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BARRY O’REILLY 1
Why Great Leaders Must Unlearn to
Succeed in Today’s Exponential World
Host: Mark Graban
Senior Advisor, KaiNexus
Mark@KaiNexus.com
Presenter: Barry O’Reilly
Author of Unlearn
barry@barryoreilly.com

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BARRY O’REILLY 2
Webinar Logistics
• Presentation (45 minutes)
• Q&A (10 minutes)
– Use the GoToWebinar
Meeting Panel to
submit a question at
any time
• Recording link & slides will be sent via email
– Also – see the “Handouts” feature and Chat box

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BARRY O’REILLY 3
Presenter Background
About Barry O’Reilly
• Author of Unlearn: Let Go of Past Success to
Achieve Extraordinary Results
• Co-author of Lean Enterprise: How High-
Performing Organizations Innovate at Scale
• Founder of ExecCamp
• Faculty at Singularity University
• University:
– Business Information Systems and Management,
Technological University Dublin

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BARRY O’REILLY 4

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BARRY O’REILLY
having fought successively against all peoples,
they always gave up their own practices
as soon as they found better ones..
Baron de Montesquieu
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Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline (1734)

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BARRY O’REILLY
• Today’s problems come from yesterday’s “solutions.”
• The harder you push, the harder the system pushes back.
• Behavior grows better before it grows worse.
• The easy way out usually leads back in
• The cure can be worse than the disease.
• Faster is slower.
• Cause and effect are not closely related in time and space.
• Small changes can produce big results—but the areas of highest
leverage are often the least obvious.
• You can have your cake and eat it too—but not at once.
• Dividing an elephant in half does not produce two small elephants.
• There is no blame.
LEARNING ORGANIZATIONS
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Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization (1990)

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BARRY O’REILLY
Knowledge grows, and simultaneously
it becomes obsolete as reality changes.
Understanding involves both learning
new knowledge and discarding obsolete
and misleading knowledge.
Bo Hedberg
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How organizations learn and unlearn, Handbook of organizational design, Vol. 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press (1981)

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BARRY O’REILLY
WORLD MOST VALUABLE COMPANIES
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1998 2008 2018
Microsoft Exxon Apple
General Electric General Electric Amazon
Exxon Microsoft Microsoft
Shell AT&T Alphabet
Merck Procter and Gamble Facebook

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BARRY O’REILLY
1998 2008 2018
Microsoft Exxon Apple
General Electric General Electric Amazon
Exxon Microsoft Microsoft
Shell AT&T Alphabet
Merck Procter and Gamble Facebook
WORLD MOST VALUABLE COMPANIES
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BARRY O’REILLY
Disruption does not actually apply to organizations.
The truth is it applies to individuals
@barryoreilly
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Unlearn: Let Go of Past Success to Achieve Extraordinary Results

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Right now, your company has 21st century Internet
enabled business processes,
mid 20th century management processes,
all built atop 19th century management principles.
Gary Hamel, American Management Expert

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BARRY O’REILLY
Unlearning is…
the conscious act of letting go of outdated information
and actively engaging in taking in new information
to inform effective decision making and action.
@barryoreilly
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Unlearn: Let Go of Past Success to Achieve Extraordinary Results

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BARRY O’REILLY
CYCLE OF UNLEARNING
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Barry O’Reilly, Unlearn bit.ly/unlearnbook

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I want
YOU (NOT ME)
to transform
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f3/Uncle_Sam_(pointing_finger).jpg

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ExecCamp http://www.execcamp.com
ExecCamp
Break The Model. Reinvent The Business

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BARRY O’REILLY
HOW DOES IT WORK?
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ExecCamp http://www.execcamp.com
!+"

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BARRY O’REILLY
• Curiosity
• Ownership
• Commitment
• Comfort with being uncomfortable
• Create safety to succeed
CHARACTERISTICS YOU MUST CULTIVATE TO UNLEARN
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Barry O’Reilly, Unlearn bit.ly/unlearnbook

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“The challenge we have in this company is that we just need to change the leadership mindset”
- every executive team ever!
UNLEARN
LEADERSHIP
MINDSET
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BARRY O’REILLY 19
$365 Billioninvested in
executive development each year
1 in 4say training was
critical to business outcomes
HBR, Why Leadership Training Fails https://hbr.org/2016/10/why-leadership-training-fails-and-what-to-do-about-it

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BARRY O’REILLY
UNLEARNING LEADERSHIP MINDSET
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Unlearn by Barry O’Reilly, bit.ly/unlearnbook

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• The holding company of Aer Lingus, British Airways, Iberia,
LEVEL, Vueling, Avios Group Limited, and IAG Cargo.
• The sixth largest airline company in the world, based on revenue
of €22.9 billion in 2017.
• 63,000 employees, 547 aircraft, and carries some 105 million
passengers each year.
INTERNATIONAL AIRLINES GROUP
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Unlearn by Barry O’Reilly, bit.ly/unlearnbook

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BARRY O’REILLY
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CxO CxO CxOCustomer Customer Customer
What do you
think of my
amazing idea?
Dumb customer…
Get me another one…
And another…
And another…
Wait.. maybe it does suck?
It sucks
It still
sucks
Awesome!
How can I make it
better?
What do you
think of this idea?
Unlearn Zone Relearn until Breakthrough Extraordinary Results
It sucks

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Part of unlearning is not getting stuck doing only what worked
in the past. When 97 percent of people think you should just
go back to doing what you've been doing, or resist the change
that you are trying to make, you know you’re on to something,
and that’s where the breakthrough journey begins...
Stephen Scott Chief Digital Officer at IAG’s AVIOS Group Limited
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“I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen”
Ernest Hemingway
UNLEARN
KNOWING IT ALL
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BARRY O’REILLY 27

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UNLEARNING IS NOT A ONE TIME EVENT ———— IT’S CONTINUOUS

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“Failure is the key to success; each mistake teaches us something”
Morihei Ueshiba
UNLEARN
MISTAKES
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NASA Gallery https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/index.html

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NASA was great at learning, but we usually had
to fail really big before it became important
enough for us to unlearn and then move forward
Edward J Hoffman, PhD, Former, NASA Chief Knowledge Officer
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BARRY O’REILLY
SURVIVAL ANXIETY vs LEARNING ANXIETY
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Edgar Schein, Organization Culture and Leadership
LEARNING
ANXIETY
SURVIVAL
ANXIETY

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THE PYRAMID OF ADVANTAGE OR CATASTROPHE
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Ed Hoffman and Barry O’Reilly, bit.ly/unlearnbook

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GOOGLE ARISTOTLE PROJECT
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Project Aristotle https://rework.withgoogle.com/print/guides/5721312655835136/
Leading indicator for
high performance
teams was not how
smart you are but how
safe the team feel with
one another

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BARRY O’REILLY
THE PYRAMID OF ADVANTAGE OR CATASTROPHE
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Ed Hoffman and Barry O’Reilly, bit.ly/unlearnbook

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BARRY O’REILLY
The best way I know is for us to share our
stories —not in PowerPoint—but personally
We strive for a culture of speaking up
with concerns, and a culture of
leaders who stay curious
Robert Lightfoot, former NASA Acting Administrator
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“You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending”
C. S. Lewis
HOW YOU CAN
THINK BIG AND START SMALL
TO UNLEARN TODAY
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BARRY O’REILLY 41
The Power of Unlearning, https://barryoreilly.com/the-power-of-unlearning/

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BARRY O’REILLY 42
THINK BIG START SMALL
COURAGE OVER COMFORT
SCALE SAFETY
@barryoreilly
Unlearn: Let Go of Past Success to Achieve Extraordinary Results

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BARRY O’REILLY
In order to succeed, it's critical for everyone from
executives to entrepreneurs to know how to let go of
behavior and methods that have helped them achieve in
the past but are now limiting.
UNLEARN explains how to enter into a continuous cycle
of replacing old ideas and models with new ones in order
to adapt in an ever-changing world. Founded on clear
principles and filled with stories from the field, it
advocates for courage over comfort not just now, but in
whatever circumstances the future offers up.
— Eric Ries, founder LTSE and
author of "The Startup Way” and “The Lean Startup”
CURIOUS TO UNLEARN MORE?
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Order at: http://bit.ly/unlearnbook

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THANK YOU
Barry O’Reilly
Business Advisor, Entrepreneur,
Faculty Singularity University and
Author of Unlearn: Let Go of Past Success to
Achieve Extraordinary Results
barry@barryoreilly.com
@barryoreilly
Join https://barryoreilly.com/newsletter/ for slides and samples of Unlearn, Lean Enterprise and more

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BARRY O’REILLY 45
Announcements
(Then Q&A)

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BARRY O’REILLY 46
Future Webinars
• Find the link to register (via Lean Frontiers) at
www.KaiNexus.com/webinars
• Mark Graban and Mike Wiersma, of Whirlpool
– “Simple CI: Creating a CI Process That is Easy for Anyone to Follow”
• March 12
• Open to all!

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Podcasts
• www.KaiNexus.com/podcasts
• Subscribe via:
– iTunes
– Google Play
– Stitcher

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BARRY O’REILLY 48
Other Resources
www.KaiNexus.com

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BARRY O’REILLY 49
Q&A
• Web:
– www.kainexus.com
– blog.kainexus.com
– www.valuecapturellc.com
• Webinars on Demand:
– www.kainexus.com/webinars
• Social Media:
– www.twitter.com/kainexus
– www.linkedin.com/company/kainexus
– www.facebook.com/kainexus
Mark Graban
Senior Advisor, KaiNexus
Mark@KaiNexus.com
Presenter: Barry O’Reilly
Author of Unlearn
barry@barryoreilly.com