About This Episode

Before this month's interview, Graeme Codrington and Dean van Leeuwen explore the grey elephants stampeding this month. Dean highlights the shift in how the world thinks about supply chains - from “where can we source most efficiently?” to “where are we dangerously dependent?” as multipolarity reshapes global trade.

For the second month running, Graeme flags the wildfires tearing through 17 countries simultaneously (and what it means to lead through a world that is literally on fire), and China’s demographic time bomb, the direct consequence of the one-child policy - 33 million more young men than women, a social imbalance with second and third-order effects that are only beginning to unfold.

In the latest developments in AI development: Dean reports that OpenAI’s models autonomously hacked into Hugging Face’s production systems, leaving Sam Altman suggesting singularity - the point at which artificial and human intelligence become indistinguishable - may already be here. With Graeme sharing that his biggest fear isn’t that computers become like humans, but that humans start thinking like computers - craving certainty, rejecting ambiguity, and losing the capacity to navigate the grey.

Our guest this month is Faisal Abdalla. Former CEO of ALJ Saudi Arabia Motors (one of the largest independent Toyota distributors in the world operating in 27 countries), now its Chief Human Resources and Kaizen Officer at over 70 years old, and currently writing ‘Emonomics: The Economics of Positive Emotions’ - with its central argument being that love is the foundation of everything. Not as a soft sentiment, but as a practical leadership strategy: the more you invest in the well-being of the people around you, the better the results you will share. He swims, he says, in an Olympic pool of love. That’s what keeps him going.

Graeme and Faisal discuss the difference between formal and informal power, and why the human being is always the most important driver of any organisation.