Episode 2244: John Hagel on overcoming fear - his proudest achievement over the last 20 years

In association with our friends at Digital-Life-Design (DLD), Europe’s iconic annual tech conference which next January celebrates its twentieth anniversary, we are starting a series of conversations with DLD speakers looking back over the last twenty years. First up is Silicon Valley entrepreneur, speaker and author John Hagel, who talked, quite openly, about his lifelong fear of fear and how he’s cured himself of this affliction over the last two decades.

John Hagel III has more than 40 years’ experience as a management consultant, author, speaker and entrepreneur. After recently retiring as a partner from Deloitte, McGraw Hill published in May 2021 his latest book, The Journey Beyond Fear, that addresses the psychology of change and he is developing a series of programs to help people navigate through change at many levels. John has founded a new company, Beyond Our Edge, LLC, that works with companies and people who are seeking to anticipate the future and achieve much greater impact. While at Deloitte, John was the founder and chairman of the Silicon Valley-based Deloitte Center for the Edge, focusing on identifying emerging business opportunities that are not yet on the CEO’s agenda. Before joining Deloitte, John was an independent consultant and writer and prior to that was a principal at McKinsey & Company and a leader of their Strategy Practice as well as the founder of their E-Commerce Practice. John has served as senior vice president of strategy at Atari, Inc., and is the founder of two Silicon Valley startups. John is also a faculty member at Singularity University where he gives frequent talks on the mounting performance pressure created by digital technology and promising approaches to help traditional companies make the transition from a linear to an exponential world. He is also on the Board of Trustees at the Santa Fe Institute, an organization that conducts leading edge research on complex adaptive systems. He has also led a number of initiatives regarding business transformation with the World Economic Forum. John is the author of The Power of Pull, published by Basic Books in April 2010. He is also the author of a series of best-selling business books, Net Gain, Net Worth, Out of the Box, and The Only Sustainable Edge. He is widely published and quoted in major business publications including The Economist, Fortune, Forbes, Business Week, Financial Times, and Wall Street Journal, as well as general media like the New York Times, NBC and BBC. He has won two awards from Harvard Business Review for best articles in that publication and has been recognized as an industry thought leader by a variety of publications and institutions, including the World Economic Forum and Business Week. John has his own website at www.johnhagel.com, and for many years wrote personal blogs at www.edgeperspectives.typepad.com as well as contributing postings on the Harvard Business Review, Fortune and Techonomy websites. He is active in social media and can be followed on Twitter at @jhagel and on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/jhagel/ John holds a BA from Wesleyan University, a B.Phil. from Oxford University, and a JD and MBA from Harvard University. John Hagel has spent over 40 years in Silicon Valley and has experience as a management consultant, entrepreneur, speaker and author. He is driven by a desire to help individuals and institutions around the world to increase their impact in a rapidly changing world.

Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.

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TRANSCRIPT

KEEN: Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the show. We're going to do things a little differently today. We're starting a new series on KEEN ON in association with my dear friends at the DLD conference. It's an annual conference held each year in Munich. My view? Certainly the best tech conference in Europe, if not in the world. And in January 2025, they're celebrating their 20th anniversary. And in association with DLD, we're talking to some of their most notable speakers about their experiences over the last 20 years. We're beginning with an old friend of mine, John Hagel, a very distinguished author, futurist. His last book was called The Journey Beyond Fear, and John spoke at DLD '16 about narratives and business. And I began our DLD KEEN ON conversation with John Hagel by asking him to cast his mind back to January 2005.

HAGEL: In January 2005, I was working as an independent consultant in Silicon Valley. I'd been there for 25 years already. I was fascinated with the degree to which digital technology was exponentially improving, and I was being aggressively recruited, at the time, by a large consulting firm, Deloitte, that wanted me to join. I was a bit resistant. I turned them down four times because I didn't want to go work for another large consulting firm. I'd been a partner with McKinsey before that, but ultimately they prevailed. They persuaded me that they would help me create a new research center that would be autonomous, even though it was part of Deloitte and it was really focused on trying to understand the long-term trends that are reshaping the global economy and what the implications are for people. And that was my passion, and I'm very grateful that I was able to pursue that.

KEEN: What was the global economy, John, like in 2005?

HAGEL: It was definitely becoming more and more connected. It was going through fundamental change even at that stage. I've come to call it "the big shift," but basically, some long-term trends that were playing out were creating mounting performance pressure on all of us. One form of pressure was intensifying competition on a global scale. Companies were competing with companies from around the world. Workers were competing with workers from around the world. So there was a lot of intensifying competition. The pace of change was accelerating. Things you thought you could count on were no longer there. And then, as if that weren't enough, all the connectivity we were creating...a small event in a faraway place in the world quickly cascades into an extreme, disruptive event. So it creates a lot of performance pressure on all people. And we were just in the early stages of that. I think we're actually still in the early stages of "the big shift." A lot more to come.

KEEN: What was it, John, about "the big shift?" It was your term, is still, I think, one of the best terms to describe the first quarter of the 21st century. What both most worried and excited you about "the big shift" in 2005? Back then, not today.

HAGEL: Well, at the time, I was starting to realize that fundamental change was going to be required in all companies, all organizations, governments, universities. And I was worried that that would be a challenge, that not many people really embrace that kind ...