Clarke Ching with Rory Sutherland and Elfried Samba on bottlenecks, leadership and progress

30:10And consequently, effectively, they also effectively look at things from a cost-saving point of view, not from an opportunistic point of view. And so if you combine the two things of a ridiculously high burden of proof, which is impossible if you're doing anything new because there's no evidence about the future. Okay. And then this scarcity mindset, which is the purpose of life. Only finance people, some engineers like this, the purpose of my life is to make it more efficient. Okay. I mean, there is a minority of people who think like that. Now, I've got a weird theory, by the way. I think a lot of people say homo economicus doesn't exist.

30:49You know, the economically rational man. My argument is in any category. I don't think there's anybody who's universally homo economicus, but in any category, there are people who behave like homo economicus within your category, and you don't want them as customers. Those people are actually totally, in other words, focusing your business to appeal to your most economically rational customers is actually a recipe for disaster. Everything gets commoditized and doubled down to the lowest common denominator, doesn't it? Yeah. But then, going back to the point about scarcity versus abundance, how you do one thing is how you do everything, right?

31:31And what you're realizing is that a lot of people, instead of focusing on how do we grow, they focus on how do we keep where we're at, right? And if you think, you can see it in sport as well. I think there was a headline about the fact that Manchester United let go of like 200 members of staff, but then still spend like 300 million in transfers or something like that, right? It's like, it's almost like there's a lot of performative slash almost like corporate actions that make it feel like you're gaining momentum, but you're not actually shifting the dial at all, right? It's almost like everybody's on their best behavior to put on this picture that they're actually doing something.

32:10But then, yeah, yeah. So my dad has always told me, something that some people might find controversial, but I believe it to be true. He says that the best way to run a country, unless you do it pretty well like the Swiss, is almost like a positive dictatorship, right? The reason being is because you have people that are committed to the long haul or the long journey and are making decisions that are going to last the next 20, 30, 40, 50, 100 years, instead of for five years and the next party's going to come in, undo what the previous party said they were going to do, and the next person comes in, You see that in football as well, when you have a football manager that has a great academy of players that are coming in, but then they're basically categorized based on whether they can stay in the Champions League this season or whether they can avoid relegation this season.

33:01So all that thinking becomes very scarcity, short-term thinking. And then they never evolve and move forward because they never give you the tenure to see out. It's worse than that, which is you then get fired because you don't get through into the quarterfinals of the Champions League. And then your successor gets all the credit for the young players that you hired at a bargain price. The other place which is absolutely famous for this is the film industry where people will overspend on films, commissioning films. They then get fired because the film is very expensive. and then when one of those three films is a massive blockbuster, effectively the successor inherits all the credit.

33:44So this extraordinary disconnect between what you might call long-term actions and short-term credit seeking. And in terms of that positive dictatorship thing, I've got another friend of BlackRock whose point is that is actually the best form of government, but it requires an absolute Lee Kuan Yew thoroughgoing genius to make it work. And generally, the most you can hope for is maybe two of those in a row. And his argument would be, for example, in China, they kind of lucked out by whatever you think of their system of government and so forth. The people at the top were startlingly clever at making things work.

34:26And actually, that's the danger, that actually democracy doesn't really exist to attain optimality. It's because it gets rid of bad people. I mean, democracy is really, if you look at the value of democracy, this is why I often take issue with people who are obsessed with proportional representation. And I get it, no, no, no. Proportional representation and democracy doesn't exist so you can have an optimal representative government. The government has to be representative to have some sort of legitimacy. That's valuable. But the real value of democracy is it's a nonviolent way to dispose of governments when they're either bad or, as it happens, they just run out of ideas.

35:08So would you therefore say that democracy is a scarcity mindset because it focuses more on what happens if you have the wrong leadership as opposed to how do you actually grow and build the country? I would argue that actually there are two kinds of continuity. I agree with you that if you have that kind of Lee Kuan Yew system, and you could argue that until recently, the US had a weird kind of continuity because there wasn't that much difference between Democrats and Republicans, to be absolutely honest. you know um but what's uh what can happen is that you know the system breaks down but particularly i think what happens is that if you if you spend too long focused on the same things okay and neglecting other things uh okay then what happens is that that the helen taylor's theory is that human neurodiversity evolved because in any group of 150 people, you occasionally need to have a different take on something.

36:13And the great thing about ADHD or, you know, the spectrum is that those people, and I find them in, well, probably included in both of those, but I find those people incredibly agreeable to work with because they don't automatically have what you might call a collective perception. They don't necessarily see things the way other people do. And that's a necessary corrective, I think. And I would argue that neoliberal economics has had too long a run. When someone says, there was a French experiment, why don't we look at gross national happiness? A lot of people go, oh, you're cheating. It's really snarky.

36:55You're changing the rules, da-da-da-da-da. But yes and no, because we all know that wealth does not linearly translate into happiness and well-being. And therefore, anybody who's coming along at least with an alternative take might be valuable. And also, of course, what happens is people focus on a bottleneck. They eradicate perhaps that bottleneck, if you're really, really lucky. And then they continue to do what they did before. Whereas, of course, what Eli Gildrat's chicken cage factory should have done is said, okay, we've kind of cracked the manufacturing problem for the next five years. Okay, we're making more bloody chicken cages than we need.

37:35What we need is more customers. Possibly even what we need is more people to keep chickens. That would be the category problem. Okay, we've seen not enough people keep chickens for us to actually sell enough cages, or it may be that the people are buying inferior cages from somewhere else. But you have to continually shift your attention because it's a bit like the bubble in wallpaper. You know, it keeps moving. And if you smooth the bubble and obsess about the patch where the bubble used to be, meanwhile, the bubbles moved on somewhere else. Alfred is too young to know about wallpaper. Oh, yeah.

38:13I love about wallpaper. The skincare makes me look younger than I actually am. But I know a little bit about it. But then going back to the conversation there, I think this is a very important conversation. Why did people stop using wallpaper? What happened to wallpaper? What did happen? That wasn't a manufacturing constraint, was it? I mean, literally, I mean, high-end interior decor, it's still used. But I mean, wallpaper was universal in my childhood. Fascinating. Yeah, but then going back to what you were saying there, Rory, about the fact that in the US, there was no real differences between almost like the right and the left, which therefore meant that there was a level of continuity in terms of ambition.

39:02There was unity. I think that words like unity, continuity, are all things that we're kind of like losing right now in society and culture. It's almost like polarizing one side or the others. It's either you have an abundance mindset or a scarcity mindset, right? There's never, it's always an all conversation, never an and conversation, right? And there's no commonality or people trying to realize why should we preserve certain things and why should we aim to innovate and create new things? There should be a conversation about how you merge those two different things. And I think that that conflict is a bottleneck in society right now, is that either we're going this way or we're going that way.

39:42And we actually had a conversation around AI, right? And the fact that a lot of people are talking about jobs being lost in AI, where the world's going in AI, I actually had a really weird take, which was the fact that I believe that our trajectory into the world of the internet kind of distracted us away from things that actually mattered in the world, right? In fact, you have the smartest brains and minds now going to build apps and things that happen on these devices. And then there's things that are happening in the world today that have not evolved at all. Like, try to get a train in the U.S.

40:19It'll take you the same amount of time as driving, right? Try, if you think about some of the other challenges that's happening, they're talking about a housing crisis, we're talking about what's happening in the world right now. Much slower than driving. Much slower than driving. The only real rationale for most Amtrak journeys, apart from the highest speed routes down the East Coast, is that you sleep on the train, which you can't do when you're driving yet. And you have to drive on the other side of the road. No, no, no. It's ridiculous, isn't it? I know. They'll come around eventually. I know.

40:48They're all hankering for a little king in their life, aren't they, really? You know, a little bit more monarchy. I will actually, by the way, there is an extraordinary role to monarchs, which is, in one case, which is that someone described them, I think it might have been Walter Badgers, as like the king on a chessboard. It doesn't do very much, but the value is in the space it denies to other pieces. And one of the arguments would be that if you become president of France, you basically become delusional after about five years because you live in a palace and you have all this bling and a retinue and, you know, trumpets, okay?

41:30And the point is, we allow the king to do the stuff with the trumpets, and our prime minister lives in a terraced house, okay? It's a very nice terraced house, but it's still a terraced house, okay? And I think there's something actually quite important about that, which is, no, no, no, no, your job is to, deep down your job as a government is to take the bins out. Keep us safe and take the bins out. But also, there are cases actually where having an extra piece on the board is decisive in the sense that if you look at the death of Franco, the Spanish monarchy, let's face it, if we look at it in historical terms, they're not the world's most successful monarchy.

42:14It's usually like Philip the Incontinent was succeeded by, you know, Amy the Mad or something like that. Okay. But the king at the time, Crown of Commons, was totally decisive in the transition to democracy. And so you have the very fact that they, in a sense, don't have a dog in the fight. And, of course, a very long-termist is another point worth making. Okay. Your fundamental thing is, you know, I need to make sure there's still a monarchy around my great-grandchildren. Which, you know, there are, you know, I'm emphatically not in favor of a despotic monarchy unless you really luck out. But, and, you know, the hereditary principle is brilliant for, you know, finding those geniuses.

43:01But there is a mindset to the whole thing, which is complementary to everything else. But then also, I know you talked about sports and now we're talking about, like, the monarchy, and then we talked about politics and culture. But if you just think about it there, the red thread is continuity, right? And sometimes, even if you do not completely agree with the decisions, the direction of a person in leadership, the fact that they're just going to be there for a very long time just gets you in line and on board, right? Well, if you think about it, okay, whatever happens, if Jeremy Corbyn had got in, if Nigel Farage gets in, you still have a king.

43:41Okay, right? Now, it's largely performative and symbolic. It's like Chelsea. We talked about football. Sorry to jump in there, but it's kind of like the continuity at Chelsea was Roman Abramovic. Like, the managers would change, but they knew that Roman would always be there. Ranga or Manchester United with... Delia Smith with Norwich City. Exactly. You've got to remember, if you're an American and you're a left-wing American and Donald Trump gets in, you feel like you've lost your country, right? In other words, completely. Your country has been taken over by an alien force. We don't really feel like that.

44:25There is weirdly a kind of left-wing group who are favorably disposed towards the monarchy because they think it is more possible to engage in left-wing experimentation if people believe there's a kind of leitmotif of stability, you know, which doesn't change. So, I mean, you know, this stuff is, I mean, Stephen Fry's argument for the monarchy is just empirical, which is if you look at countries that are constitutional monarchies, you know, you've got the UK, Canada, Spain, Japan, Thailand, I guess, that's a bit weird, the Netherlands, Sweden, okay, Belgium, Okay, it's not a bad collection of pretty sane countries.

45:07Now, we don't know which direction causation lies. Is it because the countries are quite moderately minded that they basically reach a compromise with a monarchy? Or is it because they have a monarchy that they're somehow more capable of continuity and stability? We'll never know, but you could argue, well, correlation may not be causation, but it's still correlation, right? When it comes to the process of uncovering, first and foremost, discovering, uncovering bottlenecks, and then the first step to getting them almost fixed. Clark, what would your process be? So obviously, we work with a lot of brands, and you work with a lot of organizations and institutions.

45:50So what's the first step towards identifying a bottleneck, and then what happens beyond that point? so probably the first bit about that is that most people don't know about bottlenecks so so that's almost the first step getting them aware they do know about queues though waiting queues you know if you see a queue of cars if you see a queue of people lined up at a cinema uh waiting to get their popcorn you know that there's something slowing it down if the queue's growing, you know it's costing you money because people are walking away. So you've got the symptoms and the most obvious sign, and it's not the only sign of a bottleneck, and not every bottleneck will have a visible cue, but if you can see the cue and you can measure that, suddenly you've got a lot of numbers.

46:42No, you've actually got something that's really visible. People talk about system thinking, but so much of it for me is actually system seeing and being able to see the queue that's been held up by whatever is at the front of it. And when you look to go at the front of it, you'll be looking to find, you'll be finding one type of resource. And I know people don't like to be called resources, but it could be a person, it could be a printer. I don't know if you guys know of Derek Sivers, but he, again, is very popular with his books and stuff. And he once told me that he had a bottleneck that was sitting next to him, and it was his printer when he ran the company CD Baby.

47:27And they couldn't print off orders quick enough, and so they couldn't actually ship the CDs fast enough. So what you've got to see is a buildup of things that are waiting. There's a queue. And then you've got to look there, and then you look, and you sit, and you study. and it's not always the obvious thing, though sometimes it is, because normally the obvious things have been sorted out. But that's kind of, for most people, that's how you do it. If you were in a factory, you'd walk around and you'd wander around the factory and maybe you start at the front of the factory where the stuffed leaves.

48:01You start at the finished end of it. You'd walk back until you got to where all the raw materials come in at the other end, and you'd look for the biggest pile of work. And there'd be a big pile of work there, and it would be sitting in front of the slowest machine, which would be the bottleneck. And you'd go, oh, if we can just speed up that one, everything else speeds up. So that's when it's obvious. That's when you can make it visible. The type of work I do... I often use traffic analogies because if the people are motorists, you explain that there's no point in widening a dual carriageway if there's a badly phased set of traffic lights at the end of the road, because all you're doing is just moving a jam somewhere else.

48:51And I keep writing about this business where sometimes you have to go slower to go faster. So smart motorways are massively counterintuitive because the idea that by slowing down from 70 to 50, you might arrive at your destination sooner, seems mad to the individual motorist. Okay? The individual motorist has a heuristic, go as fast as I can. But because there has to be a gap between cars, and the gap increases, not exponentially, but non-linearly with speed, there are literally situations where if you all slow down to 50, you'll proceed to your destination at 50 miles an hour, if you continue driving at 70, one person just hits the brake lights for a second, and you end up with people driving at five miles an hour or naught miles an hour for 10 minutes, which more than undoes the benefit you gain from going at 70.

49:43So people have this. I'm a lone defender of Britain's smart motorways, because I actually argue that the benefits are invisible. The costs are visible to the individual motorists, but the benefits of course, are a traffic jam that never happened, which they never get to see. When I lived in Scotland, and I used to have to commute between Edinburgh and Glasgow to get home, I would deliberately annoy the people behind me by leaving maybe three or four car lengths in front. And I did that knowing that if the cars in front slowed down, I had a buffer in front of me where I could slow down without causing all the cars behind me to suddenly do that brake light, slow, slow, slow, slow, all the way back for miles.

50:33And I know it annoyed people that were behind me, but I actually sped up the entire traffic while I was commuting anyway, to a certain extent. It would be lovely if you wanted to get the people of the dictator. Go for it. I had a friend who was devoted to complexity theory, who became so obsessed with not braking because he was aware that his brake lights created congestion, okay? He actually ended up running into the car at fright, okay? Because he basically optimized his driving around minimizing use of the brakes. Anyway, but he was doing God's work. Yeah, you've got to be careful. So if I take your question, where do you find bottleneck?

51:17So that's the obvious one, right? If you walk into a hospital, you just look at the waiting lists. And you know what sits at the end of them. You've got a candidate. And my two bottleneck books have got lots of examples there where you just look and you go, oh, okay, there's not enough operating theatres, or maybe there's not enough nursing staff. It could be surgeons. You know where it is, but you don't know exactly which type of resource it is. So those ones are all when people are doing the work. If you're dealing with a leader, and that's what I do these days, it's a lot harder because leaders do not want to be called a bottleneck.

51:58And maybe Rory, or actually both of you, since you're marketing geniuses, this is my... Actually, can I tell you a story? When I was talking to Paul when we were setting this up, he said, have a story to tell about bottleneck. And I've got to tell you this one because I'm so proud of this. And it will illustrate the situation. A colleague of mine, I started, no, a colleague, sorry, a client of mine, Angela, Angela Gedeyev, she works for a company called WiseTech in Australia. And I started working with her about five years ago. And during that time, she grew her team from having about 25 people up to having between 300 and 400 people spread all around the world.

52:40And just a few months ago, she won the Australian Businesswoman in Tech Award. So she's done really well. She's got this amazing personal story. And I was there sort of helping her and supporting her to just constantly, you know, to grow from 25 to 50 to 100 to 150. You know, there's a lot of work you've got to do with your whole team, but also as the leader. Now, the trouble, if you look, I've worked with a lot of people like Angela, but of course I mentioned her because I like showing off. because she's just won Australian Businesswoman of the Year Award, right? But as we work with each other, it was really hard, even though she knows about the theory of constraints because WiseTech, the company that she works with, uses theory of constraints all through them.

53:26She knows about it. It's really, really, when we first talked, she was quite open about this. It's really, really hard to admit that you as the leader are the bottleneck And your organization cannot grow unless you can. Yep. You're basically, you are, if you think of a botan, the other way of thinking about it, you are constrained or you are limited by the number of hours that the leader can stay awake. So the analogy I work with her, and I would have used Russian dolls, but she's Russian, so I couldn't use it. Or I would have used snakes, but it's Australian, so people get offended if you compare them to snakes.

54:09You know, that snakes, as they grow, they shed their skin. I actually popped into chat, GTP, and I think I found the most wonderful, for me, metaphor for how people grow and how leaders grow. And it's like a hermit crab. So you can look at your own lives, and you can look, say, where you're going to be when you're, say, 70, compared to where you were when you were 17. and through your life you will have been in one shell at 17 and then you outgrew that shell and suddenly you had to do something brave like like a hermit crab you had to go naked uh for a little bit um and then go to another bigger shell and then when you got in that shell you bought stuff with you uh which you probably shouldn't have um uh and then you're missing things because you've got a bigger shell and your brain has to do so much more work and then you just get comfortable in it.

55:01And what happens? You keep growing. So then suddenly you've got to look around for another shell. You've got to do that naked dash again from your shell to the next one. And you get to that and everything you knew, some of it's actually slowing you down now. Some of it doesn't belong in your head. So you've got to get rid of it. And as you grow, you've got to learn to trust yourself. You've got to go through this imposter syndrome over and over and over again. You're almost like forming, storming, norming and performing inside your own head, but also with your own team. I find that really, really just satisfying because I just think of myself.

55:36I know the shell I'm in, five, six or eight years ago, I was living in Scotland and now I'm back in New Zealand and I had to choose a totally, totally different thing. And it wasn't just moving physically from one place to the next. My mind had to move from one place to the next. And so like working with people like Angela, you know, it's just so incredibly interesting. I don't know how to do their jobs, but just sitting down thinking, you know, what got you here is not going to get you to the next step. You need to grow. How do we do that? And actually, if I'm quite frank, and this is everyone that I work with, it's all about trust.

56:20Everything is about trust. Trust with other people because you grow bigger and bigger. You have to suddenly start working with the people that scared you. You've got teams that used to work for you. Now they've got layers of people working with you. But more than anything else, it's actually about the trust of yourself. That was a great Google finding, wasn't it? What they called psychological safety. Yes. If I'm right, Google did a lot of research into what created high-performing teams. I think they did, and they wrote their book about it. They go. Yeah. Anyway, sorry. I know you're an expert in agile as well as being an expert in bottlenecks.

56:57How do the two effectively inform each other? Ah, okay. So, yeah, I'm both. And my book, Rolling Rocks Down Hill, was about that. And I mentioned my new book that I'm working on before, I think, we started recording when we talked about how I had to change the name. because it sounds rude when I say it out loud with my accent. So I won't say it here in case you get expletive warnings and stuff. But this is, so what Agile does is it basically takes the idea from the Japanese manufacturing, which we all kind of inherited and understand now, which is that you don't leave all your testing of your cars until the end of the line and then beat out the fixer stuff there.

57:52You build it as you go along. So Agile just works in small chunks. And it's so obvious. Everyone, no one knows that their software's built in Agile today, but every app gets updated every few days or every week. They've got Agile process behind them. Where it works with software is...

58:10If you just think about the bottleneck stuff of it, you don't want the leader of your team, someone like Angela, who I mentioned, you don't want them to be the bottleneck because you could have 300 or 400 people who are busy waiting on strategic decisions. And forgive me for doing a Venn diagram here. I know people can't see it, but three circles. One, the two at the bottom are expertise and management skills. So that's the stuff that every leader has in them. And the top one is the job they're meant to do, which is actually leading. And when they get really, really busy, they sacrifice leading in order to be the expert in their business domain or whatever it is they do, and to manage all of the day-to-day stuff.

58:58And so what they do, they get so busy, they sacrifice. Actually, leadership is the second thing that they sacrifice. The first thing is their home life. So they sacrifice their home life, then they sacrifice leadership, and then they just become busy, busy, busy, busy bosses. And then you've got, if you want to spot that kind of bottleneck, to go back to Elf's original question, you find that bottleneck by going, are they a leader? Question one. Two, do they have a whole lot of unanswered decisions and questions in their inbox? And if they've got those two there, they won't admit they're a bottleneck because it sounds like an insult or an accusation, but they then need help to claw back time.

59:44Because otherwise, all those decisions are slowing down their entire organization. So if you think about system seeing, that's a way of seeing, is this person a bottleneck? And you'll know that really good, not good, that's the wrong word. You know when you have a non-botly-neck manager because they seem wise, they seem thoughtful because they have time to talk to people. They seem just really organized, usually because they have an assistant or a chief of staff who works with them. And more than anything else, they have time to do that top bubble on the Venn diagram, which is thinking, which is what leading is.

1:00:21It's thinking about the big things. And if you get rid of that, you de-strategize your business because your leaders aren't, don't have enough time to lead. Today we helped a coffee shop get an insurance quote simply and easily and made sure a floral delivery van was able to make someone's day. We're the Hartford, with decades of experience insuring millions of unique small businesses. When it comes to your small business insurance, Thank you. One size absolutely does not fit all. Get a quote or find an agent today at thehartford.com slash smallbusiness. Are you stuck staring at your W-2? Are tax refund worries holding you back?

1:01:08You probably have FOMO, the fear of messing up. The fix? Using TurboTax on Intuit Credit Karma. They find every credit and deduction to help you get every refund dollar you deserve. or your money back. It's time to overcome your fear of messing up and get your taxes done right. Start filing today in the Credit Karma app. Because I think there's a really interesting insight here, not only into leadership as bottleneck, which is fascinating, but one of the things those people do when they're very busy is they create a bureaucracy around them, okay? And they try and devolve decisions. And the bureaucracy doesn't have the confidence that a leader does.

1:01:51So it effectively defends itself by creating highly systematized, uniform modes of decision-making, okay, which then mean that the organization is unable to cope with outlier in any respect. But there's another interesting thing with bureaucracy, which suddenly occurred to me the other day. We tend to get angry with bureaucrats or public sector workers because we pay them a salary. And my argument is, in most cases, what they do is probably worth the money. The cost actually is not the salary you pay them. It's the extent to which they create bottlenecks or inefficiencies in the fast flowing of a system.

1:02:34Yep. And there's a wonderful... Have you read, by the way, The Unaccountability Machine by Dan Davis? You recommended it, and I purchased it. You may notice a pattern here. No, no, no, don't worry. You keep making me spend money, and I want to read it, but I haven't got back to it yet. So one of the things, he's very interested. Now, obviously, when you're talking about Agile and you're talking about, say, Toyota's Kaizen manufacturing process, that was a guy called William Edwards-Deming, wasn't it? Or W. Edwards-Deming. Yeah, okay. And he was effectively, in a sense, partly the architect of the Japanese economic miracle, and understood things like, to optimize the whole, you have to sub-optimize the parts.

1:03:14Now, most people in a siloed organization, procurement are optimizing cost savings, marketing are trying to optimize customer satisfaction. Okay. If you have both those entities entirely focused on one thing rather than understanding the whole, it's effectively completely counterproductive. But Dan Davis is also very interested in, I don't know to what extent you've ever got into cybernetics, have you? I read a little bit about it, but a long time. You'll discover a bit, which is it's effectively that we tend to use financial flows within an organization as the sole form of information flow, when of course there are lots and lots of other information bottlenecks, you see?

1:03:56It's not just a financial bottleneck or a production bottleneck, there are informational bottlenecks and constraints and so forth. and one of the things that drives him practically insane at the moment is that if you want to get planning permission for a house in the uk or a factory or whatever you're allowed to consult extensively with the people at the council who give you approval okay and um that's all fine and dandy because you can find creative ways between the two of of overcoming problems. And then you submit your proposals for approval. None of the people who have spoken to you are allowed to play any part in the approval process.

1:04:38And the idea is it's to prevent corruption or... Right. Whatever it may be. But as a consequence, you're now starting all over again with a group of people who want to justify their existence by finding problems. Yes. How many problems do you find? You effectively turned a one-stage process into a repeat process where, in many cases, and then, of course, your appeal gets turned down and has to start all over again. So the entire consultative process, which could have been creative and valuable, now becomes actually largely wasteful. And he gets really, really obsessed with the order in which things happen.

1:05:18And I think there's this wonderful thing. Greg Jackson, you probably know. Do you have Octopus Energy New Zealand? No, but I still read all of the UK papers. It's only a matter of time. But Greg, who I regard to be a thoroughgoing genius who should be prime minister, Greg also founded a business which is, I think, called Consultant Direct. And this was, you go to the GP, and what used to happen was the GP would say, I need to refer you to a consultant. In the old days, my grandfather was a doctor, you would actually be handed a letter to take to the consultant okay and then the consultant would open it now what would happen is you you then go home and then you'd wait for a for a consultant's appointment to come available and then you go and see the consultant okay and greg just had a load of consultants who are available on the phone okay this was his the business he started up at the same time he actually started on because he's no longer involved in it but he founded it And the GP with you present would call a consultant.

1:06:21Now, three things. So by removing it... Now, by the way, when you had to take the letter to the consultants, there was a colleague of five grandfathers who wrote a letter to the consultant who was a friend of his, which started here with this old trout, and the woman opened the letter. So it was a dangerous thing to do. Anyway. But it was a completely ludicrous sequential process when it should have been a parallel process. What Greg's system would do is you bring the consultant and the consultant might say one of three things. Yes, I need to see this person. Okay. Second possibility, in which case it was pretty similar to what happened before.

1:06:58However, 50, 60 % of the time, two other things happen. One, you don't need to see me. You need to wait for eight months and come back. Okay. Actually, or you don't need to see me at all because this is a case of X and it's going to go away. yeah awful awful lot by the way of back pain and things like that basically the best advice is to wait eight months don't intervene too soon it's a third thing was yes you do need to see me but have these tests first so now by getting the test commissioned by the gp first you'd bypassed a whole extra weight in the process from the patient's point of view okay and another one is have these tests and unless it shows a gpol level of seven plus okay don't bother coming to see me yet okay so it basically turned an absolutely moronic linear process into regardless of the circumstances we go through the we go through the motions into a depending on six or seven different things we will now create new optimal paths each of which is different from you know It's no longer a system.

1:08:08But that kind of business is the kind of business which literally we need to look for because it benefits absolutely everybody, okay? It benefits the NHS. It benefits the patient. It benefits the GP. It benefits, by the way, it especially benefits the consultants because they can now make some money while they're on a golf course in Villamora answering the phone, right? Which is without stereotyping hospital consultants, you know, but I think that's what quite a lot of them would like to be doing. My wife's a consultant. So you watch it. Otherwise I'll start talking about Vickers. Yeah, exactly.

1:08:42I'm going to tell you my wife's bottleneck story. Please. I think your listeners would like it. But I've got to tell you that what I'm about to tell you is not the full truth. And it wasn't actually my wife. It's a fictional blah, blah, blah. Because I tend to tell it, I try and make it more interesting than it probably was at the time. So before we got married, I don't know how this happened that we got married, because we used to go out for dinner and I'd tell her all about bottlenecks and theory of constraints, which is embarrassing in retrospect. But she married me nonetheless. And then we moved to Scotland and she got her first consulting job, which is an old age psychiatrist.

1:09:22And the person who she replaced had been there five days a week. And we just had our first baby and she was going back to work for three days a week. So she suddenly, same area, same patch, same number of patients, all of that, but she was doing three days rather than five days, which is a big, big, massive opportunity to create a bottleneck because you had five days capacity, and eight into three. And when she got in there, she just looked around, and again, I make up a lot of this stuff to make it sound interesting, but she looked around and she went and she just realized that she'd inherited a six-month, 26-week waiting list, which is not good for old age psychiatry.

1:10:10There's natural limitations at play here. And she was really unhappy with that. The end result is she got it down to, I think, about 10 or 12 weeks over a six or maybe nine month period. And her first bit was going, and she didn't tell me this for a couple of years until afterwards, because she went around and goes, right, where's the bottleneck? And she went around and goes, right, I've got all of these people working here. Where's the bottleneck? Do we have enough nurses? Yes. Do we have enough beds? Do we have enough food preparation facilities? Do we have enough transport for people because it was a rural area?

1:10:47She went through all of these things with GPs, everything. She's trying to go, if it was a crime scene, she was trying to think of the bottleneck detective book. She was trying to identify the suspects, right? Who could possibly be the bottleneck? And then I like to think that one day she's standing and looking at the mirror and going, I've eliminated everyone. And then she looks at herself and goes, it must be me. It was suddenly, it was her and it was the least obvious person. So now, can you imagine you're one consultant and you've got these things, I'll list off some things she did. So one of them was she looked and in my book I have the focus formula which is F-O-C-C-C-U-S.

1:11:29F is defined. The three C's is coordinate, collaborate and curate. What she did is curated the patient. She looked at them and her predecessor had seen everyone on a every year come back. And she looked at them and discovered some people should be coming back every three months. Some people should be coming back to see a nurse. Some people should be coming back to see her every two years, or maybe just going to see their GP if they thought they needed to. So they curated the stuff in, just like a curator in a museum. Because previously, they were optimizing for the average. A patient was a patient, was a patient, was a patient.

1:12:07And it was all average. Yep, so she did that. This is my argument with airports, which is that half the people want a shopping center, and the frequent flyers basically want a direct route to the plane. Yes, yes. Manchester, just to divert a little bit, well, I shouldn't say divert with airports in mind, but Manchester, the domestic terminal, used to, I don't know if they still do, it's been 10 years, and I just kept to go through it every few weeks. they used to use as they would have a deliberate bottleneck would be the rate that they let people through security because there was a limited shopping space, limited seats, and they couldn't let people in fast enough.

1:12:50So they just slowed down security. And if the worst place in the world to be slowed down and having to stand and wait is security. And I hope I don't get, just they were assholes. There's no other name for it. You've probably been up the ranks in iTunes ratings Okay, so Eurostar keeps arguing we can't possibly have competitors on the high-speed rail routes because there isn't enough capacity at the lounges at St Pancras and the boarding area at St Pancras. Now, there are enormous potential boarding areas at Epps Fleet and Ashford. If you said to people, if you're prepared to use High Speed 1 to travel to Ashford and you board the train there, okay uh we'll give you you know double points on our loyalty program all right and much nicer sitting waiting and much nicer some people do that anyway i know people in greenwich who used used to drive to ebbs fleet to catch the euro star because the boarding experience was better all right you know you just get people to board somewhere else you only need this is the thing you don't need everybody to do it that's an engineering solution would get everybody doing something different.

1:13:58A psychological solution gets the people for whom it's least inconvenient to do the thing. And that's enough. And the focus is coordination and curation. The two go together. So she basically curates, she curated the patients and goes, these people don't need to come back every six months. They need to come back every 12 months. It's so obvious, isn't it? But it hadn't been done before. So she did that. Another thing she did is change the rural area. She had to go to different hospitals and drive between them. So she thought, oh, I normally couldn't get away with this because it would sound like I'm being selfish.

1:14:31But she went and talked to the various old folks' homes and the wards and stuff and said, would you mind if we change the order I did this? Because if I go in the opposite order, I will be going against the bad traffic. So I'll be here quicker. It'll give me half an hour extra every day. So can you just see how clever and simple this. That's like maybe 10 or 15 % more capacity. She used to eat with old folks. Again, this is just sort of simple psychology. And I've used this with a lot of business people. No, I won't divert into that. But she's going to go along to, she's got, old people don't always turn up for their appointments.

1:15:13So, and it's just the curse. And I'm sure you've heard Robert Cialdini's idea of asking people to commit to turning up and to phone them if they're not going to and just stuff like that. That doesn't necessarily work if you've got someone who's got memory problems. So she just goes, sometimes it's going to happen. And they would do all the follow up and encourage people to turn up. But for people that didn't, she just started making sure that she is so obvious that she had work that she could do if someone didn't turn up. And then quite often, she'd actually better do a home visit for them on the way home.

1:15:48Because she got less administrative work to do, so she had time to go and see them. Yeah. She just did admin work that she may be doing at four o 'clock at the end of the day. She did it during the patient's time when they didn't turn up. There's a brilliant one, by the way, in terms of bottleneck. When I went in for, I think it was a cataract operation, you have some really weird things like if anybody's got a latex allergy, they have to be the first patient of the day. because obviously surgeons use latex gloves, and it's rare, but it's a really serious allergy, apparently. It must be really bad if you've got a sexual fetish for latex.

1:16:26It's an allergy. Continue. That must be really awful.

1:16:33Okay, sorry. Sorry. But one of the brilliant things, by the way, was simply they realized the bottleneck wasn't shortage of surgeons. it was that you had to stop and clean the operating theater in between each patient. If you ran one surgeon with two operating theaters, the old theater was being cleaned while there was an operation going on in theater two, and then you flipped, and then you flipped, and you effectively doubled capacity with no increase in employment. There's an even better story, by the way, which you'll absolutely love. I've got some friends in Kent who run a waste collection business, and they've got the contract for a London borough to collect all their bins.

1:17:17And they had a massive problem with, effectively, missed collections. And then, of course, the people complained. They said, you didn't collect my bins, you didn't empty my bins. The problem was weirdly solved by getting rid of one person on a garbage truck. because now you had two people and one guy was responsible for the left-hand side of the street and the other guy was responsible for the right-hand side of the street right when you had three people there was a level of informational confusion which basically meant that that's not my bin that's barry's going to collect that one and then barry didn't collect it i'm stereotyping garbage collection people as male but all called barry they tend they tend to be male right um And consequently, actually, by removing one person, you actually improve the level of efficiency.

1:18:10It's surprising how often they actually... It's really, really interesting, because actually, if you look at informational bottlenecks or general confusion, sometimes fewer people fundamentally operate more effectively. And the conversation of, sorry, just jumping in there, the conversation of like human bottlenecks and Clark, I think you said something there about your wife that actually, if, obviously, if you had to recreate the aha moment, it would have been like looking into the mirror, which is basically identifying that you are the problem. That's very, very interesting because it means that the likelihood of a nation, a team, being able to go from stagnation to flywheel and therefore unlocking the bottleneck also requires self-awareness of the leader, right?

1:19:01So you need to be able to look at yourself first and even consider yourself being the problem. So I had a lot of challenges when I was making that transition from being an executor to being a leader, because one, I loved getting involved in the work itself. I loved being the creative. But then also what happens is, you almost like develop this almost like history of success that therefore gets you thinking that what's got me here is going to be the thing that's going to get me to the next level. But the world changes. A hermit, chill, crabs, they've got to be different. 100%. And the thing that unlocked that thinking was, one, I had a conversation with Ben, Ben Francis, who's the CEO of Gymshark.

1:19:47And basically, he told me that I should find an outlet. So Lewis Hamilton, his bottleneck was the fact that he took F1 was his everything. right? So he put all his focus in F1. And when he started to get other things to be able to transmit his passion, he was able to be very rational in his car, right? So I started posting on LinkedIn. So that was one unlock. But then, so I was still able to get my creative edge, but then come into the workplace, unemotive, very rational, because it was no longer about me, it was more about the work. Now, another trip that changed my life was going to Meta. And actually, what the message was, was find and unlock the bottleneck, but it actually was transmitted.

1:20:35The information was transmitted looking at three main things, which was the fact that you should not let yourself be crippled by perfection, right? You should focus on impact over effort, right? If you think about the marketing world, and just the way that agencies are almost like set up, and the fact that it's all about time, it's all about perfection, it's all about the visuals. But really, how you make, or how you almost like contribute to organizational change is through unlocking bottlenecks that are not necessarily things that take you a lot of time. It's just about finding areas to unlock.

1:21:10And Gymshark's whole model was all about focusing on impact over effort. We did a shoot in Japan that had a crew of 20 people that didn't shift the dial at all from a sales perspective, but curating a flat-layed image from a lady that was part of our community that made the leggings feel like it was in one of our audience's wardrobe. That actually got the relatability factor that we needed to be able to shift the dial. And we started to think, actually, is there a simpler way to do it? So you actually had an access of impact versus effort, right? The next one was all about false constraints, right?

1:21:47A lot of the times we create constraints that tell us, well, we can't do this because either somebody hasn't done it before or we haven't done it before or it's something new. But often than not, those are false, right? And if you actually try to have a test and learn mentality, which is we're not going to treat it as a failure. We're just testing and learning, right? That is another thing that a lot of people are very fearful of, especially when you think about European culture, if you will. But actually, the biggest one, I think, that a lot of leaders are really scared about is this whole notion of almost like taking yourself out of business, Gary Vaynerchuk seems to say.

1:22:25It's like, if you think like a competitor that's trying to get you out of business and you innovate on yourself, you're more likely to be able to keep fighting another day. And the issue with a lot of people is once they get to the top, they stop almost like innovating against themselves. We used to say, think like 19-year-old Ben, right? So, Ben started Gymshark at 19 in his mother's house, and he would look at the Nike's Adidas and say, where is the area that they're missing, and how do I innovate there? And, Rory, you talk about this a lot. And I think a lot of people fail to do that to themselves, even if it means hiring the 19-year-old Ben to come in, audit your business, and then taking that on board for you to be able to innovate and keep moving forward.

1:23:10And it's very interesting because actually benchmarking is often a massive obstacle to finding a bottleneck, actually, because patently the benchmarking hasn't solved the bottleneck problem. Okay. And what you're then doing is your, if you like, you're widening roads where it makes no difference. Because one of the, I suppose, one of the implications of bottleneck theory is that if you're not cognizant of bottlenecks, there is an unbelievable amount of wasted effort, effectively, in some cases, actually, not even pushing the needle ineffectually, but pushing it in completely the wrong direction.

1:23:49Oh, you can totally, yeah, totally. You can totally bugger things up by spending your money. One of the things, you know, like Pareto 80-20 rule, the roading systems are such a good thing to look at, to understand this stuff. If you're going to spend stuff, money on roads, in order to speed them up, you identify the bottlenecks. And London probably has 100. In Edinburgh, where I used to live outside Edinburgh, there were probably about three. And everyone knows where they are. And you can look at a map and you can spot them. But if you're going to do advertising, so the bottleneck thing is maybe 0.1 % of the actual square meters of the city space.

1:24:37If you're going to do advertising, you're going to look along the roads with billboards and you're going to do an 80-20 thing. You're not going to do all the side streets. You're going to put them in the places where the traffic is. And they're very similar ideas of making the most of a small amount. The bottleneck idea takes it to an extreme. And actually, from a marketing point of view, my favourite marketing example of this is so lame, you two will roll your eyes. In Edinburgh, when you come up the steps from Waverly Station, there's an Apple store there. And there was, in the times where, you know, replacing a screen was really expensive, and there were all those little places you could go get them replaced.

1:25:16They probably still exist. One of the shops went up there, they paid someone to stand outside that Apple stock with a little sign that said, is your screen broken? Go down the steps and turn left. We're down there. You know, it was absolutely, you know, that was the extremely well-placed version of that. No billboards would have got them anything. It's all about just being clever and thinking different, isn't it? Can I? Now, I don't know how much time you've got, but considering I have two geniuses in front of me, I've got a question. I hate it when people say that, because it basically says, you have to solve this problem instantaneously.

1:26:01Live on air. It's the same thing, yeah, live on air. Okay, yeah. No, here we go. It's just a little thing. Right, so I'm writing a new book. And you know when you get, you're just inside it, you know like in your own writing and everything, you can't, it's so hard to judge it. I have a title. The book is like a really short book. It's about how to deliver your most important software projects on time to really aggressive dates. And the metaphor I use is of when Taylor Swift went to,

1:26:38Calgary, I think it was, or whatever city somewhere in Canada. She went there, and they actually put a motorcade on for her, and they shut down one of the lanes so that she could get from the airport to the stadium. And that was negotiated. And they basically said, you know, you are number one. London had that as well, I think. Yeah, it was controversial. Yeah. Totally. But then they look at the value of it. There's millions, there's hundreds of millions of dollars in value in actually getting her to come there. And she wouldn't get there if she's going to be stuck in traffic or have to arrive the day before.

1:27:11And so she had all of these countries, you know, all these cities competing with each other. So that's the metaphor. And the idea is it's, you know, you set up a motorcade for your most important projects, and you make everything else sit in gridlock because they are, you know, they're third class citizens, all the other projects, right? Now, the name that I have for it, and I love this name, but I would love your reflection from people who aren't stuck inside my head. I want to call it Cash Cow's Make the Best Burgers.

1:27:45You like it? Alfred, what do you reckon? So on my side, something that was kind of similar, and maybe this will help. I think that this is actually coined as something. But it was a big unlock. I was listening to this, another podcast, and there was a guy called Mr. Wonderful on it. And he basically said that they talk about the fact that a lot of people talk about intellectual intelligence IQ. They talk about emotional intelligence. And the big one is all about focused intelligence, right? And actually, if you think about the commonality between some of the most successful leaders, the billionaires of the world.

1:28:24Some might be more IQ, some might be more EQ, like Steve Jobs, IQ like Jeff Bezos. But then the thing that there's a commonality between all of them is focus, right? And actually, there was a metric that they say Steve Jobs used, and it was basically signal versus noise, right? And it's like, actually, within an 18-hour day, there's five things that you have to get done that are completely almost like significant towards moving forward closer to your longer goal, right? And you should have those three things. Those are your five signals, right? That should be done no matter what. And everything else that is almost like takes you away from that is noise, right?

1:29:08And basically, now when you're seeing things coming your way, you're able to almost like the best leaders are able to now distinguish what's noise versus what signal, right? And I think that that's effectively the thinking that you're looking to establish, right? It's like, what is one thing? What's in one pile? What's in the other pile, right? What's gold and what's shit, right? Or what is almost like momentum and what's tar, right? And I think that if you're able to visualize the feeling of what it feels like getting stuck, what's clutter versus, I think a lot of people tend to use a word that almost feels like what it feels like to get involved in that thing.

1:29:54It's almost like noisiness, busyness, versus freedom, right? After that kind of feeling, I would go with something that's a feeling, as opposed to necessarily a metaphor, if you will. That's the trouble. I had someone else who's written a few books, and I've got five now, and this will be the sixth. And she advised to make it very, very, very agile on time, which is actually to some people is going to appeal. It's really hard to judge it, isn't it? To try and sum up something that's attractive to people. Because the reason I'm asking, I'm thinking, obviously I want free consulting advice. But for a lot of people like me who come from an engineering background, we are the Mark Watneys of the world.

1:30:54You know the Martian? We are the ones, the botanists that go up and grow potatoes and we science the shit out of everything. it's very hard to put ourselves to look at the stuff that you guys I don't know, I presume it comes naturally to you the way you guys think or is it really, really hard work? Well, I don't know whether Rory's going to come in here I think he's thinking I think he's still thinking about it It sort of means, I mean, it does take hard work um but i i mean the one interesting thing about working in an advertising agency well there are interesting things about working in an advertising agency but the thing of lasting importance about it is that it's a very unusual um incentive scheme if you're in the creative department which is if you come up with an obvious solution okay it's a bad career move yes okay at the worst level, it over focuses you on the counterintuitive and the oblique and the surprising.

1:32:00But on the other hand, you need people like that in the world because everybody else, if you're in a bureaucratic role, okay, and you say, here is a solution that makes perfect sense, we'll go, well done, Jeremy, you know, have a promotion to G7, okay. In a creative department and ad agency, um you know if you come up with five completely obvious issues in a row okay you're out of a job and you know it's artificial it's weird but it's kind of important i think i like that it's set up to um weed out the boring yeah it filters out the boring i like that yeah that makes perfect sense but it's not interesting yeah that you know that is actually you know in most cases boring and logical is absolutely the way to go.

1:32:48It's the best career move you can possibly make. And the great thing about working where I did... Now, interestingly, my brother's kind of a mathematician and astrophysicist. And of course, one of the strangest things that I've started doing on YouTube is watching people solve mathematical equations, which sounds like the worst idea for television you can possibly conceive of. But what I've suddenly realized is that it's not about your mathematical ability, actually, it's about your creative ability. You know, quite often, there's a geometric problem, a problem in geometry, which is completely impossible.

1:33:19And then someone draws a line between A and C and points out that these two angles must be the same. And it goes from being intractable to absolutely obvious. and you know there's an awful lot there which i found fascinating which is that in a sense with consumers or potential customers maybe you're just missing a single line which takes a problem from if you've got to prove that a triangle has 180 degrees the angles within add up to 180 degrees you draw a line across the apex that's parallel to the base okay it's a straight line okay and And you can show that one angle is angle B, the middle is angle A, and the third angle is angle C.

1:34:01Since they make a straight line, then those three angles within the triangle must alter. But without drawing that parallel line, you're literally just staring into space. And so cognitive bottlenecks is sense of what advertising is designed to overcome. One of things that's driving me nuts at the moment is, I don't think anybody solves the real cognitive bottleneck to overcome range anxiety in electric cars, because I think everybody's looking at it by direct analogy with petrol, and they're getting panicked. The actual truth of the matter is once you buy an electric car, the problem is, well, totally irrelevant, I would say.

1:34:44My two friends that have electric cars both live in totally different parts of the country, up very, very, very, very dark, windy, mountainous roads. And they reckon that they are just miles better for where they live, because they don't actually have to go there. If they're running low, they plug it in at home. They don't have to go - Exactly. You don't have a BP station at home, okay? That's one obvious thing. We wouldn't need that many petrol stations if everybody had a hosepipe at home that delivered a pint an hour of petrol, right? movement to drop it like they used to also also they will enjoy their electric cars much more if they realize that they're actually recharging while they drive downhill yes now once if they if they live in a hilly part of new zealand now what you cannot do when you're going downhill in a petrol car is convert carbon dioxide back into fuel okay but in an electric car every time they're going downhill, they're getting some of their money back.

1:35:48Right. I like that. Once they're made conscious of that, they will find... I mean, my great joy is literally, in an electric car, if someone slows down needlessly in front of me, I don't get angry anymore. Because previously, they robbed me of my kinetic energy and forced me to waste it and dissipate it as heat, whereas now I'm just getting my money back. It's fine. And of course, because the acceleration is really good, you don't really care anyway because you're back at 60 miles an hour in bloody four seconds. By the way, I'm being lent for a week a Lotus and Mayer to test drive, so I will report back on this experience.

1:36:30Oh. Absolutely fantastic. The electric Lotus. I also had a look at the Genesis GV70, which is unbelievable. i mean it's partly that people can't cope with the fact that you can have a luxury car and a sports car in the same car same thing yeah because we've grown up with the idea that there's a trade-off between the two which maybe an aston martin can solve or a bentley top gear uh years ago just want bottlenecks aren't always bad no okay no no no no so uh top gear richard hammond must have been 10, 12 years ago now, was racing around, and he had this car that was so fast that she had to put a bottleneck in, a limiter, so that the thing wouldn't go over, say, I don't know, 220 miles an hour.

1:37:23I'm making up numbers here. I know nothing about this, because the tyres couldn't handle it if it went faster. The tyres were actually the bottleneck of the car. So they put in the bottleneck, probably some electric limiting thing, a deliberate bottleneck that slowed the thing down so that it could actually go faster. It could go as fast as it possibly could. I'm going to give you another example. I don't have it here. We just got a planning permission, got signed off today for our new en suite. When the builder finished the shower, I got in the shower after spending all this money, and I go, the water's dribbling out like it.

1:38:06You know, if I go to a massage, I want to hurt. If I have a shower, I want... Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And so I rang the builder and he said, I'll send a plumber around. They put a little restrictor in the shower and you can't remove it, but the plumber can remove it and it will let the water flow faster. Plumber turns up and says, oh, that's a safety thing because of some weird circumstance that will never work in this place. But there was a bottleneck deliberately put in as a safety mechanism. And then he removed it and the whole thing went faster. And if I've been open and honest, I have a bottleneck in my tummy.

1:38:49I had bariatric surgery about four years ago, and they effectively put a bottleneck in there so that I couldn't consume as much food. It was almost like a much nicer version of wiring my mouth shut. But it does another thing. It's not just a physical restriction or limitation or constraint. it actually turns off the voices in your head. Yeah, kind of like as MPEC does. It has that same thing. So it's both psychological and physical at the same time. It's both, yeah. And just so you got one other thing I want to tell you. I have this list of things that I must share with the world. This one, the thing with bottlenecks is it's actually all around assways the way that people like me think about it.

1:39:35And I only just realized this. The perfect analogy for bottlenecks and when you know you have them, actually not the analogy, is that the problems don't happen if your organization runs at the speed of your slowest bit. Everything's fine. It happens when you try and run your organization faster than the bottleneck. And the analogy is it's like when you remember when you were a little kid and you were running downhill and suddenly you started running faster than your little legs could carry you. That's what happens when you don't manage your bottlenecks because everything else tries to go faster.

1:40:07and you end up tumbling over and falling over, breaking your nose, scraping your knees. And so obviously, if you were running as fast as your legs could carry you, you wouldn't fall over. You'd be fine. It's trying to go too fast. It would be like taking off that restrictor in the car, the Richard Hammond car, and then racing along and suddenly the tires explode because you've gone fast. Of course, of course, of course. That's brilliant. And that needs to be actually the reframe for bottlenecks because they're the problem and the solution, but they're actually not the symptom. It's the symptom that's all the stuff from going faster.

1:40:46That's all the bad stuff. Yeah, I was going to say, because often than not, when you think about new startups and scale-ups, they always, if you think about what Meta used to use, the whole move fast and break things, or build the rocket ship whilst you're flying it. Those are all analogies that basically talk about removing bottlenecks that are preventing momentum, right? But if you think about the chaotic nature or the culture within those organizations, sometimes because there are no bottlenecks or the right type of bottlenecks, you're not able to actually almost like preserve what's very important and ensure that people don't burn out, right?

1:41:27Which is super interesting. That's the ultimate. I'll tell you how to ruin an organization. Have you ever seen that CIA guide, I think it was, for Sabotage? If you want to ruin an organization, get a CEO who says, right, got all these leaders here, and they look a bit relaxed. What I'm going to do is I'm going to give them each a special project that's going to take up half their time. I'm going to take away their assistant so that they have to schedule their own calendar. And actually, you know what? They'll probably do. And then the leaders will all get clogged up. All of their inboxes will get clogged up full of decisions that aren't made yet.

1:42:10Remember, for a leader, that's the most obvious, visible thing. And then all these decisions get delayed. It's kind of like what you're talking about with the councils. You just make it so that the leader doesn't have time to actually do all of the expertise, which is decision-making. all the management which is decision making and worst of all um actually worst of all they ruin their family lives and then they burn out uh and their partners leave them by the way it has facilitated a lot of this stupidity yes okay yeah because in the day i actually am old enough to remember when most people in the office of any seniority didn't type anything okay now that was That was woefully inefficient because very often the typing pool was the bottleneck.

1:43:04Yes. Now, I'm not making this up. In Ogilvy in the 1970s, people I've spoken to in the 1970s said the shrewd career move was to spend an hour a day Terry Thomasing the typing pool. Which is you go in and go, there. I'd say, you'd charm the typing pool and bring them presents, because then you could get things typed faster than your colleagues could, because they liked you. Okay? Now, the typing pool, that was inefficient. That was ridiculous duplication of effort in one way. But now you have senior people doing their own calendar management, or doing their own timesheet. Okay? You know, and it looks wonderfully efficient because you get rid of people who are generally in overhead.

1:43:50But the productivity of the people who actually add the value has now gone down by 50%. If I mentioned Angela, with Angela, it was when I started working with her, the hermit crab, Angela, woman of the year, et cetera. When I first went there, the obvious thing that she needed was either a PA or Leo McGarry, you know, the West Wing, the chief of staff. Yeah, yeah. And we had to sneak in a chief of staff disguised in another role just so that it could take a lot of the management stuff off her. And then suddenly she was able to do so much more. She had time to think. And so much of her time was thinking, how do I grow this into the next hermit crab shell?

1:44:41How do I do that 20 times? There was always a bottleneck, de-bottleneck, bottleneck, de-bottleneck. But to get a chief of staff in, it involved skullduggery and sneakiness. But then three years later, everyone in that position was saying, I need a chief of staff because they could actually see the difference. But you can't see the difference if you've never, if you're not as old as, I think you're a couple of years older than me, Rory. And it's horrifying, isn't it? My hero, Ellie Goldratt, said, you know when you've reached that age when you bend down to do up your shoelaces, and when you're down there, you think, oh, is there anything else I can do while I'm down here?

1:45:23I think I've reached that age. And I've just completely lost what I was going to say. No, no, if you've not got the experience of seeing what it was like to have assistants, it's very, very, very hard to come up with a logical explanation that, oh, I'll get more done, and I'm the bottleneck, and therefore everyone will actually benefit, and the whole organization will run faster. Without people, it's quite a big mental leap for people to make. Very, very interesting, Dean. I mean, I think that's been genuinely catastrophic. In other words, what we've generally done is we've replaced people who are support staff with HR, you know, legal compliance.

1:46:08We've replaced them with bossy bureaucrats. And it's a double loss for people who actually create value. You know, if you're a hospital consultant, you've got fewer orderlies working for you, and you've got more assholes without a medical qualification bossing you around. Do you want to bother me a story about orderlies? Yeah, please, yeah. All right. I wish this was my story, but it was the CEO of three hospitals somewhere in the east coast of the UK. I saw him at a conference and I think his name was Michael. Who knows? He pops up a picture on his slide deck there and he says, this is what it cost to increase ophthalmic surgery by 23%, the productivity.

1:46:59and it's a picture of two chairs. And he said, it wasn't actually these. These are my kitchen chairs, two of them. In the real world, back in the hospital, I went to visit the ophthalmic surgeons and I was sitting down talking to them and they're saying, hey, look, we're really, really, really busy. And he goes, I know you're busy and I'm worried about that because your job, you know, you can't be tired and I don't want you guys. and you're currently working 110 % of your hours. And they go, no, no, no, we're fine. And then one of them says, oh, it's actually okay, because we get a lot of breaks during the middle of the day.

1:47:37And you go, oh, okay, what's happening there? And they say, oh, you know how it is. We're wrapping up one surgery. So one of the nurses will call down to the waiting area, 200 yards away, and say, bring down the next patient, please. And then they'll go to get the patient, but they have to be wheeled down in a wheelchair. They have to have an orderly. And sometimes that might take 10 minutes. So we have a little, you know, actually they don't drink caffeine, so they don't have a cup of tea. We have a little rest in that break there while we're waiting for them. So he goes, oh, that's interesting.

1:48:14And then he pops down to the storage area in the basement, gets two chairs, gets an orderly, I presume, to help him carry them up, puts them outside the surgery and makes that the waiting area. You see, it was simple and just, but he, again, he had that kind of, that quirky cleverness that comes back a little differently. Well, so this, this conversation for me, it's almost like it felt like inception, right? A bottleneck within a bottleneck within a bottleneck. And I think that we've probably have definitely throughout this conversation, I just wanted It's almost like sit down, experience it, and make sure that the listeners got the time to listen to both of you geniuses speak, right?

1:49:00Because if you just think about where the world is right now, and we were just talking about bureaucracy and the fact that actually, often than not, movement happens at the top, at the bottom. The middle is often people trying to justify, or individuals or society trying to justify their worth, right? Which actually deters us away from what's supposed to actually be doing, And I feel like if you have more people not just focusing on the individual worth, but think about the bigger picture and how them as a vehicle within this wider system is actually contributing towards the direction that we're going into, then I think the society will move further a lot quicker.

1:49:41I think that there will be more innovation. There will be more growth. And I think we talked about the importance of abundance. Right. I feel like we're in a society right now where scarcity is prominent. And effectively, everyone thinks, what's in it for me? And what have we got to lose? Not necessarily, what have we got to gain? And how much more can we grow as a civilization and as people? And I think that this conversation is very, very important depending on who's listening, right? And I think that it can influence a lot of different spectrums because of how big of a universal unlock this is.

1:50:15And that's the reason why me and Rory decided to do this thing is because we feel like it's important to have these conversations as society moves forward. But Clark, I was just going to ask, almost like parting message, final message for everybody that was listening. It is one big takeaway for people to take in. But then also, I think it'll be great for you to let us know where people can find you, some of the work that you're doing right now to ensure that we send some great traffic your way. I like traffic. That sounds like a really good idea. Okay. Actually, can I offer a suggestion for you, Alf.

1:50:53Okay. Take the course that you've done on personal branding, copy it, and rename it Personal Branding for Left Brain Thinkers. I will do that right now. Because it's something that people like me. In my 20s, I probably would have rolled my eyes. Also, if you do that, put the price up, because the more specific the target audience, the more you can premiumize. There you go. And I think you could do it for doctors. You could have the same content, but it's like the, was it Nurofen for back? I actually went and I heard this from Rory. I went and I had a toothache, and I went and I was looking for norepine or ibuprofen, and I wanted one that was specifically for sore teeth.

1:51:55And they didn't have one, and I got in a strop in the supermarket, and I just grabbed the same one, and I knew logically that it had for teeth that would be the same thing. And I went home and then I refused to take it because it wasn't for teeth. So there you go. That's rational for you, isn't it? Okay, I'm just trying to think, what's really, really useful for people? So there's lots of things you can do with this stuff, but I think that the most important bit, and you have both repeated it, I'm going to use a slightly different way of putting it, and it's not about bottlenecks, but if someone does happen to look at the bottleneck detective book, you'll see there's actually two halves, and I pointed out.

1:52:34The first half is about scarcity, which is about bottlenecks, and the second half is about abundance. And it's all the same, very short story, but at the midpoint, the manager involved suddenly realizes she's been trying to save a lot of money. And now they're de-bottleneck, and they've got more money coming in. and it takes quite a movement for her to switch from trying to save because of the scarcity to be in the abundance world. And if there's anything, the analogy I have is when people are walking along the street on a rainy day, they look down and they look at the footpath and they try and keep the rain off and they don't look around.

1:53:18That same street, a couple of days later when it's sunny again, they look up and they're looking around. and that's how I think there's that scarcity. It is actually a physical thing you're not looking around but then if you can just figure out how to lift up and look around and see that bigger, wider world. It's almost the opposite of like with one of those, you know, the good cameras you have where you can focus in and you can get that bokeh effect and blur out everything else. Sometimes you have to do that and you focus in and find the bits where you have to focus literally your attention because they're the bottlenecks, whatever way you think of a bottleneck.

1:53:57But sometimes you have to unblur the background and make sure that you can actually go wide angle and just see everything. Both of those views are really good. So I'm going to end on this by saying your book's called, of course, The Bottleneck Detective, and obviously we're a bottleneck podcast. but the word detective is also inordinately important here because actually this isn't genius it's just noticing different things it's genuinely it isn't you know internal well actually come to think of it a lot of genius is just noticing different things i mean You know, Einstein really, you know, I'm suggesting the guy was dumb, right?

1:54:43But he simply asked questions and saw things that other people hadn't seen. Or he looked at things in a way that was fun. What would it be like to ride on a particle of light, for example? And the detective question is all about effectively. and I always make the point about detectives which is you don't start by trying to prove things you start by trying to find out and there's an investigative phase and then later there's an evidential phase where you have to prove it in court and what I think business has done is it's conflated the two which is it said now everything you do has to be evidence-based but sometimes the evidence tells you what to do and sometimes it's by doing that you create the evidence so sometimes the evidence drives the action and sometimes the action uncovers the evidence and we've created this weird linear one unidirectional world where you have to everything has to be data driven but yeah which means you could only do the things the data tells you to do but what the police would do is they would do things which generate information Yep.

1:55:55Okay. And I think there's something, you know, I think in a way that if you look at the scientific process, 80 % of scientific breakthroughs actually occur through chance observation or inspired experimentation, not through sequential application of, you know, of pre-existing information. and i think i think that you know there's a really really fundamental problem here which is probably the bottleneck in many cases of discovery is not actually that we're not doing science enough it's that we're too reliant on what we already know yeah and going back to what we're seeing at the very start and i'm and i'm gonna almost like uh add my words on here about uh my lecturer marking me down because of lack of Harvard references, right?

1:56:49It's all in the same thinking. That's all scarcity thinking. Where's your evidence before you've actually done the thing, right? And if just to go even bigger, I was having a really great conversation with my co-founder, Michael, about the current state of Britain or Europe. And obviously, we all know that scarcity mindset is the bottleneck. That's keeping us where we are. But if you think about it even deeper, it's, and I think that Jeff Bezos was asked, what's the main difference between the US and Europe when it comes to like economical, almost like growth and it's fear, right? The fear of risk, right?

1:57:26And if you think about where a lot of the money in Britain is, it's either in the ground, so land, or in the bank account, or in the pensions, right? We don't make our money work. We actually need that money to be reinvesting in the future of the country. Well, rising property prices are a massive economic bottleneck, which have not been captured by existing economic models because they don't distinguish between land and capital. Yeah. Okay. That's all down to how you define something will determine what you see. And by the way, the other reason I think Detective, by the way, is a great world, is that sometimes the breakthrough comes from noticing something really trivial.

1:58:13and every case i read about where you know the joanny yates case the dutch guy you know they ask him to account for his movements and then said he says you know and then at you know 1pm i went to asda but of course you'll know that already what all right okay why would we know that already they got cctv at asda and they asked a perfectly reasonable question who the fuck thinks like that unless you've done something a bit early, right? Okay. You know, really, really tiny little things. It's like poker. It's the towel. Okay. There's information that's in the public domain. That information, by the way, that's in the public domain is generally pretty worthless.

1:58:55The information that you notice that everybody else ignores, that's the stuff that's really valuable. The dog that didn't bark in the night. Which is my favorite ever case of... By the way, I was talking to someone in the British Special Forces. And whenever they go into a situation, they're taught to look for two things, which is the presence of the unusual or the absence of the usual.

1:59:28So the point is that if you're going into a market in Iraq or something, and obviously if there's something there you weren't expecting that's important, but we're very good at noticing that. But if the usual falafel vendor isn't there that's also something to make you alert. Alright, well Clark, where can we find you? I think we should do a bloody second one of these. I think this has been absolutely I've absolutely loved this, every moment of it. It's lined up. It's lined up. Sensational. What a pleasure. Amazing. Great interview. We'll be back for part two.

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