Jimmy Jia is an author and professor at Presidio Graduate School. Jimmy was on the show over a year ago talking about his work in cleantech, and applying the insights of thermodynamics to business and beyond. We welcome Jimmy back to the Reversing Climate Change podcast for a short bonus episode on his new book, The Corporate Energy Strategist's Handbook: Frameworks to Achieve Environmental Sustainability and Competitive Advantage. You can preorder the book on Amazon. It comes out March 11th, 2020.
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Full Transcript
Alexsandra Guerra: [music] You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by the team at Nori, the carbon removal marketplace. This is a show about the innovators and entrepreneurs developing solutions to climate change.
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I’m Ross Kenyon, lead strategist with the Nori Carbon Removal Marketplace, doing something a little different today. We have back with us Jimmy Jha. You were episode 57, I believe. We just released at the time of you listening here, I think episode 106 or 107 when this comes out. We want to check back in with our previous guests, see what they’re doing, give us an update. We really enjoyed having you on the first time. So we had to have you back on since you wrote a book, you finished a book.
I think even if a book is bad, the mere act of finishing it, I think just deserves applause. So, congratulations. Thank you so much. Yeah, Jimmy Jia is a professor at Presidio Graduate School and the author of this new book, The Corporate Energy Strategist Handbook, Frameworks to Achieve Environmental Sustainability and Competitive Advantage. And there will be an Amazon link if you would like to buy it, if you... Jimmy, you have to basically pitch them on this book in this time and convince them why they need to know about it and to consume its knowledge.
So what exactly is the book about and how did its journey happen?
Jimmy Jia: Yeah, well, Ross, thanks for having me back at Norian to do this podcast. It was a lot of fun last time and it’s great to see the progress that you guys have made as well in the last year or so. Yeah, the book has been a journey of over two years to be able to write and it began basically as a question that my students posed, which was, gosh, you know, we study with you at Presidio and we learn, you know, a dozen or so different business frameworks that has to do with strategy and carbon and energy.
Wouldn’t it be nice to have kind of a little handbook that just is a summary of everything that we’ve studied? And I remember sitting there just going that’s actually a really good point. When you read a business book it’s usually teaching one framework or a handful of frameworks around a way to do marketing or a way to do strategy or a way to do communications. But if you, as a leader, you need to know all of them, or you need to have some familiarity with all of them. And you don’t have time to go and read an entire bookshelf.
So I just kind of created a reference book. And over the course of the last few years, was collecting all of these different frameworks ranging from strategy to energy to carbon, the communications, innovations, risk management. And after a while, I basically accumulated well over 100 of these. And the book basically became an interpretation, putting each one of these frameworks through an energy or environmental lens and saying, look, if you were to use the business model canvas for an energy business, this is what it would look like. If you use Porter’s Five Forces to an industry analysis of the utility space, This is what it would look like.
If you had to get in front of 3000 people and give a talk on your latest energy strategy or energy profile, this is how you prepare for a talk. If you need to run an innovation brainstorming session to come up with energy products, This is how you do it. And so taking all of these different skill sets across an organization and across a company and saying, look, each one of you have to participate in this energy transformation. Don’t just rely on the engineers. Don’t just rely on the finance people. Don’t just rely on environmental risk management people.
It’s a consorted effort that has to come together.
Ross Kenyon: Hmm. Could you contrast maybe one or two schools of thought that are sort of like paradigmatic enemies that you’re contrasting? I know there are many that you’ve mentioned, but what might be an example of this?
Jimmy Jia: One of my favorite ones that are, I would say, tools at opposite end of the spectrum, but both are useful. It just depends on which situation you’re in. And some tools are really good at what I’ll call relative management, which is to make it slightly better than before. You could call it the school of incrementalism, right? Baby steps, going a little bit at a time. And because you’re going baby steps, you’re going to accumulate massive change over the course of the long term. Then you have another school of thought, which is just, I’ll call it absolute management systems, which is, look, it’s just 100% or 0%.
You know, it’s 1. 5 degrees, it’s 2 degrees management too, and we just simply have to get that. Anything relative to those metrics is not important and just not worthwhile to pursue. Both of them are useful, but there are different times when you need to use each one of them. Incrementalism is the entire point of Kaizen and Lean, right? And that’s how the entire Toyota production system came about to create the most efficient factories that we have today. So there is a place for that. And at the same time, if we start looking at some of these carbon metrics we have to reach, especially if we look at where carbon levels are in the atmosphere, there is just In order to reach those goals, you have to have an absolute goal.
You can’t have a relative goal. So they are two different ways of approaching the problem which are at odds with each other. But in certain situations, when you’re doing process improvements, you do need an incremental way. But in other ways, which I’ll just say as an example, if you’re setting a strategic goal, You might want to set an aspirational goal which is just part of that absolute number.
Ross Kenyon: What I like about your meta approach I guess you could say is that I’ve long favored what I have called methodological promiscuity or just being able to look at issues kaleidoscopically and say this might apply here but maybe not and I think The more models you have for making sense of things and not being emotionally or intellectually or ideologically pre-committed to any of them, you might be faster or more flexible in solving problems. Do you think that’s, am I right about this?
Jimmy Jia: Oh no, you’re absolutely right. That’s what I want to know. Yeah, of course you’re right. No, but another way to describe that, right, is if we think of frameworks as tools, then any framework is just like a hammer or a screwdriver. And yeah, you can walk around. It’s the, if you hold a hammer, every problem’s a nail.
Ross Kenyon: I know some people like that. I think I once was one of those people.
Jimmy Jia: Yeah, exactly, exactly. And so, you know, too many people are trained on one framework and they hold it as a hammer and they try to... And what I did was I tried to explain the store and say, here’s your menu of tools. Which one do you need? And here’s the strengths and weaknesses and when you use each one. But then the strategist’s role, the energy strategist’s role, which I’m proposing in the book, is a person that has to decide which tool to use when. At the end of the day, there’s a lot of ambiguity around the issues that we face.
I mean, there’s no ambiguity in terms of what’s going to happen, but there’s ambiguity of what the outcomes might be. And so if you’re sitting there in the strategist’s role of which tool do I pick for this problem, you actually have a lot of freedom. That person has a lot of freedom. And yeah, it’s easy just to go back to the tool that you know how to use. But sometimes, you know, you need to learn how to use one of the other tools too. And there’s nothing wrong with starting small and incrementally gaining familiarity with these tools.
But having a menu and knowing what those tools are, that’s what the review is trying to do and what the book is trying to do.
Ross Kenyon: It seems challenging to write a book that is comfortable with ambiguity, especially one that has a practical sort of business application lens to it because people, whenever I’ve read these books, they have a very strong thesis, a very strong perspective. They’re trying to sell you on an approach. How do you write a book that is more generous or zoomed out or more willing to just grapple with that ambiguity? Yeah, that’s a really good question.
Jimmy Jia: I mean, I find the best way to grapple with ambiguous situation is to ask questions. And the more questions you ask, the more you start giving shape to that ambiguity. And questions become... Incredibly good convening factors and focusing of both your own mind as well as the team’s efforts of having something to solve. And in fact, there’s an entire chapter that I called How to Ask Questions because there are really tight questions that you can ask to be able to solve incremental problems. And there’s also very broad questions that you can ask to Use as convening factors.
And once you have that question, then at least you can start grappling with some of that ambiguity. But sometimes you don’t even know a situation is ambiguous, you know. And so questions again become a way that start forcing you to think of what’s missing and what’s lacking instead of focusing on what’s known and what you have. And talking about another two frameworks that are paired together, coupled together, I call brainstorming and question storming. Both are very old methodologies. Brainstorming is about bringing out what you know so that you can combine them and find new overlaps and ideas out of those overlaps.
Question storming is about bringing out what you don’t know and trying to find where the gaps are and where the holes are. Well, both of them actually create new ideas, one through the combination of things you know and one through identification of white space that then you can try to go and fill.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that makes sense to me. Are you able to teach me how to ask questions? I ask questions all the time. How should I be doing this? Let’s use a podcast maybe for an example.
Jimmy Jia: No, that’s a really good question. So just like any other skill, I think asking questions is a skill. And some people, just like any skill, can be naturally good at it. And some people can learn it and become really good at the discipline of asking questions. To me, in order to improve quality of any skill, you have to hang out with people that are really good at that skill. So some of the best books that I’ve read on how to ask questions are written by journalists. Why? Their job is to ask questions.
It’s just like if you want to become a good musician, you hang out with the best musicians. If you want to become a good writer, you hang out with the best writers. If you want to become someone who asks a lot of good questions, you have to hang out with people who ask a lot of good questions. But if you break it down to that type of a skill, then you know what it is that you have to do to hone that skill.
Ross Kenyon: Okay, I will keep this in mind. I know in our audience, there is someone out there who would really enjoy this book. Maybe they’re already in a career. Maybe they’re looking to change to a new career. Maybe this book would help them start thinking about these questions. Who is this book for?
Jimmy Jia: So the book is for... Broad range, and I’ll go through the ones that I think would have the most benefit. From a corporate point of view, if you’re an executive leader, you need to know what your teams are doing underneath you. And you might also need to report then to the investors and board who are sitting management above you. And there are energy flows through all of these issues. If we think about environmental social governance, ESG reporting, that’s the boards who care about energy and environmental metrics. You go down to environmental health and safety.
You go down to ISO management, ISO 50,000, 120,000. 6,000, 24,000, I think, 14,000 for sure. That’s on the operator level. And for both of those, they’re managing energy. You look at sustainability reporting and you have the GRIs. Again, there’s energy built in. And so energy as a metric is needed through across all of these different departments, but they’re all interpreted in many different ways. So if you’re sitting at the executive, you need to know what people below you are doing with energy and then interpret it for people who are above you doing for energy.
But that’s also the same if you’re the operator. You need to know what’s going on with energy as you’re trying to produce your reports. But then there’s also people that those reports are going to, and they’re going to have to be able to look at it. So fundamentally, I’m giving it to the executives so that way they know what’s going on above them and below them. But then also, as you get down into the vice presidents, the directors, the senior managers within an organization, they have to know how to take their reports and interpret it for the people that are consuming it all the way up into the investors.
Ross Kenyon: Interesting. Yeah, there’s a lot there, a lot of opportunity to apply these frameworks in unique ways. I can imagine if I were looking to get promoted and I was at a company, I think Name dropping some of these frameworks and being comfortable with deploying them surely looks good. I would hope so.
Jimmy Jia: Okay. Well, when’s the book come out? The book should be out by January. Definitely early 2020. It is already available on Amazon. So certainly pre-orders are available, but I think it’ll ship by January, by end of January.
Ross Kenyon: That’s great. Well, listeners, I hope this appeals to you. I hope you will support our friend Jimmy Gia and get this book. Here’s the title for you again. The Corporate Energy Strategist Handbook, Frameworks to Achieve Environmental Sustainability and Competitive Advances. The Amazon link is in the show notes. We will definitely be doing more of these, having people back on to check in. Jimmy, maybe you want to share some sort of insight to take us out of the episode. Is there anything from the book that you thought was amazing that you want to put in here?
I didn’t give you a natural way to share it. It’s a tough question here.
Jimmy Jia: You know, I have to say, I think my favorite section of the book was in the part on innovation. And writing about how to discover white spaces was something that I really enjoyed how to do. Because as a strategist, I like to say, good strategists find something that’s there. A great strategist finds something that’s missing. And how do you find something that’s not there is one of those things that I grapple with in terms of this realm of ambiguity and in terms of the realms of what to look for and how do you find innovation and how do you create things.
Ross Kenyon: Is it like the Rumsfeld, you know what you don’t know, that sort of thing?
Jimmy Jia: It is a little bit and that is in the book as well, the known unknown matrix. But if we think about it from innovation context, how do you find something that’s not there? That’s a white space. How do you find those white spaces? How then do you define that white space? And then how do you fill the white space? That to me is just absolutely fascinating. And developing that particular chapter was quite fun.
Ross Kenyon: Well, great. Well, thanks for popping back into the office. Thanks for being on the show.
Jimmy Jia: And thank you for having me.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, it’s a pleasure. We’ll have to do another one 50 episodes later. Write another book.
Jimmy Jia: You’re asking a lot.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, it does not seem like... I’ve edited some books. Not easy. I can’t imagine having to also write all the words too. Yeah. Well, thanks for being here, Jimmy. Thank you. Yeah. And the links to purchase this book, please do it. Please support our guests. We’re really happy that we have an ongoing relationship and we’re all part of a big community. And thank you so much for listening to this Reversing Climate Change bonus episode.
