Nadya Zhexembayeva With Reinvention Academy

Intro: [00:00:02] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX Studios in Atlanta, Georgia, it’s time for Coach the Coach Radio brought to you by the Business RadioX ambassador program, the no cost business development strategy for coaches who want to spend more time serving local business clients and less time selling them. Go to Barak’s Ambassador Dotcom to learn more. Now, here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:33] Lee Kantor here, another episode of Coach the Coach Radio, and this is going to be a fun one today, we have with us Nadya Zhexembayeva. Welcome, Nadya.

Nadya Zhexembayeva: [00:00:43] Thank you for having me.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:45] I’m excited to learn what you’re up to. You are the founder and chief reinvention officer with Reinvention Academy.

Nadya Zhexembayeva: [00:00:52] Absolutely.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:54] So tell us a little bit about that. How does one start a reinvention academy, which by definition, I would think is always reinventing itself?

Nadya Zhexembayeva: [00:01:04] It is. It was a complete accident. So I’ve reinvented a few times in my life. I was in business then. I was a doctor and I was a full time chaired professor at the business school and one of my students, an executive in a retail company, said things you say are fun and interesting and I almost believe you, but you don’t have enough business experience to speak about this. So come to work with us, do real work and real companies, and then you will be much better as educators. So in 2007, my husband and I started a consulting company working inside businesses that needed help to deal with some form of disruption. Sometimes it would be a technology competitor regulator and sometimes it would be an economic crisis or what we have now covid-19 disruption. And slowly we realized there is more demand that we can handle. And we decided to teach people how to fish rather than fishing for them. And that’s how Prevention Academy was born.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:11] So now is there a rhythm to reinvention or is this something that is just is evolution just another name for reinvention?

Nadya Zhexembayeva: [00:02:21] I love that question. So there’s two elements of the answer. It’s a very deep question. There’s absolutely everything to reinvention that has to do with the life cycles. And the life cycles for specific industry are different. But we do have averages for the world. In the 20th century, just about 30 or 40 years ago, average and the average and average life cycle for a company would be around seventy five years. That means you can run pretty much the same business model, the same portfolio of products and the same processes for very long period of time. For decades, you can milk that cow nonstop without any significant change for decades. And if you were to guess, what is the average life cycle today? Twenty, twenty one, I’m sure you would name it far, far from seventy five years on average. We did this research. We do it every two years. And this latest study we had was September twenty twenty. Today, on average, companies reinvent every three years or less to survive. So there is a rhythm you have to match your industry. Some companies like telecom, high tech, it’s actually less than 12 months and some companies like manufacturing, mining, metals, it’s closer to seven to 10 years. But the average right now is between two and three years for any industry, any size of company around the world.

Lee Kantor: [00:03:53] Now, do you find that those statistics hold true globally?

Nadya Zhexembayeva: [00:03:58] Oh, yes. So we do studies globally and they absolutely do hold they are more specific to industry than they are to geography. And it has to do with the how globally connected the world is right now. So one thing is the rhythm and the second thing in terms of reinvention versus evolution in our research and practice, working with companies, we discover that there are nine different types of reinvention and one of them is very incremental, close to evolution type of change, and others are radical innovation and a good, good approach. As safe and sound approach in our volatile and uncertain times is actually having a portfolio of very diverse reinvention projects. Some are more radical and more in the innovation than dimension and some better in that incremental improvements, evolution, stuff like that.

Lee Kantor: [00:04:54] So now how are humans adjusting to this faster pace? Because humans tend to be security oriented or a lot of them and are always looking for the safe, the safe path. And in order to reinvent yourself at that kind of velocity, you’re going to need to be taking risks and to be thinking of things that hadn’t been thought of in the past and really putting your neck on the line personally in terms of putting political capital in your own career at risk at times in order to be right where the odds are you’re not going to be right anywhere near the at the rate you were maybe when a. Life-cycle was 75 years,

Nadya Zhexembayeva: [00:05:33] 100 percent, you’re right on the money, so for very long period of time, when the cycles were long, we would do a lot of testing and experimentation behind closed doors. Our failed attempts would never see the light of day and nobody would know that we are not performing at the highest level. It would be in labs, it would be in focus groups that we would test products and we would only bring products to the market when they were already perfect. Right now we simply don’t have the luxury to do so. So we have to change our mindset and we have to change our beliefs around what it means to be professional today in a reinvention academy. We have executives, coaches and we have business owners. And we just had this discussion about a week ago at the Deep Dove session where one of the consultants, coach in New Zealand, asked me. She said, how come it seems like all of my clients are doing more and more, pedaling harder and harder, and there’s absolutely no result. And the answer is you cannot do perfection now. You have to prioritize speed to market. You have to bring half cooked, low hanging fruit, the minimal viable products to the market for be relevant to survive the past year. And then you’re absolutely right. So currently, the research shows us that very small number of people are open to change and are open to risk.

Nadya Zhexembayeva: [00:07:06] There was a recent study by the University of Toronto that was looking at American and Canadian knowledge workers. So all college degrees, all employed and in in terms of their openness to risk, it was anywhere between 11 and 19 percent. The highest was 19 percent. So you can imagine that these are knowledge workers. They are all employed and they are really risk averse. Imagine what happens in that in other populations that are less open to innovation and new things. So on one end, we have this risk aversion, but on the other end, those of us who are parents my daughter was 17 when I remember her being born and she was not risk averse. She was not afraid of change. She didn’t need the bonus to reinvent. She was OK to start walking and trying and falling and so on. So we have more of an education. We need to educate people rather than educate them when it comes to change and reinvention. Because in today’s world, we have to rethink our approach to what change is, what it means to be a professional, what it means to fail. If you’re not failing that much today means you’re not doing something worth of even being in business today. Anyone who is a real professional and expert in business is the one who fails quite a lot, fails fast, fails very efficiently.

Lee Kantor: [00:08:36] Now, are you finding that I mean, that makes perfect sense in a in a laboratory that we should all do that, but when it’s my time and I have to risk something and I might get fired or historically in the culture of this business, I haven’t seen many people who have failed two times in a row keep their job or three times in a row that keep their job. How do you and especially and that doesn’t even count some cultures. I mean, some cultures are more entrepreneurial and open to taking chances and failing, and that’s OK. But some cultures aren’t, you know, that could bring shame that, you know, could have a negative impact. And not just you, but it could your family. So how do how do people make this kind of adjustment and change the culture of their kind of their company, number one, to allow and tolerate failure at a more frequency? And also, as some countries have to adjust how historically they might have spent thousands of years not being fans of sailing.

Nadya Zhexembayeva: [00:09:41] Absolutely, so the good news is that we can now rely on quite a lot of developed and very advanced tools that can help you deal with both the cultural and mindset issues and also more hard issues. For example, even when you have an open minded organization and the culture is open to change and the failure is not punished, if the systems in the company, for example, the budgeting system is simply not allowing for flexibility, you will not match the speed of the market. So good news that we now have plenty of tools that would allow you to deal with all of these elements. For example, in our community, one of the most beloved exercises that is done again and again is Fear to Action exercise, which is a very simple three steps worksheet that you can do with your team work and you can do yourself, you can do in your family if your family is facing some sort of disruption. And it will bring you from the moment of fear and resistance all the way into action. There are other tools, canvasses, all kinds of exercises that can help you develop the pathway towards a new way of working. And for example, in the last year since the covid started, because it was such a painful moment around the world, we have work with more than three solid executives, business owners around the world using the tools. We have this free event happening every few months called easy reinvention. Lapin in five days, all of them come to results and all of them are able to start the journey in changing the culture in the company. So five, 10 years ago, I would be scrambling to give you an answer. But today there’s plenty of tools that can help us deal with all of this elements, whether it’s a soft issue like mindset and culture or hard issues such as systems and processes.

Lee Kantor: [00:11:43] But if this is just the reality of today, if this is something that, you know, that that as my business partner says, that train has sailed, that no longer is the life cycle of a business. Seventy five years. It’s changing more rapidly. And in some cases, it’s changing annually where it’s virtually impossible to stay. You have to be reinventing or else it’s impossible to even have your business in that in that industry. In order to do this and change that rapidly, you have to have trust that you’re not that it’s OK to fail at that rate. And if that was if people are really trusting this, the case of failing more frequently, then why is it that the highest levels of companies that they’re firing the like the life span of a CEO or a chief marketing officer are just a year, just a few years? It’s not something that they’re willing to just stay the course for five or 10 years. So in one hand, they’re saying it’s OK to fail, but on the other hand, we’re firing people left and right. So how do you kind of reconcile that?

Nadya Zhexembayeva: [00:12:56] The way I see it is that our business operating system is not catching up with the reality yet. So as I said, I was a professor at the business school teaching an executive MBA in the executive programs. And it’s remarkable how behind the theory and the practice of management behind the reality on the market. If you think about most of the things we teach in business schools and most of the things that we expect to happen in the corporate or small business environment, all of the tools or almost all of the tools were created full on cycles, strategic planning. It’s a great tool for long cycles, just in time, inventory and supply chain management. Great idea for stable nonvolatile markets, high debt, excellent idea. And in certain nonvolatile environments, most of the things we take for granted are designed for very long cycles and for very stable, competitive environment. So what’s happening today is that we have lived in new rules, but we keep trying to survive in those new rules with old tools and we are just not catching on. And it is a quite a drastic transformation that is happening in both academic circles and the practice of top management. But unfortunately, it’s not happening fast enough. So we see mass die off of companies. The predictions for the next five years, right before covid-19 Boston Consulting Group was doing research and therefore site is about thirty three percent of all companies will not survive in the next five years. And Innosight, another research company, was predicting that about half of fortune, not fortune standard and poor five hundred will be gone within the next six to seven years. So we’re seeing mass mass death of companies that are pretty much killing themselves because they’re not able to adapt to change and live in new environments. I call it titanic syndrome because the behavior of this company is just so, so remarkably similar to what you saw on Titanic. When a company or an organization or even an individual kills their own company, kills their own career because they’re not ready to adapt to change now.

Lee Kantor: [00:15:20] And I think it’s worse than that because I think it trickles down to even kind of primary education for children. Like you mentioned earlier, when your child was young, she wasn’t afraid to take risks and and try new things. But as they as the kid gets older, they get less and less thrilled with going putting their neck on the line 100 percent.

Nadya Zhexembayeva: [00:15:45] And again, I don’t want to make our schools, our business community, our academic community, the villains. It’s not that they were wrong. Those were right approaches for the right times. What we do in middle schools and high schools, even in elementary schools, was designed for long cycles. The concept of education, publicly accessible education is very new and just over one hundred years old. And it was designed specifically for this very predictable conveyor kind of nonvolatile, very certain business environment. So it was not in the interest of a young child to be creative, to be questioning, to be testing new things, because in the long cycle you find the winning formula, you find the product portfolio, you create standard operating procedures and you stick to them for many, many years. So they innovative, inquisitive mind. The child is simply a disruptor in that case. And we had to educate children out of their native ability to adapt, grow and reinvent. So currently we not so much need to discover or learn how to reinvent. We simply need to claim our birthright to educate ourselves and educate our children as well.

Lee Kantor: [00:17:07] Now, do you are we there yet or is this something that we’re just at the very beginning of the beginning where this is just that we’re at the just opening the minds of enough people for them to believe that we’re going to have to make some drastic changes because these are drastic changes?

Nadya Zhexembayeva: [00:17:23] Oh, this is very, very new. So I started speaking on the subject of reinvention and life cycles and how we need ministers of reinvention and so on in 2015. And I was very happy to see that a couple of years later, the other scientists, for example, the amazing best selling author, you all know, right? You probably all heard and read his book, The Sapience he was famously pronouncing in Wired magazine. Forget programing. You must teach your kids reinvention. So it’s coming along. More scientists, business leaders like the CEO of Netflix just had a book out, Netflix and a Culture of reinvention. So it’s picking up, but it’s very, very early. We now see the first American state, the state of North Dakota, that now has chief reinvention officer as a full time position under the governor. We see certain companies who now instituting reinvention officers. But we’re very, very early. And of course, because we’re shaking the boat and rocking the boat, we’re getting a lot of backlash for our work.

Lee Kantor: [00:18:35] So now where does a company start? Where does an education system start, where does the government start?

Nadya Zhexembayeva: [00:18:43] You start with low hanging fruit. The issue with reinvention is that we need to address two things confidence and competence. And the easiest way to build both is to deal with low hanging fruit. Almost everyone can name at least one, two or three things they can easily reinvent in their environment with relatively low cost, sometimes zero costs other than time and effort, but no financial investment and get a relatively quick results. So once we start with a portfolio of low hanging fruit, two things happen. We get confidence because we see results relatively quickly and we also gain very valuable competence. We learn the technicality of the process because the process is very repetitive. It’s very much like playing different music on the same instrument. I’m shocked to see how many companies think they need to invent a new instrument. We have a digital reinvention. We invent a new process. We have a covid-19 disruption. We invent the new process. We have a competitor who just entered our marketplace. We invent a new process. The reality is exact same reinvention process works for literally any kind of problems. We had people with our toolkit who are reinventing churches because it’s a massive issue that so many churches are closing up, reinventing non-profits, reinventing different functional areas, reinventing different products with the exact same toolset and reinventing their own lives and careers. So that’s where you start. You start with low hanging fruit. You start with quickly gaining a bit of confidence and basic competence. And from there you go towards a very crucial shift. You stop thinking about reinvention as a one time project, as a thing you do once, and then you sleep on and start thinking of reinvention as a process, as is as taking a regular shower. It’s like that’s the metaphor I use all the time. If you don’t wash yourself, if you don’t take a shower on a regular basis, you begin to stink. Same with reinvention. If you don’t reinvent your products, your processes, your business models on a regular basis, your company will begin to stink.

Lee Kantor: [00:20:56] And like you said, that this is not a set it and forget it. This is a this is now just part of your day.

Nadya Zhexembayeva: [00:21:04] Yes, very much so. So you need to build a process just the way you have a routine around brushing your teeth in the morning or food or whatever else you need a process around reinvention as well.

Lee Kantor: [00:21:18] So now who in an organization is the one that typically hires your firm?

Nadya Zhexembayeva: [00:21:24] We are we are unique in the sense that we work with mainly board members, executives or owners. But when it comes to education, the Reinvention Academy, of course, we come through a variety of doors. Sometimes we have a chief strategy officer. So this year we worked with a wonderful organizations. We worked with Ben and Jerry’s. That was the CEO of Ben and Jerry’s. We worked with a an amazing tech company in the UK and that was chief strategy officer who hired us. Occasionally we are asked by Chief a charge of people officers, but we are more often asked by CEO seat or or strategy head.

Lee Kantor: [00:22:05] And you have a book out that talks about this.

Nadya Zhexembayeva: [00:22:08] Yes, just just a miracle happened during covid-19 because we didn’t need to fly on location as much in the rest time. Our community of just over 3000 executives and practitioners and coaches around the world put together helped me put together a book with nine different tools that you can use in any industry and any disruption. It’s called the Chief Reinvention Officer Handbook How to Thrive in Chaos. And it’s literally a handbook. It has worksheets. It has twenty five business model reinvention cards you can tear out of the book that they’re ready for you to be used. It has cases, it has cost. It tested tools that you can use in your life right now. And I’m happy to see that the book is already gaining quite a few rewards in the industry, including the best business book of the year.

Lee Kantor: [00:23:06] Well, congratulations on all your success and thank you so much for fighting the good fight and trying to help people just kind of be the best them by looking inside and really just trusting their feeling that something is amiss and they should be changing and that they really should kind of lean into that and not fight it.

Nadya Zhexembayeva: [00:23:27] Absolutely. The remarkable thing, we are born inventors. We are born open to change. We’re just educated out of it. And it’s time for us to claim it back and actually change transform our view of change into a. Opportunity, that is. Stop thinking of change as a threat and start milking it for the opportunity that it is.

Lee Kantor: [00:23:53] So if somebody wanted to learn more about what you’re up to or get a hold of the book or just get to learn more about the academy, what’s the website

Nadya Zhexembayeva: [00:24:01] Learn to reinvent dot com. That too is a is a no numerics. You’ll learn no to reinvent dot com and you can download the eighty five page preview of the book on that website right now. Learn to reinvent dotcom.

Lee Kantor: [00:24:18] Well, Nadya, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing such important work and we appreciate you.

Nadya Zhexembayeva: [00:24:24] Thank you so much for having me.

Lee Kantor: [00:24:25] All right. This is Lee Kantor We’ll see you next time on Coach the Coach Radio.