Secret weapon
Before COVID, I’d reluctantly joined a gym. Twice a week, I’d have a workout with a trainer, followed by a sauna session — to sweat just that bit more. One day, I felt overwhelmed by a couple of complex work tasks, and my fingers had reached for my phone, to message my trainer that I was cancelling that day’s session.
But, some greater force intervened and I took my finger away and thought, “I’ll go, but I’ll multi-task - I’ll do some work in the sauna”.
I’d often taken books into the sauna with me (it’s infrared, so no steam) but this was the first time I’d taken paper and a pen. And, something strange happened: the ideas just flowed and the conceptual dilemma I’d had for days suddenly resolved itself.
I sketched a process visual, my designer mocked it up that night, and I gave it to my client the next day. “This is brilliant”, she said. “How did you come up with this?”
I didn’t tell her, but I did it again the next week, just to see if it worked a second time. It did. And a third, and a fourth.
So, fast forward to 2022. My office was due for a redesign. Of course, I specified a sauna in the bathroom. It’s now where a lot of my best thinking is done — I even line up the thorniest conceptual problems to solve in the sauna.
I have related this to numerous clients and I’m intrigued by where others say they do their best work.
Here are some I’ve discussed recently: one CEO thinks best in the bath, another while weeding or watering her garden, one while riding his bike to and from work (vigorously), one sitting at a cafe drinking successive lattes, and still another lies on her sofa, having kicked her shoes off and locked her door so colleagues think she’s gone out.
Nobody, I repeat, nobody, has said, “At my desk” or “In front of my computer”.
Question: How do you deliberately set up the right conditions to do your best reflective work?
New ways to hire
In the ‘old days’ the way senior people were hired was a straightforward linear process: the company would put a position description together, engage a search firm, who used formal and informal networks to invite applicants into a selection process.
Old days? Hang on, it still is. One client was offered a CEO job recently via such a process — after ONE 45 minute meeting with the Board Chair, one other director, and the recruiter.
By contrast, I talked this week with another client who has swapped his hat as CEO of a small, but influential, non-profit for a very senior role in one of Australia’s largest household name companies. But, the way they hired him was utterly fascinating.
This company, let’s call it Maxstra, has a person whose job it is to ‘look after’ the Top 75 executives at the company. It was he who reached out to my client, knowing he was ‘on the market’ and invited him into a discussion with a C-Suite executive (not the CEO). This was genuinely a ‘value adding’ discussion, not a job interview. It ended up with my client and the executive standing side by side, scribbling on whiteboards and taking animatedly about their vision for the company. This led to a second, then a third, then a fourth, a fifth, and a sixth conversation. Each was with a different executive, exploring ways my client could transform a vital aspect of Maxstra.
In parallel, some 30 hours of psychological testing and debriefing was conducted before an hour-long meeting with the Chief Executive, who made the ultimate call. I wouldn’t be telling you the story if he didn’t get the job, but what intrigued me about this approach was three things:
They genuinely co-created the role, from a broad-brush set of objectives and, against these, inviting my client to contribute his best thinking;
They socialised the role — and the recruit — amongst a broad group of executives, so they benefitted from ‘many pairs of eyes’ but also tested my client’s capacity to work with diverse perspectives.
They set up the new role for success, by giving my client ‘warts and all’ access to the current thinking within the business.
The proof of a pudding is in the eating, as the saying goes, so we’ll see how well he lands, and what he achieves, but this is easily the most sophisticated talent onboarding process I’ve heard of recently.
Question: How do you ensure that a critical new hire is set up for success, even before they start?
Right to repair
I’ve lost count of how many Apple products I’ve bought since my first Mac in the 1980s but my most recent iPhone purchase was a mistake. (In case you’re wondering, it’s an iPhone 13 Mini — and it’s too small). So, I’ve rescucitated my wife’s mothballed iPhone 11 Pro as a stopgap, and I’ve found a problem.
The on-off switch on the side is jammed, preventing me from clicking a button to make purchases. It’s out of warranty, so I took it to my friendly local hole-in-the-wall phone repairer. A diminutive owl-like man toggled the switch for two seconds before he pronounced, “I can’t do this. I would have to open the phone and Apple make it very difficult. I’d damage the screen almost for sure”.
I’ve since discovered that this is a strategy that not just Apple, but numerous companies use to maximise ongoing customer ‘loyalty’ (read, money spent). Other examples are Epson (try refilling your own ink cartridges) and John Deere (farmers are up in arms, globally, about their inability to fix their own tractors).
There’s an entire ‘right to repair’ movement, in the US, in Europe, and even in Australia, that is aiming to reverse this stranglehold that companies have over the users of their products. It’s a literal arms race, with hackers putting downloadable software onto online farming forums, as fast as John Deere can close the gap with increasingly sophisticated security features.
Question: What product ‘features’ do you consciously build in to create greater lifetime customer value? How legitimately valuable are these to your customer?
If you’re an occasional or regular reader of 5MSM, you know that I love knowing you’ve enjoying reading, so please click the ‘heart’. And, drop me a line, either here, or by email letting me know your answers to any of this week’s questions.
In the meantime, enjoy reflective time, wherever that works best for you, and I look forward to being with you again next Friday.
Andrew
Andrew,
Your observations and insights help my brain to shift gears. Yours is definitely the most interesting newsletter I read each week. Thanks for raising the bar.
Phil.