Co-CEOs, Devil Wears Prada 2, AI Creativity, Brian Chesky's Hiring | What We Don't Know: Watercooler

0:00Hi, welcome to a special experimental episode of What We Don't Know, all about better leadership in a Celtic world. Today, we're going to be hanging out at the water cooler. I feel we might need to upgrade that phrase. Feels very 2000s. At the coffee machine, at the Neskoso machine. Coffee machine, something like that. Anyway, the point is, we want to spend some time sharing our thoughts on what's going on in the news and answering listeners' questions. And what do you want to talk about, Jimmy? We're going to talk about our awards, Overrated, and you're going to share some leadership lessons from the Devil Wears Prada, I believe.

0:36I'm going to try. Shall we do it? Let's get into it. So, Jimmy, last time we saw each other, we were at the City AM Awards, which were great. I know. It was a really fun evening, wasn't it? It was. It's sort of held in the Guildhall in this kind of majestic building that's hosted events for 600 years. But last night had a real kind of modern twist with the Fortnum & Mason bar, etc. and it just felt a really i'm a bit of an award skeptic right there are lots of awards and so on but actually there are very few as like for all of business yeah and it felt kind of amazing there almost 500 people there last night to get everyone together to celebrate the city and kind of be optimistic i just found it a very uplifting evening absolutely and i mean it's easy to be skeptical about awards events and all that but honestly we need that good energy we need the positive sentiment we need to remember how many things there are to celebrate actually and it was a it was a room of great talent like you know you look across all the different nominees or finalists and you you had a um the opportunity to to spend quite a lot of time thinking about those people didn't you because you were a judge yeah i was a judge and had a table last night and we could talk about the leadership elements of pulling together a table which has taken a lot of time plan over the last things i don't miss in my last job um but yeah and so there was sort of yeah 12 categories so 60 companies that were nominated and they could have all been worthy winners and there was just so much kind of value and growth creation there and what really struck me about it was how many businesses have been started since 2020 that were that were put forward for awards and I just thought you know if you listen to the kind of narrative about everything going on since the pandemic and so on it's that we're all risk averse and no one wants to try anything new and actually you look at these businesses who are employing several hundreds of people now having been started at the turn of the decade it's just really quite inspiring that there's lots of you know exciting things happening out there.

2:39Yeah and I think also you can see that the the old boundaries of you know the big incumbents versus the sort of plucky upstarts the insurgents it's breaking down a bit you've got challenger banks that are now incumbents that are in turn spinning off you know units that that you know take technology to the next generation and you've got um really interesting transformation programs going on at very long established companies it It does feel like we've sort of just notched up another level of maturity when it comes to understanding what technological change means in the UK. And actually quite a lot of scale going on, bearing in mind that we rightly worry about the scale-up challenge in the UK.

3:21It's a good reminder that there are plenty of businesses out there that have made it through, that have kind of got escape velocity. Totally. No, I think that's true. And it's one of the reasons we do this podcast, right? one of the things that the UK lacks is that kind of managerial executive capability type thing. And part of that just comes from people having done it and being able to pass that kind of like wisdom on. You know, you can't sort of learn that much about it. I think one of the interesting things, you know, Brent Holman speaking last night, you know, in terms of the technology revolution, obviously led kind of probably the UK's first major tech startup back at the beginning of the millennium and so on.

4:01and amazing to kind of hear him talk about it and kind of reflect on it 25 years later. Yeah, so good evening. Thanks for inviting me. No, it was great. Well, another activities that are going on around us. I'm not going to claim this was a genuine, you know, motivated by leadership activity, but I did go and see The Devil Wears Prada 2. What was that like? Well, it was fun. And the thing I just wanted to say is it's been a long time since I saw a film where I thought, do you know what? The overarching message is having a job you love that might be really hard and really stressful at times. It's just a super cool thing to have in your life.

4:43And it's interesting to have a film where it is, you know, relationship based, but instead of being a kind of romcom, it's about work relationships. And so, you know, you can get your leadership in all kinds of places. Absolutely. How does it differ from the first? Oh, it is quite different, but times have changed. I'm not going to attempt to busk as a film critic here. Other people, other podcasts indeed, are available who have a lot more knowledge than I do. But I do think it's healthy, actually, that we keep reframing what work means in our lives in popular culture and have positive narratives about jobs that are super stretching, but in the end can be one of the most rewarding things you'll ever do.

5:27Totally. I think films as cultural moments that can inspire people on career paths are fascinating, right? I wonder how many people have been inspired to get in technology by social network, for example. Yeah, I think it's really important. We could have a whole other episode on that. A whole other mini-series coming to you. And what about in the news, anything that's caught your eye? Well, I think there's been an interesting interview that Brian Chesky has done with Patrick O'Shaughnessy where he talks about hiring and sort of challenge... That's from Airbnb, right? Yes, exactly. And he talks about how he hires the top 200 people at Airbnb continuously, which is interesting because there's a sort of narrative of or established thinking that the CEO is in charge of hiring the C-suite or maybe it's the top dozen people and so on.

6:20But to say the top 200 and basically how he keeps a continual notebook of the top names that he interacts with and just treats it as a permanent, ongoing process. I don't think that particularly surprising, but I think the 200 mark was quite interesting. Yeah, I have mixed feelings about that one. I mean, I think it is good people are honest and showing actually how seriously they take recruitment. and I think there are particular times in an organisation where it might be disproportionately important that maybe the most senior person really has their eye across things but 200 hires, that seems excessive to me.

7:00I mean, my worry would be it's kind of disempowering for your direct reports. I'm assuming he doesn't have 200 direct reports. There are organisations, I mean, Jensen and Hwang, once he has 60 direct reports, it's incredible. but I mean I think the risk is if you are sort of leaning across the shoulders of all of your trusted top team that that sense of trust is diminished and really you need the kind of chemistry to work between you know your team and their teams not always mediated through you so I'm not quite clear why you would always be the best person as CEO to drive that decision making.

7:40Also interestingly it's not really a singular decision right there's lots no absolutely you know it's not you go for one interview with brian chesky and he makes the offer there and then etc there will be you know a whole process and so on interestingly when i was last applied for oz which was quite a long time ago um you actually the final decision sort of sits with hr because you have to have the kind of like negotiations with them around salary and um compensation etc which i always think is a terrible phrase just to go off beam for a moment about work and whatever compensating people for it but um so it doesn't necessarily always kind of like sit with the ceo so i think it's an interesting thing in terms of like how you know two people are making the decision speaking of which yeah speaking of which yes that is an excellent segue into the thing i wanted to talk about which I was so interested in the 200 highest question I just got distracted no no um I was interested this week to see an article by Pillar to Clark in the FT around co-CEOs so in other words two people who share the CEO job so there are at least two different incarnations of this one is where it's like a job share traditionally so one job split across two people who are working probably overlapping during the working week but effectively just divvying up the role between them and the other is um splitting the role itself into two different facets maybe one's a more operationally focused one one's a more external maybe it's split through the different um you know key business units and it's an interesting phenomenon that has definitely been used i remember i don't know how many years ago now uh when poppy gustafson and Nicole Egan were doing this at Darktrace and that was quite unusual at that time, especially in the world of tech, to have two awesome people with the co-CEO title.

9:40And then it's come up again recently. One of the arguments that Pulitzer was making was maybe in this world of complexity where the just the volume and, you know, sheer variety of inbound that the CEO has to deal with, maybe that makes it a time when revisiting the sharing of one role between two people might be more valid than it was previously. But I'm not sure. I mean, it probably depends a lot on the people and the context and the relationship with the chair. So, you know, one of the examples that Pulitzer was using was a company where there's a very hands-on more kind of exec chair role. And then, you know, I guess it's a sort of, you have to ask yourself, where does the real power lie?

10:25but I think it's an interesting model. Have you come across it? Well, from my world, more sort of startups, entrepreneurship side, of course you quite often have co-founders. So there is that sort of, and there will be a delineation between technical and more outward facing, et cetera, like you were saying. And there it's treated as completely normal that that would happen. There will, you know, when the company grows, one of them will normally end up taking kind of like chief executive title but i think it is interesting if you're clear about the responsibilities and so on then i think it can work but i think it's one of these things because it breaks the mold so much in kind of the footsie corporate world that it's very difficult to get it established and to get it recognized and get it working i think yeah and i think there's just also something about clarity so in general i'm a big fan of you know being able to experiment with different models.

11:21And actually, if you have really strong, trusted relationships, you can make anything work, honestly. But I do think making sure that the rest of the organisation, the board, external stakeholders, shareholders, all have clarity about how accountability actually plays out in practice is an important requirement. It just makes it that much more complicated. I think it's difficult, is it? Because you can really have a soup-sup COO or CFO, almost somebody that's being groomed because part of this is a succession question a little bit as well it's like, okay, well which one of the C-suite are being kind of groomed to take over the mantle potentially because I think ultimately That's the classic kind of deputy thing the deputy CEO I still think it's different if you have two people called co-CEO you're effectively saying they split the job equally but anyway, I think we've got proof points that it can work but it may not be for every organisation.

12:21And not all the times. Yeah, I think there are times, there was the quite famous one with Standard Life Aberdeen, wasn't it, when the merger happened and they were co-CEOs for a while. For transitional periods. Periods and stuff. So, yeah, interesting topic.

12:41Okay, so let's get on to some of our audience questions. So we have a question from Flora, who I think was commenting on the Sharon White episode. And she says that it's becoming more important than ever to find the signal in the noise, and it's really hard to do. I think she's particularly talking about sectors like construction where you have a lot of inputs and signals, or a lot of noise maybe, and it's hard to distill out the signal. Thoughts on that, Jimmy? I mean, yeah, I think it's true. Everyone is struggling with the amount of noise that gets created at the moment, and it is incredibly difficult.

13:13I think if you're working, you have to, it's difficult with a sector like construction, isn't it? In terms of like, there will be so many things in the geopolitical space that do impact what you're doing in terms of the price of things, you know, sourcing equipment to build and so on. It must be really challenging, but you have to focus on what you have control over. Control the controllables, that famous phrase. I think that you have to also segment this as a different levels to it. So at the level of all the data that's now available, actually using technology to simplify the human interface with that data and to make sure that we are zoning in on the inputs that are meaningful is something that is incredibly important.

13:58You need to have the right skills in your business or, you know, in your supply chain to help you do that. So I think that is a general problem as you kind of go up your digital maturity levels. You often get a point where you're overwhelmed because there's now so many things you can measure that you're not actually sophisticated enough at focusing on the ones that matter. So that's one level. Another layer to this is you need to have a very clear strategy. like a great strategy means that you've got something that is resilient to all these sort of crosswinds that are buffeting you um and keep helps you keep that focus that you're describing so it doesn't mean you can't change your strategy over time but if you don't have a clear organizational strategy that is then sort of cascaded down into things that are meaningful to people right across the business i think it's you're going to pay a heavier even heavier price than usual for that And then the last thing I would say is, as a leader, I think it's so, so important to have headspace to kind of zoom right out and to block out all these inbound signals and really try and crystallise what you think is important and try to look outside your organisation for inspiration and for, you know, signals that are not coming from your sort of immediate local inputs.

15:22so what that might mean in practice is make sure you go for your daily run not a thing I would ever do um allegedly lots of people find this helpful um make sure that you use that block of two hours that you put in on Friday morning to do the slow thinking the long-term horizon scanning make sure you do get out and about even though it feels really hard to justify when it's just so much in terms of immediate, you know, hungry mouths to feed in front of you. But that ability to be in places outside your kind of, you know, the urgent and the immediate stuff where you get to think different thoughts and hear different voices, that all helps you as a CEO or as a leader to be better able to support your organisation in filtering the signal from the noise.

16:08Completely, completely. I'm using a coach at the moment, which I'm sure is something that we will go deeper into one day. but having that accountability in that time, because you can set aside that time, but actually to follow through on it and do the thinking is hard. So I found that very useful. So it's been really interesting, the comments by the interview that you did with Natasha at Anthropy have blown up a little bit on LinkedIn. Natasha from Hayes Mac. Yeah, from Hayes Mac. about loyalty and about how whether a company deserves loyalty etc and we've had like quite a few comments from people saying that they've been at places for almost 20 years but they've done several different jobs within them and so there's been variety etc what have your reflections been on some of the comments yeah and obviously disclaimer i did stay in organization for about 20 years.

17:02So you may be able to preempt some of my thoughts on this, but the world has changed a lot in that 20 years. So what was true before may not be true now. I mean, I thought that some of the comments were really perceptive around, you've got to think why you're staying. So I think Laura was talking about the importance of being able to see a project through, or maybe as Martin was saying, Martin was talking about the importance of being able to see a project through. Lara was saying not every company deserves loyalty. And I think those are definitely fair points. I remember someone else, Brian, I think was saying that if you go in as a kind of change maker, disruptor, positive disruptor, then you wouldn't expect to stay a long time.

17:46So I think it's asking yourself, you know, why am I staying? what is what is the what is the equation that I'm looking at in terms of staying versus going and I do think that people tend to overweight novelty when they look at two situations in front of them it's much easier to think about all the things you don't like about your current situation than to kind of adequately weigh that up against what you might not like in your new situation after a period and Natasha's point was don't throw away what you've built and invested in your current organisation too quickly make sure you value that in its own right.

18:25What do you think Jimmy? Well I think there is a there is a bit of a change in the market happening in terms of work in terms of people are signing up for the kind of projects and your work is much more kind of freely available we're slightly moving towards a bit more of a contract economy and so on that's more in place now than it was 20 years ago um for example and reed hoffman has this quite interesting uh phrase around tours of duty in places and it was actually similar when i was in number 10 when i went to work there which is 10 years ago in the next few months and they wish to do reflections piece on that um but i remember i remember saying to the pm that basically i would do till the election of which we all thought at the time was going to be may 2020 so I was signing up for four years and that was what I was going to do but then after that I would go and do something else and obviously things change we had a snap election within a year and it all got very different after that so I think it's interesting that there is definitely a bit more of that side in the economy I also think that some people's relationship with an employer has I think become a bit more transactional I think the idea of the sort of carriage clock at the end of the 40 years of service and so yeah that has that has slightly kind of gone away um but i think it's a very interesting topic um so i loved mark reed's answer about why we should still be optimistic around the role for human creativity in an ai economy but we did have a great pushback from ken uh one of our audience members who said but will that one great human creative human idea be drowned out by a thousand or a billion AI generated useless ones what do you think Jimmy well I think there's a possibility of it I mean it's amazing that clip of Mark Reed talking about the Fitbit for chickens has gone sort of like semi-viral in terms of it it is an amazing it's brilliant it's it's a great it's a great story um I think there is a danger with it.

20:27I think as a society and as business, we have become more risk averse. And we want to see data for things. We want to see the output, et cetera. And that kind of instinct and creativity, I think is in danger of being lost even more in an AI world. I think it is a challenge that sometimes, yeah, the great Rory Sutherland talks about this in terms of, he talks about the octopus cuddly toy and the AO cuddly toy, right? Like it makes no sense for those companies particularly to do those things, but the brand value they get from them are enormous, but it would be very hard to get those ideas through a kind of committee evaluating the kind of ROI on it.

21:14So I think it is quite interesting. What are your thoughts on? Yeah, I mean, I think we always have to remember that there are a lot of bad human ideas as well. just before we get overly precious about you know the humans not being crowded out by um ai um but also that i think there's something that we like as humans which is this idea that there are tastemakers people who tell us what is cool and what is good and i don't think that we're going to stop wanting those people um so i think there'll always be these kind of little um you know kind of powerful king and queen makers who decide what it is that we should be prioritizing and saying this is cool or trendy or whatever the word is my kids are probably cringing now um my wife my wife will often say i've been recommended this on netflix and my first question is always who which one of your friends has recommended this and i'm already making value judgments exactly so it could be um it will be in a hybrid world but there'll still be people whose views are disproportionately influential definitely well thanks so much for your questions it's so interesting hearing all your reflections please keep them coming and we'll do our best to give our thoughts as well follow us on linkedin right because that's where we're getting a lot of the comments and so on and we do read them all and they get put in by the production team that and we'll look at them and try and answer as many as we can absolutely and jimmy and i do hang out quite a lot on LinkedIn ourselves as well.

22:44So we'll be reading them. Thank you so much. Or you can also message us at whatweedontknow at boxlight.io and we'll read those messages too. Thanks again. Bye.