Rowers, Watchers & Grumblers – Fukuda’s Parable in the Age of AI (part 1)

 

Some years ago, I introduced a transformation metaphor in a book called Andy & Me. Both the metaphor & book found an audience. Back then I was focused on helping to transform factories & supply chains. Nowadays, the scope is broader & includes C-suites & Boards, and the advent of Agentic AI & all it entails. The metaphor & principles behind it still hold true. The fundamentals do not change & every generation has to learn them. In this series of articles, I’ll explore the implications of Fukuda’s Parable for leaders of all levels.

Fukuda’s Parable

I first learned it from Gwen Galsworth, and I understand Gwen learned it from Ryuji Fukuda. ‘Change is a voyage’ the parable tells us. Here are the key elements:

Rowers, Watchers and Grumblers

The parable asks you to imagine a ship representing a company or a team. When a leader proposes a major change, employees in the organization will typically fall into three distinct groups:

·       Rowers (10-20%): These are the innovators & early adopters. They eagerly take up oars. They’re excited by the challenge, highly adaptable, and ready to learn new ways of working.

·       Watchers (60-80%): They neither take the oars, nor run away. They sit back & watch, waiting to see how the Rowers make out.

·       Grumblers (10-20%): These are the blockers. They cross their arms & actively resist any change. ‘This is sure to fail,’ they argue. ‘The old way was perfectly fine.’

Leaders need to develop specific tactics for each group.

Promote, Celebrate & Develop the Rowers

Developing & rewarding your Rowers is Job One. Some find this counter-intuitive.  “Shouldn’t we fix our weak points?”, they ask. This is a common mistake & cripples many a transformation. In fact, as we’ll see in later articles, we should ignore the Grumblers.

Price’s Law

Price’s Law tells us that in every population, N, half of the Value is produced by . Suppose your Design team comprises N = 100 individuals.  Ten people ( ) will provide 50% of the value. (Note: Lotka’s Law says the results are even more heavily skewed). You had better reward, celebrate and develop these folks!

How Do You Identify Your Rowers?

If we accept Price’s Law, leaders had better answer this question. The Toyota Management System (TMS) makes visible What is Actually Happening (WAH) – and this is one of its greatest benefits. You can run but you cannot hide.  Grumblers, game-players, fakers and the like are quickly exposed.

I advise my mentees to create stages, forums, and ‘shows’ wherein your stars can shine. These can be Shark Tanks, Innovation Councils, Pitch Competitions, Problem Solving Fairs and the like.  The point is to provide a showcase for your best and brightest. The focus can be Protecting the Core Business or Igniting New Growth (see my articles on Ambidexterity).

More to come, stay tuned.

Best wishes,

Pascal Dennis         E: pascal.dennis@leansystems.org

Canada’s Malaise and the Law You’ve Never Heard Of

 Is Canada a poor nation in a rich country? Canada’s nosedive in GDP per capita & most other measures of human thriving beg the question. Today, I’ll focus on a major root cause and a law you’ve never heard of.

Price’s Law

Price's Law states that productive output is heavily skewed toward a small number of individuals. In any domain comprising N individuals, 50%+ of the work is accomplished by the square root of N. For example, in a group of 100 people, roughly 10 individuals will provide half the value. (Note: Lotka’s Law says the results are even more heavily skewed).

How does this relate to Canada’s sinking GDP per person? Canada’s population is roughly 40 million. Price’s Law suggests that Square Root (40,000,0000), or ~ 6,300 people provide 50%+ of the Canada’s output. 

Price’s Law & Canada’s Malaise

Canada’s brain drain to America is real. Canadian net emigration—a data series maintained by Statistics Canada—reached 65,372 in 2024-25, the highest level in the 50-year data series. The Hub article I reference reports that emigrants are disproportionately young & well educated. Business founders are over-represented. In fact, Canadian start-up founders in the US outnumber those who stay put. According to Bank of Canada research, roughly 40 percent of Canadians who would rank in the top 1 percent of earners have emigrated south, along with 30-50 percent of the next nine percentiles. Canadian-born individuals in the U.S. are more educated than native-born Americans, and cluster in top income brackets. The study finds these top earners account for three-quarters of the Canada-U.S. GDP per adult gap and up to two-thirds of the labor productivity gap. Taken together, the report concludes, “These patterns suggest Canada is losing precisely the people needed to reverse its productivity decline.”

The exodus includes people like my erstwhile neighbour, Paul, a gifted engineer who skedaddled to join a leading US AI firm. He reminds of all the extraordinary French, English, German and Canadian expats I’ve met in Singapore. When I ask, ‘Why did you leave?’ they give me a droll look as if to say, ‘Are you kidding?’ Canada’s surging antisemitism has exacerbated the problem.  Many of us have Jewish friends & colleagues who have left or are thinking of leaving.

Why Do the Best & Brightest Leave Canada?

My friend Paul rhymed off the reasons for me:

·       The Compensation & Equity (Options) Gap

·       Tax System Competitiveness: Canada's personal marginal tax rates exceed 50% in provinces like Ontario, Quebec & British Columbia, and kick in at much lower thresholds than in the US.

·       The Startup and Capital Deficit

·       Cost of Living

 

Where does this leave the Great White North? In my 2025 articles contrasting the Canada & Singapore, I proposed a (humble) road map back to prosperity. Job One: reward, promote, and celebrate our best & brightest. Don’t punish them for their success. Rationalize the tax system & regulatory system. Unleash their genius, sing their praises, and pat them on the back. If not, they’ll skedaddle & we’ll keep sinking.

Anxious to deflect attention, our elites continually invoke the ‘ogre down South’, but even that tactic is wearing thin. Recently, a senior governing party member proposed imposing a $ 500,000 exit tax on educated Canadians leaving – a splendidly Soviet response. Once can only hope this was not a serious proposal. (What’s next – barb wire & re-education?)

This gives me no pleasure, and I have no partisan axe to grind.  In fact, I believe our PM is sincere & capable and wish him well. His thankless challenge is to clean up a decade of malfeasance and restore a once-great country. Rewarding, promoting and celebrating our stars is a crucial first step.

Best wishes,

Pascal Dennis, co-author of Harnessing Digital Disruption

E: pascal.dennis@leansystems.org

Canada – a Poor Nation in a Rich Country?

 

Last Spring I wrote a series of articles on Canada’s economic, social & political malaise. If you do an AI search using the latter phrase, you’ll see the data. In those pieces I contrasted the ‘Great White North’ with Singapore, that economic & innovation powerhouse that I’ve come to know & love. I proposed a series of countermeasures and a road map back to prosperity. Has anything changed since I wrote those articles?

Things have indeed changed since I last wrote about Canada – they’ve gotten worse. Trade tensions with the US have further degraded productivity, business investment, and our standard of living. Trade barriers within Canada remain impenetrable. Our debt & deficit continue to mushroom, and per capita GPD declines. We are officially in a ‘technical’ recession.

Canada’s economic malaise is bleeding into day-to-day life. Family formation & birth rates are at historic lows. Kids can barely afford rent; home ownership is an impossible dream. Violent crime & infant mortality rates are spiking. Healthcare? - don’t ask.  Even life expectancy is falling.

There is strong separatist sentiment in Western Canada and Quebec. Alberta will hold a referendum on sovereignty this fall. As for Quebec, if the front-running Parti Quebecois wins October’s provincial election, we’ll soon have a second sovereignty referendum. Alberta & Quebecois separatism is fueled by the strong sense that ‘we can do better outside of Canada’.

And yet, Canada remains a ‘rich’ country. We are endowed with one of the planet’s most magnificent & munificent land masses. We have pretty much everything Singapore lacks. And unlike Singapore, our cities & infrastructure have never been destroyed. Our people have never been imprisoned or enslaved. We are not surrounded by enemies. We have never been invaded by a merciless imperial army. We live next door to the world’s richest & most innovative market.

Singapore has become a rich nation in a poor country. Is Canada becoming a ‘poor nation in a rich country’? Anxious to deflect attention, our elites invoke the ‘ogre down South’, but even that tactic is wearing thin.

Clearly, something has gone badly wrong. Is Canada’s decline irreversible? What would it take to regain our historic tenacity, self-confidence & entrepreneurial spirit? (I provided a humble road map in my earlier articles.) I believe our PM is sincere & capable and wish him well. His thankless challenge is to clean up a decade of malfeasance and restore a once-great country.

I do not wish to be misunderstood. This gives me no pleasure, and I have no partisan axe to grind. Canada (and America) gave my family a chance at a better life. Am I not obliged to signal the growing gap between my native land & the innovation powerhouses I’m lucky enough to experience?

They say, the ‘darkest hour is right before the dawn’. Let’s hope so.

Best wishes,

Pascal Dennis, co-author of Harnessing Digital Disruption

E: pascal.dennis@leansystems.org

How to Release the Genius of the Organization?

 

Global engagement scores suck – everybody knows it. Despite the best efforts of Boards, HR professionals, consultants and the threat of AI, people don’t put their hearts into their work. For some reason, we just don’t care enough about the mission & purpose of our organization. And yet, people have never been more capable. What’s going on & how do we fix it?

What’s going on?

Why this mass disengagement?  Dr. Gary Hamel provides a compelling answer in his HBR articles. “Insipid, incremental, inertial” – that’s the modern corporation, he tells us. Despite some shining examples to the contrary, most people would agree with him. The root causes are many and include strategic issues such as an inability to articulate Mission & Values in compelling ways, incentive structures, bureaucracy, structural complexity, a feudal mindset, and tactical issues like the absence of Visual management & related methods that make both Purpose & Current Condition visible, thereby creating a recurrent ‘pull’. 

In a struggling company, there is an absence of ‘nudges’, those small encouragements from the culture & its core processes.  In a great company, by contrast, team members sense that “I’m expected to try stuff, to solve problems, and to propose ideas.” 

How Do We Fix It? 

To what purpose do we engage people?

1.     To protect our core business by solving thorny problems & thereby reducing cost & hassle, and

2.     To ignite new Growth using our marvelous modern technologies including AI, drones, Data Analytics, Robotics, Blockchain, VR, AR, and their permutations

And how do we provide the ‘nudges’ that encourage ‘Total Involvement’?

The Shark Tank & Centre of Excellence

As a mentor, my approach is to help provide:

·       The core skills in the form of ‘Learn by Doing’ curriculum developed & managed by the Centre of Excellence, and the

·       Forum & Showcase in which your best & brightest can shine, which we sometimes call the ‘Shark Tank,’ after the popular TV show which features young entrepreneurs pitching to grizzled business touts.

To start we focus on ‘Protecting the Core’ through root cause problem solving.  Over time we build toward ‘Igniting New Growth’ through the disciplines of Growth Hacking. Our Shark Tank is, in effect, a Talent Show, wherein our best & brightest can shine. We engage HR & the Board to ensure that proper recognition & rewards accrue to our stars. Our ‘Sharks’ comprise respected senior leaders, and it’s a ‘show’ in the best sense of the word.

In my experience, the Shark Tank is an excellent way of kickstarting a culture.  Sustaining a 'Total Involvement' culture is the next challenge, and the topic of future articles, blogs, and books.

Best wishes,

Pascal Dennis         E: pascal.dennis@leansystems.org