Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's webinar on reframing how to solve the right problems. Before we get started, I'd like to go over a few items so you know how to participate in today's event. You have joined the presentation listening using your computer speaker system by default. If you do prefer to join over the telephone, just select phone call in your webinar control panel and the dial-in information will be displayed. You will have the opportunity to submit text questions to today's presenter by typing your questions into the questions section of your control panel. Just a quick reminder that if your control panel does close up, simply click on the small orange arrow to open it up again. We will be recording the session and sharing it on YouTube within the next few weeks. I would now like to introduce our speaker, Thomas Wettel Wettelsborg. Thomas is a Harvard business press author and a globally recognized expert on innovation and problem solving. His first book, Innovation as Usual, co-authored with Patty Miller, was translated into five languages and got Thomas recognized as a top 20 international thinker by HR Magazine. Today we're going to hear about his new book, What's Your Problem? Which was just released in March. The book comes endorsed by Adam Grant, Amy Edmondson, and Google's Eric Schmidt, among others, and Thomas has shared and refined his reframing method with companies like Cisco, Microsoft, Citigroup, and the United Nations. And now it is my pleasure to turn the presentation over to you, Thomas. Thanks so much, Elke, and welcome everybody to this Brightline webinar where we'll delve a little bit into this question that I explore in the book and in my research, namely, of solving the right problems. And we're actually going to kick off on that topic by running a quick handheld survey among you to try to get a sense of your own experience with this issue of whether people are solving the right problems or not. So I'd ask you to think about a specific scenario that I'm sure you encounter in your work again and again, namely, when somebody else comes up to you with a problem that they would like your help with, and that this might be your clients, it might be somebody internal or whoever you mostly help in your professional life with solving problems. And what I'd like you to consider, and I'm going to ask you to reply in the chat field here in a second, what I'll ask you to consider is when people come to you with problems, to what extent do they have the right problem? To what extent is your experience that the problem they present to you is, in fact, the problem that they should be solving? And I'd like you to consider three different categories for this. One situation is where they're effectively or essentially focused on the right problem. There may be some minor tweaks, but they are looking at the right problem. The second scenario is where you need some degree of reframing, meaning there's something about the problem that you actually need to help them understand. And then the final category, namely of whether significant reframing is needed. That might be the case if, say, the problem that they first present to you is literally the wrong problem to focus on. What I'd like you to consider is looking just as an average across your interactions with clients and colleagues. What is the rough ratio between this or the percentage if you will? So for instance, if you feel that generally, oh, this is split evenly between these three categories, you might enter in the chat field 333333. What I'm going to ask you to do now, everybody on the call, is to jump onto the chat and then write just a single line where you write in that format what your personal experience is with to the extent to which people solve the right problems. So I'll ask everybody to take 10 seconds right now, find the chat, and enter your reply.  So please take a brief minute and put in your answer here. Very exciting. And Elke, are you starting to see? I am. Yeah, they're coming in. What would you say? You don't? Yeah. It looks like most people are 20, 50, 30. 20, 50, 30. That's roughly the distribution you're seeing here. And I'm sure you have various, there's some divergence between it. But that's an interesting response to me. And that's not incompatible with what I have generally seen. When I asked this question, which I've done of a lot of people, well, pretty typically there's actually a lot of weight in the second and third category. And that's important because what we're talking about here are the cases in which you caught it. What I'm worried about are all of the cases where we don't catch it or that may where people never come to you because they think they're solving the right problem, but they are in fact not.  When you're thinking about the cost of this ability to, you know, or the lack of the ability to solve the right problems, what does that cost you when you're looking at your organization's finances? What type of time, energy and money are you wasting overall on solving the wrong problems? Or you might extend this both up and down, if you will. You can ask about our societies. How much do we waste on public expenditure programs that are headed in the wrong direction or just a very basic example, family conflicts and whatever we have. This issue, we have problems in all parts of our lives, of course. And this issue of not always solving the wrong problems is with us everywhere. The interesting question to me is, what if we could change that? Like, what if there's a way of actually making people yourself and others better at this issue of solving the right problems? And my argument, of course, is that there is such a way and it's called reframing. And reframing, it's a skill. I will go into a little bit more depth around what this skill is. But essentially what I want to highlight here is that reframing is interestingly enough not a new idea. Like, this has been with us for over 100 years. You see Einstein talking about it. Peter Drucker talks about it. What I'm going to share here are some of the mechanics of some of the details of what reframing is and how you can use it. What I want to highlight here is that the research behind this is pretty strongly in favor of the fact that this has a tremendous effect both on problem solving and on innovation. We're not going to go deep in the research on this call. But for those of you who like to do that, you will find it summarized on the book's website, HowToReframing.com, where I've outlined all the different scientific studies or the main ones that are into this, along with a lot of the historical evidence for reframing and who's been talking about it across history. What we're going to cover on this call is basically, first of all, a little bit about what it is I'm going to share an example with you. Then I'm going to delve into two different cases that highlight how to work with reframing and show some of the power it can have. And then finally, we are going to jump into discussion and kind of hear both your questions, but also your own take or experiences or reflections around reframing. So that was on the menu. Getting into what reframing is, I like to start with some of the first empirical evidence for the method.  And he was one of the first people back in the 60s to start doing studies of what good problem solvers or good artists, good innovators did differently when they faced a problem. And what they found was basically, and I'm summarizing a lot of research here, both from Csikszentmihal and otherwise, most people, when they have a problem, what do they do? Well, they grab the problem and then they rush into the solution phase. What people who are good at problem solving and innovation do differently is basically three things. First of all, they go in and say, wait a second, before we jump into solution mode, what is the problem we're trying to solve? Then crucially, they do one more thing. Which is, ask the question, is there a different way of looking at this problem? This is where the actual reframing comes into the picture. Is there another way of thinking about what is actually going on in this situation? And then finally, and crucially, they don't do this for a week on a some remote mountaintop. No, they mix this with action. So this is an iterative practice that you do even for quite short periods of time. What you're looking at here might be five or 10 minutes with respect to how much time you spent trying to reframe the problem. So in essence, the behavior I'm talking about here, looking at reframing as a behavior, is a three-step process where, whenever you have a problem, instead of jumping straight into solution mode, you first frame the problem, then you spend a little bit of time reframing it, ideally with other people. And then you figure out, how do we keep momentum? How do we move forward? Because the big danger here, of course, is paralysis by analysis, especially smart people can get easily trapped in thinking too much about the problem and not keeping the pace, if you will. We're going to try to take a look at that, and I'm going to ask for your help again, by way of a specific case, namely, what I call the slow elevator problem. And the slow elevator problem is my preferred way of quickly explaining people what reframing is and why it's important. Here's the scenario.  And now several of them have come to you and said, hey, if you don't fix this problem with a slow elevator, we're going to break out leases, which would be bad for you. What you'll notice here is that, like in the real world, this isn't coming to you neutrally. Somebody has already framed the problem for you. They come to you and say, the problem is that the lift is slow. And if you jump into solution there, you get trapped in trying to come up with ways of making the elevator faster. Can we tweak the algorithm? Do we have to install a new motor? Do we have to go out and buy a new elevator, which might get expensive? The point of the method, and we're going to try it right now, is to take, again, a short break, again, even maybe five, 10 minutes, and try jointly to come up with as many different ways of seeing the problem as you can. So this is, effectively, it's almost like a formal brainstorming, but not on the solutions on the problem, on trying to figure out, are there different ways of looking at this problem? We're going to try this now as an experiment here online. What I'm going to ask you to do, again, is to use the chat window and to enter one, two, three, whatever you can come up with, different ways to look at the problem. So you might say the problem is that, whatever else you think the problem could be. So again, everybody now, I'm going to give you 10, 15 seconds to get started. Please find the chat window and throw in a one, two, or three suggestions for reframings, other ways to think about what might the problem be, what might be going on in this situation. So let's try it out, please write ahead. We'll give it 10 seconds again here and we are now going to have, as soon as Elke is ready, we're going to have her share some of your suggestions or perspectives on this problem. So Elke, feel free to jump in once you see some of the answers coming. Perfect. So Karen says, increase the frequency of maintenance checks. Maintenance checks. So Karen suggests there's an issue here with the maintenance schedule. What's going on on that front? Great, great, what else? Here's a fun one. How might we make the slow elevator ride more fun, exciting, engaging? Right. So there's somebody here who focus on the experience of the ride. How might we make it? And you can recognize here the wording, how might we? That's a very commonly used term and for instance, in design thinking. So the problem is around the experience, not necessarily the actual speed. What else? Alvaro suggests, why is it slow? Why is it slow? Alvaro is looking into the question of what's creating the slowness. Great, what else? Patrick suggests finding out why the tenants are dissatisfied. Interesting, different problems to focus on. Not on the speed of the elevator, but asking what's going on with the dissatisfaction. Why have people unhappy? Why haven't they been unhappy earlier? Did something change? Great question, what else? Mary Beth suggests, hours of the building may dictate when everyone is getting to the elevators. Very interesting, the timing, right? Is this an issue of peak demand where everybody has lunch at 12 o'clock and that's when the crunch happens? What else? Alice Starr suggests that people are bored in the lift as there's nothing to look at. Boredom, pure boredom, again, around the experience. Let's take one more. Kate says that the lift might be overloaded. All right, so there's a capacity issue or whatever is going on. What you have just tried now are the first two steps of the process. Again, whenever you have a problem, you very rapidly describe the problem. The issue is that the elevators slow, they're complaining and we might lose our tenants if we lose them. And then you jointly, we did it here with a large group and I'm sure we have lots more suggestions in the chat but you might do this just with two other people. You very rapidly go in and try to come up with other perspectives on the problem. And I've outlined some here. This is of course an exercise that I run a good deal of times and you can see here how by virtue of going in and trying to quickly reframe the problem, you start coming up with other perspectives not just in the problem but also other potential ways of solving it. I've outlined some here is about the stairs. Why aren't people using those? It's a way boring. Is it a people problem?  Is it around the experience as somebody suggested? Like it looks old, is it peak demand? We all heard that one as well. Is the real issue here that they leave late for an important meeting? Or for that matter, and you can continue this. Is this about where on the floor people are located? Do we have a sales force at the top floor? And that's very inconvenient. They have to get in and out of the time. Is this a negotiation tactic? Is this a matter of them trying to lower the rent by pushing you on this? What I'd like you to notice here is first of all, you very easily get trapped in the first frame. The mistake people make here is that they look at this thing about the lift is slow and they never even question whether that is the right framing. They just spend all their time figuring out, okay, how do we make it faster or something? They're very solution oriented. Secondly and crucially, I want to highlight here that you're not necessarily looking for the real problem, which is something we normally talk about a lot. You might actually be looking for a better problem to solve. And that's important because most of our problems don't have just one cause or one like root issue that that's going on. Most of the problems we are facing are multi-dimensional, multi-causal, which means, this is good news in a sense, which means that there may be multiple different ways of trying to solve them. And the classical example is of course, this is a real world problem. And if you talk to building managers, well, many of them will suggest a solution to a different problem, which some of you mentioned around the experience, namely they put up mirrors in the hallway.  They look up, they see the mirror and they fall in love and they forget time. The point is here, the mirror is not necessarily the solution to this. The mirror might not work if the issue is that people are late for an important meeting. But the mirror is a memorable example of the key idea that sometimes by trying to reframe the problem, you can find a problem or a different problem that is much, much better, faster, cheaper, more effective, safer to attack than the problem you originally started with. Now, I wanna unpack this a little bit more because when you look at this, and I'll share you again here, the three-step process, there's a little bit of a black box involved and that is step number two because the first and the third step, we're pretty familiar with that, like state the problem and figure out how to keep moving forward. The mystery here actually comes in when you ask, how do we get better at the middle step? If you will, what is inside the black box of reframing and how can we get better at finding those useful different angles on the problem in the span of just a few minutes? That's one of the things I have looked at as I developed and tested my variation of this method with a lot of different companies and what I share in the book is basically under this a number of different thinking strategies that you can employ in order to do this. And the one I wanna highlight here, I'll share a few more along the way. What I wanna highlight here is the notion of looking outside the frame. What do I mean with that? What most people do when they start to look for different framings is to delve deeper into the original framing. So they ask the question, why is the elevator slow? That can bring interesting perspectives to light and we may have seen some of them here right now. But what's important is that that's not the only way to try to reframe a problem. And equally important, if not more important perspective is to go in and try to do what I call breaking the frame. And breaking the frame is about asking the question, is the speed of the elevator the right thing to focus on? Because you'll notice here the second you delve deep into why is the elevator slow, you're almost trapped in that framing, even though you look creatively inside, the ability here is crucial. And we know that a lot of from research that a lot of problem solving experts do this, they try to take a step back instead of delving straight in, they take a step back and they look for other ways to think about the problem. Now, I wanna share a little bit of cases around this. And the one you're seeing here that I brought two different cases from my research. The first one is around innovation, specifically it's a case from Samsung, which is focused on how reframing plays into innovation and finding rethinking customer problems. And I bring this up because those of you who are familiar with my first book, Innovation is Usual, you'll know that when you look at innovation, how we pursue it, we have a tendency of asking specific types of questions. We have a tendency of going in and saying, well, where do we find innovative new ideas? Where do we look for innovation? Let's look at new technology and let's look at the future. Like what's going on in our field in the research labs on technical advances and what's gonna happen a few years down the line. What I would suggest to you is that there's another side of that equation. Of course, those questions are important, but a lot of the practical innovation we're seeing in companies or in organizations, that actually has more to do with discovering old problems with the ability to look at customers and see a problem that they have, that they may not even themselves be aware of, that we may need to rethink what they really care about. And what I'm showing here, the background image is of course, of the story of the rolling suitcase. The picture you're seeing is from 1967. At that point in human history, we had not yet put wheels on suitcases that happened in the year 1972. Or in other words, in the span of human history, if you think about it, well, first we put a man on the moon and then we put wheels on suitcases. That is the de facto timeline of our history of invention, if you will. I share that as a quick example or as a precursor to the Samsung story because what Samsung had done was to focus explicitly in their innovation efforts on this question of discovering or rediscovering customer problems that we weren't serving properly. And the case you're seeing here, I wrote this up in a case called Samsung's European Innovation Unit. You can see some of the protagonists here. Luke Mansfield, who was the leader of the unit, Geron Wouter's part of it, and Ran Makasi as well. That was the core team that established this group. The case I'm gonna share is actually a little older and it's very interesting because it's around the space of camcorders. I'm sure you remember those before our beloved iPhones kind of took over the camcorder market. There are some interesting developments in this space around innovation. I'm sure you remember the default when you looked at innovation in camcorders for everybody in that industry were doing, well, they were adding a new button. Oh, well, how about a setting for low light conditions when it's also winter? And then you'd add another button to the camcorder. The Samsung store is interesting because they also added the button but they added the right button. And I'll share the story here. What they basically did was to go in and apply this principle of trying to discover customer problems that we weren't serving well. And specifically, they started to look outside the frame. So what most people do or did at the time, they looked at how do we make the experience of filming better? Like how do we make sure that people get all the footage that they want and they can use the camera okay and so what Samsung realized by looking outside the frame was that there's a big blind spot in the industry at that time and that was editing. Wait, when you looked at editing, people generally didn't have too many problems filming but most people found editing annoying. They didn't have the time for it or they just left it hanging there on the camera which was a key part of the user journey when you think of it. Based on that insight around an unmet need among customers, they did a very simple thing. They added a bookmark function. So the my clip button, which was the innovation was literally just a button that said, now the interesting thing happens. So you're filming two hours of some family excursion and whenever there's a memorable thing, you click the button so you can easily refind it so you can potentially use auto editing and so on. Now, you might think when you hear about this, that's a pretty basic idea. That that's not like an industry game changing idea. No, it was not. But crucially, many of the problems to solve that really work that create results, they're actually relatively obvious in retrospect and I'll show you the kind of difference that this made to Samsung's bottom line because this particular innovation took Samsung's, this is a loss leading industry. Most of companies in the space were in the red. This particular innovation turned Samsung into a profit or the camp corner division into a profit generating operation. What you're looking at here, the details are not important. What you're looking at here is a comparison between two different camp corners. The Panasonic's that's a competitor and Samsung's corner and there are two things to notice. The first thing is that the competitor's camera is actually more expensive to produce. The second thing is of course, that Samsung's camera that retails for 40 pounds more which is a lot in this industry. This has very thin margins. The point is here, when you can go in and identify an unmet need among customers or reframe what's really going on on their side, you can very often create significant value without necessarily having to completely reinvent your business model or your industry or whatever it is. There's of course examples of that too. I'm sure you're familiar with many of them but I think we overlook the simplicity and the power of very basic innovations that doesn't necessarily depend on new technology that might be as simple as we'd covered before around using old technology better or even as I mentioned here, putting wheels on supercases. That's the first case I wanted to share. I have one more case I wanna delve into and that shifts the focus a little bit namely towards the space of charity or volunteer work on nonprofits and so on. And specifically, I'm gonna talk about something that's been going on in the shelter dark space. I sometimes call this an industry is not entirely accurate. This is driven by volunteers by and large. What is the shelter dog problem? Well, the shelter dog problem is that when you're looking at the US, there's every year something like three million dogs ending up, and other pets too by the way ending up in a shelter. And through the efforts of shelters and rescue group and volunteers, we typically manage to get about half of those adopted which means we have a surplus problem here. We basically need more than a million new homes for dogs in shelters every single year. And that of course raises the question, how do we get more people to adopt? That is a problem a lot of people have tried to tackle. And there are some excellent efforts out there. I'm gonna show you a couple of them before I show you what I think is the central story with this. The classical thing I'm sure you've all seen is of course around framing the problem around motivation. When you consider what is stopping people from adopting shelter dogs, well, maybe it's that they're not motivated enough. They blindly go down and buy their pets from a pet store instead of going in and looking at shelters and rescues. If you frame the problem as motivation, what do you do? Well, you jump into trying to increase motivation for instance through advertising or through marketing campaigns and so on.  Here somebody is trying to appeal to your compassion for these poor animals and try to shift your behavior around where you get the dogs. That's one framing, that's of course widely used, but there's also a limit to how much compassion people really have. There's a limited, if you will, number of compassion dollars running around in general, there are many other good cases that we might consider or look at. One reframing, I saw this relatively recent, is going in and thinking not about the problem as motivation, but ease or ability. So how easy is it? If you're actually thinking of adopting shelter dogs, how easy is it to get access to them? And here there's a company called Backbox that I talk about in the book that they went in and looked at this and they realized it's actually difficult to see the dogs. If you're shelter, you don't have a lot of money, so you're not a main street, you are somewhere further away and it's not very easy to find them. And so what did they do if they had framed the problem around ability or ease? Well, they went in and created an app called Backbody which is effectively, if you will, basically Tinder for dogs. This story is quite a cute story. It created great results as well, but I'm sharing this to highlight something different. And that is one of the other strategies you wanna employ because what you will notice about both these things is that they focus on the same goal. They focus on how do we remove barriers to adoption so we can increase the rate of adoption. That's where we started out, but that's not necessarily the right goal to focus on. The strategy I have used this case to share is really around rethinking the goal. When you think about problems, mostly what we do is we focus on the obstacle.  For some reason in our minds, we are very good at kind of focusing on what's stopping us, but not necessarily as good as we should be at going into and saying, what does success look like? Is there a different goal to pursue that might be better than the one we originally have in mind? We don't question our goals. We don't often even really understand our goals. And that is a high leverage point you can set in when you're dealing with problems as well. The story here, instead of focusing on barriers to adoption, the story here is about a woman called Lori Weiss.  It's not a shelter, it's a rescue group helping shelters and helping dogs in general. And what she realized was that there is a data point or an assumption in the industry that everybody took for granted without necessarily really considering whether it was true. The data point is that 30% of all dogs coming into a shelter are what's called owner surrenders. So this is not somebody we pick up from the street because the dog has run away. This is a case in which the owner of the dog deliberately hands over the dog to the shelter. Well-knowing that the dog might not make it out of there again. Now question, and this you can think about, of course, if you work in the space, you love dogs. Like you are really, really fond of dogs. And so when you hear about somebody who deliberately hands over their animal to a shelter in which they, again, they might get utilized in there, what do you think about those people? Well, what goes through your mind when you think about the people who hand over their own pets? Probably that they're bad people. Like it is hard to imagine. Like somebody is like handing over a kid. Like how can you be so heartless, so irresponsible to take your dog and just hand it over to a shelter? Now, when you look at this, you see a dynamic in the industry. Namely, that assumptions about a problem can sometimes counter what we're trying to achieve. Because if you're framing of this problem as the intake problem, if you're framing us, the issue is that people are bad. What do you do? Well, you do what shelters all over the world do. You screen people. You create barriers to adoption. What you're looking at below here anonymized is a real world form for how to save a dog from death. Literally, it is before we will allow you to take this pet out of our shelter. We need you to fill out all of these questions, including employee referrals, information about your home, vet referrals. And people would check and reach out. It is actually a difficult process in many places to get to save a dog from death. Now, with that framing, that's understandable. But what was interesting about Lori was she thought there was something wrong with that. And not with the screening, I mean, but with the assumption that most of those 30% of people are actually bad actors or bad people. So she went in and did a very simple experiment. She went in and she worked with one shelter in Los Angeles. She had a staff member placed at the entrance. And the staff member, whenever somebody came in to hand over their dog, the staff member would ask, if you could, would you like to keep your pet or your dog? First observation, like that they could actually often help them do that. Like they could go in and they realize, okay, here's the issue. And they could help the family keep their dog out of the shelter in the first place. This was typically more cost-effective than helping the dog once it was inside the shelter. But most significantly, it flatly contradicted the assumption that most of the people in the industry are making because more than three in four families said yes. The handing over their dog was the last thing they wanted to do. And what Lori realized through this was that this wasn't a people problem, the issue of owner surrenders. This was an income problem, a financial problem. When you looked at the people who came in and handed over their dog, they loved that dog as much as you and I do. But they also had very limited means. And so what might happen is that they had had to move into a new building. The landlord demanded $150 deposit to house the dog and that was just not an amount of money they could get. And so what Lori found out was that a more effective way of using the funds that they had was actually instead of paying to the shelter to keep the dog there longer or to help it with whatever was going on, literally to go in and pursue a different goal, namely to help the dog stay with their first family. And I think the reason this story impacted me when I heard it from Lori was that again, this is not a technological solution. We've had this problem for 20, 40 years, but it wasn't until relatively recently, this is a story that happened about five years ago that somebody went in and fundamentally challenged the perception we had of the people involved. And that's the point here as well, that when you're looking at again the question of strategies, it is so easy when we see bad behavior or we see some kind of thing we don't want to make assumptions about the other person or the other people involved. Our spouse is selfish when something is going on.  It is so easy to jump into that. And one of the things we can do to alleviate that is to ask again, even if our first guess about people's motivations feels right, and it often does, asking, is there something else going on? In Lori's case, of course, was this just because there are bad irresponsible people or was there something else going on preventing them from keeping their dogs that we could address in this case in a more cost-effective manner than what we are usually doing? That's the cases I wanted to share. We are now heading towards the discussion and I'm gonna prime this a little bit before we go into it. First of all, what I'd ask you to do if you haven't been doing it already, feel free to ask questions, observation and comments in the chat field, and we will have LK help out again with kind of sharing these and delving into some of the questions here for the remaining 20 minutes of this call. And one more thing, don't necessarily feel you have to ask a question. It is okay to just share an observation or make a remark or share an experience you've had around or whatever it is. So you don't have to force it into the form of a question. I welcome questions, but also other things are more than welcome to. And as you are typing in your questions and so on, I will round off a little bit here with some next steps you can consider instead of saving this for the end of the call. I'll just cover this now. And that's of course, first and foremost, if you are interested in delving deeper into this, what's your problem? It's basically a guide I wrote for how to do this. So this is a practical guide for how to get better at solving the right problems. And a little bit about your buying options because there are options around where you wanna waste your money. You can of course get it on Amazon, Bounty Nobles and those usual platforms. That's probably where you will find it for the least money. They tend to have slightly better discounts than anywhere else. If you want to, you can also grab it from HarvardHBR.org in their store and they support multiple different e-reader formats.  If you want the audio book, that's where to go. But if you want, for instance, for the mobile or if you wanna as a PDF for that matter, Harvard supports that. And I've asked Harvard because of the price difference, I've actually asked Harvard to provide a discount code only for you which will be active the next two days.  I would almost recommend that you, the e-book will get there faster. Would recommend that you make it the physical version as you'll see in the book. I might show it a little bit later. It's very visually driven. There's lots of illustrations along the way that are slightly better experienced in a physical copy. The e-books are great to look. In terms of, sorry, I'm jumping ahead here, you might as well also go out and support some of your local book dealers. I'm sure they need a little bit of encouragement and distance here at the moment. So if I find your normal book dealer or use Bookshop or IndieBound, I think those are both US sites where you can locate independent booksellers and support them if you like. A little bit otherwise, you can jump in and look at the book's website there, howtoreeframe.com. There's more info, there's the research I spoke about with the deep dive into that. There's some free downloads like checklists and the cameras for this and so on that you can look at. And finally, if you're interested in either having me speak to your people or coming in and looking at, you know, following me on Twitter or LinkedIn, whatever, well, you can either go in on my website and contact me there, or you can just follow me with the ad Thomas Waddell, which is my handle on all social media. With that, we're gonna turn over to the questions and I'm gonna end here with a quote. Again, one of the people I mentioned earlier, Peter Drucker, who's a big and important thinker on this topic, what Peter Drucker said famously was basically that the most serious mistakes are not being made as a result of wrong answers. The true dangerous thing is asking the wrong questions. There are in this Q and A, we're now getting into, there are no wrong questions. So there's the free fall here and I'm looking very much forward to hearing from you. I'm now gonna jump out of the slides so you can get me in a little bit more of a close-up format here, whether you enjoy that or not. And that should bring us to the webcam. So I hope you are now seeing me in full screen. So that's it. Elke, we have 15 minutes and I'm looking forward to hearing and discussing some of the reactions and questions you might have. Perfect, thanks. We are now going to begin answering the questions that were submitted during today's presentation and as a reminder, you can still submit your questions or thoughts through the chat pane visible on your control panel now. So we have had some really great questions come in. Our first question asks, what would be your suggestion if you are way deep into the strategy execution and realize that the problem framing used at the beginning to design the strategy was wrong? You may have limited options, I'm sorry to say. There are cases where you can still pivot and then there are cases where you're locked in. And I have seen a few instances of people late in the process managing to change direction, but that typically goes up on the decision level and it typically also becomes expensive. So I'm afraid I don't have a lot of miracle cures for when you're in a lock-in type situation. You have been spending most of the seed journey rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic and maybe realizing that the lifeboats might be a better thing to focus on, if you will. I'm sorry that I don't have a more encouraging answer. It is exactly because of this dilemma that I thought it was so important to get the book out so we can get better at preventing that. I don't think we can ever prevent it fully. My dream is that we can make people just 10, 15% better and not making that mistake. Another aspect might of course be to get better at adopting lean startup practices. So you at least test things if you can before you roll out the full solution. That's another aspect or way of approaching that dilemma. Great question, what else Alison? Okay. So our next question asks, how do we know we are asking out of the frame questions just to be sure we are out of the frame? First of all, you don't necessarily have to be out of the frame. Sometimes you can find useful reframings just by delving in. Having said that, what I typically look for, there's no iron rule, but I look for a couple of different things. I look for surprise. So typically when you're finding an out of the frame perspective, that will be surprising to the person or to yourself because it breaks with their mental model. So it's almost a physical sensation you'll sometimes see people have when they go, oh, I hadn't thought about that. I'm looking for simplicity. Solutions can be complex, but problems are typically, as we covered earlier, they're actually fairly simple. Once you see them, the problems now you are before seeing them, you don't necessarily realize the simplicity, but I tend to look for not overly complex perspectives and weird theories about why things are going on. More looking for things that are like, ah, if that's true, that's actually basic and that's something we can fix. Finally, I encourage sometimes looking deeper into things that seem counterintuitive. You might sometimes have an adverse reaction to a specific framing, like a stronger than normal emotional reaction to it. That's typically again, because it breaks a mental model only you're not ready for. So sometimes it can make a lot of sense to look at not what seems right to you, but to ask the question, if this was true, would that make a huge difference to us? So those are very simple rules, like look for surprises, look for simple solutions and look for solutions or framings that are significant if they are true. Thank you. What else? More questions. All right, our next question. Hello, in your perspective, why do people tend to avoid simple solutions? Sometimes simple solutions seems like wrong choices. There's a lot of factors here and I'm not sure reframing can always solve that for you because one of the things that you inevitably see going on, especially in more complex systems, is of course that people are incentivized not to see the simple solutions. One of the stories I write about in the book is both positive and tragic in the sense that there's a group around a concept called positive deviance that realized that there's a much, much better way in looking at Argentinian schools of keeping kids in school. They looked at a district that had high dropout rates and they realized that there's a simple way of vastly decreasing that dropout rate. Problem, even though this method worked in that district they looked at, it was not endorsed by then the Argentine Ministry of Education. And if you read the book of the authors called The Power of Positive Deviance, they share their perspective on why that is, namely that there are people inside the ministry that got rich by taking funds from the big million dollar projects that were currently going on. And if they came in with a solution that was cost around $20,000 so orders of magnitude less then those commissions would disappear. So you unfortunately sometimes see incentive problems that are stopping good ideas from surfacing. Thank you. What else? More insights, more observations. Any thoughts on how to convince clients to slow down and engage in reframing? So I have a full chapter on this because one of the core problems once you get reframing and once you're yourself as good and of course the fundamental barrier you'll face is the resistance or recalcitrance of the other person. There's a lot of different ways to handle this. A couple of strategies you can show up with a framework. Like if you look at, for instance, design agencies they typically have a process chart for what they do. And one of the reasons for that is when you show up with something formal looking people tend to take it seriously more often. I have in the book, I share basically a canvas that you can see here, this is online as well which is one tool you can use for this. You can share the slow elevator story. That helps sometimes shift people's attention. You can share examples from other companies where they have done it so the client makes the connection to why this is happening. Or you can work on stealth. So you can say, okay, we'll look at that problem but then you go in and say, we would love to interview a couple of your employees in order to understand this problem better or a couple of your clients or whatever. And then you come back to the client and say, well, we thought this was the problem but look at the input we got here from the employees or your customers or whatever it is maybe there's something else going on. So that's a couple of different strategies that you can use. There are lots more and I'm sure you actually have some bright spots in your own organizations when you consider how you have sometimes managed to shift clients away from that first problem framing and overcome resistance. Not always possible, but there are strategies that can help. What else? Thank you. When should we stop searching for the root cause of a problem? Because if we keep looking, we will back to the man of the case. Yes. One of the big misperceptions around problem solving or problem diagnosis is that it has to happen upfront and take a significant amount of time. You know that quote, it's often attributed to Albert Einstein, it's not actually his about, if I had an hour to solve a problem, I'd spend 55 minutes understanding the problem and five minutes solving. That's a horrible idea. And that's a bad quote, put it out of your mind because what that's really saying is, get stuck in paralysis by analysis most of the time, then panic, implement something, and then this small failure. The way to use this, and the reason I emphasize this, the speed of this, five or 10 minutes might be a little bit longer if your problem is this bigger of course, is that this is repeated.  And then at the end of the week, you might come back again and say, folks, given what we did this week, do we need to revisit the problem again? Like, did we learn something during when we were moving forward that helped like made us realize we need to rethink what's going on here? You saw the story with Lori as well. She didn't think all of this. She had a different framing of the problem. And then she set up an experiment to learn about it. And that's where she realized, okay, we're also something here. So it's really in terms of the question of when to stop reframing, two answers. One is by doing real world stuff. Like you go in, you try something and that will start telling you whether you're on the right track. Second thing, I would actually argue never quite fully stop reframing because what happens is you find a solution that works and then the world changes and then the problem slightly starts to become different. And if you are by that time stuck in your solution, which is the right solution, then you might miss that the problem or people's needs or the situation is gradually changing as well. So this is not so much a process as it is almost a mindset. It is a way of looking at the world that you have in the back of your head all along the way and that you sometimes delve into in going in and trying to do. Excellent question, very relevant point. Do we have time for one more? Do we wrap up, Elka? Sorry. I think we have time for one more. Are there any tools to improve reframing problems or is it just a matter of changing mindset? There are lots of tools. Again, this is a topic we have looked into both from practitioners and academic sites for over 50 years. So you can go online or whatever and you can find the tools for reframing. I think what you wanna keep an eye out for here when you look at what tools to use is simplicity. Because I think one of the reasons I... Why aren't we better at this? If we've known about this for 50 years if the research is in place how come people are still bad at it? When I surveyed organizations, 85% of them said that we are still bad at this. We waste significant time, money, energy on solving the wrong problems. And I think one of the issues here is complexity. If you look at the problem solving space there are some really strong tools from Six Sigma, Lean A3, like lots of different frameworks you can use for this and they are very, very powerful in some contexts. For instance, a manufacturing floor where you have to sort out why are the cars coming out on the other end and not working. The problem with a lot of them is that they're so comprehensive they become impossible to use in daily life. Like nobody in an average Wednesday afternoon unless you work in a very specialized field has the time to pull out a 40 point checklist and go through like a big framework. What I've emphasized here and what I'm really trying to do with my book is to democratize reframing. To get this out as widely as at all possible. Because I think it's insane we're still bad at this. And what I've developed and road tested through my work is basically a method that you can learn relatively rapidly that you can start applying to problems big and small and that doesn't take a lot of time or special tools or so on in order to do this. When you get good at this it becomes a habit of mind for you, for your team. And that's the point where I think we have a real shot at solving more of the right problems. Thank you. Great. So I think we're just about out of time here. If you have any closing comments we'd love to hear them. Otherwise I can wrap us up. I think I will just leave you with the notion that this is a very important tool. It's important. I hope I've given you a sense for innovation. It's important for general problem solving. It's important to deal with the many, many problems we're facing at the moment, not least the new ones generated by the current crisis. This is a thing that you can learn relatively fast. When you read the book you can start applying it to problems you have right now. And that is the path forward to starting to get good at this. So I recommend to you look into it, try it out, share it with your team so you start getting other people on board so they can help you. If we get that right then I think we have a fighting chance for dealing not just with the current crisis but with all of the problems that I'm sure all of us are facing. So I'd just like to say thank you for tuning in. For listening, I hope you have found it useful and please reach out with anything with questions, with remarks, tell me what I'm wrong about. I love to get input from people. That's how I write my books. I learn from practitioners that have managed sometimes to do amazing things with the problem we face. So I'll end it here and say thanks a lot for inviting me and thank you to Brightline as well for setting this up. Great, thank you so much, Thomas. We are getting a lot of kudos to you. Excellent presentation. Thank you very much. So we'd like to thank you, Thomas, for joining us today and sharing your knowledge. Just as a reminder, the presentation is being recorded and we will be sharing it on the Brightline YouTube channel. Please do share your feedback and we will be sending you a form after the webinar. On behalf of our presenter, thank you so much for joining us today and have a great rest of your day.


Back here at HP Discover, we are in Las Vegas for HP Discover 2013. This is siliconangle.com and wikibon.org. It's theCUBE, our flagship program where we go out to the events, extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, join with Dave Vellante from Wikibon, a very special CUBE guest here. George Kedifa, executive vice president. I guess you're EVP on the executive council. What is your official title that's on the, the, the buyout? On the business card. Yeah, on the EVP. Yeah, executive vice president HP software. On the executive council. Yes. Welcome to the GM of HP software too, is that right? Yeah, yeah. And the GM of HP software. It just didn't fit on the card. Welcome to the CUBE. Thank you, thank you. We always love to get the leaders of the, of the, of the business in the CUBE, just to talk about, you know, casual business. So the news you announced today was Haven, which is a big data. You have big data. Yeah. You have IT management software. IT is SAS. Right. And mobility, and this is all under your group. Right. What were you guys announcing today? The show, and then we can jump into it. Yeah, yeah, we, we announced Haven, which stands for our number one big data platform in the industry. That is, we have more than a billion dollars worth of software alone around, around that big data platform, which puts us in the leadership position in that market that is becoming a very critical market in our industry. So we have integrated our capabilities within ATAMI and Vertica and ArcSight, and added to it support for Hadoop. And we have a very, you know, a leading position in that space. And we're also launching new types of applications. The end in Haven stands for NApps, which is a new style of IT applications where you take advantage, not just of kind of traditional relational technology, but more importantly, you take advantage of columnar technology. You take advantage of log management technology. You take advantage of idle, which is human information. And suddenly you're changing the way applications are written. And we do intend to change the way applications are written. So N, again, stands for? N number of apps. N number of apps, right? Like a variable of infinite apps. Hunter apps. Yes, hopefully. Lots and lots of apps. Yes. Okay, guys. So let's talk about the business. Obviously, the business has changed. HP software, we've always been banging on the software drum, and HP has never really been a really software company in the past. They're DNAs, most have been hardware, but a lot of firmware, a lot of software goes in the hardware. But now with the renewed focus, big data puts software in the center stage, software that infrastructure is helping to find networking. You now have that other part of the business that's integrating in. We just had Bethany Mayer on talking about fabrics, right? So this new style of IT would be based on fabrics. So you got cloud, that's holistic, and then networking underneath, and everything in between is the software. How do you evolve in the strategy of HP? What is the core strategy for HP software? Share with the folks your vision for the software. Because now you have to traverse both classical software, developer environment, DevOps, and the cloud to integrating into the fabrics. Right, yeah, it is a great question, John. And really the mission of HP software is to enable the new style of IT. And the new style of IT, if you think about it, this is the first time in my career over the last 33 years where there's a massive technology shift, not caused by one technology, but by three. I'm calling it the triple store, which is you've got mobility, cloud, and big data hitting the IT organization and the IT landscape simultaneously. And then wrapped around it is the whole concept of security and the concerns of our security, because the three hits are creating massive complexities and needs for a security framework that makes things work right. So what we've done at HP software is defined our mission to basically drive or enable this new style of IT based on cloud mobility, security, and big data. And what you see us in each one of our offerings is stressing those elements. So we're taking our IT management suite, which basically covered kind of the web apps domain and moving it to mobile applications. And how do we develop mobile applications? How distribute mobile applications? How do we test them? And how do we monitor them and match them? So that's why we announced HP Anywhere, which is basically this new class of applications. Similarly for big data, we've taken all our engines and now we have connectors, we have the engines, and now we have the n-apps, the applications on top of it to enable that ecosystem. Similarly for cloud, we have our cloud service automation software and all the software and all the situation around it to enable basically cloud systems. Well, I was really excited to meet with you on Sunday just randomly at my son's graduation event that you were there and socializing. But more importantly, when I looked at your bio, you worked at Silver Lakes with us and they have a history of doing private equity and doing all kinds of, you know, going private. You've also been an entrepreneur and you're at the big company at HP. And so I always get a chuckle when people say, well, HP is really not a software company. But, well, who is a software? Is Microsoft a software company? Well, that's kind of going to the cloud now. So software's being redefined, right? You're seeing it across the board. You just talked about it at the edge of the network. You can put software there and you can go into the network fabric. What, how has software changed fundamentally now to capture those opportunities that you're going after? What is the terms in the old way? I don't know, pick on Microsoft, but you know, box software, shrinkwrap software, download it, install it to make. Yeah, well, two dimensions. The first one is we're, you know, the days of shrinkwrap software, you know, these days are gone. These are, this is old. This is kind of classic. And really what's starting instead is, one is software is being embedded in everything. You know, if you look at the car today, there are 10 million lines of code in the car today. You know, now we're having issues about security. People are worried that, you know, if a car is connected through a GPS situation, network, or through a cellular network, that someone can actually log in and hack in into a car and drive it for you. So everything, you know, even consumer goods, even, you know, areas where, you know, you never imagined that it would be software in it. Everything is becoming, so software is becoming embedded, is the first one in every piece of equipment you have there, not just computers. And every piece of equipment is becoming a computer. And the second piece is, software has changed form. You know, it used to be shipped as a box. Now you can access it as a service anywhere. And you can access it as a small app on your smartphone, all the way to going on a website and basically downloading it, or literally using it on a subscription basis or on a one-off basis. So it's becoming amorphous. And you got to open source, and open source on top of that. Look at open stacks done in the past year, just alone is disrupted and, you know, impacted HP. Exactly, right. Actually, open source to us is a huge opportunity, a positive opportunity for us. We've always been at HP committed to open standards and committed to heterogeneity and to ensure that our customers, our customers are worried about vendor locking, about making a decision and suddenly that decision is a closed architecture decision and then the vendor comes back and asks for money. HP is different. HP is committed to open open centers, you know, open source that's part of it. And really what open source is all about is about freedom, giving people the freedom to take code and to basically deal with it and manage it in a way that is helpful for what they're trying. David and I were just talking about that open source is now the new standards bodies in the old days, you know, I should believe or some standard advisors that we're going to agree on a spec and that was the check off, not a mark. Now it's the communities. You're totally right. Communities now make standards. Yeah, and your point about freedom is right on. It's not just free of charge. It's free to do what you can do and be creative. Yeah, it's freedom. Yeah, I want to unpack your software business a little bit. So it's roughly four billion, right? And you've got a killer security roadmap. I think you guys got one of the best security stories out there. You've got an IT service management business that's transitioning to SaaS, if I'm hearing you correctly. And you've got a couple of gems in Vertica and the autonomy. So like a lot of HP businesses, you've got the old, which is declining and the new that you got to throw gasoline in the fire and make it grow faster, right? So talk about that strategy. How fast you can affect that transition? How fast you can ignite that growth? Yeah, great question, David, that is, this is any business, any software business of the scale of HP software is going exactly through the same transition. Because basically the reason we got to four billion dollars is we've been able to accumulate that revenue from the last several years and do it. And then now with these shifts, you know, the pricing is changing, the dynamics are changing and the customers demand on us are changing. And so literally we're going through a portfolio approach. And a portfolio approach, what you do is you try to take the businesses that are growing and basically give them more fuel. Then you're taking to the businesses that are not growing and the first question you ask is why aren't they growing? And what, you know, but our perspective, our strategy is not to say, okay, if it's not growing, then let's cut the oxygen. No, that's actually the wrong way to do it. Our strategy is very simple. If it's not growing, what kind of innovation can we do to make them grow again? And we demoed today, for example, two products in my keynote on stage, you know, where the first product was classic monitoring. The classic monitoring space, you know, is mature. So what we've done instead with Innovator and created what we're calling operations analytics, where suddenly, you know, we were able actually, as Christoff in the demo showed, we were able to actually move back in time. With machine data, looking back in time, a little time machine. Exactly right. So red, red, red, oh, it's green, what happened? Yeah, exactly. And then he goes, well, the guy called George K, actually, who made the change on Friday night. It's always the case that Paul screws things up. Exactly right. That's John, he does it all the time. So that's an instance where we take, that's an instance where we take, okay, if it's not growing, you know, it's not a question, well, let's not cash cow it. I think that's the wrong way to say it in technology or to work on it. Instead, let's apply innovation to kind of keep growing even the at-scale businesses. Okay, now the other question I have is followed. I asked Meg at the analyst meeting about acquisitions. She said, I'm not acquiring any companies until I pay down the debt. And I talked to her privately after, she said, that might do some tuck-ins, but really that's our priority. And then I followed up, you know, I asked her, I said, okay, George, you got to do more than four billion, right? You want to really, this is a huge opportunity for HP. Yeah, 100 billion plus dollar company. So how do you want to do that without being able to acquire it? Now, once that debt's paid down, I think you're going to be in a dangerous position in front of it, and I know you can't comment on that. But talk about, talk about between now and then. Well, talk about generically sort of the M&A strategy. You're a little bit handcuffed right now because you make saying priorities to pay down the debt. But I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit in terms of your growth strategy. Yeah, well first, if you look at our results like Q1 and Q2 and the cash flow we generated, they were very, you know, very good quarters and the organization as a whole has executed perfectly. Yeah, we're talking 5.5 billion through the first half of the year, right? Right, right. Which is a substantial percentage of the total that you've promised the street for the year. Exactly right. And that gives us basically the freedom to enable our business on the broader level where the balance sheet is looking at a very good change. Definitely getting much better. Right. Philosophically, I want to grow organically as much as possible. Yeah, there are some tuck-ins occasionally we need to do here and there. But I'm not looking to grow the business, to go and do massive, multi-billion dollar acquisitions. The markets are smart enough to realize where the value is created. And usually when you do these large acquisitions, you're paying full value. And look at Salesforce, they just made an acquisition, a two and a half billion dollar acquisition with exact target. Exactly, yeah. And the stock price went down, what, 7% that day? The market basically told them, you know, that's not the creative. Biting off more than they can chew, yeah. Right, that's not the creative. So we need to be very careful. My belief is if we get our current product lines to grow between five to 50% depending on the markets and the products, it would be great. That is, I want to grow at two to three times GDP. But I want to push on that a little bit because I want to take Vertica as an example. You paid, what, three, I think 340 for Vertica? Is that what you said? Less than that, a little bit. Okay, so let's say roughly 300 million for Vertica. Picked up an asset, that's Vertica, 300 million. Oh yeah. And you keep saying, throw gasoline in the fire, that is a diamond right there. So to me, that's the kind of acquisition that makes a lot of sense. You know, it's been multi-billions. Right, but when we acquired Vertica, unless it's a game changer. When we acquired Vertica, their revenues were in the single digits. Yeah, yeah. Right, so you're paying a big premium. You've understood you're paying a big premium, but the value that you can create for shareholders long-term with that acquisition is enormous. I agree. And that's what you're calling tuck-ins. Yeah, exactly. That's what we're calling tuck-ins, David. And frankly, if there's another Vertica, we'll do it today. That's not, that's not the... Yeah, that's a product strategy for us. I mean, that's software. So that's a product strategy. I mean, that's to me, that's more of a... Single digit revenue is irrelevant. It's a lever that you can... But we don't want to buy revenue, I think. That's the message. Right, it makes sense, right. So that's not the strategy to grow, is buy revenue. It's to product tuck-ins so you can then explode into the HP... Again, we haven't fully articulated that strategy yet, that this mag is clearly underwrite here in terms of let's get our balance for the order. Well, you get the security.  So you have a lot. I mean, your strategy right now is pretty full. Plate's full, you've got security. That's a big one right there. You've got a good story there, too. Yeah, we do. Art has the best security wrap I've heard, I would say. I've heard them all. Yeah. And his is the most articulate. No, we've got ArcSight has been in the Gartner Magic Quadrants 10 years in a row on the leadership position. And it's a growing business and we want to even grow it more. So let's talk about the classification of the world. Obviously, that's the software model that's obviously everyone's going to. You got the war going on with infrastructure as a service, the platform as a service, that's the cloud game.  Now, but the software piece about the application developers. So that you got Rails developers, you got Python developers, you got all kinds of different developers. How do you see that market evolving? Because obviously SaaS is the platform that customers want to roll out. The economics are great, deployment's great, agile. And that's great fits with mobile. So how do you see that market evolving? From your standpoint, looking at the growth, you get the two to 3% growth of GDP. That's great for consistency, but you got to, if someone's open down the end zone, you can throw the ball down the field. It's going to come from maybe a market force. Where do you see that potential edge? The person gets open, runs in the end zone. Is it going to be from the big data piece or any market force? Well, there are, you know, there's more than just one player. There's the first one is on the big data side. To give you an example, you take relational technology in the early 90s. When the relationship technology became mainstream, it created $200 billion of revenue from companies like SAP, like Oracle, like PeopleSoft, like Siebel, like, you know, PTC, like everyone in that, all these guys kind of grew out of relational technology because we were able to put data on in rows and columns, literally. And manage that. Disruptive enabler, right. So now with big data, with Haven, think about Haven as kind of the new wave of information. It's still a relational technology. Relational technology captures about 10% of total information. With Haven, we capture 100%. So we have a 10x factor in information capture. Then the growth, relational technology, information growth might be growing at maybe five, 10%. Well, the growth of non-relational or non-structured data is growing at 10 times faster. So you go and you say, I have 10x in growth, 10x in size. That's a 100 times opportunity that we've just created with Haven. And now imagine the applications we're going to build around it. To me, that's 100 billion to more than 500 trillion dollars of opportunity. And actually, I'll share our forecast that we keep on forecasting. We actually have a premise that it's going to be self-fulfilling and that you drive relational growth as well. Correct. Because you're going to be bringing non-structured and structured data to get analytic data into your transaction database and driving new value. So that's- I mean, the darts at the dartboard, I mean, they're all in order of magnitude massive, right? Don't even, it's okay, it's some big number. Yes, exactly. And the tan is just enormous. Yeah, the tan is huge. Right, and we're creating it, you know? So I want to ask you more philosophical questions. So sit back, put your M&A hat on as you're in Silver Lake or your VC or your entrepreneur opportunity recognition kind of mode. So we are living in an era, we've set on Silicon Angle and Wikibon in the modern era of business, first-time effort, unprecedented opportunity for a business to fully instrument their operation end-to-end. With mobile, with connected instruments, you get big data, a company now can reconstruct their value chains and measure everything. Everything, I mean, every aspect of your business. Talking about NSA and surveillance, I mean, companies can basically do that themselves. How are you looking at that? Because that's a real conversation people are having and it's kind of mind-blowing for someone to say, wow, I can measure hiring, firing, supply, chain, manufacturing, customer support. Every piece of data is available and captureable and measurable in real time. So that is just intoxicating just to kind of think about. How do you straighten that out and how do you talk about that customer? Again, huge opportunity. Everything we do today has what we call a digital footprint to it. I'm breathing right now, if I'm wearing one of these devices, it tells me the amount of information that basically we can capture on a human level and clearly in the enterprise, kind of like, okay, I wake up and if I can go and take a coffee at work, I can measure it right now and I can put it in the database. So these digital footprints allow a tremendous new way of managing enterprise. And what, if you think, and we're going to create this new style of IT, is going to create what we call a new style of business. And the new style of business is going to be very different. These new businesses are going to be very different from the current businesses today. Current businesses today, you know, focus on scale, focus on cost reduction, focus on EPS and what Wall Street tells them to do and try to be monopolies so that they can have pricing power. Well, the new kind of business is very different. The new kind of business, they're going to focus on growth instead of cost reduction, but their value proposition, because they can measure everything, their value proposition is a customer experience. If they can get that customer experience back into none. And there are a lot of companies that actually can capture that customer experience. They don't need to be a monopoly. They just need to capture that management experience and then everything else flows through it. I'll give you a couple of examples. I'll give you this as an example, okay? They don't have the monopoly of entertainment by far. They don't. But what they do is if you see the effort and they measure everything and they do it, they're a large customer actually with HP software. If you see what they do to capture that customer experience, it's unbelievable. And what they're going to do now in this next generation experience with these magic bands, is literally know exactly where you are, when you are, what you're trying to do, and be there at your service so that you'll have an experience second to none. You look at Starbucks, I can actually do coffee at home in the morning. I can go and do it personally, but I don't. Instead of spending $0 to do it at home, I can go and spend five bucks at Starbucks because I like that experience, correct? And they don't have a monopoly on coffee, but it's that customer experience that's going to define this new business model. Exactly. I think, you know, perfect storm, big data, mobile cloud, all hating at once. The internet of things is right around the corner. You have new way of doing business, instrumentation, big data. So big data will become just kind of like invisible. If you're just going to be just normal. You see that happening as well, right? Exactly right. Okay, George, well we got to wrap it up. Great to have you on theCUBE. Thank you. And we certainly want you to come back and share your perspective next time in Barcelona or our next year. This is theCUBE, this is Kadeeva EBP, and General Manager of HP Software and the Executive Council of HP. He's on the core team changing this company and software will be a big part of it, but it's the new software. It's the new era, the modern era. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break. Thank you.


I think what I love the most is the opportunity to serve and answer your call in multiple ways. You know, growing up I only thought there was one mode or one way to live into my call and that was being inside the local church. I love how in the United Methodist Church we can serve in a variety of ways. Whether you're laity or clergy, you can serve in a local church, in a context like the campus or the hospital or the military. So it really seems that the possibilities are endless for you to be able to answer your call in a way that's authentic to you. I would say my hopes are really the hopes that I have for our country that we can be true to what we put on paper. That we can live into the ideals and the vision that we've set before us and live into the kingdom that the Lord is calling us to. Well honestly, COVID has opened up so many doors, especially with online ministry. And I have a lot of ideas as it pertains to video game ministry that I've been kind of polluting and getting together. So I'm looking forward to using that platform as a way to reach new people for Christ.


Hi, I'm Miner from Erbigo and we are upgrading your apartment into your own smart vertical garden But first let me introduce you to Eva Eva is a millennial. She's a young busy working woman living in a crowded city center in a small apartment Even though she's so busy, she tries to eat and live as healthy as possible This is why Eva tried to grow her own plants. She tried with herbs. She tried with spices But every plant Eva grew Eva killed so she become a serial plant killer To help people like Eva and to boost urban green we created Erbigo indoor smart vertical garden Erbigo is automated which means that you don't have to worry anymore about watering or lightning Vertical design saves your space while reconnecting you with nature and our app allows you to control your plants and become a part of a bigger community With rapid urbanization, there is a growing need for organic and locally produced food Especially millennials want to know what are they eating and where their food comes from and with help of IOT We can transform almost any indoor space into a vertical garden and here we found the market opportunity Erbigo can be installed on your wall. So basically you just need a wall for this Sensors that are integrated in our vertical panel track every plant that you grow and what's best We use the smart soil pods with preceded plants that you order from us making the process easy and clean for you When you install Erbigo on your wall, you connect it with your phone using just Wi-Fi This allows you to monitor your plants to get notification whenever they need care But also to connect with other users share experience and learn from each other There is a special feature to call virtual climate tree, which allows you to track your own climate impact We we plan to sell our product online using our website So you can basically choose the design and the size of the vertical panel you want But also the seeds of the plants that you want to grow Of course, we have global competitors But we are the only ones who combine combine hardware software sustainable materials and nature in one product This led us to have more than 200 people Applied from all over the world to test our prototype and now we have 15 paying customers in Belgrade Our goal is to have a scalable scalable design that will allow us to have a maximum production with minimum cost of reinvestment We are now testing alpha prototype with 10 well-selected users and we're actively searching for an investor A better say partner who'll help us grow our business and starting from seed investment We're a young team of scientists and engineers who think that all of you deserve at least square of green in your apartment So if you're an investor or you want to know more, please get back to us. Thank you Thank you very much right on time perfect. And let's go over to the jury. I Question right away I mean this looks from the pictures that we are growing herbs or something Can you really do also like decent food like mice or wheat and and what does the harvest you can get out of it? We actually show on the pictures our alpha prototype So this is not our definite version and for now we have to start our backs Including herbs and spices, but we are definitely experimenting Further further with small small wedges. Let's say like that that you can grow in your apartment But it depends on the customer needs of course Hi Very good presentation. It was really eloquent and you were very clear I would have one question related to the cost of production And then what is the price of your product and what margin are you making because? Considering the production of your pieces then the transport logistics. What is at the end of it? It wasn't very clear in the presentation. Thank you very much for the question first I just want to say that we are four month old startup So for now I can just say what will be the cost of the better prototype It will be 99 euros for our customers and the production cost of the better prototype is 35 euros So this is not something that will be sustainable on the long run This is not the price that will be defined for a final product But for better we thought when we gather the feedback from the customers who wanted to pay We confirmed on this price so 99 euros in Serbia First of all, thank you so much and I really like the positive and the good energy So compliments of that you were saying that you were looking for partners in the room, right? So what kind of partners are you looking for for the next phase of your growth? Actually, we want I mean we want we are looking actively looking for somebody who could help us scale and grow our business globally We are currently located in Serbia, but unfortunately Serbia is not our target market We want to grow in the markets where we have the biggest competitors like North America and North Europe So we are actually looking for investors who want to invest in our region But who are actually willing to show us how to expand on these markets great. Thank you Related to that I was wondering how do you plan to? Go to market and get traction with this and what kind of Customers do you see as the potential customers to start adopting it? Well, we are still we're still working on customer development We actually wanted to show you our for now the customer segment that we have this those are millennial female Let's say females more females and males busy working women who don't have enough time space their knowledge to grow their own Plants and who are looking for the similar solution on the market, but we're not satisfied with it When it comes to traction and exit to the market where we plan to sell our products online so basically when you go to our website you can order everything from the vertical panel to seats and We have some traction for now, but those are not says sales traction It's more of the subscriptions and the beta testers and people who are willing to pay but not still like sales instructions Okay, you're working full-time on your business. Yeah, actually my business idea was born in health thinking during my studies and Few months ago. I mean before four months ago I started to work full-time since I'm a CEO and I think that you have to put yourself in this story If you want to succeed, there is no other way All right, that's a great end. Thank you so much. Anya would be go