#129 - Neil Sahota - The art around delivering transformative change, removing resistance and creating momentum that lasts

This podcast interview focuses on what it takes to create innovation that drives positive change. My guest is Neil Sahota, IBM Master Inventor, United Nations (UN) AI subject matter expert, and Professor at UC Irvine.

With 20+ years of business experience, Neil works to inspire clients and business partners to foster innovation and develop next generation products/solutions powered by AI. Neil's work experience spans multiple industries including legal services, healthcare, life sciences, retail, travel and transportation, energy and utilities, automotive, telecommunications, media/communication, and government.

Moreover, he is one of the few people selected for IBM's Corporate Service Corps leadership program that pairs leaders with NGOs to perform community-driven economic development projects.

In addition, Neil partners with entrepreneurs to define their products, establish their target markets, and structure their companies. He is a member of several investor groups like the Tech Coast Angels and assists startups with investor funding. Neil also serves as a judge in various startup competitions and mentor in several incubator/accelerator programs and is the author of ‘Owning the AI Revolution.’

I invited Neil to my podcast because of his drive to create meaningful change and social impact through innovation. We explore the myths around making money and creating social good. We dig into the need to change behaviour and remove resistance as a critical component of the innovation process in order to drive the impact and adoption we hope for. And we discuss the fine line around being successful and taking enough risk.

Here are some of his quotes:

“If you're not trying to disrupt yourself or your organization, someone else will. And I think there's just a lot of opportunities out there. But we're used to thinking about improvement, how do we make something faster, cheaper, less errors, rather than be more transformative and say: ‘How can I actually do this differently?’

We live in a dynamic world, things are always changing, new capabilities are always coming out. How can I do something like different? That's what really drives me.”

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. Why companies that drive positive social impact perform fundamentally better than the ones that don’t
2. Why solving a big problem with your software is only one aspect to success and momentum. It’s ability to change behaviour, buy-in and mindset is the other critical part.
3. How we can deliver more success in driving change is by helping people ask a better first question.
4. That you don’t always want to be a 100% successful. If you’re 100% successful, you’re actually not taking enough risk