Fred Pelard Mixed 02.mp3 [00:00:00] When you're solving problems, you're starting point pretty much every time is going to be complexity. If it's not complex, you know, it doesn't need solving. So there was a complexity as the starting point. And then in business, at least, your end destination is going to be conviction of the third party, because unless you're a really stand alone entrepreneur and even then you need to convince clients at some point to fund your solutions, you need to convince third parties and most of us in organizations, we have to convince other parties. And they often describe that, you know, problem solving is a subjective sport. [00:00:44] What's up, everybody? Welcome to the artists Data Science podcast, the only self development podcast for Data scientists. You're going to learn from and be inspired by the people, ideas and conversations that'll encourage creativity and innovation in yourself so that you can do the same for others. I also host open office hours. You can register to attend by going to bitterly dot com forward, slash a d. S o h. I look forward to seeing you all there. Let's ride this beat out into another awesome episode. And don't forget to subscribe to the show and leave a five star review. [00:01:35] Our guest today is a strategy trainer, consultant, facilitator and coach who specializes in helping teams and organizations solve complex problems. He's a rocket scientist by training who started his career in management consulting with Deloitte and then completed his MBA at Emceed. For the last 20 years, he's been lecturing on strategic thinking and complex problem solving with an audience that has included CEOs and management teams of major corporations and consulting firms around the world. [00:02:10] Today, he's here to talk to us about his book and share some tips with us on how we can be better problem solvers and more strategic. So please help me in welcoming our guest today, author of How to Be Strategic, Fred Pelard. Fred, thank you so much for taking time out of your schedule to be here today. I really appreciate you coming on to the show. Thank you. My pleasure. So, Fred, talk to us a little bit about where you grew up and what was it like there? [00:02:39] Well, actually, I am French and I'm about to be British. So literally we're four days away from my naturalization or citizenship ceremony, as it's called. But I'm French. I grew up in France, parents. My dad was in the army. So I'm an army brat, which many people will know, certainly among your sort of US listeners involves kind of uprooting every couple of years and then moving around when you're a kid. So you develop a couple of interesting habits, one of which is you do sport whenever you can. And then the second is you also make friends wherever you can very quickly. So you learn to adapt in lots of new circumstances. [00:03:15] So when you're in high school, what did you think that your future would look like? Did you think that you're going to go into the military, follow your father's footsteps? [00:03:24] Oh, that's a very interesting question. I don't remember. Truth be told, I don't think I was. I think, you know, we're going to go. It's very easy. But when I think of my teenage years, I know what was really on my mind. I know it had nothing to do with careers. I think the order was something like, you know, sport girls and grades of slight variation thereof. [00:03:45] And so you took a role that they kind of let you down to to like rocket science and then meet a shift from rocket science into management consulting. That's a really interesting path that you've taken. So talk to us about how you made that transition or what was the desire to go into the business world? [00:04:04] Was it possibly serendipity? You know, the French system is organized in a way we're a little bit like in Germany. There's a real sort of value and premium put on the engineering career. So people who, you know, people study to become engineers. And I did that a bit by accident. And when that happens, when you get this and you go and work for a couple of years and the next step is always to kind of look for an MBA and INSEAD where I went to not very original for a Frenchman. It's based outside Paris, but it happens to be sort of the acknowledged best school in Europe. So it's the Harvard Business School of Europe, if you will. I spent a year because obviously as Europeans, we do it faster. Well, or we're lazy, whichever way you look at it. And after a year, literally, you have your classic sort of recruitment rounds where a lot of consulting firm investment banks, corporate, probably not that many tech startups at the time come and recruit. And I join a consulting firm in London. And that was a relatively common. So it was not the big career change, though it might look. It was a very common sort of next step after INSEAD. [00:05:09] And how did the inspiration and idea for your book come about from from all of your experience? [00:05:17] So this book is I've I've been sort of teaching people how to be how to be I've been training people and how to be strategic for best part of 15 years. So if we if we go back to sort of, you know, graduate from a firm and go and spend five years in a management consulting consulting firm, which is a Bain and McKinsey spinoff, then set up my own firm, do that for another five years, and then clients start asking. [00:05:42] And obviously, if you're a small firm, you've got to battle all the time against the McKinsey Bain. You've got to find a way to differentiate yourself. And one of the things that I was asked often is to sort of not just give people the fish, but teach them how to fish the classic. So can you teach us can you train us? At the time, I had something like 20 employees, so it was not particularly economical or sensible for me to move from a model where I was selling hours of smart people to a model where I was just saying myself, whilst my smart people kind of twiddling their thumbs. So I resisted it for a bit. And after a while I got, you know, I got sort of a big break with three declines in the same year in Britain. So VBC, Sainsbury's and Channel four asking me to come and help. And then sort of it started from there. And at some point there is something about sort of rejection being either nature or God's way to tell you the path you should be taking and when when you go to battle and you keep losing bids against McKinsey and then you go to battle, you keep winning the bids where people go, we really like your training. And at some point you hear the you know, you hear the voices and you follow the path. And so to answer your question, I've been doing that for the best part of twenty years now and in a very timely fashion. [00:07:00] I have the idea about two years ago I thought, OK, maybe it's time for a book. I think I was I was relatively confident that nobody could just copy and paste my recipes, that, yes, you could learn the techniques and apply them for yourself, but probably be hard to sort of capture all the experience that I can give in the training room. And I thought maybe it's time now to sort of open the the kimono a bit and let people see the recipes for the for all that I normally would just deliver for my clients. And then with the time frame of publishing and the likes and the luck would have it, it comes out in just in the beginning of the second wave of the pandemic. And it's a perfect sort of indoors reading, you know how to be strategic when it could have been titled When the World Around You Crumbles. [00:07:45] Yeah, I really enjoyed the book. I went through it over the course of a weekend and the very next day. I'm sorry about that. Yeah. Don't ruin your weekend. No, no, I absolutely loved it. Like, I was just mind blown the entire entire weekend. [00:07:59] I was just ravenously just going through it. And the following Monday, first thing I did when I logged in to work on two teams, I emailed the next CEO that say the CEO in line for a company. I was like, we need to get ten copies of this book for everybody online. Leadership team, is that good? Yeah, I'm really, really excited to dig into it. A few select sections. I don't want to give the entire thing away for everybody but you. You touch on some really important parts of the Data site. Life-cycle No, because we do solve complex problems until I started to start talking about how to solve complex problems. So in your book, you mentioned that being strategic is a mindset. So talk to us about what you mean by that. [00:08:46] If I take a small step back, you know, in the journey about sort of my education that we describe, I'm a rocket scientist. So, you know, Data science not as intensely as maybe some of your audience practice it. Now, we're probably didn't have, you know, when I was doing it, didn't have the same storage capabilities either. When I rocket scientist, I went a bit into politics, which is a very different way to look at the world. And I've been an entrepreneur for the last 15 years. And one of the things I kept noticing is how a lot of the people that I work with were approaching problems differently. And, you know, it's not that complicated when you see sort of 20 different people in the classroom every two or three days. After a while, you notice patterns, even if you're not particularly partizan dissonant. But in my case, I spent a lot of time on patterns and then I spotted them. And what I can tell you is that there's effectively four main ways to solve problems. And I call them the expert, the expert weigh the analytical way, the creative way and the strategic way. You can call the mode, if you will. And pretty much every one of us kind of can do at least the first three sort of expert, analytical, creative. And then the way we spend all the time we spend in each of these days is a bit of a function of habits, personality, preference, because each sort of problem solving route or path or mode come with a slightly different vibe. [00:10:06] And also, for a lot of us, it's a function of our of a function of the employment, the profession of a daily job. Not every job requires the same amount of expertize, analytical or creativity. [00:10:17] And then the bit. So we'll talk about that may be an asset. But the bit that I really notice is that the hallmark of good strategic thinkers, very few people knew how to sort of use that. And what have developed effectively over 50 years is a sort of a model that shows what it takes to be a good start. It ought to be good to be good at thinking strategically. And then I've sort of gathered a collection of techniques that help you achieve that level of of confidence in solving problems strategically. [00:10:47] They definitely will get into those four methods really soon here. But before we do that, in terms of problem solving, you talk about these concepts of complexity, completion, clarity, certainty, conviction. And there are like different points on a roller coaster. Can you talk to us about that? Can you can define those terms? [00:11:10] You're right. They're sort of they like the anchor points in the journey. If you think about sort of the if you're driving along and you think about sort of east, west, north, south, when you're solving problems, you're starting point pretty much every time is going to be complexity. If it's not complex, it doesn't need solving. So there was a complexity as the starting point. And then in business at least, your end destination is going to be conviction of the third party, because unless you're a really stand alone entrepreneur and even then you need to convince clients at some point to find your solutions, you need to convince third parties and most of us in organizations, we have to convince other parties. And I often describe that, you know, problem solving is a subjective sport. It's the other person who decides whether you solve the problem rather than you deciding if you've solved the problem. And so if you think about a journey, you start from complexity, you finish in conviction. And then somewhere along the way, you've got to drive through one of two gates. If you were to think, if I could use maybe a snow analogy for Canada, you know, if you go if you go sort of downhill skiing, these are gates. And one of the gates you go through is clarity. And one of the gates you go through sections and the different methods and actually the third gate, as it well might be workplan. And so between complexity, as you start points and conviction as your end points, which gates do you shoot for when you go down the hill? Do you shoot for clarity? So you have something that's really clear, that's really manifest, that's easy to understand as an answer, but maybe hasn't been tested or can't really easily be implemented. [00:12:42] So it's a more visionary approach. Or on the other hand, and all the things you'll find my experience at least of working with lots of data scientist is the gate that will tend to to shoot for certainty, sort of, you know, go through a place where I can back my conviction to third party with a bucket load of data. And obviously the third one is expertize or is the sort of the workplan. But the take away from that is that going through the gate of certainty is fantastic when you can so when you've got the data to back up your conviction, then it's a. Beautiful thing to do, what many people are discovering is that certainly more and more in twenty twenty, we sort of hope that there'll be so much Data that if you were the guy with a Data, you could carry the day every time. And what we're seeing now is that's not true because there's so much Data that actually, on the other hand, of your recommendation is going to be a couple of outlier Data points. Always going to be. And now people get it's a bit of a 50 50, isn't it? And, you know, but still, you can't carry the day. [00:13:43] Thank you very much for sharing that. I want to dig in a little bit more on these four modes that you talked about. There's expert, analytic, creative and strategic, starting with expert. Can you give us an example of when we should use this motor, this method of problem solving, and maybe touch on some of the benefits and drawbacks of it? [00:14:05] Yes, I'm going to go very quickly, because if your expertize is the mood that most of us are in most of the time, most of the day, and thank God for that, because effectively, if you look at your LinkedIn profile or anyone's resume, that's a manifestation to the outside world of the things we say when experts say that we can solve the problem without having to think. So an expert is someone that maybe if you're facing a complex problem and you either can solve it yourself because you've done it before, or if you can't, you go. I need myself an expert and you're going to look for rather than use specific instances, I always like to use sort of professions because although most of us use expertize a lot of the time in our days, some professions are literally spending 100 percent of the days in that, for example, personal trainers, a personal trainer, someone who has the answer to how to make you lose weight and be more muscular. And they have no doubt about it, because arguably they do that every single minute of every day that they work. Police officers also spend a lot of time being expert or in the expert mode, because literally they are the law, what they say goes, and an estate agent or a realtor and they call in the you know, and so, again, they know more about the environment or the particular market than so. And you might recognize with these three, a really good tip about spotting when you're in the expert mode is when you have your chest slightly puffed out like like a personal trainer, an a state or a realtor or a police officer. When your chest is puffed out, you know the answer. You're in expert mode. [00:15:33] I like that analogy. That's really, really makes it really clear. Thank you so much. How about for the analytical mode? Can you talk to us by example of when we use this method and even some benefits? [00:15:44] For many of us, the analytic mode kicks in when we're faced with a problem whose solutions or problem we've never encountered or problem with solutions has never convinced us. And so now if I were to go with the physical embodiment of that is literally is the hand to the skull, to the to the top of your rubbing your head and you're going I've never seen before. I don't know the answer. And the natural tendency at this point is to go and gather lots of data and in a it's hard to convey in attack. But in my book there's a very central visual, which is effectively a map that starts if you if you see it like that, it's look to access the bottom left corner is complexity. Top right corner is conviction. And if the expert is a diagonal that goes from bottom left, it's upright. The analytical approach is a submarine. It goes horizontal fast. It spends a long time in the problem space, turning all your unknowns into that, into facts and from that deducting. Announcer A lot of people have a strong preference for that. So in particular, you might find that, as was my case, people who tend to be tend to graduate from engineering school are highly more analytical as a population than the rest of the population that I will call civilians. And he says with bunny ears. And so but there's lots of other professions that do it like that. For example, lawyers, specialist doctors, investigative journalists, engineers we've talked about. So lots of professions have a tendency to just first wanting to turn their unknown into facts before they conclude the deductive approach to problem solving. It's a fantastic way to buy a car. You know, it's an intelligent way to buy a car. Now, you may not be an expert at buying a car, but if you're good at analytics, you're probably not going to buy a lemon. [00:17:34] Yes, I really like the visuals that you had on the the roller coaster with the submarine helicopter. And this next one was my favorite one. And the one it resonated with me the most in terms of how Data scientists work, at least in my experience. And that was the creative mode. Can you give us an example of when we would use this and some of the benefits? [00:17:58] So one of the things, if you think maybe an analytical mode, people who are kind of driven by Data their analytical standard time to get the data and a lot of what these profession share is one similarity, which is a lot of the essence of their work is in the past, lawyers solve. Problems investigate, journalists reveal past crimes, engineer actions build things in the present, but you see a theme emerging. None of these people really focus on the future. And so when you focus on the future, the Data runs out of road and you have to use a different method. And there's lots of professions like advertising or A&E or fireman or the military, lots of professions where they know every day that the data they have is unreliable. And so what they do is instead of spending a lot of time gathering data to very quickly imagine three solutions, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, three or four solutions really, really quickly. And you're right, when you talk about sort of Data scientists will do that. I would contrast that maybe with Data analysts who might reach for the the big buckets of data. And so it's that in my little visual, it's really going vertically really quickly coming up with three or four ideas without any data. And that's the important thing. If you're an emergency doctor, you don't have time to do lots of analysis and tasks. [00:19:20] You've got to decide really, really quickly. Now, of course, unless you're a bit crazy, you're not going to go, oh, I know what the answer. You're going to come up not just with one hypothesis, but with three or four. And then you will very gingerly, very carefully test them. And so what we talk about creative here, it's usually either relying on sort of for some people like advertising executives or fashion design, it's a bit more instinctive for others, like scientists or emergency doctors or military officers, it's a bit more trained. But both of these approaches go quick, quick, quickly, very quickly. Identify three or four solutions rather than spend a lot of time gathering data about your problem. So shift to the solution space rather than spend time in the problem space, which is why sort of the analogy is very simple. Analytical a submarine, because it starts underwater, spends a lot of time on the water and comes at the very end of its assignment. Whereas, as you know, a helicopter, a lot of helicopter pilots get airborne and then go, OK, where are we going that because it's so flexible that way. So it's about getting airborne, come up with options and then think about what you do next. [00:20:25] And we're coming up with these solutions, a few possible solutions. [00:20:29] Do they all have to be, quote unquote, good solutions or I would not call them solutions and I always call them options. And so I call them solutions in a second. But I usually when I have the visual in front of me, I always go, option, option, option. Because one of the sentence, I repeat in the book and I use often in my training is you don't need real Data to have real options. You need real Data to have real solutions. And that's one of the slight drawbacks of a lot of the people I work with, tend to be analytical in that in their mind set in the Data the profession. And a lot of the thing I do with them over the training is slightly sort of correct the posture and remind them that Data is fantastic and Data is a really good at killing options, but not very good at coming up with options. And so I will see in a minute we'll talk about the sort of strategic approach. So very early when you come up with these three or four options, there's lots of techniques of how you do it, but I wouldn't call them solution just yet. [00:21:29] And moving on now to the strategic method. Talk to us about that and maybe give us the example and some benefits like you're just doing. [00:21:38] And so what you have is, you know, so we were talking about some of the creative method of the creative that you got really, really quickly. You have three or four ideas. And usually what happens, at least in a really creative environment, is a solution emerges over time, through a matter of let's call it subjective preference, either of the most senior person or of the designer or, you know, sort of the group over time. But in a lot of circumstances, the decision a company takes, for example, or team takes has to be validated a lot more objectively than that. And when you find yourself in that situation, where we have with the strategic approach is literally a bit that goes if it's strategic, it's in the future. So the only way to start from the beginning is to go vertical is to identify three or four ideas, three or four options really, really quickly and then sort of slightly go Jeckyll inhale, go from a very optimistic, very creative view of the world and then flip and go. Now let's go and destroy all of them. [00:22:39] Let's let's really test them through fire to find out which one resist contact with whatever limited Data the future can throw at them. And if you were to draw this in a little map, you'll recognize a shape that's a bit like a you know, you go up first, then you go down really negatively. And here is an interesting thing. When you have five, six, seven options that you haven't had time to get attached to, then you don't really use a lot more active because you don't really mind which one turns out to be wrong. You'll recognize with your with your activity and your podcast. Every every weekend you might get right, maybe I could try these four things, and then when you have four ideas of what you try next day, the creative way to do it is to fall in love with one of the solutions you I really like. So I'm going to I'm going to really focus on that. And that's a perfect way to choose the color of your bedroom, because that's really just down to you. [00:23:35] If you're if you're trying to earn a living and keep the people happy around you, keep your customers happy, then you're actually quite neutral about the four ideas you've had until you've had feedback from the world. And you know, Mike Tyson's well known expression, everyone's got a plan until they get punched in the mouth. And so all four ideas can be beautiful and very creative. [00:23:57] And then the world on the other side of the door is full of sort of bullies with punches that are going to punch it in the mouth. And as a strategist, instead of shying away from that, you're invited because you go, I want to know which of my ideas is wrong so I can reallocate my scarce time and resources towards the ones that work. And then once you've done that now, you feel even you feel very confident in your ideas. Why? Because it's a bit like, you know, one of these talent shows where you've survived so many rounds and all of a sudden you've got one idea. That's the winner. Now you're happy to go and sing it to the world and convince others that it's the best idea for the problem. And so in conclusion, what we've talked about is we've talked about sort of a diagonal staircase of the experts staircase. Then we talked about a horizontal submarine that was very analytical and all about the research. There was a vertical helicopter that goes up very quickly for creative discovery. And one of the big reveal, sort of both in the book and in training, is the realization that for many people, but more so strategic is just creative, plus analytical. It's like the combination. Oh, I get it. And that's like, you know, it's one of these where sometimes when something was there and it feels like a lot of people tell me like it was on my mind, but you plucked it out of the air. [00:25:17] Absolutely. I don't claim more credit than that. But I voice something that many people feel, which is strategic, is a combination of creativity, analytical. And the really, really big comment is more often than not, they have been spotted that it's creative first and analytical second. So first, have lots of ideas about a problem in the future and then bring the cavalry of the Data to sort of whittled them down to one. And so you talked about, you know, how does one apply that in the business world or which which professions? Obviously, you know, anything that has sort of strategy in its title. So if you think about sort of a marketeer, maybe someone who has lots of ideas about campaign, someone who is a strategic marketeer will probably have some expectation about what the audiences or the target audience, the budget she has in mind. And then once we'll take all these ideas for marketing, then we'll talk about lean, either discuss them or analyze them or test them before really putting a lot of cash behind it because you want to double check. So when you want to double check your creativity, you're probably in the strategic environment. So you might be very creative and going to buy a T-shirt. When you go shopping, you go buy this one and this one and you pick four. [00:26:35] That's fine. You're probably going to be a little bit more double check when you buy a suit because you might try a few more and you're not going to walk away with all of them. And I know that trying a suit sounds very pretty covid. But if you know the approach, then strategic agility, the things you do when you're able to be both creative and analytical and the stakes are high. And just a final comment for most people. We tend to have a and that's kind of the law of nature, as it were. We tend to have one of these two ideas developed. People are very creative or not great analytics. So I work a lot with TV broadcasts and program makers, and they won't mind me saying that they're I find them very creative and not very good at sort of killing their babies. And I work a lot with finance people and finance people are superb analytically and not always very good, creative, at least in a business context. And so the best way for a person to be more strategic is to develop the muscle in which the slightly under developed. And obviously the best way for a team to become more strategic is either have lots of people who are quite busy themselves or at least learn to leverage their relative strengths of each participant at the right time in the project. [00:27:51] I absolutely love that. Thank you. Thank you so much for being on that because there's such a foundational part of the book. And to your point, yeah, definitely developing a muscle in both analytic analytical type of thinking and creativity is super important. After having spent a very significant portion of my life being in the analytical mode, I've now been shifting more towards that creative thinking type of type of mode and. It very much sounds like a muscle, like I keep a journal now where every morning I force myself to have 10 ideas just to keep flexing their muscle and just researching creativity and things like that recently has been one of my top interests. And I love how you kind of view that together into your book with this roller coaster of strategic thinking. OK, so speaking of a book, I love to get into a section that you have and I think the audience is really going to be able to resonate with because I feel like it really closely ties into the work we do as Data scientists. That is the pyramid principle. And we start off the chapter talking about the difference between qualitative and quantitative problems. Would you mind sharing the distinction with us? [00:29:03] Yeah. So a classic qualitative problem is what's my life going to be like next year? That's a really big qualitative problem. And then the quantitative problem is how much will I earn in twenty, twenty one? OK, and now you could probably tell that if you try to resolve how much will I earn in twenty, twenty one quickly you're going to talk about work and employment and income and, and clients and things and you're going to probably end up with something that's sort of mathematical, you know, the number of hours and salary per hour or a number of clients and revenue decline. If you're talking more qualitative, you know, what's my life going to be like next year? It's a bit harder to grasp these problems. And so that that will be sort of my illustration of the difference. Now, in a business context, you might imagine that, you know, a big quantitative objective would be let's gain 10 percent market share in market X. A more qualitative one is make sure we ride the wave of a whatever new trend A happens to be. So you always have it. Most problems can be sort of are a mixture of qualitative and quantitative, and it helps to solve to sort of treat them as both. On the one hand, I'll tell you one and on the other. So to improve your life, spend a bit of time thinking, what would my life be like next year in an entirely qualitative way and then have the discipline to go and do the untidily quantitative way, either a few minutes later or the next day? [00:30:28] Seems like the qualitative problems. They tend to come with a unique set of challenges, don't they? [00:30:34] Yes, I think the main one that I would see is that a qualitative problem usually starts as a question with a very open ended. So what will my life be like? Or one of the examples I use often in training is, you know, about two people getting married and like, how do we make sure that our wedding is a great success? And more recently, you have things like, you know, how do we cope with covid as an organization, not to mention as a you know, as a country. And one of the things you might observe is every time you ask yourself how to qualitative question, it raises anxiety, because the honest answer is, I don't know, you know, stop asking me. That is kind of like people who have been dealing with that, with either team members or if you say, are you going to start asking me questions about problems in the future, they don't have the answer to. And so one of the things is not me, but a much smarter person called Barbara Minta, who was the very first consultant at McKinsey, a spotted years and years ago, she realized that there was effectively a fantastic way to solve qualitative problems. And now she's written a very, very long book, which is quite complicated. I love the technique. I always give her fantastic credit. But you could probably boil down to two tips, which I do in the book I'm happy to do. [00:31:54] Now, the first tip would be whenever you hear a question of the qualitative nature, what will my life be like? You should stop right away and refuse to solve this problem. You should solve the flip side problem. In other words, instead of asking yourself a question, you turn it into a positive statement and you're going to solve it. So instead of saying, what will my life be like, you go, My life is fantastic. In twenty, twenty one you just put it there. And usually it's, you know, it's either on a flip chart, on a piece of paper or on a window. You know, if you're writing on the window, you go, My life is a great success in twenty twenty one and pose for a second and you will notice that there's already a kind of the anxiety disappears in bed because it's a it's a beautiful objective to look at. So I'm not going to call it positive mental attitude because we're going to do something in a second that's a bit different from just going positive affirmation. My life is beautiful. My life is beautiful. It's one of the great success. And then the second big step is and then you ask yourself two questions. The first one is what we need to be true for that to be true. So it's not a positive affirmation. I'm going to say it. And then the universe delivers ballocks. So I don't know if I can swear, but let's pretend it was not a swear word. [00:33:08] So it's not a it's it's my last great success. You get what we need to be true. For that to be true, I think you might go well, if I still have a. Know intense confinement is bearable for my romantic partner and I and and nobody in the family catches covid, and then once you've done that, you actually let me reorder it a little bit. Let's go. Nobody in the family catches covid. My romantic partner and I are still on friendly terms six months from now when we haven't left the house and then I still have a job. And then the next bet that you do is you ask yourself the following question. Can I think of a scenario under which, you know, let me call them sort of A, B, C or true. So can I think of a scenario where your family is healthy, relationship is healthy, and I still have a job, and yet my life is not automatically a great success. And you go, oh yes, if my romantic partner has lost a job. Okay, so let's rewrite the third it. We both have a job. And what you do is this interplay of having a beautiful objective high up a page that goes, you know how life is a great success in twenty twenty one and then finding three building blocks under it, which is usually quite easy, and then having the discipline to go. Can I think of a scenario where these three are true and you have the one above is not automatically true. [00:34:26] Now like everything, it's a technique. So, you know, pretty much I'm pretty sure every single of your listeners would probably know how to drive. Some of them might even know how to drive a stick. And then when you know how to drive, you just forget how blindingly easy it is. But you forget how hard it was to learn, because once you get the skill, you get this get in the book. So there's about something like 15 pages on these called the Pyramid Principle. And in the pyramid principle, I go into a bit more detail. I give more examples. I show people a few things on the book's website on strategic that how there's a few other answers to exercise. You've got to practice a little bit. But I usually mention to people that by the time you've done your third pyramid principle, you go, oh, you recognize patterns. You go, oh, it's always the same thing, which is instead of going through life asking myself, how do I know, how do I work with my team? Oh, I'm going to write at the top of a page something that goes my team is being super productive and healthy. So during covid, OK, and then you go right. Oh, and you smile because that's a beautiful outcome and it's a lot less stressful than how do we do it. And you go if that's the outcome, what we need to be true for that to be true, you're right. [00:35:34] Three posts under it. You realize it's a bit you ask yourself, can I think of a scenario where the three are true, the one above is not automatically true. And that sentence, by the time you repeated ten times, it really lodge lodges itself in your brain and you go, how did I not know that? And that's effectively a way to solve. So it was discovered by Barbara Minato sort of thirty years ago, but he was probably positioned for a very when I first tried training people in that I was following her way to describe it and it kind of like was super complicated. And people were like nodding, but nobody applied it after the training unless they work at McKinsey. And then what I found over the years is I kind of went, you know, sort of Nikaido and sort of remove things, remove things ago. It still holds. It still holds. And I remove and I patted down and get it done and you go, oh so actually this thing boils down to the three things I've just told you, you know, put something positive at the top, ask yourself what would need to be true to break it down and then finally ask yourself, you know, can I think of a scenario where the bottom three are true and the one above is not ultimately control what artists I would love to hear from. [00:36:42] You feel free to send me an email to the artists of Data Science at Gmail dot com. Let me know what you love about the show. Let me know what you don't love about this show and let me know what you would like to see in the future. I absolutely would love to hear from you. I've also got open office hours that I will be hosting and you can register by going to bitterly dot com forward, slash a d. S o h. I look forward to hearing from you all and look forward to seeing you in the office hours. Let's get back to the episode. [00:37:26] Yeah, absolutely. Love that part in the book. But the pyramid principle and it lines up so well for Data size tasks. Right. Essentially taking a big problem. And all of a sudden you've gone through this exercise, you've broken down into discrete chunks and all you have to do to complete this large problem is just attack each discrete chunk and package it together and you have your solution. So I'm really looking forward to writing a piece, utilizing your framework and applying it to a Data science project that's coming up in the near future. So I'm looking forward to sharing that with the audience in the step that we talked about. We need to come up with positive statements. What are some traps that we might fall into? Like, is it possible to have a statement that on the surface. It looks positive, but has a bit of doubt built into it. What do you mean by that? I'm not sure I understand. For example, if you have a positive statement, right, for example, we talked about the wedding is a great success or something like that. Right. So if one of the conditions is the wedding is a great success and we have a subheading underneath there says, if we are able to secure a location and our guests practice social distancing like that, to me that sounds like that statement has a bit of doubt built into it. Is it possible that, you know, it sounds positive, like, yeah, we can have this wedding happen if this condition is met, but it's not like entirely positive. [00:39:02] It is that these are two different things. So one of the what happens is if you take something, imagine I'm going to put myself or I'm going to put us in the shoes of Elon Musk and, you know, Elon Musk, a lot of his spare time is dedicated to taking us to Mars. And so I can see that you go instead of going, how do we colonize Mark's? In his mind, he has something that goes, you know, life on Mars is successful for humanity. And you go, what we need to be true for that to be true. And among the bit that goes, we need to be able to get there and then we need to get that. Now, obviously, a third one is we need to be able to sort of live there and stay there, but we need to be able to get that what needs to be true for that to be true. And then if you trickle in trickle, you go from three, you go to nine, you go twenty seven. So I'm in front of you. I'm doing my classic sort of waterfall cascade where, you know, we're actually a pyramid. It goes, you know, you go from top up bottom. But by the time you get to twenty seven or eighty one of your building blocks of post, it's of course you're going to find some that are that easy and others that are complicated. [00:40:07] So in the wedding example, one of the building blocks might be let's get everyone's email address. Well, that's going to be quite easy. Another building block will be let's optimize the work, the seating area so that everyone is near people I talk to. And that's going to be a bit harder. And so these are two different things. So once you have the structure of a problem, what are you going to find? If you remember our little roller coaster as we go up to clarify with the structure? And then once you have the pyramid, you go, right, let's go and make it happen. And when you go and make it happen, sometimes even during or sometimes even ahead of them making it happen, you realize that some of the conditions are a bit harder to achieve than others. And so I wouldn't say that it's so much an issue of sort of feasibility of design or doubt. It's more that some of the components that will guarantee your success are harder to achieve than others. [00:40:59] Ok, wonderful. Thank you. So you have a really unique perspective. You kind of adro twist in remixed the lean startup philosophy a little bit. Would you mind talking to us about that? [00:41:11] Yeah. So I'm a great fan of Lean Startup because if we continue on the sort of thing about sort of the roller coaster of strategic thinking, it's kind of you've got to go up to a point of clarity. And there's three ways really quickly. Usually, by the way, Data scientists and sort of scientists and engineers in general latched onto that really, really well, because usually they're really so they're both quantitative and structured, but somehow they forget to be a little bit more creative. And then when you show them creative techniques that are highly structured or they go, oh, yes, thank you very much, I'll have that. And so we've talked about. So the pyramid principle is a creative technique that's highly structured. But I've got a few more in the book sort of mutation game, the happy line. And when you have all of these and you arrive at a point of clarity, you've got three or four options. So IKEA is a big client of mine. It's no secret to you know, it's in the public domain that the big blue boxes were a fantastic asset for years. Now it's creating a little bit of a problem for them because, you know, not just with the economy, but the trends were that not everyone wanted to go and spend their Saturday going traipsing around these big blue boxes with big Compaq and big queues, et cetera. And so they've been thinking for a long time about alternative ways to reach their customers. [00:42:28] Customers are happy, but the blue box as a channel is not working right now. If you're IKEA, you can have four or five ideas. One of them might be open, smaller stores in town centers. Another one might be open, a second hand store. So allowing people to kind of share and swap become a platform where you allow people to resell the second hand furniture at different closer to different locations closest to the homes. A third one might be partner with Cuba so that instead of the current IKEA delivery time frame is about six weeks. Instead of getting your your bookshelf in six weeks, you've got a guy who goes and waits and is paid whilst waiting and then brings that back to you that very same day. So imagine you've got these three ideas. What do you do next now, in most organizations, if we've got these three ideas on the table. Let me call them sort of small store, second hand and partnership people who have strong views, person who hates you for various reasons because we can't do this one or someone else. Well, my grandmother, when she went to the bar, so lots of anecdotes and personal stuff. So this is kind of war of words is a great way to test ideas, to get people's feeling. It's not super objective. So in many organizations, they turn to either Data scientists or one of Data gathering projects to go and analyze things. And then the third way, you can you can assess ideas through words. [00:43:55] You can assess them through Data, but you could also assess them through actions. And some of you will say what actions is just Data in waiting? I agree. Action is kind of like action generates fresh Data as part of his general thing. So what do you say? Action is the chili test. And when we talk to people, you know, testing, there's the there's lots of schools. You've got Scrum, you've got Sprent, you've got Accattone, you've got lots of these things. I particularly like Lean Startup. I like the way Eric Chris has sort of codified everything with a little caveat. And I think that maybe what you were alluding to when you're talking about the twist, which is if you're right here, you can't just go fast and break things. You can't just kind of try shit and try and see if it happens because your customers are expecting more of you and because also journalists in the media are keeping an eye and you can't just take risk the way you could as a starter. And so typically, one of the things I have and I mentioned that in the book is if you're a slightly more established company, usually what companies do is they go, we're a respectable company, so we can't afford to fuck up or what they call it. Failure is not an option. So what usually happens is established large companies fail big because they can't afford themselves to fail, small because it's risky for people's careers and in particular, it's risky for the brand. [00:45:15] And so one of the things I highlight is how if you're a large corporates, you can succeed. You can apply the lean startup with two additional bits. The first one is find a willing partner, find someone who's happy to play with you, and it might be another brand. So we talked about, for example, in the case of Uber, might be happy to play with you testing this thing. And instead of calling it an IKEA venture, it might be an Uber venture because we all know that Uber tests stuff and not everything that Uber tests works out, you know, helicopters and speedboats and all of that stuff. And so Uber has a brand that's slightly more resistant to risk than IKEA. So that might be one. If you think about the second hand IKEA thing, you might want to try it in partnership with Oxfam or another charity that will effectively give you a little bit of air cover. So aim for established organizations rather than go. We can't afford to take tests because if it fails, it's a risk on our brand. There's an obvious answer, which is find. And because, you know, everyone has a different sensitivity to different perception. So find another brand that doesn't have the same fear as you about what constitutes risk for the brand. So, for example, for an insurance company paying out in case of something going wrong is a good thing. [00:46:35] It's brand building. And then my second big tip on Lean Startup is this idea that when people design, most people understand MVP minimum viable product design something and then they go test it and learn. And one of the things I found, both with large companies like IKEA or the BBC or HSBC or small startups like Money Box Blumen, while there are a few others and you can go, one of the things you do is make sure when you have a test, it's kind of divided by ten. So look at your budget for the test and go right, let's define that by 10. And one of the things you find is when you divide the budget by 10, you are typically dividing by 10 the supply side of your tests. So the complexity of your minimum viable product. So if we take the IKEA example, most people understand it. IKEA quite well. IKEA, one of the there was to do many stores for students on campuses and to sort of create mini IKEA stores on campuses. And if you go, what's the minimum viable product? Well, it's a small store on campuses, but that's going to cost you maybe a hundred thousand dollars to set up. You do one in the US and you see what happens, I think. All right, if we only have ten thousand, then immediately people go up, up, up. Let's use let's come back in store. Let's maybe use a cafeteria at the bottom of the hole of residence somewhere. [00:47:58] It doesn't matter if it's a bit grotty because we'll call it IKEA potluck for this month. And I go right now, if instead of ten thousand dollars, you've got a thousand dollars, very quickly, people go, oh, well, we use a truck rather than a Pop-Up store, which is like the. Rather than a pop up restaurant, there's just a food truck. Let's just do the IKEA truck because that's just a thousand bucks. OK, let's go one step further. If we have only 100 bucks. Oh, and then everyone goes, well, why don't we print a big banner on the side of the building with a big arrow that points to a person with an iPad. And now what you've tested is you're still testing the demand side exactly the same, which is will students buy more furniture if it's made easy for them on location? But you've gone where by reducing the budget from one hundred thousand to one hundred, you've reduced it by a thousand in three iterations. And all you've changed is a supply side of the test and that very few people spot that. So a lot of people understand lean startup a B testing. So you use different you tried two different solutions, so you have one to compare it to. But they don't necessarily understand that you get even better solutions if you pat down and pare down and pare down your MVP at all times. [00:49:10] Absolutely loved it. And the book is just chalk filled with examples like this to really get you to think about how to approach your problems that you're working with as a data scientist as well. There's enough parallels there for you guys to draw to your own experience. I highly recommend everybody getting this book. It is clear. So let's let's jump into some of the later portions of the book talking about something I know that the audience is going to really love to hear is trying to sell your ideas and get by. And for them, you have a chapter on impactful words. So talk to us about the importance of impactful words, and especially when we're trying to get buy in for our plan. [00:49:53] So one of the things a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, my then wife and I realized that we were using different words to talk about the same thing. And we're realizing that when we were in good moods, we could see more of the world. So we really saw that we allowed each other to see more of what or to perceive more what was around us. But when we were into conflict, it was it was actually problematic. And what I've discovered, the bit that helped me make sense of that is something called NLP neurolinguistic programing, which has a you know, it puffs itself up a little bit as the study of human excellence I can make I can make you quit smoking, etc.. So some of the extreme contention I won't go with. But the bit that really I have experience that's working particularly well is the realization there's four main ways for people to take on board information. Lots of people like to see. Lots of people prefer to hear or speak. So let's call them sort of visual auditory. There's a third one called digital, which is people who prefer to read Data or assimilates a large sheet of Excel. And then a fourth one called Kinesthetic, which is more the let's call them the more physical ways to gather information. So smelling, testing, feeling in both the grasping sense and the and the emotional sense. [00:51:13] And when you have these for you realize, oh, OK, they're like different languages and, you know, so it's an analogy that works well in North America with both either in Canada or in the US. You go if someone is speaking in the other prevailing language in your state and you're not speaking it, you don't discern what they're saying with the same snappin as you know, it makes a little bit less sense. There's only one component in a while. It's a little bit less intelligible than what he was speaking 30 seconds ago, because these are languages. And when you realize there's four languages of communication, you've got to see it. You get to hear it, you're going to make sense of it and you're going to feel it. And every single one of us has a strong preference for to work with a lot of people in strategy consulting. And a lot of strategists through habit or self selection are very visual digital. They're going to go show me the data and you'll find that a lot of data scientists will be like that. Show me the data, show me the data, and then you'll find it's the same people in a in a management team meeting. It's the same people that tend to be a bit reticent to the strategist or the data scientist answer. And when you reveal a little bit, you find that there are other people who tend to be very auditory, kinesthetic. [00:52:27] So the way to convince them is something that sounds, you know, it's through words and something that feels right rather than a true picture of something that makes sense. And unsurprisingly, you'll find that a lot of the people who are very auditory kinesthetic in a not not uncommonly around the table, they'll be your salesperson, salespeople, very sort of auditory, digital, auditory, kinesthetic. They'll be your H.R. person who's going to be very kinesthetic. So very emotional or not emotional, but being being being convinced through emotions and the power of a human impact and marketing. And so between sort of sounds marketing, you've got three really big constituency, whereas you'll find that you know your lawyer, you know the legal. The finance team, the engineering team, they all got to makes complete sense with the scientists. And so one of the things I've done with clients over the years is I'm often asked to facilitate a way days. And one of the things I do is now I don't do it sort of called I always ask for at least a day of training beforehand. And one of the thing that I insert is exactly that is the realization that there's these four languages. And so we're going to be aware of everyone's preference and we're going to use all four languages, as it were. [00:53:42] I think that to be really successful as a data scientist, not only do you need to learn how to build your product, build your solution, but you also need to learn how to sell it. And I think that that chapter, impactful words, really help you, the audience get inside your stakeholders head to really understand how best to communicate with them so that you could sell your idea to them. Talk to us about memorable metrics. What's the importance of these when it comes to being strategic? [00:54:11] If impactful words is really about convincing a lot of people through a language that works for them, then the metrics is is sort of distilling the outcome in one number, not 400, just one number. And I'm going to spoil the fun, but there's one in the book that I really use a friend and I love, which is imagine for a minute if the metric you use for your financial success in life is income or salary, depending on whether you're independent or employed. And you go, OK, hold that for a minute. You go, right, that's my metric. And if you're going to try and maximize that for the first one, let's go where people are employed. There's really just two avenues. If you're going to try and maximize your salary, there's only two avenues. It's either to achieve greater recognition in your current organization through either working harder or lobbying for a salary increase or responding to the overtures of third parties who tell you there's another job going at another organization and hopefully be paid a bit more. OK, so that's really that's going to measure drives behavior and what doesn't get measured doesn't get managed. And so one of the ways to convince people of an outcome is to highlight for them the metric we're now going to move to in the future. And imagine now I tell you. OK, Harp rates. What we're going to do now is instead of trying to maximize salary, we're going to add a second metric. We're not going to replace it. We're going to add a second metric, which is going to be salary per hour. Now, right away, you see that your approach to life goes in a very different direction, because now if you're trying to maximize salary per hour, either what? [00:55:50] Ok, so I've maximized salary in the previous instance. Now, if I have to maximize salary per hour, I've got to find a way to reduce hours. So how do I do that? Well, you could cut corners, but that's probably a short term solution because that's going to impact your salary, because people are not going to necessarily keep employing you or maybe you get more productive. So you achieve the task you were paid to do in a slightly less time and you go, oh, that's an interesting one. And so one of the things you find is literally one of the best ways to trickle. Sometimes people talk about energy economics. One of the ways to trickle and trigger a slightly different behavior is to put on the table a new metric. And so you can you get people it's like shifting a boat, you know, a big ship there is. You've got the rudder and the rudder is a way to turn the boat. And then at the bottom of it, when the when the ship is really, really big and you're talking supertanker, the rudders have a rudder. That rudder is called a trim tab. And the trim tab is a tiny rudder that is used to help turn the rudder to help turn the ship. [00:56:54] And I found often a good choice of metric can be the trim tab. You go, what am I trying to maximize? I'm trying to maximize salary or salary per hour or assets. And I go, whoa. Now if I'm looking at assets now, I'm starting looking at the way I spend my money as well, not just how much I earn and how productive I am about it, but how do I save it? What do I do? What do I deploy it on? And you know that I've maximized my optimize my salary per hour. Now, I've got a few more hours where I can start thinking about what do I do with that income to help build assets and all of that sort of cascade waterfall of thinking that has just arrived that by introducing one tiny metric. [00:57:36] I absolutely love that. That's very well put. Thank you so much. And one of the huge reasons I was recommending this book to a lot of people I work with because of that that section, we have this thing at work where we are. One metric that matters is dollars shipped per hour. And I always thought that was interesting way to measure productivity across the company. Yeah, without getting too much into detail about what I do, I work. [00:58:02] It's a fantastic know. It's a fantastic well. And one of the things I would do if I work with you guys, you know, maybe after you've read the, you know, the ten copies of the book, one of the things I would do is I would say imagine if for a day. We swapped this metric by something else. I'm not saying you should. I'm just saying let's see the impact. So effectively, it's a way to road test, you know, or test drive. What a different what is the behavior that a different metric would trigger? And if that behavior is desirable, then maybe that metric should also, you know, get a bit closer to to prime time if the metric if the behavior is not desirable, that it was the wrong metric. But it's always good. I like the way the one is expressed. It sounds small enough and specific enough to create desired behavior. I would always you know, if a firm runs out of puff, if either the growth is not there or there's an issue, then the really good way to unearth new growth is to slightly tweak the metric. [00:58:59] Interesting. Thank you. Thank you. So talk to us about how to create a compelling story. I feel like this is something that small amounts of data science mentor a network of two thousand five hundred mentees. And one of the biggest questions they always come to me with is how do we want to story telling me? Like, how do I how do I create a compelling story? Talk to us about some tips that we can give. [00:59:23] So I've got one big one, which is really, really, really easy, which is you remember the pyramid principle we talked about half an hour ago when you had a big qualitative problem and you structured it with your pyramid very early in the project, and then you went down the hump of the rollercoaster to test your idea and you test your big one is we we we have pivoted away from the glass doors to a beautiful new world in twenty, twenty two. And you've got all these ideas. And at the end when you tell a story, what you find is the structure that you can use for your story is the structure you unarrest really, really early in the project to structure the problem. And the best way to talk about it is that a problem. A story has a backbone and the backbone of that story is you can discover really early in a project, because whether or not, for example, we talk, let's talk about the marriage in another marriage. The winning marriage is another whole issue. But the wedding is a great success. You need only to be true. But before that or next year, we have twenty twenty one is a great year for us. But now you can create a structure now and then you end up with lots of lots of components and then imagine that you go and present it to your stakeholders. Or in the case of the, you know, your romantic partner and you go right. Next year is going to be fabulous for us. Why is that? Well, let me tell you a story. So first, none of us is going to have covid and then you and I are going to have a fantastic time in six months. [01:00:54] I've looked down and then we'll we'll keep our jobs. Now, the person listening is like, oh, tell me more. I like this story. I'm not sure I believe it yet, but I want to hear more. And all you want from a story is you're not trying to convince people in one go. You want them to tell me more because at the very top is the big end result. You know, we've had a fantastic year or we're having a fantastic year. And then you go, OK, what are the three building blocks? Tell me more. Now, tell me more. Tell me. And by the time you get to tell me more, when you look at the very bottom, you have things like, you know, let's get everyone's email address and then select a font and then agree on a picture. At which point you go, Oh, yeah, I've been I can see is easy. So if all of these twenty seven or eighty one small components are really easy and obvious to achieve, then the story that I told you is achievable. And so a lot of communication training is a bit more on what I call the leaves rather than the backbone, because I use a tree analogy. So only the shiny shiny. And I'll come to that in a minute if you want about Adland Swagga. A lot of that is on the shiny shiny. But in particular, if you're a data scientist, you're going to be really, really good at its structure. And so when scientists in general are highly structured, people go, how do I tell a story? I said, don't obsess about the shiny shiny. The shiny, shiny is a lot of things that people are not very structured, used to tell the story. [01:02:19] If you highly structured yourself, then you have one advantage that's waiting for you, which is you can tell a story in a highly structured way that will make people want to go. Tell me more. Tell me more. [01:02:30] Absolutely love that. Thank you so much. So last formal question here before we jump into a real quick random round, it is one hundred years in the future. [01:02:42] What do you want to be remembered for? [01:02:44] Three big ideas. I've already had two, I think, and I don't know what the third one is. That's what's going to be exciting. So my first big idea was about ten years ago, something called six moons. And it's the sort of a theory of human diversity which is going to probably going to be relaunched at some point. But was there is a great has helped a lot of people in their marriages and relationship with both sets of very interpersonal, very IQ and related. The big idea in this book is the rollercoaster of strategic thinking. Which again, I think in a more professional context, in the field of sort of IQ and problem solving, the reason I've managed to earn a living on my own for 15 years is because sort of repeat big repeat clients come back and go, you know, wanted to delight after and maybe get on a few fights that will not three thousand people and they keep coming back and yes, we like it. Please tell us more about this. And then so if it's one hundred years in the future, I don't know. I've done emotional. I've done my contribution, as it were, to the field of emotional intelligence, to the field of intelligence. [01:03:44] I don't know whether the third is going to be maybe either artificial intelligence possibly is or is definitely where I'm looking at the moment. And how awesome. And what was the name of that emotional intelligence said the six moved, the six moves, the six moves of success whenever that is relaunched. [01:04:01] I would love to have you back on the show to talk about and talk about it, because we're really here to talk about how to be strategic. But us what do I want to be remembered for? And it's like, yeah, these are my my two big ideas so far. [01:04:12] Yeah. That one thing I've been huge on recently is just the EKU emotional intelligence type of stuff. [01:04:17] So thank you so much for sharing that. So first question here in the random round. What are you currently most excited about or what are you currently exploring? [01:04:27] So both of these is sort of what this two one is a neural network that's you know, I spent I spent a month, a year reading business books. So I found that, you know, one of the classic tips, as you read every day, I find it hard, I think, for this for most people. And then when you live in London as a southern Frenchman, you know that January is a horrible month. So I usually take January off and I go somewhere in the tropics and I read 30 business book in 30 days. That usually means I finish 20 and then I put them on my sort of reading list on Goodreads. And it really stimulates the books about philosophy, about marketing, about business. And the last few years, obviously, like many people, sort of, you know, block chain A.I., all of these things. And then the other one, the other field that excites me is sort of what people might call new growth. And it's a beautiful book called Donut Economics by an Oxford professor, Kate Rewires. And she formalizes an insight that many people have noticed, which is effectively the planet can't continue like that and we don't have a planet B.. And so the last whatever, one, two hundred years of industrial revolution, you notice that all of that correlates very, very strongly with extracting fossil fuels. And that was probably a one off. And we're going to pay for it for, you know, if we can for the next whatever, 100 years. And so it's that balance of so we've got a planet that's running out of livability and possibly an economic development model around growth at all costs. That's unsustainable. And on the other hand, you've got sort of the pinnacle of human ingenuity, which at the moment is a mixture of sort of A.I. and CRISPR and all of that. And I think it's a race between the two. [01:06:07] What do you believe that other people think is crazy? [01:06:12] There's a few that. So the way I would put it is I have hypothesis about my third idea for an idea to work. Let me answer it slightly differently. To leave a mark, you've got to be away from the majority of people at the point at which you have your idea. But by the time you bring your idea, they either come around to it or you've come round to them, because if you just have a slightly wacky idea that nobody cares for you, just, you know, the classic bit. If you're if you're a leader with that follower, you're just a crazy guy taking a walk. And so if you have a thought, an idea that you think has a big importance to the world, then you've got to be beyond the established sort of the agreed plane of reflection or agreed ideas. But it can't be too far out. And so there's a few crazy ones I have and I'm still establishing whether they are too far out or they can actually make sense as far as I'm going to be chewing on that idea all day. [01:07:10] Thank you so much for that. If you could put up a billboard anywhere, what would you put on it? [01:07:15] As a Frenchman who's lived in Britain for twenty five years, I married a Brit whose father to a Brit who's now about to become a Brit and is still supports France at rugby and many other international sports. My heart bleeds Brexit and the split from the European Union in particular because of the way it was. As a strategist, I find that the way in which it was presented was so mendacious. You know, the benefits, the upside, and you know it now, because even though it's going to happen and as it were, Brexit has won, they're still complaining it's not the real Brexit because we still can't find a single benefit that Britain is going to get out of that. And so to answer your question, if I could pull that one, I would put a giant one, some somewhere on the White Cliffs of Dover. And it'll be something like, wait for us. We'll be back. [01:08:06] Where are you currently reading? [01:08:07] So, as I mentioned, I read in January. And so I have a sexual I have a very big sexual on Goodreads. I think I have like about five hundred books, about half of which I've read. The other half is going to be devoured at some point. And then I put stuff into it in a bizarre way to not myself to read before the time, if you see what I mean, to not have snacks between meals. I tend to just come up with a book and then put it in the satchel without necessarily kind of spending too much time. So I'm sorry, I can't answer very, very well either. [01:08:40] No, no. Somebody I interviewed earlier this week, a label mate, I guess if you can call it another penguin. Random House author, Dr Christian Bush released a book called The Serendipity Mindset, which is based on our conversation. I think you'd enjoy that one. [01:08:55] Absolutely. Yes, it is on my list. I'm sorry. I've watched a video of his conversation with Salal London, which is a London based sort of intellectual circle where he did a beautiful presentation. And I love that. Yeah. [01:09:08] What song do you currently have on Repeat? [01:09:11] I have a playlist on repeat because I mention I spent a month sort of somewhere hot every January and this January I was in Argentina and Uruguay. It didn't completely end well because I broke two ribs by having a horse riding accident. Uruguay, my fault. But on the drive from Montevideo to La Colonia is one of these things where I was listening to radio and I was Shazam ing the whole way, which is there's a whole playlist put together by a local deejay that just absolutely tickled all the things that work for me. And so I'm listening on repeat to my sort of Uruguay playlist, which was really put together in about an hour's drive outside of Montevideo. And obviously now the algorithmic powers of Spotify has about as been able to turn that into four or five times the duration. So that's not exactly the soundtrack of twenty 20 for me is a very Latin. [01:10:04] I'd love to listen to a playlist to share that with me after this show. So I'm just jumping to a random question generator just for a couple of questions here. All right. Starting off with what is your go to dance move? [01:10:19] As well as a teenager, I was called the bell ringer because I had a sort of move that was a mixture of head and kick, that rung bell. So it's not particularly pretty, but I can still do it. [01:10:31] What issue will you always speak your mind about? [01:10:33] Oh, that's interesting. Fairness and unfairness. It's kind of like I'm a very outspoken and slightly sort of angry person. I'm angry, so strong a word, but forceful person. And I always trying to be a little bit less bouffe. But when I see things in the street, bad behavior, etc, I step in. What's your favorite book? Oh, Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance. That's one for the nerd. I mean, this is a guy, Robert Pierce. It blew my mind. I think I read that I'm going to say in the 80s. And this is a man who decided to not just create a compendium of all human whole philosophy, but to invent an entirely new philosophy. And it's obviously not about motorcycle. It's very little about Zen. It's a whole new philosophy. And I just thought I was blown away by the writing, by the story, but but also the sort of the bullseye ness of just going, hey, let's try and start a whole new school of philosophy. [01:11:30] I definitely have to check that one out as well. How can people connect with you and where can they find you online? [01:11:35] So Fred Palant, I have a certain distinctive name. It's quite a few people in particular in Quebec. So obviously somewhere in the tree, ancestors decided that North America was better than France. But Tripler Fred. And then you've got the dotcom and you've got the website with the book Strategic How? [01:11:56] Fred, thank you so much for taking time out of your schedule to come on to the show today. I really appreciate you being here. [01:12:02] My pleasure. And I love the fact that you read the book. Not every interview has. And it looks like it has had an impact on you and on your company.