How Octopus Energy used culture to reach the top

0:03This is Eat Sleep Work Repeat. It's a podcast about workplace culture. Hello, I'm Bruce Daisley. Whenever I'm out and about and delivering a presentation somewhere or running a leadership session, one of the things I often get asked is, well, are there any cultures you admire? Are there any companies that are doing this well? And yeah, I always reach for one or two specific examples. I often talk about Nando's. I love what they do at Nando's and how they do it at scale. And I also really admire the culture of Octopus Energy. Octopus is a British founded energy company that specializes in low carbon energy technology, delivering it to households around the world.

0:46They've also got a business, Octopus Energy EV, which brings electric vehicles to households. And Octopus was founded 10 years ago by Greg Jackson. It's highly possible you've seen Greg. He does a few media appearances. He's done a few high profile podcasts. It was what Greg said about culture that started my curiosity about it, really. There's some things that really stand out in the way that he describes it. Quite often when you're trying to get a hand on culture, So one of the things that often helps you understand what a company's perspective is, is the differentiation it's got. And often that is most vividly articulated in what it disagrees with, with other companies.

1:30There's a business at the end of my road that's got excellence and respect tattooed on its walls. And I guess they're only helpful for employees to help to orientate employees. if it's meaningful that a business might have mediocrity or disrespect as one of its values. Otherwise, you're just describing sort of a norm of character. Sometimes these things are called the pillars of character. So I love it when a business disagrees with things. And for example, I listened to Greg talk on a podcast. He talks about his issue he had with a lot of back-to-back meetings. Here's what he said. First of all, one thing I do that I think is unusual is I don't pack my day with meetings.

2:12I'm religious about having lots of time outside meetings because in the one hour that someone wants to have a meeting, I could make 10 phone calls or I could drop by the desks of half a dozen team members. Um, and I can be available for people to deal with what's going on that day. So one thing for me is your time is far too precious to let it get soaked up on other people's meeting requests relentlessly through the day. It's quite funny when when i got on upa she came from a very large software company and um i said i've got a lot of meetings tomorrow and she said well where i used to work my job was to pack from 8 a.m to 5 p.m every day hour by hour by hour and i was like whoa how does that person get any thinking time how does it get any any time to reset and how does it get to do anything proactive that changes the world there's a link to that it was from the high performance podcast there's a link to that in the show notes.

3:05But I just love it when people articulate what their disagreement is. Now, the culture at Octopus, I guess I was interested whether they'd codified it, whether they'd articulated it, laid it down in a mantra that people could get hold of. And Octopus doesn't really do that. It's not really defined by formal values. Greg doesn't pin it down to three or four words. Instead, the culture is this vivid, almost tangible feeling, a mixture of trust, autonomy, shared mission. And all of those things come out really clearly in the way he describes things. It's about empowering people. One of the things you're going to hear him talk about is him talking about how employees are just empowered to solve customers' problems.

3:52There's no sign off, there's no approval, there's no hierarchy. Just fix it. Just fix it. And you've got the authority to fix it. Really interesting that the origin of a lot of his thinking was the Netflix culture document. And this, you know, haloed document 15, 20 years ago now was built, was sort of leveraged on this idea of freedom and responsibility. As Greg describes, it's very hard to take that blueprint and directly transfer it and try and use it as your own blueprint because it often lacks the authenticity. It doesn't feel like it's come directly from you. I loved this discussion. You're going to find a full transcript of this on the website.

4:33I'd love to hear your thoughts on how Greg is helping this company navigate its way through the world. You hear me at one point say to Greg, how does it feel to be the second biggest energy provider in the UK? And he corrected me, he said, we're now the biggest. And there's an example of how it's constantly moving. My research had been everything I'd read had said they're the second biggest, but in fact, they overtook and became the biggest at the start of this year. So powerful illustration of how you do great culture at scale. After I'd finished, which was, it was recorded live on stage at an event near Guildford.

5:08Someone came up to me and said, my son works at Octopus. And I thought, oh, here we go. He came up to me, he said, every single word he said up there was true. He said he wishes he'd joined there years ago. He's been doing jobs that weren't anywhere near as satisfying and he's absolutely thrilled. So delighted to hear that. I think you're going to get a lot from this. Do let me know if you're interested in this, you can see this and much more on the newsletter and you can see the link to that in the show notes. Here's my interview with the group CEO of Octopus Energy, Greg Jackson.

5:44firstly let's welcome greg jackson who is the group ceo of octopus energy welcome greg where do we find you today greg i'm in trendy east london okay um i should be with you but um i got called to a meeting with the foreign office um and couldn't turn that down because i I think you never know what James Bond might want. Greg, I'm so thrilled to get the opportunity to talk to you because the one thing that really inspires me about Octopus Energy and everything you've created here is it seems to have culture right at the heart of every single thing you do. What I've found hardest to pin down, though, is that I couldn't necessarily work out precisely how you would articulate your culture.

6:33Do you think about that? How do you describe your culture to other people? The thing about culture is it's a lived experience. you can't dictate it it's the organic way in which people interact i mean just like you think about cultures not not within business but within society in different countries around the world you can kind of describe it from the outside but you can't tell someone you know you can't codify everything um and and so i think what we try to do is have relentless discussions about the stuff that is most important and then allow people to be themselves and how they work within that.

7:15One of the things I've just been discussing now is the importance of autonomy, the importance of people feeling like someone's got their back if they want to make a decision. And there seems to be countless examples through everything that octopus do. They're really... If there was one thing that seems to be the temple of the way you work, it's giving people autonomy. It's giving the people who work here autonomy. I'd love to just break that down. What does that look like? And what is the process of giving someone whose job is maybe to deal with customer problems? What is the process of gifting them that autonomy?

7:50I think there are a couple of parts. I mean, first of all, one of our early investors from a very traditional background described this as all the floofy stuff. He kind of dismissed it. And it's too easy, I think, to treat the importance of the human factor like autonomy as being some sort of lentil-eating, hippie approach to business. But then we look at what happened when Russia invaded Ukraine. The whole world was absolutely blown away by how impressively Ukraine, as a much smaller nation, was able to take on the phenomenal power of Russia and this military. And they were able to do that because they devolved decision-making, autonomy, the ability to be creative into their organization.

8:38So rather than working in the old command and control way or the very rigid way that the Russians did, Ukraine was able to reinvent warfare and has relentlessly done that throughout this horrific conflict. So I think this isn't fluffy stuff. This is hard-nosed, proven, and more likely to drive success. And I think it also, by the way, drives far greater happiness and satisfaction for employees. is people outside of work are able to solve the incredible problems of, you know, today's size, cost of living, social media on their kids, how to get, you know, sort of balance, work-life balance, all that stuff.

9:18And they do all of that. And then they come to work and we infantilise them and expect them to have to follow a series of very prescriptive rules and policies. So autonomy is about relentlessly taking out those rules and policies and replacing them with a very clear vision, very clear objective. So in the case of the Ukrainian army, it's win the war, beat the Russians. That's very straightforward to understand. And in our case, it's relentlessly deliver better experiences for customers as we drive down the cost of the energy transition. If people know that's the North Star, then they can make decisions daily.

9:51And I think the second component is how you use technology. And so, again, by the way, Ukraine showed us something really interesting. Instead of having the incredibly expensive procurement processes of the military of the US or the UK and so on, they were literally buying consumer drones and sort of dodging on explosives and whatever else was required. But that way, they could reduce the cost of fighting by 10x or 100x. And so I think when we're thinking about technology, we need to also say, look, the job of technology should not be to constrain people. That's what delivers control. them. That's what delivers computers says no.

10:29Instead, the job of technology would be to enable them. Like, show that, for example, our case, the main technology platform, Cracking, enables our customer people to see everything that's going on with a customer in order they can better look after them. And it takes away all these things that says, you know, if you want to give someone a 30-quid credit because we've screwed up, it takes away the bit they have to go and ask for permission. It takes days. They just do it there and then. The final bit of this, though, is of course you need to monitor all this because you don't want to become a wild west most people are really good at taking responsibility actually acting better when there are no rules can when there's too many rules people get used to breaking them and gaming them when when there are fewer rules they behave better but there's always going to be outbreaks of things that go wrong either because there's a few people who are miscreants there's a few people who misunderstand there's a few people will judge it right but if you've got good data you can spot that as it's happening and deal with it appropriately.

11:26We call it freedom and responsibility. It enables you to innovate faster, to have a dramatically better customer experience so this is more fulfilling for employees. And actually, I think it delivers us more, a business that has great responsibility for what matters. And it's worth saying, you're doing this at scale. Your energy business, so we're here with Octopus EV today, but your energy business is the second biggest energy supplier in the UK. So it's scale business. The thing that was interesting to me, when I chatted to a couple of friends who are our customers, they seem to be really fond of your customer focus.

12:04My energy supplier, apologies, is not Octopus currently and I have no fondness for them whatsoever. And I was just really interested that these people told me that they had a strong look. How do you get that customer focus? How do you, you know, you're doing the same that someone might describe it as a commoditized space, but how do you get a customer focus that maybe another organization in the same space just simply doesn't have? Well, first of all, by the way, don't be sorry you're not with us. I'm sorry for you. When you do switch, I will look after you very well. If we get anything wrong, you've got my email and we'll make sure we sort it.

12:44And by the way, I mean that and I say to every customer I make. I think though, look, first of all, oh yeah, also you said we do it at scale. We also think, while growing, grow very, very quickly. So we're now the biggest energy supplier in the UK, and you find increasing margin every day. We employ about 11 ,000 people across the Greek, about 8 ,000 in the UK. So I think that I talked earlier about having a really clear vision and objective. Everyone in our company, whether it be in Octopus Energy, the supplier, whether it be in Octopus Energy electric vehicles, whether it be in our businesses that install low-carbon tech in people's homes.

13:22They should all have that north star. And every week we get the entire company together for something we call family dinner. There's no dinner and we're not a family, but it's kind of a bit like families get together sometimes and have a big dinner to kind of all connect with each other. And we do that to connect with each other. In person, where people are in offices, Zoom joining up all the offices and those who are not. and yeah there'd be thousands of people on this tool it's not manicured it's fairly chaotic it enables me and our leaders to relentlessly surface the stories of things that have gone on during the week to illustrate what we do as a company how we work i think a few years ago pretty much everyone in business especially in people functions and leadership functions saw the netflix culture deck loads trying to try to create their own version but we did that too but we found it was just impossible to write down a culture we spent longer thinking about the words than we were doing on the on the most important something the kind of concepts in the context and so we also created a podcast uh which was really just designed for internal people uh so we'd have long discussions about topics that were much richer and more and deeper than the telpon uh more organic but it turned out to be quite powerful outside the organization too and it's helped to attract hundreds of thousands of job applicants and customers listen to it all of that creates this kind of customer first culture and i think one thing i was really proud of is like every every year we've been holding something called the energy technology summit a bit like the day you're at today but for energy technology with people in the industry few policymakers and journalists and I decided to work it up to the public.

15:04So five weeks before this one, it was meant to be 400 people. I said to the team, can we make it 3 ,000 and invite customers? We did a test mailing and 300 ,000 customers would give up a day to come and listen to a series of talks on energy and technology. So yeah, that kind of relationship you're talking about is very real and it can just everyone in the company should be listening to customers all the time. We don't treat calls as being something we need to avoid and deflect. They have the opportunity to talk to our customers, to listen to them, and to show them that we care. So I guess it's relentlessly core of what we do.

15:42There's a really interesting thread that runs through the way that you treat customers and the way that you design your organisation. Inside the organisation, it seems to me that you seem intent on getting rid of red tape-y style sign-off processes. You described there how employees can make decisions. And also with customers, I've seen that when you send emails to people, if customers reply to the emails, someone will get back to them, which is just not what happens when we deal with any sort of big company that we're buying from. Just trying to, I think, be clear-eyed about the processes that we find frustrating, both internally and externally, seem to be an important detail.

16:25And I wonder just how much that designing processes to to get rid of frustrations is what you think the reality of creating great ecosystems is, whether internal or external. Getting rid of those micro frustrations seems to be an important consistency across both elements. It's incredibly important. We're in a society where people feel more and more disconnected. They feel the system is against them. Now, in a sense like ours, everyone has to have our product. there is no choice it's not discretionary you know it's we're not responsive to listening to and genuinely building the business around our customers and for them then we add to that sense of disconnect and I think you know you talked there about the emails for example it was a really early decision that we wouldn't have no reply as an email address every email address is a reply once I think we probably do get more communicators from customers than other companies but we see that as a benefit like Like, we can just have to run focus groups.

17:30We've never run a focus group. We have 200 ,000 conversations a week with our customers. If we don't know what they think, if we don't know what we're getting wrong and the kind of stuff that matters to that, I don't know, we're not doing our job right. So I think this idea that you can replace the traditional idea of an organization of you have massive walls between new customers. And then when you want to do research and things like that, you're going to do it in a very social environment. You can make it much more organic. The only thing I love is, for example, if someone writes to us about the website, very often we'll just route that query to the people that design the website.

18:04And you literally get, instead of the company being this idea, there's an alien company that's doing stuff you don't understand, you literally talk to the people who are building it. Does that work internally as well? Because, I don't know if we've lost you there. Does that work internally as well? The way you've described family dinners, that sort of team meeting at the end of the week, um it feels like an evolution from what i heard you talking about previously which was uh friday night pints and i guess that was a different moment in time but when the company was a degree smaller you would all gather on friday evenings and have beers together um is that one of the ways that you get feedback from employees or is that just about creating a sense of cohesion and a sense that we are all part of something yeah first of all i think you're right it all started with with friday night pints and it was actually in a previous building when the co-founders there were about five of us uh went to pints on a friday and we found that all the stresses of the week disappeared not just because of the pleasure of the uh delicious beverages but also because um it helps you remember that you know sales and tech and marketing and all try to do that finance we're all trying to do the same thing but we're subject to difficult pressures and it reminds you it's not those idiots in finance do this and those you know fools in marketing don't pay attention to what operations can do and operations can't deliver it was actually um these are brilliant people in every function we're all trying to achieve the same thing and the more we discussed it the more suddenly we were coherent organization and stronger now as the organization grew you know that company we grew to about 100 people and then we sold it.

19:46And the CFO of the acquiring company one day came over to me and said, you do realize that you're spending, you know, I can't remember how much it was now, like, you know,£5 ,000 every Friday night in the pubs. And I was like, yeah, I do. And he said, well, I'm seeing it as, like, you know, several FPE. And I said, brilliant. It probably saves us even a 50 FPE because our team worked more effectively. We should spend more of it, not less. And I think that kind of concept is what's scaled here. So it reminds us, it enables us as a management team to get everyone on the same page and reminds everybody about how brilliant their colleagues are.

20:20And so it's a combination of both the kind of presentation aspects and the direct conversations people have with each other. And surfacing, ultimately, we're so proud when we surface something that the back-end functions like finance are doing, that suddenly makes all the people that otherwise get stressed to the finance department, so they have huge respect for them. So that's great. I think in terms of scale, many things I've learned, and I think this is the fifth business I've done, and hopefully the last because I'm just getting too old. But one of the things is people always advise you, what got you here won't get you there.

20:55Now you're big and you need to change. And you know what? I used to believe that. And every time I did it, things got worse, not better. Relentlessly, I'm just like, let's give me advice, but yeah, the effort it got us here is probably pretty good. And so, you know, from my perspective, all these ingredients for success, you say, not now we're bigger, we need to do something different. It's now we're bigger, we need to just ensure we relentlessly scale the stuff that works. And we all read about it in the management take-up. All of us have read, I don't know, things like Drive by Daniel Pink. How much we actually change the way we run organizations based on what we learned.

21:35And I think, you know, this business was the opportunity to say relentlessly we'll stick true to the stuff that we know that works not those temptations for more process more control as well i'd love to just get into some of the practicality everything you talk about is so eye-opening and fascinating and inspiring to hear actually but i would love to know for example some of the mechanics um when you've done acquisitions when you've when you've brought people in from bold how do you how do you communicate to people joining if you if you've not codified this culture if you've not written it down if you've not got this the classic old thing of set set of values or mission statement how do you pass on to them beyond just vibes how are you how are you gifting them the sense of understanding your culture because it's worth clarifying you don't you also don't have an hr department so some of the ways that typically will like seek to do this.

22:33You've not got that infrastructure in place. How do you do it? What are the practical steps to do that? I mean, first of all, things like those big acquisitions, I think with Bolivar, it's one and a half million customers and we fully integrated it within six months and required Shell Energy, which is 1.4 million customers and fully integrated it in 51 days. The final thing is that often drag companies down. The first bit here has been relentlessly confident. This is the way we do stuff. Very often people try to be polite and say, we're going to do the best of both or whatever. It's like, this isn't the best of both.

23:05You're joining Octopus and we do the Octopus way. This is the way that works. And by the way, we would love to embrace you and your talents as part of this. But we're not going to change how we operate. I think speed is essential. The longer any organizational change goes on, the more painful it gets. Now you said, you know, we don't have an HR department. That's true. But we do have some people professionals. And on a project like this, there'll be two or three, maybe five, I don't know, people professionals. working 10, 2, with one or two contractors and whoever is on the other side to ensure that we have people processed that are very swift and very fair.

23:41Our operational function really runs everything. So on day one of an acquisition, our operational function swoop into the other organization to start identifying how we're going to scoop the people and customers out of that organization and put them into Orksplus. The whole thing is, we've got this big machine and we're going to incorporate them into it, not, you know, kind of, I don't know, run it in parallel for ages or have a complex merger. We've now done 30 or 40 migrations at scale that we know it works. A couple of things, being very candid, because I think Candid is so important. And with Bulb, 93 % of the people stayed after the acquisition.

24:26I'm really proud of that. Old people were very good at what they did, and most of them slotted in brilliantly, and some have gone on to do some of the most senior roles in the business. I think with Shell, it was much more corporate, and frankly, I think when we acquired it, it had over 2 ,000 people, and we probably only needed, I know, 300 or 400. And so it was a much more painful process, but again, running it quickly enables us to be very, very fair with people. They weren't ever in any doubt about, you know, They weren't spending a year going through consultations. Ironically, Shirley Self was having a series of redundancies at the time and had gone through year after year.

25:05People had been in this kind of perma-consultation mode, which is horrid for them. And we were able to run a much fairer process with very, very generous permanent packages so people had clarity. So I think speed, clarity, fairness. But absolutely being clear that they're joining our organization because we're successful and we're not going to change it. One of the things that really comes across talking to you is that there's such a force of character, such a strong sense of convictions, a clear sense of the way you want to run the organisation. And I saw in a couple of interviews you did, you said that you'd originally told yourself when you get to 100 employees, you're going to leave.

25:43And then when you got to 200 employees, you're going to leave. And then you sort of kicked that down the road. And the way I interpreted that is that you were, I got the sense you didn't like being the big boss because you just don't like corporate authority, like this idea of institutional authority. And I wonder if that is the secret of your success, the sense that you've built an organization without any of the BS, that thing we've all learned to tolerate, because you don't like it yourself. Would you say that there's a line that runs through those things that you've created an organization that effectively is the only sort of place that you could put up with working in?

26:21Yeah, genuinely, if I wasn't enjoying it, I'd leave. And even today, we've got shareholders and a board. And so if that ever becomes something I feel is bureaucratic, BS, or not serving what we set out to do, I'd most rather leave. I wouldn't stay for the money, prestige, whatever. I think one thing that happened, which was instrumental, and in many ways I'm just a lucky bag carrier for it, was our initial business plan was to be Ryanair for energy, i.e. we were going to be unbelievably cheap because we were brutally operationally efficient and we would essentially require customers to do as we said, in the way we said, and we wouldn't even take phone calls.

27:12Everything would be automated. And our first investor said, look, I love everything you've got in your business plan about technology and operation efficiency, everything else. But I think you should love your customers. That's what will differentiate you in this sector. And honestly, once he said that, I thought he was right. And so we suddenly remember everything we talked about now about putting customers at heart. You know, the way that we were previously going to do it It was basically saying, look, we know the customers want the cheapest energy. It's like Ryanair, no people want the cheapest flights.

27:42And we'll deliver that. But I think actually what we've done is it's still better value than any other energy company. And the technology enables us to be incredibly operationally efficient. But it also enables us to empower the team to be more interactive with customers than anybody else to get better experiences. And I think this is a much better model. But it really came from there. Now, this idea of firing myself when we got to 100 people. and then I said, it was all based on the idea we could automate everything. And I think, candidly, I learned that in a sector like energy where we've got to provide universal service, I can't just provide unbelievably cheap energy for those people that are willing to interact only in the way we prescribe.

28:28We actually have to be there for everyone. Otherwise, I can't say that our solutions are going to be the right ones for society. So it was a massive change. It came from a very wise investor who, by the way, has continually backed us and enabled us to keep saying no to the BS stuff on the way. It's really interesting, the journey through that question. Do you see customer service and culture as the same ecosystem, then sort of treating employees well and treating customers well? they're all anchored around the same principles or because that Ryanair version you could have something that maybe is unwelcoming for customers but great for employees you've you've ended up at something that feels far more rounded and I just wondered how you saw the relationship between those two things first of all I think Ryanair are unbelievably good for customers right they just know the customers so well there's a great interview with Michael O 'Leary where something gone wrong and the issue is that social media is full of people saying they'll never fly Ryanair again and Michael O 'Leary said my planes are full of people who said they'll never fly Ryanair again and I think understanding your customers well enough to break convention they can do it in one way, now if we do it in another which is you know actually understanding that if we put all the information from a reply address if we welcome call, there's no average call handling time so you spend as long 25 people who want them, they're not charged on getting the officer signed, not having tons of sign-offs for things like goodwill credits they will break conventional wisdom as well because I think we have a better understanding of the fact that customers won't very very few customers want to spend hours on the phone with an energy company, we do have a very very tiny number but it's small enough it's never going to be an issue and so I think that kind of cultural approach to truly understanding the people who are customers is really what lies at the heart of it.

30:23And breaking conventional wisdom is kind of the thing we had to test when we were small, that we'd then be able to scale. But I think on the people side, you know, with our teams, it's very, very hard to deliver the kind of experience we've just been talking about. If you don't have a team who are committed, who feel empowered, who are continually feeding back both at Cramley Dinner and indeed, by the way, through, we've got tons of child feedback to kind of continue to help us develop. the way we operate and the process that was doing provide. So I think the two are intimately bound up. And if we want to treat customers with respect, we really have to treat people with respect.

31:02But this goes far further. Because, for example, when we joined the energy sector, the dominant business was companies would, and to face new customers in the price comparison site, with a loss-leading price. A year later, they'd hike the price up to 50 % to finally recover the losses. but in doing so half the customers would churn away and by the way half the ones that didn't churn away would just they just gave up they hated the company they knew this was happening but they felt they couldn't win and so challenging that business model by saying what we wanted to do was have pricing that was sustainable from day one so you join us it's a bit more extensive than others but a year later and every year thereafter it'll be cheaper unless you want to get into that kind of just relateless kind of treadmill of switching to the best deal and then go to all the hassle of setting new apps and new backcats and things going wrong.

31:54So I think we can only do that if we provided a good enough experience that people actually wanted to stay with us. We don't do that if we had the right model with our people. Very often you need to move from one paradigm where every part of the system is designed around your existing business model organization to an entirely new paradigm. If you just change one or two bits of it, it can often fail. We're coming to the end now. and I guess everybody in the room here has spent a short while now thinking about culture and then listening to you talk about the realities of it. Is there anything, as we're looking forward for the next few years, how do you think that the people in this room should be thinking about creating culture in their teams, in their organisations?

32:36What are the one or two things that we should be focused on as we're thinking about the journey to 2030? I think relentless honesty and being honest with ourselves. I think wishful thinking is the greatest enemy of shareholder value, of corporate success. The world is changing faster now than ever before, and it's only going to start changing faster. For example, in our organization, the pricing team asked us to... They were just working too hard when they were doing price changes, and they asked us to give them more planning horizon. And that's why I said we need less planning horizon, but we need you to understand how to cope with that so that we can be more agile because in an ever-changing world, we just need to get more agile.

33:20And so, you know, with that team, we ended up saying, look, it's always going to be a frantic process. The shorter we make it, the easier it's to be. But when you know it's coming, we can then book. You can literally book a week off afterwards. The company will obviously pay. So you know that you're going to have a few brutal days every few months, but you'll also have recovery time instead of allowing the process to extend. And I think, relatively thinking about how do you make your organization more agile rather than trying to create more processes so everyone can do things more slowly is going to be ever more critical.

33:58And I'm really reminded of, there's a quote from Bill Gates that says, the world in two years will look exactly like it does now. And the world in 10 years will look entirely different. We just don't know what the changes will be and wait. and so i think we need to be building organizations with that in mind otherwise what you do is you kind of you set a three-year plan and so that three years is exactly you're just as right with your three-year plan you're in entirely the wrong shape so i said earlier it's so important to have that kind of north star and vision and then people then you can devolve responsibility and decision making that people know broadly speaking you try to achieve and they can be an active part in delivering it.

34:40I think too many organizations spend an awful lot of time planning. People are just going to deliver KPIs that have been spent, spent the age of engineering, whole structure in the KPIs. And just as people are getting going on that, you're changing the North Star. And you end up with organizations where you're much halfway up the hill and then back down again, up the hill and back down again, as opposed to having the confidence to have a long-term, fundamental vision of what you're doing. and then devolve the actions to deliver it. Greg, we're out of time, but I think everyone in the room will agree with me that that was absolutely fantastic and makes us immensely envious of the culture you've created, I'm sure.

35:22Give it up for Greg. Thank you, Greg Jackson.

35:29Thank you to Greg. Like I say, all the links to the transcript and the newsletters and the show notes. Feel free to check that out. I've been Bruce Daisley. thank you so much for listening see you next time

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