The road to 1 billion innovative leaders.
Jens Heitland, Founder and CEO of Succeed, February 10, 2023
I founded Succeed on October 1st, 2022 as a startup to make leadership education available to 1 billion people. This letter will allow you to look behind my vision.
Background: I had the pleasure to work in and with small and very large organizations over the past 20 years. One ever present challenge almost all organizations face when they try to innovate is building a system that allows innovation to happen naturally over and over again. Most companies focus primarily on processes to innovate. They build a strategy, an innovation funnel and start initiatives that lead to success. But when a manager or management changes, initiatives, strategies and even full departments are not needed anymore and all learnings and insights wander into the waste bin. People leave organizations and take the knowhow to other companies. This might sound negative, but happens every day.
Why is this the case? Is one of the questions that I tried to answer within the last few years. Why would a new manager or management team trash all the strategies, ideas and insights and demotivate employees while doing that? There are many reasons I discovered.
Here are just a few examples:
The direction of the company changes through the new manager and therefore the innovation is not fitting the future strategy anymore.
The new manager has not been part of initiating the direction and does not see the value for the organization.
The manager is not in control of the innovation / process / team / ideas and sees it as a threat to what they want to accomplish.
There is no clear return on investment for the innovation initiatives.
If you work in an organization you might be familiar with some of the points, as this is not only true for innovation.
Don’t get me wrong, I understand the reasons and how this happens. You could argue it is not the managers fault and other people in the company could have onboarded them etc. Here we come back to the system that is faulty. If there is no system in place this will happen over and over again. Most managers are not to blame, they do things for good reasons and there is a rationale for that.
Let us have a look into the two major root causes to the challenges above:
The incentive structures of organizations: Including shareholders, management and all people working in them. Shareholders and managers are incentivised on the profit of the organization. It doesn't matter if and how the organization solves their vision or the problem they have been founded for. And sometimes the incentives are even disconnected from the customer's needs.
The promotion process: For all positions that lead people in any organization. The Peters Principle states that a person who is competent at their job will earn a promotion to a position that requires different skills. If the promoted person lacks the skills required for the new role, they will be incompetent at the new level, and will not be promoted again. This also means they will often stay on that level and demotivate all people reporting to them. Leadership capabilities are often neglected when promoting people into managerial positions.
The road ahead: Now that we have laid the foundation, let's look into the road ahead for Succeed. The overarching goal of Succeed is to enable innovative leaders to change the way companies are built and lead so that they tackle the big challenges like climate change, global health issues, hunger and more. All this starts with leadership. It does not matter how great the company, process and team is, if one leader can fuck it all up in a matter of weeks.
Before we go into the how, let's look into how I arrived at 1 billion people?
To educate 1 billion people requires us to radically think differently and truly innovate. Example: Imagine we would pay every person that completes a level of the leadership education and further incentivise this person to spread the knowledge in their leadership role over their whole lifetime.
According to the United Nations, the world's population in 2022 was 8 billion people. If we take the global view that 25% of the population is below 15 years old and 10% is above 65 years old we have 65% of the total population (5.2 billion people) in the potential work age. If we assume that every manager can lead 7 people we end up with 743 million potential leaders. Let’s jump to 2050 where the UN foresees a world population of 9.7 billion people. Taking the same 65% and the ratio of 7, we will arrive at 900 million people.
Yes, this is all based on the averages and does not take people into account that are not able to work etc. But this helps to get an understanding of the scale needed if we want to change the world.
I believe in easy to remember numbers, that is why I put the ambition to 1 billion and honestly if we add school kids (which we should) the number is even higher.
I am aware that there will be people arguing on these numbers and don’t agree with it. But let me tell you one thing, the world is not waiting for us, climate change, hunger and other challenges require bold steps.
Let’s look into phase one of the plan to educate 1 billion.
As you might have noticed, the initial product of Succeed is a leadership content based self learning platform. However the long term goal is to build a digital platform that snowballs human leadership education into society. This requires building a scalable ecosystem from day one.
The foundations of that ecosystem is educational content. We started with video because video can be easily broken down into different formats (video, audio, text and pictures). The engagement with this content will enable us to gain insights, what do leaders want to learn and how. Which in return enables educators to build better educational content to fulfill this need.
Another key foundational part of this ecosystem is network effect. On the innovative leader side (user) and on the educator side (producer). As more valuable content is accessible as more leaders sign up. As more leaders sign up as more educators want to produce leadership content.
The third foundational element is gamification. We have to make leadership education sexy and build gamification into the ecosystem. Not just to keep the attention of people. More important is to gamify and incentivise people so they use the knowledge outside of the digital ecosystem. And furthermore to bring the insights and learnings back into Succeed how we can further improve and create an even greater snowball effect.
The forth foundational element is assessment. We have to find new ways to create incentive systems for organizations look into ways how we measure leadership across organizations but also as an educational tool for individuals.
The last foundational element of the ecosystem are the business models. We have to build business models that enable scale plus incentivise Succeed and all platform users to reach our vision.
The start:
We start with the innovators, the people that build the businesses of the future. Founders and managers working in startups that are scaling, before we look for other organizations, school systems and more.
The reason: Startups that are scaling are onboarding many people in a short time. Leadership structures are often not fully implemented and most managers are not experienced in leading a lot of people. Additionally Founders and Managers in startups are willing to work digitally first (enabling scale), they are eager to learn and grow personally and professionally. Most people in startups are innovative leaders and want to change the world to be a better place. And that is what we are after nothing more and nothing less.
With plus 100k startups globally there are many innovative leaders in need which we want to help and get a great innovative community together that will help us further towards our goal.
Let’s change the world together the human way.
Jens Heitland