Jon and Adam

Okay, so well, we're back after a couple of weeks off. So I've obviously been over in South Africa with the lucky thing. Yeah, I know, with the GB rifle team, shooting the world championships, the long range world championships.

So I've been having a lot of fun. Hang on a minute, you can't say that and then not tell us how you did. Well, it's devastatingly painful.

So the world championships are obviously a two-day match. I say obviously, not many people would know, but it's a two-day match, shooting at 700, 800, 900 metres twice across the two days. So out of, I think it's 7,200 points as the total and devastatingly, we lost to Australia by four points.

So it was actually, it's taken me a bit of time to get over that. Genuinely, it's been, yeah, four points. So it was the closest match, closest world championships there's ever been.

I know it was after the fifth distance. I think we were equal on points. So it was really down to the wire.

We both smashed, both teams smashed on records previously held. So that's this as a percentage, that's the difference. I mean, that makes it even worse.

That makes me feel even worse. It's horrible. Yeah, it was, it was so thousands of a percent.

It was so close. Usually, the winner would be happy between the whole team to be dropping like between 100 or 200 points in total across the two days. This year, Australia only dropped 28.

That's how like the kit and the scenario and the weather played a huge part because there was just no wind, which obviously made it different. But that's so, yeah, that's why I keep trying to walk over that quite quickly. It's a silver, yeah.

Yeah, but that's still pretty impressive. Yeah. First loser is how it feels.

But yeah. So you've been off enjoying yourself in the sunshine with no wind, laying down in sort of 40-degree heat. Yep, yep.

The firing point, the stones on the firing point, one of the Americans put a thermometer down and it was 55 degrees. So we were lying on that, basically lying on like smaller coals. Yeah, absolutely kicking.

But there we go. Meanwhile. Yeah.

Meanwhile, you've been interviewing some people, some very interesting people. You've been interviewing Jeff. How did that come about? Do you know, it's really funny because I had, I thought it was spam to start with.

I had an email from, I guess, somebody that worked for me, a lady called Stephanie. I didn't look in detail, actually. I ought to perhaps have looked.

And they reached out to us, actually. I don't know how they found us. I forgot to ask Jeff, actually.

I'll follow up with that and just find out. But yeah, I guess they'd seen a podcast or gone onto our website or they'd had an email from us or something. And yeah, they reached out and said they'd really love to be a guest or Jeff would really love to be a guest on there.

And obviously, when you get requests for a guest, it's like, who's this? Is this going to try and sell something? Or is this, you know, you start with that natural scepticism. That's the journalist in me, I think. But do you know what? He was amazing.

This guy was on the list of stuff. He's done everything, hasn't he? Yeah, it's insane. Growth strategist, innovation consultant.

He's authored two books himself that are bestsellers and co-authored a third bestseller. He educates at a university at Central Arkansas. He's a former corporate executive with big companies, Axiom and other stuff as well.

He's been in the military. He was in the army, National Guard. He's got a doctorate in education, a special work in leadership and OD.

He's got an MA for human resource development. And he flies planes. And this guy, honestly, he looks younger than me. I'm like 28.

I'm not going to touch that. Too many jokes there.

And also has a fantastic accent as well. He does. He really does.

Yeah. It's one of those that you can't help trying to kind of mimic. And I'm a bit of a mimic anyway.

I'm really good with accents. Genuinely, one of my concerns, I did worry I'd sort of slip into a kind of a South Central. So how are you doing?

Stop, Adam.

But no, he was fascinating. And I think this is one of the reasons why, because there was so much information, I've decided to kind of split it into two parts because there's too much in one podcast, to be And I think you would lose track of the full learning that Jeff has provided for us. So, yeah, we're going to do this as our first two-parter, actually.

I think that'd be a better thing to do. Cool. So, well, yeah, I guess if we listen to it and then have a quick wrap-up of what he said before moving on to the second one.

The interview – Part 1

Yeah. So for everybody, Dr Jeff Standridge from Arkansas. Well, we have a very special guest in the office today.

We have Dr Jeff Standridge. All the way from, I got told off last night for calling it Arkansas deliberately, but it's actually Arkansas, isn't it? So it is Arkansas. Yeah.

Dr Jeff, welcome, welcome, welcome to intheOffice Cast. It's fabulous to fabulous to have you here. It is.

It is my pleasure. I'm looking forward to the conversation today. I have fond, fond memories of my time in the UK. And so I appreciate the opportunity.

No problem at all. It's wonderful to have a guest on.

We've been a guest. We've got lots of guests lined up. We're fairly new as a podcast, but we've got tons of guests lined up from all over the show.

So it's wonderful to have somebody from across from the US and somebody with, well, let's get right on with it. Let's just go through this list here. So growth strategist and innovation consultant, bestselling author of three books. You're an educator as well. You're a teacher at University of Central Arkansas. You're a former executive. You've done time in the military. You've got yourself a doctorate and a master's and you're a pilot as well. How do you fit all that in?

I'm 130 years old. I know I don't look it, but, you know, here in Arkansas, we really keep young. I was wondering whether you had a clone and it's actually two people or a twin or something. Yeah, yeah.

No, I've said before, people ask me if how I'm doing today. And I said, well, if I was any better, I'd have to be twins. Too much good for one person to enjoy.

And they say, oh, if there was a twin of you, we would all be in trouble. So imagine what you could get done there, right? Yeah, for sure. For sure.

Well, it's wonderful to have you here. So I've sent you a bunch of questions of things that we'd love to talk about. And we just crack on with those.

I think it's wonderful to, you know, have you here and chat through and, you know, we're just if you've got questions far and back and, you know, anything that kind of sticks to mind, which is and if we go off topic, you know what? That's great. Yeah, great. So we'll start at the top and just go with, you know, growth strategist.

A lot of what we talk about here and certainly the business that Jon and I, I help Jon run is all about hybrid working. It's set up a long time ago, you know, just after the pandemic to do a better job of the people element of that. And because at the minute, a lot of the software is all about a desk or a space.

Actually, it's more important about the people. So as a growth strategist, do you see hybrid working sort of in principle supporting and driving business growth with what you're seeing? Has it become part of that? Yeah, it really has. Clearly, it's a shift from the status quo to something new and more innovative.

Yeah. But I think the organisations that do it right and do it well, it ends up becoming a growth catalyst for them versus a compromise of settling for something less than ideal. Yeah.

I mean, I worked for a big American company when this all came about. And our strategy at the time was, well, there wasn't anything to basically to pop. You know, you know, it was this, right? We have to be working from home.

And what we did is we took the idea of what the big business is doing. You know, they've got tens of thousands of people and stuff. And we use that as try to find that kind of win-win scenario of, well, if we try that, let's see what happens and go from there.

And for us, that was the way that we did that. Obviously, there's a law in April. There's a law passed in this country that you are actually allowed to ask for hybrid working, which is unique.

I mean, there's caveats to that. So from your perspective, you mentioned that particularly about doing it well. How do you think, what does it mean doing it well from your perspective? Well, so let me back up a little bit.

So in the 90s, I worked for a publicly traded company in the US and UK and otherwhere. And we had a work from home policy then. This was in the mid 90s.

And at that time, what we did is you had to be a strong performer in the organization. And you then had to request work from home. And then we had a set of guidelines that said, you need to have your own workspace.

You need to have an ergonomic chair and desk. You can't babysit your children and also work from home. So you need to have childcare arrangements.

And if your productivity drops, we reserve the right to bring you back in house if necessary. And that was 96, 98. And it was very, very popular.

Now, there were some people who could do it and some people who couldn't. And I think that's when I think about how organizations are doing it well today, they understand that there are some people who can't work in an unstructured work environment well. They may need to be trained to work into that environment.

They may need to start definitely hybrid with some time in the office and some time out of the office to learn the work skills, I guess. But then also they select for those capabilities as well with their recruiting and selection process. So those are some things they do.

I think they use technology. They still gather on a regular basis. So I work in a hybrid environment, and we have a team in northwest Arkansas.

We have a team in central Arkansas. We go where the work is. There are days when no one's in the office, but we still come together at the same time on the same day every single week.

And we do a little round robin catch up to make sure everyone's connected face to face. We also look for opportunities to get together in person. Doesn't always work, but we look for opportunities.

And about, I'd say most of those times when we do have those times, we're able to get 75% of us together. And sometimes it's a different 75% next month than it was the month before. And so we do see each other in that regard.

Yeah, I think it's, I've written blogs about kind of some of the detail around this and the fact that now a lot of HR people are a big part of their recruiting process. The sort of talent acquisition is very much, you know, the hybrid working policy is a very, it's up there now. You know, a lot of businesses, there are some stats there that, I think there was an hourly, the people who make microphones for conference rooms internationally, they did a survey and there's something like, if you had a back to work policy that mandated five days in, you'd lose 50 to 60% of your team, not straight away.

So this is a big deal now with the ability. I think it's more about having the choice of where is best for you stroke the business to actually work. And the office then, and what office managers and facilities managers and even MDs and CEOs, founders, et cetera, need to think about the office in a different way.

Is that something that you're experiencing now seeing this as an educator and businessman, et cetera? That I completely, completely agree. You know, also I believe what I'm seeing is that organisations that do it well, they still focus on building the culture that they're trying to build. Yeah.

And they don't stop cultural development of the team. They don't stop putting those things. They just do it in a different way.

The elements of what we call a culture of excellence are the same elements, whether you're an in-office work environment, you're a manufacturing environment, you're a complete hybrid or a complete remote, you know, distributed workforce. Yeah. There's another point here as well.

If you look at the company I used to work for, they had, I think it was 1200 sales people spread out across the whole of the US and hybrid working for them because they were working not in the mothership, as I used to call it, but they were spread out across the whole of the US. It's like, well, we've been kind of hybrid working in all our lives and remote sales people. This is nothing new to them.

It's just, so I guess they're probably going, what's all the fuss about? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's exactly right. I led a sales team for several years and I had people all over the US.

Most of whom were working in their homes and, or out of their homes, I guess I should say. And, you know, we had a Monday morning call every single week. And I said, look, schedule your clients around, you know, around the Monday morning call because that's going to be our time to catch up and make sure that we're covering off on the things we need to cover off on.

And it was our annual sales conference when we got everybody together. That's when we got to see each other. Yeah, and that's an important point about keep, you know, culture is an organic thing, you have to work on it, you have to feed it.

And, you know, it comes from the top and there are micro-cultures within businesses, but they all ultimately feed into the culture itself. And individual team leaders and managers and heads of departments and then the senior leadership team will contribute towards that culture itself. Agreed, completely agreed.

You know, culture is everything about an organisation. It is the shared beliefs and norms, both written and unwritten. You know, we try to articulate the culture as a set of core values a lot of times, and that's one component.

But how we approach work, are we a process-oriented culture or are we not process-oriented? Do we have a lot of rules, or do we not have a lot of rules? Do we have a lot of humour in the workplace, or do we not have a lot of humour in the workplace? Do we genuinely like the people we work with or do we not? Do we gather for like, you know, I worked in Amsterdam for a while and the office there had kind of a kitchen area, it was almost a dining room area with two long tables and nobody went out for lunch. They had cold cuts and sandwich makings there every day. And so they would make a sandwich and play ping pong.

And that was their lunch break every day. And so they have a little miniature ping pong tournament. Well, that's not for every organisation, but for that organisation, it was very, very much part of the culture.

And so in other companies I've worked in, everyone started kind of pairing up in the mornings and decided who's going to go have lunch where and when, and they would all go out at different places, three and four people at a time. And so, you know, everything about an organisation becomes part of that culture over time. And do you think that cultures, they're kicked off by leadership or the person who started the business? Or do you think that actually it tends to be more the new people that come in, they change the culture over a period of time or some potentially quite quickly? Well, you talk about micro cultures.

I talk about the espoused culture. This is the culture we want to have. And this is the culture in use, right? The one that we actually have.

And I believe the best organisations, they create the culture that they want. They hire for that culture. They interview and select for that culture.

They coach people according to that culture. They promote them according to that culture. You know, I talk pretty black and white about core values.

If you're not willing to hire someone against a set of core values, actually interview for those. And more importantly, if you're not willing to fire someone, if they blatantly violate one or more of those core values, then they're really not core. And they're really not value.

They're just flowery words on a piece of paper that are stuck on a wall. Yeah. And then if it starts to break down from that, it's a cancer.

You said it. They feed that culture. They cultivate that culture.

They know the culture that they want to create. And so they hire people that fit the culture. Now, does it evolve over time? Of course it does.

But hopefully it's positive evolutions and not negative evolutions. Yeah, absolutely. And that comes down to the leadership, keeping the hand on the tiller, as it were, just to make sure everything kind of works.

Now, a point that you touched on there about productivity. I've got a question here from one of the team, actually, in the office. I'll just read it.

It says, one of the biggest areas of conflict in the employer-employee RTO, return to office argument, is around productivity. Employees saying that they can be productive working away from the office. And leaders suggesting a disagreeing.

In knowledge and creative work, there is a tendency to try and measure productivity by output, quantity. Do you have any thoughts on any better metrics? Or is there a better way to do this? I mean, one of our clients, when they were working at productivity, they found, I think it was, I can't remember the number exactly, but it was either 120 or 10 times that amount of metrics to judge productivity. Now, that's rare that you get an organisation, I think, anyway, that measures that level of detailed productivity.

What's your take? Yeah, so we have what we call our strategic growth system. And we work with clients to implement that. And we actually eat our own dog food, so to speak, right? So we do it for ourselves.

And when I talked about the kind of the six common elements of a culture of excellence, one of those is 100% accountability. One of them is engaged and committed teammates. And one of them is 100% accountability.

And so part of 100% accountability is having very clear lines of ownership. So you own these things, and you and only you own those things. And so anything that happens within this box of accountability, you own it, you're responsible for it, you make it happen.

That's kind of point number one. Point number two is we meet on a quarterly basis. And in a manner consistent with our annual goals as a company and our multi-year goals, our strategic goals as a company, we have quarterly priorities that are down to the individual.

And usually, each individual walks away with three to five orderly priorities. And each week in our meeting, we ask them to report on, are you on track or are you off track? If you're on track, we're not even going to talk about it. If you're off track, then there are two types of off track.

There's off track, but it's under control, meaning that I was out on holiday for two weeks, and so I'm just coming back. So I'm a little bit off track, but I'm under control, don't need any help. And then there's off track, I need help.

And so then we work together to solve it. And so 100% accountability says, looks like this. If I've agreed to do something by a certain date, let's say Thursday at noon, well, if I see on Tuesday that something is side-tracking me and I'm at risk for delivering that, 100% accountability flags it up and says, hey guys, is Thursday at noon a drop dead for this because I'm off track or can I get it to you by Friday? And they're like, oh no, they can get it to us by Friday.

Okay, great, we're all good. Or they say, no, I've got a client meeting at two o'clock, so noon Thursday is absolutely essential. Okay, then I have to not do this or this in order to get that done for you.

That's what 100% accountability says versus just waiting until Friday morning and hoping they don't ask me about it. But that also implies, sorry, go on. No, so this culture of accountability to me really supplants the need for hard and fast productivity metrics because productivity is very squishy in a professional creative work environment.

Sales is the easiest thing to measure. Yep. Lines of programming code is very- Did you hit target? Yeah, exactly.

But in other jobs that are more professional, executive level and others, productivity is tough. Yeah, yeah, very much so. Yeah, and I think that's why people back away from that.

I mean, a big component of this, connected with culture, with productivity, with teams is trust. Now, obviously, being able to trust, Franklin Covey talked about smart trust, or Stephen R. Covey does particularly, smart trust, you don't just kind of chuck trust out and go, yeah, it'll be fine, it's his job. There is, as you say, an accountability that comes with the trust.

That's two sides of the same coin, trust and accountability. They come as a package, right? Completely agree with you. And when trust and accountability are misaligned for some reason, or when accountability is suffering, then conversation needs to happen in the moment.

And we talk about empowering communication, is one of those elements of that culture. The word empower means to make someone stronger and more confident in dealing with the circumstances they're facing. Well, that doesn't mean I can't have a tough conversation.

I may have to have a tough conversation, but I want them to leave that conversation feeling stronger and more confident versus weaker and less confident. And even though I've had to have a tough conversation, it's a trust-building conversation because I demonstrate that I have this authentic desire for their wellbeing and for the good of the organisation. And those things have to go hand in hand.

It's highly counterproductive to dig out the foundations from underneath your feet. For sure, for sure. You bring people, smart people on to work for you and let them go on with it, right? Yeah, exactly, that's right.

Job said. I've worked for a large American company and it's a very different culture there. I loved working with it because it was so different to the UK culture.

But you guys work a different way. You've got a very different mindset around success and action. And that mindset is top of that list.

It's everything's possible. It doesn't really matter what it is. Don't worry, everything's possible.

I can get there no matter what. You know, it's an all-star for everybody else. They go, really? You sure? But it's not just positivity.

It's almost like I put it down to like a religious belief, a fervour almost. Why do you think that is? Is that education? Is it just purely that indomitable spirit? Is it the independence? Because one thing people don't realise about Americans if they've not spent any time with them is that you're incredibly independent as a nation, as a people, as individuals. So why do you think that is? Why is America at the forefront of that? You know, I experienced that when I lived in the UK.

That, and they would say, oh, you're just, you know, you Yanks are so, you're so optimistic all the time. You know, you're so happy all the time. Because we would stand in front of the room and we would talk about how excited we are for this and how enthusiastic we are for that.

We're like, are you always just enthusiastic and excited? You know, I think it's probably our youth, quite frankly. And I don't mean my youth. And I mean our youth as a country.

I mean, when you look at us, we are, we're the new kids on the block, relatively speaking to the UK and all of Europe and other continents as well, countries and continents around the world. So we're the new kid on the block, you know, a couple of hundred years. And so we were created from an entrepreneurial endeavour.

And so that spirit of entrepreneurship and spirit of entrepreneurialism still kind of lives as part of the culture of the organisation. So I think it's youth as a country and the fact that our roots were born out of a spirit of entrepreneurialism. And I think that still just kind of permeates who we are as a people.

I remember being on my first town hall when I worked for FranklinCovey and there were two and a half thousand people on this on one big Zoom call. And honestly, if you had the chat on, it was like... And somebody would just come on and introduce themselves. It's like, oh my goodness, it's great to have you on.

And it's like, not met them. I don't know if it's great or not. Grumpy Brits, what are you talking about? What is this? You know, we come from, you know, kind of a... I guess we're more not pessimistic, but we just see things differently.

So, but this is the wonderful thing connecting with culture and working in different cultures. The fact it's fantastic in an organisation to be able to have all of that culture together, all those experiences, because I certainly felt from it. I learned from it hugely and became a different person because of it.

 And it should do. That's the point, right? Yeah. No, I agree with you.

And I've had the privilege of working on five continents. Each country has its own nuances, if you will. You know, I know in Brazil, I used to peter on the verge of a nervous breakdown all the time because I'm a person who'll be... I'll be 30 minutes early before I will be three minutes late anywhere.

Linear, yes. And a meeting in Sao Paulo, you know, is scheduled for nine o'clock. That means there's no way it's going to start before 9.45, you know? It would be three minutes till nine.

And we're talking about going down and getting in the car. And I'm like, no, we should have left 45 minutes ago. And so each country has its own nuances.

And I've learned a lot from experiencing those as well. Yeah, yeah, certainly me too. I worked... I was head of marketing for Europe.

So we dealt with the Swiss, Swiss-Italians, a lot of Germans. And because of our connections all around the globe, you know, there's a lot of contact. And everybody does things differently.

And you can see that in terms of the way that they approach content, marketing, how their cultures are, you know, based on so many different things. You know, we had Middle Eastern, Chinese, Japanese. It was fascinating to see all those sort of cultural references and elements feeding through as tendrils into the business.

And all the better for it, I think. So let's pivot now into some of the stuff that you do. You're an investor and author.

So let's talk a little bit about investing. One of the rules that I've read so many times now, we as a small business, so, you know, we've been looking at how we fund our business. There tends to be this rule of a 10 to 1 ratio, where an investor comes along and says, I can accept 9 straight 10 that don't work out or don't really make it big because one will.

Is that a formula that you work to? Is that your experience? Or have you got a different set of rules as an investor? Yeah, we call that portfolio theory, which really is portfolio law. Now, I think it's, you know, my experience is, you know, if you invest, you know, there's going to be, you know, there's going to be one or two complete zeros for sure. Yeah, there's going to be one or two heroes.

And then the remainder of them may go south. They may go slightly north, but they're not going, you know, you're going to make all of your returns on one or two of the deals out of that portfolio. Now, we don't select deals using that formula.

We know that that formula will come to come to roost, right? We're looking at, do we feel like we can get, you know, a 7 to 10 times our return in 5 to 7 years? And that's kind of the that's kind of what we're looking at in the venture capital space. You know, in the private equity space, I hear them use 3 to 5 and 3 to 5, right? A lot of times. Can we get 3 to 5 and 3 to 5? And we're more like, can we, can we get 7 to 10 and 5 to 7? Because that, you know, using that kind of measurement and holding ourselves to that set of questioning and investigation and what have you, hopefully we can drive two or three heroes out of that group of 10 versus just one, you know.

But yeah, that is portfolio law in our observation. Yeah. Yeah.

And from your point of view, having that from your portfolio of knowledge that you've got that aids in the whole process of being an investor in the first place, deciding to be that and then what you actually invest in. That's right. That's exactly right.

So we have an investment thesis that says, you know, if it's a, if it's a software as a service company with a software product or data product or AI product or something like that, then, you know, we're going to be looking at probably two year, two million of annual recurring revenue and then 50% year on year growth. But so those are kind of just, you know, the initial kinds of numbers to really deeply look at a company. But then we're going to spend a lot of time looking at the team.

We're going to look at the CEO and the founding team. We're going to look at the breadth of experience. Have they done this before? And we're going to look at a lot of trust like factors.

So how directly do they answer direct questions? Or how indirectly do they answer them? If they've made, if, if, if, if it's in October and they have a, a current year forecast that they created in January, then I'm going to ask them in October. Well, where you said you were going to be at $2.7 million in October. We're in, we're in October.

Where are you now? Oh, no, we're at $800,000. Well, then why didn't you update your, why didn't you update your, your deck, right? So did you do the work? Are you just hoping that I'm not going to ask, right? And then when we decide to go to due diligence, we say, yeah, we're very interested. We want to go to due diligence.

Here's the list of things we need. You can put them in a data room, a Google drive, a Dropbox folder, or what have you. But we need you to populate these items.

If it takes them two weeks to fill out that, to that list of items, then they're really not on top of their game. And so every interaction with them is a bit of an interview. And either their reputation or their credibility goes up or it goes down.

It seldom stays the same with each interaction. Yeah. And yes, I guess the balance then is, is 80% people, 20% numbers, because the numbers are kind of there, right? So there's not too much.

You can interrogate those independently, but ultimately it comes down to, right. If I stick a couple of million dollars into this business, a million dollars of our, you know, investor’s money, then I need to make sure that it's in good hands, not just financially, but actually, you know, they're not just going to either sit on that, screw it away and put it into projects that are just don't make any sense. That's right.

That's exactly right. And, and, uh, you know, and even the numbers with, with startup companies, you know, the more so than the numbers, what are the assumptions underlying those numbers? And are those assumptions realistic? You know, uh, you know, we have shark tank over here in the U S. I don't know if you guys see that as well. And, you know, Mr. Mr. Wonderful will eviscerate someone who says, well, it's a 30-gazillion dollar market.

And if I can just get 1% of it, well, no, no, no, no, no. That's not the, that's not the, the right way to create a pro forma, right? We start at the bottom and we make some assumptions about the number of clients we can sell the average sales, the average sales ticket item, you know, uh, how often the customer will buy. And then the next month, you know, we have to make those build up assumptions and make them credible rather than just this top-down lazy man's approach.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

It's the confusing vanity and sanity metrics and, and not understanding that actually the numbers come from their outcomes from the actions. I believe I have a plan. You've got to have got to do stuff.

For sure. That's right. So moving on then to books, because, you know, there's so much to go through.

Three books. My question was not so much about the books themselves. And we, we can, you know, talk about those, probably ad infinitum and you probably have already.

But for me, I've, I've worked in publishing. I used to edit magazines years ago. I've worked with a business that it's kind of its whole backbone of how it worked was from books and then created content from those books.

Now the challenge for any book is that it's, it takes a long time to do it. And your biggest concern is relevancy. The age, because by the time you've written it is, is it still relevant? How do you get through that as a writer yourself and somebody who's living off their, you know, the, the, the, all the stuff that they do is thrown into those books as well.

So that's a great question. You know, some of the books that, um, have had the biggest influence on me over the course of my career are pretty timeless. I still use concepts.

In fact, uh, the, the definition of teamwork, uh, I still use from a book that was written in 1994 by John Katzenbach called the wisdom of things. And it's because that definition of teamwork still, still, it has stood the test of time. Uh, some of the principles that Jim Collins in good to great uncovered with his research, those principles have stood the test of time.

So I do think that there's, you know, if, if we're writing on a very technical subject, like, uh, uh, software development or, or, uh, uh, other forms of technology. Yeah. The half-life of that information is about 12 to 14 months.

And so it's, it's going to be largely irrelevant or obsolete, uh, by the time it's published. I think when we're talking about, um, the process of innovation, um, not innovations themselves. Yep.

So, uh, the process of innovation, I think is, it has stood the test of time. Yeah. Uh, the, the process of being a good leader, the elements that employees look for in leaders really hasn't changed drastically, haven't changed drastically, uh, uh, over, over, over the years.

Uh, and so, you know, the, the two of the books that I've written, um, they explore kind of high-level concepts, but they're more reflective books. There's a, a short reading, uh, there's a, then there's three or, there are three or four discussion questions or consideration questions at the end of each, each reading. And so I do think about how, how does what I'm about to write and publish, how does it stand the test of time? For sure.

Yeah. Yeah. And then just so that people know, the two books that you've written yourself are The Innovators, A Field Guide and The Top Performers, Field Guide as well.

And then you, you co-authored a book, um, Startup Junkies, is that right? Creating Startup Junkies. Creating Startup Junkies. And it's about building venture ecosystems in unexpected places.

So Arkansas is about the same geographic size as the UK, roughly. You have 70 million or so people and we have 3 million. And so we are an unexpected place.

You know, we're not a Silicon Valley. We're not a, an Indianapolis. We're not a Boston, New York or Austin, Texas, even.

We're Arkansas. And so, uh, we're, we've been focused on building a sustainable venture ecosystem here. And we've seen things around the commonalities of sustainable venture ecosystems in Boulder and, and, and some of the places I mentioned.

And so we, we talk about four principles, four pillars, if you will, uh, talent development, uh, creating an entrepreneurial culture, getting engagement from flagship institutions and organizations and employers. And then finally, uh, working to create access to capital at every stage of venture development. So again, it's, it's, it's a principled approach versus a roadmap approach.

A roadmap can become obsolete over time, but a principled approach, not so much. So, yeah, I mean, I'm certainly, um, my experience and from a lot of the books that I've read as well. And stick with me, um, exactly that.

It's not so much about an individual innovation. It is generally about how people act, what they do, you know, kind of their mentality. Some, okay.

Some of the, some of their systems, if you like my two books at the minute that I'm playing with. And that one of the reasons I asked this question is when you go and pick a book, for example, this one is how relevant is it for me? Am I just going to waste 13 pounds on a book that when I read it, I go, well, I could get that on the internet. That's the danger, right? Is that the internet is, um, and then the, the, the one that I've got stacked up ready to go is, yeah, is this one as well, just to get that one on my shelf right over there.

Yeah. So again, um, you know, I'm in a startup business. We are looking to grow.

We don't want to, um, go outside for funding. We want to do it purely on our own merit. Not, not for ego’s sake, but we feel that we can, we feel that, you know, the opportunities to do that.

Well, but it's that relevancy piece. It's how as a buyer of books, you know, it's like, well, goodness me, am I just going to waste eight hours of my life over a period of time or 10 hours, however long it takes me to read the book and not gain anything from it. Yeah.

And I, and see, and I don't think you ever waste, you know, it's wasteful if, if you get just one concept, just one insight. And that's what I tell folks, you know, that, look, I recommend a lot of books, but in no instance, do I think you should take that book and, and take every strip, everything out of it and create a recipe or a checklist for yourself. Pick out the things that resonate, pick out the a-has and the new insights.

And, and I just look for one or two things. Out of everything that I read and how might I apply this to my business? And, and if I, if I don't, and I can't, then it's, then at least I've exercised my thought processes. And that's about not trying to copy people because that's the point of innovation, right? You don't try and copy, you try and find a problem that's not been solved.

Very much so a problem that that has not been solved or that you can solve better than someone else. Yeah. And, you know, Ash Maria wrote the book Running Lean from which we get the lean canvas.

And he's very much somebody that we, that we recommend for entrepreneurs. And he says that we should fall in love with the problem, not the solution. Don't fall in love with the solution, fall in love with the problem we're trying to solve.

And the, the magnitude of the problem, because that's what people will pay for is solving a big problem. There are, there are nagging problems that people have tried to build businesses around. But the problem is not enough people would buy the solution at the price point required for it to be a profitable, ongoing concern because they didn't do it a good enough job on the front end of, of understanding the problem and whether the problem was a real big problem or not.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

And warrants actually somebody going, I'm going to put money into that. Yeah. People will, people will complain about a nuisance.

Yeah. But they won't pay to have someone solve it for them. No, they won't.

The Debrief - Part 1

Wow. So what did you think? Well, I'm not sure you guys could be covering more stuff. You're covering absolutely every, every avenue.

It's, it's amazing. I mean, the, he's got some very good insights. It's really interesting the way that he's approaching certain things that, you know, that I might've read in a book or listened to a podcast before or something like that, where they've gone the one way and I've taken a couple of nuggets from that and I can see how that then relates to what, what Jeff's saying.

There was, there was one bit where I, I think I would stand with a lot of other developers and argue against his, his metric for measuring productivity for developers, but we'll come on to that. But I mean, if we start with the hybrid working bit, that was, I thought that was really interesting because it highlights that, you know, this isn't a brand new thing. Some people have been doing it before, but, you know, so he said the mid nineties, he was doing, working from home.

There was, it was available from the, the listed company that publicly listed company that he was working for. And the main things that I saw from that were that it was intentional. They had a policy, they had, you know, it was a, it wasn't just what I feel a lot of people have at the moment where we've just sort of come to an agreement about it.

Not an agreement. We've sort of compromised, sorry, is what I was going to say. And that's a, well, it's sort of the worst of every world.

It was a, this is a company thing. Everybody loses in a compromise. Exactly.

You know, it was a, this is a definite thing. We've got a policy. You have to have an ergonomic chair.

You have to have a desk. You have to have your proper setup, but also the company can withdraw that ability to work from home if they think that you're not performing. And so that for me was a, you know, it shows that actually, I feel like we do get into that.

It's an employer against employee battle. It's the two poles. Whereas this is a, look, this, we want you to be productive.

We want you to be happy and healthy and a good employee. So we're going to try to help you to do that. And if that means that you can work from home, brilliant.

If it means that actually you can't work in that unstructured way, then we'll either help you or whatever it is, we'll try to make sure that you're actually, yeah, we'll protect you as an employee. I guess is sort of where I was taking that. What we kept kind of coming back around to in a lot of this, you know, dotted throughout the conversation was this is, this is about trust.

At the, you know, kind of one of the central emotions around this and tenets of this is about businesses trusting, leaders trusting, managers trusting. Because people don't go to work and want to do a bad job. Yeah.

Or I guess if people do, yeah, if people do, or if they are doing a bad job, then it's about the leaders and their managers to actually try to address that. I think it's the worst thing where you see someone's doing a bad job and you write them off. You know, that's the biggest issue.

And if you've got a trusting environment, that person might not be doing a bad job because they're wanting to. It might be they're trying to do the best, but they need someone to help them along the way. So I think that's some, that's really interesting.

I was looking at, what was I, I wrote the blog some time ago now around, you know, kind of what is the office anyway. And this whole kind of paradigm, this 500-year-old paradigm that, in fact, most people probably don't really, you know, think of offices. Yeah, it's always been around.

And remote working was something that the Dutch, I always get the name of this company wrong. It's in all the movies. Basically, in about 1756, the Dutch shipping company, everybody knows the name of it except for me, but they had remote working as a principle anyway, because they dotted people all over the world to run their offices for them.

And they worked from their own homes to do that. And I think about governors running countries. I mean, okay, let's not talk about colonialism because that's, you know, not a great piece of English history, but it's nothing new, is it? That's the point.

The whole principle of this is, you know, and that he just highlighted that really well to say I was doing this 40 years ago, 30 years ago. Yeah, exactly. And I think that it's really interesting then like moving into the performance management and performance sort of tracking, because that's obviously such an enormous thing at the moment.

This is where I disagree with him because he, well, in one part, I agree that sales do seem to be quite an easy thing to track because it's, you know, have you reached your sales target? But I still think there are so many other bits that could be in there. You know, you might not have reached your sales target, and it might not be that you're performing badly. It's being affected by something else.

And so I'm not completely convinced that it's that cut and dry. Similarly with the lines of code being a good indicator of a coder's performance. I mean, I can write something in five lines and it will be fantastic, or I can write it in a hundred lines and it will actually be unreadable and, you know, fall over.

So yeah, I think there are, it's not that cut and dry, but then I liked his sort of performance indicators where it was the way that they did it was it was based on a very good, healthy relationship within the team where you could be vulnerable and honest and say, I'm, what does he say? Off track, on track, off track. If you're on track, then everyone assumes it's fine. If you're off track, then you say, is it under control or you need help? And at no point until now was there a blame game.

If you need help, it's well, okay, so let's help you. And the other team members or the mentors or the managers dedicating time to actually help that person out. So I think that's where, yeah, I think that's where it falls apart a lot.

And it relates to something that I know you're going to talk about in the second part with sort of managers and where managers can see someone's off track and they do need help, but they don't dedicate any time to actually resolve that. So all you end up with is an employee that's completely losing their mind because they're trying the hardest in a lot of cases, some cases not, but they're trying the hardest and they can't achieve what the manager's expecting. But then the manager's just saying, just do it.

Not, okay, let's actually sit down, work out what's going wrong. Okay, I can see that you've just got far too many tasks. So let's, I'll manage that and we'll move off that.

And that's why I'm looking at some stats the other day where something like 400,000 people in the UK are signed off on long-term sick from mental illness. And that's one of the leading causes of that is poor management and overwork, which is also poor management. So this is a serious problem that we need to start getting right.

Yeah, what's the stat as well? Something like 83% of managers haven't been trained. It was the CMI, the Chartered Management Institute said 82% are accidental managers, have no training. So again, we'll probably come onto it in the second one, talking about a bit more like mentorship and stuff like that.

But yeah, that was, it requires good management, and it requires empowering your team to be able to come to you to say, I've got a problem. I'm trying to meet this deadline, but I can't. I think it was also kind of pointing out as well though.

So to kind of not defend him, but kind of add to that was certain areas of business are really easy to track in terms of productivity. You can, it's relatively easy to go, right. If you've got a target of 5,000 units and you do 4,999, I'm cool with that. That's fine. You're kind of being productive. Whereas if it was a stuff that doesn't have a deadline, like I've got, I don't know what jobs don't have deadlines these days.

But if you haven't got a deadline or the deadline's a bit woolly, or it's a, you don't count stuff in that role. You know, maybe a designer, you've got a deadline which you've got to produce, but you know, how long is it that you take to produce? How, what are the steps every day that you take? So I think it's more about trying to understand what productivity means. And then, as you say, it's that kind of, are you on track or if you're not, trusting your team to do their work and supporting them.

Maybe it's the team management is the wrong word because that's top down. Perhaps, you know, when people talk about coaching, you talk about, well, that seems to me that you're kind of a mixture of player coach as a leader. Perhaps you shouldn't be called a leader anymore.

Perhaps we, you know, perhaps the title's naming. You're not managing people. You're coaching them through a situation.

Let's get, let's shelve the term leader. That's a, that's. That's a good one for later.

Yeah, I like, that's a, yeah. What's a. But I do think, that's all right. I do think it, you know, that he was, I think he was highlighting the fact that some roles are really easy to go, well, that's productive.

That's what we understand to be productive. Other roles are very difficult to, because they don't have deadlines or timeframes and stuff. You know, it's much harder to do that.

So, and maybe it's that that we need to look at. And I think the other part of it as well was setting realistic goals. Yes.

You know, not, you know, you did 5,000 units last month. I want you to do 25,000 this month. It's like, what? Yeah.

But again, if you, if you've got that environment where you can speak up and if you speak up, you will be heard. Yeah. You know, that's, that means that you won't ever, well, you shouldn't have that scenario where you're like, come on, you're, you're having a laugh.

There's no way I can achieve that. Yeah. And I think that's, especially with what I've been reading about with this sort of increase in people being on long-term sick is the knock-on effect that that has with the team is that, you know, because it gets very difficult.

Managers don't know what they're doing. If I had someone that was going off on long-term sick from a mental health illness, I wouldn't know how to approach that. I'd have to go and learn that myself.

It's not just, you know, the biggest worry is if I say something wrong, that might make them, you know, deteriorate even further. But also the rest of the team then had to pick up that work. So in that scenario, if you've got someone that is then picking up the extra work and goes, I can't do this.

And now I've got all of these other deadlines, you know, we, you need to, you do need to be realistic and also be able to say, I can't achieve that. And that, that means that actually you don't then have to achieve it. I don't want to say it in a bad way, but.

No, I know what you mean. It's they, they know their job and they're probably not better than the manager or the leader, whoever's the coach, whatever phrase you want to use to do that. So trusting them to know that, but asking them the right questions in, for example, good quality one-to-ones, like I see you're a little bit off, you know what? Rather than the stick to beat them, it's the right, how can I help you through this? Moving the rocks out of the way of the path for them to actually achieve and realising that we're not robots.

We're not, we don't, you know, do 27.4795 things every day. That's not how we operate. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. Particularly in a hybrid work situation where, you know, we had it just a second ago. I had somebody come to the door.

Bing, bong. Wasn't expecting that, you know, kids, dogs, you know, something happens, a pipe bursts, you know, a car breaks down, all this normal, normal stuff that everyone has to deal with, particularly at home. Actually, that's really interesting from the first part that he was talking about, where they were able to work from home, that as part of the policy, you had to have childcare set up.

Yeah. You know, obviously that's something that's changed since the pandemic, because now there's a more of a, well, actually we can fit life things around work. As long as you're getting your stuff done and achieving those deadlines and you're on track, you can have a bit more freedom and autonomy to do your own things.

So that was an interesting thing. I wonder if they still have that policy where, no, you have to have a desk. You can't have your kids there.

You can't be waiting for the Amazon delivery guy or whatever. It's, you know, it's... Well, it's that rubbing out of those lines at the beginning of the end of the day. You know, that nine o'clock.

 ou know, where's that come from? Well, 1729, you know, the factory opened. Bang, you were there at the crack of dawn and you left when the target was hit. And we've still got this slight mentality now.

You rub out the five o'clock or the 5.30 or the six o'clock. And, actually, now it's because we should be concentrating on what you're able to produce. And is it, are you on track or off track to use Jeff's radiology is, well, that's more interesting pretty surely.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It was also interesting with his stuff he was talking about with the investment and, you know, how... So for, as I was listening to that, I was going back to my sort of product manager brain and thinking about, you know, and actually with the learning and the books and what he's been training people where it's, you know, you fall in love with the problem, not the solution.

I love that. Yeah. You know, I've worked in companies where they've got a solution looking for a problem to solve, you know, that sort of thing.

Or it's a problem that's actually not big enough. It's just, it is that niggle. And, you know, you throw time and effort into doing this and you're like, why isn't everyone using it? I mean, one of the things that, you know, we do is we use our own product because that's how you know that you're actually solving that problem.

If we don't use it, again, I've worked at companies where we should have been using the product and trying to get the team to actually use it. There was so much pushback. I was like, if we can't do it and we're meant to be, this is ours, this is our baby and we're not prepared to do it, how can you possibly expect a customer to do it? So yeah, that was really interesting.

I thought that was very useful for a product manager or anyone basically building a product or a business. Yeah, I loved that. That's one of the things I think that would stay with me.

And it's not the first time I've heard it, but a nice little reminder to fall in love with the problem and make sure that it's, as you say, it's not a niggle, you know, you know, it's a blue light on the kettle rather than a red one. That's a niggle. Wow.

If that starts to wind you up, got to be careful. But yeah, so I mean, that's, it's really interesting. I have to admit, I haven't actually read his books yet, but I'm definitely going to because I think he's got a huge amount of knowledge there and it's really interesting as well.

It's like, yeah, if you just learn, if you can take one thing away and put that in with all of your other learnings, that's how we, how we improve as people, isn't it? Yeah, I think the book thing for me, because I've written books before, I've written magazines before, loads of news articles and magazines and stuff like that. And the point about the relevancy piece, and particularly when I work with Franklin Covey, obviously they trade off their IP, which is their Stephen R. Covey, Stephen M. R. Covey, for, you know, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, et cetera, Speed of Trust. In actual fact, we've got a guest coming on from FranklinCovey in the not-too-distant future.

So it's interesting because they talk a lot about very similar things to what Jeff does because they're a leadership company. But this guy's talking about leadership in a hybrid world. So that's coming up.

But it's how do they keep their books relevant? That was the bit, because it wasn't to catch him out. It was generally to find out, well, how can you innovate a book that's two years old? How can you call that a book about innovation or something? Yeah, but software moves on at a rate, you know, we've been looking at software just recently, and there's 20 different bits of software to do one thing. It's like, oh my God, how did you choose? So the relevancy of something from two years ago, it's just like, well, but I thought his answer was great around that, around actually it's the process of innovation, not innovation itself.

Yeah, yeah. Principled approach rather than a roadmap. Yeah.

That was, yeah, it's absolutely, because there are so, you know, the short books that promise you instant results in the seven steps and like follow this roadmap and you go, yeah, but I can't because that bit's not relevant to me, which means that actually the whole thing falls apart. But the principled approach is, yeah, that's something that you can pick and take what you need to that's appropriate to you. And maybe all of it will be appropriate, just not at this one time.

But it also feeds into, and we talked about culture and all sorts of things there, about leadership and cultural leadership and all those things. But you think about if you're basing everything on, if you're basing it on principled centred leadership, principled centred innovation, principles in human nature don't really change. We've not had this massive leap in change of principles, you know, the trust, honesty, you know, talking straight, you know, kind of all sorts of things like that.

They are standard and need to be, we need more of that in business, more transparency, et cetera. So I think, yeah, very, very interesting approach, but also one that the point is in business, you need to be able to replicate stuff and have, you know, kind of be predictable. And that using principles when, you know, they're kind of, in theory, if it's a principle, it hits a block and it doesn't go any further.

It's like, no, no, no, we don't do that. No, we do do that. That ties in so nicely with what he was saying about culture at the beginning as well, where he was like, you know, your culture is something that you have to work on, and the hybrid has just moved.

The way that you build culture to be a slightly different thing, but also you have to, if you've got these core values, you have to live by them. You know, these principles, you should be living by them because if you don't, and I think he said, I've got it written down here. If you're not prepared to fire someone who blatantly violates your core values, then they're not core and they're not values.

They're just flowery words. When I heard that, I thought, yeah, how many of those sorts of, let's do an offsite thing where we'll come up with our five main principles and then everyone tries to, you know, cringingly inject it into what they're saying. You know, oh yes, we're giving back or we're focused or whatever, you know, those flowery words are.

In that case, it's all rubbish, but if you can build it out of your culture, then it can be part of your core values and then you can hire for it to improve your culture. And sometimes you do need to, you know, let people go who don't conform to those. No, absolutely right.

  mean, and obviously I mentioned about micro cultures within cultures and stuff like that, but I think that's super important, particularly right now. I mean, I was talking with a chap yesterday who's talking about, he's a networking guy. He's my financial chap as well.

And he goes to these networking groups and one of the biggest topics that comes up every single time is about hybrid working and how, just to keep it working, you know, and create, keep a culture. And it's hybrid working and how do you keep the culture? Hybrid working, how do we keep a culture? Now, I think he's, some of his clients have like HR businesses and stuff like that. So, you know, having that, those principle-based values within your business, they will travel with everybody, no matter where they are.

You know, whether they're in Stockholm, whether they're in New York, whether they're in Sydney. These are the values of the business and most skills you can train. Principles and values in people, they have to be there.

Yeah, and it's not about writing them on the wall so that everyone can see them when you walk in. It's about having it in that sort of intangible culture. Like you said, you know, do we have a lot of laughter in the office or is it very serious? That is part of the culture.

And if you have a very serious office and you hire someone who's a bit of a joker, that's going to, you know, you'll get that culture clash. And then what do you do about it? That's when it starts to become toxic. But not just that.

As a hybrid worker, somebody who sits at the desk all day, you've got a set of rules that you abide by when you're making your decisions because you don't manage time. You make decisions and you have priorities. So when you're making those decisions, what are you basing them on? Well, your internal values.

You know, yes, you've got timeframes and deadlines, all this kind of stuff. But when stuff gets a bit tough, what are the principles and values that you as an individual, you know, kind of agree with? You know, what's the symbiosis with those, with the company? And so you can make decisions around, do you know what that, I've just got to think about, you know, Beth in that department, that if I do that, that's not going to do well with her. I can't talk to her about it because she's away.

So, I'm going to have to make a decision based on what I think is best for her, not me necessarily, or what's best for the business. That's really going to affect her. I can't dump that on her lap because I'm going on holiday.

I won't get to talk to her. You know, imagine a scenario like that. So I think for a hybrid worker, having those values and principles as a baseline, as a foundation to make decisions from is super powerful.

Because they travel, they just travel everywhere. Well, it's, I can't remember which book it was, but it was something about, you know, as a leader, you shouldn't, oh, sorry, we're getting rid of that word. As a leader, if you are in a team and you say we're not doing that because of this reason, whatever the task is, you want to do that enough so that then when you're not in the meeting, everyone knows that that's what's expected.

So then they'll go, is this something that our leader would accept? You know, is that the right quality or whatever it is? But so it's creating that unwritten intangible thing that almost rules that people abide by organically. They don't have to think about it. But that's created through, we come back to the big T word, it's trapped, it's creating the business leaders, people who own the company, the management team, whoever it is, creating that environment of trust that people can work with it and know that, you know, when you come back and go, well, I perhaps wouldn't have made that decision that way, but do you know what? That's fine.

I'm, you know, why would I employ somebody and then not allow them to use their brain and their ability? Exactly, yeah. Hire smart people and let them get on with their work. Yeah, what is it that if you're the smartest person in the room, you need to either change to a different room or change the people you're with.

You're in, no, you're in the wrong room or what is it? Obviously, I'm not the smartest person in the room. That really well known, yeah, that line that comes to your mind straight away. All right, yeah.

Anyway, everybody knows what I mean. They're smart people, they're smarter than me, so they'll go, yeah, it's all right, we got it. Well, I mean, I guess we've, we've talked quite a bit about this, so we should probably wait to go over the second bit.

What do you guys talk about in the second, in the second? So, yeah, in the second half, we, it's kind of three things really. Again, super insightful again, but we talk about kind of innovation. What is an innovation consultant? Because I was like, it sounds a bit, you know, a bit flowery.

But then I wanted to just give a little bit of insight into asking me about himself, you know, routines, you know, what's his daily routine? What does he do? Is there anything special? You know, does he like do 14 hours of yoga and then he starts work, you know, so basically he doesn't sleep. But then the last one really, as an educator, what's the big three things that he teaches kind of, because he centres around innovation finance for his education pieces. So, what are you telling, you know, kind of startups these days, people who've got ambitions to be, you know, kind of micro or entrepreneurs of the future.

So, yeah, we just, we get his insights on that. I assume that would be also really relevant for, well, for entrepreneur, entrepreneurs in inverted commas, but also anyone that's involved in building a product. As I said, with the beginning stuff he was talking about, I was just like, yeah, as a product manager, this is, these are the things that I was worried about.

And these are the things that I had to make sure that I got right. So that as a product manager, you're just, you're trying to make sure you're building the right thing that someone will use and that solves someone's problem. So that's great.

Well, let's, let's, I'll see you there, I guess. Yeah, see you on the other side. Cheers Adam.