Zoe Scaman on The Unseen Source of Value Destruction

0:00When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. This Labor Day at Lowe's, get up to 45 % off select major appliances.

0:37Plus, deals on select materials and tools to keep the job moving. Right now, get a free DeWalt 20V Max battery 2-pack when you buy a select DeWalt 20V Max tool. At Lowe's, we have what you need to keep your job moving. Valid through 9-13, while supplies last. Selection varies by location. See Lowe's.com for more details.

1:01This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Listening to this podcast instead of doom scrolling? Smart move. Another smart move? Getting help from one of State Farm's 19 ,000 local agents when you choose to bundle home and auto. Bundling. Just another way to save with the personal price plan. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings, and eligibility vary by state. I was with a financial organization a couple of weeks ago doing a keynote and before I went on stage, their CEO said, we have to talk about AI publicly.

1:34And if we don't talk about our AI agenda publicly, shareholders will get nervous. So they're just doing it for the sake of doing it. And yet they don't necessarily spend as much time or any time at all really talking about what do we hold on to? What do we protect, even if it doesn't logically make business sense in the next two quarters? And I wish that we were having more of those discussions because the value destruction, I think, is much more real right now than any level of value creation.

2:07This episode of Creator Destroy starts with a French sociologist and intellectual named Pierre Bordeaux, whose work on how meaning accretes around objects, brands, and symbols should be foundational to every enterprise that cares about value creation. But it's not. I'd never heard of Bordeaux until just a few months ago when my next guest, strategist, consultant, and big thinker Zoe Skamen, introduced me to his thinking in her musings of a wandering mind newsletter. Zoe's one of a small number of people I know who's willing to say out loud what a lot of people feel but won't admit, which is that much of what passes for marketing strategy has been reduced to a process producing decks and frameworks and post-it notes that make everyone feel like something happened without actually creating value for anyone.

2:52She's the founder of Bodacious, a strategy studio, and has spent two decades working inside and alongside companies like Droga5, Lego, Netflix, L 'Oreal, Tesco, and with Mark Cuban and Luka Doncic. What makes this episode what it is is that Zoe's not here to share what's working, but what's broken, why most of the people running enterprises can't see it, and what the costs of not seeing it are. We get into what competencies should actually look like when the old playbook was written for a world that no longer exists and where playbooks don't work anymore, and the paradox of how you intentionally construct meaning when meaning only works if it doesn't feel intentional.

3:31So Zoe, a few months ago, I read something you'd written where you mentioned Pierre Boudot, and I'd never heard of him, and I'd never heard of or wasn't familiar with his thinking on how meaning accretes. And I wound up going down a bit of a small rabbit hole as a consequence. And I want to start our conversation here. If meaning is the mechanism by which value actually accrues to an object, a brand, a human, an organization, a company, I'm wondering from your perspective what the absence of understanding of how meaning is actually built, nurtured, and sustained costs a business. It's a nice small question to start with.

4:18So thank you for that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Warm me up with the big ones. That's fine. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I came across Pierre Bordeaux's work probably about 10 years ago. And I was obviously massively late to the party even then. But what I found really interesting about... Not as late as me, as it turns out. Not quite, not quite. But we're there. We're there. We're good. So he wrote a book, you know, well before I was even born called Distinction. And what he was kind of suggesting in Distinction was there is kind of three levels of capital that can accrue. There is kind of economic capital, which is, you know, what is a product or a service worth in terms of its kind of straight economic value?

5:07but that there are two others. One is cultural capital which is this idea of you know a product or a service will accrue a certain amount of meaning based on you know what it means to people from I don't know the way that they want to kind of position themselves the values that they might attach to it you know all of the other kind of cultural aspects around it and then there's another one called symbolic capital which is this idea of basically how is something seen as prestigious, what kind of attributes are tied to it in some way. And so when I started reading this, I thought, well, this is interesting because this is a way of me understanding what the value of a brand is.

5:44But then as you went deeper down the rabbit hole, so did I at the time. And where I kind of got to was this understanding that, hang on a minute, meaning is not something that we can manufacture per se. It's not necessarily something that we can build in a kind of paint by numbers process. It's something that almost kind of gets built by accident. And he called this space where meaning gets built the field. And he said that all meaning is relational. So a lot of the time, we like to think that meaning is individual. So something means something to me because of a reference that I have or a personal experience that I've had.

6:21But he basically said that's mostly bollocks. And actually, it's all kind of relational. So something will mean something to me because I know that it means something to you and I'm therefore symbolically giving that meaning because I think it says something about me to you. And so the more I started thinking about that, the more I started thinking about the fact that actually, hang on a minute, in advertising and brand, we like to think that we are the authors of meaning, but we're not, if this is true. And actually the process that we go through, which is we create this idea of kind of synthetic meaning that we want to attach to a brand or a business, we vomit it out into the world and we assume that everyone kind of jumps on the meaning train is massively misunderstood in terms of actually the process that we are actually going through and what we are actually creating.

7:11And so I started kind of thinking, well, actually, there is a very different way of understanding both our role, but also what is a brand out there, you know, when it actually starts to kind of create all of that sort of meaning aspect around it. You know, and the question that you us, which is, you know, what happens when a business or a brand doesn't really understand this? I think it's kind of three issues, really. The first one is if we continue to build meaning as if we are the sole authors of it, what we actually end up manufacturing is something that is very hollow, which is a kind of cosplay version, I suppose, of meaning because we've written the positioning statement to the nth degree.

7:49We've wordsmithed the ads. We've done the color palette. We've got the right celebrity attached to it. We shove it out into the world and we assume that we have built some level of meaning, but actually we haven't. And there's something kind of missing there. I think we also don't understand that meaning has to be nurtured over a long period of time. And what we're doing at the moment, which everyone is kind of aware of, is we're basically resetting brand to pretty much zero every two and a half to three years when we have a kind of new CMO coming in. We're very short termist with how we look at kind of brand in business now and that's accelerating and getting faster and faster so we're actually breaking any ability that we have you know to kind of build meaning because we're not allowing it you know to kind of compound and then I think from a kind of sustainable aspect of it and sustainable meaning how do we maintain any level of meaning that we may have accrued for a business and a brand I don't think we quite realize that you know meaning is a currency of sorts you know we've earned it over a period of time and if we fuck up which a lot of brands and businesses do now on a regular basis from a PR perspective, we spend it and it doesn't necessarily come back.

8:55And so we basically start to kind of chip away at that meaning. And a plastic example of that is obviously what's happened to Nike over the last couple of years. And the fact that they were kind of riding the coattails of all of this meaning that they'd accrued over decades and hadn't quite realized that they'd been spending down the balance of that over the last kind of 10 to 15 years without necessarily building it back in. And so I think it's this kind of threefold issue, which is we're building something really hollow because we don't understand actually what it is. You know, we're not nurturing it properly, so we're not letting it compound.

9:25We're just cutting it and starting from zero over and over again every two and a half to three years. And then we're not realizing that this is something that we have earned as a currency. And if we screw things up and spend it too quickly, we've lost all of that meaning. It's very difficult to kind of build it back in again. So I think that's the kind of cost to business of not really understanding this work and what this means for the job that we do. I'm struck by one of the first things you said, which is that, you know, we as, and tell me if I'm interpreting it or playing it back wrong, which is that marketing marketers can't create meaning.

9:59But of course, isn't that the job of marketing and marketers, which is to create meaning. Now I get that meaning doesn't exist in our positioning statement, our work, our outputs, it exists in the minds of the audience, right? And if it doesn't exist there, it doesn't exist. But help me resolve that tension, and then I got a follow-up tension for you. Yes. So I think the way that I see it is that we are not the authors of the meaning per se. You know, the audience is, the culture is, the people that we're going out there to are the authors. And what we do is we create the conditions for that meaning to either occur or not to occur.

10:47So I think it's a very small tweak on the significance of the role that we play. Yeah, but it's an important one. I get it. Yeah, I hope so. And I think that that's the difference, which is when we wordsmith everything to the nth degree, when we build our, you know, brand love keys or, you know, brand houses or whatever that may be, we think that we are essentially capturing meaning and then we have the ability to communicate and supplant that you know onto the culture you know that we hope to move in the right kind of direction um but i think what we're missing is actually we need to be creating the conditions for that meaning to then become emergent in some way um and that does change i think the role and the approach you know that we should be playing and i think for me the thing that creates those conditions is how a brand or a business behaves as opposed to what they say.

11:40And that is a really, really big shift as well, because if you then start thinking about how a brand and a business behaves, suddenly the job of marketing is not just the marketing assets, because how a business behaves can come from any part of the business, which can then hit the public sphere, which then has a knock-on effect to the emergence of whatever that meaning tends to be. And so I think it's really helping us to kind of step back and see the whole picture as opposed to just the kind of advertising stuff that we tend to focus all of our time and energy on.

12:16When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing and candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. This Labor Day at Lowe's. Get up to 45 % off select major appliances.

12:53Plus, deals on select materials and tools to keep the job moving. Right now, get a free DeWalt 20-volt max battery 2-pack when you buy a select DeWalt 20-volt max tool. At Lowe's, we have what you need to keep your job moving. Valid through 913, while supplies last. Selection varies by location. See Lowe's.com for more details.

13:17This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Listening to this podcast instead of doom-scrolling? Smart move. Another smart move? Getting help from one of State Farm's 19 ,000 local agents when you choose to bundle home and auto. Bundling, just another way to save with the personal price plan. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings, and eligibility vary by state.

13:48the the difference between how a brand a business a company behaves and what it says is oftentimes enormous right and and you know the easier examples to cite are when there are contradictions between what you say and how you behave in the united states over the last few years starting I think three years ago, maybe four, Target has suffered from that contradiction, right? Which is for 20 years, 25 years, they were talking about inclusion and values of belonging and what has suddenly become a bad three-letter word, which is DEI, right? With a real commitment to it, not just words. And then they capitulated to some angry folks and their business for other reasons as well has suffered significantly as a consequence.

14:44What's your advice as both a strategist but also as a consultant and advisor to your clients on how to, what systems they might put in place to ensure that there's alignment between what we say and what we do, that they're talking the talk and walking the walk? Are there frameworks that you use? No, not really. I think that for me, the biggest issue in pretty much every single business that I walk into that causes this misalignment between words and actions is incentives. And that is always the problem. What are you saying? The internal cultural ones, right? Yeah. What are you paying lip service towards versus what do you actually reward internally?

15:36In terms of, you know, the incentives that you have. So I was working for a company many moons ago, a large sportswear company, which I'm sure many people will know. And they were undergoing... Does it rhyme with Fiky? Maybe, maybe not. But they were going through a large transformation project that took a couple of years. And the whole point of that collaboration, of that kind of project was collaboration, which was how do we work better together? How do we kind of connect ourselves across seemingly disparate work streams, departments, that kind of stuff to kind of create, you know, one brand, one business.

16:13So the motivation was very, very clear in terms of actually what they wanted to try to achieve. And we went through loads of workshops, as you do. But there was one particular workshop that we were in. Zoe, I'm sorry, can I interrupt the story for a second to ask you a question, which is presumably what they wanted to achieve was greater efficiency in the name of greater effectiveness, was a more holistic, organized, integrated approach to business. And I'm kind of like, we talk about this a lot on the show that org design is one of the greatest impediments to growth. Like, why the fuck do you think so many large enterprises do not understand that multiple P &Ls is not the path to prosperity?

17:04I think they do understand that multiple P &Ls are not the path to prosperity. I think the challenge is probably twofold. one which is organizations are made up of humans and humans are inherently irrational beings who like to hold on to their own fiefdoms who like to hold on to their own success who want to judge themselves by factors such as their job title how many people they manage you know their specific pnl um you know what they're earning in terms of their bonus and if you try and take that stuff away from people, they often dig their heels in and they become personally, you know, the biggest impediment to change.

17:45So it's a very light balance between organizational transformation and people just being dickheads about it and kind of getting in the way of it, which I think is a real challenge. And I think the other thing is when you get to organizations of that size, the organization becomes a kind of Frankenstein's monster. You know, bits of it have kind of grown and evolved and morphed in different ways over time. And then they've added another bit over here and then they've added an extra, you know, box over on the right hand side. And it just becomes this kind of monstrosity that still somehow manages to kind of function.

18:18But I think the inefficiency in them is everywhere. And, you know, it's a symptom of just having a gigantic organization, which is why I also think the traditional approach to organizational design is completely inappropriate because, and I've seen this a million times and I've been part of these as well, we plan it almost like this perfect chessboard. And we like to move people and departments around like they're kind of pawns on a chessboard. And we come up with this kind of perfect encapsulation, which is very neat and very logical of what an organization should be. And we have it on a PowerPoint slide and, you know, McKinsey, et cetera, charge, you know, 250 million quid for this kind of stuff and then they impose it um on top of an organization which is as i said inherently a monstrosity and run by irrational humans and that's why it breaks every two years and mckinsey get to renew their contract for another 250 million quid it just doesn't work um and so i think this is the problem so i think there is an inherent understanding that yes competing incentives and pnls are a mess and are the cause of a lot of the pain but then how do you get past that?

19:27How do you get over it? You know, when you're dealing with these organizations that are emergent in their nature. I want to ask you to follow up on that, which is how do you get past it? But I interrupted your story. So go on with the story. Then I'll bring it back. Okay, so I'll finish this story first then. So yeah, so workshop, all about collaboration, how do we start doing more stuff together? And this particular workshop was about retail. and we had three teams in the room one was wholesale so they were selling to big department stores one was e-coms they were managing the website kind of e-commerce sales and the other one was in-store so basically managing their own stores and their capabilities there as well we're like you know how do we get more fluidity amongst this how do we start sharing ownership how do we kind of funnel people into different experiences different touch points etc and one particular story came up from the store guys which said well we're pissed off with e-com guys because they never put the address of the stores on the website.

20:23I said, well, that's a bit weird. Why wouldn't you do that? And they said, well, we don't want people to go to the stores because we're e-com and we want to sell via e-com because that's our P &L. And if they go to the store, we lose that sale and doesn't show up on our P &L. So we're not going to do that. And then suddenly all of these red flags and alarm bells started ringing in my head going, well, we've got completely misaligned incentives here. If you are deliberately not putting the location of the stores on the website, they cut their nose off, then what else have we kind of misaligned on here?

20:53And we kind of really got into a big, deep discussion about the way that different teams were rewarded, about what success metrics were looking like and how they were set at the beginning of each year. And we realized that there were these huge walls between each of these different teams and their ability to actually have any level of collaboration and fluidity. It did not exist because if they did start to collaborate, they'd be chipping away at their own P &L, chipping away at their own kind of incentive structure and the rewards that each of them got, you know, individually and as a team at the end of the year.

21:22So it just didn't work. And the more I started kind of delving into this, the more I then have started seeing it in pretty much every organization, you know, that I work with. The number one barrier to any level of success is misaligned incentives. And nobody really wants to dig enough into it because it's messy and it's combative and it's really difficult and tangled and it's a mess to try and fix it. So they just leave it alone. But isn't that the fundamental job of the chief executive, which is you may not want to dive into it, but if you want to increase the if you want to create sustained value, you better fucking dig into it because you're punching growth in the face.

22:00Right. Which which then brings me back to what I said I wanted you to help us understand, which is how do you advise companies to get past it? How do you advise companies to ensure kind of the cultural incentive and financial economic incentive alignment? Excuse me. So there's a thing called, and it sounds very fancy, but it's not. There's a thing called dialogic systems change, which I've been very interested in for a long time. So about 10 years ago, I was living in New York and I was working for a company called Undercurrent, which at the time was this kind of bleeding edge. I knew Josh and Aaron back in the day.

22:42I was a client of Undercurrent. Were you? Well, there you go. Yeah, when I was at Live Nation. So amazing. So then I went over there because they were the bleeding edge of organizational design at that point in time. And I wanted to understand how they were doing things differently. And in that era, holocratic organizations were all the rage. You know, this idea of kind of no structure, slam teams, so basically, you know, autonomous, lean, multidisciplinary teams. And it sounded logical. And it allowed you to kind of move fast, break things again, you know, the same kind of era that that stuff was happening.

23:16And it essentially created a bunch of renegades within a hierarchical structure. but one thing I started to notice very quickly is that it didn't matter which organization we went into whether it was American Express whether it was Climate Reality Project whether it was PepsiCo whether it was Live Nation we kept picking up and supplanting the same strategy over and over again so we were almost becoming a McKinsey and we would go in with the same recommendation you need slam teams you need to you know pull some stuff out turn them into kind of you know these renegades and these people who are doing pilots and that's how you smash through your hierarchy and there was no real understanding of the organizational issues that that business had no real kind of empathy for what they were going through no real understanding of the specificity of the challenges that they were facing and it got my back up and I just thought you know we're just doing what McKinsey does but in a slightly more fashionable kind of trend forward way and I don't think it's working and so I started exploring this thing called dialogic systems change which is actually about 30 or 40 years old so it's not new um and it was this idea of well actually organizations are emergent you know how they start to um build and evolve their practices and their operating methodologies um is fed by every single person that walks through that organization and deposits something and every single person that leaves absorbs something and it creates this you know kind of concept which i've labeled previously as this idea of something called the heartwood which is this kind of dense inner working of what an organization is um and i just thought well how does that get created over time um and so dialogic systems change suggests that actually it gets created through a number of different pillars you know one being this idea of you set a vision for um you know where you kind of want the company to go which people kind of know you know the vision but you then allow people to find their own way to it and you never ever do it as a top-down mandate you never kind of take the vision shove it into a bunch of posters you know plaster them up inside all of the toilet doors you know and call that kind of organizational transformation and culture change and kind of job done and instead you allow people to have a certain level of autonomy and subjectivity over that meaning and to kind of create it for themselves and there's a number of different kind of practices that sit underneath that and I think for me that's the stuff that that kind of really really works and it shows up in very different ways in different organizations so snapchat being one of them so snapchat um how they practice called counsel and i've done it a few times one of the most powerful things that i've done in terms of you know organizational communication and it came from evan spiegel who's the you know founder of snapchat he actually used to do it in middle school and they come together before really important decisions and they sit literally in a circle of chairs and they talk to one another you know and they share how they're feeling they share what they need in that moment.

26:09And the idea of counsel is to be heard and to feel a sense of recognition and then also to hear others. And it really helps them to kind of shift and change how they approach different subjects. And one example of what they did recently was when they were going into one of the court cases that was brought against them and the other social media platforms is, you know, Evan Spiegel and his legal team and some of the others actually sat in counsel before they then walked into the courtroom and really kind of sat and talked through the nitty gritty of how they were feeling in that moment, how they wanted to approach things.

26:38And it was at that particular court case when Evan stood up, turned around and actually addressed the parents, you know, the children who had died. And no other social media founder did that, but the council gave him the ability to feel like he could. And then there are other practices as well. So for example, in NVIDIA, with Jensen Huang, the Jensen Huang, the co-founder of NVIDIA, never ever does one-to-one meetings. He will actually go out onto the floor of NVIDIA and just start talking. You know, people kind of gather around him and he finds that as a much more effective way of disseminating information and also disseminating decision making.

27:11By the way, I do that all the time and nobody listens. I just, it's like... Maybe you need to have the statue of Jensen, I don't know. Or a leather jacket. It's an interesting methodology for kind of this idea of dialogic systems change and emergence as well. You know, Netflix have got this kind of first captain mentality. So regardless of your seniority in the organization, you basically have an idea, you take it as a project and you run with it and you just get on with it and you kind of see where it goes. And so I think there's a kind of multitude of lots of different practices that are pointing towards this idea of kind of dialogic systems change.

27:43And then I start to basically adopt that in the work that I do with my clients, which is I'm not going to give you an org chart. I'm not going to give you a set of, you know, values and pillars and principles and practices, because all that's doing is me taking this idea of the chessboard and trying to impose it on your organization, which is messy and gnarly and filled with lots of different, as I said, irrational people with very different viewpoints. And instead, you know, how do we open up spaces for these different types of practices, which give you the ability to open up communication, give people autonomy, help people be heard?

28:14You know, perfect example of that is AI rollouts. You know, right now, everyone is saying how many co-pilot licenses could we possibly release in the organization? Let's get some AI training programs in place. And Bob's your uncle, you know, we've done it. And suddenly we're AI centric. and for various reasons that is going to fail you know top-down licenses first of all are kind of coming with no context people are just like what is this i only figured out excel macros last week i'm not trying to you know play around with copilots like that and then other people are seeing the headlines you know out in the world ai is coming for your job ai is eating the energy grid ai is water hungry you know and we're all going to be um you know basically starving for any kind of natural resource if we allow these data centers to be built and suddenly they're seeing these co-pilot licenses come down and there's a bit of a mismatch there in terms of what they're seeing in the outside world and what they're being mandated internally.