From Upgrading Our Mental Operating Systems to Decrypting The Culture Puzzle – The Top 10 Takeaways from NovoEd’s Book Club LIVE To Date!

We know intuitively that we can leverage human connection to drive learning and business outcomes in today’s volatile and often isolated workplace…but how can we bridge the gap between this abstract process and the measurable results that we want for ourselves and our organizations? 

Authors and business leaders Rishad Tobaccowala, Mario Moussa, Michele Zanini, Adam Morgan and Janine Kurnoff joined NovoEd’s Book Club LIVE this March and April and shared insights from their books and stories from their extraordinary careers to help answer this question. 

We discussed a wide range of topics that included best practices for storytelling in online environments, how companies that embrace creativity outperform peers and competitors, what it means to be culturally virtuosic, how to imbue collaborations at work with energy and empathy and how to create a culture of innovation in times of nonstop transformation. The thread running through it all was the importance of alignment between learners and their peers and learners and the business. 

Here are our top 10 takeaways from this season’s Book Club LIVE sessions to date…

Takeaway #1: There are two ways to change an organization: get people to change or change the people.

“We’ve always basically thought that change is about the following three things: a strategy…some M&A…and you need to basically make sure that you’re not contained. I wrote great strategies. We had great acquisitions and my god, the reorganization was so beautiful…but nobody did anything. And that’s because we forgot to solve for four, five and six: which are ‘why is it good for the individual?’ ‘Will I be incented differently?’ And then the last one…‘where’s my training?’ So if you don’t explain to people why it’s good for them, if you don’t incentivize them to change their behavior and you don’t provide them training to learn new skills, having a strategy and an M&A plan and a reorganization plan is a joke.”

Rishad Tobaccowala, former Global Strategist and Chief Growth Officer of Publicis Groupe and author of “Restoring the Soul of Business: Staying Human in the Age of Data”

Takeaway #2: Individuals, teams and companies need to constantly “upgrade their mental operating systems” to succeed in today’s digital economy.

“…we all have to continue to learn…because every day, if we don’t do that, we get increasingly irrelevant. Last night, I was upgrading some of my technology to the latest operating systems. I have a Sony TV and it said, ‘You need to upgrade your system.’ And this is the, I don’t know, the third time I’ve done it this year. I [also] upgraded to the latest Mac OS, which is basically right now at 10.5, I think. And then the latest iOS, which I think is 15.4. And I said: it’s interesting…are we actually upgrading our own mental operating systems while everything else is being upgraded around us?”

Rishad Tobaccowala, former Global Strategist and Chief Growth Officer of Publicis Groupe and author of “Restoring the Soul of Business: Staying Human in the Age of Data”

Takeaway #3: Equitable access to capability building is crucial to future success in enterprises.

“Capabilities need to be continuously and constantly built. You want to make sure that everybody has access to learning, and it’s not just one or two people, because talent is everywhere. There are lots of different ways of doing it. And in fact, I’m so fixated on it, almost everything I now do is only on that.”

Rishad Tobaccowala, former Global Strategist and Chief Growth Officer of Publicis Groupe and author of “Restoring the Soul of Business: Staying Human in the Age of Data”

Takeaway #4: Culture is not about amenities, holidays and dress codes. Culture is the unspoken way we get work done.

“Human beings have come to dominate the Earth because we have this powerful cultural process that defines us and runs through us and it’s always at work and we’re really good, because of it, at learning and adaptation. So I like to focus on that because that helps…it helps make a really concrete connection to business. It’s about learning. It’s about adapting to the environment. It’s about getting things done. And it’s always moving.”

Mario Moussa, management consultant, executive educator, Co-Creator of the Strategic Persuasion Workshop at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and author of “The Culture Puzzle: Harnessing the Forces That Drive Your Organization’s Success” 

Takeaway #5: Avoid mismanagement by abstraction and lean into management through material connection.

“Often when we talk about culture, we talk about lofty visions like, ‘We want to be number one,’ or, ‘People are our most important assets.’ You’d be amazed, literally, companies still say that. And the point is that, often, that abstract way of talking doesn’t connect with what it really feels like to do our jobs day in and day out. There’s the reality of the day-to-day workplace and then there are these abstractions like org charts, incentive schemes. Those have their place…but if that’s primarily how you communicate about your organization or those are the tools through which you communicate with others, you’re not going to connect with people in the way that they really want to feel a connection. They’re not going to feel listened to.”

Mario Moussa, management consultant, executive educator, Co-Creator of the Strategic Persuasion Workshop at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and author of “The Culture Puzzle: Harnessing the Forces That Drive Your Organization’s Success” 

Takeaway #6: Don’t confuse leadership with positional authority. Explode bureaucracy to drive independent judgment at all levels of the organization. 

“We’ve created organizations where the thinking happens at the top and the doing happens at the bottom. People at the frontline, they’re not expected to exercise a lot of judgment. They’re just expected to follow the rules and do what they’re told. And this puts a lot of capability on ice, and it’s a waste. And it’s also not okay.”

Michele Zanini, co-founder of the Management Lab and co-author of “Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them” with Gary Hamel

Takeaway #7: If we want to truly change organizations, we need metamorphosis that is both incremental and dramatic.”

“Think about the change in function of going from caterpillar to flying insect. I mean, it’s enormous. But for the insect itself, it’s never traumatic. It’s gradual. It’s progressive. And that’s the kind of model that we need to adopt if we really want to change organizations in a way that is deep and fundamental.”

Michele Zanini, co-founder of the Management Lab and co-author of “Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them” with Gary Hamel

Takeaway #8: Community facilitates performance readiness. Use social accountability to drive results. 

“It’s not just about community. It’s about performance-based community. You want a community where people are pushing each other hard and where there is mutual accountability for results, and where you don’t get to coast. If you have too much community… it could become really conservative, insular, tribal. So you’ve got to make it performance-oriented.”

Michele Zanini, co-founder of the Management Lab and co-author of “Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them” with Gary Hamel

Takeaway #9: Don’t categorize people artificially. Every human being is creative AND logical AND emotional all at once.

“The reality is we all have the same brain. There’s no special brain for developers, no special brain for [the] C-suite. It’s all the same and we all use all of it. When you’re a business leader and you make a pivot because things are changing and the world’s falling apart, that’s a creative act. When you’re looking at things from a new angle and trying something new and experimenting, it’s all a creative act. And so just changing the mindset that everyone is creative and everyone is logical, I think, changes everything. “

Adam Morgan, Executive Creative Director at Adobe, one of AdWeek’s top “Creative 100” inspiring creative minds in marketing, media, and culture in the world, and author of “Sorry Spock, Emotions Drive Business: Proving the Value of Creative Ideas With Science”

Takeaway #10: Conflict is a status quo killer and actually critical to bringing your idea to life. 

“Conflict is everywhere. It’s in every boardroom of every company, period, right? And so, we can either be crushed by it, or worse, avoid it at all costs. And I think that’s what a lot of us do. And, it does seem like an unlikely dance partner, but it’s actually critical to bringing your big idea to life. People always say, “Well, I have a big idea. I don’t need to worry about all the other signposts.” I’m like, “Really?” Because your big idea is so dependent on your conflict. It is essential to storytelling. Conflict is essential. It’s like having Dorothy without Oz. You need the two. And so, yeah, it takes practice…it’s uncomfortable at first, but anything new is uncomfortable at first. This is the thing that I see all the time…people dancing around the conflict. And I think we just need to hit it head on, whether we’re telling a story or we’re in our business lives.”

Janine Kurnoff, Co-founder and Chief Innovation Officer at The Presentation Company (TPC) and co-author of “Everyday Business Storytelling: Create, Simplify, and Adapt A Visual Narrative for Any Audience”

To see on-demand video recordings of our Book Club LIVE sessions to date, or to register for an upcoming Book Club LIVE webinar, please visit:

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