Nik Modi on resourcefulness and the right people in the room

What this conversation is about

Nik Modi covers consumer goods for RBC Capital Markets, and as he puts it, his job is to predict the future so investors can act before it arrives. He is also one of the people who encouraged Glenn Llopis to build Leadership in the Age of Personalization, after telling him at the 2019 summit that very few people were prepared for what was coming.

This episode belongs to the special series for Glenn’s book Make Reinvention Your Superpower, and it centers on the fourth skill, Build: taking action with and for others. Modi works through its five ingredients, and starts with how he learned to see what his peers miss. The answer was to stop being only a subject-matter expert and take an outside-in view, which gives what he calls a lateral perspective. Any headline then makes sense inside the subject he is thinking about.

Why institutions cannot see it coming

Modi’s diagnosis is unsentimental. Marketing models still assume the institution holds the influence, when it is now people and their social networks who drive brands. Managers cannot see it because they are, in his phrase, the frog in boiling water: you have to be taken out of the pot to feel what is happening. And the infrastructure beneath them was built for a slower world, designed for very low levels of change, which makes moving expensive even when leaders know they should.

He adds a warning about timing. Companies usually figure it out when it is too late, and with the pace of change now, catching up is very hard. The old fast-follower strategy no longer works.

Bet on instinct, not credentials

When Glenn tested him with the idea that credentials will take you where you want to go, Modi was blunt:

"And lemme tell you, if I bet on my credentials, I would not be where I am." — Nik Modi · 00:12:39

What replaces them is the ability to learn as you go. You do not build the plane and then fly it, he says; you build it while flying, improving it every mile. He treats himself the way he treats the companies he covers, with a strategic plan reviewed every year, aimed not at money or fame but at what actually makes him happy.

The first ingredient of Build is making use of whatever is at hand, and here Modi is emphatic that constraint is not an excuse. His own research budget is slim, and free information through the internet and AI means imagination is the expandable resource:

"And so yes, an organization might have to cut back because of the environment, but that doesn't mean you have to cut back." — Nik Modi · 00:25:05

Much of his insight comes from talking with enough people across an industry that the collected view produces something none of them held alone.

The right people in the room

That leads to the claim he makes most forcefully:

"It works when we collaborate, when you have the right people in the room, amazing things happen 100% of the time." — Nik Modi · 00:26:37

Glenn added what he sees when organizations solve for the wrong opportunities:

"Because they think they do, because they have the right titles in the room. But those titles don't tell you what people are capable of." — Glenn Llopis · 00:27:04

Modi’s version of the fix is practical, and it is what he now tells boards and executive teams in his industry:

"who's closest to the consumer? It's the actual people on the periphery of the organization. How do you pull them into the decision-making matrix" — Nik Modi · 00:27:45

He is not proposing that a new hire set budgets. He is asking how the views of the people nearest the customer reach the decision at all. Building the right room also takes work: he spent three months choosing the outside experts for one initiative, thinking about what each would bring and how they would fit with the others.

Six years of no

The second ingredient of Build is moving an idea forward with or without support, and Modi’s example is his own. He pitched a future-focused research framework inside his firm and heard no, repeatedly:

"And I got turned down for my first six years at the company. Every year I'd go back and I'd make what I thought was a sharper and sharper pitch until finally they came on board and we did it" — Nik Modi · 00:29:29

It became a board-level topic and part of how the firm works. Had he given up, it would not exist. Which is where the line at the top of this page comes from.

Glenn matched it with a story from the first Leadership in the Age of Personalization summit, where five chief executives told him at lunch that the game works by assimilating to those who came before. By the end of the day, after listening to a young student, they came back with a different view, including this admission:

"nobody has the guts to tell me the truth of my deficiencies as a leader." — Glenn Llopis · 00:31:26

Modi’s closing advice fits the skill: think forward, then move backward, so you have a line of accountability, and make change in steps rather than all at once. You cannot skip the sequence, he says, or the chain has a missing link.