Welcome to Incorporating SuperPowers. I am your host, Justin Recla and today, I’m going to butcher your last name. Welcome our guest, Steve. Steve, how do you say your last name?
Glaveski.
Glaveski, okay. Steve Glaveski is the CEO of Collective Campus. If you haven’t taken a look at their site folks, this is such a great concept of what Steve is doing. Today, we thought we would talk about how to revolutionize the world through collective efforts. This is something that I think is so, so important, that we’re shifting the way business gets done. Steve, thank you so much for joining us today.
Thanks so much for having me Justin and it’s an absolute pleasure.
Steve, tell us what are some of the problems that you’re seeing in your industry or the areas of the industry that you serve, just in general. What are some of the biggest issues that you’re seeing with your clients that you help right now?
Well, our clients tend to be large Fortune 500 companies with thousands upon thousands of employees. Many of these companies reach back to the 20th century when things moved at a much slower pace. Whether it was economic change, technological change, political change, you could reliably predict, to some degree, what the next five, ten years would look like. But now, thanks to Moore’s Law, the doubling of computer power every 18 months, that certainty is no longer there.
Now, large organizations are finding themselves operating in an environment of increasing ambiguity and uncertainty. What that means is they need to get a hell of a lot better at experimenting, moving quickly, and adapting to these changing circumstances. Whenever you find yourself in an environment of ambiguity, the best way to deal with that is to experiment quickly to figure out the end desire.
Collective Campus, at our core, we’re about unlocking the latent potential of people at such organizations to create impact for the world and to lead more fulfilling lives as a byproduct of that. I worked in the corporate world for big brands like EY and KPMG and investment banks for about 10 years. Ultimately, as someone who is quite entrepreneurial, it’s a very frustrating space to work because the nature of these organizations, the way they still build their systems and culture, it’s still a throwback to the 20th century.
So what we’re trying to do with Collective Campus, which operates at a number of different levels, is to help these companies move into the 21st century so that they can use the vast resources to create impact for the world, but also to empower the people to do more interesting work where they feel rewarded going to work and at the end of the day they can say well, I really contributed something today and they look forward to coming back the next day and making a difference of some kind.
I absolutely love that. You would think that with as long as the technology we have has existed that you would think that some of these larger companies would be ahead of the curve, but they’ve been doing business the same way for so long that they haven’t really evolved with the technology. Ironically from the stuff that we see, while the technology may be evolving, the people themselves may not be, right?
I think that what you’re doing is so beautiful. You’re helping bridge that gap and you’re moving, not just the companies in the 21st century, but you’re helping move their people into it. I think part of that is reconnecting the people of those businesses with their consumers, with their clients, and actually building relationships.
How much of what you do actually dives into the actual people aspect?
A big part of what we do in this space, it’s easy to default to running isolated initiatives to trick people into thinking that what they’re doing is moving the needle because as human beings, our brains have a tendency, and this from an evolutionary theory perspective, our brains have a tendency to optimize for the lowest hanging fruit. We think that an executive at a large company, and we’re struggling to move with the times. We might just default to running something like, oh let’s run a hackathon or let’s run a startup accelerator program, and we’ll be innovative. That’s just an isolated initiative. That’s not going to change anything at a fundamental level on an ongoing basis.
if your strategy is to change processes and policies, people are ultimately a product of their environment
What we do when we start our engagements with clients is we look at the culture. We’ll go into an organization, we’ll look at the processes, the policies, the systems, the values, and we’ll interview people from top to bottom, from left to right to get an understanding for their behaviors, and what they actually value as people. Once we understand that, we can then add design, new processes, policies, systems, and so on that will actually get the kinds of behaviors that we want from people. There’s an old adage, I think it was Peter Drucker who said that “culture eats strategy for breakfast” and I totally agree with that. But at the same time, if your strategy is to change processes and policies, people are ultimately a product of their environment.
If in my business landscape, I have an idea, but I need to complete a 20 page business case, and that business case needs to go in front of a steering committee who meets maybe four times a year to review whether or not I get some funding, that’s obviously not a fast moving enterprise and that’s not a place where you can really apply the kind of techniques that startups are using nowadays to innovate. But, if we change that process to okay, you got an idea; the process is you get 100 dollars just to test whether or not this is actually a problem. Go out there, speak to people, do what you have to do, get some data. If you can validate that it is a problem, great, here’s an extra 500 dollars. Let’s take that next step, so we’re supporting people experimenting, and incrementally testing out their ideas. By looking at the processes, the policies, the systems, the values, the culture of an organization, we can then get the kinds of behaviors that we need from people to help that organization move into the 21st century.
I absolutely love that approach because you’re not coming out with the whole it’s going to cost 10,000 dollars, let’s step it in increments, break it down to see if you can even get there, to see if your culture, your business can even hold the frequency of what’s needed in order to make this a success. By bringing it up, you’re up looking the entire organization into higher frequencies of just of being as to what the culture can assimilate. I absolutely love that process because there are too many people, too many old ways of doing business that have come in and it’s a big wall, right, if it’s not this way then we’re going to try to change everything. First off, if they can even get there, it’s not sustainable because they haven’t brought the culture; they haven’t integrated into the culture of the business itself. I absolutely love that approach.
Steve, before we go on break, where can our listeners learn about you?
They can head over to steveglaveski.com and they will find links to Collective Campus there. They’ll find links to my podcast, Future Squared as well as my new book, and my social media profiles so it’s all there.Â
Awesome. We’re talking about how you revolutionize the world through collective efforts. We’re talking to Steve, he’s the CEO of Collective Campus and when we get back we’re going to dive into a little bit more about this and some of the tricks that you can instill for yourself. What, right now, in your business to really start up leveling it up leveling your own business and moving it forward and bringing yourself into the 21st century.
Stay with us we’ll be right back.
To listen to the entire show click on the player above or go to the SuperPower Up! podcast on iTunes.
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