From bust to Boom! How Red Bull, ITV and Lloyds supercharge their people for serious growth - Scott Morrison

0:06Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Uncensored CMO. Now in this episode we're going to be talking about more boom and less bust with the wonderful Scott Morrison, the inspirational, energizing coach that teaches marketing teams how to do it, how to be more successful, how to turn around business, how to win pitches. This is a great, energizing, inspirational masterclass in how to create more boom and less bust. Scott Morrison, welcome to the show. Thanks, John. Great to be here. I've been looking forward to this for a little while. I do love, you know, the title of your company because internally in my day job assistant, whenever we have a result, I always send around a massive boom.

0:44There you go. And it's become like trademarks. I'm just like, you know, it's great we're having this conversation. Where did the name come from? Well, for exactly that reason. When I was at Diesel, exact same thing. Whenever something brilliant happened, the team always used to just go boom. And actually, it's been quite useful for me because when I'm speaking to people and just having a chat and people say, well, what do you do and everything else? I say, listen, let me ask you a question. When something goes really well and everything's going how you want it to be and your business is firing, what's the one word that comes into your mind?

1:11And they go, boom. I go, yeah, great. Let's get to that. There it is. And then so it kind of is quite a neat little sales pitch because it's an emotional connection. One of the first things you always think about when you're building a brand is I could have called it Scott Morrison Consulting, but that's really boring and nobody would have come to work with you. You call it something emotionally engaging and people connect with it. Boom. There you go. Brilliant. Now, you've had a really cool career. You've worked on some iconic brands and in some iconic agencies. It takes me back to the beginning because, interestingly, the very first application I ever wrote at university was to Saatchi and Saatchi.

1:45Oh, wow. And the application form was fascinating. I went down the library, as you did back then. You didn't have internet. I went down the library to dig out all the application forms. And I just thought advertising sounded pretty cool. And so I found Saatchi and Saatchi as the most famous agency I could think of. and it was a really thick application for me it's 30 pages oh wow oh my god this is amazing and it opened it up blank pages ah i thought that's clever yeah genius that is clever like what do you want to tell us how much do you use what's important i'm like that's really good isn't it anyway i didn't get the job but you did so you you started off at such and such yeah well my my application form really was a it was very thick as well but it was a cardboard coloring in book and each of the pages had a story that you had to create and colour in and tell the story about again you know just crazy you look at it and go how everyone else you know all loads of questions you know Sarchway was very different and I fell in love with that whole approach because it was just like well what do you know what are you going to do how do you do it what's good what's not it really made you think differently and interestingly I got to the sort of second round and they take you you know you're a student at the time they take you to a really plush restaurant they look after you for a weekend but they put you through kind of an intense SAS training thing so on the first night they took us to a really beautiful restaurant and we're all sat having dinner and I was sat next to Marilyn Baxter who was then the CSO of the business I didn't realize who she was at the time very very senior and you know going through dinner you've had a couple of drinks chatting away and all of a sudden five people came down the stairs into the restaurant and sort of looking for a table and I said to Marilyn who are these people and she said oh these people applied for several second round interviews and we allowed them to come to the Saatchi second day because you know they had all these other interviews and I can't do it here but I literally slammed my hands on the table and just went that is disgraceful I said I can't believe I'm here because Saatchi is the only place I want to work it's the only place I've ever wanted to work and I can't believe you've and I sort of had this kind of rant and then suddenly zipped my mouth and went oh no I've just blown it here and then got the job and then when I bumped into Marilyn not long after she said that conversation you had with me at the dinner table showed how passionate you were about the business and the brand and I thought at that moment in time we've got to hire him so these little serendipitous moments we sort of think have I said the right thing or the wrong thing but you know if you're passionate I was just so passionate about wanting to get into that industry and get into that specific agency well in any interview you're looking for passion aren't I think passion is a big percentage of why you hire someone.

4:17Do you care? Do you want to be here? Yeah, and are they going to fit into the culture of this organisation? The beautiful culture at Saatchi's, and it still is, is nothing is impossible. And literally like the blank piece of paper, it just opens up a whole world for you. When you're thinking about solutions, when you're thinking about creative work, when you're thinking about commercial work, when you think about anything, the starting point is like there's nothing we can't do, as long as it's legal or whatever else. but there really was nothing that you couldn't do and if you came up with something as long as it was creating value and making something good for the client people would say yeah we'll help you do that and that was just fascinating and you can't have that unless you've got that fire in people to make that one to happen and and i think i think there's an iconic adidas strapline isn't there that inverts that yeah impossible is nothing impossible is nothing yes that's right yeah yeah which which seamlessly brings us to your next role doesn't it because you went from there to widening kennedy to work on the nike account that's right which is pretty cool.

5:13I mean, Nike's iconic, isn't it? I mean, so many people revere Nike for what they've done. What's your experience having worked with them about what is it about Nike that just makes people so passionate about wanting to work there? I know people even have tattoos, for example, when they work there. Can you explain what that is and how that's made their business what it is? Yeah, absolutely. It's definitely one of the things that I focus on in my current business because it is one of the most important things. And it's all about culture. like it is about the impact that a culture can create on people and then in turn on the creativity and internal costs on the business and those three words just do it are absolutely embedded just like nothing is impossible in the Saatchi world in the Nike world and and how that translated to the work that we were doing is you know there was a real kind of like you know don't give me any bullshit you swear can we swear this is uncensored yeah all right we've had Mark Ritson on so don't worry we're all clear on that front so so yeah what it boiled down to is like don't give me any bullshit you know let's go and try these things over here if we want to create another sport let's just go and make it happen you know when i did the we we worked on the world cup i can't remember what year it was now but the world cup work and you know most of the world cup work people are doing is all about you know just football and everything else no no no not nike it was like we're going to create a new sort of football called scorpion football and then this is pre-social media we're going to divide london up into 16 different sections each which will be a scorpion team and they will all compete against each other and then we'll bring them all to the o2 to create this huge football kickoff at the end of the you know at the end of the world cup so that sort of stuff was just like you know at that time without the kind of ease of stuff that you've got now people would have been like oh we can't possibly do that we can't but everyone from you know the client to the agencies the people we work with to to the business itself to the actual people who got involved on the street in london you know that's what they just associate with that brand it's like let's just go and make things happen let's just go and do it and i think that pervades through the work pervaded through the product faded just through the attitude and i think you can sort of see nike people you know when you meet nike people you meet them and i think it was a great marriage for widens because that was how widens was at the time you know and still is now it's like yeah that's just iconic relationship isn't it widens and nike together very similar yeah and that cultural match and that cultural pairing is is I think what helps drive that, both those businesses.

7:40And a real founder legacy as well, isn't it? I mean, I read Shoe Dog and all the stories, you know, in terms of how Nike challenged the, you know, the way marketing is done. And also the how to just do it as a philosophy that's carried through in everything. And just, you know, you can see it everywhere, can't you? It's very impressive. Well, I think when you've got, you know, if you look, they created that little manifesto at the very beginning, you know, Phil Knight. And those first principles really hold true. And I think, you know, for any business, you know, your first principles, the things that really drive your organization, if you hold true to those throughout everything that you do, it goes to show that, you know, fundamentally, you know, you maintain that culture, you maintain that momentum and you keep the brand healthy and where it needs to be.

8:22And the minute you kind of deviate from that, and by the way, brands do deviate from that, things can go very wrong. So it's always about keeping your eye on that. And how do you stay true to that rather than moving too far away from it? It would be a good exercise, isn't it? Like, what are we here to do? And what are our guiding principles that will never, ever change? And just try and document the way that, because you're right. I mean, it gets shared, doesn't it, regularly on LinkedIn or whatever, the original thing he wrote up with his separate principles or whatever. You read them and you go, might be 40, 50 years old now, but it's like, bang on.

8:50Well, I mean, I often say to businesses I work, what's your equivalent? What's your, I hate the word manifesto, but you know, what is the thing that guides this organisation? And when you can start to tell stories, that's the key thing. stories that embellish that you know that tell the story about how this business came about or some moments in a meeting or pivotal decisions that made this shoe great or that campaign great or that athlete sign or whatever else those are things that perpetually because they become mythology right great brands have a mythology about them sometimes it's true sometimes it's really matter but if you can dig into those stories it gives the the next generation of the people in the business, something to reflect on, something to sort of bounce and use as part of their everyday.

9:33And if you don't have that, that's a real challenge. And it's great for recruitment as well, isn't it? Because I think part of the reason why Nike hires so many great people is that they're steeped in the legacy and the history of Nike. So when they join, they kind of almost know already what the culture is. Yeah, exactly. Which I think is brilliant. Exactly. One thing I wanted to ask you, you know, the energy and I love the boom and, you know, we've done a few things together and, you know, it's so much fun. but but let's just briefly before we talk about more about how to create the boom what happens when things go bust right so occasionally they do and uh one of the things i love about you is your kind of honesty and facing into things so tell me a time in your career maybe where things haven't gone quite so well it's great that we we've just covered sort of the nike widen thing because i was in advertising for quite a long time then i moved into brands and part of the reason i did that is because when I left Saatchi's to go to Wyden's, I was given a kind of a brief to go in.

10:29And part of the brief was, you know, we want to get the account management a bit tighter. We want to, you know, we want to get a bit more professional. It was still quite a young sort of startup in the UK at that time. It was more, you know, a satellite of the Amsterdam office. And so I went into Wyden's with that in the back of my head going, right, I'm going to be Mr. Saatchi, you know, get all this stuff you know and it's a great example to me of how culture can reject you know something an alien thing you know so i came in and i didn't handle it particularly well i was like no you need to change that now why is that not happening i got very frustrated and very annoyed and the organization was like who's this guy like we're not sarchies with the culture is this culture is different he's got to try and adapt to this culture not we're going to just suddenly a year So it became for me a very frustrating 18 months.

11:17And in the end, I just, you know, I left the business. I left the business and ended up going to be client side. But it was, for me, it was an enormous failure because, you know, you don't get the opportunities to work on that piece of business and in an iconic agency like that very often. You know, they're kind of dream roles for people. And I sort of beat myself up quite a while going, you know, I didn't make the most of it, I didn't make the most of it. But with everything, you learn, right? I learned that when you want to make culture shift, you've got to do it in a different way. You've got to bring people with you.

11:47You can't just try and change everything straight away. And actually, you've always got to think, what's the real brief? What really needs to happen here? And how do I really understand that before I just sort of jump in and try and make anything? It's a good point because it's easy to look at the name above the door, isn't it? Go, I want to work there. But understanding how the culture works, how decisions get made, how things operate, all those kind of things, you need to kind of discover that before you join, really. Or have that as part of your interview process. We were just saying earlier, weren't we?

12:12You know, buying a house, we spend probably, we spend less time buying a house than we do buying a pair of jeans. And I sometimes think in an interview process, you spend a lot less time sort of questioning the culture that you're going into than you would, you know, going out, you know, going on a first date on Tinder or something, I don't know. And so when you walk into an organisation, sometimes you're so ill-equipped, you know, what you've been asked to do and what the job description says or whatever else you go in with is actually quite far removed from actually what's going on in the organisation.

12:42And you don't always have the chance to, you know, you don't get a test drive very often. And success is often so much down to not just technical competence, but the ability to get things done, work with other people, get things approved, you know. Absolutely. You know, adapt to, you know, what the business needs you to do, all those kind of things. So it's all those softer things that we don't spend any time thinking about before we join an organisation. Always is. No one's sitting there waiting for their new manager, you know. oh great I can't wait for a new manager or new director to join you no one's sitting there waiting for that because people and you know humans we naturally want the status quo we quite like it thank you very much so they know that when someone new's coming in it's going to bring its own challenges they're not sitting there waiting so if you just go in and actually just don't confront that in the right way yeah you're just adding it you're just adding fuel to the fire and then the kind of the the body rejects the organ yeah that's true now you mentioned jeans because that takes us nicely in doesn't it to your next venture which was at uh diesel yeah Now, Diesel's one of my favourite brands.

13:35And, you know, maybe 10, 15 years ago, I'd probably, there'd be my default choice, right? I'd be, you know,£100, pair of Diesel jeans, and I love the positioning, only the brave. It's one of the most iconic, I think, challenger brand positionings. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, my perception is they're not necessarily the brand that they were. What's happened to Diesel in the last few years? Well, it's interesting, the kind of timeline, and it's a good reflection for any brand. You know, all brands that come out at some stage, you know, good fashion brands are hot for a moment, right? And the hard thing for brands like that is how do you maintain the longevity?

14:14Whilst, like we were saying earlier, how do you stay true to your core? And if you move away from your core, then, of course, bad things can happen. And, you know, I think at Diesel, you'd have probably seen probably 15 years ago when I was there, we had various transitions. So we, you know, we were very focused on for successful living, which was a great story, kind of subverted the world through a different lens and, you know, really hot, great product, everything else. Then there was a subtle shift where we tried to become a more premium brand. And what's interesting is, you know, if you're not in the premium world to suddenly try and move into premium, it's very, very difficult.

14:48In fact, it's almost impossible. It doesn't matter how much positioning you do. It isn't, you know, you're just not going to get in there. and i think respect to the brand we realized actually that wasn't going to work and so we had to go back to what's the core element and essence of the brand so that's when you might have seen a few years ago the be stupid campaign and all the thinking back around renzo the founder and owner of the brand how he thought how you know being stupid isn't about you know being dumb jackass sort of stupid it's about we think differently when the world says you can't do things actually you can and marries up nicely to kind of just do it and nothing is impossible so So that's hence, that's why it's important.

15:25But once you go back to those kind of first principles, then that helps the brand push on again. So the retail, the product, everything going back to, this is the heartland of this brand and what this business stands for. But again, and I think like all fashion, I was looking yesterday at what people were saying about Superdry. If you looked in the news, somebody said they're not cool anymore. That's why they're struggling. You know, you have challenges. You've got distribution. You know, you've got things called adjacencies. You have to be seen with the right brands. And that isn't just a localized thing.

15:57That's a global thing now, much more. So if you're in one market, in one set of adjacent positions, and another market is in a very different one, it's much more premium, it looks different, and the travelers from that market come into the UK and they don't see the brand where it needs to be, then, of course, that shifts their perception back in the market. So you've always got to be thinking, like any great portfolio leadership, you've got to be thinking, where do we need to, how do we maintain everything? how do we maintain pricing cause all sorts of things and i think that the brave decisions literally only the brave are you know the business has has had another great turn because it's looked at well where do what's the right size for this business where do we really need to be what are our adjacencies what does the brand look like what does a product look like what's the you know how do we maintain that diesel spirit and i look around now and it's quite nice because you know I now see and hear the younger generation coming up to me that you know if I go to do marketing stuff people say I used to work at diesel yeah it's really cool again now but you have all these kind of cycles you know one minute it's in one minute it's not one minute it's in one and you kind of got to live whenever you live with a fashion brand like that you've got to live with that yeah but it's how you it's all about how you recognize when you're when you're in a position that's not where you want to be and why and then what do you need to do about it because it's very easy to to the ego kicks in no we're going to keep going we're going to keep going we're going to keep going before you know it no one's buying the brand the wrong people are wearing it and the brand isn't is dead but you've got to go no we've got to we've got to make some significant changes we've got to cut back on distribution we've got to focus on retail we've got to get back to the product looking like this we've got you know whatever it is that it might look like you've got to make those tough calls in the long term for the health of the brand we don't talk enough about this actually because we tend to talk about what makes success right but a lot of people are working on brands that are facing decline they've got competition i mean a few points in my career i've worked on um drinks brands have been in quite rapid decline or where the category's shrinking or where it's been relaunched a couple of times and it's failed yeah and it's hard right it's hard because it takes a while to do that turnaround you know to get back to what is it you're here to do to try and make the long-term changes that you talked about you know it can take time and it's really hard you know when you've got a business that's like you know wants growth immediately you know because you can don't go to short-term discounting to try and like you know push up the sales the worst thing to do you know what i mean so it's it's really hard isn't it so any advice to anyone like right now facing maybe they got a lot of competition brands in decline what do they do to you know help turn it around yeah well this is this is what i do with the business that i work with actually i mean i i somehow i've been i've been labeled a turnaround kind of expert in a way I've helped turn around lots of businesses and lots of brands.

18:40But I use a very simple, really simple, I try and make everything as simple as I can when I'm doing business, but just a really simple process that goes on in my mind and that works to try and help people think differently about the business. Because when you're in that kind of lull, or, you know, it's very easy to make those, like you say, short-term decisions, not think long-term, panic, you know, do all sorts of, do lots of stuff rather than do the things that really matter. so the simple three words that i use are unblock unlock unleash in the first instance we think about unblocking success so what does success look like what do we want to get to what does it what it what literally what does it look like so i have an exercise that i do with with boards around the world it's quite funny which is they've got to create a movie poster and it's fascinating because at first think i'm not doing that and then within an hour of doing it they're like oh my god this is amazing and then it becomes this kind of totem for the business but once you understand that then you've got to think about what's blocking what do we need to unblock to get there because once you've got that very different perspective on what the turnaround looks like what growth looks like you can then go what's stopping us and then that's where you start to have the really neat discussions about what's the friction what's getting in the way once you start to bring those out then you can start to unlock new ways forward new thinking new ideas outside in expertise quite often by the way a lot of the unlocking is most of the people in the room knows know what needs to happen so true but they've never had the space to have the conversation because if you say well actually that thing over there we need to do that because of this but no that's not true but once you bought the blockers out and they're on the table people go actually yeah that is a blocker right so now we can think about that so once you start unlocking new ways of doing things the final thing is then unleashing the the challenge with turnarounds and things like is if you've got to go through 55 different approval processes to get anything happening, or people just sit around chin-stroking and go, yeah, this might be a nice idea.

20:30By the time you've done that, you've lost another, I don't know, 100 million, or you've lost another outlet or whatever else. So you've just got to create actions that start to happen and roll out in the marketplace that you are in. Whether that is, you know, in turnarounds, you do things like contract negotiations, really boring stuff, or supply chain challenge. You look at all these things. They're the things that people don't want to touch because it's like, oh, that's going to take too long. But as soon as you start getting a bit of traction in each area, you start to see where the heat is.

20:57You start to see things moving and changing. And then you can kind of double down on that if you need to. Or you can make tweaks along the way. You can say, that's not really important, that is. So it's really about finding where are the key levers. How do we get blockers out of the way? How do we create new ideas, join dots in new and interesting ways and get people engaged? Back to the point we said earlier. People often know the answer in your organisation. If you get them engaged and power them up with their thinking, they will make it happen for you. And get them out in the marketplace doing the work, getting the action happening.

21:28Execution is so key, isn't it? It's the only thing that makes the change happen. Because, you know, we're geared to spend a lot of time thinking. And thinking makes us feel good. There's a great quote by a guy called Daryl Davis. He says, we live in space age times with stone age minds. And it's this thing of, you know, we've got all this kind of incredible technology, ability to do things. but our brain sometimes just goes back into the old ways of thinking. And it's like, I'm just going to sort of sit and think about this, or I'm in flight and flight, and there's nothing I can do, all that sort of stuff.

21:59You've got to really get your mind into the right position to go, right, if we're going to make change, these are the things we need to do, and then you've got to get doing them, and you've got to make it happen. And the more you create action, the more momentum you get, and it doesn't matter whether it's good momentum or bad momentum, because you can then make course corrections. But if you've got no momentum, you've got nothing. Absolutely. The curious thing I learned, I've been in this situation a few times and probably the most challenging one is I did a management buy into a juice brand. And I had like something 12 or 14 weeks to completely change everything.

22:31So it's a new factory line. It was new flavours. It was new labels. It was everything. New customer. I mean, literally, we were just pivoting from one market to another in what was probably about a quarter of the time that a big company would do it. Now, we were small, privately owned. It was possible to move that quickly, just sort of thing. But we relaunched in the summer, and it was a really hot summer, and we had a mould infestation on the production line. And of course, imagine due to bits of mould in it. It's not a great start, right? So we had to recall the products from the market totally.

23:02And we'd just got all these new customers signed up, and they were screaming at us, going, we've just put you into every store, and we've just got all these complaints. The complaints were going wild. to imagine all the and the photos we were getting and the upset customers and the people that were being you can imagine something right and um so what we then did is we had to do a big investigation into what's gone wrong and what we're going to do and how we're going to relaunch the thing i learned it was really powerful actually was that the thing i thought had gone wrong or the reason for it going wrong by the time we finished it took about six months to a proper you know root and branch review and analysis the assumptions i made at the beginning were completely wrong and we ended I think it was something like 95, you know, discoveries we made in this process of figuring it all out.

23:45But it was a real lesson in sometimes you have to go a little bit slower and properly understand how this is made, you know, and actually properly make the improvements. And then, so we lost about six months. When we relaunched, oh my word, it just literally took off. I mean, we became the fastest growing drink in the country and it just absolutely exploded. Brilliant, right? But it took that pain. in a weird way i think we end up being more successful over three years almost because of the pain of having to literally like understand it and how does it work and you know this kind of thing it was a weird thing but i remember the lesson which is a bit of an odd lesson is you've got to you've got to properly give yourself the right time to do the right things and take a longer term view because the pressure to go let's go for the quick fix let's go for the discount you know rather than discount price to all the customers and that kind of thing which is the knee-jerk reaction, isn't it?

24:37Of course, and you'll never get that back. Yeah, you can't recover from that. No, you can't do the right thing. But I mean, it's a great point because really understanding that that's why I go in the unblock phase, because it's very easy for people to unlock. If you go and say to people, let's have a brainstorm about these things that we need to do, or go off and go and do some solutions. People can do all that because we're geared to do that as humans. But what we're not doing then is actually understanding what we're solving for. I was working with a global airline business, right and and it was a completely sort of different thing but they were saying to me scott we've created all these values and this vision and values for the whole organization massive organization around the world nobody's nobody's using them i was like okay well what do you think we need to do that well we're gonna have to do them all again okay so we ran we did the unblocking session i run this sort of diagnostic program with them and we worked through what's actually going on and what they thought was that the vision and values nobody connected with and actually when we started doing the unblocking what they realized was that they hadn't actually told many people about it it had really gone to the boardroom and a few other people and when they then started creating some experiments okay let's get it out to people people loved it yeah yeah but it's interesting because you they could have gone away and gone right we're going to redo them or spend a lot of money redo it all and that would have been i don't know a million quid let's say or we can just spend 20 000 pounds and properly market it and get people involved and and that's what the mistakes people are making all the time because they're jumping into let's quickly do this So creating action is good when you know what it is that you're solving.

26:05There's a brilliant story. I need to try and find it again because I've quoted this a few times. But I think it's in a Malcolm Gladwell book. And I think there was a virus that broke out on a campus somewhere, university campus somewhere. And they wanted to get the students inoculated against this virus to stop it spreading. And so at the beginning of every lecture, they put a big picture up showing what would happen if you don't get vaccinated. So they were showing the kind of consequences. Anyway, no one got vaccinated the next day. And they're like, oh, what do we do? So they thought the problem is the message, right?

26:37We've got to amp the message up. So they basically made it more graphic on the next day to really scare the audience and go like, you know, this is what could be really serious. And, you know, same thing, nothing happened, right? So they went the third day. They were like, what do we do? We're going to have to go even more graphic and even more extreme on the message. So they really, you know, show some even more graphic images of what happens. and still no one went to the doctor. And someone came up with an idea. And the next day they put a map of where the doctor was. Ah, yeah, great. It wasn't the message.

27:09I thought you were going to say nobody dared leave their rooms because they were too scared to get this horrendous disease. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was simply the problem they were solving for is no one knew where the doctor was. I think one of the greatest media campaigns ever, because people often say, what's your favourite? What's one of the best campaigns you've seen? I think it's when McDonald's you know when they started putting arrows around the corner around the corner yeah I just I mean you know I'm not we don't eat loads of McDonald's I do occasionally but that whole thing of where's our audience they're coming up the tube they've probably had a few drinks of a night out and they want some and there's McDonald's it's just like you know but just that's what I like you know simple solutions that create you know create action based on well they obviously know what the need is they've thought lots of different things they haven't got anything fancy they've just gone just let's do the thing that's the most that's going to create the most impact let's just do it exactly the desire is probably already there um i want to move from turnaround to rapid growth right so uh different different scenario different problems kind of bring to it and uh you're fortunate i've been in been in sort of two or three cases of working in rapidly scaling up businesses which are hugely exciting yeah but they bring their own challenges don't they absolutely how you succeed and maintain momentum what would be your advice in people in those situations where you've kind of a success on your hands well across my business i i call this thing the holy trinity right and i think if you get the holy trinity right in impact then you you really do start to see a difference in organization and the holy trinity is creative impact cultural impact and commercial impact so can you get your the culture of your organization right geared up to create impact and get the people on board can you then use creative to to drive that and creative thinking not just creative output, but creatively thinking across all the department, across all the, can your people use that creative superpower as humans to do what they need to do?

28:57And then how does that commercially translate? If you're thinking creatively, then you can bring that into the commercial thinking, join dots in new and interesting ways, create new products, blah, blah, blah. Get that right, you're off. The key thing that drives all of that, and I think it's particularly important in rapid growth organisations, is the idea of the learn-fast culture. So quite often, you know, it's quite sexy to say, hey man and fail fast and all that sort of thing and and and you know i hear it a lot and i hear it in you know in in corporates and i hear it in you know small parts corporates you know they kind of incubate and all that because they kind of think it's like san francisco it's quite cool to say the reality is it's not and actually businesses that scale and grow really quickly what they know what they do they go right you know we've got to create action and stuff and block unlock unleash but we're going to create the currency around learning and if we learn fast it doesn't we'll create lots of experiments we'll do create lots of hypotheses we'll test loads of things we'll get get them get the the wheel moving but we're not going to worry whether it's a failure or a success because once we start saying to people oh you failed then it you know back to stone age minds failure is a really toxic human you know thing right for most people because if you fail you know in in the in the world of working if you fail i could you know i could lose my job if i lose my job i'll lose my house if i lose my house i've lost everything so people don't want to fail and of course they want to succeed but actually when you make the shift and go no the currency in this organization about learning the more learning we do the faster we learn that's going to be our competitive advantage that will help you get to rapid growth because you suddenly go through a process and block a knock and leash create the right actions now let's get them moving quickly focus on the right things focus on the things that are going to grow the business and just get the learnings feed them in and those businesses that don't do that they don't create that learn fast culture you know you kind of get fiefdoms you kind of get success in silos you get people you don't get a team operating on the same levels you get sort of somebody over here i'm really successful this person you get kind of cross departmental rivalries and and it's just it's just becomes quite toxic so so for me the kind of fundamental thing always about culturally how do you set the right tone in the culture to make people really believe that they can do something different whether that whether that's indeed turnaround or more important in this case rapid growth you're absolutely right about the toxicity of failure aren't you and and and i again there's another another story that i wish i remembered what i heard it somebody's invent an app that just records stuff oh you never know that time you know but i i think it was in the car industry i don't know i think it's in the car industry and this exec had made a monumental mistake and it cost the business 20 million pounds and he went to the ceo and handed in his resignation and the ceo's reply was i didn't just spend 20 million on your education not to use it yeah very true i was like wow yeah it's amazing isn't it like you know but it's it's true so but back to your learning is is taking you know because we we will fail i mean you know the only people that won't the only people that won't fail is people that haven't tried anything but you know it's going to happen right so use it to learn you know and and put it to your advantage i often tell the story of mike asberhoff who was the he was I think it was a USS Benfleet in the US Navy, right?

32:07And they'd spent a billion dollars on the ship and it was the worst performing ship in the whole US Navy. And he was brought in to head up the ship. And of course they needed rapid growth because they'd invested all this money. They needed to literally, you know, get that ship working correctly. Now there's a number of ways you can kind of go and do that, right? But his way was, I'm just going to do three things. I'm going to walk in, I'm going to go to everybody in the organisation on the ship and I'm going to say, hi, my name is Mike. I'm the new leader. What's your name? What do you do on the ship?

32:37And how could we make it better? So, you know, my name's Doreen. I put the nuts on the hull. And if I was to make it better, I wouldn't buy steel nuts because they cost four times as much as rubber nuts and they last three times less. So let's just buy rubber nuts. Okay, go and make that happen. Went around the ship, got everybody to do it. Had a huge amount of experiments happening. that ship then within three years became the top gun of the of the u.s navy now of course it's a bit of a turnaround story but also if you think about the level of investment they need this kind of it's also a rapid growth of people story yeah because the people were suddenly powered up to go well i have got to say here i can create this make a decision i can help the ship learn fast and with everybody learning fast they just got this incredible growth yeah and you know what that does it creates more leaders in an organization you know think about you know what do you need to maintain that what you need is not there just be one fulcrum person in the whole organization you need great leaders create leaders they always say you need other leaders in the organization to take things forward to take the decisions to find other blockers to keep things moving forward when everybody's doing that that's when you start to see that grow really good point in there about scaling isn't it because you can't scale unless you're delegating to other people who who know best than you because they're closest the answer and empowering them to make a decision it's so True.

33:55And there's a thing we've used at System 1, actually, we borrowed and we've stolen from Amazon, the whole idea of the flywheel, which is like breaking down where growth comes from and how it happens. And almost breaking the stages down to go, well, if this happens, then that happens and that happens. And then you get growth. And then looking at it and go, well, where do we not have enough resource? Where are we getting blocks? Where do we need to do things faster? Where do we need to put resource? and it's a really simple concept but what i like about it is it it connects the organization in a way that i think before we might have thought in in you know in silos and because when you think just in your own silo you can say well i think i should do this better but you know you get past the ball from from this department and pass it on to that department and think about how all those things connect together and like your general going around to everyone going well that connects to that connects to that and that's how the ship goes faster i'd say i'd say joining the dots is join the dots in new and interesting ways i always call it but it's one of the most underused business tools that you can have and it sounds a little bit trite but i was i was doing some work a few years ago a couple years gonna with a footwear brand global footwear brand and very similar i had huge growth trying to understand where the pockets of growth were but didn't really know and so we had all the whole of the global organization together for three days and to help them understand where it was coming from and then actually how to make more of it how to kind of scale it we created a very simple approach and the simple approach was you if you hear an idea that you like that's going to grow that's been growing the business then adopt it if it's right but not quite right for your market you need to do some tweaks adapt it but only then if you neither of those two things can you invent something so what was happening is lots of people our human nature right we we understand the blocker we want to create a solution six markets create the same solution same level of investment sunk cost you know return in a small market so they're getting growth but actually wouldn't be better if one market was doing it and then all those those learn fast results were being fed across the organization so and it's and it's the antithesis to how we normally work right yeah because you speak to a lot of people and the first thing you want to do is invent the solution yeah you reverse that you reframe it for everybody and so what happened was the big growth projects the big growth stuff that was going on people would stop i want to adopt that myself thank you very much so it created this broke the barriers down broke the silos down got people working together but created a much lower cost base because you were just investing one time and getting a return from that one thing rather than doing six or seven and then actually it meant other people had space to then think about what else can we do yeah how else can and so it became this beautiful virtuous cycle but again it's you know that's how you got to think if you want to create rapid growth don't duplicate the stuff that's going on it's quite a weird pivot but in a weird sense that's kind of partly why i wanted to do this podcast because there is not a problem that anyone listening right now is facing that someone else hasn't faced somewhere else right yeah so i was thinking if i can disseminate like and talk about the failures and the successes and you know there there will be someone out there listening that's gone that's exactly what i'm facing now but when you're in it you think you're the only person the world has ever come up against this particular problem yeah Yeah, yeah.

37:09And it's also, you know, you're often told, we're often told at school and everything else, oh, you can't, don't copy ideas. Don't copy from somebody, put your ruler up so they can't see work. But actually, you know, Grayson Perry, we wrote the book, Creative Superpowers, oh yeah, I think three or four years ago now. uh mark laura daniele and i we we put together this book there were four key skills in there hacker maker teacher thief the four superpowers for as humans if we really leverage it will bring real power back to sort of creative impact and mark's whole element was about copying he's stealing you know the thief element and and i always draw upon that because it's one of those things as a leader in an organization it can be lonely at the top you know you cmo you're top of the business and and sometimes like i remember my my md always saying to me scott i don't understand marketing it's down to you yeah and you get these challenges and then you sort of think oh my god i've got to invent something i've got and actually when you start going no where can i steal from in the nicest possible way who's done this before who solved it elegantly and look outside of your realm outside of your i do this a lot with with the clients i work with and suddenly they're bringing in solutions from all sorts of different places they never thought of you know in fields that are so far removed from their own.

38:23They're like, yeah, well, why can't we? We've got the same resource. We can do that, you know. And suddenly that generates a whole wealth of new thinking and movement in the organisation. I think, look, you're so right about looking out and looking back as well. I think sometimes we had this thing on LucasA where we had to relaunch it. It was a really pressure cooker situation. And we had a new formulation and someone went back through literally the archives into the history and found the original recipe from the original chemist and looked at the mixture of glucose that was in there and the particular amount of dose that was used.

38:55It was originally invented to help kids recover from surgery. Because this basic physician discovered that children weren't dying because of surgery, they were dying because they couldn't recover from surgery. And that was the problem, right? So LucasAid was invented. Good on blocking. Yes, exactly. There you go, right? To give enough glucose, the body could basically give itself the energy to go through the recovery process. But there was a specific amount of glucose required, required beyond which too much was not as effective right so there was actually a perfect amount anyway when we're going through this like reformulation we rediscovered the correct amount that of course over years it had changed yeah we kind of went back and went ah that's you know that we're inspired then to go well what is the perfect amount that you need to get recovery there's not going to give you too much that's going to make you all that kind of stuff something but we just the story of able to go back to the original invention it was just like oh it was the The answer was there 85 years ago in some library.

39:49You know what I mean? That's the thing is that, you know, invariably the answer already sits somewhere in the organisation or somewhere right next to you or in a field that's so far away that you've not actually thought about it. And you've just got to really understand what we're trying to unblock here. Okay, now if we unlock, what's the thinking that we can really unlock and think broad and think wide and then create that action? That will get you really far. Now, I want to switch gears a little bit to pitching, right? Because you and I love pitching and we've done a few pitches and we help other people pitch and all that sort of thing.