Dr. Ichak Kalderon Adizes
Doctor of Philosophy, Founder and CEO of the Adizes Academy of Management, International speaker, author of books
Speaker Bio
Dr. Ichak Kalderon Adizes is one of the world's leading management experts and an internationally best-selling author. He has written 27 books, translated into a combined total of over 31 languages.
Dr. Adizes is the founder and CEO of the Adizes Institute, an international change management company based in Santa Barbara, California.
Dr. Ichak Adizes has received many recognitions, including 21 honorary doctorates, two honorary Eastern European citizenships, the rank of honorary lieutenant colonel in the Israeli army, and the 2010 Ellis Island Medal of Honor. He is also a Fellow of the International Academy of Management.
Leadership Excellence magazine named Dr. Adizes one of the Top Thirty Thought Leaders on Leadership, and The Holmes Report named him as one of the Best Communicators Among World Leaders for 2017 alongside Pope Francis, Angela Merkle, and the Dalai Lama.
Dr. Adizes lectures in four languages and has appeared before well over two hundred fifty-thousand senior-level executives in more than fifty-two countries.
His book Corporate Lifecycles: How Organizations Grow and Die and What to Do About It (subsequently revised, expanded, and republished as Managing Corporate Lifecycles (2012)) was named one of the Ten Best Business Books by Library Journal.
Speech
Thank you for inviting me and giving me space to share with you my thinking in our modern life.
Let’s review civilization. History of civilization, of humanity. We started as chimpanzees, if you follow Darwin. And the strongest chimpanzee was a leader. Then we became a nomadic society, and the strongest hunter was a leader. Then it became an agricultural society, and the one with the most sheep or cows, or land became the leader. What is the common denominator? Power, strength. And it permeated our philosophy in colonialism. Philosophy of colonialism: the more land you have, the more resources you have, the stronger you are. More is better, that was the philosophy. More is better! More, more, more, more, more, more!
Then came the industrial revolution. The brain got into the act, now we had to plan and organize, and budget, and systematize. So, it was power and brain. Today, we live in a post-industrial society, where the brain is a dominant factor now. Not power, brain.
The biggest company in the transportation business does not own one car. They own just a computer and information that they can manipulate. What is it called? Uber. The biggest hotel in the world does not own one hotel. They have the computer and information. What is it called? Airbnb.
What do the biggest companies on Earth today in the stock market, the most valuable ones, have? Information. What do you think is Google doing? Information. What is Amazon accumulating? Information, manipulating information, handling information, managing information.
What is Facebook trying to do? Even more and more and more and more. More information. More information. The future of companies of success is going to be in those that can get data and manage data. That's what digitalization is, the age of digitalization. The brain is a source of success. Muscle is losing it.
Just being in manufacturing — hmph... That's where the whole economy is moving to, the service industry, which is brain. But that is on its way out, too. With artificial intelligence, with quantum computing, it's going to be more powerful than our brain, we are going to rely on that to decide for us. Somebody is going to develop it there and it's going to be bigger and stronger than those who developed it. The brain is on its way out. So what is on its way in? What is the future like? The heart.
If we do not listen, if we do not make the transition and develop the heart as the driving force of our behavior, of our culture, of our foreign policy, of who we are as humanity. And we stay with power and brain, Nazi Germany was not a fluke in the history of mankind. It was a preamble. A point of what's going to happen.
Imagine, what was Nazi Germany? Knowledgeable, powerful, and they had a lot of literature and even art. And Hitler loved to listen to music. Brain and power, no heart. How could these people burn little children? How could they have done it? And gas people: women, children, old people. Brain, power, no heart.
So, if we continue as humanity, more and more into the brain, more and more into the power, stronger and stronger arms of destruction: biological, chemical, nuclear, more and more powerful, more and more artificial intelligence, and no heart — the whole world will become Nazi Germany. And we're going to destroy ourselves. We're going to kill each other.
The 20th century, more people were killed by other people than accumulatively in the history of mankind. Before that, before the 20th century, we killed each other in thousands. In the 20th century, we killed each other in millions. So the 21st century — more and more powerful? Brain, artificial brain that has no heart?
Think about your grandchildren, the world they're going to live in. And what does integration come from? The heart. Why? What is the utmost of integration, maximum of integration you can imagine? What is it? What is it called? Love. An integration is the solution of a disintegrating planet, disintegrating humanity. So what is the solution? Love. And if you don't develop Love, God help us. Thank you.