Phronesis: Practical Wisdom for Leaders with Scott Allen

Dr. Mansour Javidan - Global Leadership

• Scott J. Allen • Season 1 • Episode 240

Share episode

Send us a text

Dr. Mansour Javidan is a multiple award-winning and bestselling author and executive educator whose teaching and research interests span the globe, Thunderbird School of Global Management at Arizona State University received his MBA and Ph.D. degrees from the Carlson School at the University of Minnesota. He is the Garvin Distinguished Professor and Executive Director of Najafi Global Mindset Institute at Thunderbird School of Global Management at Arizona State University.

Mansour is currently the Project Director and Principal Co-Investigator of GLOBE 2020, working with a team of 426 researchers studying culture change, leadership ideals, and trust dynamics. The project has received close to $1.5 million in funding and has completed data collection from over 60000 managers and professionals in 144 countries.

He has designed and taught executive development courses and workshops, conducted consulting projects, and made presentations in over 40 countries. Published in the best journals.

Mansour’s article on global leadership recently received the Decade’s Best Paper Award (2006- 2016) by the Academy of Management Perspectives. Dr. Javidan has been recognized by Stanford University as among the top 2% most cited scientists in the field of business and management in the world in 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023. He was also recently recognized as among the top 100 most influential (i.e., top 0.6%) authors in Organization Behavior in the world. Mansour was awarded the 2023 Lifetime Achievement Award by the International Leadership Association.

He has designed and taught executive development courses and workshops, conducted consulting projects, and made presentations in over 40 countries. His publications have appeared in such journals as Harvard Business Review, Journal of International Business Studies, Organization Science, Strategic Management Journal, Academy of Management Perspectives, and Leadership Quarterly.


A Quote From This Episode

  • "One of the implications of living in such a diversity-rich environment is curiosity. Curiosity about how people do things? Why do they do things differently? This curiosity about how and why has been with me; it is in my genes."


Resources Mentioned in This Episode

About The International Leadership Association (ILA)

  • The ILA was created in 1999 to bring together professionals interested in studying, practicing, and teaching leadership. Register for ILA's 26th Global Conference in Chicago, IL - November 7-10, 2024.


About  Scott J. Allen


My Approach to Hosting

  • The views of my guests do not constitute "truth." Nor do they reflect my personal views in some instances. However, they are views to consider, and I hope they help you clarify your perspective. Nothing can replac

Note: Voice-to-text transcriptions are about 90% accurate, and conversations-to-text do not always translate perfectly. I include it to provide you with the spirit of the conversation.

Scott Allen  0:00  

Okay, everybody, welcome to The Phronesis Podcast. Thank you for checking in wherever you are in the world. Speaking of the world, I have a gentleman here today who's very interested in the globe, and that's going to make a heck of a lot more sense in a few moments, but I am honored to have Dr. Mansour Javidan, and he is a multiple award-winning and best selling author and executive educator whose teaching and research interests span the globe. He works at Thunderbird School of Global Management at Arizona State University, and received his MBA and Ph.D. degrees from the Carlson School at the University of Minnesota, my home state. He is the Garvin Distinguished Professor and Executive Director of Najafi Global Mindset Institute at Thunderbird School of Global Management at Arizona State University. Mansour is currently the Project Director and Principal Co-Investigator of GLOBE 2020. Working with a team of 426 researchers studying culture change, leadership ideals, and trust dynamics. The project has received close to one and a half million dollars in funding and has completed data collection from over 60,000 managers and professionals in 144 countries. He has designed and taught executive development courses and workshops, conducted consulting projects, and made presentations in over 40 countries. He has published in the best journals in the world. His full bio is located in the show notes. Sir, other than being hot because it's summertime in Arizona, what else do listeners need to know about you?

 

Mansour Javidan  1:28  

Hey, Scott. Good to see you, and thank you for this conversation. I look forward to having a fun and enjoyable conversation. The one thing that I would add is my own personal background. I was born in Iran in Tehran. My father was Iranian, and my mother was Russian. And, in my family, there are five different languages spoken, so it is quite possible that two members of my family can be sitting at the table and not being able to communicate because they speak different languages. That's not always bad because there are three religions practiced in my family. So, this issue of understanding human behavior and the diversity that exists is not just my research interests, or consulting interests, it's my human interest. This is how I've been raised, and the world that I've always been interacting with as a child and as an adult.

 

Scott Allen  2:29  

Well, and it was so wonderful to learn more about you last November when we were together at the International Leadership Association, you were being honored for your lifetime of just incredible work in academia. And it was fun to learn some of these little tidbits about you because it very, very nicely informs some of your work. And maybe what we could do is do a very quick overview of the impetus of this work, The GLOBE Study, and then maybe what are some contemporary ways we're thinking about it? What are you finding? So, maybe a little history lesson, but then let's zoom forward to what are some contemporary and cutting-edge things that are emerging from the research. Just an incredible, incredible scope of this project.

 

Mansour Javidan  3:16  

Thank you, Scott. Again, I'm going to start with my childhood. One of the implications of living in such a diversity-rich environment is curiosity. Curiosity about how do people do things? Why do they do things differently? I'm going to give you a very specific example, a simple example, but it's an important example. So, when I was growing up, I noticed that the Italian and the French side of my family have coffee for breakfast. The Persian and Turkish side of my family had tea for breakfast, never coffee. Why is that? I would ask my parents, family members, nobody had an answer because it was such a silly question to ask, but I was just curious. So, this curiosity about how and why people live their lives differently has been with me, I guess, in my genes. Let's put it that way. And then, when I was doing my Ph.D. degree in Strategic Management at the University of Minnesota, my dissertation was about CEOs, major corporations, how they make strategic decisions. And I was interviewing CEOs, I was interviewing their top executives, and something really interesting captured my imagination. These were very talented, very successful, fantastic executives with perfect track records in terms of accomplishments, almost every one of them would tell me about their successes in the US and their challenges outside of the US. So, it was fascinating listening to them, “Oh, we have this strategy of starting operations in such and such country, and things didn't work out, or we had so many surprises.” And those kinds of comments, again, triggered my curiosity. So, why is it that we have these brilliant American executives who are very successful in the US, but then when they talk about markets outside of the US, it's always with a lot of tension, and stress, and anxiety, and issues? And this was early 1980s that I'm talking about. So, this curiosity kept building in me as I finished my dissertation, I started my work at University of Alberta in Canada. And the notion of cultural diversity and the diversity that exists across borders was kind of in the back of my mind and in everything that I was thinking, in everything I was reading, in everything I was doing. And in 1990 I met the late Professor Bob House, world-renowned authority on leadership, charismatic leadership. And we started talking about his understanding of leadership, and his framework for what does it mean to be a charismatic leader, and his presumption that it will work everywhere. And then, during these conversations, both of us ended up with the curiosity of, “Really? Do we know? Is there evidence that charismatic leadership works in Uganda the same way that it does in the US? And if it doesn't, why not? What accounts for the differences?” So, those conversations were really one of the drivers, not the only driver, but one of the drivers of the GLOBE Project, which Bob has, at the time, submitted a proposal to the US Department of Education for funding. And we had very simple question that started that project. The question was, what is the relationship between national culture and leadership ideals? What does it mean to be an outstanding leader in the US versus Jamaica, and what is the role of the cultures of these two countries in explaining the differences? Only one question, that was it. And we submitted the proposal. And after Bob received the funding, we said, “Okay, all right. Now we gotta start this. How do we measure cultural differences?” Well, (?How Today’s Work?) was seminal, was powerful in the literature at the time. It educated me personally because I read pretty much everything he had written. So, our option one was, let's use how today's culture dimensions and country scores, and which is what a massive majority of academics were doing. And then, Bob decided there's no real science behind ‘How Today's Work.’ It's very powerful. It's very intuitive, very interesting, we've all learned from it, but let's build on it, and let's conduct a scientific study of cultures. And that's how the GLOBE Project started. So GLOBE, by the way, is an acronym. It stands for Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness. And, at the time, we thought, “Okay, let's review the literature. Let's come up with measures of dimensions.” So after they had four at the time, we ended up with nine. There is no one can claim that they have a comprehensive, fully encompassing measure of national culture because national cultures are too complicated. So, to us, our focus was on those cultural dimensions that have something to do with management, with leadership, and with organizations. For example, we had no interest in dress codes or jokes that people tell. We wanted to know how authoritative, how hierarchical, or how future-oriented, how performance-oriented are the cultures of countries. So, at the time in 1991, I was at the University of Calgary in Canada, and I hosted the first GLOBE conference, and we invited researchers from different countries to come and join us. Our initial plan was, “Let's do the study with 20 countries.” Large-scale countries study is not easy, so we thought, “Ah, let's do it with two.” And, by the way, Scott, for your information, we had paper questions. Everything was in paper. (Laughs)

 

Scott Allen  9:57  

You were mailing. Weren't you? You were mailing. 

 

Mansour Javidan  9:59  

We would mail it, they would mail it back. We had someone manually inputting the data. It was 1993 at the time. The questionnaire was completed, and we started data pilot testing and all of that. We were so proud that we were using email to communicate different things, but everything else was low-tech. So, as soon as we started approaching people, researchers to join us and collect data in their countries, other researchers started contacting us, saying, “Oh, we've heard about this project you're working on, we want to be part of it.” So, we ended up with 62 societies, and, at the time, it was the largest study of its kind. And we produced cultural profiles of every one of these countries and ideal leadership profiles. And we've published all kinds of things on that study. And then, the major output was the 2004 book. We call it the Blue Book. It's received, I think, 15,000 citations. It's a very influential book, but it's written for academics. We published a bunch of articles to provide practical applications of [Inaudible 11:15] And then, in about 2006 we asked another question, and the question was, “Okay, now we know what does it mean to be an ideal leader in different countries, let's look at the actual behavior of CEOs as the ultimates in leadership, and to what extent that behavior fits the ideal profile.” What happens when the behavior of the leader is similar to the profile? What happens when the behavior of the leader is below the society's expectation, the society's profile of outstanding leadership? So, we ended up studying 1,000 CEOs, over 5,000 VPS, executive VPS, direct reports of CEOs in 24 countries. And our book came out in 2014. And what we found was CEOs whose leadership behavior exceeded the society's expectations, they produced incredible results, and the top management team was cohesive, was committed. It's like everything was working fantastic. And then, those CEOs whose leadership behavior did not match, was below the society's expectations. Their companies were suffering, were struggling. Their top management were complaining. So, clearly, the CEOs who understand the psyche of their culture in terms of what it is I'm supposed to do in the US, what it is I'm supposed to do in China as a CEO of a Chinese corporation. 

 

Scott Allen  13:10

Yeah, or Singapore. 

 

Mansour Javidan  13:12

Or in Singapore. Those CEOs who had that understanding either intuitive, implicit or explicit, and exceeded that. For example, in the US, being visionary is a serious requirement to be an outstanding leader. The star-performing American CEOs far exceeded the society's expectations on being a visionary leader. They were so good at it, and they had turned it into really an art of communicating, crafting, engaging, picking up signals from the environment. These guys were masters at that. And then we looked at the unperforming or low-performing American CEOs, they just had no idea what their vision was, what the strategy was. They were all tacticians. Their top management teams were saying, “We have no idea what we're doing, why are we doing this?” So it was really interesting, the contrast. So, that book came out in 2014. And then, in 2016, we started with myself, Peter Dorfman, who was a professor at the time at New Mexico State University, he's retired now, and my late and dear friend, Ali Dastmalchian, who was the Dean of the Beedie School of Business at Sammy Fraser University. The three of us were staying at the Sheraton Hotel in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, and it was raining all the time, so we didn't have a lot of options to go out. So, we were together a lot of time, and we started saying, “Well since the 1990s a lot has happened. The world has changed. It's time to go back and review the cultures of those 62 societies and look at their leadership ideals, and let's come up with a new question, something we haven't asked in the past.” Well, the new question was, what does trust mean in different cultures? The way that two Americans come to trust each other, is that the same way that two Chinese people or two Brazilian people come to trust each other? Why, yes? Why not? And what is the role of culture again? In what way does national culture influence the way that people build trust? So, in December of 2016, we came up with a proposal. We sent it to Canadian government funding agency. We were fortunate, we received the funding, and we started approaching researchers. This time, we ended up with 144 countries, not just the original 62. We were much better, much more knowledgeable about how to build networks. The work of GLOBE was much better known, and we had some colleagues who also had beautiful networks, particularly in Africa. So, I'm very proud to say that the GLOBE project is probably the biggest Scientific Study of African countries to this day. Only three or four countries in Africa are missing in our database, which is incredible. 

 

Scott Allen  16:39

It is. 

 

Mansour Javidan  16:41

So, we ended up with, again, culture dimensions, except this time we added a new culture dimension, which is religiosity. Might wonder why. Well, if you study leadership in the Middle East and in Africa, you have to understand the role of religion, because the way people live their lives in all of Middle East and all of Africa is so interwoven with their religious views, religious practices, religious values. So we thought, “Well, we cannot ignore that, so let's include it.” So, again, we created an instrument, a set of questions that measures the way religious views, doesn't matter whether it's Muslim, or Christian, the content of religion is not the issue the influence of religious values.  So, we created the instrument. It's a brand new instrument, nothing like it exists. I'm very proud to say that. So, we now have cultural profiles in terms of 10 dimensions for each one of 144 countries. We now have the leadership profile. What does it mean to be an outstanding leader in all of these countries? We also have a trust profile. What is the society trusting as a whole? And then what criteria do people use to decide whether or not somebody is trustworthy? So, we have these four sets of profiles that we've created, all unique, all brand new, nothing like any of it exists. And, right now, my colleagues and I are very close to finishing four papers to be submitted to top-level journals. Once those papers are accepted, all of our databases will be made publicly available. So, that's where we are.

 

Scott Allen  18:44  

Now, here's the big question. Is there any early insights that you are in a position to share based on what came back?

 

Mansour Javidan  18:58  

I'm glad, yes. So, some really interesting findings that I will share with you. Remember, the original sample was 62. In those same 62 societies -- by the way, I'm using the word society instead of the country very deliberately. The reason is, we have Macau, we have Hong Kong in our sample, and Taiwan. Now, we know that Macau and Hong Kong are not independent countries anymore, they're part of China. They are special administrative regions, but they were included in the original globe data. So, that's why we wanted to collect the data. And then, Taiwan is a tricky one. There are many countries in the world that do not recognize Taiwan as an independent country, others that do. For us, the issue is we just want to see the cultural evolution of the society of Taiwan. We're not politicians, we're not diplomats, we don't care. We want to show evidence, that's all. And because Taiwan was included in the original database, it's also included in the latest phase. So, here are some interesting things. These 62 societies have made big strides in improving gender equality through their laws, regulations, cultural changes. These 62 societies in general, are showing greater sense of equality between men and women compared to early 1990s. We also show that, in general, societies have become less hierarchical. However, there are specific countries like Russia where the power is still very concentrated, people are used to it. In terms of trust, what is interesting to us is that pretty much all countries don't have a lot of trust in general. Even Nordic Europeans, which historically have had high trustingness scores, in our latest survey, don't come out shining, and that partly explains what's going on in these countries. I don't know if you and your audience are up to date in the political changes taking… All of these countries, Nordic Europeans, are moving towards right-wing, moving away from the more liberal, socialistic views and policies. They're becoming more attractive to the more, “Let's close doors. Let's be involved. We don't want immigrants.” The right-wing politicians have picked up on the stress that exists in the society. The governing party in Sweden has neo-Nazi roots, so think about that, this is Sweden we’re talking about. Italy is another example. Their party, the ruling party has roots in Mussolini's fascist party. It's not something they hide. It's their history, their heritage, and people don't seem to mind that. But now, I want to make a comment about the US, speaking of stress, what our findings show is that the level of general trust in the US has gone down a lot. The trust in institutions has gone down a lot. And we asked all of our participants in different countries to tell us, “How much do you trust these people?” We gave them a list of groups; so foreigners, members of other countries, citizens of other countries, members of different religions, members of different gender, members of different political... So, we gave them a list of these groups, and we said, “How much do you trust them?” The least trusted group was members of the other political party. We actually just published a paper. This was a surprise. Now, think about this, our respondents are managers and professionals, so the distrust and animosity between the political parties are now permeating organizations, and we have managers say, “I will never work with the other person because he or she is a Democrat.” So, the level of dysfunctionality that is created and the stress that has created a very dysfunctional political discourse, that is now the reality of our society in our country is premiered in organizations. That's a tough one. That was a new thing. So, some examples; compared to the early 1990s, the cultural profile of the United States still is part of the Anglo cluster; Canada, US, New Zealand, Australia. When we cluster them, US is part of that cluster, but the cultural profile in terms of these 10 dimensions, the United States is now much closer to the cultural profile of Eastern European countries like Hungary than it used to be in the early 1990s. In the early 1990s, there was pretty much no similarity between the US culture, Hungarian, Bulgarian cultures. In our latest data, there are clear similarities between US cultural profile and Eastern Europe.

 

Scott Allen  25:13  

Well, as I reflect on what you've just said, what I would like to explore is where's your mind right now? What questions have emerged for you based on even just this little snippet because you have, I imagine, it's a treasure trove of data, of insights, potentially, that you're going to make public, which is incredible. But what questions have arisen for you? 

 

Mansour Javidan  25:41  

Well, let me give you one other tidbit then I'll try and answer your question. 

 

Scott Allen  25:46

Okay.

 

Mansour Javidan  25:47  

European culture as a whole has changed a lot. There's been a lot of cultural similarities and dissimilarities that didn't exist in the past. So what I'm saying is the cultural change is not just in the US, even France, a country like France and its cultural profile has changed. So, I'm not surprised when I see what's going on in France right now. So, here is a very high-level insight. Globalization over the past 40 years has been probably the greatest and most successful human endeavor in the sense that it has lifted economic prosperity of a massive number of countries. Over a billion people have moved out of poverty because of the jobs and opportunities that have been created because of globalization. So, I'm a big fan of globalization. I work at Thunderbird, that's who we are. Let me be very clear about that. 

 

Scott Allen  27:02  

It's kind of my jam, yes. (Laughs)

 

Mansour Javidan  27:06  

However, the thing about us human beings, which is both beautiful and frustrating, is that nothing we do is perfect. Everything we do has positive consequences and negative consequences. So, what are the negative consequences of globalization? Number one, there are losers. There are people who lost their jobs, opportunities in developed countries. You look at the American auto manufacturing industry, I was put in the car, driven around in Ohio and Michigan, these other manufacturing plants being shut down. What happened? Well, investments in Mexico. So, Mexico is prospering, benefiting from investments in its auto industry has been incredibly huge, growth in Mexican auto manufacturing industry. Who pays for that? The people in Michigan and Ohio who lost their jobs. They are typically white men, 40 to 50, too old to start new skills, are used to a lifestyle that doesn't exist anymore.

 

Scott Allen  28:22  

Unionized workers, oftentimes. 

 

Mansour Javidan  28:25  

Unionized workers. Yes. Same with England, UK, and Brexit. What drove Brexit was the promise of, “We will keep British jobs for British people.” It was a silly promise, but it worked. It motivated the people who viewed themselves to be the losers to vote for it. So, one negative consequence of globalization is the fact that there are losers in societies that governments and political parties for a long while ignore because they weren't rich people, they weren't business people, didn't have a lot of money. So, politically, their voice was kind of ignored until politicians like Trump in the US, Brexiters in the UK, and typically, right-wing political parties in many developed countries picked up on, “There is a stressed voter community that we can bring a message to, and we can tell them we can do better for them.” So, that's one side effect, unintended consequence of globalization. The other huge consequence of globalization is incommunicore. What is happening is the professional class, the educated class, the business people, executives, corporations, reap humongous benefits. Why? Because they had the skills. So, they moved around, they invested, they created jobs, but at the same time, they took away a lot of money. So, as a simple worker, now I have a job, I make some money, but I look around and I see my executives that are running Rolls-Royces in Jakarta. So, income inequality has grown across the world because governments and their taxation systems have not been able to catch up, partly because the same rich people influence the decision-making about tax policies. And the US is a perfect example of that. Any politician who uses the word ‘tax increase’ might as well say goodbye to their career in this country. And the fact is that millionaires and billionaires are being produced in many countries by huge numbers every day. And the people who are just barely making it, and their purchasing power either hasn't gone up for years, or actually has declined, are quite stressed about that. And, again, that's another voice in these societies. So, the cultural transformations that are taking place in many parts of the world are really driven by the economics of globalization and the role of the political system, or its inability to manage the economic consequences of globalization. So that's why, no matter where you go, you feel stress. Very few countries are now happily living with not much political stress. Developed countries are all going through stress. I cannot think of one single developed economy, maybe Singapore. Probably Singapore is the only one. 

 

Scott Allen  32:13  

Well, and I know that another passion of yours is digitization, exploring this as a topic, because, yes, digitization, globalization, it's shifting a lot of the work. So, talk a little bit about that, and then we're gonna probably have to wind down here. So ,this is flown by.

 

Mansour Javidan  32:33  

Okay, yeah, but you're getting me to talk about something I really enjoy. Warning, warning.

 

Scott Allen  32:43  

Well, the digitization is another fascinating… I think that also has us uneasy. I think that also has us confused, agitated. We could call it artificial intelligence, but there's a series of a number of technologies enabling disruption that are shifting the landscape rapidly, whether that's synthetic biology, whether that's nanotechnology, internet of things, sensor technology, Blockchain, we could go down the list, but that's a part of this conversation as well. Would you agree? 

 

Mansour Javidan  33:15  

Absolutely. Those positive and negative consequences of globalization that I talked about, just watch the next five years, digital transformation is going to put positive and negative consequences of globalization on double steroids. The experts in digital technologies are telling us that in 2026 two years from now, the overall expenditure by organizations globally on digital transformation is $3.6 trillion with a T. So, you might wonder, what the hell is going on? Why are these organizations, both public and private, why are they investing so much money? What are they looking for? Tell you what they're looking for, experts are telling us that the productivity of corporations specifically driven by digital technology is going to go up 10X. Now think about it, where is that coming from? Well, it's coming from technology taking over. So, again, there's going to be a lot of people who are going to lose their jobs. Organizations are going to use these magnificent technologies to incredibly speed up their global reach, global expansion, very successfully, but the turmoil is going to increase drastically in terms of people who are going to benefit from it, and the people who are going to be the victims of it. Now, in my work, my interest has been around this $3.6 trillion. Again, experts tell us a huge percentage of it is going to be wasted. Why is it going to be wasted? Because the investment is going to be made, but the people who are going to be managing that investment and that technology, not all of them know what the hell they're doing. So, the management of digital transformation, particularly in a global arena, is going to be the distinctive competitive advantage, not the technology itself. People are going to buy the technology, but how you socialize it, how you introduce it, how you manage resistance to it, how you incorporate it in your business model, in your consumer experience, in your production efficiency, all of those are critical decisions that have to be made by humans; middle management executives and senior executives. So, my work is, what does it take? What are those individual characteristics that would enable, would facilitate your middle managers and your senior executives to do a better job of managing digital transformation? So, I have now a brand new instrument called Global Digital Mindset Inventory, or GDMI, which will go live probably three months or so, and that assessment shows you your own profile in terms of what are your areas of strength, what are the areas that you need to develop on in order to do a better job of managing digital transformation. 

 

Scott Allen  36:44  

Oof. Well, okay, a couple of things. One, I'm excited that you will be presenting at the International Leadership Association in November in Chicago. So, for listeners, if you want to learn more, if you want to be in the space with this gentleman, this scholar, this global expert on globalization, digitization, that is an opportunity. Number two, I love your mind and the purview. And you said a word at the very beginning of our podcast, which was curiosity. Obviously, that shines through in a very, very beautiful way. And it's one of my favorite words, curiosity. And so, thank you for that. And then, number three, I just want to say thank you for not only the scope of your work, but the scale. It's groundbreaking, it's incredible, and you've made an impact in just innumerable ways, at helping us make sense of what's valued in certain contexts, of what's perceived as valuable in certain contexts. And I think it's wonderful. It's absolutely wonderful. So, for listeners, join us November, Chicago International Leadership Association, and you can learn more. Now, I always wind down these conversations, sir, with a question, and that is, what have you been listening to, reading, or streaming? What's caught your attention in recent times that you've enjoyed?

 

Mansour Javidan  38:11  

First of all, Scott, thank you for the opportunity. As you, I'm sure, can pick up, I always enjoy talking about these things, so I appreciate the opportunity. I am right in the middle of reading a book which I'm enjoying very much. It's called ‘Age of Revolutions,’ which talks exactly about the issues I was just sharing with you. I am a big fan of Fareed Zakaria's thinking insight, his GPS program on CNN on Sundays. And he has just produced this book, published this book called ‘Age Of Revolutions,’ where he talks about the US specifically, and how cultural transformation is also causing stress in the society. And I really like his way of thinking. And I'm enjoying that book. I would recommend it to anyone who wants to gain insights into what's going on in our society. Scott, human beings in at no time in human history have been so educated, so well to do, well off. The way we live our lives, people 100 years ago couldn't even dream of. We are so lucky and fortunate to live when, at this moment, we are living. And then, you look around and you see a lot of stress, a lot of anxiety, a lot of discomfort, which raises the question, why? What's going on? To me, the simple answer is we're human. We do things, some good and some bad. This is the nature of things. But sometimes people take for granted the fact that we live as the most fortunate generation of human beings in the history of people. It doesn't mean everything is rosy, but that's something, because of all these stresses that we go through, we tend to forget where we are now as humans compared to our previous generations. So, I would recommend this book. I think it's a great read. 

 

Scott Allen  40:29  

Well, and you just reminded me a listener, Gary Lloyd, had recommended a book a while back called ‘The Coming Wave,’ Mustafa Suleyman. And he was one of the co-founders of DeepMind, which is now part of Google. And he talks about some of what you are speaking to of just, well, it's the coming wave of what digitization will do to society, to us. And it's just there's a number of shifts, geopolitical shifts, shifts from digitization, generational shifts with retirements. There's just a number of shifts, and it's going to be interesting to watch us navigate those shifts and see how we do as a globe all the way down to our communities and in our families. 

 

Mansour Javidan  41:13

Absolutely. 

 

Scott Allen  41:14

Okay, sir. Thank you so much. I look forward to seeing you in Chicago in November.

 

Mansour Javidan  41:17  

Same here. Thank you very much. 

 

 

[End Of Recording]