to my Canvas course in the chat. So feel free to open that up and follow along today. I don't have slides. I'm using my Canvas course today. So that's that's what we're up to here. All right. So let me go to the next slide. What OK. So just a word about OTAN. So. Well, welcome everyone. We're glad you've been with us the last couple of days. OTAN is a state leadership project for adult education in California. We're actually one of three. Process, CalPro and OTAN are the state leadership projects that support adult education. We of course focus on. Location, technology integration, everything technology. We're very excited about technology. So what we're going to talk about today is I'm going to mention like a number of vendors and maybe some products that you've heard about in other sessions during the conference. So I just want to be clear that OTAN actually we are not a vendor, right? We're not I'm not trying to sell you anything. If you get a product or don't get a product, I don't really care. So that's up to you and your agency to decide. Our goal, however, is sometimes we enter into partnerships with vendors for curriculum offers and pilot programs. So our goal is to kind of give access to the field with certain products that you might want to take advantage of it at your agency sort of long term. The goal of the pilot is to give you kind of an experience with the product, see how it works out in your classroom or in your program. And then long term, your agency would make a decision about whether to invest in the product or not. If you do so great, if you don't, that's great too. It's whatever your agency has decided. But I just want to be clear that OTAN itself, we're not a vendor. So I'm not here to sell you anything. It's merely for informational purposes, OK? And again, we're happy to have you here at the conference. And OK, so what I would like to start with is just a quick entrance ticket, a quick survey. And again, you can get to all of my I'm not doing slides. In my session, I'm using my Canvas course. So if Karen will put the link to the Canvas course in the chat and if you can navigate to the entrance ticket and go ahead and take that. So let's just talk about the survey, the entrance ticket here for a second. So if you can indicate your primary program at your agency and then what is your role at the agency, question two. And then the next five questions just fill out any products. Let me know about any products that you're using in a particular in your program. So it doesn't I know a lot of us are just one or in one program or the other. So I'm just curious to see kind of what programs are using, what are the particular products that you're using? So three questions, three through seven, just feel free to put whatever information applies to you. And then we'll take a look and see what the group results are in a second once you get a chance to finish that. So we have a nice mix between some ESL folks, some ASC folks. We have course from CDE as well. And all teachers, except for I'm going to guess Corey. All right, so let's take a look and see first in ESL. So some folks say they're using Burlington English. They're using Canvas, Cambridge, one. Not sure about that one. English and Action two. OK, so some textbooks. OK, good. All right. ABE, let's see what we've got going on here. With ABE, we have Aztec, Reading Plus, IXL, OK. Good, would be typical. Let's see with the ASC. OK, so we have Aginuity, Ed Ready Map, good. OdysseyWare, Aztec Online, IXL, Quizlet, Canvas, Sites. OK, so other sites, good. All right, CTE, CTE, not sure. OK, you can sign. All right, and then the last one, what other products? Aginuity, I would like to use more already developed ESL curriculum products at no cost to students in Canvas. OK, good. All right, good. You came to the right session. So hopefully you'll see something that kind of piques your interest. OK, good. So thank you for taking that survey. Let's move on to the next slide. OK, so on the OTAN website, we have a web page that is devoted to our curriculum offers information. So if you go to the OTAN website, show you that right here. If you go to the OTAN website, otan.us, we have this resources tab here. And under the resources tab, we have a page for our curriculum offers. OK, and so when you come to our curriculum offers page, we have it organized here. Some of these are more for teachers and some of the students. So I'll just say that this page is something that I'm hoping to kind of reorganize in the coming weeks. But today I wanted to give you kind of a different view of our curriculum offers on this page here. So back in the Canvas course, what I've tried to do is kind of organize it by program area. So you can see which products are more for ESL students or classes, which offers are more for AVE or ASC, which ones are more for CTE. And then we do have a few offers that might be for something completely different, right? In some cases, with digital literacy skills. And then we also have something devoted to blended learning. So if you want to learn more about blended learning and how to organize blended learning courses, that would be something you might want to take a look at. And then on the left hand column here, all of these links are clickable to the Canvas pages where you can get more information about these different products. So so far, any questions about kind of this chart or table, what we're looking at here or online questions? And sorry, I keep turning my back to the online folks. OK, let me go back to the home page for a second. So I want to talk about kind of how these products are organized, how we have them organized so far. So right now, we currently have two pilot programs that we're running. So one is with learning upgrade. And the other one is with more third digital literacy. So the idea with the pilot is that we give you and your agency the opportunity to participate in a pilot program where you're basically kind of test driving the product at your agency. So maybe with a few of your classes, maybe in one of your particular programs back at your agency. But it's really an opportunity for you to try out a particular product that we think might be of interest to agencies because it's in a particular program area or it deals with technology, skill building, digital literacy skill building. So these are our current pilot programs. And they will change periodically from year to year. So we try to keep the field up to date on what pilot products programs are running. Then we have a few things that are kind of ongoing. So this will be learn 360. This will be our work with the NROP project. And then this will also be the blended learning course from essential education. And you might have heard about some of these products during the conference. So but we'll talk more about this. So these are a little bit more open-ended. So you can kind of join whenever it's convenient for you. Beginning of the school year, middle of the school year, end of the school year, whatever the case may be. And then lastly, we do have a few curriculum products that we have partner organizations that we work with. And so we wanna let the field know about some of these products in particular that are available to our partners as well. These are not like in a pilot program or anything. These are just kind of freely available to those in the field. But we wanna just bring a little bit more attention. For example, like with CK12, we've actually been kind of actively working with CK12 to build an adult education space on their website. And then on that space would be freely available to kind of OER Open Educational Resource courses in the different field, in a different program area. So ESL, CPE, AV, ESC, right? Okay. All right. A good question about the CK12. Sure. Is that just like an online textbook or does that include like, you know, as, you know, something like all of that? Right. So the question is about the CK12 offering. So basically it's the online courses or the online textbooks that you can use in your course. And it's really up to you what you would like to include in the course or in the textbook. Sorry. So with CK12, what you can do is you can create an account on the CK12 website. And then basically you can download a copy of that textbook, put it into your own account and then you can customize it the way you want. You can keep it as is. You can add new content. You can take out content. You can add assessments if they're not there. So you have a lot of flexibility in that. You can add some stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Good. Other questions? Online questions or any written questions? So what I'd like to do, again, kind of keeping this kind of informal today is I want to give you a chance, maybe about 10 minutes or so to take a look and see, go back to this kind of guide to the offers. And again, depending on your program area or where your interest is, take a look at some of these products in particular. Again, you can visit any of the Canvas pages by clicking on any one of these links to get some more information. Let's just go to the essential just for example. So on the pages, I've just put some basic information about what the product is. In this case, this is a blooded learning and adult education course. It's kind of a self-paced course that you can create an account sign up for. And then you can work your way through the blended learning course, but basically it's gonna give you a lot of information about how to teach your blooded learning courses, how to get started, how to organize the courses, what's gonna happen in the classroom, what's gonna happen asynchronously, what's gonna happen synchronously, things of that nature.  And in this case with the blended learning course, if you're interested in this course, there is a form to complete at the bottom of the page. You just go ahead and fill that out and then you can get started with your, with the self-paced course. And then if there is some more basic information about the course, I've also included that on the page as well. And that's kind of the organization of these different campus pages. So again, I wanna give folks about 10 minutes or so just to kind of explore. I'll circulate around the room. Karen will help me if there are any online questions if you wanna ask those. But I just wanna give folks time to explore their non-learning questions. Just if they're wondering why the links are working. I just used that to bitly, bitly link. If you wanna go, they're trying to push that button. The button. Yeah, they're trying to hyperlink to the books that you were showing. Oh, okay, so on the guide. Okay. Okay. So if these links, oh, sorry. If these links on the guide are not working for some reason, just go back to the home page and then all of the products and vendors are down here towards the bottom of the page, on the homepage. Okay, so let me get, let's take 10 minutes or so just to kind of explore. I'll walk around. Karen will let me know if there are any online questions and then we'll come back and discuss further. All right. So why don't we, we'll come back together and talk about this a little bit more if people have questions. Why don't we start with, so let's start again with the two current pilots that we have, which are the learning upgrade pilot and the North Star digital literacy pilot. Do folks have questions about that? Do we have any folks in the room who are actually using either one of them? Do they want to, I don't know, talk about how they're using it at their agency? That might be helpful too, if anyone's using learning upgrade or using North Star. We had a PD a few months ago and everyone took the North Star test to see your digital skills. And it was interesting to see like where you scored and we actually had some staff that are using it. And they're getting hours to do professional development and they're just using the North Star system to review their skills and upgrade their tech skills. So it's really good, I think, for either students or staff to upgrade those types of tech skills. Okay, great. Thank you. Tom, go ahead. Hi, thanks. Yeah, it seems like learning upgrade is, it has its own LMS or it is the platform. That's what it is, which is, I'm trying to figure out what I could use and what I couldn't use. And because I have to have my stuff in Canvas, I can't use a platform that takes them out of Canvas to do the work for class. So I'm thinking, I'm wondering if, which of the items I can't use? For example, it seems like learning upgrade would not be an option for me. So, okay, so for example, let's talk about the Learn360 for a second. So we know that Learn360 is available through Canvas as a, I'm not sure as a LTI or a plug-in or whatever. Don't remember, a what? An app. An app. Okay, so a product like the Learn360, for example, would kind of seamlessly integrate with Canvas, for example. I think also maybe the CK12 would as well. So I know, yeah, that's like a big issue with these products is that they don't always talk nicely with one another. And so some of them are farther ahead with their Canvas integration or other LMS integration like Google Classroom, for example. So it really kind of depends sort of app to app product to product, how it's gonna work. But I would say kind of off the top of my head, the Learn360 and the CK12 textbooks would probably be good places to start. Great. And do you know about accessibility also? With Canvas or with the products? With the products. With the products, right. Yeah, I think that this is kind of another variable is how accessible are these products. I mean, we do, when we talk with the partners, I mean, we do, for sure, we let them know about our concerns about accessibility. And I think a lot of folks are working on it. Some are better than others. Some are farther added with accessibility requirements than others. So we do try to figure out like which one of these are gonna be, which products are gonna be better for accessibility purposes than others. Okay, thanks. Yeah, thanks. Were there other questions with either, oh, let me just talk about the North Star again, in particular. So with North Star, what we, the offer is basically, so with North Star, typically an agency pays a yearly subscription to become a North Star location. And when you become a North Star location, that enables you to offer the assessments, the proctored assessments, and then you can earn badges and certificates if you pass those proctored assessments. And North Star recently within the last few years has really worked on developing a digital literacy skills curriculum. And so you can either use that, their curriculum and their modules and such. You can use them in your computer forces, depending on, and computer classes and even your regular classes, like however you would like to integrate that skilled building into your classes. You can also offer the modules asynchronously, so the students can do online learning as well. So that's all within the parameters of being a North Star location. So the current pilot is for an agency if they're interested in becoming a North Star location. Basically OTAN will cover the annual subscription fee. So it's only, well, I shouldn't say only, sorry. It's $400, $500, depending on, well, no, it's probably $500 per agency per year. But OTAN will cover that for the year. And then the goal with the pilot is then for the agency to decide if they would like to continue as a North Star location, then they would pick up the cost of that after the end of the pilot. So that's what the current North Star pilot is right now. So we've been adding agencies since the start of 2023. And so if you're interested in learning more about that, there's a form that I've provided on the North Star page and you can go ahead and fill that out and I'll be in touch with you and we can talk more about your interest in becoming a North Star location. Okay, so other questions about the learning upgrade pilot or the North Star pilot, can we move on? No. I mean, if we're interested in using the phone. Yeah, right. Learning upgrade, their angle is that they really encourage mobile learning. So everything is learned on the phone. They have a number of different courses. So they have ESL courses, but they also have breeding courses, math courses, GED prep, digital literacy skill building. They have kind of a range of things as well. They also have some kind of like soft skill training, workforce training. They have financial literacy, a financial literacy course as well. I think they're also developing a citizenship course. So they're trying to cover sort of a wide range of adult education program areas in learning upgrades. But it's mobile learning, yeah. Okay, other questions, learning upgrade North Star or... Okay, so let's talk about kind of the next set of offers. So the Learn360 is primarily using video in the classroom. So it's easy to integrate the Learning360 videos into your LMS, whether it's Canvas or previously Moodle with OTAN, Google Classroom. You also can, it's not a robust LMS within Learn360, but you can kind of organize some of your classwork within Learn360. But the primary goal is using video in the classroom or asynchronously for homework or with a flip classroom, for example. They also, Learn360 has also been adding supplemental materials to the videos. So like worksheets or other activities that you can use in conjunction with the videos. Learn360 is primarily a K-12 product, but we've also added on the classroom video on demand, which has more of the secondary school focus or secondary student focus. So that's where you're probably gonna find more of the, like your ASC kind of videos, some CTE videos, even ESL as well. It's a little bit more older age oriented than some of the material that you might find just in the regular Learn360 platform. But again, the goal is to try to use more video in your classroom and educational activities. We talked a little bit about the NROC project. So basically, oh, Michael, yeah. I just looked it up in Canvas, it was under apps. Yes. This is a subscription as required. So one of the things that we're trying to work on between us and Learn360 folks and our Canvas folks is to see it, because we're kind of new with Canvas as well at OTAN. So we're trying to figure out a way to integrate that together. So we're kind of working on that at the moment. You should be able though, if you have to Learn360, at least you can link to the videos, you can put links to the videos in your Canvas courses. And I think bring some of those materials into your Canvas course as well. And then the videos. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, Karen said embedding the videos and the materials in the Canvas course. That's kind of a workaround. Subscriptions are free. So, right, so, right. So Learn360, so OTAN has purchased sort of a bulk set of, or a bulk subscription as a word. So anybody who works at an adult ed agency can sign up for an account. And then once you have your account, you can go ahead and explore and get the videos you need for your courses, set up the kind of LMS sort of kind of within Learn360. I think the request form is at the very bottom. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, Alejandra, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, just go down to the bottom of that page. Okay, then the NROC project, we talked a little bit about that. That's basically the secondary level mass of ASC. Primarily, although there also are, especially with the math courses, we do have, sorry, NROC has a number of basically math for the workplace courses, right? So if you're, depending on the kind of CTE programs that you're offering, you may want to take a look at some of those specialized math courses that might tie in with the math skills that you need for your particular CTE program or workforce program. Karen, yeah. There was a person in chat who asked, I started to do that, and the form asked for the principal, et cetera. I'm thinking they might need for 360. Yes, yeah, the Learn360 form, I think we just want it, we just, so, okay, so on the forms that we have, not just the Learn360 form, but we often ask for the name of the administrator because we get a lot of teachers who fill out the form. And sometimes we just need to make sure that everybody at the agency is on the same page. We love teacher initiative. I'm not gonna discount ever teacher initiative, but we just wanna make sure that everybody at the agency, before you sign up, your agency has a North Star location, just make sure that everybody is on board with this. Everybody is aware that you have now become a North Star location. We don't want anybody after the fact to be like, what are you talking about? So that's why we ask for the name of the administrator on the forms, just so we know kind of who's all there. Okay, the NROC, right, so the NROC again has the secondary level of math and English courses in particular, and then with Ed Ready you can do that customization. So with the NROC courses, probably the best thing to do would be to email us. We would need it to do a little work to get you set up with an Ed Ready account, but we're happy to do that, so. And then the other was the essential ed. We talked about that a little bit. So that's basically kind of a PD offering, professional development offering. So for those of you who are interested in blended learning, maybe after this conference you've heard a lot about blended learning, but you wanna learn more about it kind of at a foundational level. So this is really a self-paced course that kind of walks through the steps of what is blended learning? How do I get it started in my classroom? What are the things that I need? What am I gonna do in the classroom? What am I gonna do outside of the classroom? How are these things gonna integrate to create a blended experience, a hybrid experience? So that's really a self-paced offering right there. And let me pause there. Any questions about any of those products or online questions? Okay, I'm shaking your hand. Okay, so then let me talk about the last set of, oh, Karen, Karen, what time? Oh, what time? No, what time is it? It goes to two or two 10? I don't know. It goes to two 10. Oh, two 10, okay. So all right, I'll pause it here. I won't rush it. Okay. So then the last set, the CK12 USA Learn, Skills for the Nursing Assistant and the ISTI skill rights. So these are really offers that we make available through our partnership with certain adult edit agencies and other agencies that we work with. So the CK12, they are primarily a sort of K12 oriented organization, but the goal with CK12 is to create online textbooks that are customizable for your own classroom, for your own program. So we actually entered in the partnership with CK12 a few years ago to create an adult education space on the CK12 website. And so when you go to the website, you'll see that we have some online classes, some free online classes that are available in the different program areas. So we have some ESL classes, we have some ABE and ASC classes, sorry, that class is textbooks, textbooks, ESL textbooks, ABE, ASC textbooks and CTE textbooks. So really you're free to create an account on the CK12 website. And then what you can do is you can download copies of those free textbooks into your account and then you can customize them further. However, you can use them as is, you can customize them for your classes, they're open educational resources. So you're free to do with them, whatever you would like. Depending on the version that you create, you actually can add that version to the community space and CK12 so other adult educators could also get those versions of the textbooks as well. So that's really the goal is to try to create textbooks that are freely available for students. So they're not spending that extra money for textbooks and other kinds of big ticket item material. So that's CK12. Oh, one thing too, I'll just say is with CK12, so if you really get into CK12 and you develop your own textbooks, let us know at OTAN because we're working on building more textbooks for the CK12 site. But if you are creating your own textbooks, please let us know we'll work with you to get them onto the CK12 page so that they can also be available for other people too. And Tom, yes, Tom. Hi, yeah. What form do those textbooks take? Are they web pages or PDFs or what kind of files are they? Right, yeah, they're basically web-based. I think you might be able to download them into PDFs, not just positive about that, but they're basically web-based. So that way you can integrate them in your Canvas course, for example, or use them as a supplement, but that's how they're organized. And I can edit the web pages? Yeah, so what you're going to do is you're going to down, you're going to get a copy of a textbook and you bring that copy into your account. And then from there, once it's in your account, you can do with it whatever you would like. You can customize it the way you like. Thank you. Yeah, sure. And you can customize the textbook then you embed that in your Canvas. Yeah, yeah, yeah. On the CK12 site, they have some information about how you can integrate with Canvas. So I would just follow their directions on how to do that. And yeah, that's good. Do you guys do a work with Alex's lab? Alex? Do you guys do a work with McGraw-Hill? Um, no. It's a math lab. OK. It comes with all the values and some factors and textbooks and stuff. OK. Much better than that. Yeah, I'm not familiar with what's it called again? Alex's lab. A-L-E-C-S lab. Alex's lab. OK, so it's with McGraw-Hill. Yeah. Yeah, we're not currently, we don't partner with them on that site. I mean, so, but thank you for asking that because I did want to say, so we really encourage you all to let us know about products that you're, you know, using at your agency or things that you might think might be of value to the adult education field. And we're happy to take a look and see what those are. We use that customizing. It allows us to pitch modules. So we want to specifically crash them. So they're allowed. They're grabbing modules that would be useful for our boot camp. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Where do we make these recommendations? So if you want to pop this, our support, support app. So basically you can email us, give us a call, support at otn.us. And we'll start right back from there. The other one I've seen here is UC Scout. UC Scout. Yeah, it's University of California. And they have, like, they're all the A through G curriculum and some AP stuff, I guess, for those that use it. But I'm more interested in the secondary curriculum. Right. They'll give it to you for free, but they will only allow you to host it on their own campus. OK. Unlike Amrock, which will let you do the show and put it on your own campus. Right. That's why one of those things would be cool. We could have it on our own so we can control it more. Exactly. But they have maybe a little more control than somebody would like. So I just started looking into it and I thought, oh, that would be cool if we could get that there. Yeah. I will say that from our point of view, from OTAN's point of view, so we really are interested and want to encourage the use of OER, open educational resources. Right. And so versus commercial products, for example. So that's why we really like something like CK12. Yeah. Because that's OER. That's freely available. And really the goal is to be able to use it and customize it and then maybe share it back out with the field again, or you're developing your own textbooks. And then we find ways to share that with the field. So from our point of view, we really like going the OER route because it's going to be, it's really going to benefit students, ultimately, right? Because they'll be able to take advantage of these free resources. And sometimes for the benefit of the teacher, but for the benefit of the students as well. We're going to use this as free to public schools. OK. To public school students. OK. I think they do charge for private school. Yeah. And we all know in the K-12 adult ed family that sometimes our relationship with the K-12 district is a little tenuous at best. So we can't always take advantage of some of these things. But sometimes if you work in partnership with your K-12, the IT folks or the instructional technology folks or whomever over there, there might be a way to piggyback on some of the K-12. K-12 materials that are available, right? OK. The next two products, the USA Learns and the Skills for the Nursing Assistant. So actually, one of our close projects at the Sacramento County Office of Ed, where we are, where OTAN is, they have developed the USA Learns, which is for, which are ESL classes. And they also have a citizenship class as well. So these are online classes. They are now more kind of like LMSs as well. So you can sort of have these organized as online courses for ESL, different ESL levels and for citizenship. And then the Skills for Nursing Assistant is also developed by them at the county office. And so this is specifically for the Nursing Assistant students and their teachers. So this is really a series of modules that kind of walk through some of the skills that you need, kind of a lot of soft skills that are needed for the Nursing Assistant program in particular. They might be good for other kind of CTE programs as well, maybe medical assistant, dental assistant. You might consider kind of the sort of soft skills that are transferable, right, between the CTE programs. But this is also freely available. And you could use it as a supplement to the Nursing Assistant curriculum. And then the last program is the ISTI Skill Rise. So this is another digital literacy skill oriented program. But this is more digital literacy skills for the workplace. So kind of that area of digital literacy training. So the idea is actually for teachers to kind of walk through the ISTI Skill Rise curriculum. And then they would in turn kind of turn around and then do that skills training with their students for workforce development, workplace training. And ISTI is one of our partners. Actually ISTI, if you've heard about the digital literacy guidance, we also work with ISTI in developing that. And we're continuing to work with ISTI to develop some new training materials for the guidance as well. All right. So that's kind of, again, just sort of a rundown of the curriculum offers and the products that we have available when you visit that part of the website. So I don't care whether any online questions are good. Yeah. OK. Just a question for the group. I mean, we talked, you talked about learning or you talked about the NROC classes. Is anybody out there using any of these products currently? Did they want to take a minute just to talk about how they're using it in their classrooms or in their programs? Just for the benefit of the good of the group? Don't be shy. We don't need any of them. I'm excited to bring them all back. OK. We don't use anything. So yeah. Yeah. Really, I mean, if you kind of latch on to one of them and just start with that and just see how it goes and let us know about it. Online folks, anybody currently using any of the products or you want to speak to any of them? I put the CK12 app and our Canvas admin into our Canvas instance. So OK, he's there. Is that a move? OK. I'm going to try to promote it, particularly on the high school diploma side. I was hoping maybe ESL. We have a lot of stuff going right now. Not some North Star. We used some of the three things in the ESL class. Right. Unless some students take it. Particularly those with lesser skills we leave bashed on. Some of the higher suppliers are supposed to write through it. But so I played with them. Good. The students, we know that the students who earn the certificates, we know that they really love those certificates. They'll frame them. They'll put them up on their wall. They're really excited when they earn those certificates. And now they can also earn badges as well. So if they want to use that for if they go for a job or put on a resume or whatever, they can also have that as well. So Karen, yes. Question from the chat. Do we need to get USA Learns through OTAN? No. The USA Learns, you can go ahead and create your own account. I would probably do that first before you. If you want to use it in your classroom, for example, or if you want to suggest it for your students, then you might want to create your account first and just get oriented to which of the, for example, which of the ESL courses you want to offer. If you want to offer the citizenship course as well. So just get oriented to those courses first. And then with the USA Learns, they have a separate email creation and login for the students. And then once the students create their accounts, you can add those students to one of the ESL courses that you have in your account. So you basically just add them as students to that account. And then you'll have your roster. And then you can see how they're doing with the different USA Learns activities, with the course activities. Yes. Question. Cyber High Fresno is an amazing credit recovery program. Does OTAN know about this, or knows and chooses not to include? I'm not personally familiar with it. So I appreciate the recommendation. We will definitely, we can definitely take a look at it. Karen, if you want, if you can share. Who is it? You have to open up your. Oh, OK. So whoever shared the information, if you can, oh, Suzanne. OK, hi, Suzanne. So yeah, just if you can email that to, you can email me, aburickandotan.us, Karen, if you want to put that in. Just email the reference to me, Suzanne, and I can take a look at it. That'll be great. Is putting English to work kind of an OTAN curriculum? So right. So putting English to work, we actually just had a session on putting English to work in the morning there. So we've worked a long time with LAU. It's originally an LAUSD product. And we've kind of partnered with them over the years to offer the online version of putting English to work in Moodle previously. OTAN has made the transition away from Moodle at the end of last year to Canvas 100%. So we actually, you may have heard in that if you went to that session, that we've been working on developing the Canvas versions of putting English to work one, two, and three. As we kind of get our Canvas organized on the OTAN side, we're going to figure out a way to make that also freely available to the field as well. So we'll let you know when that comes out. But yes, that's our goal. If you were sharing a Canvas or anything like that. Yeah. So right now, yeah, it's so, you know, in the move from one LMS to another LMS, right? So always kind of speed bumps along the way, right? So we're trying to figure out, right? Sorry, OTAN, right now is trying to figure out the best way to share those courses with the field. So we, once we kind of crack that net, then we'll let y'all know that those are available. And then you'll be able to get copies of those PET courses into your Canvas account. And then you can start, you know, distance learning or however you're doing effectively with your agency. Yeah, thank you for that. And then Suzanne said she has five years' experience using this in the classroom. I think she's referring to PETW, but... No, Suzanne was the cyber high. No, but she wrote another comment. Oh, another comment, sorry. Okay. As soon as you were talking about PETW. Got it, okay. Yeah, we had, yeah, there's, I mean, a lot of folks have used the PET, the Pudding News to work with their distance learning students over the years. And so we want to bring those over to campus and make sure people can take advantage of that as well. Okay, so I think we're almost at 210. Any last questions in the room or online? Again, if you have any questions about... Oh, Tom, yes. Hi, I just wanted to say I'm totally interested in putting English to work. How will we get updated on when, you know, that is available through Oton in Canvas? Right, so as soon as we, like I said, as soon as we figure out where on Canvas we're going to house those and make those available, we will definitely let you know. We don't want to like, we're sort of chomping at the bid as well. Like we really, we, I think right now, Paul has shared, I think one PETW, Pudding News to work one and two are basically like ready to go. And he's working on the final touches for three as well. So, yeah, I mean, they're coming together. We just need to figure out how we're gonna, where we're gonna put them on Canvas so we can share them out, you know, yeah. And we'll let you know when that happens. Yeah, great. Okay, other questions before we, right? Okay, so again, thank you for coming. Please take advantage of these freely available curriculum offers. And if you have questions or want to get more information or if you have suggestions for other products to let us know about, you can email me, you can email Perry and we'll take a look at those and figure out how to get them out to the field. So, I think with that, I'll sign off here.


Welcome to today's Harvard Business Review webinar, How to Choose and Execute the Right Strategy. I'm Julie DeVall, Marketing and Communications Director for HBR. And I want to thank all of you for joining us today. And I want to thank Brightline Initiative for making this discussion possible. Executives are bombarded with best-selling ideas and best practices for achieving competitive advantage. But many of these ideas and practices contradict each other.  Should you create a blue ocean, be adaptive, play to win, or forget about a sustainable competitive advantage altogether? In a business environment that is changing and becoming that is changing faster and becoming more uncertain and complex by the day, it's never been more important or more difficult to choose the right approach to strategy. Martin Reeves is with us today to discuss his research into designing and choosing the right strategy for your company. He will help you learn how to assess your business environment, choose the right approach, and determine when and how to execute for maximum impact. Martin Reeves leads the BCG Henderson Institute worldwide and is a member of the Strategy Practices Leadership Team as well as a senior member of the Health Care Practice. Martin is also a member of the BCG Henderson Institute's Innovation Sounding Board, which is dedicated to supporting, inspiring, and guiding upstream innovation at BCG. He has been a fellow since 2008. Martin's research topic focuses on the future of strategy. Strategy has historically relied on concepts of scale, efficiency, and first-order capabilities. However, traditional approaches are often undermined by unpredictability and dynamism in today's business environment. Therefore, companies must supplement traditional competitive advantage with dynamic adaptive capabilities and strategies, which is what Martin is exploring. Martin is the co-author of Your Strategy Needs a Strategy, which offers the Strategy Palette as a tool for enabling business leaders to tune their approach to strategy into their strategic environment. Martin, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you very much, Julie. So what I'd like to talk about today is choosing and executing the right approach to strategy. And you'll see that actually one of the things that we're going to emphasize is the connectedness of strategy and execution. But first, a word about where the Your Strategy Needs a Strategy comes from. So I lead the Bistro Henderson Institute, and our mission is to essentially look at the ideas which forward-locking leaders will need to shape their next game. And there's nothing more important in that respect than strategy. And we talk this on because we hearing essentially confusion and stress around the role of the strategy department around the effectiveness of the annual planning process. So we decided to take a look at what works, what doesn't work, and why, and what you should use under what circumstances. And one of our challenges was that we were spawned for choice because there are actually about 120 strategy frameworks in common use. So another aim of this book is essentially to try and clarify how those different approaches fit together and which one should use under what circumstances. So let's start at the beginning. Business strategy is, of course, quite a young discipline, in contrast to military strategy, which is thousands of years old, a system of the first mentions of competitive strategy about the late 1950s, early 1960s. And early into the evolution of strategy, essentially strategy was equated with planning, with the idea that plans can be constructed from analysis of the marketplace and the capabilities of a company and that strategic positions can be created that endure in time. And here we have some quotes from one of the grandfathers of strategy, Michael Porter. And you can see that he stresses continuity. He stresses the idea of stable positions and he asserts that they should, if the strategy is constructed right, last a decade or more. Well, this was the very proposition that we increasingly called into question by our clients. So we decided to take a look at the literature. One advantage we had that the founding fathers of strategy didn't have is that we could look at massive amounts of data to actually test what worked. So we found in fact that there was quite a lot of skepticism of strategy coming from various quarters, which essentially gave us some hypotheses to test. So one of them was that strategy has been eclipsed by technology and of course, traditionally competitive strategy hasn't had a lot to say about technology. That strategy or the possibility of having a plan is killed by the speed or the velocity of the business world. Or there were some very popular books amongst practitioners that essentially asserted that execution was really where the made the difference between a great and a mediocre company and therefore our focus should be on execution, not on strategy. So probably the biggest question we had to answer is, is strategy actually still relevant? And so we analyzed, one of the sources of evidence for the book is that we analyzed about 135,000 companies over a 65 year period and asked questions like, what is the difference between the performance of successful companies and unsuccessful companies? So here you see the performance of the top quartile of all the US public companies compared to the bottom quartile of companies with respect to their operating profitability. And you can see that whatever constitutes strategy, whatever constitutes the basis for doing things in a different way, is actually becoming more important, not less important. So in other words, mirroring the polarizations that we're seeing in society and income that have been much commented on, actually there's a much less commented on phenomenon going on which is that actually there's increasing inequality between the highest performing companies and the lowest performing companies. So this tells us that strategy is important, it doesn't tell us what should constitute strategy. One of the key findings or one of the key questions that we looked at essentially is, what has changed that has made planning less effective and what constitutes a more effective approach in recent years? And the problem is of course that many things have changed since the early days of strategy, we have globalization, we have changes in geopolitics, we have technology, we have millennial values, we have connectivity, cheap computing power. So actually it was quite challenging to sort out these different threads of what the essential changes in the environment are that necessitate a new approach to strategy. We came down with a conclusion that basically one of the most important changes in the business environment was actually that the diversity of strategic environments was growing. So pretty much whatever macro variables you take to characterize a strategic environment and here you see a chart where each dot represents a company and you can see market cap volatility if you like the unpredictability of environments and the attractiveness of each environment, revenue growth in the 60s, the 80s and the 2000s and you can see that the footprint of the conditions of business has massively increased over time and we saw this pattern being replicated across a variety of variables. So the conclusion that we came to basically was that the question, we're asking the wrong question, that the question is not what approach to strategy is now relevant today but rather which approach should one use under which circumstances, in other words to adopt a contingent approach to strategy. So if you stare at this chart a little you'll see what I mean. Dots at the bottom of the chart where there is a high degree of predictability are gonna require a very different approach from dots at the top of the chart where you have a state of very high end predictability. Similarly, in a declining environment points to the left-hand side of the footprint of environmental conditions are gonna require a very different strategy to a very high growth, high rate of change environment. So the broad conclusion was that one approach to strategy does not fit all circumstances. So the next problem really was to say, what is the minimum number of questions that we can ask to discriminate between different approaches required in different environments? And here I'm gonna talk about the key tool in the book which is we call the strategy palette and before I go into it the basic idea of the palette is that we need a tool for discriminating between different types of strategic environment and different approaches to strategy and execution. So the three axes here are unpredictability, malleability and harshness. Or if I put it more simply the vertical axis represents the question, can I plan? And if I can plan, I should and if I can't, I'd be wasting my time. So clearly this is a very key determinant of the approach to strategy. The second axis, the horizontal axis is malleability. In other words, my ability to shape the environment rather than treating it as a given. And clearly if I can shape my own fate, I should but if I can't, I'd be wasting my time. And then the third axis harshness is basically about how the profitability and cash flow and growth of an environment reflects the harshness or the beneficence of the environment. And because if we're in a position where essentially the emphasis is on short-term survival that's one approach to strategy. Whereas if we have lots of growth options that's really quite a different situation. So this gives rise to five approaches to strategy. And in the literature, these have lots of different names but let me tick through those and say a few comments about each. So let's start off with the familiar. In environments that are stable and given and predictable, then we can employ a planning-based approach, a classical-based approach to strategy. Analyze, plan, execute would be the algorithm here. So the big news here is that in spite of some claims made by various authors, we definitely think that this space is not dead. It's just no longer a panacea. So a good example of where planning still is applicable is for example in confectionery. So we have a case study and an interview with the CEO of the Mars company, for example in the book in the chapter on classical strategy. And he says basically that chocolate grows with GDP, that the key brands are stable over many decades, basically stick with their childhood brands of chocolate and confectionery. And within a reasonable margin of error, one can in fact forecast. And therefore it's all about scale, economy, efficiency and execution disciplines. So Mars adopts a classical approach to strategy and its core business, one based upon analysis and planning. Of course, that doesn't mean that things are easy for Mars because their competitors are doing the same thing. So they have a number of innovations even within this classical form of strategy. For instance, one of their innovations is that they have very few people involved in the process and they submit themselves to the discipline of being able to explain their strategy to anyone in the company and everyone in the company within 20 minutes. So the reason they do that is that the strategy is not effective unless it's understood by all and executed. So even within this classical approach, innovation is certainly possible. Moving to increasingly exotic forms of strategy. So in the technology space as represented here by Tata Consulting Services, the world's second largest IT services company, they're in a doubly unpredictable business because not only is it hard to forecast which technologies companies will be employing, but actually each individual company will have a very high variance in whether it embraces the latest technologies or some traditional technologies. Therefore you have two sources of unpredictability, technologies themselves and how companies use them. And that leads Tata Consulting Services to conclude that actually they're better off not trying to plan but rather regarding their business as a portfolio of experiments. So every customer deployment is in a sense an experiment and that experiment yields an outcome and that outcome is either successful or unsuccessful. If it's successful, they try to codify the learnings and then scale them and apply them to other clients. So they do this process continuously. So this is really quite different from classical planning. It's more like an evolutionary process in biology and TCS has figured out a way of doing that. So we have a chapter in the book on the adaptive approach to strategy. Here in contrast to the classical approach where the algorithm is analyzed plan execute, the algorithm here would be vary or create variants, very select, select those things which work and then scale them and then continuously iterate in a loop on that process. The third canonical approach to strategy and execution is the visionary approach. And here this is the approach of entrepreneurs. It's the approach to use in situations where the market does not yet exist. It is therefore shapeable by the first mover. And you may ask, what is new about this form of strategy? In one sense, nothing is new. This is what entrepreneurs have been doing for centuries, creating a vision and then realizing that vision and then scaling the resulting business model. What is new, however, is that when I began my career in consulting 1989, I was basically most of the time advising large companies on how to compete with other large companies that were fairly similar to themselves and we had these titanic decade long battles between the number one and number two in an industry. Now more commonly I find myself advising a large company against a disruption caused by a small upstart company, an entrepreneur leveraging some new technology or business model. So what's new here is that large companies too need to be able to create new spaces and disrupt themselves by creating new businesses before they are disrupted by upstart visionaries. So we have a chapter based around the innovative consumer genetic testing service company 23andMe to illustrate the approach to execution and strategy in the visionary space. Coming on to the fourth approach, we have what we call the shaping approach which is an incredibly powerful approach. It's the approach of platforms and ecosystems, some of the most stunning examples of success in business we see today. If we think about Amazon or Alibaba or Red Hat, all of these companies essentially are cultivating an ecosystem leveraging the capabilities and assets of other companies to bring about a reshaping of an industry. So it contains elements of both malleability because they are the orchestrating ecosystem but also elements of unpredictability because they don't actually control or own all of the assets and these are basically strategies of platform strategies of co-evolution. So the algorithm here is one of creating influence of cultivating an ecosystem and of co-evolving with that ecosystem and the trick, of course, is to have a platform that somebody wants to join. There has to be mutual benefit in the economics of the ecosystem. The last approach to strategy, some people may not think of as a strategy at all but literally hundreds of companies, hundreds of large companies are currently embracing this approach to strategy which is strategic renewal. They are avoiding redundancy or obsolescence by fixing an obsolescent business model and what we found about this approach to strategy is that one is incredibly common because of the rate of change in the environment. Secondly, although it may be familiar, most companies have been through this several times. Actually the rate of failure is very high about 75% of companies that set out to renew or restructure or delay actually fail to restore their profitability to sector median returns in the short and the medium term. And what we found here was that the biggest cause of failure was a failure to pivot between the early stages of a renewal process where cost reduction and cash flow restore were the key and then pivoting to growth and value creation in the immediate term. That failure to pivot was the discriminator between successful and unsuccessful companies. So that's the strategy palette. Again, the idea is know which environment you are in, know what the basis of competition is and then choose the right approach to strategy accordingly and with it comes a distinctive approach to execution. Let me explain this a couple of other ways to help the point and sink home. So you can think about this, another way of thinking about this is different approaches to strategy on different timescales. So clearly one needs to fix things that are broken from the past. One needs to restructure obsolescent business models or to fix loss making a business unit. So this is the renewal strategy. A failure to do this will essentially starve the company of cash and short term financial viability. In the present one needs to run the cash cow business or the core business with a lot of, generally with a lot of classical discipline because this is the business that is paying for the future. And in most large companies, it's this trio of adaptive shaping and visionary strategies which is actually underrepresented and which is the hardest for big companies to get their minds around. But let me say a couple of things about it. A, it's very different from a classical approach and B, this is the approach to create the future growth options. So actually leveraging the, let's say embracing the contradiction between the analytical discipline of a classical strategy and the more creative strategies of adapting, shaping and visionary which you might call ambidexterity, the ability to do both is actually key to success for a large company. So in other words, what we're not saying is that the average large company should pick one of these approaches to strategy but rather to pick the right approach for each part of the business. I'm not sure whether you can see the diagrams inside each of the boxes here on this diagram, but what I'm trying to illustrate here is that not only is each of these approaches a different approach to strategy but it's a different approach to execution. So let's contrast classical with adaptive, for example. The classical approach begins with analysis of a market environment with creating a plan and with executing that plan which is usually stable over a period of time of one year or five years or whatever the planning horizon might be. An adaptive approach in contrast has the execution algorithm of experiment or create variation, selecting those variations which are successful and then scaling up those successful variations. So let's just think for a second how different these two approaches are. If we ask ourselves what is the plan? Well, in the classical approach there will be a binder called the strategic plan and it will be one thing for a business unit or a company. In the adaptive approach there may not actually be a written plan. There may be a general direction but the plan is constantly changing. In fact, the plan is a emerges from a population of experiments and is constantly changing as in the case of TCS. Let's ask another question to just illustrate the difference between these two approaches. If we ask which comes first, the plan, the strategy or the execution, then you may say in the classical approach of course the plan comes first because only when we have the strategy can we execute. But actually in the case of adaptive strategy it is the trial and error, the initiative taking at a working level. In other words, the execution which comes first and the strategy emerges from a stream of execution experiments. So really these are very fundamentally different approaches to strategy and execution. Now, if large companies want to use the strategy palette, want to apply the right approach to strategy in the right circumstances and we can show that that is a very beneficial things to do, companies that do that are more successful in the medium term. Then there are a couple of obstacles that they bump into. In fact, there are three capabilities that they need to develop, they bump into. So I'd like to say a few words about each of those. The first one is what you might call adaptive capability, the ability to undertake disciplined experimentation. Another one is the what I call shaping capability which is the ability to actually create new spaces and to shape the external environment. And the third one is the ability to adopt different approaches to strategy at the same time in different parts of the company, ambidexterity. So in terms of adaptive capability, this is not about randomness or lack of discipline. The discipline to run a portfolio of business model experiments requires every bit as much discipline as a classical execution, just a different type of discipline. It requires the discipline to understand the environment specifically enough to be able to target experiments. It needs the capability to be able to run a managed portfolio of bets. It requires the capability to run a stage gate process so that the unsuccessful bets are closed down and the resources are constantly recirculated to other experiments. It requires the organization to stay very close to the customer because it's the interface with the customer that the experiments and the learnings actually take place. It requires the ability to both profoundly decentralized because the initiative taking is decentralized but also to scale knowledge and share knowledge of successful experiments across the corporation. So both integrated and decentralized. It requires a culture that actually tolerates failure in individual cases and values speed of accuracy since the strategy emerges through continuous innovation. So in the words that I've used to describe it, you can imagine that that is quite challenging for the average large company that typically runs according to a hierarchy a set of SOPs, a prescribed planning cycle and so on and where initiative taking may not be sufficiently rewarded. But nevertheless, the example of Tata consulting services and other examples in the book show that it's necessary in some situations and entirely possible. Let me say a few words about the second capability which is typically bottleneck for large corporations, the ability to shape the environment. One might think logically that the largest companies with the most educated resources with the most political influence with the best financial positions with the scale to buffer change are in the best position to shape the environment. But of course we all know that that in practice is not the case. It's the mavericks on the edge of an industry that have no choice but to challenge the status quo that actually in the vast majority of cases end up reshaping industries. So how do we have large companies achieve their fully deployed potential influence and get on top of this capability of shaping the environment? Well, one way is to really start thinking to change the unit of analysis to start thinking about mutualistic ecosystems and not just the company versus its customers or the environment. One needs to think hard about mutual benefit for those purposes. One needs to think about innovation not only in terms of products but in terms of services and platforms. One needs to think about what it takes to be an orchestrator. The key question for anyone running an ecosystem is why would anyone want to join my club? And there has to be some benefit in terms of a brand or risk mitigation or systems cost or cost of accessing customers or the ecosystem doesn't make sense. One needs to be comfortable with if one is running an ecosystem with not controlling all variables because the complexity would make that impossible. And in any case, it would undermine the idea of a co-evolving system, a system where everything is constantly in motion. So often when large companies try to actually run their businesses as ecosystems, they mistakenly try to control all of the variables. So the irony is that many of the companies that are successfully run platform businesses have what you might call a slightly non-managerial culture. In other words, they know when to trust a marketplace mechanism and when to trust a managerial mechanism and they tend to keep managerial mechanisms away from marketplaces because marketplaces are self-organizing. So that's a little bit about the shaping capability. So let me say next about this third capability that's very important. So here we see different performance horizons and you see the blue circle here is represents current performance. So what most companies measure most of the time is their current productivity or their current financial results. So, and they measure those using backward-looking objective financial accounting measures. And of course, performance is very important because today's performance pays for tomorrow's growth. And then we have the green circle on the right which you might call vitality which is, excuse me, the ability to generate future growth options through innovation. And companies tend not to have very good metrics for this but we recently actually since the publication of the book a couple of weeks ago published a new index together with Fortune called the Fortune of Future 50. And the idea was that in contrast to most indices which are or rankings which are based upon either reputation or financial performance, we try to create a ranking that was based on future performance potential one that was based upon the ability to generate the future growth or innovation. So relate this back to the that trio of three styles in relation to the future in the strategy palette the adaptive approach, the shaping approach and the visionary approach. So coming to ambidexterity then what ambidexterity means is can you do both of those things at the same time? Can you run and reinvent the company at the same time? And interestingly, when we looked at how many companies can do that how many companies can run and reinvent the business with advantage at the same time. We found that it was about 3% that by coincidence is about the same proportion of the human population that can actually write fluently with both hands hence we called it ambidexterity. It's rare, it's hard because it involves a contradiction but some companies can do it and it's worth between six to eight percentage points of total shareholder return in the long term and clearly logically it's necessary for longevity and long term survival. A few words about ambidexterity. So we asked ourselves how can companies in practice conquer this tough problem of ambidexterity the ability to run and reinvent the business at the same time. And by the way this was a very common theme in all of the CO interviews that we did for the book the desirability of doing this not everybody used the word ambidexterity one CEO that we spoke to called it mixed messages but essentially they mean the same thing the ability to run and reinvent the business at the same time. And what we found was that we didn't find a single company that had enough ambidextrous talent such that all teams individually could run and reinvent the business but what we found was that some of the companies we spoke to had different organizational fixes for this lack of ambidextrous talent this insufficiency of ambidextrous talent. And we actually found four approaches that they used to produce ambidexterity and one of them is quite a common philosophy maybe the most common one which is separation illustrated by the green here in other words they separate the old way of doing things from the new way of doing things and this goes right back to Lockheed Martin and the idea of the skunk works where years ago Lockheed Martin tried to produce an advanced jet fighter in the same facility as a commodity bomber and the idea was separate them to different buildings with different cultures, different operating procedures and that's one approach to ambidexterity unfortunately it doesn't always work because it's sometimes the case that the new and the old are interconnected or the new becomes old very quickly so that a separation approach would constantly need to be sort of merged and then separated and then separated. So in these cases we see another approach is what we call the switching approach where you actually have multi-skill teams essentially have accountants and poets in the same teams so that you can actually do creative work and also disciplined classical work in the same teams and this mixed-skill team actually changes its emphasis as the product life cycle of the product proceeds and a good example of that is the glass manufacturer, Corny. A third philosophy which for some reason most of the examples we could find are actually with Chinese companies is what you might call an internal ecosystem whereby you have many many different business units and higher the world's largest white goods company is an example they have around 2,000 micro-business units and each unit is able to choose its own approach to strategy and execution and the management of the role of the corporate is to create a marketplace for these companies to transact with each other and buy services from each other so this permits tremendous diversity and sort of an emergent structure in an internal ecosystem still quite rare there are only a handful of companies I can find that are doing this but this is a third approach and the fourth approach which is now quite common is the external ecosystem whereby you actually have a number of collaborating companies there could be hundreds of companies which actually constitute your supply of R&D or your supply of hardware or your supply of software and you're tapping into their different approaches to strategy and execution and you basically orchestrate that ecosystem so we have many examples of this Apple is a classical one and in fact there's a very interesting memo which is the internal diagnosis of Nokia as to how they were beaten by a company that could ever make a smartphone before and the conclusion of this memo which is now freely publicly available is essentially that it's the wrong question Apple did not beat Nokia Apple and a self-organizing ecosystem two ecosystems in fact a hardware and a software ecosystem beat the monolith of Nokia in the smartphone market in four and a half years by being able to adopt different approaches in each supplier different approaches to strategy and execution so those are four different approaches to ambidexterity lastly let me say a few words about leadership and then also what happened beyond the book so we didn't set out to write a book on leadership but inevitably we bumped into the question how do you lead an ambidextrous company if your company is choosing the right approach to strategy and execution in each business and if you've mastered the capabilities to do that and you've even mastered ambidexterity you can reinvent the business in one part of the business and run the business in another part of the business you need to lead somebody needs to lead that very complex organization and so this leads to the question how can you be an ambidextrous leader and across a series of interviews with CEOs that we did for the book we distilled these eight signature behaviors of an ambidextrous leader and let me just pull out one or two because they're described in detail in the book so one very important one is what we call the antenna function namely that large companies and we can measure this tend to become very very introverted they become cut off from the environment because most of their attention goes to internal coordination and most of their beliefs essentially are self-perpetuating internal beliefs in order to adapt to a changing environment one needs to be very externally focused and it's really the leader that is either the direct antenna or ensures that the large company resists this gravity of introversion and actually keeps his attention externally oriented number five let me make a few comments on that so the CEOs that we interviewed all stress that sensible organizations employing smart people tend to migrate in the right direction over time so it's not that there are hundreds of companies out there that are not fearing disruption and not trying to do some of the things I'm talking about it's just that they're unable to do so promptly and cleanly so this is what the CEOs that we work with describe as the accelerator role which is taking the natural intelligence organizations about their self-awareness about what they need to do and just making it happen faster and more cleanly and more substantively than would otherwise be the case and then we have number eight which is the disruptor so it's sort of logically obvious that one of the few ways of avoiding being disrupted is to actually disrupt there's some circumstances where you can protect yourself against disruption but really when somebody has employed a technology to come up with a new business model which is superior to the incumbent model your choice is essentially a choice of timing namely do you wait for disruption or do you preemptively disrupt and put yourself in a position of control and one thing that our evidence shows large companies are phenomenally bad at is preemptively disrupting themselves so this really can only come from the leadership the ambidextrous leadership because this really goes against the grain of the conservatism of a large company let me go quickly over this one because I'd like to wrap up and give some time to questions so another skill of the adaptive leader was number seven which is leading not with instructions and of course unless you're in a class environment or a renewal environment you can't really have instructions because you're dealing with unpredictable environments and leading with questions and here on the slide you can see the very different sort of questions that CEOs will ask in each of these different strategic environments and there's a big emphasis in the book on what are those questions what are the right questions to ask and what circumstances and how do you lead with questions but I'm going to have to skip over that in the interest of time so let me wrap up with a few words on what has happened since the book so we are not academics we are practitioners so all of this was done with the hope that it would be embraced and help our clients so we've we did a number of things that I want to touch on so if you go on at the Android store the iTunes store you'll see that there's a game called your strategy needs a strategy one word and the game is if you like a practical accompaniment accompaniment to the book we designed it because we found that intellectual understanding of the ideas that we're talking about here is not sufficient to implement them to build the muscle memory so we built actually a video game to give managers the feel for what is it like to actually implement an adaptive strategy and what we've found in fact is that it's a really good way of learning the intuitions of each of these different styles in fact there's a whole bunch of other assets many of which are publicly available that you could also look at which would help a company to implement these things there's obviously the book there's a TED talk there's an HBR article there is the app I just referred to the iPad game in other words there is an e-course available we're working with a number of business schools to actually make this either a large part or a small part of their strategy course we're about to release a competition variant on the game app we've tested it thoroughly internally so we can now run massive parallel strategy competitions which are a really good way of giving a large group of people before you set out on a strategy change exercise the intuitions and the vocabulary to be thinking about these things and finally let me tell you about the future so what we're doing next is what we've found is that as I referred to earlier individuals are not ambidextrous when you have them play the game they actually show a very strong preference for a particular style of strategy now the good news is that everybody learns in every style over time that people display very strong tendencies and in our interviews we found that choosing the right person for the right job was a real dilemma facing CS and HR departments who do you put in charge of the new disruptive experiment what do you look for so we're teaming up with an AI and cognitive testing company called Pymetrics a startup coming out of MIT and what we're doing is we're using the game data and some neuroscience tests to actually create strategic personality types and we've already piloted this we haven't released it as a product yet but we will be doing so shortly to create these personality if you like archetypes or more strictly let's say neuroscience types so then you can actually tell after doing a short test or a period of gameplay which manager would be best off to lead an ecosystem strategy which manager would be best off leading a renewal strategy and we found it considerably more accurate than say Myers-Briggs or some of the other tools that are often used for this purpose so in summary you know what would be the implications of some of this for companies what we're saying is choose the right approach to strategy in the right environment we're saying learn how to deploy different styles in different parts we're saying become an ambidextrous an ambidextrous leader and we're saying build the capabilities that would enable you to do that and this last slide is just really some practical imperatives that come out of about how to do those things so that brings me to time let me pause there and maybe take any questions or comments that people have that's great Martin lots of questions coming in great presentation the first one and this is a question I have as well when you're starting out and defining and implementing a strategy what time period should people be thinking with the world moving so fast is it realistic to consider a 3 year plan 5 year plan or does it depend on the type of strategy you're going after I think the simple simple reply would be number one look at all time scales so that three slice diagram I gave you I think that's one simple way of looking at this do fix the things that are obsolescent in your business the broken business models because otherwise they will hemorrhage cash and attention do think about overperforming in the core business in the present and do think about future growth options now how fast should you do that I think you should have matched the clock speed of your environment so I think it's very important to look at the rate of change of business models of the environment to make sure that you're matched with that and the trick I think is not to focus on your nearest competitors because other big companies like you may actually have a clock speed which is too slow so look to the Mavericks on the edge of your industry for the rate of change I think the other thing I'd say is that the emphasis is on speed and necessarily so because things are happening faster we can actually measure how fast it's on average across all public companies it's twice as fast but it's considerably faster in technology than in some other industries but don't think about the slow because the average age at death of a public company has come down from something like 30, sorry 70 years to about 34 years in recent years and so there are some very important slow processes too that need to be taken into account for example the cultivation of talent is a slow process actually building marketplaces is a relatively slow it's a multi-year process so you really need to focus on all time scales a lot of people are chiming in about culture is one of the biggest barriers to embarking on a new strategy do you have any advice there for how to lead a cultural change right well culture is really important and I have to illustrate this with a question how would you supposing you wanted to do an adaptive strategy and you put in place the processes you hide the right people you decentralised innovation you had portfolio discipline and the question is if you wanted to kill that instantly in the simplest possible way how would you do so and the answer of course is to punish failure if you visibly punish failure and create fear there will be no experimentation so I think this illustrates the importance of culture we didn't have time to go too deeply into that but each of these styles has a culture associated with it now that gives rise to a problem which is if you're trying to master ambidexterity can you really have different cultures in different parts of the company well under separation you can and if you're using an external ecosystem you can you can employ some extremely conservative companies you can employ some very entrepreneurial companies you can do that but if you're trying to actually have an ambidextrous culture then you really and some companies are really trying to do that then you really need to legitimise embracing contradiction embracing dynamism so that the organisation really does understand that in the core business we need to overperform and we need to take risk in the peripheral businesses and although this is an apparent contradiction this is what we do so there's an amusing anecdote in the book actually about one CEO that says somebody says to the CEO you're giving me mixed messages one minute you're telling me to be very disciplined with every penny and then actually telling me to be risky and creative you know I'm confused by the mixed messages and the CEO's response is that's what I'm paying you for to actually create a culture of mixed messages that's what leaders do now it's called ambidextrous leadership so it's a it is indeed a very very critical area so sort of related somebody had a question around dual strategy and if there's an example of a company where one part of the business was executing against a classical approach where another part of the business was focusing on the adaptive approach absolutely so we give the example in the book of PepsiCo since it's public I can talk about it so PepsiCo's the PepsiCo CEO's response to strategy is sorry response to ambidexterity is to have competing teams inside each business so in other words take one of their business units run the business team and there'll be a reinvented business team and there she is trying to keep the teams fighting to preserve the contradiction because out of the contradiction will come the balance between performance of the current business and it being replaced by something better so in each of Pepsi's businesses you have this contradiction another example would be the classical example of Lockheed Martin another example I can't give the name of the company that would be a major telecom that has a very multi decade NPVs for their fixed line telecoms business runs their mobile business in a different way and then runs their over the top services businesses in a very sort of Silicon Valley like way and they use the separation philosophy to do so so this is I think a necessity for almost every large business that I looked at I mean changes faster in some businesses than others but this run reinvent tension is now I think present in every business great somebody was asking about the relation the differences and similarities between testing and executing can you say a little more how I go ahead well let me let me maybe let me maybe guess so I guess you're referring to the the tension between deductive approaches and empirical approaches do you think that's the sense of the question Julie I think so yes yeah so so I think a so this varies very much between the different approaches to strategies so the a classical approach is one that's biases towards analysis and and deduction and you know decomposition of a plan into its components and those things don't change very much over time whereas an adaptive strategy biases very much towards trial and error in other words the assumption is not that if you analyze a lot of data it will tell you exactly what to do and that thing that you need to do will will not change over time the biases towards references the there's this term minimum viable product in other words get into the market with roughly the right thing you know see what happens and then move very quickly to fix it and fix it and fix it again so it's what the software industry talks about you know version 1.1 version 1.2 so the bias towards action not perfection and towards speed rather than accuracy so this really this is one of those dimensions that differs very much between the different approaches to strategy in fact there's a table in the book that actually in the first chapter that distinguishes between all of these different facets of a company that hinge upon the approach to strategy adopted so the approach to innovation changes the approach to execution changes the approach to culture changes the approach to measurement changes the tradeoff between accuracy and speed changes so that's where the power and also the challenge of the approach comes in to change all those things coherently and that is ultimately why we call the book how to choose and execute the right approach it's actually about strategy and execution and their coherence not just about strategy here's a really good question I imagine a lot of big companies face this but what are some suggestions for ambidextrous leaders that are trying to navigate internal resistance and fatigue so maybe they're not as fast to getting up to speed and on board with a strategy and yeah well that I think is one of the one of the classic obstacles to doing all of what we've been talking about it's the you know how to make the elephant dance and I guess the hints you know the whole books that have been written on that subject but the hints that we picked up from our research I mean one of them is that that is indeed one of the critical roles of leadership that was the disrupter role in the eight roles I think another one is is acceleration just to constantly try to compress the timelines and make what will happen naturally happen faster with less disruptive cost to the company I think another one is to remove obstacles so not as part of the book but separately from the book we recently carried out some research on successful transformations and we found that leadership change actually improves statistically improves the odds of success in in transformation. Transformation is renewal in our framework so it's just one of the five but I would expect that it would apply more generally sometimes you have to sometimes the active resistance or just the mental of inertia of the members of the leadership team that have been successful under one regime is the obstacle to the next so that's where the CEO has to have courage to swap out the team is necessary another one is simplifying the problem you know I don't think there's any company in the world that could do there could be ambidextrous in all aspects in all in all parts of the business simultaneously but the good news is you don't really need to do that so if you look at any particular business it usually crunches down to something much simpler it usually in my experience crunches down to a three-part problem you know one part is you know what is what is surplus to requirements or needs fixing that's your renewal agenda you know how do you run the how do you overperform in the core business which is usually the familiar part of the equation and then how do you create sufficiently a sufficient number of sufficiently large bets in the in those trio of creative strategy styles that I talked about so actually if you look at it that way you've you've simplified many possibilities down to sort of three slices the simplification I think is part of the recipe too great there's a question coming in it's sort of forward thinking he's wondering if you've seen this being played out and how people are hiring leaders and executives I mean especially with the personality part of your presentation do you see this becoming part of onboarding and applicant selection well our partner Pymetrics that's their main business actually to apply neuroscience which is different from psychology neuroscience doesn't measure your perceptions of yourself it actually measures your behaviors so that they have some games whereby you measure your reaction speed or propensity to be distracted and this sort of thing it's actual behavior so they have a series of neuroscience games and they also have some artificial intelligence that actually matches behaviors to likelihood of success in different job families so they have a whole business based around this doing precisely that and their vision of the future would be that indeed that's the way that we'll be hiring people moving into the future Martin you have some experience in healthcare do you see this how do you see this playing out in healthcare companies and businesses well I think highly regulated businesses and very technically complicated businesses like healthcare often think that they are different and it is true that highly regulated businesses often change more slowly because you just have less freedom for maneuver but I'd say I see our framework was based upon evidence across all industries and I think we see this being quite universal and a good example of that is the example I gave of the visionary company 23andMe 23andMe is this innovation whereby you take e-commerce technology and you put it together with genetic testing and you put it in a sort of a two-sided business model whereby the tests are administered very cheaply it's just a saliva sample and it costs $100 I think and then you have the value of the anonymized data that results from that which has another market so probably going back five years I imagine that the beliefs of the industry were that this would be illegal immoral technically impossible and economically infeasible and there have been some regulatory issues around the business but nevertheless even in a very regulated and complicated business with high barriers to entry like healthcare we are seeing this sort of disruptive innovation so the short answer would be it applies every bit as much maybe just on a slightly slower time scale to some other businesses I think we have time for one more question so under the leadership capabilities somebody has a question around the role of the team coach so the idea of the team coach role is that you're never going to have enough ambidextrous capabilities it's never going to be the case that you have a huge population of entrepreneurs and the population of planners and all of those other things that you need in an ideal circumstance so I talked about the organizational work around for that but there are the coach role refers to the if you like to the training work around so you can at least make sure that you have for instance what the Japanese call a horizontal fast track so in other words you can give people early in their careers an experience of each of these approaches to strategy by rotating them through different parts of the business and make them somewhat ambidextrous you can also make sure that people are selected for mission critical roles the right people are selected as we've just been discussing and you can also make sure that teams are operating effectively if you're using that switching approach that I suggested in other words they're able to work with strategic personality profiles that are different from their own so if you have teams that are mixed sort of disciplined implementers and creative experimenters that actually you can do teaming exercises to make sure that that works rather than falls apart so there's a lot that there's a lot of ways in which the HR function becomes actually very strategic if you implement the model we've been talking about today great Martin this has been a great presentation but I'm afraid we're out of time I want to thank all of you for joining us and thank Brightline Initiative for making this discussion possible this concludes our presentation have a great day


I've talked about sunscreen and topical retinoids. What other skin-creen components have been shown to help with skin aging? While placebo-controlled trials are the standard in most medical research, they're still all too rare for cosmetic products. This raises advocacy questions. Many are left with simply buying hope in a jar, as well as safety concerns. Cosmetics to this day contain an array of toxic chemicals. Of the more than 12,000 synthetic chemicals used in cosmetics, fewer than 20% have been recognized as safe. Of course, this doesn't mean natural ingredients are necessarily harmless. Poison Ivy is as natural as you can get, but you wouldn't want to rub it on your face. However, there are some relatively safe natural options with varying degrees of efficacy. In contrast to retinoic acid, a form of vitamin A that can be irritating, topical niacinamide, also known as nicotinamide, is a form of vitamin B3 that is non-irritating and found to be effective. It's been described as one of the best-studied cosmaceutical ingredients for anti-aging. But it looks like there are only two placebo-controlled human studies, which gives you an idea of the state of cosmaceutical science. Skin photoaging is largely mediated by UV-induced free radical formation. One of the consequences of excess sun exposure is the oxidation of sugars and proteins in the skin into yellow-brown pigments that give aging skin a yellowing, sallow appearance. Since niacinamide is a precursor to two potent antioxidants, the hope is that this process could be interrupted, and indeed, the first published study was entitled Topical Niacinamide Reduces Yellowing, Wrinkling, Red Blotchiness, and Hyperpigmented Spots in Aging Facial Skin. It was a 12-week, double-blind, placebo-controlled, randomized clinical split-face study of middle-aged women. In a split-face study, each woman is her own control, rubbing the active formulation, in this case 5% niacinamide in moisturizer, on one side of her face, and the placebo, straight moisturizer, on the other half, though neither she nor the researchers know which side is which until the code is broken at the end. This controls her skin type and administration technique, and different people apply facial products differently, but participants often use the same hand for applying the creams to both sides, so unless specified that different gloves be worn or hands washed in between, there can be cross-contamination. Anyway, at the end of 12 weeks, there was a small 5% reduction in wrinkles and fine lines, and slowing the development of blotchiness, spots, and salinus. A subsequent publication noted an improvement in skin elasticity as well. The magnitude of these effects may only be one-third to one-fifth as good as redinoic acid, but there were no reports of excess skin irritation. But, used a 4% concentration, an application was limited to crow's feet wrinkles around the eyes. Significant reductions in wrinkles by both subjective and objective measures were noted by the end of the 8-week study. 64% of the niacinamide side eye wrinkles unwent moderate or market improvement compared to 0% on the placebo side eyes.