681: Harvard's Cornelia Choe on How Great Leaders See Differently

0:27Welcome to the Strategy Skills Podcast, where strategy partners teach you the tools and techniques to solve mankind's greatest problems.

0:47Welcome to the Strategy Skills Podcast. I'm your host, Krista Farova, and this episode is brought to you by strategytraining.com. If you have ever felt overlooked in important conversations, We have a gift for you. You can download five reasons why someone ignores anybody in a meeting and you can get it at firmsconsulting.com forward slash on the room. If you are building or considering to build a consulting practice, you can access at no cost episode one of how to build a consulting practice at firmsconsulting.com forward slash build. and if your goal is to strengthen your strategy skills, you can get the overall approach used in well-managed strategy studies at firmsconsulting.com forward slash overall approach.

1:34And finally, for those targeting firms like McKinsey and BCG or looking to change your roles anyway outside of consulting as well, you can access a proven winning resume example at firmsconsulting.com forward slash resume PDF. And today we have with us Cornelia Cho. who is a co-president of the corporate board of the alumni network of Harvard Women at Harvard University and sits on the Women's Leadership Board at Harvard Kennedy School. Cornelia has worked with leaders in private equity, law, government, non-profits, and at organizations including the UN, the White House, Morgan Stanley, and the list goes on and on.

2:17And I'm so glad to have Cornelia with us today. Welcome. Thank you, Chris. It's such a pleasure to share this conversation, to be here with you. So maybe we can start with an overview of how you ended up in the place in life where you are today, your journey up to now. Sure. That's a great question because there's a lot of movement in the past. I was born and raised in Minnesota and had a happy and rather simple childhood up until about 10, at which point I moved to Seoul, South Korea with my family. And there I was promised a world of loving relatives who I hadn't met before. And these relatives, instead of embracing me, found me to be very confusing.

3:03And they asked me, you look Korean, but you're not acting Korean. And to, you know, to stop and to be who I was supposed to be. And it wasn't any easier at school either. My first day at school, there was a group of girls from my class, and I approached them, and they were in a circle, and the circle just closed up. And I wasn't able to talk to someone. And at lunchtime, I was told not to sit with them either. And so it became a completely confusing and overwhelmingly lonely experience. And I'd never had this before in my life. And I needed to figure out how to deal with this overwhelming change around me, kind of like what a lot of us are experiencing today.

3:54And one time I saw an interview with an actress who was a single mother. And she said that she experienced many moments of loneliness and happiness, but also anger and sadness. And these experiences are what really helped her become a better actress and to understand people better. And that's when I realized that in order to be able to improve my quality of life in Seoul, I needed to get up close to people and understand their backgrounds, how they saw life. And little by little, I started to talk to anyone who would talk to me at school from any grade. I would talk to taxi drivers just to understand and put myself completely in their mind.

4:44And what I learned is that, you know, at this new school, trust is not a given. It has to be earned. And it takes a long time to earn trust. And once I understood that, I was able to create the friendships that I needed and was the only middle schooler in the high school musical, which was a lot of fun. But it's taught me something that's helped me throughout my whole life. Now I've lived in 11 different places in three different continents by the time it was 18. But I learned that we only in times of massive change, like now, we only see part of the picture. And we may be right about what we see, making us feel like we're completely right.

5:29But it's no longer enough to be right. We have to be able to see the whole landscape. And that's something in the book that I've written with Marshall Goldsmith, we call perspective blindness, where we think we see the whole picture, but we only see a part of it. And that's becoming increasingly dangerous and a big problem going forward as we experience more and more change and more complexity in our businesses and in our lives. Can you take us in a little more detail through the part of your life when you graduated and had to decide what you're going to do with your life? That's a great question, Chris, because there's complexity there as well.

6:14I've started my career working in leadership because I had this insatiable curiosity to understand how different people thought, how I could get along with them, and how to bring people together. And that's something that was constantly confusing to me, changing environments all the time. So starting from my freshman year, my first year at university, I helped start a company or an organization to help women around the world create their own companies. And I was in, when I was in Korea, I was talking to some relatives and found that a lot of people, especially women, when they call for an interview, they hear the phone hang up because it may not be commercially really worth it to hire women if they are, after being trained, going to leave to take care of their families.

7:19So there was a structural problem here. And so I was thinking, for the people who do want to pursue a career, if they can't get a job or the job that they want, then they can help create their own companies. And so I was working with female leaders in the United States to see how we could bring them together. And actually, from this experience, was asked to be one of the youngest speakers at an international United Nations conference to share my experience. But from this position of studying leadership and helping other people really operationalize it, I then, after my master's program, moved into private equity because I'd worked with a lot of big ideas and a lot of ideal movements in the world.

8:17But I wanted to be able to do the really nitty-gritty quantitative work that is so important in the world. So I went into finance and worked in private equity and absolutely loved it. I'm still an investor. It's not what I do as my principal role, but I really developed a love for investing. And then when I moved to Switzerland about 10 years ago from London, I then switched back to leadership advisory on a global level and was able to bring together everything I'd learned in so many different spheres working with government, startups, Fortune 500 companies, nonprofits. And so it's been a very fulfilling journey, even though there's been a lot of movement in there.

9:07Oh, definitely. how difficult was it to start your first company helping other women to start businesses? Do you remember the first few steps you took that allowed you to gain momentum? It's really about talking to the right people who are interested and being able to listen to a lot of different voices to hear who's really interested and how can I fulfill a need that they have to find that, you know, that product market fit, but to stay open-minded because where we think our value is may not be where other people see the fit for our offering. And so I remember as a freshman or in my first year of university, putting on my best suits and taking buses and trains and taxis and going to these huge, shiny office buildings and top floors with unbelievable views.

10:04And at that point, it was great because I had no fear of, you know, the consequences of making big mistakes or really focusing on what could go wrong. I knew what I believed in, and I was really receptive to hearing all kinds of information. So it was a very exciting time. And fortunately, I wasn't very intimidated because I hadn't developed a lot of fear by that point. That is very good. Can you take us through some of the most pivotal moments in your career up to now? You know, Chris, there's been a lot of pivotal moments when I changed careers, when I changed countries. And my father often tells me you can change your country, you can change your industry, and you can change your role.

11:03But it's hard to change all three at the same time. And there have been a few times when I've changed all three, especially when I started working in private equity. I moved to Singapore, which is a new country. I took on a new role in a new industry. And fortunately, I had studied private equity and finance as part of my master's program. So that was helpful. And I already had, you know, a toehold in that industry. But it takes really what we talk about in our book of being completely receptive to getting up close to people and understanding how they think. Because if we want to be able to share our ideas in a way that are actually is productive for the people around us, we need to micro translate our ideas and share them in a way that fits into their world, into the language that they speak.

11:58And that takes a lot of listening and a lot of empathy to be able to fit yourself in, whether you're moving towards someone in finance or you're moving towards someone who works in a nonprofit. Getting that background and that context is extremely important. And being able to hone that context was so important because I find that today we have access to so much information, more than I did up until now, changing industries or changing countries. But it's almost misleading because information has become commoditized and we have access to all kinds of information almost instantly at our fingertips.

12:43But what I feel that we're missing is context and judgment. We can't use all the information that AI gives us and knowing what to prioritize and what to throw out is extremely important. But that's really what I try to develop by changing so much, and especially the career, the industry, and the landscape of the country at the same time. I'm glad you mentioned AI. What do you think our listeners should think about in terms of how the world will change and how they can prepare for that change? AI is really a tool. And if you look at the industrial revolution, jobs were whole, you know, categories of jobs were completely displaced.

13:36And there were groups of people who moved to factory work earlier than others, for example, and there was massive upheaval in the markets. But ultimately, it still remains a tool and it depends how we're willing to use it. So if we use AI to broaden our understanding and to challenge our thinking so that we don't end up in with holding, you know, just a partial part of the map of what we need to know around us, then that can really help us expand our understanding, expand our opportunities, really. It can serve as a proxy to a certain degree of getting up close to people. Instead of talking to them, if we don't have access to them, we can read about them.

14:30We can learn about how they see the world and how they might see a project that we're working on, for example. And so we can use AI to broaden our view and to be able to, you know, to help us see around corners. Now, I don't think that replaces getting up close to people and actually talking to them as far as getting all the information we need to be able to understand their perspective and to complement what we understand about the world. And it certainly doesn't help us in creating the right relationships and partnerships that we need, but it can serve as a very helpful tool in helping us adapt and move forward in today's world.

15:15of constant change and displacement and hopefully staying ahead of that change. Do you have concerns about AI, for example, how it is impacting people's ability to think and other things? Absolutely. As I mentioned, AI can be, you know, like a very easy substitute for judgment. It can make us feel satisfied that we have a lot of information. And having information is helpful and it's great. But ultimately, the most important part of being able to use AI is to maintain our judgment and to know which pieces of information are wrong and to be able to challenge change what we hear back from AI and to maintain that judgment.

16:09Now, my concern is that people will stop thinking and they'll take this information for granted. And so then we'll have to go to the mind's gym to maintain, you know, to keep our minds from shutting down and gathering too much dust, just as we need to go to the gym today, sometimes to maintain our level of physical activity. And so that is a major concern. The question is, what do we default to? Do we default to being able to trust our own judgment and to continuously make the effort to hone that judgment in different situations to say, let me test this out. Does this information work? Or do we go on autopilot and just accept it?

17:01And this is an interesting example and a proxy for what a lot of people are facing today. Because in the face of constant change we have in AI and how that's affecting our lives, but also supply chains and tariffs and economic disruption, political change, it's hard to know what to do and we can succumb to two we're vulnerable to two different forces and on the one hand we have the fear of the unknown and after we've been through so much change we can actually develop a fear of the unknown and feeling overwhelmed and a very common reaction is to go into either fight or freeze and to say look I don't know what to do anymore.

17:55And on the other end, we're vulnerable to autopilot and moving on autopilot. And we want to move fast. We want to make fast decisions. And it's always comforting to hear that, you know, I have a lot of experience. Therefore, I understand what's happening around me. But in a world of constant change where, you know, your map can go upside down overnight, tonight to think that we can blindly rely on our past experience is very dangerous because what we've lived through may have been right at that point, but may not be right today and can take us down the wrong path. So it's important to keep our foot on the gas, but today to look out the windows and to communicate with different drivers because we're not actually driving on the highway or the motorway anymore.

18:52We're driving on open road because even the lane markers or the institutions that we've known are changing today. So we're thinking we're driving on the highway very fast when actually we need to pause from time to time and ask ourselves, who sees this differently? What do they see? And which of our assumptions would they challenge? Definitely. What skills do you think will become more valuable, not less? Definitely judgment, Chris. Being able to know when we're hearing something that's right or wrong. And what we talk about in our book, Panoramic Leadership, and being able to get up close to people who think differently, a lot of our stakeholders who have a meaningful influence on our companies, and to create relationships with them, that is going to be an extremely important skill going forward.

19:53And it's something that we need to maintain constantly. I would say Monday morning, do a perspective audit and see who do I understand? How long has it been since I've spoken with them or I've updated how they're seeing the world and to get those meetings into your schedule? And if your stakeholders are people who, you know, an influencer from halfway around the world who's bringing people to your products or not, to be able to read about them, to watch their videos and try to understand what they see that we don't yet see. And so that's an extremely important skill. And it's a very new skill for leaders because up until now, it's been important to assess what we see.

20:46But today we're going to have to go out and seek out information and And that's distributed in the minds of very different people because otherwise we're dealing with change that we can't always see. And so that's one very important skill. And another is being able to adapt quickly, being able to know yourself so that you can tell yourself, this is how I've created value in the past. I've been the person, for example, who has had a lot of the answers because I've been able up until now to rely on my experience and my expertise. But what I'm encouraging leaders to do is to move from being an expert to the chief investigator of their company.

21:34Because in order to know what's happening today, you can't just be an expert according to what you've learned. You have to get out there and to be a chief investigator. and that is one of the most helpful things we can do in our roles to add to our toolbox. So important and I really like how you said chief investigator it just reminds people of the importance of being curious and actually speaking to people and I also love how your current work with leaders connects to that time when you were a child in new school and you had to talk to a lot of people to figure out how to actually make it, how to be successful in this new skill.

22:16Do you think that there are certain things that you see people are doing now or not doing now as it relates to AI that they will regret? It really depends on the situation, on what's at stake. But what is universal across many different situations is when we rely on AI without questioning it. It can be a tool and it can be fantastic in bringing us a lot of information that we can then use our judgment to put together. But to blindly use AI, it's like driving down a highway blind. We have a lot of people we can talk to, a lot of ways we can get different opinions and triangulate and to blindly accept what we see.

23:08And it's, and Chris, it's so easy to do. We're all busy. We all want to rely on someone intelligent, right? And this is artificial intelligence nonetheless. And it's, it sounds very convincing. So it's a very easy thing to do to rely on AI. And it's, it's understandable, even, but it's, it's so risky. And it's something that, you know, we just have to pause and take the time to, to either verify or to question. And I think that'll be a very reasonable and doable practice for us to maintain going forward. And if you feel comfortable sharing, could you share with us how you personally use AI and also how you recommend your clients to use AI?

24:02Sure, Chris, I use AI in a few different ways. But my favorite way of using AI is to create different AI personas. And usually this involves a lot of stakeholders around me. And most importantly, people who see the world opposite from me. And this is the most painful. And, you know, I always kind of, you know, pause for a second before getting the answers and reading them. But when we talk to, you know, whether it's a persona or an actual human being, someone who sees in the opposite direction of us, they're able to see our blind spots. And there's always something right about what they're seeing.

24:50And in a world where change is constantly around us from every direction, we're no longer in a world where because one person is right, the other is wrong. We both see part of the picture. And this is the magic of both using AI with personas that challenge you and also speaking to people who see the world in opposite ways from us. Because then we're able to see so much more. And I actually lead circles of CEOs, C-suite and other leaders who come together, sometimes from different continents, usually in the same level though, and are able to talk about their most difficult and longstanding problems together.

25:40And they often say, you know, I've never thought of that before when talking to someone who sees the world in an opposite way. And I never knew that was possible, but I've seen that you've done it. And so now I'm going to try it. And the beauty is that it really opens up a new set of options and possibilities for leaders when they talk to someone in a safe, curated environment and are able to see different options, solutions, and degrees of freedom that they didn't have before. And we use something called optimistic fear, because when we're in a situation where that's completely overwhelming, often as we feel today, with so much change coming from every direction and all the unknowns that come with it, to be able to say, I know there's risk, but I'm going to get up close to the situation anyways, because I have confidence that I will learn much more.

26:46and very often see more options and with those options see many more solutions. For someone who will be reading your book, what are the key things you want them to take away? A few things. I'll limit it down to two. Today, we may be right about what we see, but when things are constantly changing and we have a lot of unknowns around us, we often only see part of the picture. And even if we see the whole picture for a moment, that picture will change and we'll be back to seeing only part of the picture. So I would say it's no longer enough to be right in a world of change and complexity that's growing faster than we are.

27:35It's no longer enough to be right. The best leaders are not experts. They're not the ones with the answers. They're the ones with the best questions. And they will be able to see the most, the biggest part of the map and the landscape around us. And the other thing is that there are two types of perspective blindness where that would lead us to think that we see the whole picture when we don't. And the first is reality blindness, where we haven't asked enough questions to say, I have a good picture of really to get up close to situations, to people, to ideas, to information, even when they're very, very different.

28:23And we take this for granted, because up until now, the landscape has been much more stable than it will be, especially going into the future. So after we learn something, we can have a reasonable confidence that it will stay true for a certain amount of time. But going forward, what we learn may change from day to day. And so practicing the habit of constantly getting up close to people, ideas and situations can help us prevent reality blindness. And the other type of blindness is projection blindness, because we may not know what's happening around us, but we often think that other people see the world we do.

29:15Or we save time and speed by assuming that other people have the same assumptions that we do. Of course they would. Why would they possibly see it differently? It's obvious. Anyone with any logic will be able to see what I see. But we have a fragmentation of what different people are experiencing today. And in a senior management team, for example, the CFO may see vastly changing capital markets. Um, regulations are changing, uh, day by day. We have AI, which is evolving, uh, on a constant basis. We have different factors of change affecting different members of our senior management teams. And so we can't necessarily assume that we see the world that they do.

30:14And we have a fragmentation of realities. And each person can be right according to what they see and the reality that they're living. But altogether, if we don't understand everyone's perspective, especially in a senior management team and how it's constantly evolving, then we may make decisions that answer the wrong questions or make decisions without really understanding the full landscape around us. for companies that are feeling the pain because of how the world changed with the rise of ai and automation and they need to find other products and services they can offer to the market that will be a better fit what would be some of the first steps they should take the first step is to really be open-minded and to think this is how for example um consulting this is how i've delivered value in the past.

31:13What do people need today? And how can I deliver that value going forward? And then from those answers, we can get up close to people who would be able to answer whether this new purpose for our product would be helpful or not. And then from there, be able to implement it. But it's, it's hard to think that we may need to change our assumptions about the value that we create, because we're so entrenched in what we do every day. But, and this is one of the hardest things, but to be able to question what value we're actually giving to other people, What do they need? And does this value that I create still fit in the world today?

32:07What are their needs today? And are there other substitutes for what I'm providing? being able to address those painful questions as if you have nothing to do with this position that you're actually in and to be able to 100 % say, yes, I'll be in the customer's mind and I can cut Cornelia and her offering out as well. That will really help us see more possibilities and be able to use that optimistic fear. And let me give you an example. Uber Jolie, when he first started working at Best Buy, he got up close to a lot of different employees, heard their opinions, and even was working on the shop floor with a badge that said CEO in training.

32:59And he was wearing a blue t-shirt and khakis like many other employees around him. And he was able to see that a lot of the problems at Best Buy were self-inflicted, as he called it. And he saw a lot of hidden levers that he could use to really improve operations. But he didn't just get up close to people inside the company. He got up close to a lot of competitors, even. Best Buy was predicted to be run out of the market by Amazon, by a lot of its suppliers from Samsung, Microsoft, Apple, for example. And he got up close to a lot of the leaders from these suppliers, for example, Samsung. And he learned that Samsung was looking for a place to showcase their items and found a new way to repurpose what Best Buy offered.

34:04And he created the concept of stores inside stores where, for example, Samsung would be able to have an area where they could showcase their products. And this was extremely helpful, not just in rolling out these stores in stores for Samsung, but also for many other suppliers and very, very big suppliers like Microsoft and other suppliers. So this is another example of where we're able to get up close to people who may not be our customers today and to be able to see how we can provide a different kind of value and to say, OK, how do they see Best Buy? They may not need Best Buy in this situation, but they have another need.

34:50And where can we align our maps to create a win-win, but also to fulfill that need and to be able to transform ourselves to shapeshifters instead of telling ourselves, this is how I create value. This is what my identity is. and to, again, shift from being experts in what we do to chief investigators and to new possibilities. For someone who will listen to this podcast today and decide, you know what, I need to speak to customers, what would be your recommendations on the right questions to ask and the right way to approach this conversation? Chris, I'm going to flip your question around because I think one of the best things to do is to not ask a lot of questions.

35:39And to just zip it and listen and to try to understand what they're thinking. Sometimes when we ask questions, you know, when we start a new company, for example, there's a book called The Mom Test where we're working with a product that's not great. But then we talk to our mom and she says, honey, that's amazing. Like, of course, of course, you're going to do well when in reality, people who are not your mother will not be interested in the product. So, you know, it's when we talk to different people and get up close, if we say this, this is what I'm thinking. Can you verify it? We can be at risk of getting a misleading answer.

36:34People don't like to reject others or bring on discomfort. And so we have a much higher probability that people will say, yeah, it's great. So I would say one of the most important things to do is to just listen. Whatever direction they go in, use that as a clue. And consider whether you want to put that on your map of understanding of the landscape. And so I would say instead of asking the best questions in this scenario at the beginning, I would say at the very beginning, just listen and try to understand what has happened in their life to lead them to think what they do. In conclusion of today's session, what would be your final words of wisdom for our listeners?

37:29I would say the goal is not to eliminate uncertainty. Uncertainty will always be there and change will only increase in velocity going forward. But we can reduce the risk of making mistakes of our perspective blindness by getting up close, by taking a wider, more panoramic view before making decisions. and to pause before making important decisions and to ask ourselves, who sees this differently? Why do they see this differently? What do they see? And which of my assumptions would they change? Because just starting that can lead to a series of questions and kind of a really good reality to check and an expansion of the map that can be very helpful before making important decisions.

38:29Bernalette, thank you so much for being with us today. Where can our listeners learn more about you, buy your book, anything you want to share? Sure, Chris. The book is called The Panoramic Leader and we're on Amazon, Barnes and Nobles and many other outlets. And to learn more about me and to get in touch, I would love to hear from you as well. You can go to Cornelia Cho.com. It's C-O-R-N-E-L-I-A-C-H-O-E.com. Thank you so much. Cornelia, thank you again. Really appreciate you being here with us. It was a pleasure. Thanks, Chris. Our guest today again was Cornelia Cho and our podcast sponsor today is strategytraining.com.

39:12We have some gifts for you. you can get access to episode one of how to build a consulting practice at firmsconsulting.com forward slash build. If your goal is to strengthen your strategy skills, you can download the overall approach used in well-managed strategy studies at firmsconsulting.com forward slash overall approach. And if you are currently updating your resume, you can get a proven winning resume example, a template that we use with all our clients and most of our clients are very senior it works very well at senior levels as well and you can get it at friendsconsulting.com forward slash resume pdf thank you so much for tuning in and i'm looking forward to connect with you all next time

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40:36Thank you.