Innovating Leadership:
Co-Creating Our Future

Resources:

Carla’s website is https://www.gobluechair.com/.

Our host Maureen Metcalf posts a newsletter every week on LinkedIn. You can subscribe here.

Maureen’s latest book is Innovative Leadership & Followership in the Age of AI. You’ll find details about it at https://bit.ly/LeaderInAI, or check out the Kindle version at https://amzn.to/44buVz8. The audiobook version is now available at  https://amzn.to/4dTCleZ.

Her other 10 books are available on Amazon here.

Other episodes you’ll enjoy:

– AI, Your Story, & the Professional Identity Crisis with Christopher Washington

– To Stop a Tyrant: The Power of Followers with Ira Chaleff

– In It Together: How Boston Consulting Group Combines Strengths from Every Generation with Alicia Pittman

Guest(s):

Guest(s) Bio:

Carla Morelli is a seasoned M&A and strategy advisor with extensive experience across startups, Fortune 200 companies, private equity-backed businesses, and global transactions. With deep expertise in deal execution, transformation, and post-merger integration, she brings a unique blend of financial acumen, strategic insight, and human-centered leadership. A Wharton Online-trained capability builder, Carla has led nine-figure P&Ls and advised on strategy and M&A across the Americas, Europe, and India. She is also an experienced executive coach and counselor, guiding CEOs and boards through growth, M&A readiness, and cultural alignment. Co-authoring key ILI content on merger success, Carla champions authentic, sustainable outcomes that align business objectives with human values.

Transcript
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Maureen: [00:00:00] Welcome to Innovating Leadership Co-Creating our Future, where we explore how leaders navigate complexity, scale, impact, and build organizations that perform without losing trust, culture, or long-term value. Today’s conversation is for leaders who are growing fast or preparing their for their next stage, blah.

Beep. There we go. It starts. growth creates opportunity, but it also exposes cracks in the leadership system, decision architecture, and execution discipline. Today I am joined by Carla Morelli as a core member of the Innovative Leadership Institute team.

Carla’s work focuses on helping organizations scale in ways that strengthen execution, leadership capacity, and culture, rather than stretching them to their breaking point. What makes Carla’s perspective distinctive is that she doesn’t treat scale as a growth tactic. She treats it as a system challenge.

Boy, was that a mouthful, Carla?

Carla: But a good mouthful.

Maureen: Yeah. Let’s start with [00:01:00] scaling. When leaders say we’re scaling, what does that really mean?

Carla: Scale is a really funny word. It can be both aspirational, IE we are going to grow very rapidly, or it could mean we’re intentionally going to build something that sizes quickly and sustains. A lot of times I find businesses talk about scaling and it’s really just runaway growth. That has happened because you have, let’s call it lightning in a bottle, or you’ve got something that you weren’t planning that suddenly you got one big customer who needs a certain kind of thing.

It represents a lot of revenue and you’re gonna do whatever it takes. And they call that scale to the extent that it means growth. That’s true. But scale in terms of something that is. Size sizes quickly and is sustainable scale and scalable, I guess I would say are not the same thing.

Maureen: So the distinction being sustainable.

Carla: [00:02:00] Yes, absolutely.

Something that can sustain scale to me is growth that is operationally, and I’ll say psychologically sustainable.

Maureen: Can you say more about psychologically sustainable? ’cause I don’t hear many people say that. They just seem like growth is good, stagnation is bad. It may appear that we’re not growing when in fact we’re, if we think about the natural world, we’re cultivating, we are planting, we’re expanding the foundation so that we can hit the next growth level.

Carla: Yes, that’s well said. There’s a saying that says you have to go, sometimes you have to go slow to move fast. That’s exactly what you’re saying. Psychologic for me, psychological the psychological component of scaling, psychological sustainability, has to do with how people are oriented toward all kinds of things.

And at ILI we look at innovative [00:03:00] leaders, right? So what does that mean? There’s a psychological resilience, right? That you’re able to sustain. Scale is strain. Growth is challenging. It puts a lot of strain and a lot of times it’s the leader’s psychological sort of orientation. That breaks first. It’s the ceiling on what a company can actually do, right? It’s, can you delegate? Do you have trust? Is there psychological safety? Meaning people feel like they can speak, like they can perform experiments. Like they can be how to say they can be collab, collaborative, experimental, innovative, at the risk of overusing the word innovative.

But those are the things that. I think are the foundation for scale being something that sustains, and then there’s the time of challenge that comes, right? All of the challenges that come alongside, there are leadership structures that change decision making structures that [00:04:00] change the systems piece.

And when I look at a business, I look at the operational foundation as a people process. Finance and technology. So across those four operational domains, changes occur when you start scaling, they have to you move across, maybe not a maturity model, but a capability model that says at earlier stages or smaller businesses, some of these  some of these characteristics, let’s say, are online.

As a leader, I do all the things. It’s me. It’s a small business. There are a couple of people, and I do all the things, make the decisions and own most of the relationships. As the company grows bigger, and I add people, and I’ll say, this is not revenue or number of employees dependent. It’s the whole context. But then as you move along that capability model, we start introducing other people into the mix. And then there are other decision makers, and then you’ve got leaders, and then you have teams, and then you have distributed teams. And so along [00:05:00] that continuum. Things have to change. People have to change their orientations, and a leader has to be able to do that.

The CEO, the person who was running the thing that now has teams running the things has to be able to delegate. And so the challenge that can come along with that is that the person may not be ready for those things themselves. So the psychological safety comes, and then the psychological orientation and the developmental orientation to, for me, comes from. Do I have a solid enough core and an integrated enough core that these kinds of changes that have to happen along the continuum as I get bigger, as the business scales, that I can both offer those. And if I don’t have the expertise to offer those, someone else can offer those and we can put them into practice in a way that is safe for everyone to also go and do.

Maureen: You’re talking about scaling and you made reference to smaller companies. [00:06:00] Let’s now pivot slightly and say I am a larger enterprise and I am in acquisition mode. How does that change the scaling equation? ‘ Cause we’re not looking at an individual leader. We’re looking at people who have been in corporate settings where we’re now potentially combining, we’re weeding.

How does scaling look in that context?

Carla: Beautifully messy question because I’ve spent a lot of time in mergers and acquisitions. Unfortunately, I’ll say it’s not that different in that I’ve always said acquisitions are people and people are messy. That’s just part of our charm. That’s just kinda how we are. And so when you’re bringing companies together, you’re still more often than not bringing people together and that we’re back to that. How is that person oriented? Are they able to. Sustain change, are they able to be open to, to examine, to [00:07:00] participate in? And so when you talk about scale in the sense of an acquisition, it comes in a couple of flavors.

One is I’m buying more of what I have and I wanna expand my existing market. In other cases, it’s, I wanna buy something that’s adjacent or completely different. That’s where I think scale tends to be trickier. When you’re bringing together disparate businesses or disparate lines of business, you’re bringing together oftentimes that operational structure of people, process, finance and tech can look very different, not just because it’s a different business, but because it’s doing something that’s very different and perhaps that different set combination of, of domains, the way they’ve set themselves up is actually appropriate for what they’re doing. It’s different than what you’re doing. And so at that point you need to be able to– again, I’m back to the psychology because look, the systems are the systems. The systems don’t care, right? The financials don’t care.

The processes don’t care. None of those [00:08:00] things care, right? The people who are engaging with those things are the ones who care. So I always bring it back to the people without trying to belabor like the what’s in your head and how are you feeling? It’s true. You can’t escape that. So when you start to have to try to mesh these things together and figure out, assuming that you don’t say, “We’re going to leave those businesses as they are,” because that’s an option.

You can run them as they are and that’s it. But oftentimes that’s not what happens. And you’re trying to merge these businesses together in some way so that they have a coherent message; people speak of the people inside the business, speak about that business in a common way. There may be underlying shared services, HR, finance, IT, legal, that’s now supporting all of the business.

The contracts may look the same now and the customer service may look the same. You’re merging those together. So as you work on those things, you have bought scale because now you’ve got a bigger thing than you had before by whatever factor you purchased. But you also have to figure out how to make that [00:09:00] work in a way that people come back tomorrow and say yes, and you’re getting them doing their best work. Again, the processes are not complicated. Even when they are, they’re not right, you can always distill these things down to something very simple and very granular. But where things fall apart is in the people and in the change management and in their orientation.

Maureen:  Is that the biggest challenge? And I know you’ve done lots of acquisitions across all kinds of industries. Is that the biggest challenge? And if so, why does it continue? To be such a challenge, if I know that something’s not working, why do I keep doing the same thing?

Carla: I also have a therapy practice on the side and I’ll just say after having done my own hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars, I still do the same dumb things. that’s the human condition. And I say that sort of tongue in cheek, but not completely. People have their own context, right?

Everyone’s got their context. There’s a lot of identity that’s, tied up in what one does at [00:10:00] work. Or for work, there’s survival, right? This may be how I feed my family, right?

So when you tie identity and survival together and then you’ve got whatever sort of, capabilities that you come online with, meaning I’m good at certain things, I’m not good at certain things, I may have underlying issues of anxiety or depression. you know, Maybe I’m an expert and I always have to be seen as being right.

It’s hard for me to back off of a point. I may be someone who’s more an achiever and I wanna get it done, and I don’t care if you’re right. Like I just wanna be fit. So when you start to get all the competing sort of things in there, acquisitions are people and people are messy.

Maureen: Okay.

Carla: so yeah, I think that is the fundamental, I think that is the kernel of pretty much anyone that didn’t go right unless someone has modeled incorrectly.

They made assumptions and diligence that were wrong, which is absolutely possible and happens all the time because you’re dealing with imperfect information and sometimes you have people who maybe shouldn’t be making those decisions or running those models anyway. So errors aside, assuming you got most of it , [00:11:00] the kernel is the people and the way they get through that is through their leadership period.

Maureen: so let’s go to then the decision making piece. ’cause you hit on that. Where do you most often see decision making? Slow down or even move as in the wrong direction, either during m and a or just during growth?

Carla: They can be different. But not always. I think it’s a question of pressure points. I would say in an acquisition you tend to have a lot of, it’s a bit pressure cooker. The timeline for diligence is very tight. There’s a lot on the table, there’s a lot at stake.

There’s a lot of uncertainty and you’re making big bets and on both sides, right? The

buyer and the seller, both. And the timeline is very compressed. And then on the other side of that, there’s a lot of pressure to deliver on the business case,

right? And to keep people and to make sure things don’t fall apart.

So there are a [00:12:00] lot of sort of reasons to try to run as fast as you can. Without sort of cramming people into, shoehorning people into such a setup that you got it wrong and now you have fallout. In a growth setting, I’ll say you can also have that situation, but I think there’s a lot more flexibility in how it’s handled, especially from a decision making perspective. When you’re talking about growth. I’m gonna make a bit of an assumption here, but it’s not. Totally wrong. You are in control. The business gets to pick, when am I gonna do this? How am I gonna do this? Who am I gonna do it for? Who am I gonna do it with? And sometimes that’s not true. You get a big customer who needs a certain thing, fine. I’ve seen it happen in multi-billion dollar companies, so it happens right at all sizes. And that customer may have a timeline and there may be real constraints there, but if you’re just talking about we wanna grow the business, we wanna enter a new market, we want to, we just wanna, we wanna take over a leadership position in the market. At that point, you’re [00:13:00] fully in control or mostly in control. And so the decision making can be quite an intentional and a deliberate thing. I would argue it should be.

Maureen: On the topic of decision making, let’s go to m and a for a minute. I’m just thinking of a client that I’m working with now. They’ve combined the two organizations, they’re still in the process of sifting through technology. New organization is gonna go on the acquiring companies platform, not, not uncommon. People are still getting sifted out. what do you recommend as the systems that enable integration? So I’m thinking decision rights, roles and responsibility, governance, reporting cadence, scorecarding, all the stuff that helps reduce the stress of, “I used to work here, now I’m driving to a different building or going into Zoom or teams in a different, with a [00:14:00] different bunch of people.”

Now we’re a bunch of humans. I may have been a C-level person, now I’m a level lower my iden back to the human stuff, right? My identity has changed. I don’t like it. I feel uncomfortable. I used to have all the information. I don’t anymore. How do we create the container for people to get traction quicker.

’cause one of the things I remember even from years ago is how long it takes for acquisitions to hit their financial targets. And it’s often not what was justified in the acquisition case.

Carla: No, I’ll just say aspirations are just that; we’ve all

seen it.

Maureen: I, yeah.

Carla: yeah and that’s a good question. Look, I’ll say I, I ran HR m and a for a part of the world for a Fortune 200 company a number of years ago, and so I [00:15:00] spent a lot of time in the HR world. And I did that on purpose because it was the one area that I really didn’t have a lot of experience in.

I used to run deals completely and I

said, ” if I wanna get steeped in a function, this is one I really don’t know very well.” And so we spent a lot of time because it was my team’s responsibility to not have the people go off the rails to the best of our ability, given that they weren’t our acquisitions.

There was a business unit, was buying something. And really truly, there are two things I would say that are really important. One is you have to, as the acquirer especially, you have to take a minute to understand where people are coming from. What I’ve seen time and time again is the arrogant acquirer who says you’re ours now and we’re gonna make all the decisions.

That is the worst thing you can do. I’ll say that flat out.

Maureen: It doesn’t work in dating and it doesn’t work in business.

Carla: No, nope. Yeah, no and so understand where people are coming from or back to identity survival. And oh, by the [00:16:00] way, these are the people that got the business to where it is, for better or for worse. This is the group that got you where you are. And so they may not all be worth keeping. And I say that sort of in the nicest way possible. They may not all be people that need to stay in the long run or even the, or in the medium or short term, however, they’re

still humans. I used to.

start my conversations, I used to start my phone calls at this company with “let’s agree that we’re human beings first and, fill in the blank your name, X assholes second,” right?

Sorry for the language, but humans first, and then let’s be, blind corporate people Second. And you need some of that. Not to say that doesn’t exist but it’s understanding people’s context and then understanding that this is the hearts and minds game. If those people don’t feel okay, then you’re not gonna get what you thought you were gonna get unless you’re only buying a bunch of customers.

And even then, you’re not gonna get what you thought you were gonna get. ’cause those customers will not be taken care of. They’re close to some of those people. They’re gonna hear the complaints, those customers are gonna leave. Especially when those people [00:17:00] leave. There are all kinds of reasons why you don’t wanna do this if you don’t just wanna look at the human component. So in terms of what do you do, how do you create a container? It’s about openly acknowledging what you know today and what you don’t know today. Here are the things we can tell you that we know here, what your benefits are gonna look like. Here’s what we think the org structure’s gonna look like, or here’s what we don’t know.

We don’t know what the org structure’s gonna look like yet. We think we’ll know in the next two weeks, or you give people as much information as you can without saying so many “I don’t knows.” We don’t know this and we don’t know that. We don’t know this and we don’t know that. You can give one umbrella one and say, “we don’t know X. This is something we’re working on.” You pull in people, aside from the leaders you pull in what we used to call spheres of influence. So who are the people inside the business in various places who may not be in leadership positions, but people gravitate to? You bring those people in, you create, and if the, if it’s a big enough acquisition with enough people, if you’re talking about you bought something, it could even be very expensive, but maybe you bought something that has 30 people.

You don’t do this quite [00:18:00] as much. Excuse me. But if you bring people in and you create a change, you can create a change network where those people are solicited for input and they’re the ones who filter back out to everybody. Here are some of the changes. They’re your change champions as you, they’re more classically known.

So there, there are things that can be done, again, human and communication wise that are in some cases basic change management principles. But they really apply here because what’s at risk is so big. It’s not just your check, it’s the reputation of your business. It’s unemployment, it’s lawsuits, the liability is quite large.

So approach it with intention. And I think it’s, you get a much, much better outcome.

Maureen: one of the things I was talking to a recent client about is using one of the assessments that I’ve used with lots of clients, the position success indicator to map the people.

So stepping away from: bill lost his C-level job and he’s [00:19:00] replaced by Fred or fill in the blank. If we step it back and look at what’s the distribution in the system, I can now take a human, but predominantly systems view and say for where we are in the integration, who takes which role. Then once we stabilize, who takes which role Is there, are we going to continue to acquire and grow?

In which case, I’m gonna want someone who’s an improver or an integrator. If we’re going to level out, I may want someone stabilizing, and so I would use an assessment to make the human piece a little more objective and a little less personal.

Carla: That’s very fair. Yes. And I love the position Success [00:20:00] Indicator. PSI is a great way to look at both people and their orientations and people with respect to a business and business with respect to strategy like it’s a… For me, that’s a really great lens to be looking through. For sure.

And I think one of the things that it does really nicely, that I would say is true everywhere irrespective of scenario m and a versus not, is it’s always gonna be a function of humans. Psychology and systems like those two go together, period. They don’t travel separate from each other. One cares, the other doesn’t.

And when you put them together, you have a holistic sort of thing that is its own sort of almost living, breathing, being, I’ll say. So I don’t think you can, you can’t escape the, you can’t escape the psychology, but you can’t escape the system either so and so Then you have a system, you have systems within a system, right?

Maureen: So when you say one cares and one doesn’t, I’m going to clarify that because I’ve heard you say those words so many times, [00:21:00] but our listeners may not. So I have heard you say about so many things, it’s the math. This is how the parts fit together. This is how the system operates. This is what the funders want.

All of those things are the math. They don’t care if it’s you or me or Bill or Fred. It’s a system and the system is designed to generate a specific thing. If we wanted to generate something different, we need to change the design. But given what it’s designed to do, it’s. Going to generate that result.

Then we add humans who actually do care.

When we aren’t getting what we want from the system, we forget that we were the ones that designed it and it’s probably giving us exactly what it’s designed to give us, we need to fix our design.

Carla: Yes. Just taking it down to its most basic, I’ll say just as a sort of tidbit [00:22:00] story, my, I have a daughter who’s now in college, but when she was little in elementary school, she had terrible A DHD, and she was little. It’s a terrible sense of time, obviously. Me not a terrible sense of time.

And so getting her to school was painful. And I’d be like, we have to leave at five minutes to seven. “And she would say, “okay.” And then that would not happen. And I’d be, she’d be kicking and screaming. And finally I said to her one day, I’m like, “look, Anna, the clock doesn’t care. The clock doesn’t care that you didn’t get to do this, or you forgot that, or you woke up late.” I’m like, “the clock doesn’t care. It’s still five minutes to seven and we have to go out the door.” That’s it. Like clock doesn’t care. You care. And so that’s when I say the math doesn’t care, it’s the same thing.

These are not sentient things that have an opinion. They just show you their mirrors. Or their markers one way or the other. And so to your point about people are designing the system, if someone is not happy with what’s in the system, then. We come back to what, how? How is it structured for feedback?

How is it oriented? How is the system structured [00:23:00] for feedback and how are people oriented to feedback such that they can give it and others are open to hearing it?

Maureen: So we’ve gone all around the things that foundation that needs to be in place, things that can go wrong. There’s traditional change management. There’s the technology and the system side. There are the humans. When you have seen the most effective scaling, whether it was, company that was scaling organically or through acquisition, what was in place that facilitated that success?

Carla: a business that I saw work acquisitions really well was a public company. It was a little under 2 billion, so not super big, but not tiny either. About 6,000 people call it globally and they. They had dedicated and very intentional acquisitions, m and a groups, teams, and there were,  there was [00:24:00] infrastructure, I’ll call it, in place.

There were playbooks, there were processes, there were RACI charts. And so going back to sometimes you have to go slow to go fast, we took a good six months. To come up with what that model looked like. Who was on the team? What were the decision rights? When did people kick in? What was a trigger for something happening or someone getting involved? What was the governance structure, both during diligence and once you got into integration? They were different governance structures with different stakeholders. And then there was a technology piece as well, right? We had we chose to implement a, an MNA management system, which was one of the most brilliant things I’ve ever seen done. That actually took a lot of the data and the information and made the processes much easier. So I would say that was the foundational, the operational piece of the success that these folks exhibited or experienced on the human side. They were also. Not always super happy [00:25:00] about hearing what they heard, but open to hearing what they heard. And there were times where that business was overburdened with processes that were reminiscent of a time when they were much bigger and, too many specialists and too much specialization. So you would have a meeting and you’d need like 10 people to turn up when you really only needed two.

But that’s common. Those kinds of things could have been changed, but, and so even though the people were open to hearing, they weren’t necessarily open to changing something.

And I get that. But generally speaking, the company that I saw probably do some of the best I’ve ever seen, had that kind of setup, intentionally designed architecture that supported people’s ability to go and do that thing.

Maureen: So systems, the full range of systems and both the m and a system, but also the decision rights, the governance for diligence and integration, and then also building in the human side of [00:26:00] “this is gonna be hard and disruptive for humans’ lives” and while we could say, “just shut up and do what we say,” we all know that isn’t terribly effective.

Carla: Yeah, no. Yeah, like I don’t like it. I don’t want it done to me,

Maureen: no.

Carla: Not my favorite. Yeah.

Maureen: When I say we wish we could do it, it just, it’s a long process for people to. Buy in, settle in, learn the new roles, understand the new cadence, use the new technology. It’s a significant shift even in the best of situations and in challenging situations where people are losing part of their team, angry, hostages.

It’s gonna be a lot worse.

Carla: Yeah. And I’ll say, I think you said it well. There’s a lot that goes into people’s experience and I wanna say I’m also an [00:27:00] operational executive who has had to deliver results and not very much time. And it was not m and a, so I get being on the firing line. And that’s to say. All the things I say about, you gotta take people into consideration, you also have to deliver a result.

There’s no way outta that. Otherwise, we all go home, right? The only reason we get to come back tomorrow is because the business is working, right? If the business falls apart, then we all go home. So having said that, there are times where that’s just not option. It’s just not an option, right? We’re just gonna have to do the thing, hold your nose, do the thing, that’s the end of it. And I may not be able to say those things either,

because that’s just gonna, undermine everything. But I will say: at the foundation of the human side of things is trust. And when I talk about psychological safety, I also mean there’s gotta be trust.

And in my case, I would walk in to lead a deal or I’d walk in to lead a business unit or whatever. People don’t know who you are. They, there’s no trust. I don’t assume any, I don’t assume I have your trust. I don’t assume I have your respect. I’m happy to earn both all day. And I think that [00:28:00] kind of entry point to people. Allows them to make their own choices. And when you give people agency over even the most basic of things, trust starts to get earned and respect starts to get created. And then they start to become a little more open to hearing what you have to say and you’re a little more open to hearing what they have to say.

And it just it just becomes self perpetuating.

Maureen: We do know that the more we give people input to their lives, the more control they have, the more effective they’re gonna be.

Carla: Yeah, I mean with guardrails, of course. And not everybody wants a hundred percent control of all their stuff. I get that too. And so degrees of appropriateness, which then come into sort of judgment and discernment, which if you’re in a leadership position, God love you. I hope you have them because we’ve seen plenty who don’t.

Maureen: Yeah.

Carla: right? That’s how good systems get built is with people who have good judgment, good discernment.

Maureen: Yeah, and lacking good judgment and good discernment, systems are less effective.

Carla: [00:29:00] I can give you a tick list for what needs to be in place for the foundation to work pretty well. I can’t give you a tick list for what needs to be in place in your head. I can point those things to you, but yeah, I can’t like put them in.

Maureen: And the difference between things being okay and the question I asked, what was the best situation you’ve seen; the difference in employee satisfaction, but also the difference in returned revenue. It can be significant when I’m a hostage showing up because I have no choice until I find a new job. the differential productivity is significant, and if I’m an executive and I’m phoning it in and not being as thoughtful as I need to, one bad decision can change the trajectory of the organization.

Carla: You’re leaving money on the table. And you can do that. And look,

there are for a long time, and I don’t know if the debate’s still [00:30:00] rage today or not, but when I was hot and heavy in things, there was a big debate about do you integrate and you pay attention to people and you pay attention to the context, or do you just come in and slap it in?

There are several companies who are very well known who would literally come in, tell everybody they were fired on day one and they had to reapply for their jobs and it was horrible. And they really prided themselves on making sure that everybody felt so uncomfortable that they were on their best sort of behavior and giving their all.

And that’s how we knew. And there are some, you still hear stories today about that.

I would say it’s absolutely an option. Like it, it’s an approach like any other approach and it will make you money, like all the other approaches will make you money, but I would argue it will make, it won’t make you as much as the other way around. Now that’s debatable. ’cause once you’ve taken a path, you can’t take the other one too. And some people may say, that’s okay. I’m all right. Leaving money on the table. I’ll take this ’cause it suits my profile. And that’s a choice too. I’m not, I don’t judge that. I just say mathematically, you’re leaving money on the [00:31:00] table.

Maureen: We’re certainly in interesting times with AI now with even more geopolitical uncertainty with tariffs. But we also know that any bit of uncertainty creates advantage for some and disadvantage for others.

So there are some people who are saying, “bring it on. This is my spot.” They wanna scale. What are a couple of things they can do to really. Increase the probability of their success.

Carla: Ooh, I love that. And yeah, I totally agree. When someone’s down, someone else is up. It’s a zero. It’s almost a zero sum game in that sense. There are definitely pockets of opportunity for various parts of the world, various industries, various kinds of businesses, for sure. And for those folks I would say look at those four domains.

Look at people, process, finance and technology, and inside of people look at decision rights, [00:32:00] distribution delegation, leadership how you look at those things, how much autonomy your people have, and whether that’s an appropriate amount. Whatever you do today. Has to 10 exit a hundred exit and take a look and ask yourself, is that gonna work? If that’s not gonna work, then you put it on a list over here that says, here’s my holding pen of things. I have to look at that that aren’t gonna make it. When you’re done, people process finance, tech then, and don’t look at your actual people yet. Just look at those sort of pillars. Make your holding pen.

Take a look at that and be like, “okay, we need to fix these systems like this. ERP isn’t gonna work. We’ve got individual people doing lots of things and no bench drink. There’s, if somebody’s out, we’re stuck, we’re screwed.” Take care of those sort of foundational things that would really break your business if that thing really occurred separately ish.

Look at your people.  Look at your actual people. [00:33:00] Are they, how are they operating? Can they expand? There are lots of ways to look at that. Like I said I love PSI just like you do. Look at your leadership team first and figure out whether those people have an adaptive mindset. How do they act toward change? Or are they always trying to preserve what’s here? ’cause if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Those people aren’t gonna, the people who got you here, as they say, aren’t gonna get you there. And that may include the absolute top leadership. I’ll say that too. So if you happen to be one of those, the guy at the top or the woman at the top, God love us too. Be willing to look at yourself. And if you can’t, go talk to your board. Go talk to your advisors. Go find somebody else to help you through this because you’re not gonna make it on your own.

Maureen: And many people can make it with assistance

Carla: Absolutely. Yes. Yeah.

If you’re open to changing, you can absolutely do that. If you’re not open to changing, your odds are your odds. I’ll give it 50 50.

Maureen: If [00:34:00] we look at the most sophisticated leaders, I don’t need to be the most sophisticated If my advisors are, and if I’m listening to them. I can rent them and get myself through it. In a perfect world, our leaders are more sophisticated, but we all got where we got for a range of reasons, and knowing when I need to borrow, rent, or hire additional.

Carla: Yes.

Maureen: Wisdom allows me to then get back on track to accomplish my big goals and make the big impact I wanna make in the world.

Carla: Absolutely and I don’t ever discount someone’s opportunity to evolve, right? E even if you are one of those people where you say, you know what? I don’t have all those things. I’m just gonna borrow, rent, beg, borrow, steal; that’s great. I, to [00:35:00] me it shows you’re actually a pretty creative thinker who doesn’t have an identity and ego that says I have to be the one who does all the things, and it’s gotta be my way. You’re already ahead of the game, but you will evolve. You’ll absorb some of that stuff anyway, so you’ll end it better off no matter what. There is no shame in my world in saying I don’t know how to do that.

Maureen: As we look at what, how thing, especially with ai, there’s a whole lot we don’t know how to do.

Carla: Oh God. Yeah.

Maureen: yeah, having the curiosity and the humility to say, “I can’t do this now. I used to be able to, I can’t do it alone,”

Carla: Yes.

Maureen: The other is, some of these tools allow me personally to look at all kinds of scenarios that I didn’t have access to because in the past I would’ve had to hire a fleet of consultants.

Carla: Yes.

Maureen: now I can look at a bunch of scenarios. Just crank through ’em. Show me this, show me that change this, change [00:36:00] my staffing mix, change my location, change my ERP.

How does change my pricing models? How do these things play out? And it’s, I still can’t do it without people to test my assumptions, but it’s amazing how much further I can get. Now that I did six months ago.

Carla: Yeah, I think the beauty at this particular stage is that you can get information and. A lot of it’s imperfect to be

fair, but it will at least orient you and give you some data points where you can go and do some of your own research or it may give you a 98% great answer, right? That’s true too. And from there you go informed to the advisors that you’re going to. I spent

years as an Oracle consultant very early on in my career, going in and cleaning up other consultants messes. Because the client needed to implement a system and they didn’t know how to pick a consultant and an implementer

who was any good and those people weren’t any good.

And then when it broke, I was the [00:37:00] one who came in to clean up and I’m like you’re lucky that I know what I’m doing ’cause that we can fix. So at least you come in with, if nothing else, you come in armed with some information and you can start to make sense of what that other advisor is telling you or that other resource is telling you.

Maureen: Which is amazingly helpful

Carla: Absolutely.

Maureen: because that’s the other, I think we’ve all worked with advisors. They were recommended. We thought they knew what they were doing, and they may have known a whole bunch about something, but just like taking what. Copilot tells me or whatever AI I’m using, sometimes taking what advisors say as if it’s true

Carla: It’s the same.

Maureen: risky.

Yeah.

I, my, my advisors aren’t supposed to be hallucinating. They’re not.

Carla: No, they’re just inept. All right, so sometimes you get the inept people. Sorry, I hear, but

Maureen: And so how do I have that discernment? ’cause it takes a lot of [00:38:00] energy to manage all the moving parts.

Carla: I think in that ga in that case, especially if you’re somewhere at the top or somewhere just below the top, I think it’s a great way to orient yourself and get at least a little bit grounded in something enough to start to have questions. And that’s really what it’s about. It’s about learning.

You never stop learning things. It doesn’t matter what position you hold or how long you’ve held it, right? The world moves on. And so to do you, so in that sense walking and thinking you have all the answers is a bit of a dangerous game to play.

Maureen: Yes it is. And even knowing I don’t have the answers, finding where to get them, they’re not always easy to uncover. It’s not like I can just go down to my local Starbucks and grab the person who knows the stuff

Carla: Yeah, true.

Maureen: Thank you. I learn every time I talk to you, and I trust that our listeners have as well gotten some different perspectives on [00:39:00] how do they scale and what does that mean for their specific situation.

Carla: Oh, thank you for having me. I always appreciate it.

Maureen: so how would people learn more about you?

Carla: Find me on LinkedIn and please feel free to message me there. Linkedin.com/n/carla morelli or on the innovative leadership.com website, I’m on the team page. Happy to connect with anybody anytime. And I also offer via the website or via, sorry, LinkedIn 15 minute instant insight calls.

So if someone’s interested, they can book me for 15 minutes. They can ask a burning question and actually get specific, a specific answer for their scenario. Happy to do that. Yeah.

Maureen: Beautiful. Thank you. And for our listeners, please like us share the podcast and comment. That way we get boosted and we able to reach more people.