Podcasts about good strategy bad strategy

Substack Week: Engineering Strategy, Bridging Technical Excellence with Business Success With Aleix Morgadas In this Substack Week episode, we explore the critical intersection of engineering strategy and business success with Aleix Morgadas, an engineering strategy consultant focusing on sociotechnical aspects of high-stake business challenges. Aleix shares insights from his experience helping organizations align their technical capabilities with business objectives, while offering practical approaches to developing and implementing effective engineering strategies. The Genesis of Engineering Strategy Personal experience sparked Aleix's journey into engineering strategy when he joined a large company and found himself grappling with strategic decision-making in engineering. He identified a crucial gap: while strategy was well-established in product and business domains, engineering organizations often lacked strategic frameworks for participating in key decisions. This realization led him to start writing about his struggles and insights, helping others navigate similar challenges through his newsletter. "I found that engineering was missing a way to be part of the decision making process, and we needed to be clear on the problems and challenges that engineering organizations face." Breaking Down the Four-Step Process Drawing inspiration from Richard Rumelt's work on strategy, Aleix presents a comprehensive framework for developing engineering strategy. The process emphasizes the importance of understanding organizational context and identifying shared challenges before taking action. "Solve the shared pains - that's why we need to uncover those pains in the first place." The framework consists of four key steps: Context Understanding: Begin by defining your business context, as strategy must align with your specific environment and circumstances Problem Identification: Focus on understanding current organizational pains and creating alignment around which problems to solve Direction Setting: Break down larger goals into manageable increments while ensuring actions don't compete with each other Strategy Execution: Create space for teams to work on strategic initiatives while maintaining autonomy The Power of Bottom-Up Strategy Aleix challenges the traditional top-down approach to strategy development, advocating for a more inclusive process that brings together perspectives from all levels of the organization. This approach recognizes that teams and top-level management often have different visions that need to be reconciled for effective strategy implementation. "Strategy does not need to be designed top-down. Teams and top-level management have different visions, and we need to be able to bring those together." Implementation and Execution Success in engineering strategy requires more than just planning - it demands thoughtful execution and ongoing adaptation. Aleix emphasizes the importance of learning through action and starting with minimal effort initiatives to gain momentum. "By doing you learn, and doing is critical for strategy. Start with the least effort action you have in mind." Recommended Resources For Further Study The book: Good Strategy/Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt The blog post: North Star Framework Template & Activity Library The Jobs to be done Framework TEMPLATE: The engineering strategy template by Aleix VIDEO: Aleix's Engineering Strategy Journey Talk [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

CTO Series: Sergey's Leadership Insights—Bridging Innovation and Strategy as CTO of CrateDB   In this BONUS episode, we sit down with Sergey, the forward-thinking CTO of CrateDB, to unpack his journey from Nokia to CrateDB and his leadership philosophy that blends technical expertise with strategic foresight. We dive into the key moments that shaped his career, the challenges of scaling technology in a competitive market, and how Sergey aligns his team's efforts with broader business goals while staying adaptable in an ever-evolving tech landscape.   The Defining Moment in Sergey's Leadership Journey   “Being a cheerleader, servant, and strategist for your team creates an environment where innovation can thrive.”   Sergey shares how working at Nokia with an inspiring people manager, Sotiris, influenced his leadership approach. Sotiris embodied servant leadership and made strategic thinking a team-wide responsibility. Sergey reflects on how this mindset helped him approach his current role at CrateDB, emphasizing the importance of not only building great products but ensuring they resonate in the market through thoughtful sales and marketing alignment. “The best leaders help their teams see what's next—not just solve today's problems.” Navigating Product-Market Fit for Technical Products “For technical products, adoption is not just about features—it's about connecting with both developers and decision-makers.”   Sergey breaks down the challenges of achieving product-market fit for developer-centric solutions like CrateDB. He explains the dual approach of engaging both top-down decision-makers, like CTOs, and bottom-up developer communities. By drawing from his startup experience, Sergey underscores the importance of building trust and delivering a developer experience that wins over early adopters.   “The real challenge is bridging the gap between leadership adoption and the developers who use the product every day.”   The Impact of AI on Developer Experience “AI's true transformation lies in how it enhances the products we already use, often invisibly.”   When asked about AI's current role, Sergey reflects on the potential of AI-powered tools to transform workflows over the next few years. While not yet life-changing for his daily routine, he anticipates that AI's influence will soon be felt through the optimization of background processes in everyday tools and databases.   “The future isn't about flashy AI features—it's about smarter tools that simplify complex workflows.”   Aligning Tech Strategy with Business Goals “A strong strategy needs to be a story that teams can rally around and imagine themselves in.”   Sergey details CrateDB's unique approach to strategic planning, inspired by open-source RFCs (Request for Comments). Instead of rigid OKRs, they craft stories that clarify priorities and invite feedback from across the organization. He highlights the importance of quarterly check-ins and building checkpoints to validate assumptions along the way.   Key tips in this segment: Document the assumptions behind the strategy. Break initiatives into steps to test their feasibility. Avoid deadline-driven development; focus on value-driven milestones.   Fostering Collaboration Between Tech and Business Units “Collaboration thrives when both sides understand the trade-offs involved in strategic decisions.”   Sergey explains how collaboration between engineering and business leaders is fostered through transparency and communication. Product managers and engineering leads play key roles in advocating for priorities and ensuring alignment across teams. Sergey emphasizes the value of making trade-offs explicit to avoid silos.   “The best partnerships between tech and business come from mutual understanding—not just of goals, but of constraints.”   Staying Ahead with Strategic Roadmapping   “A good strategy diagnoses the situation, sets guiding policies, and outlines coherent actions.”   Sergey highlights the importance of competitive intelligence in staying ahead of market trends without reacting impulsively. In the world of databases, long adoption cycles offer the advantage of thoughtful strategic planning. He references the book Good Strategy/Bad Strategy and describes how CrateDB maintains an evergreen list of initiatives that can be prioritized when needed.   “Don't just chase trends—create a strategy that withstands change by focusing on long-term coherence.”   Overcoming the Challenges of the CTO Role   “The CTO role is often ambiguous—define it based on your organization's needs.”   Sergey candidly discusses the challenge of imposter syndrome and the ambiguity that comes with the CTO title. He outlines two common archetypes: the technical expert versus the team builder and cultural leader. He stresses the importance of adjusting the role to the organization's maturity and goals.   “Your leadership role isn't static—adapt your approach to meet your organization where it is.”   Books That Shaped Sergey's Leadership Approach   “Most tech problems are people problems disguised as engineering issues.”   Sergey shares the books that influenced his leadership style: Peopleware by Tom DeMarco: Reinforces the idea that technical challenges often stem from team dynamics. Drive by Daniel Pink: Highlights the importance of autonomy, mastery, and purpose in motivating teams. Good to Great by Jim Collins: Explores what makes some companies thrive while others stagnate. About Sergey Gerasimenko Sergey is the innovative CTO of CrateDB, leading the charge in real-time analytics and hybrid search. Previously, he was VP of Engineering at MongoDB, shaping the edge device strategy, and at Realm, a leading open-source mobile/embedded database acquired by MongoDB in 2019. With a career spanning groundbreaking roles at Brainly and Nokia, Sergey co-founded two companies and holds a patent. His leadership continues to push the boundaries of tech innovation. You can link with Sergey Gerasimenko on LinkedIn.

In the final episode of the series, Jacob Stoller and Andrew Stotz discuss the difference between typical companies using traditional management and more successful Deming-style companies. If productivity and performance are so much better, why do companies stick with traditional management? TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.3 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I continue my discussion and conversation with Jacob Stoller, Shingo Prize winning author of The Lean CEO. And ladies and gentlemen, I just received my copy finally. Productivity Reimagined, it just arrived from Amazon. You can get it there. And that's the latest book that he's come out with. And this is exploring applying Lean and Deming Management Principles at the enterprise level. The topic for today is moving forward with productivity. Jacob, take it away.   0:00:41.7 Jacob Stoller: Oh, thank you, Andrew. Great to be here once again. Yeah. Moving forward. That's really Chapter 13. Whether you consider that, hopefully you consider 13 lucky as I think they do in Italy.   0:00:57.4 AS: We do in Thailand.   0:01:00.4 JS: Oh, really? Wonderful. Okay. Perfect. Anyway, so I wrote in the book, I sort of defined where we're trying to go by describing two companies; a typical company, and then the company that we would aspire to for maximum productivity. So I'm gonna read those, just to illustrate. "Company A follows traditional top-down management practices. Leaders determine how the work is to be done, and give orders to their staff accordingly. Individuals, functional groups and departments are treated as independent entities under centralized control. Pay and promotion are determined by individual performance according to a set of predetermined criteria. Employees are ranked and encouraged to compete with each other." So that's company A, your typical company, which probably comprises what percentage would you say? 90%? 95%?   0:02:03.8 AS: 97.9%   0:02:04.4 JS: Okay. Okay. Let's look at where we'd like to go from there. "Company B is managed as an interactive system where people and functional teams depend on each other. Supervisors aren't expected to have all the answers, and they rely on frontline workers to share their workplace knowledge and take an active role in improving their work processes. All employees know they are part of a team culture pursuing common goals and solving problems together to move the company forward." Okay, so that's really, that's where we wanna be. And the reason you would want to go there is because if you take those two companies and they have similar resources, similar markets, perhaps operating in similar region, company B will outproduce company A 10 times out of 10. It's a more productive model, and it's proven to work. So why don't people do it?   0:03:16.3 JS: Well, there's some thinking that gets in the way, some sort of systemic kinds of barriers that are out there. So even people who aspire to making a company better, and I think there are a lot of people out there that think that, but they run into these barriers, and I'm just gonna review them again because we've gone through them in some detail. But the myth of segmented success, that's the really kind of the exact opposite of a company as a system. It's this idea that all the parts are interchangeable. You can take a department, you can give each department separate goals, and they'll all make their goals and it'll all add up. That's the myth, of course. So the myth of segmented success. We have really stemming out of that the myth of the bottom line.   0:04:11.9 JS: And because of that segmented structure, we believe that we can use finance as a proxy for all the quantitative, all the accomplishments of all these different segments. It all adds up. It's arithmetic. We figure, so why not? We just take, everyone makes their numbers, and then they all make their numbers and they all celebrate together. That's the myth, of course. The bottom line doesn't tell you what's really going on in the company. The top-down knowledge myth they run into, and that's this whole idea that managers are supposed to know all the answers, and their job is to tell people what to do. And it's not just people with MBAs. It's people with degrees in psychology and maybe working in HR. It's engineers, it's any person with professional training, figures that they have not only the privilege, but a duty to actually tell people what to do. And if I'm not telling people what to do, I'm probably not doing my job and somebody's going to be looking over my shoulder. So a big fear around that.   0:05:31.6 JS: Myth number four is the myth of sticks and carrots. And this is this idea of Homo Economicus, the idea that people act in their own financial interest and it's perfectly predictable. Performance is down? Well, let's just pay them more or maybe we need some threats here. Maybe we need to threaten them, or maybe we need to get some competition. So somebody is gonna be a little bit worried looking over their shoulder that they might get fired. Fear is a big factor here, obviously. Finally, there's the myth of tech omnipotence. And this stems right from the myth of segmented success. This idea we can take a process and we can swap out technology, we can put in technology and swap out people. We can reduce head count by 5, 10, 15 people and put in a machine in its place. That's been the business case for technology for decades. And we still have a very strong belief in that. So that's kind of what we're stuck with, those myths. And we really have to crush those myths as we go along.   0:06:42.5 AS: You know, Jacob, I was just at a meeting yesterday with a very senior executive at a very large company in Thailand. And I was just talking to him, it's off the record, so we were just chatting, but he was talking about the challenges that they're facing, and I said, so how are your KPIs? And he said, KPIs are just killing us. They're causing us to be siloed. It's setting up competition in the company. People can't work together. And I asked him this question, like, what can you do about it? He says, not much. What am I gonna do? Remove the KPI system? No. We know...   0:07:31.1 JS: Isn't that interesting?   0:07:34.8 AS: That ultimately that's probably one of the best things that they could do and get people to work together. But it just, you know, he said something to me that just made me think about, for the listeners and the viewers out there who are running small and medium-sized businesses who feel disadvantaged so many times when they're fighting against the big giants...   0:07:53.6 JS: Yeah.   0:07:53.6 AS: Take comfort that you can change your business. But many of these big companies, they just can't. And they won't.   0:08:01.2 JS: Yeah.   0:08:03.5 AS: And they never will. So that's what's so great about these types of principles, both Lean, what you're talking about, Deming, is that if you're a business owner, it's a family business, it's your private business or a group of people that you have real control over the business, you can implement these things. And you can build your business to be great.   0:08:23.7 JS: That's interesting, Andrew. I've talked in my book, I've talked with some smaller manufacturers, and at least a couple of them have said they're getting refugees from large corporations. And he'll interview these people and say, well, I can't give you, you know, you won't have 500 people reporting to you or anything. And they say, I don't care. I said, I really, you know, I've had it with this corporate stuff, and they want to be part of a culture that makes a difference. And so that's maybe catching on. I mean, interesting that the gentleman you're talking with also recognized that.   0:09:00.3 AS: Yeah. And he's just as, his hands are tied in some ways. And, so, but that to me is hopeful for the rest of the businesses that can change. And the other thing I was, you know, I always end with my favorite quote from Dr. Deming, which is that people are entitled to joy in work. Yesterday I was speaking to about 75 students in my Ethics in Finance class, and it's the kickoff day. And so it's a real fun, and I talk about a bunch of things, but the one thing I said is that ever since I graduated from university, all I really wanted was a job that I enjoyed, at a place that I enjoyed doing it, with the people I enjoyed doing it with. That's all I wanted. I wanted joy in work and I got it because I walked away from the places and the people where it wasn't happening, and I walked towards the places where I had the opportunity to enjoy it. Of course it helps that I found my love, which is being a financial analyst. It's just, I understand that so well, but this is where I think I want us to think about hope and potential for happiness in work and all of that. And so I know you've got some more steps that you've got to help people. So maybe we move into that.   0:10:27.7 JS: Sure. Sure. Well, and it would be interesting, this gentleman you talked with, I wonder if he's visited any companies that we would admire that are using Deming principles, or maybe...   0:10:39.1 AS: Well, it may give it away, but this company in the past has fully implemented the teachings of Dr. Deming.   0:10:49.2 JS: Oh, really?   0:10:51.5 AS: But they had a changeover in management, and they completely walked away from this and implemented the KPI system.   0:11:00.9 JS: Yeah. Oh my. Isn't that something? Yeah, that happens. That happens for sure. And we've had, you know, in my last book, The Lean CEO, I found some people, number of companies had fallen off the ladder. And gosh, the Shingo Institute had a real problem with that. People were winning Shingo prizes and then they were falling off the ladder, and they changed their emphasis on criteria now, and now they really emphasize culture. You can't just follow the principles, but you really have to get the culture, and they really grill them on that. So, interesting. Interesting.   0:11:38.2 AS: Yeah.   0:11:41.0 JS: But the first step, the reason I asked you if they've visited anybody is really, I think if you're starting from scratch at company A, I think the first thing is to go visit companies.   0:11:48.6 AS: Yep.   0:11:49.5 JS: I mean, you've got to see what's going on in companies that are different to even appreciate what's possible. And it's...   0:12:00.6 AS: 'Cause it's inspiring.   0:12:00.7 JS: It's not only inspiring, but you see things that you wouldn't expect to see. And I think what they said, what these folks have told me over and over again is that what you see is you actually feel it. There's a culture in there, there's a kind of an atmosphere when you walk in the door. And that's what really wows people. I hear that over and over again. So you have to feel that, you can't write that down, or you can't explain that in a talk. So I think that's really the first step. And fortunately, companies that have gone through these transformations are happy to welcome people to come visit, because it helps them reinforce their culture as well. So it's a reinforcing kind of thing. I think after you've done that, gone the rounds a bit, that's when you really need to assess where you are and what you wanna be. And I think there has to be some honest criticism about the kind of company you are. I don't know if you wanna call it soul-searching, but there's not a realization that we don't wanna go on as we were, you're really not gonna do much. So that's, I think, critically important. You're smiling. Do you have a story there?   0:13:20.8 AS: No, but I'm just, you know, it makes sense. It makes sense. I did actually, you know, in Thailand there was a company that I saw in the newspaper many years ago that it came out in the newspaper that they won the Deming Prize from Japan, from the Union of Scientists in Japan. And so I just called the company and I said, congratulations. And they said, great, thank you. And then I said, and I talked to the CEO of the company, and then I said, could I bring my staff from my coffee, you know, management team from the coffee business to come and see you guys? And he said, yeah. And that started a lifelong friendship with a guy named Srini, who was the guy who won that. He passed away about a year or two ago. And I featured him in my book on Transform Your Business with Dr. Deming's 14 Points. But the idea is...   0:14:11.0 JS: Oh yeah...   0:14:12.7 AS: Go out and...   0:14:14.0 JS: I love that book.   0:14:16.2 AS: Explore and see it, see what's out there.   0:14:16.3 JS: Yeah. For sure.   0:14:17.5 AS: Because you also, when you go out and explore, you also find out, hey, we're pretty good at some of these things and there's things that we're doing well, you know?   0:14:23.5 JS: Of course, of course. So once you've assessed your state, I think it's very, very important, even before you start talking to your people, 'cause it's gonna be a transformation, you're gonna demand an awful lot from your people, you've really got to know where you're going, and you have to establish a vision. And companies have different ways of doing that. But the one thing I would emphasize is that it's gotta be a vision with substance. And I think Dr. Deming would say, by what method? [laughter] You say where you're going. Right? So, for example, a hospital. I saw a hospital that did a very good job of that, establishing a vision, and they wanted to be the safest and most compassionate hospital in their region. They said, well, what would that look like?   0:15:13.3 JS: And they looked at, well, okay, safety would obviously be big. There would be fiscal responsibility. Wait time is a big issue in healthcare, be no waiting. I think there may have been one more as well. But anyway, they established these kinds of what I would call aspirational goals. It's where we, really where we want to be, and it's gotta be something that inspires employees, right? You wanna be a compassionate, safe place for patients to come. I mean, that's what people want. So then what they do is they took it a level down, and they said, okay, well, if we're going to have an exemplary safety record, what would that look like? How would we measure it? And they have safe... The health organizations have safety statistics. So, they have an institution, that third party organization that would report on the numbers, so they could set some targets according to that. And then they go down even further. They say, okay, safety. What are the things that we need to do? What are some of our weaknesses? So they say, well, patient falls was one of them. They have things like medication error, hospital acquired illnesses. So all this goes under the idea of no harm to patients, right?   0:16:44.0 AS: Yeah.   0:16:45.3 JS: All goes together. So, they then started to work on the most pressing one. You know, work on targets, do projects together, PDSA kinds of projects. And they chipped away at it and eventually with a number of projects, they were very successful. But I think the key, of course, is that problems in workplaces and hospitals, maybe especially, are very granular in lots and lots of things, so you need all hands on deck. But they were very, very successful at getting a very high rating just through these efforts. So, that's...   [overlapping conversation]   0:17:28.8 AS: Yeah, the vision with substance is a great one because I think lots of visions are flaky, and we've been working on the vision for Coffee Works, for my company, and that is we supply coffee to every leading brand in Thailand. And that's something that we can visualize, the employees can visualize, they can also see who we don't serve. And also when we lose a customer that's a leading brand, we can say we messed up, but when your contract's up with our competitor, we're gonna be back because we supply every leading brand in Thailand.   0:18:08.0 JS: Right, right.   0:18:10.3 AS: So, substance, vision. Yep.   0:18:13.3 JS: Yeah, definitely. Yeah. And I guess you share that, been sharing that kind of vision with your people for a long time, right?   0:18:18.3 AS: Yep.   0:18:21.6 JS: But I mean, would you say, how important would you say vision is? I mean...   0:18:23.2 AS: I think it's critical. And I think that part of what happens is that many companies start with a vision, and then they get, it's just so easy to get distracted. And there's so many, you know, business just grows complex, and then all of a sudden you feel like, we can do all of this, we can do this, we can do that, we can do this, we can do that. The best book on this is Good Strategy Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt. And he talks a lot about what are bad strategies, and he talks about these fluffy visions that really don't help anybody. And so getting a vision with substance, I think is critical.   0:18:58.0 JS: Okay. So we got our vision, it's got real teeth. It's something that we can stand in front of our people and say, here's what we're going to do. And they won't say, oh, this is just another flavor of the month. They'll realize that we're serious and we're gonna do this. The next step, number four, is building trust. And that's extremely important. And one of the manufacturer actually told me a wonderful story about this. He was working in a very... Had a plant in a very rough neighborhood in Baltimore. And when he took over that plant as a general manager, there was terrible culture. People were... He said there was racism and there were just people quitting all the time. And just walking out the door, not showing up to work. You know, the workers hated management.   0:19:56.7 JS: So this guy went in onto the shop floors. I'm your new general manager. And he said he spent the first three or four months just talking to them about their lives. You know, he was committed to the Lean methodology, but he didn't talk about methods, how we're gonna do things different. He just found out what's important to these people. And a lot of 'em were financially strapped. They were in poor neighborhoods. So the direction was really how to make this company more profitable so we can pay you more. And that was kind of a guiding vision and remarkably successful how it did. How he won the people over. And I think there's so many people out there asking people to do things. And, you know, you really have to... Takes a lot of trust. I mean, you're gonna say, I'm gonna admit when I've made a mistake, I'm not gonna cover it up and you're not gonna fire me. You know, that's never happened. So...   0:21:02.9 AS: And I can tell you, for the listeners and the viewers out there, here's a good inspiring movie to get you an idea of thinking about how to get out on the shop floor and understand from the inside what's happening in the business. And the movie came out in 1980, and it's called Brubaker by Robert Redford. And it's the story of a new prisoner warden.   0:21:25.2 JS: Oh, I never saw it.   0:21:27.0 AS: Yeah. Prison warden who goes in as a prisoner, and the governor of the state has sent him in as a prisoner. And so he lives a prisoner's life for, I don't know how long it was, a week, a couple weeks, a month, until eventually he, you know, reveals himself and then takes over. And then he knew all the corruption and all the problems and all the issues, and he went about solving 'em. It's an inspiring movie.   0:21:54.2 JS: Yeah. And more recently, there was a program, I've seen a couple of episodes of Undercover CEO, you know, where CEO actually goes into the workplace in disguise and flips burgers or whatever. And then discovers what's really going on in the company.   0:22:09.2 AS: Yeah, that's a great. That's probably even more applicable.   0:22:11.2 JS: Yeah. Right. So building trust is just... It's very personal. And from that point, you start to make changes. But those changes... My favorite examples, I don't know if this is a general rule, but some of the best examples I've seen are working on safety. You work on safety because improving processes to make them safer is actually kind of like a gateway drug to doing continuous improvement, right? You start to understand what processes are, but first of all, people are improving the process in their own interest.   0:22:50.8 AS: Yep.   0:22:52.2 JS: So you get them very good at making these changes, proposing changes, speaking out, pointing out when other people are not following safety guidelines. Understanding that something has to stop when safety is not there. No, you build on the trust you created and you start to change the culture around that. So that's number five. So you notice I've gone five steps and we haven't introduced any methods or anything. You know, it's...   0:23:23.8 AS: What I noticed from those first five is that they're really all things that senior management need to do before they go out with all their exciting new ideas and start training people and start really bringing that out in a much more aggressive way.   0:23:41.5 JS: Exactly. So really step six is train and transform. And that's when we do all the... That's when we draw the diagrams, and that's when we start the PDSA training or the Kaizen events or whichever type of transformation you're doing. That's when we start to train the workforce and we start to undergo the transformation. So that's all the work, but the transforming work. But we've done enormous preparation before we get there. And I think that's what I've seen is the best way to do it. So we train and transform, and then of course we have to remove barriers as they come. So it might be removing some aspects of the accounting system because they might be holding us back. So you run into the barriers and you take on those barriers as you run into them and you build momentum.   0:24:36.3 AS: Yep.   0:24:38.6 JS: So step seven really is you're building this momentum and you raise the bar. You've done something and now you raise your standards and continue to raise them. And that leads you to a continually improving organization where you're always expecting to get better. People have a joy in work because they know that they're part of making something better. And you continue raising the bar 'cause people like a challenge.   0:25:07.9 AS: Yep.   0:25:08.5 JS: As long as it's a safe environment and as long as it's a team kind of self-supporting workplace. So finally we get to share and learn. So we've gone full circle. You know, you've got... You've gone through a transformation, you're proud of your work, and you start to open the door to visitors because that's where you really reinforce the culture. And, I don't know, you have... You say you have visitors at the coffee place?   0:25:45.9 AS: Yeah. I mean, for me, I just love going to companies that do like to share and learn. And I like to do that too. We get students, a lot of times it'll be like executive MBA students coming to Thailand and others that I'll bring out to the factory, so to get them to see how we do things. But I just personally love to... Well, it's great when you go out to a place, and there's a lot of factories in Thailand for sure where you can just see that they have a vision of what they're doing and they clearly communicate it. I had a company that I saw in the financial data many years ago when I was an analyst that really did something very odd, which was their cash conversion cycle was negative. Normally it's a positive thing for a manufacturing company 'cause they have a lot of inventory and accounts receivable and the like.   0:26:34.9 AS: And so I went out and I met with the CEO and then I said, how did you do this? He said, it took us five years, but we brought our inventory down to seven days of inventory. And how did you do it? And he took me out on the factory floor to meet all the different people doing it. And he said, I put people in teams and they work together and they try to figure out how do we reduce the inventory here? I help them see the overhead cost that's coming from the executives so they could calculate a P&L and understand like, how can they make their section, you know, better? And then he had some of the guys come and speak and explain what they were doing, some of the supervisors and managers on the shop floor. And I was like, wow, this was impressive. So love that sharing and learning.   0:27:22.7 JS: Yeah. No, it's great. And I've had wonderful visits where people are so excited about their work that you think, wow. And of course that means they're really, really productive. I mean, they just... They're doing it because they love it and it's... You can't compare with that kind of creativity that you get from that. So I guess that I'd like to talk a little about the competitive advantages here of taking this journey and, you know, that's the whole point. Productivity becomes your competitive advantage. You outproduce other companies with similar resources. And I believe that the way the world is changing right now, that competitive advantage for company B type companies is going to grow as things... And I have four reasons I cite for that.   0:28:21.0 JS: Reason one is flexibility, adaptability, agility, whatever you wanna call it. You know, we're going with manufacturing and services too much more into high mix, low volume type scenarios. So the mass production machinery approach has just become less and less relevant to manufacturing and also with services as well because it's not... It's less a ones size fits all kinda world. That's one very strong reason. The ability to hire talent. You know, we're just starting to see that. You know, people don't wanna work for these corporations that they feel don't have purpose. And couple of manufacturers actually told me, and this is in the US, I don't know how that compares with Thailand, but in the US he said there's a real crisis not just 'cause people maybe don't have jobs, but because people don't have purpose in their work, so people go home depressed, they take drugs and they've done medical studies on this.   0:29:30.3 JS: You know, if you don't have purpose in your work and you're doing something even though you know it's dumb and you're doing it anyway, just, you know, because to please the boss or whatever, that places huge stress on people. And there are actually medical... They've done medical studies on that, people who work in those kinds of jobs, on the negative effects. So anyway, I think getting the best talent, I hear that more and more anyone I talk to, and I think that's gonna be more and more of a factor. There's a whole deglobalization process going on right now. A lot of reshoring here in North America. People, you know, companies really realizing that sort of the fallacy of having these very, very long supply chains. So it's all about now shortening that supply chain, having immediate suppliers that are close.   0:30:23.9 JS: I mean, that's the only way you're gonna get your inventory turns down to 50 or whatever your friend was talking about. Right? And finally on climate change, that's getting tougher and tougher to deal with. And it's not just about governments not acting, but it's going to be scarcity of resources. It's going to be having to run businesses in difficult climate circumstances. It's gonna be government regulation. It's going to be whether people will come and work for companies that aren't making... Doing their bit to combat this. So those four reasons, I think that's a competitive advantage that's going to grow. And I think it's urgent that corporations act, and Dr. Deming warned that there'd be a crisis coming if companies kept running the way they were, and the crisis is here. We've arrived and, you know, the statistics are terrible. Don't have to bore you with those, but, you know, it's a very rough world and we need, obviously governments will have to act, but we need better companies. Now... Sorry, go ahead.   0:31:48.2 AS: I was... Yeah, that's why he entitled this book Out of the Crisis 'cause there was a crisis then, and the fact is there's still, and it's so many things are harder too particularly in the US with reshoring and that type of thing because education has been decimated also in the US so it's very hard to bring back, you know, engineering prowess and things like that, so. Yep.   0:32:14.1 JS: Yeah, for sure. So I... My sort of wrap up comment would be, answer to your question, not really a question, but your title, you talked about boosting Lean with Deming. So, you know, when we chat about this, but you know what, I was thinking about this, what as a person who wrote about Lean initially and then took a much deeper dive into Deming, what does Deming add, from my perspective? And what excites me the most about Dr. Deming is that I think he was less interested in maybe methods and more interested in fundamental truths. I mean, he really, I think put forward what are really fundamental truths about people, about the physical world and about how people in the physical world interact. And these are, like I say, this is not slogans or anything like this, this is science. I mean, these are proven scientific principles and I think those principles underline any method you use. You know, if you're really following that. And I'm not a Deming scholar enough to be able to say that that's what he meant by profound knowledge. But when you use the term profound knowledge, that's what that means to me. It means just a very fundamental knowledge of the way things work.   0:33:49.8 AS: Yeah. Well, it's exciting to think about how we can learn from what you've written about and what you've talked about. So ladies and gentlemen, the book is Productivity Reimagined: Shattering Performance Myths to Achieve Sustainable Growth. And I've really enjoyed our time, Jacob, to go through all the different myths and to hear the way you look at things which is coming from your direction originally, the Lean direction, and then bringing that thinking together with the teachings of Dr. Deming. So I just wanna thank you and give you the last word. If you'd like to wrap up for the listeners and the viewers to say, what's the main message you wanna get, want them to get out of all the... Out of the book and out of all of our discussion? How would you wrap it up?   0:34:45.4 JS: I would wrap it up by saying, let's look for those fundamental truths. You know, let's not look for slogans, let's not look for techniques. Let's look at what's really true about humans, about the physical world, and let's build our future based on that.   0:35:04.2 AS: Well, Jacob, on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I wanna thank you again for this discussion right now and the prior discussions about each part of your book and the myths and the like. And for listeners, remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey, and you can find Jacob's book, Productivity Reimagined, at jacobstoller.com. This is your host, Andrew Stotz, and I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming, "People are entitled to joy in work."

In this Checkout episode, we chat with Damien Smith, CTO of Paramount Retail, the tech leader behind brands like BoozeBud and Barrel & Batch. Damien shares one of his more unusual online buys, sings the praises of small skateboard retailer brand Kick Push and highlights Good Strategy/Bad Strategy and the Manager Tools podcast as sources of practical, no-nonsense advice for leaders. He also explains how Asana keeps his team in sync across locations, highlights Shopify as crucial for powering Paramount's e-commerce presence and gives his insights on juggling the demands of leadership with personal growth. Check out our full-length interview with Damien Smith here:Reinventing BoozeBud: Inside Paramount Retail's Push to Transform Alcohol Retail | #446About our guests:With over 25 years of experience, Damien Smith is a bit of a Swiss Army knife in business and technology. After founding an IT services company in the late 90s, he eventually became CIO at SurfStitch in 2013. Immersed in analytics and eCommerce, he later held key roles at MTB Direct before joining BoozeBud as CTO in 2022. Damien now drives tech innovation at Paramount Retail, overseeing BoozeBud and helping transform the online alcohol retail landscape.About your host:Nathan Bush is the host of the Add To Cart podcast and a leading ecommerce transformation consultant. He has led eCommerce for businesses with revenue $100m+ and has been recognised as one of Australia's Top 50 People in eCommerce four years in a row. You can contact Nathan on LinkedIn, Twitter or via email.Please contact us if you: Want to come on board as an Add To Cart sponsor Are interested in joining Add To Cart as a co-host Have any feedback or suggestions on how to make Add To Cart betterEmail hello@addtocart.com.au We look forward to hearing from you! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

John Dues and Andrew Stotz are diving deeper into the improvement model that John is building with his team. In this episode, learn the three ways to think about an improvement frame for your big challenge.  TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.6 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. And the topic for today is Frame the Challenge. John, take it away.   0:00:23.6 John Dues: Hey Andrew, it's good to be back. Yeah, we're gonna talk about Framing the Challenge today. We kicked off a new series a couple of episodes ago. I introduced this improvement model that we can use to set ambitious goals backed with this sound methodology. Make this disclaimer again, we're sort of building the plane while we are flying it. So this improvement model is new at United Schools where I work. And so again, we're actually letting listeners sort of see it as it's being built and first put to use. And so I think just starting out with a quick recap of the model is a good place to start. So what is this improvement model that we've been looking at? I'll pull up my screen so we can share a visual of the model for those that are watching. Right. Can you see that all right?   0:01:21.2 AS: Yep.   0:01:21.3 JD: Great. Give me one second. All right. So we have this improvement model. Basically the core idea of the model is it gives us the scientific way of thinking. And remember, we talked about we're working to close this gap between current conditions in our organizations and future aspirations. In order to close this gap, we're walking through the four steps on the model. So first, we set the challenge of direction. That's really where we focused our time last episode. The second step is to grasp the current condition. The third step is to establish the next target condition. And then the fourth step is to experiment to overcome obstacles. And that's where we spend most of our time in this four-step process. And then the other thing we've talked about is we do it with this team. The people working in the system, that's one part of the system, one part of the team.   0:02:19.8 JD: And we've talked about this in our case. This can be students, it can be teachers, whoever the frontline people are in your organization. Then there's those with the authority to work on the system, to make changes to the design or the architecture of the system. That could be a teacher in a classroom, or we've said the principal of a school, or maybe the superintendent of a system of schools. And then one of the innovations that we've made to this improvement model is that that third group or that third person on the team is someone that has Profound Knowledge, someone that's using Deming's principles to guide the work. So that's the basic model that we looked at in the first episode and...   0:03:11.8 AS: And I would just highlight... By the way, can you put it on slideshow?   0:03:15.3 JD: Sure.   0:03:15.4 AS: And I've been reading Mike Rother's book, rereading his book on Toyota Kata and stuff. And so this has really got me back to it. But what you're doing is applying this and helping us understand it as you're putting it into action at your school, right?   0:03:35.0 JD: Yeah, we've had an improvement model. And I think... Yeah, so like it says down in the right hand corner, that this model, it's based on Mike Rother's work, the Toyota Kata work. I think one thing that was missing from our model previously was like, how do you set this challenge or direction? How do you do that in an ambitious but reasonable way? And I think Mike Rother's sort of model speaks to this. So that's why I like his four-step model. I also like the four steps because it's pretty simple. It's not 15 steps. It's not 20 steps. It's four steps. Now there are some steps that you have to learn and stuff like that. There are different pieces to each of the steps, but I like that it's four steps. It's sort of easy to remember. It's memorable. And I think the innovation that we've done so far is who is the team that's working through this? And I think to frame it as the people working in the system, the people working on the system, and then someone with Profound Knowledge, I think that's an innovation, from what I've read about Mike Rother's work.   0:04:39.6 AS: Yep.   0:04:40.4 JD: Yeah. And so to continue the recap from last time, I think in the last episode, so we introduced the model two episodes ago. And then last episode, what we said we were gonna do is start walking through each of the steps, episode by episode, and do a deeper dive into each of the steps. And we did that with step one last time. So we did Set the Challenge last time. And just as a refresher, this is that longer range goal that would differentiate us from other schools in our case, if we achieve it. But remember, we also said it seems nearly impossible at the outset. This is something that's off in the horizon. It's probably gonna take at least six months, probably more like two or three years. And then I gave this example at United where I am. So we're a school system. One of the challenges that we've set is to reduce our chronic absenteeism from 52%. So that's sort of the current condition. And we wanna bring that down to 5%. And there's this huge gap between those things. Obviously, we talked about an order of magnitude, and we don't quite know how to get there right now.   0:05:48.7 AS: Yeah, I think that's the point is we don't know how to get there right now.   0:05:57.6 JD: Yeah. Yeah. And I think... And so what I originally had planned to do is to go on to step two. And I think we're gonna do that next. But I wanted to pause because last time we briefly touched on this idea of Framing the Challenge as an improvement goal. And so with this episode, what I wanna do first before we go on to step two is talk about how to sort of think about that framing. And I sort of have studied a little bit of performance management from healthcare specifically. And there's really these three phases of performance management. When you're setting a goal, there's sort of performance measurement that has a research orientation. There's performance measurement that has an accountability orientation. And there's performance management that has an improvement orientation. And I think it's really important to understand the difference between those three types of measurement because I think conflation of those three things can derail and often derail improvement efforts. And in fact, as I was doing some research for this episode, I read this quote in one of the journal articles that I was sort of reviewing. It said, "the problem with measurement is that it can be a loaded gun, dangerous if misused, and at least threatening if pointed in the wrong direction."   [laughter]   0:07:19.6 JD: Right. So, when I read that I was like, this is important enough to take a pause and do a little bit deeper dive into that, you know, the differences between the three that we sort of got into on a surface level last time.   0:07:33.5 AS: One of the things that I like to say these days when I talk to people about measurement is measurement... If the subject being measured, let's say a table, I'm gonna measure the length of a table versus measuring the performance of an individual as an example. If the subject being measured knows, is aware that they're being measured, you're gonna have a problem.   0:08:02.0 JD: Yeah, I think that's very well put. And...   0:08:07.5 AS: The table doesn't care.   0:08:09.3 JD: The table doesn't care, but people always do. No doubt. No doubt. So I thought it'd be... I put together a table for those that are watching 'cause there is a lot of nuance to this and we'll kind of walk through this step by step, sort of the differences between goals or measurement for research, measurement for accountability, and then measurement for improvement. So I think just... I came up with these dimensions in some of the research I was doing. So, what's the purpose of each of those? What questions are you trying to answer? What are some example questions that are answered with that type of measurement? What's actually getting measured? How often is it getting measured? And then why does quality improvement or quality measurement matter in that particular area? So let's start with the purpose first. So when we're thinking about measurement for research, what we're really trying to do is contribute to some knowledge base, right?   0:09:01.8 JD: You know, I think the classic example is, what a university professor is often doing in their research. The second type of measurement is measurement for accountability. And really there, what we talked about last time is the purpose is to determine the application of rewards and sanctions or rewards and punishments. And that's really juxtaposed against measurement for improvement, which is... The purpose there is to learn our way to a system that produces a higher level of performance, right? And so let's look at measurement for research. We talked about the purpose being contributing to the knowledge base. If the questions that we're asking are about constructs or relationships between constructs or theories, then research is probably the direction we wanna go. An example question would be what's the relationship between two conceptual variables and what gets measured is... Could be numerous latent variables, but how often is this measurement happening? Typically once or twice during a study. And what we're trying to do is detect a relationship where they exist, right?   0:10:16.8 AS: So it could be... Like in a school, it could be a relationship between being late, the late rate and the absenteeism rate.   0:10:29.9 JD: Yeah. I mean, you could do research into why is it that student... Why are students chronically absent? You could do research into what's the best way scientifically to teach reading, right? And so you're gonna sort of come up with some answers there, at least answers that are sort of coming out of a lab, right? And a lot of times measurement for research or research goal or research study, that can be helpful to sort of initially point you in the right direction. You might do a literature review when you're trying to come up with solutions in your particular context.   0:11:10.3 AS: And it's important to remember that surveys properly done are a great form of research. So not only going back and seeing what's already been... What is the knowledge base on attendance, but also trying to do some research into what do students or teachers or parents think are root causes as an example.   0:11:33.3 JD: Sure.   0:11:34.8 AS: Okay. Great.   0:11:35.5 JD: Gives you a starting point, right? And so you certainly need measurement for research for sure. In that second bucket, we have measurement for accountability. And this is probably the thing that teachers and educators are most used to because there's accountability systems in all 50 states, right? And remember, we said the purpose is to determine who should be rewarded and who should be sanctioned. That's the purpose of an accountability measure. It's gonna answer questions about merit or status or accomplishment. It could be of someone like an individual teacher in a classroom, or perhaps about a school, for example. It's gonna answer questions like who's performing well and who isn't, who should be considered knowledgeable enough to do whatever, something X, right? But when we're talking about measurements, they're typically end-of-the-line outcomes, usually once per year after the fact. I've given state tests as an example multiple times. That's a very typical accountability measure end-of-the-line outcome. And why it's important to have quality measurement for accountability is that we can assign consequences based on measurement that lacks sufficient technical rigor so.   0:12:56.0 AS: Consequences as in rewards and sanctions?   0:13:00.4 JD: Could be... Yeah, consequences as in rewards and sanctions. And so there's technical guides that go with accountability systems. So how is the state, for example, calculating all of these different measures that show up on a school report card, test scores, value-added progress scores, chronic absenteeism rates? All those things have to be well-defined. Data has to be collected systematically. And it has to be done the same across the entire system so that rewards and sanctions are meted out equally amongst all the districts and schools and classrooms. But those two things are very different than measurement for improvement. And that's where I focus most of my time and where these talks really, really focus. And again, we said the purpose is to learn our way to a system that produces a higher level of performance.   0:13:48.4 JD: So we're talking about questions about specific changes as potential improvements to our systems. So some questions might be, are the changes I'm making leading to improvement? How are my changes affecting other parts of my system? And really, we're talking about outcomes and processes relevant to the object of change in terms of what gets measured. And that's happening... Those measurements for outcomes or processes are happening frequently as the practice or as the process occurs, right? Because we want feedback on a much more frequent basis than once or twice per study or at the end of the school year. That's one of the advantages here of measurement for improvement. And why does quality measurement matter in this particular area? Well, we wanna learn which changes are an improvement without wasting resources or will. Those are both very finite things in organizations, schools are... That's the same in schools.   0:14:55.2 AS: Will as in energy towards this objective, is that what you mean by will?   0:15:01.7 JD: Yeah. So two finite things, resources, which could be time or money. But will, I literally mean the will of the people, the will of the frontline people that you have to get on board with whatever this change is gonna be. And if you're moving between this thing and that, you sort of use up that will for good...   0:15:23.4 AS: It seems you have depleted the will of the people.   0:15:27.4 JD: And that happens all the time, especially where you're in a service business like education, the frontline people are being burned out all the time, teachers, in hospitals it's nurses and other folks in other industries. So that's the basic overview. And then I think one of the key things here is that there are some real measurement limitations when it comes to accountability measures and research measures or goals, when we're thinking about organizational improvement.   0:16:08.5 JD: I think the key limitation for accountability goals is that... The key limitation for improvement is that it does not illuminate why the outcomes occur or what should be done to change them when we're thinking about accountability system. For research, the key limitation for improvement is that it is impractical to administer it and not designed to inform changes in practice. So those are some real limitations. But what often happens, I think... And I should say again, like we said at the outset, that the three types of measurement are complementary. Like we need each of these three different types of performance measurement. But I think what happens is that problems arise when they're not used for their intended purpose. Remember, we said research, we wanna contribute to the knowledge base, that's the purpose. For accountability, application of award and sanctions. And for improvement, there we're actually learning our way to a better system, right? So, I thought it would be useful here. I may put you through like a little quiz here to apply the purposes of measurement to the right scenario. So, I have three situations here. They're unrelated to education. So, there's no pressure there. So, I'll read the three situations and then you're gonna tell me how would you... Which of the measurement purposes would you use?   0:17:47.7 AS: So, research, accountability, or improvement.   0:17:49.2 JD: Research, accountability, or improvement so.   0:17:53.6 AS: And I'm doing this on behalf of our listeners and readers so... And listeners and viewers.   0:17:55.7 JD: Everyone yeah.   0:17:56.7 AS: So, pay attention ladies and gentlemen, 'cause my answers may be wrong, but yours may be right. Okay.   0:18:01.7 JD: This is the check for understanding. This is a true education exercise here. And we're gonna be talking about avocados, right? So, there's no prior knowledge needed. So, I'll read through the first three situations, give you a chance to think, and I can repeat them if necessary, and you kind of think between those three. So, the first situation is rank the grocery stores in Columbus, Ohio, according to the quality of their avocados. So, would you use measurement for accountability, measurement for research, measurement for improvement? That's the first situation. The second situation is understand the relationship between weather, soil, acidity, and the eventual quality of an avocado grown in California. And the third situation is improve the quality of avocados on sale across all stores in Columbus. So, let's go back to that first situation. So, if you're gonna rank the grocery stores in Columbus according to the quality of their avocados, what type of measurement orientation makes the most sense?   0:19:15.5 AS: So I'm thinking accountability.   0:19:20.0 JD: Yeah, that's exactly right. Accountability, it's basically a grading system for avocados. You think how meat gets graded, it's grade A meat. That's really an accountability system.   0:19:33.6 AS: Okay, so listeners, viewers, did you get that one right? These are tough. John's a tough teacher. All right. Next one.   0:19:39.0 JD: You're one for one, and you have A grade schools, right? So you have A grade avocados, and that's an accountability measure. The second one was you're understanding the relationship between weather, soil, acidity, and the eventual quality of an avocado grown in California.   0:20:00.2 AS: Ladies and gentlemen, is this research, accountability, and improvement? Well, we've already eliminated accountability, so it's got to be either research or improvement. And if I get this one right, then I'm gonna get the third one right naturally. And I would say that sounds to me more like research.   0:20:15.8 JD: Yeah, that's exactly right. Research, right? So 'cause you're experimenting to see how the manipulation of variables, in this case weather, like the pH level of soil, acidity, impact the quality of an avocado. So you're basically a researcher trying to figure out what's the best combination of those things that gives you the best avocado. But this experimenting is gonna take probably years as you adjust those variables, right? And the last...   0:20:46.5 AS: Yeah, avocados don't grow so fast.   0:20:50.2 JD: They don't grow so fast, yeah. And then the third situation was you wanna improve the quality of avocados on sale across all stores in Columbus. There's only one left, so it's got to be...   0:21:03.5 AS: Well you used the word improve in it, so I think it's improvement orientation, huh?   0:21:06.8 JD: There you go. That's a giveaway. So aim is the quality of the avocado. So the basic theory of change is something like maybe improving the transport time from the field to the store. So there you can see that it's not like one is bad in terms of a measurement orientation and one is good. It's just... Is it being applied to the appropriate situation?   0:21:35.6 JD: There are certainly appropriate situations for accountability, appropriate situations for research and appropriate situations for improvement. So basically to sort of wrap this up, I mean, I thought it was really important because last time we talked, when you set the challenge and then it's gonna be something like a vision far out into the future, maybe two or three years, it's gonna be really important that that challenge is framed correctly because you're gonna be working on this thing for a long time. So with the model, we now have a way to bridge the gap between conditions and future aspirations. There's always gonna be a gap. We now have this model that gives us the scientific way of thinking and working to close the gap. And then we've said it's the responsibility of upper management to set this overall challenge as a key priority.   0:22:37.5 JD: And then we've said it's really important to understand the difference between these three types of performance measurement because conflation of the three can derail our improvement efforts. So the key takeaway here is you wanna frame this challenge or this far out direction that we're heading in as an organization as an improvement goal. And that's gonna orient the work. It's gonna orient the types of questions that you're asking. It's gonna orient the people, and the outcomes and processes that they're tracking. It's gonna orient your measurement system. You're gonna have to come up with frequent process and outcome measures that let you know how you're doing along the way. And the purpose of all of this is to learn our way to a better system. That's the purpose of measurement for improvement.   0:23:34.1 AS: That's great. A great summary. I wanna ask a question. Recently I've been teaching my corporate strategy course and I've been talking about the teachings of Richard Rumelt, who wrote the book called Good Strategy Bad Strategy, which is such a great book on strategy. But one of the things he complains about when he says his bad strategy is just setting an aspirational goal. Because as we learned from Dr. Deming, by what method? Like now, so there's... You've got to have a vision. You've got to have an aspiration of where you're going. But what he really focuses on... I think we're gonna talk about this in next sections. He really focuses on, have we really identified what the problem is?   0:24:21.7 AS: Like, what is the constraint? What is the thing that is holding us back from getting there? And what ends up happening is, when you clearly articulate the problem, what happens is it focuses... It becomes hard. Because to solve that problem, you need new resources. You need to get rid of old stuff. You've got to make substantial changes. And so it's much more comfortable for people to set strategies that are based upon wonderful visions. But never really deal with the problem. And then the workers in the companies, an employee in a company just looks up and goes, what did management just do for that long weekend? They did a weekend getaway to do their corporate strategy. And then they just came up with a fluffy vision of whatever with no help for us of how do we deal with the hardest problem is that we can't beat our competitor with the technology that we have. And we're never gonna get to that goal if we can't solve that problem.   0:25:28.7 JD: Yeah. And that's really the essence of the steps two, three, and four. I mean, the very next thing that we're gonna talk about is one, what's the current situation on the ground? Now we have this aspiration, but what's actually happening? For whatever data we have, whatever time period, 10 years, five years, whatever it is, we're gonna look at that data in a way that gives us a very firm understanding. And then remember, there's that crack in the model. That's the threshold of knowledge. So right up front, we're acknowledging.   0:25:58.0 AS: We don't know how to get over this. We don't know what's blocking us. We don't know...   0:26:03.3 JD: Yeah. We may have some ideas, but... Some initial ideas, but we do not know how to solve this chronic absenteeism problem. And that's where the experimentation comes in.   0:26:11.4 AS: So let me ask you one last question before we go. This is completely selfish, but also for the listeners and viewers out there, that is, I always ask my students this question in corporate strategy, should corporate strategy be kind of secretive in the sense that you're trying to build a competitive advantage and therefore some of the best battle attacks in war were kept secret. Stonewall Jackson was famous in his Shenandoah Valley campaign for not letting anybody know what he was gonna do the next morning. And then... Or should it be public? Like your number of 50 to five is pretty scary. And I'm just curious, what are your thoughts on that?   0:27:00.4 JD: Well, if you're in war, I think you should keep it secret. But pretty much anywhere else, I think public. Now that'd be my opinion. Now I'm in a school setting. I acknowledge that. But I've also seen...   0:27:11.4 AS: This is my quiz for you, by the way.   0:27:14.7 JD: What's that?   0:27:15.6 AS: This is my quiz for you.   0:27:15.7 JD: Your quiz for me. Yeah. Well, I have seen... And I've had the same thought. I think it was one of the founders of Toyota, or maybe someone that was an early CEO basically said, well, you give away your playbook basically. And he's like, well, just because someone has my playbook does not mean they can do it. And so education is a different orientation. There's not corporate secrets. And we're very open, we often share our practices. But I've often been on the...   0:27:45.2 AS: If you could get from 50 to five, you would want the world to know.   0:27:48.8 JD: I would want the world to know. I want everybody to do it. But I've been on the other side of this where I've gone to school and I've reached out to people get a manual or an artifact or something that they have that they do really well at their school system. And I look at it and I'm like, I don't know what to do with this. Right? So it's something altogether different to have the thing and then be able to do it. In our case, it's gonna benefit kids. We're gonna share it as far and wide as possible. So yeah, I think the setting matters. If I'm... The Union Army fighting Stonewall Jackson, then I'm gonna keep my secrets secret, my battle plan secret. But for most of the things I'm gonna share.   0:28:32.9 AS: Nathaniel Banks taking on Jackson. It was a rough series of battles for him. So I'll close out with my thoughts on this, which is that, yeah, I think ultimately once you've decided on what's your goal, where you wanna be, then I think you've got to make it public. And the reason why is because you need your employees to deliver that. It can't be... Everybody needs to be bought in. But even more importantly from a marketing and a relationship with customers, suppliers and others, they need to feel that vision. And they need to feel that mission. I think another great book is Start With Why. And that is why are we doing this? And I just read a great book on corporate strategy that is called Corporate Strategy Demystified.   0:29:25.5 AS: But it's just great because it was written in 2006. So he's talking about the battle between Apple and Compaq and Dell and all of these and IBM. And he doesn't know the outcome that Apple ends up being this multi-trillion dollar business. And basically his last sentence that I read in the last chapter is, it's over for Apple. They just can't compete in this space. And what he missed... This is what I'm teaching tonight, what he missed was the trusting connection that the customers had to Apple, to Apple's mission. Somehow Steve Jobs was able to create that mission and get it out to the world. And in the valley of death, when they were going through the worst time and it didn't seem like they were ever going to be able to do anything, it was customers that stuck with them because they believed in the mission of what they communicated. And it is that total, let's say intangible, that is very hard to measure and very hard to understand. But this is what I got when I was reading that book from 3:00 AM 'till 4:00 AM This morning, John.   0:30:44.4 JD: Whoever that author is was a small miss, a small miss.   0:30:48.8 AS: Yeah. And he's a brilliant guy. And so it's also a great point that just stick with your vision 'cause people's commitment to Apple and all that is so so strong. So being public about what you're doing and sharing it is critical because the last thing, as you said, even if somebody else has your playbook, I like to tell people that if somebody was working at General Motors and they had all the list of all the parts for Cadillac or whatever it is that they're building, and then they went to Toyota and said, build this, just because you have a list of parts and you have that operating system doesn't mean that they can build it because the product was actually designed for the operating system. And it's that entanglement in the actual process of production that makes that corporate strategy almost impossible to duplicate, even if you have the playbook.   0:31:41.8 JD: Yep. Yeah, that's it right there, I think. That's it.   0:31:46.5 AS: So fantastic. Well, on behalf of everyone at The Deming Institute, I wanna thank you again for this discussion. And for listeners, remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. You can find John's book, Win-Win: W. Edwards Deming, The System of Profound Knowledge and the Science of Improving Schools on amazon.com. This is your host, Andrew Stotz. And I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming. "People are entitled to joy in work" and in school.  

- Episode Antibes: Deep dive into AI, technology trends, entertainment and news hosted by Mananigas and Kolesky. Engage in exciting discussions on various topics including horror movies, comic books, iPad gaming and more on their Discord channel [here](https://discord.gg/T38WpgkHGQ).- Podcast trends: Analysis of the increase in podcast listenership based on the frequency of releases.- AI & Tech: Exploration of 'interruptible queries' in 'Codex Judge-y PT', their application in ad-hoc research, and potential usage in interactive reading.- IT News: Shared experiences and critiques on glitches experienced during Windows OS updates.- Future Reading: Discussion on potential advancements in e-readers, with a focus on AI integrations via platforms like Judge-y PT.- Gaming Review: Detailed review and comparison of Resident Evil game performance on iPad M2 and Xbox.- Comic Corners: Appreciation of comic books "Nice House by the Lake" and "Something Is Killing The Children"; in-depth discussion on Kindle's zoom feature for reading comics.- Literary Hour: Intricate exploration of the Russian classic, "Brothers Karamazov."- Pop Culture: Examination of the transition from old to new TV series, with "Breaking Bad" as the turning point in quality.- Horror House: Deep dive into the horror film genre, including titles like 'Hell House', 'The Blair Witch Project', and 'A Quiet Place.'- Futuristic Film: Examination of sensory deprivation focused movies- 'Bird Box' (sight), 'A Quiet Place' (sound), with prediction on upcoming themes in the genre.- Tech Trends: Detailed study on Tesla's self-driving strategy including design, regulations, data acquisition, and testing restrictions.- What's Next: Look into the "Master of The Air" TV series, and recommended watches like "Band of Brothers" and "The Pacific."- Book Club: Next episode's reading suggestion - "Good Strategy/Bad Strategy."

If you need to create an HR or People strategy but are feeling completely stuck, this episode of HR Coffee Time is here to help. Host Fay Wallis, a career and leadership coach for HR and People professionals, shares practical advice on how to feel more confident about creating the strategy, where to start and resources to help spark your ideas.Key Points from This Episode[00:00] Episode introduction[00:32] There is a podcast playlist of strategy episodes for you[02:46] You already are strategic (even if you think you aren't)[04:31] Insight from the book, ‘Good Strategy/Bad Strategy'[05:29] The importance of aligning HR strategy with the overarching organisational strategy[07:28] Resources from The Essential HR Planner to help[13:41] Recap and final thoughts Useful LinksConnect with Fay on LinkedInFay's website: Bright Sky Career Coaching Other Relevant HR Coffee Time EpisodesOperate Strategically or Create a Powerful HR/People Strategy PlaylistBook Recommendations from the EpisodeThe Strategy Book: How to think and act strategically to deliver outstanding results, by Max MckeownGood Strategy, Bad Strategy: The difference and why it matters, by Richard RumeltLooking For the Transcript?You can find the transcript on this page of the Bright Sky Career Coaching website.Rate and Review the PodcastIf you found this episode of HR Coffee Time helpful, please rate and review it on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. This video shows you how to rate and review the podcast on Apple Podcasts (because it isn't very intuitive). If you're kind enough to leave a review, let Fay know so she can say thank you. You can always reach her at: fay@brightskycareercoaching.co.uk. Enjoyed This Episode? Don't Miss the Next One!Be notified each time a new episode of HR Coffee Time is released and get access to other free career tips, tools and resources by signing up to receive the free weekly HR Coffee Time email.Mentioned in this episode:3R Strategy's Free Resources & Fay's HR Planning DayBecome a member of 3R Strategy's free Pay & Reward Academy, or access their free resources by visiting: bit.ly/3Racademy Learn more about Fay's HR Planning Day and get your ticket here: https://brightskycareercoaching.co.uk/hr-planning-day/

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: EA Netherlands' Annual Strategy for 2024, published by James Herbert on June 5, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Summary In Q4 last year we spent time strategising for 2024. We already shared the resulting strategy with our amazing organisers at our Christmas EA Organiser Meetup but we thought it'd be valuable to share it here as well. We think the EA community in the Netherlands can be much bigger, we want to ensure we have a good reputation, and we want to do something about the lack of opportunities for Dutch EAs to put their values into practice through their work or volunteering. This being the case, our 'guiding policy' is targeted expansion whilst ensuring growth does not compromise our core epistemic values. This will require maintaining a balance between outreach, intellectual rigour, and field building. More concretely, we will: Develop and implement a communications strategy targeting people who we think would like to be a part of the community, but don't yet know of its existence (thus leading to growth, a stronger reputation, and more new projects) Develop and implement a global catastrophic risk field-building initiative (thus contributing to our level of intellectual rigour and providing more career opportunities) Use EAGxUtrecht to encourage and support attendees in starting new projects or initiatives (thus leading to more career opportunities) Increase our use of volunteers to help with all of the above Meanwhile, we will maintain our existing programmes, e.g., our national EA crash course, our support for organisers around the country, and our co-working office. Introduction Previously, we shared our theory of change. In this post, we're sharing the annual strategy we've been working with in 2024. Together, these are our main strategic documents. They are supplemented by a set of five-year aspirational goals[1] and quarterly OKRs. We developed this strategy in Q4 of 2023 after conducting 20 or so 1-1 calls with key stakeholders. We then held a feedback session using the near-final draft with 30+ key organisers at our Christmas get-together (we sure know how to have a good time!). We developed it using advice from Rumelt's book, Good Strategy Bad Strategy. It consists of a diagnosis, a guiding policy, and a set of coherent actions. It's important to note that our strategy for 2024 is not an exhaustive description of what we will work on. Instead, it describes what we will focus on improving whilst continuing to run our established programmes. For example, we will continue as usual with our national intro programme, our support for organisers around the country, and our co-working office. Diagnosis We begin by defining and explaining the challenges we face and making a 'diagnosis'. This simplified model of reality allows us to make sense of the situation and engage in further problem-solving. The first challenge is the size of our community. With an estimated ~700 effective altruists in the Netherlands, we're smaller than many student associations. This limits our influence and obstructs our capacity to create substantial positive change: namely, helping more people use evidence and careful reasoning when trying to help others. Suppose we want to end factory farming or spend a not-insignificant proportion of society's resources on ensuring the longterm future goes well. In that case, more people need to get involved and start new initiatives. EAN has a good track record here. Many new initiatives from the Netherlands have an origin story closely tied to our community, e.g. Doneer Effectief, several AI Safety Initiatives, and the Tien Procent Club. If we have a bigger community then more of this can happen. The second challenge is the proliferation of negative narratives surrounding effective altruism, primarily in English-speaking regions, and t...

Ikram Mohideen is the Chief Strategy Officer at Shift Integrated, an independent agency in Sri Lanka. In this episode we discuss: Why quant doesn't tell you everything The importance of testing and radical thinking Focus on effectiveness Marketing and advertising in a difficult economic climate Lessons from judging awards Does positioning exist Recommendations LondonSEOXL ⁠ - use code Andi20 to get 20% off a ticket Good Strategy / Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt Social Class in the 21st Century by Mike Savage The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable Paperback by Nassim Nicholas Taleb Other links James Hayhurst on agency client relationships JP Castlin on why language matters in marketing Ikram Mohideen Ikram currently leads strategy at Shift Integrated – an independent, fully-fledged creative agency based in Colombo, Sri Lanka. At Shift he is the custodian of the “effectiveness culture”, focused on creating a culture that combines rigour, creativity, and data, to help make work that really works. He previously worked at Nielsen in consumer insights, specializing in brand equity research, and afterwards at Leo Burnett, helping to grow brands in CPG, telco, banking, finance, and real estate. Working together with clients and research partners, he is currently engaged in establishing a brand and advertising strategy practice built upon marketing science. Find Ikram on LinkedIn Strategy Sessions Host - Andi Jarvis If you have any questions or want to talk about anything that was discussed in the show, the best place to get me is on LinkedIn or Instagram. Make sure you subscribe to get the podcast directly or sign up for it here to have it emailed when it's released. If you enjoyed the show, please give it a 5* rating. Find the full audio transcription here: https://eximomarketingstrategy.com/focus-on-effectiveness-with-ikram-mohideen-strategy-sessions-podcast/

Dr. Deming developed his philosophy over time and in conversations with others, not in isolation. As learners, we tend to forget that context, but it's important to remember because no one implements Deming in isolation, either. In this conversation, Bill Bellows and host Andrew Stotz discuss how there's no such thing as a purely Deming organization and why that's good. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.2 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussions with Bill Bellows, who has spent 30 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities. Today is episode 20, entitled, System of Profound Wisdom. Bill, take it Away.   0:00:31.6 Bill Bellows: But not just for 30 years. I forgot to say I started when I was 12.   0:00:36.6 AS: Yes. [laughter] Yes. And you've got the hair to prove it.   [laughter]   0:00:43.7 BB: All right. Now, actually, I was thinking the proposal and the title, I thought... I mean, System of Profound Wisdom is cool, System of Profound Questions. Either one of those is good. Let's see which title comes out.   0:00:57.6 AS: Yeah. And I think we'll have to also understand that may some listeners that may not even know what System of Profound Knowledge means, they've been listening. They do. But if today's their first episode, we also gotta break that down, just briefly.   0:01:10.9 BB: Yeah. Okay, let's do that. All right. Well, let me give an opening a quote from Dr. Deming from chapter three, and then we can explain this SoPK, System of Profound Knowledge, thing. But in chapter three of Dr. Deming's last book, The New Economics, the last edition, edition three, came out in 2018. And chapter three, Dr. Deming says, "We saw in the last chapter, we are living under the tyranny of the prevailing style of management. Most people imagine that this style has always existed. It is a fixture. Actually, it is a modern invention a trap that has led us into decline. Transformation is required. Education and government, along with industry, are also in need of transformation. The System of Profound Knowledge to be introduced in the next chapter is a theory for transformation." So you wanna...   0:02:15.4 AS: That's good.   0:02:16.7 BB: So let's say something. Let's just say something about SoPK. How would you explain that?   0:02:23.1 AS: Yeah. Well, actually, I wanna talk very briefly about what you just said, because it's just...   0:02:27.1 BB: Oh, sure.   0:02:29.6 AS: At one point, I thought, "It's a system of knowledge." But he just said it was a system of transformation.   0:02:38.7 BB: It's a theory for transformation.   0:02:40.1 AS: A theory for transformation. Okay, got it. I see. And one of the things that I... I look at Toyota so much just 'cause it's so fascinating and how they've survived all these years, the continuity in the business, the continuity and the profitability of the business, the continued march to become the number one auto producer in the world, and having faced all the ups and downs and survived. And I just think that what they have is a learning organization. No matter what the challenge is, they're trying to apply learning tools, like System of Profound Knowledge, like PDSA, to try to figure out how to solve this problem. And I think that many companies, including at times my companies, [chuckle] we sometimes will scramble and we'll lose knowledge and we won't gain knowledge. And so the System of Profound Knowledge, to me, is all about the idea of how do we build a base of knowledge in our business and then build upon that base of knowledge rather than destroy it when the new management comes in or when a new management idea comes in.   0:04:00.7 AS: And that's something I've just been thinking about a lot. Because I do know a company that I've been doing some work with, and they basically threw away a huge amount of work that they did on System of Profound Knowledge and stuff to go with the prevailing system of management, is like going back. And now, they just produced a loss in the first quarter, and I just think, "Interesting. Interesting."   0:04:27.6 BB: Well, a couple things come to mind based on what you said. One is I would propose that Toyota, I'm in agreement of "Toyota's a learning organization." And that'll come up later. I've got some other thoughts on learning organizations. And we know that they were influenced by Dr. Deming. To what degree, I'm not sure of. Shoichiro Toyoda, who is one of the sons of the founder of the Toyota Motor Car Company, was honored with a Deming prize in 1990. And I believe it came from JUSE, as opposed to the American Society for Quality. One or the other. He was honored with a Deming Prize.   0:05:32.0 AS: Yep.   0:05:33.5 BB: Again, I don't know if it's Deming Prize or Deming Medal. But I know he was honored. What's most important, the point I wanna make is, upon receiving it he said, "There is not a day that goes by that I don't think about the impact of Dr. Deming on Toyota." But, if I was to look at the Toyota Production System website, Toyota's Toyota Production System website, which I've done numerous times, I'd be hard-pressed to find anything on that page that I could say, "You see this word, Andrew? You see this sentence, Andrew? You see this sentiment? That's Deming." Not at all. Not at all. It's Taiichi Ohno. It's Shigeo Shingo. I'm not saying it's not good, but all those ideas predate Deming going to Japan in 1950. Taiichi Ohno joined Toyota right out of college as an industrial engineer in 1933, I believe. The Japanese Army, I mentioned in a previous episode, in 1942, wanted him to move from Toyota's loom works for making cloth to their automobile works for making Jeeps. This comes from a book that I would highly recommend. Last time we were talking about books. I wanted to read a book, I don't know, maybe 10 years ago. I wanted to read a book about Toyota, but not one written by someone at MIT or university. I didn't wanna read a book written by an academic. I've done that.   0:07:15.1 BB: I wanted to read a book by somebody inside Toyota, get that perspective, that viewpoint. And the book, Against All Odds, the... Wait I'll get the complete title. Against All Odds: The Story of the Toyota Motor Corporation and the Family That Changed it. The first author, Yukiyasu Togo, T-O-G-O, and William Wartman. I have a friend who worked there. Worked... Let me back up. [chuckle] Togo, Mr. Togo, born and raised in Japan, worked for Toyota in Japan, came to the States in the '60s and opened the doors to Toyota Motors, USA. So, he was the first person running that operation in Los Angeles. And it was here for years. I think it's now in Texas. My late friend, Bill Cummings, worked there in marketing. And my friend, Bill, was part of the team that was working on a proposal for a Lexus. And he has amazing stories of Togo. He said, "Any executive... " And I don't know how high that... What range, from factory manager, VPs. But he said the executives there had their use, free use, they had a company car. And he said Togo drove a Celica. Not a Celica. He drove a... What's their base model? Not a...   0:08:56.2 AS: A Corolla?   0:08:57.7 BB: Corolla. Yes, yes, yes. Thank you. He drove a Corolla. He didn't drive... And I said, "Why did he drive a Corolla?" Because it was their biggest selling car, and he wanted to know what most people were experiencing. He could have been driving the highest level cars they had at the time. Again, this is before a Lexus. And so in this book, it talks about the history of Toyota, Taiichi Ohno coming in, Shigeo Shingo's contributions, and the influence of Dr. Deming. And there's a really fascinating account how in 1950, a young manager, Shoichiro Toyoda, was confronted with a challenge that they couldn't repair the cars as fast as they could sell them. This is post-war Japan. They found a car with phenomenal market success. Prior to that, they were trying to sell taxicabs, 'cause people could not... I mean, buying a car as a family was not an option. But by 1950, it was beginning to be the case. And the challenge that Shoichiro Toyoda faced was improving the quality, 'cause they couldn't fix them as fast as they could sell them. And yet, so I have no doubt that that young manager, who would go on to become the chairman, whatever the titles are, no doubt he was influenced by Dr. Deming. But I don't know what that means.   0:10:23.4 BB: That does not... The Toyota Production System is not Deming. And that's as evidenced by this talk about eliminating waste. And those are not Deming concepts. But I believe, back to your point, that his work helped create a foundation for learning. But I would also propose, Andrew, that everything I've read and studied quite a bit about the Toyota Production System, Lean, The Machine That Changed The World, nothing in there explains reliability. To me, reliability is how parts come together, work together. 'Cause as we've talked, a bunch of parts that meet print and meet print all over the place could have different levels of reliability, because meeting requirements, as we've talked in earlier episodes, ain't all it's cracked up to be. So I firmly believe... And I also mentioned to you, I sat for 14 hours flying home from Japan with a young engineer who worked for Toyota, and they do manage variation as Dr. Taguchi proposed. That is not revealed. But there's definitely something going on. But I would also say that I think the trouble they ran into was trying to be the number one car maker, and now they're back to the model of, "If we are good at what we do, then that will follow."   0:11:56.8 BB: And I'm gonna talk later about Tom Johnson's book, just to reinforce that, 'cause Tom, a former professor of management at Portland State University, has visited Toyota plants numerous times back before people found out how popular it was. But what I want to get into is... What we've been talking about the last couple episodes is Dr. Deming uses this term, transformation. And as I shared an article last time by John Kotter, the classic leadership professor, former, he's retired, at the University... Oh, sorry, Harvard Business School. And what he's talking about for transformation is, I don't think, [chuckle] maybe a little bit of crossover with what Dr. Deming is talking about. What we talked about last time is, Deming's transformation is a personal thing that we hear the world differently, see the world differently. We ask different questions. And that's not what Kotter is talking about. And it's not to dismiss all that what Kotter is talking about, but just because we're talking about transformation doesn't mean we mean the same thing.   0:13:10.6 BB: And likewise, we can talk about a Deming organization and a non-Deming organization. What teamwork means in both is different. In a Deming organization, we understand performance is caused by the system, not the workers taken individually. And as a result of that, we're not going to see performance appraisals, which are measures of individuals. Whereas in a non-Deming organization, we're going to see performance appraisals, KPIs flow down to individuals. [chuckle] The other thing I had in my notes is, are there really two types of organizations? No, that's just a model. [chuckle] So, really, it's a continuum of organizations. And going back to George Box, all models are wrong, some are useful. But we talked earlier, you mentioned the learning organization. Well, I'm sure, Andrew, that we have both worked in non-Deming organizations, and we have seen, and we have seen people as learners in a non-Deming organization, but what are they learning? [chuckle] It could be learning to tell the boss what they want to hear. They could be learning to hide information that could cause pain. [chuckle] Those organizations are filled with learners, but it's about learning that makes things worse. It's like digging the pit deeper. What Deming is talking about is learning that improves how the organization operates, and as a result, improves profit. In a non-Deming organization, that learning is actually destroying profit.   0:14:51.8 BB: All right. And early, spoke... Russ, Russ and Dr. Deming spoke for about three hours in 1992. It got condensed down to a volume 21 of The Deming Library, for which our viewers, if you're a subscriber to DemingNEXT, you can watch it in its entirety. All the Deming videos produced by Clare Crawford-Mason are in that. You can see excerpts of volume 21, which is... Believe is theory of a system of education, and it's Russ Ackoff and Dr. Deming for a half hour. So you can find excerpts of that on The Deming Institute's YouTube channel.   0:15:37.0 BB: And what I wanted to bring up is in there, Russ explains to Dr. Deming the DIKUW model that we've spoken about in previous episodes, where D is data. That's raw numbers, Russ would say. I is information. When we turn those raw numbers into distances and times and weights, Russ would say that information is what the newspaper writer writes, who did what to whom. Knowledge, the K, could be someone's explanation as to how these things happened. U, understanding. Understanding is when you step back and look at the container. Russ would say that knowledge, knowledge is what you're using in developing to take apart a car or to take apart a washing machine and see how all these things work together. But understanding is needed to explain why the driver sits on the left versus the right, why the car is designed for a family of four, why the washing machine is designed for a factor of four. That's not inside it. That's the understanding looking outward piece that Russ would also refer to as synthesis. And then the W, that's the wisdom piece. What do I do with all this stuff? And what Russ is talking about is part of wisdom is doing the right things right. So, I wanted to touch upon in this episode is why did Dr. Deming refer to his system as the System of Profound Knowledge? Why not the System of Profound Understanding? Why not the System of Profound Wisdom? And I think, had he lived longer, maybe he would have expanded. Maybe he would have had...   0:17:28.4 BB: And I think that's the case. I think it's... 'Cause I just think... And this is what's so interesting, is, if you look at Dr. Deming's work in isolation and not go off and look at other's work, such as Tom Johnson or Russ, you can start asking questions like this.   0:17:45.7 AS: One thing I was going to interject is that I took my first Deming seminar in 1989, I believe, or 1990. And then I took my second one with Dr. Deming in 1992. And then soon after that, I moved to Thailand and kind of went into a different life, teaching finance and then working in the stock market. And then we set up our factory here for coffee business. But it wasn't until another 10 years, maybe 15 years, that I reignited my flame for what Dr. Deming was doing. And that's when I wrote my book about Transform Your Business with Dr. Deming's 14 Points. And what I, so, I was revisiting the material that had impacted me so much. And I found this new topic called System of Profound Knowledge. I never heard of that. And I realized that, it really fully fledged came out in 1993, The New Economics, which I didn't get. I only had Out of the Crisis.   0:18:49.9 BB: '93.   0:18:49.9 AS: Yeah. And so that just was fascinating to go back to what was already, the oldest teacher I ever had in my life at '92, leave it, come back 10, 15 years later and find out, wait a minute, he added on even more in his final book.   0:19:10.4 BB: Well, Joyce Orsini, who was recruited by Fordham University at the encouragement of Dr. Deming, or the suggestion of Dr. Deming to lead their Deming Scholars MBA program in 1990. Professor Marta Mooney, professor of accounting, who I had the great fortune of meeting several times, was very inspired by Dr. Deming's work. And was able to get his permission to have an MBA program in his name called the Deming Scholars MBA program. And when she asked him for a recommendation, "Who should lead this program?" It was Joyce Orsini, who at the time I think was a vice president at a bank in New York. I'm not sure, possibly in human resources, but I know she was in New York as a vice president.   0:20:10.0 BB: And I believe she had finished her PhD under Dr. Deming at NYU by that time. And the reason I bring up Joyce's name, I met her after Dr. Deming had died. Nancy Mann, who is running a company called Quality Enhancement Seminars with, a, at the beginning one product, Dr. Deming's 4-Day seminar, when Dr. Deming died, and I had mentioned, I was at his last seminar in December '93, she continued offering 4-day seminars. And I met her later that year when she was paired with Ron Moen and they were together presenting it, and others were paired presenting it. And at one point, as I got to know Joyce, she said, "His last five years were borrowed time." I said, "What do you mean?" She said, "He started working on the book in 19'" evidently the '87, '88 timeframe, he started to articulate these words, Profound Knowledge.   0:21:11.0 BB: And I know he had, on a regular basis, he had dinner engagements with friends including Claire Crawford-Mason and her husband. And Claire has some amazing stories of Deming coming by with these ideas. And she said, once she said, "What is this?" And he is, she took out a napkin, a discretely, wrote down the, "an understanding of the difference between intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation. Difference between understanding special causes versus common causes." And she just wrote all this stuff down, typed it up. When he showed up the next week, she greeted him at the door and said, and she said, he said, This is Claire. And Claire said, he said, "What's that?" He says, "Well, I took notes last week."   0:21:54.2 BB: And he says, "I can do better." [chuckle] And so week by week by week. And as he interacted with the people around him, he whittled it down. And I'm guessing it put it into some, there's a technique for grouping things, you, where on post-it notes and you come up with four categories and these things all go over here. There's one of the elements of that, one of the 16 had to, or 18 or so, had to do with Dr. Taguchi's loss function. So that could have gone into the, maybe the variation piece, maybe the systems piece. But Joyce said, basically he was frustrated that the 14 Points were essentially kind of a cookbook where you saw things like, "cease dependence on inspection" interpreted as "get rid of the inspectors." And so he knew and I'd say, guided by his own production of a system mindset, he knew that what he was articulating and the feedback were inconsistent.   0:23:01.9 BB: And I've gotta keep trying. And she said, "His last five years on borrowed time as he was dying of cancer, was just trying to get this message out." So I first got exposed to it 19, spring of '90 when I saw him speaking in Connecticut. And I was all about Taguchi expecting him to, I didn't know what to expect, but I knew what I was seeing and hearing from Dr. Taguchi when I heard Dr. Deming talk about Red Beads. I don't know anything about that, common cause and special cause, I didn't know anything about that. And so for me, it was just a bunch of stuff, and I just tucked it away. But when the book came out in '93, then it really made sense. But I just had to see a lot of the prevailing style of management in the role I had as an improvement specialist, become, [chuckle] a firefighter or a fireman helping people out.   0:24:01.5 AS: I noticed as I've gotten older that, I do start to connect the pieces together of various disciplines and various bits of knowledge to realize, so for instance, in my case, I'm teaching a corporate strategy course right now at the university. Tonight's, in fact, the last night of this particular intake. And my area of expertise is in finance, but now I see the connection between strategy and finance, and how a good strategy is going to be reflected in superior financial performance relative to peers. And of course, I know how to measure that very well. So I can synthesize more and more different areas of things that I know things about, that I just couldn't do when I was younger. So I can see, and he was always learning, obviously. So I can see how he, and also I can also see the idea of, I need bigger principles. I need bigger as you said, theory for transformation. I need, I need to be able to put this into a framework that brings all that together. And I'm still feeling frustrated about some of that, where I'm at with some of that, because I'm kind of halfway in my progress on that. But I definitely can see the idea of that coming later in life as I approach the big 6-0.   0:25:37.3 BB: The big 6-0, [chuckle] Well, but a big part, I mean, based on what you're talking about, it ended up... Previously we spoke about Richard Rumelt's work, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, and I mentioned that I use a lecture by Richard Rumelt, I think it was 2011 or so. It was right after his book, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy came out. He spoke at the London School of Economics, and our listeners can find it if you just did a Google search for Richard Rumelt, that's R-U-M... One M. E-L-T. Good Strategy/Bad Strategy. LSE, London School of Economics. Brilliant, brilliant lecture. And I've seen it numerous times for one of my university courses. And he is like Deming, he doesn't suffer fools. And, it finally dawned on me, Deming organizations, if we can use this simple Deming versus non-Deming or Red Pen versus Blue Pen, and as, George Box would say, all models are wrong, some are useful. If we can use that model, I think it's easy to see that what frustrates Rumelt is you've got all these non-Deming companies coming up with strategies without a method.   0:27:00.0 BB: What Rumelt also talks about is not only do you need a method, but you have to be honest on what's in the way of us achieving this? Again, Dr. Deming would say, if you didn't need a method, why don't you're already achieving the results? And so it just dawned on me thinking the reason he's so frustrated, and I think that's one word you can use to describe him, but if he is talking to senior staff lacking this, an understanding of Deming's work, then he is getting a lot of bad strategies. And organizations that would understand what Dr. Deming's talking about, would greatly benefit from Rumelt's work. And they would be one, they'd have the benefit of having an organization that is beginning or is understanding what a transformation guided by Dr. Deming's work is about. And then you could look up and you're naturally inclined to have good or better strategy than worser strategies.   0:28:02.2 BB: And then you have the benefit of, profit's not the reason, profit is the result of all that. And, but next thing I wanna point out is, and I think we talked about it last time, but I just wanted to make sure it was up here, is I've come across recently and I'm not sure talking with who, but there's this what's in vogue today? Data-driven decisions. And again, whenever I hear the word data, I think backed in Ackoff's DIKUW model, I think data-driven. Well, first Dr. Deming would say, the most important numbers are unknown and unknowable. So if you're doing things on a data-driven way, then you're missing the rest of Dr. Deming's theory of management. But why not knowledge-driven decisions, why not understanding-driven decisions And beyond that, why not, right? How long... [laughter] I guess we can... Part of the reason we're doing these Andrew is that we'd like to believe we're helping people move in the direction from data-driven decisions to wisdom-driven decisions, right?   0:29:13.1 AS: Yeah. In fact, you even had the gall to name this episode the System of Profound Wisdom.   0:29:24.0 BB: And that's the title.   0:29:24.9 AS: There it is.   0:29:28.9 BB: But in terms of, I'll give you a fun story from Rocketdyne years ago, and I was talking with a manager in the quality organization and he says, "you know what the problem is, you know what the problem is?" I said, "what?" He says, "the problem is the executives are not getting the data fast enough." And I said, "what data?" He says "the scrap and rework data, they're just not getting it fast enough." So I said, "no matter how fast they get it, it's already happened."   [laughter]   0:30:00.0 BB: But it was just, and I just couldn't get through to him that, that if we're being reactive and talking about scrap and rework, it's already happened. By the time the... If the executives hear it a second later, it's already happened. It's still old news.   0:30:14.7 AS: And if that executive would've been thinking he would've said, but Bill, I want to be on the cutting edge of history.   0:30:23.1 BB: Yeah, it's like...   0:30:24.6 AS: I don't want information, I don't want old information, really old. I just want it as new as it can be, but still old.   0:30:32.9 BB: Well, it reminds me of an Ackoff quote is, instead of... It's "Change or be changed." Ackoff talked about organizations that instead of them being ready for what happens, they create what's gonna happen, which would be more of a Deming organizational approach. Anyway, we talked about books last time and I thought it'd be neat to share a couple books as one as I've shared the Against All Odds Book about Toyota.   0:31:08.8 AS: Which I'll say is on Amazon, but it's only looks like it's a used book and it's priced at about 70 bucks. So I've just...   0:31:16.2 BB: How much?   0:31:16.8 AS: Got that one down? 70 bucks? Because I think it's, you're buying it from someone who has it as a their own edition or something. I don't know.   0:31:23.8 BB: It's not uncommon. This is a, insider used book thing. It's not uncommon that you'll see books on Amazon for 70, but if you go to ThriftBooks or Abe Books, you can, I have found multi-$100 books elsewhere. I don't know how that happens, but it does. Anyway, another book I wanted to reference in today's episode is Profit Beyond Measure subtitle, Extraordinary Results through Attention to Work and People, published in 2000. You can... I don't know if you can get that new, you definitely get it old or used, written by, H. Thomas Johnson. H is for Howard, he goes by Tom, Tom Johnson. Brilliant, brilliant mind. He visited Rocketdyne a few times.   0:32:17.1 BB: On the inside cover page, Tom wrote, "This book is dedicated to the memory of Dr. W. Edwards Deming, 1900-1993. May the seventh generation after us know a world shaped by his thinking." And in the book, you'll find this quote, and I've used it in a previous episode, but for those who may be hearing it first here and Tom's a deep thinker. He's, and as well as his wife Elaine, they're two very deep thinkers. They've both spoke at Rocketdyne numerous times. But one of my favorite quotes from Tom is, "How the world we perceive works depends on how we think. The world we perceive is the world we bring forth through our thinking." And again, it goes back to, we don't see the world as it is. We see the world as we are. We hear the world as we are. I wrote a blog for The Deming Institute. If our listeners would like to find it, if you just do a search for Deming blog, Bellows and Johnson, you'll find the blog. And the blog is about the book Profit Beyond Measure. And in there, I said, “In keeping with Myron Tribus' observation that what you see depends upon what you thought before you looked, Johnson's background as a cost accountant, guided by seminars and conversations with Dr. Deming, prepared him to see Toyota as a living system,” right? You talk about Toyota.   0:33:53.9 BB: He saw it as a living system, not a value stream of independent parts. And that was, that's me talking. I mean, Tom talked about Toyota's living system. And then I put in there with the Toyota Production System, people talk about value streams. Well, in those value streams, they have a defect, good part, bad part model that the parts are handed off, handed off, handed off. That is ostensibly a value stream of independent parts 'cause the quality model of the Toyota Production System, if you study it anywhere, is not Genichi Taguchi. It's the classic good parts and bad parts. And if we're handing off good parts, they are not interdependent. They are independent. And then I close with, "instead of seeing a focus on the elimination of waste and non-value added efforts, Johnson saw self-organization, interdependence, and diversity, the three, as the three primary principles of his approach, which he called Management By Means." And so what's neat, Andrew, is he, Tom was as a student of Deming's work, attending Dr. Deming seminars, hearing about SoPK, System of Profound Knowledge, and he in parallel developed his own model that he calls Management By Means. But what's neat is if you compare the two, there's three principles. So he says self-organization.   0:35:31.0 BB: Well, that's kind of like psychology and people. So we can self-organize interdependence, the other self-organized, but we're connected with one another. So that's, that's kind of a systems perspective there as well. And the third one, diversity. So when I think of diversity, I think of variation. I can also think in terms of people. So that what I don't see in there explicitly is Theory of Knowledge. But Tom's developing this model in parallel with Dr. Deming's work, probably beginning in the early '80s. And part of what Tom had in mind, I believe, by calling it Management By Means, is juxtaposing it with that other management by, right? You know the other one, Andrew, management by?   0:36:33.8 AS: You mean the bad one or the good one, Management By Objective?   0:36:37.8 BB: Or Management By Results. Or Dr. Deming once said, MBIR, Management by Imposition of Results. But what's neat is, and this is what I cover and with my online courses, Tom is really, it's just such insight. Tom believes that treating the means as the ends in the making. So he's saying that the ends are what happen when we focus on the means, which is like, if you focus on the process, you get the result. But no, MBIR, as we focus on the result, we throw the process out the window. And so when I've asked students in one of my classes is, why does Tom Johnson believe that treating the means as an ends in the making is a much surer route to stable and satisfactory financial performance than to continue as most companies do? You ready, Andrew? To chase targets as if the means do not matter. Does that resonate with you, Andrew?   0:37:44.1 AS: Yes. They're tampering.   0:37:46.8 BB: Yeah. I also want to quote, I met Tom in 1997. I'm not sure if this... Actually, this article is online and I'll try to remember to post a link to it. If I forget, our listeners can contact me on LinkedIn and I'll send you a link to find the paper. This is when I first got exposed to Tom. It just blew me away. I still remember there at a Deming conference in 1997, hearing Tom talk. I thought, wow, this is different. So, Tom's paper that I'm referencing is A Different Perspective on Quality, the subtitle, Bringing Management to Life. Can you imagine? “Bringing Management to Life.” And it was in Washington, DC, the 1997 conference. And then Tom says, this is the opening. And so when Tom and his wife would speak at Rocketdyne or other conferences I organized.   0:38:44.0 BB: Tom read from a lectern. So he needed a box to get up there and he read, whereas Elaine, his wife, is all extemporaneous. Both deeply profound, two different styles. So what Tom wrote here is he says, "despite the impression given by my title, Professor of Quality Management, I do not speak to you as a trained or a certified authority on the subject of quality management. I adopted that title more or less casually after giving a presentation to an audience of Oregon business executives just over six years ago. That presentation described how my thinking had changed in the last five years since I co-authored the 1987 book, Relevance Lost, the Rise and Fall of Management Accounting, and the talk which presaged my 1992 book, Relevance Regained." And this is when he... After he wrote, Relevance Lost, he went on the lecture circuit, he met the likes of Peter Scholtes and Brian Joiner, got pulled into the Deming community.   0:39:45.4 BB: And then he wrote this scathing book called Relevance Regained and the subtitle is... I think our audience will love it, From Top-Down Control to Bottom-Up Empowerment. Then he goes on to say, "in that I told how I had come to believe that management accounting, a subject that I had pursued and practiced for over 30 years." Over 30 years, sounds familiar. Then he says, "could no longer provide useful tools for management. I said in essence that instead of managing by results, instead of driving people with quantitative financial targets, it's time for people in business..." And this is 30 years ago, Andrew. "It's time for people in business to shift their attention to how they organize work and how they relate to each other as human beings. I suggested that if companies organize work and build relationships properly, then the results that accountants keep track of will what? Take care of themselves."   0:40:50.8 AS: It's so true, it's so true.   0:40:54.1 BB: Yeah, it sounds so literally Tom was writing that in 1999, 2000. Well, actually no, that was 1997, that was 1997, but the same sentiment.   0:41:03.4 AS: It just makes me think of the diagram that we see and that Deming had about the flow through a business, it's the same thing as of the flow from activity to result.   0:41:20.6 BB: Yes.   0:41:21.9 AS: And when we focus on the result and work backwards, it's a mess from a long-term perspective, but you can get to the result. It's not to say you can't get to the result, but you're not building a system that can replicate that. But when you start with the beginning of that process of how do we set this up right to get to that result, then you have a repeatable process that can deliver value. In other words, you've invested a large amount in the origination of that process that then can produce for a much longer time. Um, I have to mention that the worst part of this whole time that we talk is when I have to tell you that we're almost out of time 'cause there's so much to talk about. So we do need to wrap it up, but, yeah.   0:42:09.3 BB: All right. I got a couple of closing thoughts from Tom and then we'll pick this up in episode 21.   0:42:21.3 AS: Yep.   0:42:22.9 BB: Let me also say, for those who are really... If you really wanna know... I'd say, before you read The New Economics... I'm sorry, before you read Profit Beyond Measure, one is the article I just referenced, “Bringing Quality to Life” is a good start. I'd also encourage our readers to do a search. I do this routinely. It shouldn't be that hard to find, but look for an article written by Art Kleiner, Art as in Arthur, Kleiner, K-L-E-I-N-E-R. And the article is entitled, Measures... The Measures That Matter. I think it might be What Are The Measures That Matter? And that article brilliantly written by Kleiner who I don't think knows all that much about Deming, but he knows a whole lot about Tom Johnson and Robert Kaplan, who together co-authored "Relevance Lost" and then moved apart. And Tom became more and more Deming and Kaplan became more and more non and finally wrote this article.   0:43:35.6 AS: Is this article coming out in 2002, "What Are The Measures That Matter? A 10-year Debate Between Two Feuding Gurus Shed Some Light on a Vexing Business Question?"   0:43:46.4 BB: That's it.   0:43:47.2 AS: There it is and it's on the...   0:43:47.4 BB: And it is riveting.   0:43:50.8 AS: Okay.   0:43:50.8 BB: Absolutely riveting. Is it put out by...   0:43:54.0 AS: PwC, it looks like and it's under strategy...   0:43:58.5 BB: Pricewaterhouse...   0:43:58.8 AS: Yeah, strategy and business.   0:44:00.2 BB: PricewaterhouseCooper? Yeah.   0:44:01.3 AS: Yeah.   0:44:03.1 BB: And 'cause what's in there is Kleiner explaining that what Tom's talking about might take some time. You can go out tomorrow, Andrew, and slash and burn and cut and show instant results. Now what you're not looking at is what are the consequences? And so... But... And then... But Kleiner I think does a brilliant job of juxtaposing and trying to talk about what makes Kaplan's work, the Balanced Scorecard, so popular. Why is Tom so anti that?   0:44:37.9 BB: And to a degree, it could be for some a leap of faith to go over there, but we'll talk about that later. Let me just close with this and this comes from my blog on The Deming Institute about Profit Beyond Measure and I said, "for those who are willing and able to discern the dramatic differences between the prevailing focus of systems that aim to produce better parts with less waste and reductions to non-value-added efforts," that's my poke at Lean and Six Sigma, "and those systems that capitalize on a systemic connection between parts. Tom's book, Profit Beyond Measure, offers abundant food for thought. The difference also represents a shifting from profit as the sole reason for a business to profit as the result of extraordinary attention to working people, a most fitting subtitle to this book."   0:45:35.9 AS: Well, Bill, on behalf of everyone at The Deming Institute, I want to thank you again for the discussion and for listeners, remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. If you wanna keep in touch with Bill, just find him on LinkedIn. This is your host, Andrew Stotz, and I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming, "People are entitled to Joy in work" and I hope you are enjoying your work.    

Today, we'll talk about strategy - what good (and bad) strategy looks like for startups, and how most early-stage companies lack any strategy at all. Using a framework from Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, we'll explore the three core elements: diagnosis, guiding policy, and coherent action. We'll examine strategies from a stand-up comedian and GoPro as examples, before applying the framework to craft a strategy for launching a successful children's book.TackleboxIdea to Startup NewsletterThe Skeptical Startup EpisodeGood Strategy / Bad StrategyGet On Your Knees (comedy special)Go the F*** to Sleep00:29 The Skeptical Startup1:58 Strategies vs Goals3:58 The Comedian Story8:50 Smooth Jazz9:30 Bad Strategy11:38 Fluff12:12 Failure to Face the Challenge13:19 Mistaking Goals for Strategy14:50 GoPro17:16 The Kernel of a Successful Children's Book19:56 Guiding Policy20:50 Coherent Action21:24 The End + You 

Richard Rumelt is a legend in the world of strategy. He's the author of Good Strategy/Bad Strategy and The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists, both of which are often recommended by guests on this podcast. From his early days teaching in Iran at a Harvard-sponsored business school to teaching at Harvard Business School itself to over four decades teaching at UCLA's Anderson School of Management, Richard's impact resonates globally. His strategic insights are sought after by major corporations including Microsoft, Shell, Apple, AT&T, Intel, and Commonwealth Bank and by governmental organizations such as the U.S. Army Special Operations Command. In this episode, we discuss:• The essential components of a good strategy• The importance of coherence in strategy• Common pitfalls that create a bad strategy• How “power” plays into strategy, and common sources of power• The value of knowing history when developing effective strategies• Why a strategy should simply be called an “action agenda”• The need for one decider in an organization—Brought to you by:• CommandBar—AI-powered user assistance for modern products and impatient users• Miro—A collaborative visual platform where your best work comes to life• Vanta—Automate compliance. Simplify security.—Find the full transcript at: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/good-strategy-bad-strategy-richard-rumelt/—Where to find Richard Rumelt:• Email: richard@generalimagination.com• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richard-rumelt-18520828/• Website: https://thecruxbook.com/—Where to find Lenny:• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/—In this episode, we cover:(00:00) Richard's background(04:29) What is a strategy?(06:23) The essential components of a good strategy (the “kernel”)(15:04) An example of good strategy(16:55) Bad strategy(25:17) The importance of focus and power(28:19) Identifying and utilizing power(34:38) Types of power(41:13) Implementing power(48:15) The importance of historical knowledge(55:23) How to write an action agenda(01:02:47) The crux(01:10:40) Challenges to executing a strategy(01:15:44) The need for a decider(01:20:39) Strategy for startups(01:26:04) Richard's “value denials” exercise(01:31:01) Closing thoughts(01:33:57) Lightning round—Referenced:• China's Xi says ‘reunification' with Taiwan is inevitable: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/31/chinas-xi-says-reunification-with-taiwan-is-inevitable.html• The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists: https://www.amazon.com/Crux-How-Leaders-Become-Strategists/dp/1541701240• Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters: https://www.amazon.com/Good-Strategy-Bad-Difference-Matters/dp/0307886239• Fundamental Issues in Strategy: A Research Agenda: https://www.amazon.com/Fundamental-Issues-Strategy-Research-Agenda/dp/0875843433/• Strategy, Structure, and Economic Performance: https://www.amazon.com/Strategy-Structure-Economic-Performance-Richard/dp/0875841090• There's more than the CIA and FBI: The 17 agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community: https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-17-intelligence-agencies-20170112-story.html• Programme for International Student Assessment: https://www.oecd.org/pisa/• Gerstner: Changing Culture at IBM—Lou Gerstner Discusses Changing the Culture at IBM: https://hbswk.hbs.edu/archive/gerstner-changing-culture-at-ibm-lou-gerstner-discusses-changing-the-culture-at-ibm• Marvin Lieberman on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marvin-lieberman-2a6b72/• S&P 500: https://www.spglobal.com/spdji/en/indices/equity/sp-500/#overview• Battle of Tora Bora: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Tora_Bora• Milton Friedman: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_Friedman• The Louvre: https://www.louvre.fr/en• How does SpaceX build its Falcon 9 reusable rocket?: https://www.sciencefocus.com/space/how-does-spacex-build-its-falcon-9-reusable-rocket• Charles Darwin: History's most famous biologist: https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/charles-darwin-most-famous-biologist.html• Donald Rumsfeld: https://www.defense.gov/About/Biographies/Biography/Article/602800/• Bush: The Decider-in-Chief: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bush-the-decider-in-chief/• Woodrow Wilson: https://www.whitehouse.gov/about-the-white-house/presidents/woodrow-wilson/• How the Sinking of Lusitania Changed World War I: https://www.history.com/news/how-the-sinking-of-lusitania-changed-wwi• Nokia: https://www.nokia.com/• The Rise and Fall of Nokia: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=46041• Salesforce: https://www.salesforce.com/• These New Windows Let the Summer Breeze In, But Block the Street Noise: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/these-new-windows-let-the-summer-breeze-in-but-block-the-street-noise-7906121/• Stop it! (Bob Newhart): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvujypVVBAY• The Innovator's Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book That Will Change the Way You Do Business: https://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-Change-Business/dp/0062060244• Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works: https://www.amazon.com/Playing-Win-Strategy-Really-Works/dp/142218739X• Steve Jobs: https://www.amazon.com/Steve-Jobs-Walter-Isaacson/dp/1982176865• Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company: https://www.amazon.com/Only-Paranoid-Survive-Exploit-Challenge/dp/0385483821• Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.: https://www.amazon.com/Titan-Life-John-Rockefeller-Sr/dp/1400077303/• Yellowstone on Paramount+: https://www.paramountnetwork.com/shows/yellowstone• Smart telescopes: https://milehighastro.com/collections/smart-telescopes• Cassandra Clare: https://cassandraclare.com/—Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com.—Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed. Get full access to Lenny's Newsletter at www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe

In the ever-evolving landscape of professional development, I've noticed that the term "strategy" is frequently thrown around, often without a clear understanding of its true meaning. Unfortunately, this misunderstanding often leads to the formulation of ineffective strategies, a topic explored by Richard Rumelt in his book Good Strategy/Bad Strategy. In that ancient conflict, Hannibal faced a Roman army much larger than his own. So, how did he emerge victorious? What crucial lessons can we draw from Hannibal's strategic brilliance? Now, why does this historical tale matter to you and me in the modern professional landscape? In today's short episode, I delve into the intricacies of strategy, shedding light on common misconceptions and providing valuable insights. Strategy is not just a buzzword; it's crucial for individuals and organizations alike. It provides a decision framework, guiding actions, aligning efforts, and paving the way for success. Join me while I break down the lessons using three key elements:

"The Difference and Why It Matters"

David and Andrew discuss the three types of power that leaders have: authority, knowledge, and persuasion. David also explains where the current style of "command and control" management comes from and what a nearly failed family vacation can tell us about power. 0:00:02.7 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I am continuing my discussion with David P. Langford, who has devoted his life to applying Dr. Deming's philosophy to education, and he offers us his practical advice for implementation. The topic today is the Three Power Rangers and Their Sources of Power for Improvement. We are now on item number seven on the list that was given to us by Dr. Deming in the book, The New Economics. It's called, the title of the list is called Role of a Manager of People. This is the new role of a manager of people after transformation. For those of you who have the third edition, this is on page 86, and for those with the second edition, it is on page 125. 0:00:56.7 AS: So now let's get into number seven. So we're talking about the manager after transformation. He has three sources of power. Number one, authority of office. Number two, knowledge. Number three, personality and persuasive power or tact. A successful manager of people develops number two and three, that is knowledge and personality. He does not rely on number one, which is the authority of office. He has, nevertheless, obligation to use number one, as this source of power enables him to change the process - that's the equipment, materials and methods to bring improvement, such as to reduce variation in output. Dr. Robert Klekamp says "He in authority but lacking knowledge or personality must depend on his formal power. He unconsciously fills a void in his qualifications by making it clear to everybody that he is in a position of authority. His will be done." David, take it away. 0:02:02.5 David Langford: Okay, that's great. So this is one of my favorite points, which has three subset points or Power Rangers, sources of power for improvement. And I've used this with managers around the world for the last 40 years. And in some cases, they just drop their jaws and they're just amazed at how simple this is. But the more you think about it and realize what people, managers of people are not doing, it gives a roadmap about: what do you do? How do you do something? And I get that question all the time from superintendents and principals in my field of education, and people that do have a formal position. Then they wanna know: well, how do I get these people to do stuff, make things happen? 0:02:58.2 DL: So, before we get into each of the three Power Rangers, I wanted to give a little bit of context too, because I wanna remind everybody that, Deming lived through World War II and was a part of the quality improvement effort for World War II. And what happened during World War II is that a lot of the manufacturing was being done by women in the United States especially. And so when the war ended, you had all these military people coming back to corporations and moving into top management positions, and basically the management style that they brought with them was military. And so that's where you got phrases like, "My way or the highway," and, "You're not getting paid to think. You just do what I tell you to do and everything will be fine." 0:03:51.5 AS: Attack that hill. 0:03:53.1 DL: Yeah, right, which was totally opposite to the whole manufacturing thing that had been going on during the war and was really the key to the war machine was being able to produce huge amount of military items in a very short period of time. 0:04:09.3 AS: Well, and also when you think about that, David, it's interesting to think about the patriotism and the commitment to a cause that those women went into those factories to do. And so when it was all done and the cause was met, the challenge was met, then to be faced with that, it's like, "Wait a minute, we lost something here." 0:04:30.9 DL: Yeah, and then I remember Deming talking about it one time at a conference and stuff and talking about, basically, in those factories, women liked to get together and talk about what was going on, and their performance and everything that was happening in the factory. And then when the men came back in, they said, "No, we're not gonna have groups or teams or anything like that. You're just gonna do what I would tell you to do, and if you don't like it, then find someplace else to work." One of the phrases I always remember Deming used to say was that: "pretty soon you're left with only the people who can't get a job someplace else." 0:05:14.0 DL: And I've found that to be so true in every profession that I've worked in or helped people with, etcetera, and have... So it leads us to number one, your formal position. So yeah, you have a job. You're the CEO, you're the principal of a school, you're a headmaster, you're whatever it might be. You got the job, right? And so with that comes formal position that you need to be able to...you have to do stuff and you have a job to do. And you may even be given goals by a board or something that it's your job to make this happen. Well, the question is, how do you make it happen? If it was just so simple that a new boss could come in and just start bossing people around and tell them what to do, and then they all do it and things get better, then we wouldn't actually need any of this Deming stuff, right? 0:06:13.6 DL: But it's not so simple as being able to do that. And basically what Deming is saying in this point too, is that if you act like that and you use your formal position to make change, basically, you're not gonna be around long, because pretty soon the people that work for you are gonna start to kind of revolt, and either they'll find other jobs or the pressure will become on you to get out and get somebody else in there. This is also the reason that some boards think improvement means, we'll just hire somebody else. Well, that doesn't work either. I'll never forget a superintendent of a huge school district that I worked with, and I had asked him, when we started working with him, I said, "Well, what's been your method of improvement?" And he very looked at me very clearly and just said, "Well, we fire people." 0:07:17.3 AS: That's the Jack Welch School. 0:07:19.8 DL: Yeah, exactly. 0:07:20.3 AS: Take the bottom, bottom half or the bottom quarter or the bottom 10% and make sure you're firing them often. 0:07:25.8 DL: Yeah. But that's means that you're also in that category too, right? To improve your position, all we got to do is fire you and find somebody else in that position. But are you finding somebody else with the exact same philosophy or are you actually looking for somebody else that has a different philosophy? And I think that's really what Deming is talking about here, is that, hey, if you want to stay around a very long time, yeah, it might be your formal position, but don't use that unless you absolutely have to. I often tell managers, if suddenly there's a fire in a building, you're not gonna get a bunch of people together and have a meeting and say, "Okay, what do we do? And which way should we go?" And things like that. You're probably gonna use your formal position to take charge and say, "Let's get out of the building," etcetera. But then very quickly, you should get people together to say, "Okay, how could we have done that better? And how could we work through that and improve that whole process?" 0:08:31.6 DL: And so that's where I think point number two really comes in, is that, do you have knowledge of a different way to manage, different way to think? And that's all Deming, about statistics and understanding process analysis and understanding how people work together, and do you understand how to do Plan-Do-Study-Act - the PDSA process - to improve something? And so you're using your knowledge of theory and background to improve something. And the irony of that is, when you concentrate on using your knowledge to do stuff, you actually gain authority. Just 'cause people start to look up to you as, oh, he or she, they have a process of improvement and they just stick with it. Anytime that something comes up, it's never blaming people. It's always looking at what is the process? What's happening? Let's use a few tools. Let's analyze what's happening. Let's look at a flow chart of the process and let's improve the process. That's knowledge. 0:09:40.4 AS: So the people want to follow you rather than people must follow you. 0:09:46.6 DL: Yeah, that's a good way, it's a good way to put it. Exactly. So, I think of the three, probably that's most important, right? 0:09:57.9 AS: Yeah. 0:10:00.6 DL: And the other thing about these three points is that, maybe you're working in an organization, maybe you're just a teacher. I say just, maybe you're a teacher in a school, and there's maybe 200 teachers, and you see that things are not going well. What can you do? Well, you're not the person in charge, right? And if you just march into the headmaster or the principal or whoever and start telling them what to do, you're probably not gonna be around. But what can you do? You can use your knowledge of improvement. And through that process, you actually become very powerful, because lots of people wanna work with you, 'cause every time we do, we get things done and we look at problems differently. And then pretty soon, your boss is coming to you when problems arise or when process improvement is necessary and saying, "Hey can you help here? Help us work through this problem?" And that's a level of power that's for change or improvement that is significant, if you think like that. 0:11:14.2 AS: I was thinking about, if you're a young person going into the workforce, you don't have authority. I mean, you may be given it in a small position. I was a supervisor at Pepsi when I first started, so I had a certain level of authority, but there's no way I could use it when all of my work... All the guys working for me had been there 20 years or whatever. 0:11:33.7 DL: Yeah, exactly. 0:11:34.8 AS: And do it would be foolish for me to do that. And so, I definitely used my personality and I didn't have much knowledge, so I had to try to acquire knowledge, which was making me...I took a note and just thought about, to be able to use knowledge as an a form of management, you've gotta acquire it, and it comes through your own acquisition plus also hiring people who...you can acquire knowledgeable people that are around you that can help to solve things. And then as I started, and in my case, David, what we were doing was we were filling Pepsi trucks every night, and they were all wrong. So the drivers in the morning would come in and they'd have to waste a lot of time counting their trucks, counting what's on their trucks, and then going back and getting what was missing. 0:12:24.3 AS: And I had to then develop...I had to then acquire knowledge of why were we making these mistakes? Which one on my staff was doing really well? How could we learn from that? And how could we do it so that we could lock those trucks and guarantee those drivers that that truck was accurate? And it took me many months to get to the point where I acquired enough knowledge to be able to then have the authority to go, "All right, now we've done all of this. Now, this is the way we're doing it from all that we've learned." So anyways, this is just me rambling, but that was just something that I thought about. 0:13:00.9 DL: Yes. No, that's a good... That's a really great example. That's a great, great story about that. And I'm sure that it took a while for the drivers to trust that it was actually right. 0:13:14.7 AS: I mean, I had to negotiate with them, and I'd tell them, "Look, if you find a problem out there, we're gonna fix that," and blah, blah, and all that, but then they were like, "Well, if I find a problem out there, I don't have the product to sell, so it has to be right," which basically it was, there's a lot of teaching actually involved in that to help everybody understand. 0:13:33.9 DL: Yeah, exactly. So then point number three is about personality. And so, you probably have worked for people, if you've had several jobs, everything from delivering papers on up to a current job you may be in now, you probably worked with people that are just really great people to get along with, right? And that's a source of power. I mean, they get things done because they're just really nice people and supportive, and they just have a really great personality about how to work and what to do. And I can visually see people in my mind that I worked with over the last 40 years that, just great people like that. But it's not enough, because you might be a really great person to work with. "Joe is really a great person to work with, and he's really fun and everything else, but he never gets anything done." Because he doesn't have the knowledge of basically the Deming philosophy about how to get stuff done, right? 0:14:45.7 DL: So what Deming's talking about here is that these are the three Power Rangers, the three sources of power, that if you wanna get something done and move forward and improve something, really you have to think about it as an inter-relationship of parts to the whole, of these three areas working together. So if you start concentrating...and the explanation in the following paragraph, he talks about, well, you don't have any knowledge and your personality stinks, and so what you rely on is your authoritarian position just to tell people what to do, you won't last long and also you're not gonna improve things. Things are not gonna get better when you do that. So you may have a formal position, but he talks about concentrate on two and three, your knowledge and your personality, and you will start to see a major transformation. 0:15:44.8 DL: Everybody knows you're the boss. You don't have to go around and tell people you're the boss. By virtue of the formal position, you have that. And I always take these things down to a teacher in a classroom. A teacher, that's a formal position that a teacher has. I have authority over these students during this time period, right? And I've known teachers that that's all they concentrate on, is the authority. And again, we've talked before about oftentimes, especially in like grammar school or primary school or elementary school, you're physically bigger than them and so you use that as part of your authority, that, "I'm the boss here. You do this, out you go." Well, even very little kids don't respect that. 0:16:42.1 DL: I think I told a story one time of 5-year-olds testifying for a state board of education, and they were so amazing explaining all these wonderful things that they were doing in their classroom and collecting data and improving stuff. And one of the board members said, "Well, where's your teacher when all this is going on?" And this 5-year-old, without hesitating, grabbed the microphone and said, "The teacher's not in the closet, you know." And as soon as I heard that, I thought of these three points. That little person knew they had been coached and mentored and taught a process of how to work together and improve that classroom, and the person that he looked up to was the teacher. So even at 5 years old, these things come in to play in a very real way, so. 0:17:41.6 AS: I would like to bring this back to constancy of purpose for a second, because...and I wanna think about, there's a book I recently read by Richard Rumelt, which is called Good Strategy Bad Strategy, and it's an excellent book about setting corporate strategy. But he talks about how businesses kind of move in waves, where you have a decentralization period of time where you're expanding and your giving authority. And then, basically the organization can lose focus, and then it's gonna require the authority of the senior management to say, "Okay, we have to, at some point, restructure and refocus this," and then you rely on more centralized, and he was just talking about the waves of that. And then I was thinking about the authority, from a positive perspective, is the role of the leaders of an organization, of the school, of a business, the role of those leaders is to set that direction. 0:18:37.5 AS: And you do have to claim authority or else you can't...that's what I also liked about what I learned from Deming when I first started learning, is that you can't just go, "Okay, what do you guys think our direction should be?" I mean, that is a fun question, but ultimately, as a leader, you got to really make sure that the constancy of purpose and the aim is there, and that sometimes requires what I would call good authority, authority coming from a knowledgeable and experienced perspective, but there must be authority. 0:19:07.3 DL: Right. Well, you could be the manager that comes and says, "Look, we need to reestablish our constancy of purpose. So let's talk about some ideas about how we can go about that and that are different than what we've done before, because obviously that's not working. So let's work together to figure out a good pathway that we can make that happen." So that's using your personality to run a meeting and get what you need to have happen, but you're bringing people with you instead of doing stuff to them, so. 0:19:39.2 AS: Yeah, I have one little story to tell about this authority concept, is that in our coffee factory many years ago, my business partner Dale was sitting in the office up above the roasting area and he started to smell smoke. And roasting coffee has... We have roaster fires that happen in the roasting machine. And basically, he went rushing down to realize that a fire was raging in the roasting machine, particularly in the chimney, and was getting down into the machine. And so the first thing he did is he just started yelling, "Everybody out!" And he got everybody out of that building first thing, except for one or two men that were there working. And with one of the guys, he said, "Grab that little hose," and he's got this little hose that they had to try to cool down the plate that he had to unscrew all these screws on. And he told the other guy, "Get up to the top of the building and start pouring water down the chimney of this roaster to start putting this fire out." 0:20:49.6 AS: And then they eventually got the whole thing out. But it required authority at the time to save the factory and to save the lives of the people. And so authority is necessary. It's just that that authority came at a time of emergency. Also, the other question is, is it good authority? There are people that give really bad advice in the middle of an emergency. And so, you know... 0:21:14.2 DL: Yeah, but then, points two and three come into play, personality and knowledge, because the very...soon as that crisis is over, the very next thing that guy should have done is bring everybody in and say, "Okay, what do we do to make sure this never happens again?" 0:21:31.8 AS: Which is exactly... 0:21:31.9 DL: Yeah, and if it does happen, what's going to be our process? 0:21:38.7 AS: Which is exactly what happened. And they analyzed why it happened and it was because they hadn't been maintaining the machine by the schedule that they had set. So they had to set up a better schedule to make sure that all of the husk that's coming off of the coffee, the chaff, is taken out on a daily basis and all clean. And so, we've never really had a major fire like that, and that's been, probably be 15 years ago. 0:22:00.3 DL: Wow. No, that's really a great example. So if you have a crisis, my advice to managers always is get through it. And then as soon as you get through it, bring everybody together to just say, "Okay, how do we make sure this never happens again?" 0:22:15.6 AS: Yeah, it's the balance between short-term and long-term. Last thing, I want to just highlight something that you talked about at the beginning that many people may not really understand is that, that workforce change that happened after World War II. And this is something that shaped a lot of Dr. Deming's observations. And that is, the estimates are that there was about 4-5 million American men who came back from Europe after World War II. And we know that there was a large amount of women in the workforce there. And so about 4-5 million men was about 3-4% of the 140 or so million population of the US. So, it wasn't a small number, but if you actually look at the labor force of the US, it was roughly 50-60 million of that 140 million that were in the labor force at the time. So we're talking about 7-8% of the labor force. 0:23:11.4 AS: And so this wave of command and control men who had been trained through boot camps and all of that, of command and control, it kind of explains why Dr. Deming railed against what then started happening was that all of a sudden, the joy was just destroyed. The aim that the women in particular that came to these factories producing, that aim was kind of demolished by these marching men that came in. So any thoughts on that, David? 0:23:43.3 DL: Well, in wartime, it's just constant crisis management. That's all it is. And that's why the military relies so heavily on chain of command and who's in authority and who's in command here and all those kinds of things, because you're just trying to survive a situation. But when you're not in wartime, that's the time to actually improve processes, get things done, understand a different way to work and operate. But even in those kinds of situations, military commanders that concentrated on two and three, knowledge and personality, got a lot more done and saved a lot more people than just "do it my way" kind of thing, so. 0:24:29.9 AS: Yeah. Well, in wrapping up, let's just now revisit what we've been talking about, and that is, ultimately, it's authority, knowledge, and personality. And these are the three factors that Dr. Deming is talking about. And ultimately, we want to develop personality and knowledge, and then ultimately that leads to higher authority. And the idea of command and control type of authority is only really useful in times of emergency, but most of the time, you need to use the others. Anything you would add to that? 0:25:10.0 DL: Yeah, that's a perfect way to think about it. That's a great, great wrap up to it. And Deming talked a lot about business, but I always gonna wanna bring it back that this applies to anything, a classroom, a family. If you're treating your family like that, you have a different kind of problem. And I don't know if I've told this story, but I have five children and I live in Montana. And so we had a really bad snow year, one year, and there was, just terrible in February, just so much snow and everybody's sick of it and everything else. So my wife and I dreamed up this scheme that we would get tickets to take all the kids to California and go to Disneyland and all these great things, but we wouldn't tell them. We would just get up in the morning like we're getting ready for school. 0:26:01.9 DL: And so we're sitting around the table and my wife says, "I'm sick of this snow. I'd like to get out of here, and who else would like to get out of here?" And the kids are all like, "Yeah, I would like to get out of here. When can we do that?" And she said, "Well, our plane leaves today at 11 o'clock, so here's a list. Go pack these kinds of things." And they were like "Wow, where are we going? What's happening? This is so exciting." And we didn't tell them anything, so they had to figure out when they got to the airport, where the plane was going. And then they said Orange County, and they, "What? Orange County? What's in Orange County?" 0:26:39.6 AS: Oranges. 0:26:39.8 DL: So, they figuring all that out. So we just thought we were so clever using our position of authority to do this. And after about three days, we are sitting around a dinner table and the kids are all kind of moping and we'd been taking and spending money going to Disneyland and all this great stuff in Southern California and all these wonderful things, and they liked it, right? And I said, "Gee, what's going on? You guys are just tired or just all kind of silent and kind of moping and everything else? And didn't you like what we did to today?" "Oh, yeah, that was okay," and da, da, da. And then finally, one of my daughters said, "You know, we talked about it and we just want to go to the beach," because they'd never seen the ocean. 0:27:29.3 DL: And I was like, "Oh, these three points," right? Yeah, I had the position of authority as father and I could make this decision and spend all this money to do these wonderful things, but if I just used some personality and knowledge and asked them to begin with, "Hey, if we go to California, what would you really like to do?" "Hey, we'd like to go and hang out at the beach 'cause we don't have an ocean." I could have saved thousands of dollars and lots of headache if I just had a little bit of personality and knowledge certainly in the situation, so. 0:28:02.5 AS: What a great story. And kids can play on the beach for weeks. I know. 0:28:03.9 DL: Oh, yeah. 0:28:04.1 AS: I was young, so yeah, that was crazy. 0:28:09.1 DL: That's what we did. The rest of the trip, we canceled everything and we just went to the beach every day, and they were happy as could be. 0:28:13.5 AS: And it's easier on you. 0:28:15.7 DL: Yeah. 0:28:17.7 AS: Yeah. Well, David on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I want to thank you again for this discussion. And for listeners, remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. Listeners can learn more about David at langfordlearning.com. This is your host, Andrew Stotz, and I will leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming. "People are entitled to joy in work."

GraphQL is one of the biggest API enablers in software development, but just how complicated can things be? Tanmai Gopal – Hasura's CEO extraordinaire – talks with Jason and Patrick about how the secret sauce gets made. They dive deeply from how APIs function to having them managed in practice – among several other topic, making this a must-listen episode.  00:01:19 Introductions00:01:48 Tanmai's late start in programming00:05:48 Plinko00:13:06 Coursera00:23:28 The question of API development00:30:30 API layer functionality00:34:58 How Hasura leverages JSON00:39:08 GraphQL00:42:49 Worse than an API call00:49:15 The potential REST minefield00:53:41 JSON Web Tokens01:11:34 Scaling writes01:15:17 Careers with Hasura01:22:35 FarewellsResources mentioned in this episode:Join the Programming Throwdown Patreon community today: https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown?ty=h Subscribe to the podcast on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@programmingthrowdown4793Links:  Tanmai Gopal:  Website: https://hasura.io/blog/@tanmaig/  Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tanmaig/  Twitter: https://twitter.com/tanmaigo  Github: https://github.com/coco98  Hasura:  Website: https://hasura.io/  Careers: https://hasura.io/careers/  Twitter: https://twitter.com/HasuraHQ  Github: https://github.com/hasura  Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/hasura  Others:  Good Strategy, Bad Strategy (Amazon): https://www.amazon.com/Good-Strategy-Bad-Strategy-audiobook/dp/B07R6XQ8YP  Modern Application Development (IIT Madras, archived): https://archive.nptel.ac.in/courses/106/106/106106156/ If you've enjoyed this episode, you can listen to more on Programming Throwdown's website: https://www.programmingthrowdown.com/ Reach out to us via email: programmingthrowdown@gmail.com You can also follow Programming Throwdown on Facebook | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Player.FM | Youtube Join the discussion on our DiscordHelp support Programming Throwdown through our Patreon ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

A solid UX research strategy serves as the compass that guides research ops and helps ensure repeatable success. But how do you envision, create, and execute a strategy that helps you achieve your goals in the most effective way possible?  In this episode of Awkward Silences, Devin Harold, Director of Research at Capital One, unpacks how to craft and refine a winning UXR strategy, including tips to help you make team playbooks, win stakeholder buy-in, and inform your strategy with maturity models. In this episode, we discuss: The significance of a robust UX research strategy The definition of a good and bad strategy  Essential components of an effective research plan Aligning research with stakeholder needs and expectations Metrics and KPIs to evaluate progress and success Highlights [00:01:17] Strategy vs delivery, prioritizing projects and allocating resources   [00:10:13] The role of flexibility and adaptability [00:15:38] Gaining stakeholder buy-in and tying research to organizational objectives [00:21:05] Establishing KPIs and metrics to measure progress and success [00:33:46] Periodic reviews and updates to maintain relevance and effectiveness Sources mentioned in the episode: userinterviews.com/awkward Good Strategy/Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt UXR Maturity Models: Move to a more advanced level in your org by Nikki Anderson of Dovetail UX Strategy Components by Nielsen Norman Group The Organizational Appetite for Research by Behzod Sirjani About our guest: Devin Harold is the Director of UX Research at Capital One, where he leads a team dedicated to improving end-to-end experiences and touchpoints for one of the company's primary business units. With over eleven years of experience in UX design and research, he has a deep understanding of research methodologies, leadership, strategy, frameworks, and interaction design. Devin's expertise and leadership have been recognized with multiple awards, including the IDEA Award, Verizon Beyond Award, and Verizon Credo Award. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/awkwardsilences/message

Join Sandi and Jen as they discuss good strategies in the workplace versus bad ones, and how to get your team through both. Listen in as they discuss some of their favorite strategy authors, resources, and inspirations to navigate process and product. For Sandi's website, Click Here For Jen's website, Click Here

This week, we took one giant leap to catch aspiring astronaut turned account manager, Faizan Ali.   Currently Account Director at VMLY&R, Faizan is a loud and proud advocate for account managers worldwide. Having cut his teeth at Saatchi, JWT, and Hogarth Worldwide, he shares stellar advice on LinkedIn on how to calm storms, massage egos and help sell the work.  Tune in for an out-of-this-world chinwag on all things account management; why it's both extremely hard and very simple, the qualities of a good client partner, what to do when s**t hits the fan, why agencies need to realise what added value it brings, the best way to deal with client briefs, the wording of the job title itself, having a point of view, timesheets, job specs, ego and tons more.    ///// Follow Faizan on Twitter. And on LinkedIn for a choice cut of stellar account management advice.  Here's a few to whet the appetite:  3 QUESTIONS IN 3 MINUTES As Account Managers, we wear many hats Listening is an Art GOOD ACCOUNT MANAGER vs GREAT ACCOUNT MANAGER Listen to Call To Action with Nick Ellis for tips on creative briefing, his “womb room”, making the world's most boring advert for a sex toy client and loads more.  And here's Nick's talk from ZeeMelt on Account Management.  Thank you to everyone who has lent their ears and their brains for over 100 episodes of the Call To Action® podcast. It's a real privilege. Please do share and review the podcast to help more marketers feel better about marketing.     Timestamps (01:42) - Quick fire questions (02:50) - Starting a social media agency at university  (08:57) - First account management role at JWT (10:41) - Why account management is extremely hard but very simple (13:00) - Agencies need to realise what added value account management brings (17:32) - Handling mess and politics as an account manager (20:40) - Dealing with client briefs  (26:30) - Account Manager or Client Partner? (28:20) - Listener questions  (34:28) - 4 pertinent posers  (38:56) - How to navigate problems to do with ego  Faizan's book recommendations are:  Good Strategy Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt  Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris  Strategy Is Your Words by Mark Pollard  /////

We laid traps of tactics before strategy to lure Mark Ritson (and Ritdad) as he was reintroduced to mainland UK to unleash his Tasmanian devilish take on the industry, for Call to Action's 100th episode.   He's spent 25 years working as a marketing professor, has been a columnist at Marketing Week for over a decade, is a world-class speaker and has built, presented, and demolished marketing plans for some of the world's biggest brands. Through his Mini MBA courses in Marketing and Brand Management, Mark has trained nearly 30,000 marketing marsupials across 60 countries, including 83.7% ish of …Gasp!     Mark chirps on being the rarest breed of marketing professor who loves (and actually does) marketing, getting aroused at Wacker Drive, being lured to la Maison LVMH, how the Mini MBA became his AirPods, what to do with woolly briefs, planning cycles, Pot Noodle's purpose, pricing, and more, before piling on praise for the grumpy Byron Sharp in our feast of listener questions. So get your ears out and listen in. ///// Follow Mark on Twitter and LinkedIn  Become a better marketer with the Mini MBA in Marketing and Brand Management  Read Mark's Marketing Week column  Here's the Tone of Voice work …Gasp! did for the Mini MBA series  Thank you to everyone who has lent their ears and their brains for 100 episodes of the Call To Action® podcast. It's a real privilege. Please do share and review the podcast to help more marketers feel better about marketing.     Timestamps (02:21) - Quick fire questions (05:50) - First ever job (08:45) - Professor or Marketer?  (11:10) - Getting aroused at Wacker Drive (13:30) - Landing the role at LVMH  (17:49) - Is marketing changing for the better?  (23:15) - Marketing Twitter vs the silent majority  (27:34) - Problems in marketing academia (36:19) - Why he isn't really Mr Anti-Purpose  (37:54) - How to plan your marketing  (49:52) - Listener questions  (57:53) - A masterclass in pricing  (1:00:22) - 4 pertinent posers  Mark's book recommendation is: Good Strategy Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt  /////

Part 2 of our interview with Richard Rumelt, strategy professor at UCLA Anderson and author of Good Strategy/Bad Strategy.

Part 1 of our interview with Richard Rumelt, strategy professor at UCLA Anderson and author of Good Strategy/Bad Strategy.

Skip the Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. Your host is  Kelly Molson, MD of Rubber Cheese.Download our free ebook The Ultimate Guide to Doubling Your Visitor NumbersIf you like what you hear, you can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, and all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue or visit our website rubbercheese.com/podcast.If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review, it really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned in this episode.Competition ends October 1st 2022. The winner will be contacted via Twitter. Show references: https://maryrose.org/https://www.historicdockyard.co.uk/https://twitter.com/DominicJonesUKhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/dominicejones/ https://www.nmrn.org.uk/https://www.historicdockyard.co.uk/news/item/1152-buoyant-bounce-back-bodes-well-for-portsmouth-historic-dockyard Dominic Jones was recruited to the Mary Rose in 2019 ago as Chief Operating Officer, and became CEO in 2021.  He brings an excellent background in commercial visitor attractions (Disney, Merlin) and creative visitor experience development.During his time at the Mary Rose, he has already driven an excellent commercial and operational performance and worked closely with previous Chief Executive to create the new Portsmouth Historic Dockyard joint venture with the National Museum of the Royal Navy, which launched successfully in August 2020.  Transcriptions: Kelly Molson: Welcome to Skip the Queue, a podcast for people working in or working with visitor attractions. I'm your host, Kelly Molson. In today's episode, I speak with Dominic Jones, CEO of the Mary Rose Museum and Director of Portsmouth Historic Dockyard. Dominic shares the amazing impact of the joint venture between the Mary Rose Museum and the National Museum of the Royal Navy and his advice for any attractions looking to start and improve their partnership arrangements. If you like what you hear, subscribe on all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue.Kelly Molson: Dominic. Welcome to Skip the Queue. Thanks for coming on.Dominic Jones: Thanks for having me. I'm looking forward to it, I think.Kelly Molson: You are looking forward to it. You don't need to think about it. Can we just point out, I know, listeners, you can't see this, but if you're watching this on YouTube, can we just see, you've got a lovely little, "I love Skip the Queue" graphic in the background there. Look at that.Dominic Jones: Yeah, I think it's important to get across that I do love Skip the Queue and it's important to get that across before the icebreaker questions, I think, just in case you had a couple and you were thinking, "Oh, I'm going to be a bit tough." And then, so I did that and I tweeted this morning how excited I am about your forthcoming website attraction questionnaire, so that's a double. That's a double positive, right?Kelly Molson: Thank you. Thank you. Don't worry, listeners. I've got a special little recording so you understand what we're talking about that will be coming out in the next week or so, so you'll find out more about that soon.Dominic Jones: And I bought you a rubber for your rubber collection. Can you see that? Mary Rose rubber?Kelly Molson: Wow. Look at that.Dominic Jones: You may or may not get that depending on how the icebreakers go, so that's my third attempt.Kelly Molson: Gosh, I've never been bribed for a good icebreaker question.Dominic Jones: It's not bribery. It's a nice gift. It's a nice gift.Kelly Molson: Right, well, let's get cracking on the icebreaker questions, shall we? I think I've been quite kind to you. Tell us something that you are really great at cooking.Dominic Jones: I really like cooking. I actually find cooking really relaxing, so on a Friday or Saturday, I often cook at home, so it depends, really. I quite like making my own recipes, so just using what we've got in the house. So for example, scallops with chorizo, or if you're doing a steak, might do it with some sort of watercress and various cheese, or just sort of experimenting. I really like sort of seeing what we've got, putting it together and making it work. I think it's important, when you're cooking, to drink some wine as well.Kelly Molson: Oh, I agree.Dominic Jones: So cooking with wine is something I enjoy doing.Kelly Molson: We can be friends, Dominic.Dominic Jones: There we go.Kelly Molson: Absolutely, we can be friends. Also, really great choices of food there. I would definitely eat both of those. You'd be really good on Ready Steady Cook, then. That would've been your show.Dominic Jones: Yeah. Do you know what? I used to... So I once applied for a game show, which I didn't get on, I was very disappointed, but Ready Steady Cook was one I think I could have done. Because it's not hard, is it? Most things go with things, and it's also about having the confidence to carry it off and knowing... The only time it went wrong was I wanted to cook for my girlfriend, who's now my wife, a lemon pasta dish and it tasted awful and it had lemon rind in it and stuff, so... But apart from that, it's always worked out.Kelly Molson: Well, I mean, you must have done all right. She married you.Dominic Jones: Yeah.Kelly Molson: She married you in the end.Dominic Jones: True.Kelly Molson: All right. Well, our next one, I've gone topical for this. If you were the captain of a pirate ship...Dominic Jones: Yeah?Kelly Molson: What would be the name of your ship?Dominic Jones: That's a good one. Oh. I do like pirates. I think, because I'm Welsh and because I'd want to be a pirate who... A bit like sort of the Warrior in the Dockyard, which isn't a pirate ship, by the way, but when it came in, people normally surrendered, I want to be a scary pirate that people would think, "Oh, don't..." Maybe, like, Smoking Dragon or something like that. And then we'd light smoke as we came in so people are like, "Oh, here's the Smoking Dragon."Kelly Molson: Yeah, I like that. And there'd be a big dragon's head on the front with flame and smoke coming out of it.Dominic Jones: And people... Because a lot of pirates were Welsh. I don't know whether you know this, but a lot of pirates were Welsh.Kelly Molson: I didn't know that.Dominic Jones: Yeah, it's massive.Kelly Molson: Wow.Dominic Jones: Massive.Kelly Molson: Okay. All right. This is great. That's an excellent answer.Dominic Jones: I have to say, these are slightly biased questions because I was listening to a few of your podcasts recently and, like, you had someone from the zoo, "Oh, what's your favourite animal?" Or you had someone from IAAPA, "What's your favourite ride?" And I'm getting a "name a pirate ship"? Know what I mean?Kelly Molson: All right, what's your favourite boat?Dominic Jones: No, only joking. I'm not going to answer that. I'm not going to answer that.Kelly Molson: All right, but what is your favourite smell? That's my last question.Dominic Jones: Genuinely, we're looking at smell now for the museum, because smell is so important, it's something that can make a difference. When I was at Madame Tussauds Amsterdam, we used smell, as well, as part of the experience, because it just creates that emotive moment. I do like cookie dough and cookies and the smell of that sort of baking which you get pumped in in Disney parks. I quite like the smell of red wine.Kelly Molson: Yeah. Yep.Dominic Jones: Yeah, so I think it's food or drink smells I like, but yeah. Good question.Kelly Molson: Good answer. We are at Unpopular Opinion Point. What have you got to share with us?Dominic Jones: This is a hard one because I've decided to go work on this and I did have some really cool ones about lager and N-Dubz and stuff, but I decided to go with work because one of the things that through my whole career, anyone who knows me will know is I get really frustrated when people blame the weather, so I think you shouldn't blame the weather for anything because what happens is when someone blames the weather, when the weather's... So I've worked in theme parks and in museums and aquariums, indoor and outdoor attractions, and you probably know that when it's bad weather, it's great for indoor attractions, when it's good weather, it's good for the theme parks, right?Dominic Jones: So you get people that, when it's good weather in theme parks or bad weather in museums, they say, "Oh, our marketing and our everything we're doing is brilliant because the visitors are coming." And as soon as it's the bad weather or the good weather, depending on what you are, then it's all about the weather. So, "Our visitors are down because the weather was good." If you're in an indoor attraction and it really, really irritates me, and it's one of those things, they're mutually exclusive, you can only blame the weather if you give the weather credit when it's good, and it's one of those things, if things are good, I always think you should look outside the window and think, "Right, what's the reason for that?" And then if things are bad, you should look inside your organisation. It's one of my pet hates, but probably doesn't work for the podcast, so I should probably go with the lager or N-Dubz one, but anyway, there we go. But it is important, right? I think it's a good one.Kelly Molson: It is important. No, I think, yeah, that is important. It's really interesting. I've never really thought about that before. We need to give the weather more credit.Dominic Jones: Well, you need to give the weather credit if you're going to use it to blame. For me, it's a constant. It's something... And these days, weather forecasts are 10, 14 days out, so you should be able to plan.Kelly Molson: Yeah. Okay. Good. All right.Dominic Jones: I'll get off my high horse now. Yeah.Kelly Molson: Listeners, let us know how you feel, so let us know if you want to know about that N-Dubz one as well. I'm intrigued. Right, Dominic, I want you to tell us about your background because we met up recently, didn't we, at the M+H exhibition? And you were very humble about coming on the podcast and you said, "Oh, I'm not going to have anything... You've had really interesting people on and I'm not that interesting." You are really interesting and you've had such an incredible background. Tell us a little bit about it and how you got to where you are now.Dominic Jones: Well, I'm not sure about that. I do like listening to your podcast and you have some amazing guests and 9 times out of 10, I normally think, after listening to them, "Right, I'm going to either do something that they've suggested." Or I follow them on LinkedIn or Twitter and think, "Right, let's learn from them." Because I think you should always learn from other people, but so my career is a lot of luck, a lot of opportunity and a lot of chats.Dominic Jones: When I was growing up, I wanted to be a leisure centre manager. You know? Like you probably won't remember The Brittas Empire, but that was my dream. That was my dream, much to my mum's disappointment. And so that was all I ever wanted, so I went to college and did a leisure studies course, a HND, and there was a placement in PGL Adventure, which is like an adventure park, and I was a Multi Activity Instructor. Absolutely loved it.Dominic Jones: But then I sort of realised, actually, there's a whole world out there and decided I wanted to work in theme parks, so I applied to work at Disney and didn't get it the first time. I was very cocky, I was the wrong sort of person for Disney, but I went back three times and eventually got it and I did a placement in Disney and it was the best thing I ever did and it changed my life. It's one of the few jobs that I've left and thought, "My life will never be the same again." So good. So I did that and I got my master's degree. I didn't get the doctorate because I went on spring break, but hey, I was young...Kelly Molson: Well, spring break, though.Dominic Jones: Exactly. I was young. And then sort of went to Thorpe Park and was a Ride Operator. I remember my friends and some of their family were saying, "That's a real waste of..." Because I went to, in between Disney, went to university in Swansea, and they said, "It's a real waste of university, operating a teacup for £3.50 an hour." Or whatever it was at the time. But I loved it and for me, it was... I thought, "If you want to become a manager or you want to become, eventually, a General Manager or a Director of a theme park, it's really important to know how these things work."Dominic Jones: So I loved it, and just in case you ever get to operate the teacups, it's not too complicated, there's a red and green button, the red is to stop and the green is to start. I mean, it was five hours of training, but I finally mastered it and you can't actually make it go faster, so when you're there on the microphone and say, "Do you want to go faster?" You can't, it goes faster anyway, but I loved it and then very quickly rose through the ranks, so I became a Ride Supervisor, Team Leader, Area Team Leader, Coordinator, went to Chessington, worked there just at the time when Tussauds had bought Thorpe Park, so it was a real great time for career opportunities.Dominic Jones: Then I went to Madame Tussauds, was the Customer Service Manager there and helped create the first contact centre, if you like, call centre, where we sold tickets for things like Rock Circus, which is no longer in existence, but Rock Circus, the London Eye, Madam Tussauds, the Planetarium and that became the Merlin Contact Centre in the future, and then I started applying for loads of jobs, more General Manager jobs, and didn't get them and realised that I needed to get some marketing and sales experience.Dominic Jones: So I left and went to work for Virgin and then I was there for nearly 10 years and absolutely loved it and instead of getting the sales and marketing, well, I got the sales experience, I ended up becoming Vice President of Europe, the Middle East and Africa for the logistics side of the business, and then also, so we opened up Kenya, had some amazing life experiences, we saw the whole world and then was Regional Vice President Sales in Hong Kong for Asia Pacific, so great time.Dominic Jones: And then my wife became pregnant, obviously, I was involved in that, and it made me realise that I probably couldn't do a job where I was traveling 24/7. I mean, for a while, I did literally consider, which makes me sound like a bad person, "I could call in from Skype and things like that." And my wife was like, "Come on." So we went back to Wales and it was really hard to find a job that would allow me to be at home and be around so I actually thought, "Well, originally, when I went to Virgin, I wanted to have marketing experience."Dominic Jones: So I actually went to Thorpe Park and the marketing team and looked after the partnerships and promotions, did some really cool things, the Ministry of Sound nightclub deal was there, did some stuff with Lionsgate. A really good time doing the "buy one, get one free" things, the partnerships and events, got some good bands together on the stage that hadn't been on stage with the Wideboys and the [inaudible 00:11:55] boys if you know your dance music, it was massive.Dominic Jones: Anyway, so I did that for a bit and then got an opportunity to go back to Wales, which is where my wife's family is from. I'm from North Wales, she's from South Wales, so I got a chance to run Oakwood Theme Park, which I absolutely loved and probably would've been there forever if an opportunity hadn't come up with Merlin and Merlin, it was to look after the rest of Europe and the rest of Europe was basically anything in their midway, so Madam Tussauds, Dungeons, Lego Discovery Centre, Sea Life, that wasn't in the UK or Germany, so it was like Istanbul, Helsinki, Paris Blankenberge in Belgium, Spain. I mean, it was brilliant and I did that for a few years.Dominic Jones: Then I went and ran Thorpe Park for a few years, which absolutely loved because that was where I started as a teacup operator and I remember, there was a guy there, good friend of mine, he said, "I remember, when you were on the teacups, you said, 'One day, I'm going to come back and run the place.'" And I did, so amazing. And then, in that time, I had three kids and really was commuting from Christchurch, so decided to change careers again and come into the heritage world and came as the COO of the Mary Rose, which I did for two years, and then, during the pandemic, became the CEO, so quick sort of... Yeah. But lots of luck and right place, right time, all those sort of things, but that's good, right? That's most people's career.Kelly Molson: Whoa. That is amazing. I mean, you've been to so many different places. I love that you went full-circle at Thorpe Park as well. What an incredible story, to have gone in there as an operator and then end up running the place. That is amazing.Dominic Jones: Yeah, I loved that. And actually, all the jobs I've had have really become part of our story. I was talking to someone yesterday about the Mary Rose and they were talking about what they were going to do next but how the Mary Rose had been a massive part of their story and I said, "That's the beautiful thing about work and careers and life. Whatever you do, it becomes part of your story and you're part of their story." So whether it's Thorpe Park, whether it's when I opened up, for Virgin Atlantic, the Nairobi route for logistics and the Hamlin, it was amazing and I've been to Kenya probably more times than I've been to Birmingham, you know? So that's part of my story, and when I leave the Mary Rose, I hope isn't any time soon, this will always be... It'll be my favourite Tudor warship. I mean, it's probably the only Tudor warship, but also my favourite one, so yeah.Kelly Molson: That was the answer to my question, as well. "What's your favourite ship?"Dominic Jones: Yeah.Kelly Molson: Wow. I'm blown away by your career. I just think you've had such a phenomenal journey to get to where you are now. There's something that I want to talk to you about today and that's about your joint venture that you have with the Mary Rose and the National Museum of the Royal Navy. I just want to read out a tweet that I saw because this is what sparked this conversation, so this is a tweet that went out on the Mary Rose Twitter account.Kelly Molson: It says, "We are very pleased to share that Portsmouth Historic Dockyard saw a 150% rise in visitor numbers in 2021, reported by ALVA today. The significant rise in visitors demonstrates the effectiveness of the joint venture between Mary Rose and the National Museum of the Royal Navy in our first year."Kelly Molson: I am very intrigued by this because this has been kind of a constant throughout most of the podcast conversations that we have is about how collaborative the sector is, but this is really specific about two attractions collaborating together to bring more visitors in. I would love you to tell us about this.Dominic Jones: Well, yeah, the end result's fantastic. 150% increase in visitors. It really feels joined up. My son's school is coming in today so I was in the visitor centre and I was waiting to see what time he was coming in because he obviously wouldn't tell me the time he's actually in, so I was looking around the visitor centre and I couldn't be prouder, when you see the mixture of Victory and Warrior and Mary Rose, and how far we've come since we started, but if you go back in history, the Mary Rose used to be part of Portsmouth Historic Dockyard and there was one ticket and there was a separate company called Portsmouth Historic Dockyard that ran it, and lots of trusts, at that time, there were lots of trusts that fed into it, and then, for whatever reason, some of these trusts went independent.Dominic Jones: And so when I joined the Mary Rose, we were separate. We had a separate ticket, visitor centre, if you like, so imagine, I guess, like a... You know when you're on holiday and there's people trying to get you to go on boat rides or they're trying to get you to come into their restaurant? And literally, we were competing, so when a visitor was outside, there'd be the Mary Rose saying, "Hey, come and see Henry VIII's warship, the biggest Tudor collection in the world." I mean, it's amazing. And then the people next door, "Hey, come and see the Victory and the Warrior." And it just was really difficult for the customers, and for whatever reason, we weren't together and we had these two separate companies, so for quite a while, when I started, along with Helen, who was the CEO and Dominic and a gentleman called John in NMRN, we had meetings to see if we could get closer and to get a deal, and then I think Matthew joined, as well, from NMRN, and eventually we kind of got to an agreement.Dominic Jones: It was about, "What can we do together? What, collaboratively, can we do?" We came up with three things. We can sell tickets together, we could run a visitor centre together, so that's #1, the visitor side. We could market the destination together, and we could do strategic operations like events. So we then looked away and came across a deal, and for us, it was important that the two parties, so Mary Rose and the National Museum of the Royal Navy had a 50/50 parity of decision so it wasn't a one-sided joint venture and it was really... There's lots of talent in both organisations, so I've always admired what the National Museum of the Royal Navy have done over the years and how they've told history and how they bring it to life, and obviously, I love the Mary Rose.Dominic Jones: And so when we put us together, it was just a real opportunity, that synergy. You know when people say "one and one and you get three", but it was exactly like that and it worked really well, so we share marketing, so marketing costs, we share, we share marketing resource, so Mary Rose marketing people work along with NMRN marketing people. We do some things independently so our trusts are independent, our conservation, our research and all that sort of stuff, that's just Mary Rose and NMRN is just that, although we are working on some projects together, but in terms of the visitor, we have one visitor centre, we have one ticket you can buy, lots of options, we could talk about that, some amazing pricing we did which allowed us to do that.Dominic Jones: Because when you're competing against each other, you almost are encouraged to discount more, so we had, at times, the National Museum of the Royal Navy who were saying Portsmouth Historic Dockyard then might have a deal on Groupon, we might have a deal on Wowcher and you'd just be discounting, discounting, discounting, and you wouldn't be really getting across the real value for the customer, so yeah, it was really hard, and I remember, we would really fight for every single visitor because, for us, 84% of our money comes from tickets, so I remember, we'd get Henry VIII down the front, out the front, we'd have him talking to the visitors, saying, "Oh", you know, and with people talking in French and he'd go up in French and say, "Well, I was the king of France. Why are you going to Victory? Come to Mary Rose." But he wouldn't be taking them away from Victory, because that would be bad, but he would be saying, "Go to both." And we'd always be positive about NMRN, but we'd also want people to come to Mary Rose because that was how we were going to survive.Kelly Molson: Just going back to those times, then, was it more like a rivalry than anything?Dominic Jones: Yeah, it was really hard.Kelly Molson: So it was really difficult?Dominic Jones: It was really hard. I mean, we all respected each other, but it was really hard. It was like one of those ferry terminals or restaurants on holiday. I mean, I remember, we would flyer, like circus marketing, bumping into the brand, resort domination, we called it. We would be literally, when it was sunny because you can't blame the weather, when it was sunny, we'd be on the beach with Mary Rose leaflets saying, "Hey, get out the cool, we're air-conditioned, come to the Mary Rose." We were literally in all the restaurants, we had colour-in sheets, "Come to...", it was all about getting everyone to come and actually, we quickly realized that the NMRN was spending so much money on getting people to Portsmouth that we needed to make sure when they're in Portsmouth, they came to the Mary Rose and we did.Dominic Jones: I mean, I look back on it now, we had adverts that had, because we'd been very lucky with Tripadvisor, five stars, I mean I would've dreamed of that at Thorpe Park, but five stars constantly so we'd have posters that say, "You've just missed the best thing to do in Portsmouth." And then another one. "Turn around." You know, like when you go to Camden Town and there's a McDonald's, a Burger King and then outside the Burger King, there's a sign. "Why are you going to Burger King? Go to McDonald's." It was like that, so it wasn't great.Kelly Molson: It's quite intense, as well, isn't it, for the visitor?Dominic Jones: Yeah.Kelly Molson: That's a lot of pressure.Dominic Jones: Well, it is and I would do it and I would literally go down and leave, because you've got to leave from the front, and I would put my Mary Rose coat, which I've still got here, and I'd be down the scenic and we'd be... And I remember coaches would turn up and one of the ladies who was fantastic with us, Sandra, she's now one of our Visitor Experience Managers, but she'd jump on the couch and say, "Have you booked your tickets? Where are you going? Can I tell you about the Mary Rose?" And she'd bring whole coaches in. It was hard and it was really... I went to sleep every night easy, because it was so tiring and it wasn't sustainable and we did need to get a deal, and actually, the National Museum of the Royal Navy and the Mary Rose always treated each other with respect, but it was like the Battle of Victory Gate and that's not the way to behave and that's not the long-term way to run a business.Dominic Jones: So what was really great was we've got a deal, we got the ability to sell tickets together and we got the ability to work together and there's some really super talented people in the National Museum of the Royal Navy and in Mary Rose and we did some great things, so when we reopened after COVID, we did this really cool video where we had Henry VIII and we had some of their characters from Warrior and some of their actors all visiting each other's attractions in the lift, wearing face masks, getting hand sanitiser, and it just feels joined up.Dominic Jones: I mean, I've done lots of partnerships in my career. At Merlin, we had a Sea Life in Helsinki, which was a joint venture with a theme park called Linnanmaki. If you ever get to interview this lady who ran Linnanmaki, or she might the CEO there, she was amazing, but we had this joint venture. See, it's really hard in a joint venture because, especially if it's a 50/50 parity decision one, you've got to get agreement and that means that you work really hard on doing the right thing, so what's quite nice is if we were on our own, we probably would've done marketing campaigns and other things which were okay, but because we end up working together and we've got to make sure we get that joint agreement, the results is always way better. It's brilliant. And the customers benefit, because it's one entrance, it's one ticket, there's a lot more value in it, so yeah, it's been really successful.Kelly Molson: I hadn't realised quite how intertwined the organisations were in terms of decision-making and marketing, like you say, and sharing all of those resources. You talked a little bit about the visitor centre. Did you have to change the infrastructure and stuff? Did you have to build new buildings and all of that and agree on that?Dominic Jones: Well, no, they had a big visitor centre because, I mean, they've got a lot more footprint, more attractions, they've got the Warrior, they've got M.33, they've got a Submarine Museum over in Victory and we've got the Mary Rose, which is amazing. And so we had a building called Porter's Lodge, which was here and then there's the gate, and then they had their visitor center and their visitor center was perfect, so we moved in there, but we agreed to make it look and feel like it was Mary Rose and National Museum of the Royal Navy, so we spent a bit of money on the look and feel of it, so that was good and same with the brand and the marketing and making it feel like it was something new, but yeah, so there was a bit of that.Dominic Jones: I mean, in terms of infrastructure, we went with their ticketing system because it made more sense because it would be a bigger cost for them to change. We went with some of the Mary Rose's media buying because, at the time, we were buying media cheaper and better. And actually, now, we're in the process of going to tenders together, so the digital agency, we've done together, the PR agency, we've done together and it's great because it's a bigger portfolio and you get different views, and I always think the best way to run any business, so, for example, the Mary Rose or Thorpe Park or wherever it is, to talk to your customers, to talk to your staff and then, obviously, to talk to the manage experts. And we get that in spades, because we've also got our staff and our customers and our volunteers, but we've got NMRN staff and customers and volunteers and together, we are getting some really cool ideas and things we can do, so it's working well. As you can see, 150% increase in the first year.Kelly Molson: I mean, I've read it with my own eyes.Dominic Jones: And I hope you saw, NMRN, they did a little nice fist bump reply, and it just is in the spirit of it. We are working together and I think that's so important.Kelly Molson: It is massively important. You mentioned something about pricing earlier, and we've spoken about this before, but you said that you did something interesting that you'd implemented that allowed you to grow the yield and the revenue as well. Was this something that you did jointly too?Dominic Jones: Yeah, it was. So we had to come up with a new pricing structure because we were doing something new, so they had, what was it called? Full Navy Ticket, which was for all of their attractions and we had an annual ticket, so when we merged, we had to come up with a new pricing structure and it's a good opportunity to change, and 84% of our business, our revenue comes from tickets, theirs is about, I think, 80% or so, I can't remember, so it's still important to them as well. So we had to get the pricing right and it allowed us to really think about what's the best value for the customer and what's the best thing to do that stops us having to discount heavily?Dominic Jones: So we created a... It's like a decoy pricing model, like supermarkets have been doing it for years, so if you buy one attraction, it's a really bad ticket. I mean, still, a few people buy them, it's a really bad ticket, so it was... I mean, it used to be £18. We put the price up to £24. It used to be, if you bought one ticket, you could visit that attraction all year. You can only visit it once. So we made it a really unattractive ticket, so that's your lower decoy, so the idea of that is you only buy that if all you really want to do is go to the Mary Rose or all you want to go is go to the Victory and if you've just come to see one of those things, that's the sort of money you would pay, it's very competitively priced with other things on the South Coast, so that's what we did.Dominic Jones: And then we created a Three-Attraction Ticket or Three-Ship Ticket, which was slightly more money, so that went up to £39, which was the biggest sort of sting, about a £15 increase, big, big jump. And that was an annual ticket. That was, you could pick your three attractions and visit them all year. And then we did, "But for £5 more, you could have an Ultimate Explorer and have everything including the..." And that sort of, so you've got the lower decoy, which is the single attraction, then you've got the medium decoy, which is three ships, but then you go, "Well, for £5 more, you could do everything."Dominic Jones: And 80% of people do the Ultimate Explorer and they do everything, and it's so good value. I mean, it's less than the price of a football game and football game, 50% of the time, you're disappointed, and you don't get long, do you? It is incredible value and you get to go to all the attractions, you get out on the water, it's brilliant. So we've got that. And then we were going to put in an upper decoy, now, an upper decoy is a premium, really expensive ticket, so for example, we might, "We have, at Mary Rose, you can go into the ship for £300 and have a private experience." And we were going to put that in, but actually, because the decoy system worked so well, we didn't need that so we've just kept it as Single Attraction Ticket, Three-Attraction Ticket and Ultimate Explorer and it's working really, really well.Dominic Jones: So yeah, that's our pricing. And because of that, we don't have to discount because we put all the value and loaded the value in, actually, we don't have to discount. And then, when we do discount, we want to reach the right people, so, for example, we do, between the months of November and February, we do a Loyal and Local campaign where we go out to Portsmouth and Southampton regions and we say, "Bring a bill in and you can get a considerable discount." All year round, we do a discount for people who've got a Portsmouth leisure card, so anyone who's on Universal Credit, so they get 50% off.Dominic Jones: And we do some other really cool community engagement stuff between us with schools and stuff like that, and then if we do do a discount, so discounts are still important, so there's some amazing partners out there, GetYourGuide, Picnic, lots of the providers that really support businesses, Virgin, Ticketdays, all that sort of stuff. But we do it at the right level, so we've got like a playground, so whereas before, we might have been competing against each other, thinking, "Oh, we need to discount by 40% or 50% and then give them extra commission so they push it." We now do it at a really fair level, so there is a bit of a discount, but it's not much.Dominic Jones: And then for the consumer, we want the cheapest, best-value ticket to always be on our website. And we used a couple companies, so we used a company called, they were called Brand Incrementum, they're now called Magic Little Giants, we use them, we use some insight into what previous businesses have done before, but we copied the American Six Flags website model. If you ever want a quick lesson in pricing, just go to Six Flags. Their website is that... I mean, you're into websites, right?Kelly Molson: I am.Dominic Jones: It's the best website for pricing. I love it and I check it nearly every month. It makes me laugh, how focused they are on decoy pricing and how in-your-face they are, but how you don't know it as a consumer unless you know. It's amazing. It drives my family mad. I love it. Anyway. Yeah.Kelly Molson: This decoy pricing, I've never heard that phrase, I've never heard that used in pricing before. This is all new to me.Dominic Jones: It's like supermarkets when you get... And I remember, we've got a local supermarket near us and the guy did, "buy one bottle of wine, get one wine free". And then he had, "or buy one wine for £7 or buy two for £7". We were always going to buy two for £7 or two for £8. It's all that sort of trying to encourage behaviour, but he didn't quite get it because recently, I went in, it was like, "buy one, pay for one" and I was like, "Isn't that... That's the same as normal, yeah?" "Yeah." But he's a nice guy so I bought one. Well, that's my problem.Dominic Jones: But no, it's the same way supermarkets have been doing, where they try with the club card to get you to purchase things, or they're trying to do that, and all we're trying to do is encourage everyone to go for that Ultimate Explorer, which is the best value. It's almost like you can imagine it on the website, it's got a sign saying, "Pick me." So even to the extent we still don't, this day, discount our Single Attraction Ticket on our website. We don't give any discount for it and then we give a £5 discount on the three attractions and £5 on Ultimate Explorer. But yeah, loving the pricing.Kelly Molson: Love this. This is such great insight. Thank you for sharing. This partnership is really intriguing to me because I think it seems like the perfect setup, right? Because you're literally neighbors in the same area, you could make this work really well. What advice would you give to other attractions that are thinking about partnering with other attractions? Like what would be your top tips for people to make this work well?Dominic Jones: I mean, it's really hard. You've got to think about, because often people see it as competitors, but you've got to think in terms of getting the customers or the guests or the consumers, whatever you call them, giving them the best value, and during lockdown, when we were being interviewed and stuff, we'd always say, "Come visit the Mary Rose or come visit..." Once we did the joint venture, "Come visit the Historic Dockyard. But also, if you can't come visit, go visit your local museum, go visit anyone." It's important to share that, and I think there are always benefits of working together, you're always stronger together.Dominic Jones: When I was at Oakwood Theme Park in Wales, amazing theme park, you're in West Wales and we were thinking, "Well, how do we reach further and advertise more?" And actually, we ended up working with a farm, which was a stunning farm that had rides and animals called Folly Farm down the road and we worked, then, with Manor House Wildlife Park and Heatherton, and you actually work together and you can work together and I'd always say, "Try it on something." So try it whether it's an event or try it whether it's a destination marketing campaign. I mean, we're working with the people of Portsmouth, so with... "The people of Portsmouth", that sounds a bit grand. We're working with attractions in Portsmouth on trying to get people into Portsmouth, so we do something with Portsmouth Council where the Spinnaker Tower and D-Day Museum and Mary Rose and National Museum of the Royal Navy and now Portsmouth Historical Dockyard, together, we advertise in London because actually, advertising in London individually is really expensive, but if you do it collaboratively.Dominic Jones: There's lots of ways to do stuff collaboratively and find another angle. So we've got other people on our site that we're not partners with at the moment, so the Portsmouth Naval Base Property Trust, amazing people who run some of the small boats that we did the Gunboat Race with the D-Day veterans on the weekend. Fantastic. So yesterday, we had a really great Volunteers' Tea Party to celebrate the end of volunteer and we had the volunteers from the Property Trust, we had the volunteers from the NMRN, the volunteers from the Mary Rose, there's always some synergy and I would say, in any way, find it.Dominic Jones: Everywhere I've worked, I've tried to get partnerships with local businesses, with other theme parks, with other attractions, because, actually, it's your stronger together, and if you're going, especially, after a local market, because you've always got to love your locals, that's the most important thing. If they see that you actually are the sort of people that work with each other, it makes them almost more proud of you. You remember the Game Makers in the London Olympics in 2012 and how amazing they were and how they did that sort of course where everyone was recommending all this stuff to you, that's kind of what you want, but I would find some common ground, whatever it is.Dominic Jones: Whether it's lobbying, we found common ground at Thorpe Park with other attractions to lobby the government for things, for VAT to level... Or whether it's in Oakwood, trying to get some advertising to get people from Bristol to cross the bridge to come into Wales or whether it's, I'm trying to think, in Amsterdam, we worked, so Madame Tussauds Amsterdam and Dungeons, which I was responsible for, we worked with Heineken because they had this amazing experience and with Tours & Tickets, so we'd make sure that if anyone came to Amsterdam, they came to our attractions. It's those sort of partnerships, finding the common ground and making it work.Dominic Jones: And don't be scared of it, because you are always bigger and better together and customers have so much choice, so working together delivers amazing results. I would never want to go back to not being part of a partnership with the National Museum of the Royal Navy and I would love it if we could do more. We are keen to do more with other attractions in the South to get people to come to the South Coast, to come to Hampshire. But yeah, I would definitely do...Dominic Jones: And also, you get bigger buying power, so say, for example, Merlin are really strong, so they don't necessarily need those with other partners because they can do a campaign in the press, Sun, Days Go Out and you've got all the Merlin attractions, but if you're individual attractions, you can't, so if you do a partnership with your competitors, you can then suddenly say, "Right, well, we want to do a Days Out campaign in the press between all these independent attractions."Dominic Jones: I mean, it's brilliant. I love it and I love, also, this industry, how collaborative especially the heritage side is. You can say, "Oh, I was thinking about doing this. What do you think?" Or, "What do you think about that?" And everyone will share and everyone is almost willing you to be successful. It's crazy, right? It's one of the best industries in the world. If you were in, I don't know, the restaurant business, you wouldn't be doing that, would you? Or another... It's so good. Anyway, hopefully, that answers your question.Kelly Molson: Oh, absolutely.Dominic Jones: I get very passionate about it. I'm so sorry. I love it.Kelly Molson: I'm so glad that you do because it answered my question perfectly and I think you've given so much value to listeners today in terms of all of the things that you've done, I couldn't have asked for a better response. Thank you. It's a big year for the Mary Rose, isn't it? And I think it would be very right that we talk about that. So it's your 40th year celebration this year, isn't it?Dominic Jones: Yeah, 40 years since the raising, so 1982, October. I am obviously older than you so I remember watching it on Blue Peter as a child and it was the world's first underwater live broadcast. It was watched by over 60 million people worldwide. I mean, it was amazing of its time and so yeah, 40 years, and because of that, we've now got the world's biggest Tudor collection of everyday life, there's nowhere else in the world you can get closer to Tudor and we've got the biggest maritime salvation, so we've got a lot of plans to celebrate. Unfortunately, the pandemic got in the way. During the pandemic, I'm not going to lie, it was horrific. There were times when we were drawing a list of who we were going to give the keys to, got really, really bad and it got dark for everyone and every museum, every attraction, every business, I'm not trying to say, "Oh, poor us." Everyone had that tough time.Dominic Jones: But it meant that actually investing, we were going to do another building, we were going to do a whole museum dedicated to the raising and actually, probably one of the best things that came out of it is we didn't because we got the joint venture, which is brilliant, our trading improved, we had a fantastic summer and then we were like, "Right, we should really do something for the 40th anniversary, but we can't afford taking another lease of another building or building another building, so what can we do?" And we managed to come up with a few plans, so the first thing we're doing is we're doing a TV documentary, which is going to be brilliant, coming out in October. Honestly, I've seen, they started some of the filming and the pre [inaudible 00:37:39], it's going to be brilliant.Kelly Molson: Oh, that's so exciting.Dominic Jones: I can't give too much away because we've had to sign something, but it's going to be great. And actually, we even had, because we're responsible for the wreck site, so we had Chris and Alex who helped raise the Mary Rose, our Head of Interpretation, Head of Research, amazing people, they were out diving the other day because we're still responsible for the wreck site and it just gives you goosebumps. I saw the footage and oh, it's amazing. So we got that. We're also building a 4D experience.Dominic Jones: So when we reopened last summer, we opened with this thing called 1545, which was an immersive experience and we wanted to get across the Mary Rose didn't sink on its maiden voyage, it was Henry VIII's ship that he, when he came to the throne, he commissioned two ships, the Mary Rose was one of them, it fought in lots of battles, it had a long life and then sank defending Britain in a battle, by the way, the French who were invading was twice the size of the Spanish Armada, but because history's written by the winners, we don't hear that.Dominic Jones: But amazing, so we did this amazing, immersive experience. We got Dame Judi Dench to do the voice and you feel like you're going to get sunk. Well, the ship does sink and you go under and then you go into the museum and it's so good and we were like, "We want to do something for the end. We want to have a finale that says..." Because the thing about our museum, it's authentic. There's 19,700 artifacts. You can't get that anywhere else. I mean, it's just brilliant. Anyway, so we thought, "How are we going to end this?" And the thing we don't do justice to is the finding, the raising, the excavation, all the divers, there was 500 volunteer divers. From the 1960s, people were looking for it.Dominic Jones: I mean, Alexander McKee, who found it, was on the news and people would say... It was like an Indiana Jones movie, they were saying, "Oh, he's never going to find it." And other people were looking, the Navy were looking and there was a bit in Indiana Jones where they got the map the wrong way around and all of that. Brilliant. So they found the Mary Rose and then they got Margaret Rule who was this amazing lady who had, when she went to university, I think she didn't get a place at university at first because she was a woman and this is amazing, today's day story, and she didn't dive, she was an archeologist. And then she said, "I'm going to dive." Taught herself to dive and without her, this museum, the Mary Rose wouldn't be here, so Alexander McKee, Margaret Rule, two amazing people, both of them...Kelly Molson: What a woman.Dominic Jones: Yeah, what a woman, but both of them, both of them, without them, we wouldn't be here. So we want to tell their story, but also, we want to put the guests and the visitors to what it's like to dive, so with a mixture of real-life filming, footage from these 500 volunteer divers, outtakes from the Chronicle programs that are on the BBC, including, if we can get it to look right, even His Royal Highness, Prince Charles diving. It is stunning.Dominic Jones: So we're going to take the guests on a bit of a pre-show with the history, then they're going to get into the 4D theater and it'd be like you were boarding a red, going out to the wreck site, there'll be a dive briefing, you'll have the wind in your hair, the seats will be buzzing, but I'm hoping it's this good. I better ring the people after this [inaudible 00:40:38].Kelly Molson: You're really building it up, Dominic.Dominic Jones: Yeah. Well, it better deliver. No, they're brilliant. Figment are amazing. They're so good. So you get in there and then you dive and then you go down and you see what it's like to be under the water. The Royal Engineers were involved, the divers were involved and then you'll be there when the Mary Rose is raised, we're even going to recreate the moment where it... Oh, it'll be brilliant.Dominic Jones: So in answer to your question, we're doing a documentary and a 4D experience, and we've got anniversary lectures so if you're around in October, come and get involved. We've got a lot of people, from historians to divers to... Just talking about the relevance of the Mary Rose and the history of it, and also the diving, and we've got a new coffee table book coming out, so we've got lots and lots and lots going on.Kelly Molson: Oh, my goodness. It's all going on.Dominic Jones: And if we'd have done it the old way, if we'd have done it with a new museum and a new building, I don't think it would've been as good. I mean, I joined the Divers' Legacy group, so about 150 of the divers, on a Zoom call a few weeks ago and it's just, it takes you... These people, who, some of them are retired now or bear in mind this was 40, 50 years ago and hearing their stories and it's living history and it's so important that we tell these stories and capture them now, because in 50 years, they won't be here, and part of our responsibility, our charity objectives, if you like, is to tell the story and forever, and I think that bit of the story's missing, so if that's one thing that we do while I'm at the Mary Rose, I'll be really proud.Kelly Molson: Ah, that is wonderful. And it is [inaudible 00:42:12].Dominic Jones: You have to come, right? You're going to have to come.Kelly Molson: Well, this is the question. When do I need to come to experience everything that you've just sold to me? Because I am sold.Dominic Jones: Yeah. You probably want to come after our anniversary, because we're hoping to launch all this around that time, which is in October, which is, now, this is an interesting one because this was a good conversation with our trustees and our board. "Do you want to launch something in the off-peak period? Don't you want to launch it at Easter or the summer or..." And my view is we should launch it because it's the right thing to do and we're launching this in October because it's a legacy, we want the divers there, we want as many of them there as possible and it's going to be at the Mary Rose forever. This is the ending to the Mary Rose Museum. So it's not like we're launching something for Easter or summer, so we are going to launch it in October, so I'll let you know the details, come and get involved.Kelly Molson: All right, absolutely. I am there. If it's as good as what you've just described, then it's going to be one amazing day out.Dominic Jones: It'd be better. And then, and final thing, sorry, which we're not doing, but I wanted to do is we've still got some of the Mary Rose down in the ocean, so one day, I'd like to bring that back up. I don't think I'll be here to do that because it's probably be in 15 years' time or something because we need to raise a lot of money and do that, but we want to bring the rest of her back up or whatever's left down there back up, and that's quite exciting because our story continues. We still do research.Dominic Jones: We did this fantastic piece of research on skeletons, on human remains. It's a really cool diversity story. Out of the eight skeletons, one was Spanish, one was Venetian, two were North African, second generation, not slaves, a real diversity story in Tudor England. Amazing. Maybe the Victorians whitewashed history. Who knows? But what a great story. And we keep learning and we've got this amazing team of curatorial staff and all of our staff, from the maintenance to the visitor staff to the volunteers and every day, we learn something new, so [inaudible 00:44:03] we want to do. And then, at some point... Have you seen The Dig on Netflix?Kelly Molson: Yes. Yes.Dominic Jones: Great film.Kelly Molson: So good.Dominic Jones: Great film, but I want to write to Netflix to do The Dive. Can you imagine? This story about human endeavor with the Mary Rose? It'd be amazing, so we'd like to do that as well at some point, but we just don't have enough hours in the day, right?Kelly Molson: No. Just add it onto that long list of stuff.Dominic Jones: Yeah.Kelly Molson: Wow. Thank you.Dominic Jones: So if you know anyone in Netflix, let us know, or if anyone from Netflix is listening, get in touch, we want to do that. It'd be cool.Kelly Molson: I would love it.Dominic Jones: I've already casted.Kelly Molson: If someone from Netflix was listening, that would be incredible. Who have you casted?Dominic Jones: Well, so local, because you've got to get local, so for Margaret Rule, I reckon Kate Winslet, she'd do a good job. Great actress. I mean, we've already got Dame Judi Dench, so the same sort of caliber in our 1545 experience, and then also another local who could bring the Alexander McKee, Kenneth Branagh, but to be honest with you, Netflix can do all of that, because let's be honest, I'm not going to make movies, am I? I'm running a museum. But I just think it'd be really cool. It'd be really cool.Kelly Molson: I don't think there's anything that you couldn't do, Dominic, to be honest, after this podcast, so who knows?Dominic Jones: It'd be really cool. Yeah, who knows?Kelly Molson: All right, last question for you, a book that you love that you'd recommend to our listeners?Dominic Jones: I love this question and I really struggled, so I went back and thought about a work example, because I think that's probably more useful, so in all of my career, I've come across lots of people who talk about strategy and I have my own view on what strategy is, but there are lots of books you can read about strategy and there's only one book, in my opinion, that is worth reading and it's this, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy. Hopefully, it's still in print. It is the only book to read on strategy. It's the best book I've... And without this book, I don't think I would've been able to do half the stuff that I've done, because it's all about how you formulate your decisions, how you make your decisions, what the outcome is, it's about execution, it's about everything that, for me, you need to be successful, so I recommend this book. Really good book.Kelly Molson: Good Strategy/Bad Strategy. I have not read that book, but I feel like that's going to go...Dominic Jones: You should read it.Kelly Molson: Yeah, that's going to go top of my pile. All right, listeners, if you want to win a copy of this book, as ever, if you just go over to our Twitter account and you retweet this podcast announcement with the words, "I want Dominic's book." And then you will be in with a chance of winning it. Oh, my goodness. I have had such a good time listening to you today. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing. It's been so valuable. Yeah, that's blown me away today. I'm very excited about coming to visit and thank you for sharing the insight into your partnerships.Dominic Jones: Yeah. Absolute pleasure. And thanks for being kind with the icebreakers, you're going to get the rubber, that's going to your collection.Kelly Molson: Oh, yay. A rubber rubber.Dominic Jones: Because I was really upset that you've got a rubber collection without the Mary Rose. That actually hurt my feelings. It hurt my feelings.Kelly Molson: Well, I'm sorry, I've never actually visited the Mary Rose.Dominic Jones: Well, we're going to put that right.Kelly Molson: We are going to change this, aren't we? So yeah, I'm sorry. I will come and get my rubber in-person, then. Don't post it to me. I'll come and get it in-person when I come and visit.Dominic Jones: Yeah, let's do that. Thank you. Keep it up.Kelly Molson: Thanks for listening to Skip the Queue. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five-star review. It really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned. Skip the Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. You can find show notes and transcriptions from this episode and more over on our website, rubbercheese.com/podcast.

What's the difference between good strategy and bad strategy? Why is understanding strategy as a theory of success so powerful? What is a framework for good strategy? And how grand is grand strategy? Dr. Van Jackson sits down with Dr. Jeff Meiser (University of Portland) to discuss. They also talk about Richard Rumelt's classic book, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy.

Megan joined Hotjar two years ago, and had the challenge to create the strategy from scratch. But moreover, she has the opportunity to review with fresh eyes how the execution went and what she learned along the way. In this very interesting conversation we covered the journey, starting with very insightful tips on the initial strategy creation, how they communicated and aligned the strategy across the organization, and eventually what they learned while executing. We talked about: Considering that 70% of strategies are never executed due to bad communication, Megan decided *not* to fail for this reason and what she did about it. How Megan first aligned expectations by sharing what a strategy is not. Megan recommended strategy books: Blue Ocean Strategy, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, Playing to win. How Megan used a trello board to divide all the “task” or all the information you need to put together for the strategy following the Good Strategy/Bad Strategy methods. Using Reforge's “4 fits” to align on the market, the model, and the channel, and use it to discuss with stakeholders the fit of the product strategy. How to identify market insights through signals, patterns and trends. The role of product leadership in keeping an eye of those external trends. The high ROI of 1:1 strategy conversations. How Megan used Airbnb's 11-start experience exercise, and the key result was that people find out that 5-star experience was not out of reach. Hotjar's final strategy artifact was a 5' video extracted from the original 15-pages document, making much more memorable, and easier to consume and understand. How Hotjar teams created ⅔ of the initiatives that were considered for execution of the strategy. How they learned that one of the strategic pillars was not relevant and what they did about it. And many other things! You can find Megan on Linkedin. Remember that you can find more info and material on 100productstrategies.com. If you are eager to know more about product strategy, check out Product Direction: How to build successful products at scale with Strategy, Roadmaps, and OKRs You can also contact or follow your host, Nacho bassino, at nachobassino.com (training, coaching, and more)

In this video, I thought it would be fun to share 10 of my favorite reads from 2021. This list includes books on business, personal growth, and other interesting topics. To be clear, these are books that I READ in 2021, not necessarily published in 2021.Want to leave a COMMENT or watch the VIDEO edition?► https://youtu.be/-wh-ZiXPa8U1. GOOD STRATEGY / BAD STRATEGY by Richard Rumelt Buy It On Amazon ➜ https://www.amazon.com/dp/1781256179/2. THE SERENDIPITY MINDSET by Christian Busch, PhDBuy It On Amazon ➜ https://www.amazon.com/dp/0593086023/Book Summary ➜ https://youtu.be/6SM24_RNLWw3, 4, 5. THE GREAT MENTAL MODELS  by Rhiannon Beaubien and Shane ParrishVolume 1. Buy It On Amazon ➜ https://www.amazon.com/dp/1999449002/Volume 2. Buy It On Amazon ➜ https://www.amazon.com/dp/1999449037/Volume 3. Buy It On Amazon ➜ https://www.amazon.com/dp/1999449061/6. PEAK by Anders EricssonBuy It On Amazon ➜ https://www.amazon.com/dp/0544947223/7. CHATTER by Ethan KrossBuy It On Amazon ➜ https://www.amazon.com/dp/0525575235/Book Summary ➜ https://youtu.be/i0gdp6cu5pQ8. FOUR THOUSAND WEEKS by Oliver BurkemanBuy It On Amazon ➜ https://www.amazon.com/dp/0374159122/9. TINY HABITS by BJ Fogg, PhDBuy It On Amazon ➜ https://www.amazon.com/dp/0358003326/10. SURELY YOU'RE JOKING, MR. FEYNMAN by Richard P. FeynmanBuy It On Amazon ➜ https://www.amazon.com/dp/0393355624/THE TOP 50 BEST BUSINESS BOOKS

Our guest for today is Gaurav Baheti, CEO & Founder at Procol. Gaurav is an Engineer turned Designer & has worked at companies like Zomato and Google. But being passionate and full of potential, he decided to start his own company wanting to experiment and do what he really loves! Procol is a digital procurement platform that helps companies digitize their buying processes. It has raised a capital of $1 Million from Blue Ventures & Rainmatter, a fund managed by Zerodha. ⭐ Subscribe to Whiteboard.fm to stay updated with more interviews and clips https://www.youtube.com/whiteboardfm?sub_confirmation=1 _____

Let's explore 50 of the best business books of all time. This list is made up of influential classics and personal favorites that have guided my entrepreneurial journey over the last 22 years. Each one covers unique and valuable insights that I believe can help you achieve your goals in business and beyond.CLICK HERE FOR THE FULL ARTICLE, BOOK LINKS, AND MORE:

Good strategy, bad strategy: The difference, and why it matters By Richard Rumelt Key insights Strategy =/= ambitious goal setting, vision, charisma Around the 60's, many authors started ascribing leader's success to their vision, combined with their charisma. This has resulted in a lot of bad strategy, based on ambitious goal setting. Example: 20/20 plan - 20% growth with 20% profit margin. Often a goal or a vision can be a perfectly fine starting point for a strategy. However, the strategy itself must include precise information on how these goals will actually be achieved. Example: warzone Every good strategy has the same foundation: a diagnosis, a guiding policy and a set of coherent actions Diagnosis: What is the challenge to be overcome? Often requires focus on critical elements to simplify complex realities A guiding policy is an overall approach chosen to cope with or overcome the obstacles identified in the diagnosis. Like the guardrails on a highway, the guiding policy directs and constrains action in certain directions without defining exactly what shall be done. A set of coherent actions dictate how the guiding policy will be carried out. The actions should be coherent, meaning the use of resources, policies, and maneuvers that are undertaken should be coordinated and support each other (not fight each other, or be independent from one another). A good strategy demands that you make a choice, based on your diagnosis (strengths, weaknesses). Example: Bonsai Good strategy vs bad strategy -Good strategy identifies the key challenge to overcome. Bad strategy fails to identify the nature of the challenge. -Good strategy includes actions to take to overcome the challenge. Actions are not “implementation” details -Good strategy is designed to be coherent – all the actions an organization takes should reinforce and support each other. Leaders must do this deliberately and coordinate action across departments. Bad strategy is just a list of “priorities” that don't support each other, at best, or actively conflict with each other, undermine each other, and fight for resources, at worst. Good strategy is about focusing and coordinating efforts to achieve an outcome, which necessarily means saying “No” to some goals, initiatives, and people. Developing a strategy is not a one-time-exercise. The only constant in any situation is change. Your action points, and maybe even your strategy will need to adapt to this change. Change can come from technology, industry trends or competitors. Next to adapting to change, it is also possible to use change to your advantage. Example: The author once asked Steve Jobs how he was going to compete against the Win-tel standard in the personal computer industry. His answer was - ‘I'm not going to, I'm going to wait for the next big thing in the tech industry, and take it'. A good strategy maximises your competitive advantage by limiting your rivals' opportunities and maximising your resources. Approach strategy like science, start with a hypothesis and continue to test your hypotheses. Once in a while, it pays off to stop doing and reflect on your priorities, example: interview of the CEO.

Wrong Sequencing kills more businesses than anything else. Here is how to get your sequencing right so that you can run a successful business. 7 Day FREE Trial to “The Entrepreneur's Book Club”: https://2000books.com Get my Coaching & Mentorship on scaling your Online Business: https://www.2000books.com/grow  

در این پادکست، از زبان ریچارد روملت، کتاب استراتژی خوب و بد را روایت خواهم کرد.

Business strategy is often ignored until there is a problem. Until then, we often rely on strategy substitutes like a compelling vision or having ambitious goals.CLICK HERE FOR THE FULL ARTICLE, BOOK LINKS, AND MORE:

Saya membahas buku Good Strategy Bad Strategy karya Richard P. Rumelt. Buku ini membahas bagaimana membuat strategi yang benar dan tepat sasaran. Apa yang membedakan antara strategi yang winning dan tidak? Tentu saja, strategi digunakan untuk mencapai tujuan yang diinginkan, tapi walaupun tujuannya sama, hasilnya jauh berbeda. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/si-kutu-buku/support

This week, we talk about how to become a more strategic designer: what should you be doing day to day, or thinking about more often? In The Sidebar, we talk about the downsides of using metaphors to describe the role of designers in building software.Golden Ratio Supporter:AroundThank you to Around, a better way to video call. The product is designed specifically to make it easier to gather small groups to collaborate in real time, without all the distracting and frustrating interfaces that comes with most video chat software. We love the small floating heads and emphasis on making it easy to work alongside the video call, rather than constantly having to app switch.You can get started for free by signing up at Around.co!Latest VIP Patrons:Tim NoetzelCollin HadleyKristin AuCamden GabaGabriel LibermanJosh HoubenPreethi ShreeyaEdward LakeNick GiordanoCaleb HillJames Molyneux-BirchThe Sidebar:The Sidebar is an exclusive weekly segment for our Patreon supporters. You can subscribe starting at $1 per month for access to bonus content going forward! Sign up at patreon.com/designdetails.Tweets:Nejat Seçkin Oral tweeted: I’m pretty sure I said this multiple times before but @designdetailsfm manages to answer questions that I’m seeking at that particular time. Almost every episode. I don’t know what magic it is but I’m here for it.Main Topic:Jessica Tong asks on GitHub: I work at a small startup with less than 15 people and I'm the only designer. Recently, I've had a performance review and my manager, who is the Head of Product has recognised that I am lacking in "strategy skills". I seem to mostly come up with short term ideas. eg. we have a problem regarding X, so i am able to come up with multiple solutions, etc. I've also been to a job interview where they said I was lacking high level, strategy skills. I am unsure as to how to develop this skill and think of my work more in the long term and plan for the long term. My manager has suggested a book called "Good Strategy/Bad Strategy" by Richard Rumelt but other than that, he does not know how to help - probably because he is from a product management background, and I should be developing a UX strategy skills. Do you have any advice, or resources you can point me to where I can grow in this area as a product designer?OKRs: Objectives and Key ResultsSpotify acquires Locker RoomStratecheryCool Things:Brian shared Readng, a beautiful app for tracking what you read, and following other people’s book recommendations. It’s like Letterboxd, but for books! And it’s beautifully designed, and a joy to use.Design by Aziz Firat – follow!Marshall shared Quadeca – From Me To You, a music video. Quadeca also comes from the YouTube world, alongside his own music productions, so dive into the backlog of videos.Design Details on the Web:

Not all entrepreneurs start as someone who was successful in academics or social skills. Eric Siu found his success starting as a serious eSports and poker player then converting his experience into the world of digital marketing. Eric is the CEO of ClickFlow, a content intelligence software that helps grow SEO traffic. He is also an investor and an advisor to many who look to bring their businesses to the next level. He’s worked with companies such as Amazon, Uber, and Salesforce as a digital marketing advisor and now shares his expertise through two podcasts and his new book, Leveling Up. I’m looking forward to getting into today’s episode and learning more about mastering the game of life from the master himself. Things you will learn in this episode: *[00:01 - 07:26] Opening Segment* * I introduce today’s guest Eric Siu * Founder and CEO of ClickFlow * Podcaster * Digital marketing expert * Be sure to check out guestio.com ( https://guestio.com/ ) and start booking * Eric shares a bit about his book and what to expect * Available as of Feb 24th, 2021 * Acquiring power-ups in life * The wealth ladder * The game as life * Link below * Eric’s background * Feeling like a failure as a kid * Into gaming * No interest in school * The lessons learned from games *[07:27 - 14:36] Failing Up; Mastering the Game of Life* * Combining the lessons learned and applying it to business * Eric’s experience in negotiating deals * Failing your way up * How Eric formed his marketing skills * Getting hooked on digital marketing * Consuming content through books * Failing constantly * The beauty of business - hitting the home run * You just have to get it right once * Taking the time to turn things around * Reinvesting *[14:37 - 20:33] Diagnose Your Unfair Advantage; Leveraging the Best Channel* * Eric breaks down the best marketing channels to focus on * Strategy is not the goal * Diagnose your unfair advantage * Executing tactics with strategy * Eric talks about channels to look for * Clubhouse * Leveraging Twitter * Algorithm strength of TikTok * LinkedIn organic strength * What works best for what you want to achieve *[20:34 - 29:27] Closing Segment* * Who you know or what you know? * Who - the power of peer groups * Learning and teaching * The network effect * One relationship that changed everything * Experience with hiring someone * Finding someone at a conference * ThE RaNdoM RoUnD * How to reach out to Eric * Links below * Final words *Tweetable Quotes:* “The reason why it’s not called level up, it’s called Leveling Up, because the game doesn’t end,  you continue to play the game… for me, business is the ultimate game.” - Eric Siu “At some point you get so numb to failure, it’s the ticket to success.” - Eric Siu “If you want to go far you go with a team, if you want to go fast you go alone.” - Eric Siu *Resources Mentioned:* * Marketing School Podcast ( https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/marketing-school-digital-marketing-online-marketing/id1138869817 ) * Leveling Up Podcast ( https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/leveling-up-with-eric-siu/id741544976 ) * Leveling Up: How to Master the Game of Life ( https://www.levelingup.com/ ) * Let My People Go Surfing ( https://www.amazon.com/Let-People-Surfing-Education-Businessman/dp/0143037838 ) * Good Strategy/Bad Strategy ( https://www.amazon.com/Good-Strategy-Bad-Strategy-audiobook/dp/B07R6XQ8YP/ref=sr_1_1?crid=32T86V0MO1KFQ&dchild=1&keywords=good+strategy+%2F+bad+strategy&qid=1614502447&s=books&sprefix=good+str%2Cstripbooks-intl-ship%2C400&sr=1-1 ) * A Nordic Theory of Everything ( https://www.amazon.com/Nordic-Theory-Everything-Search-Better/dp/0062316559 ) * The Great CEO Within ( https://www.amazon.com/Great-CEO-Within-Tactical-Building/dp/0578599287/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=the+ceo+within&qid=1614503216&s=books&sr=1-1 ) Connect with Eric on LinkedIn ( https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericosiu/ ) , Twitter ( https://twitter.com/ericosiu?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor ) , YouTube ( https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3owDdLk7HL1dyQnkoBuRew ) , and Instagram ( https://www.instagram.com/ericosiu/?hl=en ). Be sure to visit https://www.levelingup.com/ to learn more. Did you love the value that we are putting out in the show? *LEAVE A REVIEW* and tell us what you think about the episode so we can continue putting out great content just for you! Share this episode and help someone who wants to connect with world-class people. Jump on over to travischapel.com/makemypodcast ( https://travischappell.typeform.com/to/kmf5p4 ) and let my team make you your very own show! If you want to learn how to build YOUR network, check out my website a travischappell.com ( https://travischappell.com/ ).  You can connect with me on Facebook ( https://www.facebook.com/travis.chappell15 ) , Instagram ( https://www.instagram.com/travischappell/ ) , and Twitter ( https://twitter.com/traviscchappell?lang=en ). Be sure to join The Lounge ( https://www.facebook.com/groups/byncommunity ) to become part of the community that’s setting up REAL relationships that add value and create investments. 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President-elect Joe Biden ran against Medicare-for-All in the Democratic Presidential primary, and he won. Despite millions of Americans losing their medical insurance after being laid off in the midst of deadly pandemic, the crises of 2020 have not brought universal healthcare back onto the national agenda.So what do advocates for Medicare-for-All do now? And how should we think about using the leverage the Squad will wield inside a Democratic caucus that has only a slim, 222-seat majority in the House of Representatives?Group chat regulars Guido, Amira, and Waleed make sense of a recent strategic debate swirling around the left: what if AOC and the Squad refuses to vote for Rep. Nancy Pelosi until she brings Medicare-for-All to the floor for an up-or-down vote? Is that a good strategy? The Group Chat sifts the good from the bad while trying to stay humble and keep the good vibes going.Winning takes long-term planning, it turns out, which is why you, yes you, should nominate a leader in your community to run for Congress in 2022.Additional references:Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's interview with Jeremy Scahill at The Intercept.AOC: Pelosi needs to go, but there's no one to replace her yetJimmy Dore: How Progressives Could FORCE A Medicare For All VoteThe Campaign Against ‘Medicare For All' Is Spending Millions. Progressives Not So Much.The Majority Report with Sam SederThe Left Can Win, by Pablo Iglesias

26 November 2020 Prompted by some discussions at work, I recently read Turn the Ship Around! I enjoyed it. Here are my notes. Making followers into le... https://www.annashipman.co.uk/jfdi/turn-the-ship-around.html Anna ShipmanJFDICVEtcFollow me on TwitterTurn the Ship Around!short video (10 min)High Output Managementthe ones I asked my team when I joinedaim is to have the principal engineers on my team running the team without meWhat got you here won’t get you thereblameless post-mortemTurn the Ship Around!How to sellMeeting everyone on a new teamThe Multiple Faces of Technical LeadershipUnlocking value with durable teamsWhy and how to do annual performance reviewsA 'Hello World' mod-wsgi applicationThe difficult teenage years at Tech NottinghamSocial distancing quizSlackThe Effective ExecutiveTriggersWhat got you here won't get you thereNo next NextThe difficult teenage years: Setting tech strategy after a launchAfter the launch: the difficult teenage yearsRussell Davies's strategy adviceHow do you delegate to a group of people?Good Strategy Bad StrategyFinance for non-accountantsHow to make the most out of meetings with vendorsFinding the next level tech jobWhat I learned in six years at GDSHow to interview job applicants fairlyHigh output managementMoving SPA to HTTPSReplacing the SPA CMSUnderstanding my strengths using a Johari windowCleaning up SPA for GDPRHow coding in the open can help you release fasterDeploying to shared hosting with TravisResources for coding in the openHow to open up closed codeA year in the life of an Open Source LeadCoding in the open in government: Turing Fest talkSign up to my new mailing list!An awk command I always forgetRemoving MediaWiki from SPA: Cool URIs don't changeRemoving MediaWiki from SPA: Changes to the siteDon’t be afraid to code in the open: here’s how to do it securelyThe benefits of coding in the openBreak into public speakingCross government meetup on Open Source and SecurityJoin the SPA organising committeeWriting a business caseCome to the cross-government Open Source meetupNext steps for Open Source in governmentI am now Open Source LeadHow to blogMaking my site look better on small screensUseful questions for one-to-onesCode sharing in large organisationsChoosing Cloud Foundry for the Government Platform as a ServiceVideo of Operations: a developer's guideSlides and links from Operations: a developer's guideA PaaS for GovernmentLooking at open source PaaS technologiesBuilding a platform to host digital servicesA career path for technologists at GDSTips on writing a technical CVHow to raise a good pull requestStaying technicalWhat is a technical architect?How we moved vCloud Tools from Coding in the Open to Open SourceHow do I get more women to speak at my conference?Build Quality InSome thoughts on preparing an Ignite talkHow I keep alphagov/fog updated...Using Git to refactor vCloud Tools into separate gemsSketchnotingBuilding tools to provision our machinesRunning OSS projectsAre you thinking of speaking at a conference?Applying for a job at GDSHow Anonymous Submissions Affected Gender Balance at our ConferenceCreating a Puppet moduleSome Regex in the form of a Picture!Where Do I Start?Roof Bug-fixingUpgrading to 12.04...Partitioning!Roof HackingHow to EstimateTesting the redirectionsLearning the perlsLearning More About D3CAP again – or should that be PACELC?The CAP Theorem and MongoDBWhat Should Your Work Log Tell You?P.O.A.Would Have Been Useful to Know at My First Game JamJavaScript Talk Takes ShapePreparation Begins for the JavaScript Talk...JavaScript Visualisations ProposalMy Continuing Struggles with LinuxSorl-thumbnail Comes Back to Bite MeHow to Write Efficient CSS – Evaluation of CSSHow to Write Efficient CSS – Basic CSSA Voyage of Discovery – Upgrading Firefox Part 2Upgrading Firefox – part 1...What I have learned about folder structure today

What is bad strategy? What is good strategy? How did Steve Jobs save Apple? How did David beat Goliath? What is the reason behind Walmart's success? Was Kennedy's goal of landing a man on the moon, actually a strategy? How does IKEA excel? Why is the Disney brand so strong? How did software help Cisco rise to the pinnacle? What could be the future for newspapers? How did Nvidia become a superpower? How did Starbucks become a giant? All this and more in Good Strategy Bad Strategy, by Richard Rumelt. This episode is a review of this book, focusing on one very significant story - of Hannibal's victory over the Romans, making him the Father of Strategy. Please rate & review this podcast here: https://podcasts.apple.com/in/podcast/the-31-5-guy-podcast/id1528897344 You can find me at https://rounakbose.in Links: https://www.instagram.com/the31point5guy/ https://twitter.com/The31point5Guy https://medium.com/the-31-5-guy https://www.linkedin.com/in/rounakbose1997/ ~ The 31.5 Guy

Riku Vassinen is a Managing Partner at Ogilvy Africa and the writer behind the strategy blog, standupstrategy.org. He has written a book, Moccalattehipsteri (in Finnish) on marketing back in 2011 and even shot a hip hop video to promote it. He currently lives in Nairobi, Kenya. Fun fact - this episode was recorded live across three continents: Africa, Asia and Europe.  Resources: Good Strategy Bad Strategy, by Richard P. Rumelt, the great book on strategy that gave this episode its title Ryanair on charging passengers to use the toilets on airplanes IKEA's founder, Kamprad on saving money. Mark Ritson on Brand Purpose

17 September 2020 When I joined the Financial Times as Technical Director for FT.com, I inherited a team of around 50 engineers. One of the first thin... https://www.annashipman.co.uk/jfdi/meeting-everyone.html Anna ShipmanJFDICVEtcFollow me on Twitterchildren’s book publishingmasters in Software SystemsOpen Source leadcross-stitch hobbytech strategyMeeting everyone on a new teamThe Multiple Faces of Technical LeadershipUnlocking value with durable teamsWhy and how to do annual performance reviewsA 'Hello World' mod-wsgi applicationThe difficult teenage years at Tech NottinghamSocial distancing quizSlackThe Effective ExecutiveTriggersWhat got you here won't get you thereNo next NextThe difficult teenage years: Setting tech strategy after a launchAfter the launch: the difficult teenage yearsRussell Davies's strategy adviceHow do you delegate to a group of people?Good Strategy Bad StrategyFinance for non-accountantsHow to make the most out of meetings with vendorsFinding the next level tech jobWhat I learned in six years at GDSHow to interview job applicants fairlyHigh output managementMoving SPA to HTTPSReplacing the SPA CMSUnderstanding my strengths using a Johari windowCleaning up SPA for GDPRHow coding in the open can help you release fasterDeploying to shared hosting with TravisResources for coding in the openHow to open up closed codeA year in the life of an Open Source LeadCoding in the open in government: Turing Fest talkSign up to my new mailing list!An awk command I always forgetRemoving MediaWiki from SPA: Cool URIs don't changeRemoving MediaWiki from SPA: Changes to the siteDon’t be afraid to code in the open: here’s how to do it securelyThe benefits of coding in the openBreak into public speakingCross government meetup on Open Source and SecurityJoin the SPA organising committeeWriting a business caseCome to the cross-government Open Source meetupNext steps for Open Source in governmentI am now Open Source LeadHow to blogMaking my site look better on small screensUseful questions for one-to-onesCode sharing in large organisationsChoosing Cloud Foundry for the Government Platform as a ServiceVideo of Operations: a developer's guideSlides and links from Operations: a developer's guideA PaaS for GovernmentLooking at open source PaaS technologiesBuilding a platform to host digital servicesA career path for technologists at GDSTips on writing a technical CVHow to raise a good pull requestStaying technicalWhat is a technical architect?How we moved vCloud Tools from Coding in the Open to Open SourceHow do I get more women to speak at my conference?Build Quality InSome thoughts on preparing an Ignite talkHow I keep alphagov/fog updated...Using Git to refactor vCloud Tools into separate gemsSketchnotingBuilding tools to provision our machinesRunning OSS projectsAre you thinking of speaking at a conference?Applying for a job at GDSHow Anonymous Submissions Affected Gender Balance at our ConferenceCreating a Puppet moduleSome Regex in the form of a Picture!Where Do I Start?Roof Bug-fixingUpgrading to 12.04...Partitioning!Roof HackingHow to EstimateTesting the redirectionsLearning the perlsLearning More About D3CAP again – or should that be PACELC?The CAP Theorem and MongoDBWhat Should Your Work Log Tell You?P.O.A.Would Have Been Useful to Know at My First Game JamJavaScript Talk Takes ShapePreparation Begins for the JavaScript Talk...JavaScript Visualisations ProposalMy Continuing Struggles with LinuxSorl-thumbnail Comes Back to Bite MeHow to Write Efficient CSS – Evaluation of CSSHow to Write Efficient CSS – Basic CSSA Voyage of Discovery – Upgrading Firefox Part 2Upgrading Firefox – part 1...What I have learned about folder structure today

Tom Roach is a well-recognised marketing strategist who has been in the advertising industry for just over 20 years. Tom has worked with many infamous and successful brands, but perhaps his most proud campaign was Sainsbury’s “Try something new today” that delivered 1.9 billion pounds of sales. Tom has established himself as a champion for the commercial power of creativity through his work in London at AMVBBDO, Leo Burnett, BBH and recently adam&eveDDB.Tom also writes his own blog discussing well known marketing ideas with a modern twist.In this episode, we discuss: Marketing effectiveness; how do you define it and how does it link to creativity'The Long and the Short of it: Balancing Short and Long-Term Marketing Strategies’ – by Les Binet and Peter FieldThe correspondence between the level of creativity deployed and advertising effectiveness as well as the commercial impact of emotional creativityHow long-term brand building and short-term sales activation are not mutually exclusive and how the 60/40 rule should be adapted to each bespoke brandTom’s most recent blog post - ‘The wrong and short of it’, and how it champions for a radical middle path that looks at finding a balance between brand and performance marketersThe culture of binary opposition in marketing and how to find unity and a common enemyThe prevalence of short-termism in today's world and the impact of social platforms.Three Quick Questions: A business Book you recommend? ‘Good Strategy Bad Strategy’ by Richard RumeltPerson to follow on social media or digital media? Tom Goodwin @tomfgoodwinOne on one dinner with a living person? Tom’s wife Jane.To follow Tom on twitter - @tomroachTo find out more about Tom’s blog or to contact him, visit https://thetomroach.com/

معرفی و خلاصه کتاب استراتژی خوب استراتژی بد Good Strategy / Bad Strategy تصوری که بیشتر ما از استراتژی داریم مشخصات یک استراتژی بده، کتابچه رنگی قطور، جلسات طولانی و برنامه های 5 ساله، نمودار و جدول و حرفهای قشنگ، ولی استراتژی این نیست. این کتاب همه خرافات در مورد استراتژی رو رد میکنه و تفاوت استراتژی خوب و بد رو روشن میکنه متن و روایت: امین علیرضایی

I interviewed Head Of Multichannel Sian English on how she got into the industry, how marketing has changed over time and she provides some helpful tips.  The main topics we cover are: Comms strategy in 2009 versus 2020 Early stage social media marketing Working in-house versus working agency side Avoiding data paralysis and solving problems in the marketplace Balancing mental health with the demands of working in marketing The evolution of content marketing and social media marketing working in combination Networking and building your professional network How to manage your agency  Creating a multichannel marketing plan for an agency and for clients Learnings from launching a brand Mentors and looking after your mental health Wise words from Sian about careers: "A friend once told me, that in life you will possibly get fired or made redundant, make a terrible decision job wise and you will experience one job that will absolutely change your life". Links and resources Manchester Publicity association - https://www.mpa.org.uk/ Pro Manchester association - https://www.pro-manchester.co.uk/ Manchester Digital - https://www.manchesterdigital.com/ Esther Perel Podcast - https://www.audible.co.uk/ep/esther-perel?source_code=M2M14DFT1BkSH082015011R&ds_rl=1235779&ipRedirectOverride=true Good Strategy / Bad Strategy (apparently the best book on strategy!) -  https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1781256179/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_U_8ilhEbVW4CHA1  Brene Brown - https://brenebrown.com/ Dan Nolan (Formerly of at the E-Word) - https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielvnolan/ Cindy Simmons (MD at the MPA) - https://www.linkedin.com/in/cindy-simmons-05891460/ Christian James (MD at The IF Agency and Sian's mentor) - https://www.linkedin.com/in/christian-james-74504b1/ Liane Grimshaw (Founder + MD at SupaReal) - https://www.linkedin.com/in/lianegrimshaw/ We hope you enjoy the episode and if you have any questions or follow up please contact me or Sian on Twitter or LinkedIn  SUBSCRIBE Spotify Apple Podcasts Connect with the host, Paul Casey: @caseydigital on Instagram Paul Casey on LinkedIn @casey_digital on Twitter

Chris and Rifa's continuing bitesize adventures in the world of arts, culture, tech and diversity. This week our intrepid duo check out the iconic new installation at Tate Modern's enormous Turbine Hall, Kara Walker's powerful reflection on slavery and empire Fons Americanus. We also watch Eddie Murphy's sweet new Netflix film Dolomite Is My Name – a biopic of blaxploitation / comedy / hip hop pioneer Rudy Ray Moore. In What You Reading For? Chris is trying to read Under The Radar poetry magazine from Nine Arches Press, while Rifa is digging into Richard Rumelt's business guidebook Good Strategy/Bad Strategy. Though we've mistakenly called him 'Rumlet' throughout the podcast – and even taken the piss out of his name, though it's wrong. Sorry, Richard. Find us on Insta, Twitter and Facebook. Please give us a nice review and 'like' and subscribe etcetra etcetra.

Too often leaders substitute good strategic planning with vision statements and goals. While these are useful tools for alignment, they miss the mark on guiding people towards a successful outcome based on a deep understanding of the reality a business is in. In this episode, Ryan and Ethan dive into what makes a good strategy and how it fits into the overall alignment management framework.

When a business is struggling financially, cost-cutting looks like a brilliant move.But can you shrink your way to success? From what I've seen, it's easier – and healthier – to increase revenues than it is to cut costs. Cost-cutting comes at a very high cost. When I was 16 years old, General Motors was the bluest of the blue-chip stocks. Alfred Sloan was the Steve Jobs, the Jeff Bezos of GM and he sold 50% of all the cars in America. Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick and Cadillac were easily distinguished from one another and what you drove said a lot about you. In the United States, those 5 GM brands outsold Toyota, Honda, Nissan, Ford, Mercury, Lincoln, Chrysler, Volvo, Volkswagen, Subaru, Mercedes, Dodge, Plymouth, American Motors, Jeep, Rambler, Alfa Romeo, Fiat, Renault, BMW, Audi, Citroën, Opel, Peugeot, Ferrari, Jaguar and Porsche combined. During the years I've been old enough to drive, GM has fallen from 50% down to just 17% of sales in the U.S. But don't blame increased competition. Other than Tesla and Hyundai, every brand of car available in America today was available when I was 16.What happened to GM? Cost-cutting. After a long and successful history of choosing CEOs from its manufacturing and sales divisions – Sloan, Wilson, Curtice, Donner, and Roche – General Motors chose a money manager, Richard Gerstenberg, to become CEO in 1972. Two years later, they replaced him with an accountant, Thomas Murphy. Money-manager Gerstenberg and accountant Murphy said, “Why are we spending all this money to design never-before-seen cars every 2 or 3 years? The cost of re-tooling our factories is astronomical. It would be more cost-effective to simply attach different grilles, headlights and tail lights along with a different interior and let each of our 5 brands sell essentially the same car.” “By the 1980's, Sloan's design had faded away. General Motors had not only blurred its brands and divisions, it engaged in badge engineering, offering essentially the same vehicle under several model and brand names.” – Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, p. 221 On Oct. 11, 1988, the New York Times reported, “Underscoring the need for a distinct image in the era of look-alike cars has been sales performance. Buick sales dropped to 557,491 last year from about 920,000 in 1984, and Oldsmobile sales fell to 714,394 last year after having topped one million in the preceding three years.” Then, just before the end of 2018, we read, “In a move that will save the company $6 billion by the end of 2020, General Motors announced a restructuring Monday that includes chopping its workforce by 15% and shuttering 5 plants next year.” Some people never learn. Rust in peace, GM. I've watched this same movie, over and over, in every category of business in America. But no matter which actor is playing the lead, this movie always ends the same.Are you planning to shrink your way to greater profitability? I suggest you try to increase your sales revenues instead. That's the only movie that has a happy ending. Roy H. Williams

Simplest definition of strategy: "Finding the crucial leverage points where the smallest effort unleashes the greatest effect. In this Episode, I talk about the 3 key components of a Good Strategy and how you can formulate your own strategy. Need Strategic coaching to help you grow your business? Apply for my coaching here: https://www.2000books.com/apply

Author Campbell Macpherson joins us to talk about his new book The Change Catalyst and what it takes for organisations to create true change initiatives. The Change Catalyst provides you with the insight, tools and know–how you need to make sure your next change, strategy or M&A is the one in eight that succeeds. Find out more: [Book](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Change-Catalyst-Successful-Sustainable-Business/dp/1119386268)  [Website](http://www.changeandstrategy.com/)  Twitter @CampbellTCC [Linkedin](https://www.linkedin.com/in/campbell-macpherson/) [Good Strategy Bad Strategy](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Good-Strategy-Bad-Difference-Matters/dp/1846684811) [The Innovator's Dilemma](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Innovators-Dilemma-Technologies-Management-Innovation/dp/142219602X)

I read this book by Richard Rumelt called Good Strategy Bad Strategy and it completely changed my ability to develop a strategy for our business. https://www.slideshare.net/Michaelcmcdermott/a-rumelt-perpsective-on-good-strategy

Episode 24 of the Modern Agile Show features an interview with Karl Scotland, veteran agile/lean leader, focused on helping to build learning organizations. Karl discusses how to work with agile strategically. He recognized that four statements I'd written in the first Modern Agile blog were actually strategies and he observed that they might be a better guide than even the four values of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development. He observes that strategies are generative and enable constraints rather than govern us. He explains what the phrase, “Don't be a tabby cat trying to be a cheetah” means. He mentions the importance of Richard Rumelt's book, Good Strategy Bad Strategy. Finally, Karl discusses his work on what he calls the X Matrix.

The 3 elements of Strategy

策略的優劣決定企業的成敗。但企業組織往往身陷劣策略的泥淖中而不自知。你知道你的策略出了什麼問題嗎？認清策略本質，掌握決策九力，你就能從劣策略的泥淖中爬出來!