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How do top CEOs lead during this exponential age?
How do you manage the explosion of information and onslaught of increasing competition?
How do you sort through the abundance of opportunity and prevent getting burned out?
How do you maintain agility during today’s tsunami of change?
Today’s blog is the first of three parts deriving insights and advice from three incredible, forward-thinking leaders: Beth Comstock, Sue Siegel, and Arianna Huffington (their bios are below).
Beth, Sue and Arianna participated in my 2017 Abundance 360 CEO Summit in a module called “Exponential Leadership.”
There is post in this blog for any exponential leader, so let’s dive in.
Meet the Exponential Leaders
Beth Comstock is the vice chairman of GE. In this capacity, she leads GE's efforts to accelerate new growth. She heads GE's business innovations including GE Lighting, GE Ventures, GE Licensing, GE sales, marketing and communications. And since 2008, she has served as GE's Chief Marketing Commercial Officer.
Sue Siegel is the CEO of GE Ventures. She heads their growth innovation business investing, licensing new creations. Previously, Sue was the President of Affymetrix, and she’s had 30 years of combined commercial experience. She's also on my board at Human Longevity Inc., which I'm very proud of, and GE is an investor in HLI.
Arianna Huffington is the founder of Huffington Post, the Founder and CEO of Thrive Global and a fellow Greek. She is the author of 15 books, including "Thrive – The Sleep Revolution.” She's been named by Time Magazine and by all of us as one of the most influential people on the planet.
All three of these leaders had extraordinary insights to share about leadership in exponential times.
For part 1, let’s dive into Beth’s top takeaways.
Beth Comstock’s Eight Principles of Exponential Leadership
Beth has an extraordinary mindset as a leader at GE.
“These days, I think you have to be constantly thinking about what's next, what's new, and how do I adapt,” Beth began, during her address to A360 members.
Beth outlined eight principles for exponential leadership. Read carefully.
1. Be a Mission-Based, “Emergence Leader”: If you're a leader today, your job is change and culture. It's a lot of other things, but it doesn’t matter where you are in the organization, [the most important aspects] are change and culture. The old is going away (but it has not fully disappeared), the new is emerging and we're all trying to make sense of it. Change suddenly shows up and it's disruptive. An emergence leader is constantly focused on and ready for change.
2. Organize Around Information Flows: In the digital age, information moves fast. To keep up with information flows, you have to ditch hierarchy. There's no room for bureaucracy. It's about openness, candor, radical feedback and full transparency. If you organize your organization around these tenets, you’ll thrive. At GE, we've really reorganized ourselves as a digital industrial company digitizing everything we can get our hands on.
3. Empower Individuals: Build a team of people who are prepared for change and empower them to do great work. The question is: how do you get people to get excited to grab power and go for it? More autonomy.
4. Define your company's “MO” – Mindset Orientation: Mindset is everything. As a leader, you must provide the vision and then allow your teams to figure their way out. Create a mindset that incentivizes them to do what they need to do the fastest, best way they can. It means they may fail. You should encourage them to fail fast, learn from their mistakes, and keep going. At GE, this process is called FastWorks, and it's built on lean startup methodology.
5. Establish Feedback Loops: Exponential leaders must both give and receive feedback—and importantly, they have to actually use it. Beth offers three ideas here:
First: “One of the things we've done at GE is we've actually gotten rid of our employee performance reviews. Anyone in the organization can give anyone feedback. I just did a Facebook Live event last week and one of my young colleagues in the company gave me some feedback. It wasn't so good… ‘You weren't looking at the camera at the right point. You looked like you were distracted.’ It was hard feedback to receive, but it was encouraged.”
Second: Beth suggests asking your team a very direct question that yields a lot of value: “What is the one thing that is true that you think I don’t want to hear?” Beth comments that you’ll be amazed what you’ll learn. It’s extremely valuable.
Third: Rather than doing long, convoluted employee surveys, stick to a simple feedback mechanism: Continue, or consider. You get feedback that says either “Continue doing X” or “Consider changing X to make it better.” It’s really simple, fast and actionable.
6. Get Used to Living in the In-Between: Exponential leaders are comfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty. This is going to be key to survive the change that is coming. Beth advises, “Get used to the ambiguity of working with people who know how to figure it out and who don't need as much instruction.”
7. Mash Up Minds and Machines: Exponential leaders use technology to their advantage, combining the power of computing and data with human leadership. They must develop collaborations between people and machines, between artificial intelligence, machine learning, and the people operating in their company, their customers and their executives. Teams that don’t do this will be left behind.
8. Prioritize Innovation and Observe Patterns That Block It: Innovating is really hard. Good leaders understand they have to navigate the tension. Sometimes leaders give up, and they don't hold their team accountable for growing. They themselves back off on it. And so is it any wonder that the people on the team deprioritize innovating? It’s also important to stick around a while. I've been around my company a while, and it's only after a few years that you start to see the patterns and to understand what went wrong.
In Conclusion…
Change is coming. Exponential leaders must prepare for it and embrace it.
Beth concluded, “I think we still need great leaders with vision, the ability to find and coach people, to encourage people, to help them renew themselves, to go forward…
“I'm a firm believer that the future still depends on great leaders who can constantly reinvent themselves.” –Beth Comstock, Vice-Chair, GE
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Robot Operating System (ROS)
http://www.ros.org
Today by far the most commonly used robotics software is ROS, which stands for Robot Operating System. This is an open source software, and the most number of developers and robotics users are involved with this program with an ever increasing rate. It contains set of libraries, algorithms, developer tools and drivers for developing robotics projects. The first release of ROS was in 2010, and as of beginning of 2017, ROS has reached its 10th official release, which is called “ROS Kinetic Kame”. There are translations to 11 languages other than English, which are: German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Turkish, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Thai and Chinese. It currently has 2000+ software libraries, which keeps increasing every year.
Many robots use ROS now, including but not limited to hobby robots, drones, educational or advanced humanoid robots, domestic robots including cleaning robot vacuums, cooking robots or telepresence robots and more, robot arms, farming robots, industrial robots, even Robonaut of NASA in space or the four legged military robots in development. A list of robots which use ROS can be found here: http://wiki.ros.org/Robots. In here, the link to each robot shows varying information such as packages, installation, resources, related software if any, usage and other details about how ROS is used for that robot. It virtually standardizes the robotics software and therefore prevents “reinventing the wheel” by individual robot developers.
We were checking the Alexa.Com (a website that gives you the ranking of websites in the world) ranking of ROS since few years, in order to track the increase in usage:

Copyright: Robokingdom LLC

As can be seen here, in May 2011, when we first checked this ranking, ROS.org was at 189,000 th place in the world from the top among all other websites in terms of unique visitors that visit the site, and it almost continuously increased its ranking. As of February 2017, it is now the 15,621st most reached website in the world, with mostly being accessed in Japan (6044 from top in Japan). Let’s not forget that even if it’s ranking in the world remained the same, let alone going up, it would still mean the traffic of the site was going up, as every day there are more websites in the world which means the same ranking means better place and more traffic. The ranking of 15,621 means ROS.org is a very high traffic website in the world right now, being accessed probably by at least hundreds of thousands of people every day, with no indication of slowing down its rise yet.
The most important result of all of this, is that the use of robots is increasing, both in terms of number and type (when you look at the type of robots that use ROS, as it also increases in variety all the time).
From Alexa, we were also able to see, that the percentage of reach among countries for ROS.org is as follows as of February 2017:
Japan 22.9%
China 19.8%
USA 13.7%
South Korea 9.0%
Germany 5.2%
With ROS, any type of sensors can be controlled, including 1d/2d range sensors, 3d range finders and cameras, audio/speech recognition sensors, cameras, environmental sensors, force/torque/touch sensors, motion capture, pose estimation, power supply, RFID, and sensor interfaces.
In ros.org site, in addition to all packages, there are also extensive tutorials and a discussion board that one can ask questions and share knowledge.
ROS also has an industrial section, the version of software modified for industrial applications. It is called ROS industrial, and can be reached at: http://rosindustrial.org/. Although we see domestic robots with new abilities or advanced research projects that aim to develop capabilities of robotics every year, according to the results of a study that is shown on http://rosindustrial.org/the-challenge/ website, the abilities of industrial robots are not progressing and the abilities are restricted to welding, material handling, dispensing, coating (although we know that they do additional tasks such as packaging, inspection, labeling etc…). ROS Industrial aims to solve this challenge by providing a common skeleton to all developers, with its extensive and stronger software architecture, than other individual robotics programs.
ROS makes possible to program a robot’s navigation and limbs, regardless of what hardware is used. Therefore it is a highly promising tool to standardize operations of robots all over the world. It has high level commands for anything a robot can do. ROS starts its operation in a robot first by obtaining information about the robot’s characteristics, such as the length and movement limits of limbs, servos involved, sensors and then it will communicate this data to higher level algorithms.
A discussion forum that users and developers of ROS where users can share information and ask questions also exist, at ROS website : http://answers.ros.org/questions/
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