Can You Change Yesterday's People?
The Change Signal with Mark Surman
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Mark Surman’s three key insights: spending years wrestling with whether your foundational values still make sense; accepting that legacy teams can't build the future, so you need separate structures; and mastering the ability to think across different timescales simultaneously.
Mark Surman, Mozilla's president, shares the messy reality of transforming a 25-year-old organization for the AI era. He's replaced 60% of staff, created entirely separate companies, and spent five years questioning whether Mozilla's core values around privacy and open source even work anymore.
This isn't your typical change management playbook. Mark talks about the "righteousness stick" that nonprofit employees wield to resist transformation, why he set up independent entities to avoid the innovator's dilemma, and his ongoing struggle to help people let go of the past without losing what made them special.
You'll hear practical advice about validating that your communication actually landed, the temperament required to shift between strategic and tactical thinking, and why change leaders need to resist the temptation to force transformation down people's throats. Mark's honest about what's working, what isn't, and whether this whole thing might end up being a "flaming dumpster fire of disaster."
If you're wrestling with organizational transformation, this conversation offers both wisdom and warnings from someone deep in the trenches.
ABOUT MARK:
Mark Surman is President of Mozilla and a leading voice on building trustworthy AI and open-source innovation. He led the creation of Mozilla.ai and Mozilla Ventures, and has spent over two decades shaping technology that serves the public good.
Mark on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/msurman
