What is your vision? Featuring Thom Dennis. Podcast Session 1.

What is your vision? Featuring Thom Dennis. Podcast Session 1.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Tell me about your vision.

• 0:05Speaker 01

  Well, it's something that's developed over quite a long time. But I, you know, I've been teaching leadership for thirty odd years, thirty three, thirty four years now.

• 0:21Speaker 01

  And it's clear to me that the, the, the skills of leadership that are taught today are not the ones that are going to take us forward. We need new mindsets. We need a new idea about what leadership is and how

• 0:41Speaker 01

  it's going to bring about real change that we can live with. So my, my vision is, is bringing the concept of rewilding

• 0:51Speaker 01

  into leadership. So I'm, I'm writing a book at the moment, which is called Rewilding the Corporate Mind.

• 1:01Speaker 01

  And it's, well, that's, that's what it is. I, I don't know whether everybody's familiar with the, the term rewilding. It's not in the dictionary. Each time I write it, my computer wants to put something else in. But yeah, that's, that's what it's about.

• 1:20Speaker 00

  That's awesome. Thank you for sharing that. What would you say, Tom, that

• 1:27Speaker 00

  why do you think that leadership needs to change and why is it not working? I want to get to know about your vision a little bit more. Can you tell us more about it?

• 1:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I think that the world is, the world is in a mess. Right now, on a political basis, there are moves either left or right, mostly right. And there's an enormous amount of damage being done to, if I can call him Joe Normal.

• 2:05Speaker 01

  The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. And this is, if you look at history over the last 2-3 thousand years, you can see how, quote, civilizations have risen,

• 2:25Speaker 01

  and then they've fallen. And we are in a very typical downward spiral now. And I think that in order to,

• 2:41Speaker 01

  in order to, for us to prevent us just going down the way that literally every civilization has over millennia, then we need to behave differently to all the ones that failed.

• 2:58Speaker 01

  And part of that is bringing in the traits of kindness.

• 3:22Speaker 01

  I'm talking about kindness, compassion,

• 3:28Speaker 01

  the willingness to bring on the strengths of community. I think that an awful lot of, you see it all over the world, really. Community is being destroyed. People are being encouraged just to be individuals. And you never have success that way. Where we have success is when people come together as community and support each other. I mean, I could go on about this for quite a bit. But I remember when I lived in Colorado, there was all the flooding in Boulder. What I did was to bring out a sort of a pioneer spirit,

• 4:12Speaker 01

  where everybody got together and, working together, to

• 4:21Speaker 01

  a soul teacher. And I don't know, that after the LA

• 4:34Speaker 01

  It's a leadership that cares more for

• 4:44Speaker 01

  the group than it does for the individual. This is less about me and it's about us.

• 4:53Speaker 00

  Awesome.

• 4:56Speaker 00

  Tom, what would you say that

• 5:00Speaker 00

  if people were to actually start looking as or start applying better leadership roles and skills into their day-to-day life? How do you see that helping us with the society not declining now?

• 5:21Speaker 01

  Well, I think society is changing. Whether it declines or not is kind of dependent on, I think, the quality of leadership that people bring to it.

• 5:32Speaker 01

  What leaders now is the, what they need is an access to their own inner wisdom. I think that an awful lot of the business schools and other schools are teaching people about how to lead by looking outwards and seeing groups of people and how do we, for instance,

• 5:59Speaker 01

  inculcate followership. Some people define leadership as a way of creating followership. I don't really agree with that. I think that an awful lot of people are looking for a leader. I mean, there was a statistic in the London Times the other day where they said that 52% of young people in this country would rather have a dictator than a normal prime minister. And that's a sort of a reflection of how confusing and anxiety creating

• 6:40Speaker 01

  the environment is and how unhappy an awful lot of people are.

• 6:46Speaker 01

  They just want someone who's gonna take away the problems. Come in, tell me what to do, get rid of the problems and then I can get on with my life. But life's not like that. And, and so what we really need to do is, is to resource individuals to be, at least to a good extent, self-sufficient in the way that they look at the world, in the way they make decisions, in the way that they conduct themselves with other people. You can't do it alone. You've got to do it with others. That's why the power of community is so, so very important. But at the same time, it's not community where you've got some, some head honcho.

• 7:29Speaker 01

  It's a community where people get together and they, they talk and they communicate. I mean, boy, we've got social media coming out of our ears and yet people don't talk to each other anymore. It's, it's a real irony.

• 7:42Speaker 00

  Yeah. Wow, there's a lot you shared in that. That was, wow, that's, something blew my mind. One thing I, I did not expect that so, a big percentage of people would want a dictatorship in their own country. There's a lot, I, I come from India, born and raised, and I live in the United States. And coming to the United States and experiencing the freedom that we have here and knowing the history of what people went through to get the freedom that they have and the, and the rights that they are so proud of. And the sacrifices that were made. I can understand if someone is too weak to, to see that

• 8:27Speaker 00

  and giving away their, their freedom for, for ease of life. Cause it never comes, you know, throughout civilization, throughout civilizations, anytime someone has given up their freedom, only with bloodshed has been recovered. So I, I totally agree with you on that aspect. There's, there is, we need to be tweeting, we need to have a lot more. Better leaders, you'd have better leaders in the society that lead by example in ways. It's, I think it's reminding me of, of that very famous social media quote like,

• 9:09Speaker 00

  great men create, good men create good times, good times create weak men. Weak men create hard times and hard times then create strong men. It's a circle and the circle that keeps going. So, wow, thanks for sharing that. What are your thoughts on what I just, just shared with you?

• 9:29Speaker 01

  Well, I'm one, I, um, I don't know. For what it's worth, speaking as an Englishman, although actually I am three quarters French, but speaking as an Englishman, looking back at the way that particularly England, let alone Britain, treated India. It's the kind of thing that we don't really see in the history books and yet in this country. And yet, uh, it was, it was abominable. The colonial mindset, which still exists in, in many ways. It's, it's old hat and it doesn't belong in today.

• 10:14Speaker 01

  But like so many of the things that the legacies of history that we carry, even if we only carry them systemically, we still carry them. And they need to be put to rest. And the only way to put them to rest is to really acknowledge them. Uh, and I think that there's an awful lot of dynamics in today's societies where they say, oh, look, that's in the past, forget it. You can't do that. And, and you know, I deal with organizations all the time where, you know, they, they, they want to bring in a change, but they, they don't want to acknowledge where the organization has come from to get to where it is. That needs to change. They just say, right, here we are, let's change.

• 10:57Speaker 01

  And it, it never works. You know, systemically, you've got to look at the roots and where things have come from. And, and actually look at the mindsets of the people that created the environment that has produced the situation that we're now in. So, uh, I, I, we, we have to acknowledge the, the past. I think that's a, that's a, that's a, that's a really important aspect. When I talked about the fifty, fifty-two percent, I think that they're, they're genuine, um, Generation Z. So it's not the whole population that's thinking like that, it's the youth. And, uh, I mean, that's kind of scary in a way.

• 11:39Speaker 01

  Um, but, I mean, these things are so complex, you know, why, why do they think like that? Well, because their boomer parents have both been out at work earning money. And, you know, these are the latchkey kids that are now saying, I don't want that, I, I, I want something different. And so, uh, again, we're getting these waves of, of, of change. Um, so, uh, yeah, there was something else I was gonna say, um, to, to what you said, and I'm afraid that bit slipped my mind right now. Uh, yeah.

• 12:21Speaker 00

  Tom, um, thank you for sharing that. There's a lot more thoughts that I have. You know, it's, it's a, call it a coincidence or not, but yesterday I was listening to a podcast from someone in India. It was actually talking about the history of India. And it's probably the, one of the first times I've actually listened to a podcast that talks about that. And in that, it was a staggering opening, eye opener for me, that when the, when the British, when the Brits colonized India,

• 12:54Speaker 00

  they, they did a lot of damage to, uh, the memory of India where, where the history was stored and the things that they, they were keeping accounts of. So they burned a lot of that. And when they colonized, they rewrote the history in a way that to till this day, in the books in India, they are taught the wrong history. And they're taught the wrong mental blocks in their own head where they're it's I think it's easy even now for people to self sabotage because of what they've been taught for generations now and it's on autopilot it's it's flowing through the system it's flowing through government

• 13:38Speaker 00

  it's flowing through everything and that's that's I think that's kind of the leadership I think you're talking about earlier that we need leaders who can see through that and and give clarity and and need to know how you can discern from from the truth and and false claims how you can I can how you can stop from self sabotaging and and actually not be a victim of the situation anyhow how you can take control and not blame anyone else for the situation you're in but take away power from them and and empower yourself to do better to be better to make the change that you want to see in the world so that was that was a very eye opening thing

• 14:22Speaker 00

  for me that I saw it's a I just wanted to share that with you.

• 14:24Speaker 01

  Sure, yeah, I mean if your if your listeners are are are interested there's a there's a British podcast which is done by a a British Indian journalist and a a British author who lives in India it's called Empire and there I don't know I mean there's hundreds of them now the podcast but it starts with an examination of the East India Company which was an organization that went in

• 15:01Speaker 01

  and frankly raped and pillaged through India and the the motivation for that was money and it's one of the the troubles the difficulties that we are in in today that so much damage is being done by people who have one orientation which is to make money and it's really interesting I've done quite a lot of work around AI the introduction of AI.

• 15:38Speaker 01

  One of the things I often say about this is that AI is an amazing tool. It's gonna bring all sorts of amazing positive changes. But at the same time, companies are fighting over how to use the AI in order to make more money. And they're spending fortunes on it. But very few companies are actually looking at what are the implications of the way that we introduce AI to our people, to the human beings. You know, we've got British Telecom in this country, which is a, you know, it's a fairly large company.

• 16:18Speaker 01

  Where they were talking about laying off, I think it's 20,000 people in the next two years because of AI. So what are these guys gonna do? What jobs are they gonna get? So, once again, AI actually, if we don't apply it sensibly and with a systemic viewpoint, we will just make the rich richer and the poor poorer. And as I said a little earlier, I don't know whether that was caught on the recording, that where you have in this sort of quote-unquote civilization,

• 17:01Speaker 01

  this disparity, this spread, this difference between the rich and the poor. Eventually, society breaks down.

• 17:14Speaker 01

  And one of the things that really struck me in the States was when I lived there, there's a lot of people who just say, why should I help this person? They're not working hard enough, or they've had bad luck, that's tough on them. I pay my taxes and I don't want to pay anymore.

• 17:38Speaker 01

  And it's that sort of sense of

• 17:42Speaker 01

  that sense of individualism as opposed to a community. You know, in the old days, when, when a, a, a family had a child, the child was brought up by the community, not just by those parents. And, and the, the children that way had a, a sense of, of balance in them and a sense of belonging, which today we've largely destroyed by the way that we've created society. And nothing stands still. As I said, we're on this roller coaster. But I think that the, the effects of, of these kinds of things will come home to roost. And so, uh, going back to the sort of the concept of leadership,

• 18:28Speaker 01

  what we need are leaders who can see the, the, the, the, the overall picture, see the impact of what's going on and can say, actually, no, we're not going to do this. We're going to do that. And the implications are we'll make a little bit less money. But actually, we'll have a group of people who have a level of contentment

• 18:54Speaker 01

  in the group and within themselves, that, uh, things will go better. Yeah, you know, I mean, I've been to India a number of times. And, and one of the things that really strikes me about that every time I go is you see people who have nothing. And they're really happy.

• 19:13Speaker 01

  And then you go, you come into the, the, the West and you see people who have got everything. And they're miserable. You know, there's something wrong here. We, we are prioritizing the wrong things. And so we need leaders who can see that. And, uh, have a, this broader sense of, of, of the impact of the decisions that they're making.

• 19:35Speaker 02

  Thank you for being here today. I'm really happy that you tuned in to Vision Pros Live. I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions as these episodes continue to move forward. It's going to get more and more fun. We'll have more and more engagement as well. We'll invite people to participate in the show and thank you for giving us your time and attention. Have an excellent time building out your vision and becoming a vision pro yourself.