Espresso: Seth Godin, 3 Golden Rules for Creative High Performance Cultures

0:06I think food can be kind of interesting analogies for creative cultures and creative um organizations like this is a bit of a weird thing so excuse me this is a bit weird but like um i really believe like a bowl of ramen is ramen or ramen it's like analogy analogous for what a great culture is it's like imagine that the egg is your sales department your your noodles are your finance department your um your your um your um your big meat is your whatever your operations department like individually they're okay but as soon as you pour the the the broth on the broth is culture that suddenly everything begins to alchemize and dance and galvanize and i think that that's a kind of an interesting thing for um kind of creative cultures but i'd love to know you've worked with so many businesses and brands like i'd love to know what tahini cookies taught you about creative building creative cultures okay well first thing is i've never done a day of consulting so i don't really work with brands i just notice things um culture for me is more powerful than strategy organizational design or almost anything else culture is the way things are around here so if you are a chef and you are building a restaurant based on fear now you have a culture and that culture is going to persist even after you leave.

1:31If you are Danny Meyer, you can build a restaurant empire worth billions of dollars on a different culture, a culture that's based on dignity and respect and connection. That if something goes wrong at a Union Square hospitality restaurant, the way it gets fixed is horizontal, not because there's some dictator telling someone they have to fix it, but because everyone else is leveling up everybody else's game. and so the ramen analogy sort of falls apart a little bit because the departments aren't the point, the culture is the point and particularly in food service most people don't have a specific job as much as they have the desire and assignment to make it better for the person that they're serving and there's lots of things built into hospitality that do that so you don't want someone to say that's not my job I can't help you What you want is a culture that says our job, our job, is to figure out how to make things better around here.

2:34So on to the tahini cookie. If someone goes to Seth's blog and types, where is the secret recipes? They can find all the recipes we're talking about here. Tahini cookies have four ingredients. Almonds, sesame seeds, maple syrup.

2:56and then salt and baking soda, which I count as one. And that's all there is in them. You puree it, puree it, puree it. The tahini is basically sesame seeds. And then you bake them for 15 minutes in little golf-sized balls, maybe a little smaller. And I'm just hooked on them. I don't eat a lot of food. Nowadays, there's all these things that aren't on my diet, but these I can eat and I enjoy and they make me smile. I think the magic is you could not eat any one of those ingredients more than a spoonful at a time. Even a spoonful of maple syrup is probably more than most people can handle. But when I mix these ingredients together and add some heat, it's pretty delicious.

3:41And I suppose, kind of pulling that into the marketing, if there's a marketing lesson, I like to ask weird questions, but I think there is something in those individual ingredients, um, alchemizing together in terms of, you said, I, I don't do consultancy. I notice and I, and I watch and I see, um, I'd love to talk about, uh, Danny Mayer, um, or Danny Meyer. I hope I've said that right. Um, so he, he talked on Tim Ferriss's show that, uh, his favorite, his most gifted book of all time is, is this is marketing. And, um, I would love to know what what you've you've taught Danny a lot about marketing I'd love to know what hanging out with him seeing his his him build Shake Shack him build Union Square like what's he taught you quick one guys Espress has got a brand new sponsor Unleashed Unleashed's inventory management software that talks directly to your finance and econ software we use Unleashed daily islands I love it we've got our admin time in half saving approximately 30k a year why use it save money save headaches, save stress, get granular clarity on your margins.

4:51No way, stockers, don't miss availability. Look, your favorite brands literally use Unleashed as their backbone. Candy Kiddens, Tiny Rebel, Trip, all use it religiously. Look, there's a link in the show notes. Please feel free to book a call with Josh and his wonderful sales team at Unleashed. They're amazing. Even nothing comes of it. And even better news, you'll get your first month free if you reference Hungary. Thank you. Oh, Danny has taught me way more about marketing than I taught him. I'm sure of that. The first thing is that Danny is not manipulative. What does it mean to be manipulative?

5:26It's when you get people to do things that later on they regret. There's a lot of hype and hustle in marketing that is used to manipulate people, to get them to overspend or overbuy or overcommit. Then later, now that they know what you know, So they're like, oh, I'm sorry I did that. That's not what Danny does. So when Danny named a loaf of bread after one of my blog posts, he wasn't doing it to manipulate me into spending more money at Union Square. He was doing it because he was trying to send a signal, not just to me, but to the people who worked with him about what things were like around him.

6:08and when I see how hard he worked at implementing a no tipping policy, and then when I figured out why it didn't work, these were the acts of somebody who understands time is short and our job is to make things better. And they were also the acts of someone who understood that if we don't experiment, who will. And so I'm inspired by watching the path that he's gone down. I wish there was a way I could get hamburgers out of the equation, but he didn't ask me and that's what people want to buy. So there you go.

6:46And you talked about the horizontal versus vertical cultures. What's the difference and why do horizontal cultures solve problems faster? true. So there was a commandant to the US Marines named Kulak, and he coined Kulak's law, which is that in the 40s and 50s and 60s, wars were won by generals, by strategy. But now they're won by privates, by the people on the front line, by the people who are going house to house and door to door. The lowest paid person in your organization is the person who is dealing with the customers. So if you need to monitor them, measure them, and watch them at all times, something isn't going to scale and something's not going to work.

7:36But if you create an institution where the people on the front lines are doing what you would do if you were there, now the culture is working and you have something that's resilient. People like us do things like this. The math is very simple. How is the math simple? Well, because how many people worked at Amazon five years ago and how many people there were named Jeff Bezos, right? There's only one Jeff Bezos, but there's all these people who have never met him who are making decisions. If he has to be present in every one of those meetings, it's not going to scale. The same thing is true with any restaurant that has more than one outlet or any restaurant that's open seven days a week if the owner isn't there all seven days.

8:20sooner or later, the person in charge isn't in the room. In the case of Starbucks, Howard Schultz took over Starbucks when there were two stores and they didn't sell coffee to drink. They only sold coffee beans. But once a mom and pop place has more than two stores, mom and pop can't be at the store all the time. You run out of mom and you run out of pop. So Howard had to build an institution where it's possible for there to be a magical Starbucks experience, even though he's not there and has never been there. That is the act of scaling something. And you can see that the math doesn't work. You can't say, I have to run faster and work harder.

9:02What you have to say is, I have to create a culture, codify the way things are around here so that we get to where we want to go. Thank you so, so much for listening. It honestly means the world to me. I hope you enjoyed your morning coffee and go and have an amazing day let's be having ya if you want the full episode it will be in the show notes a link will be in the show notes for the full episode thank you so much please stay friends as well, it means the world to me