Toby Eduardo Redshaw is a global strategist, innovator, and sometimes bad poet. We’ve interviewed him in the past and each time we’re left invigorated and reminded of the significance great humor, perspective and progressive thinking has in our industry.
Here are a few highlights from the conversation I had with Toby a few weeks back.
M.R Rangaswami: Of all the ventures that have crossed your desk, what is one idea or concept that got away?
Toby Eduardo Redshaw: If you have been active out on the innovation edge for some time, I think you have several of these that become clear, if not painful, in hindsight. I have a dozen or so. Bad timing on clever XR. Running eBusiness at a giant tech firm back in 2003, head of strategy at an internet native enterprise B2B commerce stack, and early guy at Workday, a top slot at PeopleSoft were all entreaties I walked away from where I think I could have made a big difference and a great outcome. In high school, we had a talented artist pal, and lots of my friends bought his work for almost nothing. Not doing that turned out I was leaving a 3000x return on the table.
M.R.: What is an enterprise trend you’ve seen people chase that leaves you shaking your head?
Toby: AI projects intended to show upstairs they are on it and making an impact, without a board-top-down strategy refresh and without a hard look at the state of IT and what to do about it. If your IT department is just average and you aren’t fixing that, you have little chance of managing this AI wave well.
M.R.: When you look at our industry as a whole, what is something that people often get right?
Toby: Pivoting. The capability to be 110% committed to an idea, plan, and path, and then really hearing what signals the real world is giving you and pivoting accordingly. In the enterprise world that is so very scarce.
M.R.: As an industry, what can we get better at?
Toby: We need to get much better at being responsible participants in our communities, simply being constructively charitable, thinking through positive structural impacts across society that we can do because of our capabilities and the nature of the industry we are in.
There are some marvelous positive examples, but they are few, and we just generally suck at that. We have a long way to go to be lauded as an overwhelmingly positive sector for society. Even more so when you think about what a dozen top companies could do if they collaborated on key societal-level or ecosystem issues.
The top ten tech firms have the market cap of $30T. You need the top 285 non-tech firms to equal that. Reinvent the AI native B corp?
M.R.: What is your hope for our industry in the next three years?
Toby: Well, 1) I hope we realize just how big this change wave is. It is three industrial revolutions worth of impact and change inside a decade. and 2) I’d like to see how we create a new model for pan-economic, low-bureaucracy, ecosystem-level impact generation. Key parts of a Manhattan Project, a Zaibatsu and a B Corp all pulling at an ecosystem level. Without that, I fear the economic ecosystem approach in China will leapfrog us within 5 years.
M.R. Rangaswami is the Co-Founder of Sandhill.com