The Reinventor's Mindset - Episode 5
Ashton Jones in conversation with Dr. Corinna Galliano Researcher, University of Sydney Business School

Ashton: Welcome to the Reinventor's Mindset, insights about transformation with leaders who've done it from the inside. I'm Ashton Jones and I'm writing Bold Water, a book about transformation. Today I'm speaking with Dr. Corinna Galliano, a researcher at the University of Sydney Business School whose work sits at the intersection of entrepreneurship, paradox theory, and how founders actually experience the tensions that most business schools teach as strategy problems. Born in Italy, trained as a management consultant, and now an accredited Vedic meditation teacher, Corinna has an unusual range. We first met on a course called Leading in a Post Crisis World, which given everything that's happened since turned out to be more relevant than either of us expected.

Welcome, Corinna. Let's dive in.

Corinna: Thanks, Ashton, for having me here.

Ashton: Corinna, your research puts you inside some of the most dynamic working environments. You spend a lot of time with the youngest and brightest minds in Australia, but also with founders, CEOs and people who are mid transformation. What patterns do you see in how people and leaders experience transformation versus how they might describe it afterwards, in hindsight?

Corinna: I believe that when people are going through a transformation, they're not that aware that they are going through transformation. What they're aware of is the struggles they are facing, the uncomfortable feelings. And then they would realise that that was a transformation only looking backwards.

That's why what I try to do in the classroom is to make that process visible to my students. Experiential learning gives a great opportunity to create those disorienting dilemmas, these uncomfortable moments for students. And then I guide them through processes of self reflection and sense making that then allow them to realise: there was a moment of transformation. And why was it a moment of transformation? It's because very often we start questioning our beliefs, our assumptions, our values, and a new view of the world is emerging for us. And that can feel very uncomfortable.

Ashton: Can you think of any moments where, running these experiential sessions with students or in different settings, someone's had that aha moment, where they came into it not quite sure what to expect, and then you've seen in real time their eyes open to the fact that they are experiencing something they didn't quite expect, or learning about themselves in real time?

Corinna: There are two things that usually happen. The first is students who come to take entrepreneurship classes who don't think they might be entrepreneurial, innovative or creative. Then they're put through this process of trying to create something from nothing with zero resources, and they start realising: actually, it's not impossible. I could develop those skills. I could become that version of myself that I never thought I would be able to become.

The way they get to that aha moment is by showing them processes. So instead of saying entrepreneurship is a trait, the academic literature has moved from first looking at entrepreneurship as a trait, what makes entrepreneurs successful, and then realising that if you look at all the research, the outcome of that personality would be everyone. There are so many different skills that make someone successful that there is not really a complete, definitive picture of what will make a successful entrepreneur.

The academic world is now moving to looking at processes, at practices. What I teach my students is: look at the process. There are processes that have been found to facilitate and accelerate the learning that an entrepreneur needs to go through to do things faster. And when you look at something from a process level, it becomes much easier to approach than thinking, oh, I need to be an extroverted person, or I need to be very emotionally stable. It really changes. And it gets them to start looking at successful entrepreneurs and asking: what is it that they do? What are their everyday practices? How do they transform themselves?

The other example that comes to mind is looking at values. In our society, especially in the business world, we have a very narrow view of the values we use in making decisions, business value. Society has evolved a little further, so we now have business value and social mission as the two values you see companies embracing. But I bring a framework called the Economies of Worth to the classroom, and through an amusing fiction, a little sitcom that I create with my colleague, we show that actors within an organisation actually leverage far more than just two value sets.

We get students to analyse processes of justification and critique in the media, and they start pulling apart the values that different people use to create different arguments. The aha moment they develop is realising that everyone might see their own argument as legitimate, because it's grounded in a specific value. And that's a great transformation, because it helps students become more empathetic, better at engaging in processes of justification and critique, and hopefully it contributes to less of the polarisation we see in the world right now.

How do I know that they go through these aha moments? I ask them to write reflection portfolios at the end of the unit and reflection logs throughout. Those are some of the insights that emerge.

Ashton: As you were speaking about that second aha moment, what came to my mind was something I've definitely seen over the last decade in business. When I started my career, if a senior leader said we need to do this, people would just fall in line and get it done. But particularly in the most recent generations joining the workforce, being really clear about the why, what is the purpose of what we're trying to do, how does that purpose serve not just a business outcome but also a broader social outcome, I've very much seen that as a much more prominent part of business and leadership culture in Australia.

In my current role, in order to drive innovation and transformation, people really need to understand the why. Everyone is pretty comfortable going on a similar pattern until something disrupts them from the outside. It's quite difficult to disrupt from the inside unless you've really been able to articulate the why and have that why connect with people beyond just the logical reasons and arguments. How do you connect students with their why and their purpose through these experiences you're giving them?

Corinna: The number one thing is giving them agency, they get to choose what they want to work on. We always recommend they choose something they connect personally with. In the Leading in a Post Crisis World course, they work on solving a global or local challenge of their choice through applying the leadership methodologies we teach them. In the collaboration course, they create a performance that showcases how we could solve a collaboration problem that prevents addressing a global challenge. And in the entrepreneurship unit, they create their own entrepreneurial opportunity and ask themselves: what societal problem are you solving with this, and how does that resonate, or not, with your values?

At the first step of all the courses I teach, I ask students what they value and give them a little bit of time to identify that, either through an activity or self reflection. From there, they can practise what's called in academic terms reflexivity, seeing whether the choices they make are aligned with the values they hold, and if not, what does that mean for the type of life they're creating for themselves?

In the entrepreneurship class, I also give a case study that looks at: is this the right entrepreneurial opportunity for you? I try to get them to answer the questions for themselves, because that was the one thing I really missed when I had to choose my university degree. No one ever got me to think, the world you choose will determine the type of lifestyle you have. Back then, there was still this idea that you study something and you'll do that for the rest of your life.

When I realised that perhaps my path wasn't totally aligned with my values, it was a little bit difficult. It took me several years to understand: well, you are not bound to this. I was an engineer by training and I didn't like the idea of sitting behind a computer all day doing calculations. And then I had the aha moment: I don't have to be bound to this. That's how I got to do a PhD in business management and decided to go to the other end and study qualitatively, entrepreneurs and leaders. And that was a big transformation. It's what I try to give students.

Ashton: If it's okay, I wouldn't mind staying a little bit on your own personal transformation journey. I've spoken and interviewed about five or six executives, founders and senior leaders recently, and I'm very much seeing that a lot of them are adopting this mindset of a portfolio career, they have their main career but are increasingly being more deliberate about the interests and activities they pursue alongside it. And a lot of practitioners are looking at academia as an area they want to invest more time in. I'm curious to learn a little bit more about your own journey into doing your PhD. And how did you end up in Australia having been born in Italy?

Corinna: It was one of those things that, if you're a spiritual person, you would say I was destined to come here. When I was growing up, my pen friend, all my classmates' pen friends were from the States or from the UK, and I was the only one who had a pen friend from Australia. Just by chance. And I still have a little kangaroo pin that this girl sent to me. She was in Adelaide. Then I forgot all about it.

I did my engineering degree following the perfect parents' plan: if you study engineering, you'll have a successful career, there will be no money problems. I came from a family where there was no abundance of money. So I followed the plan, even though I was really passionate about theatre and acting. And in 2004, I landed my first job in an architecture firm.

The founder of the firm came to me and said: Corinna, you are a really intelligent and smart woman. You must leave Italy. He said he'd spoken with people in the economics department and they told him the country was going to be done in 10 years, there would be no opportunities. Back then my English was really basic, just school level. I looked for Australia and realised flights were very expensive. I found on a website a scholarship, the Australian Endeavour Award, but I thought it looked too complicated, closed it down and parked it.

I fell in love with a man from Milan, moved to Milan and got to work in a consultancy company. That was fun, a very dynamic environment. From there I got to work in a clean tech startup for three years. It was really amazing. And then the whole thing blew up. In Italy in 2012, the government threatened to withdraw a feed in tariff from renewable energy companies and make it retroactive. All the investors in the market quit, including ours. All the companies in the sector started closing down one after another. There was no work.

So I said: I'm going to do an MBA. It was in global business sustainability. I arrived at the end of the MBA and the director said there was no work out there, not even internships. So I said: get me a professor in Australia who can invite me, and I can apply for that Australian Endeavour Award. I reopened that browser tab, about 10 years later. I got the scholarship and came to Australia for six months on an exchange program. I realised I really liked the university environment here. It's different from Italy. It's inspiring, and there seemed to be more opportunities.

So I applied for a PhD. I got the scholarship. To be honest, at the time I didn't really know what a PhD was.

I came here at 35 years old and everyone in Italy said: you're very courageous. And I was like, I don't know, it seems normal to me. I was really surprised by how courageous everyone thought I was, also because I had to end my romantic relationship to come here. And then I came here and I realised why everyone was telling me that.

The changes in expectation I had to go through were massive compared to what was in my mind. It had a massive toll on my mental health, the cultural change, the language change, everything. Also the change in terms of comfort. I had been living in a beautiful home, and I arrived here to share living with others.

That's when I learned Vedic meditation. I'd tried different techniques before, but I'd never had a proper technique. I went and I learned Vedic meditation, and the thing that really changed for me was that now I was able to meditate every day without effort. And I could feel day by day that all that turmoil that was going inside myself was getting better and better.

For me, the main thing was that I was feeling extremely lonely. A PhD is a lonely journey for everyone. I didn't have a corporate job. I was alone in a country where to go back and say hello to my friends and family took 24 hours. The level of loneliness I was experiencing was massive. And it was the thing I had feared most in my life, even before coming to Australia, I was completely terrified.

This meditation practice gave me that sense: I'm not alone. I have my own self. And it's so big, when you get in touch with the source of your own self, it's so big that loneliness can't be there anymore. That practice really gave me very solid ground from which to complete my PhD.

I started noticing that I was walking that path without the fears that once, I was the most fearful of all. That was when I really started living my life differently, instead of chasing, instead of pushing. Sit back, relax and enjoy, be present, do great quality work, but let things come to you rather than constantly chasing and running towards things.

Ashton: I don't know if I've mentioned this to you before, but my experience of you is that you have this stillness about you. I think a lot of people do fear loneliness. I've been through my own journey with being comfortable with being alone or just with myself and being connected with myself, and feeling that you can move through life in a way where, as you said, things come to you, what's meant for you comes to you, rather than trying to force things that were not meant for you.

I understand you trained under Thom Knoles for two years, including three months in the Himalayas. That's not a casual dabbling in meditation, you've deeply understood and trained in the practice. I'm curious to learn more about what that gave you, and also what opportunities are there for leaders to be more in touch with themselves and to be more still.

Corinna: The opportunities are massive. In fact, just last weekend I saw McKinsey put out an Instagram post saying we should meditate: AI gives you information, meditation gives you wisdom. The opportunities are enormous.

For me, the best thing that happened in my life was encountering Thom and this journey, because when we talk about transformation, the technique helped to remove years of built up anxiety that started with my grandmother and grandfather. In the Second World War, they saw people killed in the streets. My grandmother had her house burned to the ground. She risked having that happen to her twice, as a young girl. The level of fear she ended up with, she's still alive, she's 95, and the way she coped with that anxiety was to spend most of her life inside the house. My grandfather was an adventurer, so he would go out and adventure into the world, and they found their balance there.

So massive fear, massive anxiety. And growing up, I knew that was not mine, but I didn't know how to get it out of myself. The problem with stress is that the moment you have a pattern, I need to be afraid of something, any change, any fear, any recession becomes a trigger. This fear based orientation is a little bit the way our society is rolling right now. And if your patterns of thinking are wired to always expect the worst, then you think that through having fear you're going to save yourself. That's going to have a detrimental effect not only on the way you think but also on your body. That's what happened to me.

Meditation started unwinding these accumulated stresses that were there for a lifetime. Bit by bit, the body gets rid of them. And so what happens is that next time the fearful event comes, which is nothing more than a change of expectations, you have space between your automatic reaction and what you could do differently this time.

To conclude: I believe that if you look in the workplace, leaders, entrepreneurs, employees, everyone has their own collection of accumulated stresses. The way you know it is by observing the behaviour that is not optimal in the people around you. For leaders, you can see it from their behaviour, because that's ultimately what stress causes, dis ease and suboptimal behaviour.

There is no unique formula for what meditation will do for you, because every one of us has their own collection of different stresses. But what will be the same is the discovery that happiness is not out there. Happiness is not by chasing the next client, the next million in revenue, the next billion. Happiness is within.

The practice of meditation, by removing those accumulated stresses, awakens you to that reality. And so if you are a happy person, then your way of running your business, your way of being with your family and with others is not: give me more clients and then I'll be happy. It's: what can I offer to you? Because I'm already happy, and my happiness needs an outlet to be expressed. I move around looking for occasions to use my happiness to help others. And that's what leaders really should be doing, they should be in service of others.

What happens today is that leaders have accumulated stresses and think that by having a collection of achievements they are going to get happy. It applies to every sector, even in academia. People think that more knowledge will make them happy. And that's me, I'm addicted to learning, I'm addicted to knowledge. But I can get all the knowledge in the relative world and it's not going to make me happy.

From a more practical level: you're going to experience greater clarity of mind, greater stillness of mind. Most of the thoughts that people have are over 90% the same thoughts they had yesterday. So how can you be innovative and creative if you're just having this incessant rubbish thinking, constant worrying and repetitive thought patterns? They're just occupying the mental potential you could use to do great work, create new ideas, update the way you work, question social practices. A still mind is a mind where you get the right thought at the right time. Most people's minds are crowded with thoughts, and most of them are not useful.

And then you are calmer, your presence has that uplifting effect on the people around you, and your health gets better, because whatever health issue you have, stress is going to make it worse.

I think the great thing that's happening, Ashton, is that AI will force a consciousness revolution. If AI can get better at us at doing all these tasks, what's left for us? It's left to develop our consciousness and be more relevant than AI is.

Ashton: In investment theory, there's this concept of a flight to quality, when there's a lot of volatility and economic uncertainty, really high quality assets is where the money goes. And I think that in today's society, with so much uncertainty, so much information and the rise of AI, there's going to be a flight to humanity. People are really going to invest more time in real life experiences, invest more time in being more in touch with themselves. So I'm quite excited for the consciousness revolution, Corinna.

I always say to younger staff members: you are not your thoughts. You are the one that watches your thoughts. Coming to understand that was a big part of my own personal transformation.

You reference in your teaching the Rig Veda, the idea that knowledge seeks out the one who is awake. Could you explain what that means in a business context?

Corinna: We create all these strategic tools through analysis, you run all your analysis to predict the future. But that's still fragmented knowledge, bits and pieces. And I'm not sure in your sector how much space there is for intuition, for the moment where you've run all the calculations, but then you just know: I'm going to do this.

What the Rig Veda tells us is that knowledge seeks the ones who are awake. What does awake mean? The ones that have removed all the stress from their physiology through a meditation practice that allows the body to be rested deeply enough, because the body will release stress only when it rests deeply enough.

That wakefulness that comes from having removed stress awakens you to that reality of the eye, who is that eye that is witnessing the thoughts? As you keep removing stresses and meditating, your container grows. From a spiritual perspective, you have always been that consciousness field, what quantum physics calls the unified field. You have always been that unbounded consciousness field. But your capacity to become aware of that grows. So from a little coffee cup you get to a mug, and then it grows and grows. And once you discover your true self, you have access to the source of all knowledge.

But nature works with relevance. You get the knowledge that is relevant for your next action, and your next action, and your next action. There is no need to accumulate to get there. The question is always: is this relevant right now?

Ashton: I'm a huge believer in developing your intuition and your judgement. I wrote an article recently about how you develop taste in a world of AI, because AI collapses everyone to an average outcome. In a world where people are increasingly using tools that produce average outcomes, being in touch with your own particular taste and judgment and cultivating that intuition is hugely important.

You teach effectuation, the idea that entrepreneurs act as if the future is already present. I've called this in a corporate context leading with the hypothesis: starting with a hypothesis even if the data doesn't quite tell you that's the case, and then testing it through actually building towards an outcome. Is the concept of acting as if the future is already present a learnable skill, or does it require a kind of disposition that a lot of people just don't have?

Corinna: Everything can be learned. So if that's not your natural disposition, you can still learn it. It's a process. There are people who are very good at it naturally. And if you look at the founder of Theranos, she took it to the very extreme, so balance is always required.

But how we can use the parallel of acting as if, what the Vedic tradition tells us is that making a move, making a decision and moving, is always better than being paralysed and doing nothing, because you're going to gain information. You can almost always come back from a move you made if you realise it's not the right direction.

So acting as if helps you to make a move in a direction, and then you're going to gain information. And by effectuation theory, you then develop new means, new knowledge, new connections, new alliances, or you develop new goals, because now you have a better understanding of where you're headed. Effectuation and the acting as if principle help you get into action. And entrepreneurship is driven by action. Without action, there is no entrepreneurship. Everyone can learn it, as long as they have the desire to do so.

Ashton: Maybe before we finish up, just two more questions. One was about your PhD, if that's all right. Your PhD found that the classic explore exploit tension in startups was actually expressed at the belonging level, as an identity paradox, not a strategy paradox. That definitely mirrors something I've kept seeing throughout the interviews I've been conducting, every transformation or innovation story starts with identity, not with a plan. Did you expect to find that, or did the research surprise you?

Corinna: It surprised me. It really surprised me, because I was asking: what was challenging, what went well? So I was not asking leading questions. And what everyone ended up telling me was: is this a tech company? Is this an insurance company? Who are we? Everyone was obsessed by that, including the external stakeholders. Are you insurance? Are you tech? You're too insurance. You're too tech. This became so pervasive in my data. I was like: wow.

The conclusion of that is coming in a paper, so I'm not going to share it right now. We will have a part two coming. But the process I'm creating is looking at these belonging cues, and what founders can do when they need to start becoming awake to those belonging cues. That wakefulness to these belonging cues can save time and speed up the process to get to product market fit and then scale.

Ashton: That sounds fascinating. I can't wait to see it when it's available, Corinna. Thank you so much for your time today. Before we finish, I always ask my guests the same closing question, and it's a question related to identity. Could you reflect on what childhood belief did you have to let go of to become who you are today?

Corinna: I had to let go of the idea that if I worry strongly enough, I'm going to be safe.

That was a hard core, hard wired belief. I spent a lot of my young days worrying, worrying, worrying about everything. The more I was talking about my worries, the more I felt safe. That was going to save me. That was it.

Ashton: Worry is one of those things that hurts you twice, once in the worry, and once if the thing you're worrying about does happen. And a lot of the time it doesn't.

Thank you so much, Corinna. It's been an absolute pleasure. It's been a real eye opener to understand both the philosophy and the academic side of identity. This has been the Reinventor's Mindset. Thank you so much everyone.

Corinna: Thank you. Bye bye.