Prepare for the Worst With "The Flexible Method"

0:00From Entrepreneur Media, this is Problem Solvers. a show in which entrepreneurs do what entrepreneurs do best, solve unexpected problems in their business. We were completely wrong. And I'm just like, it's not selling. It was like, we have to start from scratch. I'm Jason Pfeiffer, the editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur Magazine.

0:22So, does this sound like your business? We run very tight margins, and we're used to flexible thinking. And when something happens and it makes life difficult, or when something doesn't work, we are used to pivoting on the spot. This is a guy named James, who has made a bunch of television shows you've probably seen. Hi, my name is James Burstall. I'm chief executive of Argonon, which is a very large international production group producing shows all over the world for television and movies and also the platforms, Amazon, Netflix, and various others as well. And the reason I played you that clip at the very beginning where James was talking about running on tight margins and having to pivot a lot is because James wrote this fantastic new book, which is called The Flexible Method.

1:06It is a 16-step book about how you can prepare for any calamity in your business. And it comes out of his own real-world experience of having to pivot many times through many, many crises. And it's really interesting because you read this book, which is really for anyone in any industry, and he starts very early in the book by making the case for why the entertainment industry is actually a pretty good place to learn this kind of stuff and how these lessons apply everywhere. And that was interesting to me because, you know, usually you think if you're not in the entertainment industry, then the entertainment industry is something completely different.

1:47It is a place full of tons of money and where the rules are totally different. But then you get James to actually talk about what it's like in the entertainment industry and you hear stuff that sounds pretty familiar. We employ electrical engineers. We employ electricians. We employ astronomers. In our industry, there are all of the sectors, including, of course, legal and commercial and accountancy. And our production sector is huge. We employ nine million people in the U.S. And if you are not really smart and nimble when crisis comes, like, for example, when COVID began and production had to be shut down everywhere, well, that's a lot of people relying upon you for their jobs.

2:32And so I wanted to dig into the flexible method with James, and it is big and detailed, and we can't get into all of it right now. But I wanted to understand what it was that he had learned navigating this incredibly complex industry over a long period of time with very large challenges along the way so that anybody facing any kind of crazy, unexpected turn can apply what he has learned to their own business. The Flexible Method was a bestseller in the UK, and it comes out in the US on July 18th. And in this conversation, we're going to dig into just a little part of it, but a part that I found particularly fascinating because also early in the book, James talks about how a lot of the things that you need to do to save your business during crisis and to prepare your business for crisis are things that are kind of counterintuitive.

3:30And that was an interesting lens to look at his advice through. So that is how we're going to do it. We're going to talk about the counterintuitive advice that saves your business. Part of the flexible method coming up after the break. I write a newsletter. It's called One Thing Better. And my favorite response that people send me is where they say, you know, I subscribe to a lot of newsletters and I don't open many of them, but this is the one I open every week. And I really appreciate that. And the reason I think that they're doing that is because this newsletter is designed with you in mind.

4:07One thing better, just one way each week that you can improve your company or your career and do work that you love. I know that there is infinite advice out there. It feels totally overwhelming. So I make it simple. It is one thing to do, one way to solve a problem, one way to think differently about the challenges ahead. One thing better. Try it yourself. You can find it at one thing better dot email. That is a web address. Just plug it into your browser. One thing better dot email. All right, we're back. I'm talking with James Burstall about his new book, The Flexible Method. And to start, I asked him to just define this concept, the flexible method.

4:51We developed the flexible method during the credit crunch, which was brutal for everybody all over the world. I'm sure your listeners will remember. And we knew that we had to pivot on the spot. We had to think laterally. We had to supercharge our creativity. We had to bring our people together and come up with new ideas as a team. And we came out of the credit crunch stronger. and that was really the beginning of us starting to realise that there is a methodology. So I started to put together some thinking about how I could put this into writing and created 16 lessons, which are all in the book.

5:20And the lessons are not easy. The flexible method is not a simple process, but it is completely achievable. And it is, I believe, useful and will change any person working in any industry across any sector if you apply the methodology. I won't go through the 16 lessons now, obviously, because I hope you'll read the book. But there are many steps that you can take, which are very practical and very pragmatic. And they're not easy, as I said, but they helped us get through both the credit crunch, the pandemic, and we've been using it since. You know, we've been facing potential recession, these terrible inflationary times that we are in now.

5:53We are using the flexible method all the time. James, you write in the flexible method that a lot of the elements of the flexible method are counterintuitive. And as I started to read through some of the steps, I started to think about it through that lens of what is it that you're telling me that would go against how I might more naturally think when I'm a leader in crisis. And that was an interesting way to think about things because I started to think of, for example, you writing about how to put people first as something that sounds correct and logical now, but in a moment of crisis actually might feel counterintuitive because you might think, I need to save the organization first, and therefore people become expendable.

6:37So I'm going to ask you in a moment to highlight some specific pieces of advice from the flexible method that you see as counterintuitive, and we can explore them. But first, I'd just love to hear you speak a little bit about that nature of how crisis management can feel counterintuitive, and how you might have discovered that yourself. The thing about crisis management is that you have to keep a cool head. Being authentic and being honest is absolutely appropriate, but massively oversharing is not going to help anybody, least of all you. So it's really important to be calm and purposeful in a crisis.

7:12And this is what we did in COVID. We stepped back and although, you know, behind the scenes, of course, we all had anxiety and I was losing sleep. We were very frightened. The truth of the matter is that we needed to communicate with our people in a very calm and purposeful way and say to them, the management team at this group do not have all the answers. We don't know what this, you don't even know what COVID is at the beginning, but we are as a team working together step by step to try and get everybody back into production because the most important thing for us in our industry is we have to produce.

7:42So that's the only way we get money coming in. That's the only way we can pay our bills. So moving on to the thinking, counterintuitive thinking, and I have had a lot of feedback on this, the first thing that you absolutely have to do in any crisis is put your people first. Your people are everything. You depend on your people. They are loyal to you. They give you hours and hours of their creativity and thinking and drive. And if you dump them at the first sign of a crisis, what does that say about you when the crisis has passed? It says you do not care. And we know that increasingly, when people are applying for work now, they've got thousands of different options.

8:21In my industry, they've got a thousand competitors they could go to, UK, US, or internationally. Why would they choose us? Well, they choose us because they know that we do care about our people. So the first thing we did in COVID was we made sure everybody was at home very safe and we moved very, very early. You must invest in technology. We moved two weeks before any of the lockdowns happened and we made sure that we had 1 ,500 logins off-site and online within 48 hours. And the first thing we did is we made sure people were safe in their home, that their elderly parents were okay, that there was food on the table, the kids were safe.

8:53And then we started reaching out. And starting with me, I started a daily email. Then each individual department was reaching out on a one-to-one basis because we knew that people were frightened. So it's absolutely vital that people knew that we were there for them. There was a voice in the darkness. And remember how dark and scary it was in those very first few days. The next thing that's very important is that you have to put your values back. I mean, I met some of my peers during that time online who would say to me, diversity and inclusion, too much to worry about right now. We're worrying about whether or not we can pay our bills.

9:25Dump diversity and inclusion. Now, again, what does that say? It says that these values are ephemeral. They don't mean anything. They don't count. So, again, of course, when you come out of the crisis, what are people going to say about your business? They'll say that, you know, you drop and run. That's not a good place to be. So in fact, we increased our diversity and inclusion during COVID. We brought in more apprenticeships, UK, US, New York and Los Angeles. We introduced the new apprenticeships actually from scratch. And we were paying people from scratch, getting people into the industry from diverse backgrounds.

9:58The other thing I would say that's counterintuitive is seek help. It's incredible how much help is out there. It is not a weakness to say, I'm going to put my hands up right now. I do not have what we are. Now, there is an old school of leadership, which is, you know, I'm the macho boss and I know everything. That is just so not fit for purpose anymore. The truth of the matter is now there are incredible people out there who want to help you. And the government in the US was very supportive. People across our sector were very helpful. People across multiple different industries wanted to step up and support us and help us.

10:31So I do think it's really important to know that actually saying that I'm in trouble here and the business is in trouble, this is really difficult. That's big strength. Yeah, and as you're talking about this, one of the things I'm thinking about is, and you said words to this effect a couple of times, which is what happens after? What happens after the crisis? And it makes you think about how a lot of our panicky instincts about crisis management are really about the narrow singular moment that we're in and forgetting that there are going to be other moments. time does not stop. Something is going to come after this.

11:10And so what is that? Because in a weird way, James, crisis management, I guess, isn't just about managing the crisis, but it's also about trying to figure out how to be two things at once, how to be the organization that navigates now, but also how to be the organization that is going to be needed later. What do you think about that? We live in a time of perma crisis. It's not about dealing with one crisis and then putting your feet up and it's all over. There are multiple crises happening simultaneously right now. We've got the recession threats to coming down the track. We've got inflation worries.

11:44We've got Ukraine. There are so many things happening simultaneously that we have to be willing and able to deal with them all at the same time. And of course, that's very demanding if you're leading a team or a leader of an organisation. So you have to prepare in advance and you have to get your team battle ready, if you like. So what we all say is that when one crisis seems to have passed through, You've got to get back to prepare. You've got to be thinking about what's coming next. Have we invested the right kind of money in technology? Are we talking to a range of different clients? Do we have a good relationship with our bank if we need to ask for a bit of credit?

12:16These things are important. Long-term relationships matter. And I have to say that if you have dumped all your people at the beginning of a crisis because you panicked, you won't have a business when you come out because they will all go and work for somebody else. So it's absolutely critical that, yes, you deal with the minutiae. In COVID, we were dealing it minute by minute in those first few days back in March 2020. And then it became hour by hour and then day by day. But what we did not do is we didn't drop our values and we didn't drop our people. We kept people on as much as possible. In the UK, we used furlough.

12:46The US government helped us keep people on across from one month into another to make sure people had some medical health insurance to keep them going. We obviously worked with a lot of freelancers in our industry. We did everything that we possibly could. And we did ultimately, of course, have to let some people go. We couldn't keep everybody, but we made sure that they knew we were going to get them back as soon as we possibly could. And we did. We got everybody back. And we were back into production far, far more quickly than many of our competitors because we were very pragmatic. We took a lot of tough decisions and we worked together as a team.

13:16And when you work together as a team, people will roll up their sleeves and they will make stuff happen. Keeping on the idea of counterintuitiveness here, I'm curious to hear you speak about maybe something that you initially found for yourself, counterintuitive as you've navigated crises, because what you're talking about here is born out of personal experience and hard-won lessons. And you can speak about it now as a system that you've put in place and then tested against crises. But in the moment, particularly your earliest business crises, I'm sure that this was all pretty fresh and new as you were going through it and learning.

13:54And what felt most counterintuitive to you or something that you did and then realized you needed to actually do the opposite of? I think one of the most difficult things when you do run a business, as I do, and I've been running my company for 20 years, is to admit that you don't have all the answers. That is tough because as founders, we are used to thinking that we can do everything and do everything well. And of course, that's just not true. That is nonsense, frankly. So one of the things that I did very early on in COVID is I brought together a team of my top five generals who work from across the group who have big ideas and they are not yes people.

14:32They tell me stuff I do not want to hear. And at the beginning of COVID, I had to hear that stuff because of course I knew it was true. I knew that we were going to have to make savings. So for example, I cut my salary immediately. But having people around you who will raise your attention to the difficult stuff, put you in an uncomfortable place where you're just going to have to accept you're going to have to sit for a while. But the comfort of having your five people around you, and I call it a Cobra team, which is the term that we use in the UK. It's like an emergency response team, government use.

15:01By having this Cobra team at your side, you are not alone. And it was an incredible source of strength because these powerful people who came from everything, from HR, to operations, to finance, to legal, these people were able to say to me, you're not alone. We're with you together and we will come up with these solutions together. And then I and they could transmit that to the team. And again, being honest, we didn't have all the answers. We didn't know what was going to happen at the beginning, hour by hour, let alone week by week or month by month. But by having a very strong team together who were facing up the worst, we were not hiding from the truth.

15:35And also we were not boosterism, faking it. You know, that's just, that's nonsense. That doesn't make people feel good. You have to be authentic and you can lean on your team because they will help you. What kind of communication did you have with the people in your Cobra team about exactly that? And the reason I ask is because in moments of crises, a natural thing that people do, and you certainly see it politically, is that everybody just falls in line behind the leader. And you were describing the opposite. You're describing surrounding yourself with people who are willing to push back. And I think that there are two things that really have to happen there, which is number one, you have to have created a culture in the first place where you're recruiting and fostering people who are going to push back.

16:20But then two, I suppose, you have to make sure that they feel really emboldened to do that in incredibly high stakes situations. So how much of that is organic? It's just the people that you chose. And how much of that is really articulated directly from you to them? We built it into the system from the get go that all these major players, there are nine different production companies in the Argonaut group, producing everything from digital content to documentary to drama to investigations, entertainment, and so on. We built it into the structure of the group from the get-go that all of those people are stakeholders.

16:56They have stock in the top company. I wanted these people to know that they are my business partners and that we are on the journey together. Now, it's not in anyone's best interest to employ weak business partners who are just going to follow the leader without question. That is, I mean, And that's just pathetic, frankly. That's not going to be where you need to get to. So I made sure I was hiring people who were in and of themselves incredibly entrepreneurial. They could go and work for a thousand of my competitors, but they wanted to work with me and in my group because they knew that we were going to respect them.

17:28We were going to value them. We were going to get them stuck in the business. So they're going to get paid properly, not going to be exploited. And they have got skin in the game. So what are they going to do? They're not going to sit back and let terrible decisions get through. They're going to challenge them. And on that point, you do absolutely have to have a positive culture where constructive criticism and feedback is just part of the day to day. You have to I mean, that's kind of who I am anyway. I do have a lot of emotional intelligence. I think emotional intelligence is a really important leadership skill now.

17:58You've got to be willing to listen. You've got to admit sometimes that you're wrong. And then at the same time, you also have to have fierce determination and fierce resolve. Both of that I have. I care passionately about my business and I care about my people. And when terrible things happen, I'm not going to let somebody destroy my baby. I'm going to do everything I possibly can to protect it. I care about it that much, but I do not have to do it on my own. And I've built that into the very structure of the group. You opened the book. And this is an interesting place for us to land on because a lot of what we've been talking about here is leadership and people.

18:35But you opened the book in a way that I'll be honest, I didn't entirely expect. And the reason is because the first chapter of the book is about preparing, preparing for disaster long before it starts. And then what you get into is just incredible, what some might just think of as the most boring tactical things, a disaster recovery plan, investing in IT, building a safety net, All this stuff that nobody, you know, everybody likes to think about how good of a leader they are, but not everyone wants to go through like a document. So can you end by just speaking to the real importance of that kind of stuff and how you have structured your team to make sure that all that is in place?

19:16My business is a very creative business, but we are those two things. We're both creative and we're a business. We want to make knockout shows that win international awards. And we do that with one more than 130. And we also want to make money. We're not in this for fun. We want to make money. It's my job as chief executive to create value for myself and my team and all of the stockholders in the organization. So we want to do both of those things. Now, you cannot be creative and do innovative work unless you have incredible detailed management infrastructure and support. Which, yeah, I agree, it's boring.

19:49We used to laugh about disaster recovery plans and thought, like, roll our eyes and go, oh, my God. But actually, you know what? We leaned on it so much. And my IT guy, for example, again, I would say he's been with me 15 years, my director of technology. We don't even need to speak half the time because we know each other so well. And he's been saying to me for years, James, you're not going to like this, but we have to invest in teams. So we had to put that in. We put it in five years before COVID. And you know what? We leaned on it. We moved 1 ,500 logins off-site and online in 48 hours. and we had all of our people talking, communicating, feeling connected overnight.

20:28And it was, you know, that's all over the world. I've said we've got offices all over the UK and in New York and Los Angeles. So people in all different time zones were communicating. And that gave, that really kindled a sense of hope that we are in this together and we're going to move early, we're going to make stuff happen. And indeed we did. So, you know, these things are essential and they are, the detail is sometimes boring, but then, you know, you do have to bring people around you who are excellent at different things from you. One thing I will say, I've done a lot of training. I went to the business school at Oxford in my adult life.

20:58I also went to the grad school at Stanford because I wanted to learn new skills. I'm constantly learning. And one of the things I realized in both of those courses is that you absolutely have to surround yourself with people who are operationally detail-minded, brilliant lawyers, amazing commercial-minded people, people who are different and complementary. So you don't have to pretend that you can do everything because, of course, you can't. but you need people around you who can do all of those things. James, thank you so much for sharing all you have learned as you've navigated through so many different crises.

21:30The book is called The Flexible Method. Can you remind folks where they can find it and learn more? Oh, thank you. Yes, it's available on amazon.com from July 18th and also Goodreads and all good bookstores. So I really hope you pick it up. And please give me feedback because we're in this together. I want to hear from you guys. Which is exactly the kind of leader you're describing. You don't want people to just say it's good. You want to hear the real stuff. James, thank you so much. Thank you. And that's our episode. I would love to hear what you think and maybe even about a problem that you solved.

22:00You can find me at my website, jasonfeifer.com. J-A-S-O-N-F-E-I-F-E-R.com. Also, I have some more useful stuff for you. I write a newsletter about how to future-proof yourself and become more adaptable and optimistic. I would love for you to sign up. It is at jasonpfeiffer.bulletin.com. Also check out my other podcast. It's called Build for Tomorrow. In each episode, I take on some belief that we have that holds us back from progress and show you why it is not as bad as you think. Problem Solvers is a production of Entrepreneur Media and comes out every Monday morning. So make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss an episode.

22:39Thanks to Deepa Shah for production. My name is Jason Pfeiffer. See you next week.